From San Francisco to Oakland: North Korea’s Cultural Future
Biography can be such a tease. I just inhaled the Roberto Bolaño books that came out in the last couple of years, and he does this so well. The flashes of who he is behind the story are what keep you reading, for sure. With every writer I like, there’s a transparency, even if it’s not literal. Even — or maybe especially — when the subject isn’t domestic or personal. I think what makes you feel so connected with certain writers isn’t a matter of autobiographical detail, but that the emotions are real. The way some writers are able to channel themselves through the form.
A conversation between Chris Kraus & Maxi Kim.
A Japan of the Mind
Tom Bradley’s novels are not portents of things to come, but are hypnotic forays into the things that cannot be changed – just as one of the cheap arguments by the US for the justification of nuclear build-up was that atomic weapons could not be disinvented, so may as well manufacture more. The events cannot be erased any more than we can pretend nuclear bombs are simply fiction. Tom is not a preacher of that gospel of hope and change, for the inherent cynicism of his novels betrays an absurdist streak that always brings us back to the beginning of the circle: it’s too late. Not that Tom walks around with a sandwich board bellowing that the end is nigh – no, the end was nigh long ago, and the horrific events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki only serve to carve the last piece of punctuation on history’s epitaph.
Kane X Faucher spends an evening with “7’2″ ginger-furred yeti” Tom Bradley whose new book is out in early August.
The Missing Links
Christopher Tayler on the experimental art of Tom McCarthy. * “To ignore the avant garde is akin to ignoring Darwin,” an interview with Tom McCarthy (via) * Defining the avant-garde. * Annotated books from David Markson‘s personal library have been showing up in bulk at The Strand (via) * Dead Fingers Talk, a mind-bending retrospective […]