BURN PILE: Advice for Book Lovers, Rebecca Solnit, and Congestion of the Brain

We ordinarily come up with some sort of theme for the Burn Pile—a feature in which we offer up a smattering of the week’s lit-related offerings—but our picks for this week are perhaps best described as “grab bag.” Consider the following, no less tasty for their randomness:

• Have you seen the New York Times’ “Match Book”? It is—wait for it—“an advice column for book lovers.” People write in asking for recommendations based on previous likes/dislikes/obsessions, and writer-cum–book critic Nicole Lamy responds via columns with titles like “Busy Dad Seeks New Updike” or “Books for Globetrotting Girls” (both published this week). Is it just me, or is this both heartwarming and profoundly comforting?    
       
• The New Yorker’s “Page Turner” reviews Rebecca Solnit’s new book of feminist essays, The Mother of All Questions. The genesis of the collection was Solnit’s infuriating encounter with a male interviewer in which he insisted she explain her decision to not have children. The encounter is, as Page Turner notes, “a self-conscious corollary” to the incident from Solnit’s earlier feminist work, “Men Explain Things to Me”—an essay that gave rise to the term “mansplaining.”
   
• John Scalzi, a Los Angeles Times critic and Hugo award-winning novelist, offers readers a ten-point plan for getting creative work done during a Trump presidency.  Necessary and dare we say inspirational.
   
• And because more than half our staff is gleefully morbid (oh how they delighted in explaining corpse farms to me at our recent content meeting), I’ll leave you with Lit Hub’s piece on “The Notorious Legends and Dubious Stories of Ten Literary Deaths.” Click-baity? Sure. But you know you want to hear the attending doctor’s thoughts on Edgar Allen Poe’s suspected “congestion of the brain.” Drank himself to death? Maybe… maybe not. We won’t even get into that turtle that supposedly struck Aeschylus in the head.

BURN PILE: In Memoriam

It’s been a hard few weeks for art, literature, and music. We’ve lost notable people whose art has forever enriched humanity. This week, CutBank remembers those people.

At The Paris Review, check out this story about Chuck Berry and mysticism.

Derek Walcott tells us the problem with poetry students in The New Yorker.

Electric Literature remembers Colin Dexter, the author of the Inspector Morse series.

Chet Cunningham—prolific author of 450 books—is remembered by Los Angeles Times.

And at LitHub a number of literary icons including Joan Didion, Claire Messud, and John Banville recount the legendary brilliance of Robert Silvers, founding editor of The New York Review of Books.

CutBank thanks these people for their brilliant lives and work.

Never forgotten:

Chuck Berry (1953–2017)

Derek Walcott (1930–2017)

Colin Dexter (1930–2017)

Chet Cunningham (1928–2017)

Robert Silvers (1929–2017)

BURN PILE: Lent, NOLA, and... Butter?

Lent is upon us, folks. Yes, it is the season of ascetic self-denial. But fear not! CutBank is here to provide you a literary/culinary survival guide for your time of penance. Prepare yourself for the dog-days to come, the days of gazing slack-jawed at the new season of Chef’s Table, dreaming of the grand Easter meal to come.

But what of Fat Tuesday? Even though the last day of revelry has come and gone, we can still look back at Literary Hub’s list of ten great works of New Orleans literature to help you remember the festivities you probably don’t remember.

And the Pope, we can’t forget about the Pope! The Paris Review features the story of Bartolomeo Scappi—the head chef for Renaissance popes and cardinals.

Or maybe you’re the practical kind—stoic and studious. The Millions offers you a literary reader for Lent—forty reads for forty days.

Have you ever wondered about the eating habits of your favorite writers? If so, check out Entropy’s feature aptly named Dinnerview. The feature explores the culinary lives of many writers such as Bonnie Jo Campbell, Julia Elliott, Rebecca Makkai, and Mary Jo Bang.

