“Literature has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Nabokov’s Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?” Jonathan Lethem on plagiarism (via BoingBoing) * Admittedly not particularly new, but I’ve just bought the print edition of Mute and John Barker’s essay, Reader Flattery – Iain Sinclair and the Colonisation of East London, is worth bringing to your attention: “If Sinclair is not self-aware when it comes to the style of much of his writing, it is because those value-laden summing-ups are so ingrained in the tradition passed down from [TS] Eliot, who Sinclair quotes regularly. What he cleverly knits this together with is a style that on the surface seems so antithetical to the Eliot view of the world. It is the psychogeographical style with a situationist edge which suits the business of trails and searches. Once it had a subversive sting but it has become a stuck-in-time aesthetic.” Read Hari Kunzru’s comments as well. * “Amis’s decision to do his own kind of letting rip was a large one, and must have taken a deal of courage. It won him a new freedom, and a reputation as England’s most ambitious, most exciting, and, at times, most controversial novelist. A number of younger writers saw in him an example of how to escape the crabbed confines of English letters, and sought to write with a similar freedom, irreverence, and energy.” John Banville on Martin Amis. See also, The Strange Career of Martin Amis (both from Maud Newton) * A photo history of Neil Gaiman’s hair: “When about 4 or 5, my hair was bothering me, so I took matters into my own hands. I found a pair of scissors, climbed into bed, got under the sheets, to hide, I suspect, and gave myself a haircut. It was the sort of haircut you give yourself in the dark under your sheets at the age of 5.” * The current issue of Cabinet magazine is on the Shadow. Available on-line, an interview with Victor I. Stoichita, author of A Short History of the Shadow: “Etymologically, photography means “writing or drawing with light.” But we can also call photography a writing with shadow, or a writing with light and shadow. The early photographer, William Henry Fox Talbot, spoke of “shadowgraphy.” With his “a-logical” painting, Black Square (1915), Malevich wittily illustrated this fact.” * One Grey Eye, penny dreadful stories from London. * The Women of Pedro Almodóvar. * Radical Living Papers, A history of the free, alternative, counter-culture and underground press 1965-75 exhibition running in NYC until 7 March, and curated by Eva Prinz, Dan Donahue and Thurston Moore (from Strange Attractor) * Marc Weingarten on New Journalism: “In order to understand the impact of these writers, one must cast one’s mind back to a time before blogs, split-second news updates and the machinery of the media superstructure that dominates popular thought today. In the ’60s and ’70s, subcultures could very effectively remain sub rosa if they so chose; unlike the present day, selling out wasn’t the American Dream and outcasts could keep to themselves. And so we needed writers like Tom Wolfe, this patrician southerner with impeccable manners, a fine academic pedigree and voracious curiosity, to introduce us to Kustom Kar wizards, Southern California surfers, Ken Kesey and incipient counter-culture. Similarly, we needed someone like Hunter Thompson (also a southerner, but troubled and restless where Wolfe kept to a straighter line) to dive headlong into the muck and show us what riding with the Hell’s Angels was really all about. By contrast, Gay Talese didn’t like to sully his suit.” * The Millions talk to SIC editor Christopher D. Salyers: “We’re the mix tape of literary journals, collecting voices from every single angle of the spectrum and meshing it all into one solid road trip… And we’re pocket size. You gotta love the pocket size.” * Nick Antosca’s Book Notes for Fires: “The Velvet Underground & Nico – Sunday Morning: This song is eerie not just because of the bells but because Nico’s androgyny is so menacing. Carnal enough to draw you in, cold enough to kill you.” Antosca writes a cracking blog, Brother Cyst. * “Ian Rankin has accused government minister Tessa Jowell of “literary snobbery” over her refusal to recognise the Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle as one of Britain’s literary giants.” * The NY Times on Semina Culture, running until 31 March: “Sent, copy by copy, through the mail, Semina defined a distinctively trippy, sardonic West Coast surrealism. New York had hard, cold Pop; the West Coast had a woozy Peyote-Funk that prefigured the hippie era.” More on Semina on Dogmatika. * An interview with Brian Eno: “I’m actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender. And I think part of what happens to people when they come into this show is that they practice this feeling of surrendering.” The Constellations (77 Million Paintings) * Beasts! edited by Jacob Covey, and the Beasts! blog. * 9 animals named after celebrities (via The Morning News) * Louise Welsh and Ian Rankin on Robert Louis Stevenson. * Johann Hari on the Chapman brothers: “These works have somehow leeched into our collective subconscious. So why – as I staggered around their retrospective in Tate Liverpool, gaped at their new exhibit at Tate Britain, and read through their scattered essays – did I find myself ravaged by hatred for them?” The feeling is mutual: “What a cheap fat-faced ugly four-eyed shot. Cheaper still because a lazy editor saw fit to allow a journalist to sling words like “fascist” around and permit shoddy thoughtcrimes to stand as journalism? [..] PS: We know Hari is a fascist because he publicly supported the war against Iraq!” (from Butterflies and Wheels; tks A.) * In 3:AM news, David Thompson has a blog, Noah Cicero’s Burning Babies may get a new lease of life and Ben Myers has Hammer the Keys Like Jerry Lee, an on-line poetry chapbook, in Open Wide magazine.
