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world-ridden...Thoreau's Journal: 12-May-1857
How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden. I take my neighbor, an intellectual man, out into the woods and invite him to take a new and absolute...Show More Summary
Auction Report: April & May
Recent and upcoming auction doings:- 10 April was a pretty amazing day for Christie's New York. The sale of the first part of the Collection of Arthur & Charlotte Vershbow on 10 April can only be described as spectacular. The sale realized a grand total of $15,842,145, with Goya's Tauromaquia leading the way at $1,915,750. Show More Summary
MFA Day Job: Ideas for Your Possible Future
A number of my conversations with writers this year have revolved around the difficulties of securing a job in the academic world. What happens if you’re a writer and can’t get an academic job? Or what if you have other… Continue reading ?
Neureligion
There is very little (if any) variability in the brains of human beings regarding cortical localization. That is, the motor cortex responsible for, say, left arm movement, is reliably located on the right side of the brain, and in… Continue reading ?
Islamabad Literature Festival reports
The first Islamabad Literature Festival was held 30 April and 1 May, and it's great to hear that it seems to have been quite a success: Thousands throng Islamabad Literature Festival reported Asma Ghani in The Nation, and LiteratureShow More Summary
M. Lynx Qualey Q & A
At Moby Lives Sal Robinson has a Q & A with leading Arabic-lit blogger M. Lynx Qualey about her site Arabic Literature (in English) (and about Arabic literature more generally).
NYTBR watch
As I've repeatedly mentioned (the last time: here), The New York Times Book Review is under new leadership (Sam Tanenhaus is out, Pamela Paul is in), and I've been nervously wondering what would become of it (yes, foolishly I hold out...Show More Summary
distant thunder...Thoreau's Journal: 11-May-1854
While at the Falls, I feel the air cooled and hear the mutterings of distant thunder in the northwest and see a dark cloud in that direction indistinctly through the wood. That distant thunder-shower very much cools our atmosphere. And I make haste through the woods homeward via Hubbard’s Close. Show More Summary
Book News: At Home with Faulkner, Vampire Love
“I was explicitly told that the bloodletting had come to an end.” Two top editors of the Village Voice resigned yesterday after being told to lay off five staff members.
“Not everyone wants to admit a world in which there is so muchShow More Summary
“Room” and Cleveland
Since the news from Cleveland broke earlier this week, I have been thinking about Emma Donoghue’s novel “Room.” Published in the autumn of 2010, “Room” is narrated by a five-year-old boy named Jack who, along with his twenty-six-year-old mother—“Ma”—is imprisoned in a one-room structure by a man referred to only as Old Nick. Show More Summary
Graphs, Maps, Trees
Somewhere at the intersection between the social sciences and literary criticism we find Franco Moretti’s writing on literature. “The form of any portion of matter, whether it be living or dead,” writes D’Arcy Thompson in his strange wonderful book On Growth and Form, “may in all cases alike be described as dur to the action of force. Show More Summary
E-reading in ... Africa
In the Christian Science Monitor Donna Bryson finds that there's A 'novel' idea for spreading literature in Africa: The cellphone, as: New technology and new thinking are helping African literature leapfrog the high costs of traditional...Show More Summary
Translation in ... Bangladesh
At bdnews24.com they report that Bengali literature needs translation: PM, as: 'Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has laid emphasis on worldwide translation of creative literary work from Bangladesh'. Sounds good... though there's certainly a lot of work to be done.
A Short Tale of Shame review
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Bulgarian author Angel Igov's A Short Tale of Shame, coming out from Open Letter.
the May-gate...Thoreau's Journal: 10-May-1853
I proceed down the Turnpike. The masses of the golden willow are seen in the distance on either side of the way, twice as high as the road is wide, conspicuous against the distant, still half-russet hills and forests, for the green grass hardly yet prevails over the dead stubble, and the woods are but just beginning to gray. Show More Summary
Matå’pang, Migration, and The Case of the Stolen Mangos
My favorite season is mango season. Two towering mango tress grew at my grandma’s house on the island of Guåhan. We patiently waited and watched the fruit turn from green, to yellow, to ripe red. I remember afternoons sitting around… Continue reading ?
Lost in Translation?
Last month, Haruki Murakami published a new novel in Japan. Before anyone could read it, the novel broke the country’s Internet pre-order sales record, its publisher announced an advance print run of half a million copies, and TokyoShow More Summary
Darlings of oblivion
Vladimir Nabokov was wont to fall into a reverie over nail clippings, bitten-off cuticles, tufts of lint plucked off a sleeve, bits of food picked from between the teeth and spat out. After disposing of these tiny scraps of human life, no one thinks of them any more. Show More Summary
The Movies Are Dying: A Video Poem
The Movies Are Dying: A Video Poem. (Futzing around, I made a thing.)
Witold Gombrowicz's Kronos
Among the books I've slowly been making my way through but which I haven't reviewed yet is Witold Gombrowicz's Diary, recently re-published in a one-volume edition by Yale University Press; see their publicity page, or get your copyShow More Summary
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