It is important to remember the simple things during Lent, the small delights that make the world bearable. Butter, for instance. Over at Electric Literature, Ted Wilson reviews butter (5 stars). Need I say more?

CutBank wishes you only the best in your time of atonement.

Fight the good fight.

BURN PILE: Celebrity Writers

Who ever said you had to be a poor, highly-educated, no name to be a writer? Who said you had to struggle through a sea of ramen to one day wield the authorial power of an MFA and/or PhD?

Why not just be a celeb?

Mick Jagger wrote a memoir apparently. But he also forgot he wrote a memoir. That might be the most Mick Jagger thing I’ve ever heard.

But this begs the question: what celebrity books do we really need to have? Fortunately, the good folks at Literary Hub have answered this question.

If we were to follow this line of questioning further down the rabbit hole, who is the best fake novelist on TV? Electric Literature hands out their fake Pulitzer.

All right, all right. Let’s reel this back in. Did you know that the one and only Marcel Proust starred in a movie? Take a gander here.

And for all you celeb and not celeb writers out there, Brain Pickings has compiled a list of famous advice on writing to help you as you slog forward with your next prize-winning manuscript.

As always, keep scribbling.
 

BURN PILE: Dystopia, America

Things I said way too much this week:

1)    He did what?
2)   Have you seen Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men?

Are you ready for the Cheeto-glazed descent into the dystopian future? Did you get your copy of 1984 before Amazon ran out of copies?

The Los Angeles Times reminds us that dystopias are “a great place to be a tourist. Not a great place to be a permanent resident.”

So, what can we do to help?

Hope? Yes, yes, a story of hope! A story of resistance. No, not Rogue One. How about the story of an all-but-forgotten American diplomat who resisted the Armenian Genocides of 1915 and 1916?

Or perhaps you would like a drink? The fine geniuses at McSweeney’s have compiled a list of presidential cocktails for every occasion.

Not thirsty? Maybe a trip to the movies can cure your growing despair.  I Am Not Your Negro hits the big screen today. Go see it. The screenplay was written by the great James Baldwin.

But really, why not just join the resistance? AWP is in D.C. this year, and numerous protests and rallies are being organized to coincide with the arrival of over 12,000 writers, editors, students, teachers, and publishers.

Above all, resist.

Make America Read Again.

BURN PILE: A New Year, a New President, and a Writer's Call to Arms

Today, amid simultaneous outcry and applause from a deeply divided country, Donald Trump was sworn in as the forty-fifth U.S. president. The day after the election, Dan Piepenbring of the Paris Review posted the following under the headline “Writers, Start Writing.” His call to arms bears repeating today:

“This site is dedicated to literature, arts, and culture. Electoral politics are usually beyond our remit. On a morning like this, when America has chosen a bigot and a xenophobe as its next president, my job feels pointless. But I don’t want to add to the chorus of despair, because I do believe there’s a role for art at a time like this, and I don’t say that lightly—words like these don’t come easily to me. I would rather make fun of things, and I’m struggling against an inborn fatalism. (My iPhone just reminded me to water my plants, and I thought, why bother?) The creative impulse is such a fragile thing, but we have to create now. We owe it to ourselves to do the work. I want to encourage you. If you aspire to write, put aside all the niceties and sureties about what art should be and write something that makes the scales fall from our eyes. Forget the tired axioms about showing and telling, about sense of place—any possible obstruction—and write to destroy complacency, to rattle people, to help people, first and foremost yourself. Lodge your ideas like glass shards in the minds of everyone who would have you believe there’s no hope. And read, as often and as violently as you can. If you have friends, as I do, who tacitly believe that it’s too much of a chore to read a book, just one fucking book, from start to finish, smash every LCD they own. This is an opportunity. There’s too much at stake now to pretend that everything is okay.”

Entropy Magazine, beloved by writers for its lists of "Where to Submit" throughout the year, has included a section for "Post Election Calls for Submissions." (Deadlines include Jan. 27 and Feb. 28., with Anti-Heroin Chic taking submissions through midnight tonight "on Trump, the election and the trauma/coping/resistance surrounding this event.")

If the muse fails you, and you instead feel the need to turn to the writing and wisdom of others, (a move Piepenbring also suggests), you might pick up one of (former!) President Obama's recommended books, as shared with New York Times chief book critic Michiko Katukani in a recent interview, itself well worth reading.

If all else fails, try my recipe for an essential oils blend I call "Feel Better":  Frankincense (6 drops) for grounding, Cedar (6 drops) for grieving, Lavender (6 drops) for calming, Ylang Ylang (6 drops) for boosting mood, and Mandarin (2 drops) for energizing.

BURN PILE: Fake It 'Til You Make It

Sometimes, you just have to fake it.

Whether you need to wing that last-minute term paper or just charm a stranger at the office holiday party, Lit Hub humbly offers “An Incomplete Guide to Proper Literary Name-Dropping.” If this nifty article doesn’t do the trick, you can always turn to Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, which extols the virtues of skimming and/or gleaning information from what others say about a text, among other approaches.

Recently, the editors of the New York Times offered up their picks for the ten best books of 2016—perhaps, in a pinch, these shall be your favorites too? Of course, there’s always the chance you won’t have to talk about the books themselves, but can get by on a critique of their covers.

Meanwhile, over at Book Riot, Michelle Anne Schlinger presents her ode to “dirty books” and the good old fashioned reading that makes them so—books that have been read to death, books with broken spines and torn pages, books that take on that beloved “old book smell." Schlinger notes, “To be in such disrepair, for a book, means that you have been enjoyed.”

As the holidays approach, and with them a handful of precious lazy afternoons, I ask myself, Remember reading for pleasure?

BURN PILE: Curing the Election Blues

Well, the election happened, and Donald J. Trump is going to be our next president. That is a sentence I never thought I’d write, and it is a sentence, so many of us fear, in more than one sense of the word.

The L.A. Times argues one way to weather the Trump presidency is to head to your nearest public library. Why? Because it is the one institution most Americans still champion. In the meantime, you can read a collection of post-election-results tweets from famous authors—everyone from Stephen King to Joyce Carol Oates (who in turn quotes Samuel Beckett)—compiled by the Times.

Garnette Cadogan, a Jamaican immigrant and Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, speaks about the importance of “staying and fighting” despite Trump’s well documented stance on immigration, as well as the importance of “finding strength in poetry.”

But maybe it would be better to just slip into cushy escapism. This week the New York Times listed its top illustrated children’s books of 2016, along with a review of two new nonfiction publications, Following the Dog into the World of Smell by Alexandra Horowitz and How House Cats Tamed Us and Took over the World by Abigail Tucker.  

Dogs v. cats? Now that’s a debate I can always get into. 

BURN PILE: Shirley Jackson, Ouija Boards, and Truman Capote's Ashes

The spookiest month of the year begins tomorrow. Here are some literary tidbits of a decidedly darker nature to get us all in the mood.

• This week marks the publication of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, a new biography of the oft-overlooked American writer best known for her short story “The Lottery” and the novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Biographer Ruth Franklin reports that Jackson was pegged (and promoted) as somewhat of a domestic “witch” in the early days of her career, and that Jackson took exception to this claim. Later, however, Jackson wrote the following, which should delight those of us who embrace our inner witches: 

I am tired of writing dainty little biographical things that pretend that I am a trim little housewife in a Mother Hubbard stirring up appetizing messes over a wood stove. I live in a dank old place with a ghost that stomps around in the attic room we’ve never gone into (I think it’s walled up) and the first thing I did when we moved in was to make charms in black crayon on all the door sills and window ledges to keep out demons, and was successful in the main. There are mushrooms growing in the cellar, and a number of marble mantels which have an unexplained habit of falling down onto the heads of the neighbors’ children.

At the full of the moon I can be seen out in the backyard digging for mandrakes, of which we have a little patch, along with rhubarb and blackberries. I do not usually care for these herbal or bat wing recipes, because you can never be sure how they will turn out. I rely almost entirely on image and number magic.

• Jackson’s earlier reviewers compared her to Truman Capote, not a writer she “admire[d] particularly.” Capote still has his die-hards, though—a portion of his ashes just sold for $45,000 at auction. The anonymous buyer promises, “Truman will continue his adventures”—whatever that means.
• James Merrill's biographer reportedly used a Ouija board to summon the dead poet, who himself used one when writing. Reportedly Sylvia Plath also used one. 
• In the New York Times’ feature “Bookends,” Francine Prose and Ayana Mathis discuss the most terrifying books they have ever read. I have just three words for you: Hans Christian Anderson. Though Mathis’ selection proves that the real-world horrors of racial injustice are just as terrifying, if not more so. 

BURN PILE: Award Finalists Announced, Jonathan Safran Foer's "Joyless" New Novel, and "Bad" Women

This week, the National Book Award Foundation announced its longlist for the 2016 National Book Award in Fiction, joining its previously announced selections for Non-Fiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature. Finalists in all categories will be announced October 13; winners, November 16. In the meantime, we can all add the following to our fall reading list:

·       The Throwback Special, Chris Bachelder

·       What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell

·       Imagine Me Gone, Adam Haslett 

·       News of the World, Paulette Jiles 

·       The Association of Small Bombs, Karan Mahajan

·       The Portable Veblen, Elizabeth McKenzie

·       Sweet Lamb of Heaven, Lydia Millet

·       Miss Jane, Brad Watson 

·       The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead  

·       Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson  

The Man Booker Prize Shortlist in Fiction was also announced this week, with the following finalists:

·       Do Not Say We Have Nothing, Madeleine Thien

·       The Sellout, Paul Beatty

·       All That Man Is, David Szalay

·       His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet

·       Hot Milk, Deborah Levy

·       Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh

The winner will be announced Oct. 25.

In other book news, the LA Times largely pans Jonathan Safran Foer’s new novel “Here I Am,” which it calls "joyless" and “kitsch at best.” Meanwhile, LitHub offers readers “10 Books Featuring Subversive Women,” which kicks off with Mary Gaitskill’s excellent—and tenacious—collection Bad Behavior. 

BURN PILE: Setting Rejection Goals, the Dubious Origins of the Six-Word Short Story, and Gene Wilder, Writer

Submission season is finally upon us. Read why setting “rejection goals” can help you meet your publication goals, too. (Plus a perfect analogy from the always inspirational Art & Fear.)

Dream of being as prolific as [insert favorite author’s name here]? You might consider setting your alarm clock an hour earlier—or maybe not? Check out this infographic that compares what time famous writers rise each morning with how much they publish. (The infographic, it should be noted, does not indicate what time said writers went to bed each night.)

It’s back to school time, and soon writing teachers everywhere will be using Hemingway’s infamous “six-word short story” to teach students about the nuts and bolts of narrative. (For the uninitiated, those six words are, “For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn.”) But that story, it turns out, is likely apocryphal. (Do we care? Don’t forget to submit your own six-word stories here.)

Did you know beloved comedian Gene Wilder, who died this week at age 83, dabbled in both memoir and fiction writing? Check out this LA Times review of his memoir Kiss Me Like a Stranger. Among other nuggets, you’ll learn for which film Wilder was hired because the director needed "an actor who could believably fall in love with a sheep and play it straight." RIP, Gene.

BURN PILE: Elena Ferrante, Deaths, Books to Film, 10th Grade Reading, and the Classics

Enigmatic, pseudonymous Elena Ferrante gives the Guardian a rare interview, discussing the creative freedom afforded by anonymity, her relationship with the "sociocultural ladder," and the "ransacking of the enormous warehouse that is literary tradition."

Authors Harper Lee and Umberto Eco passed away last week on the same day; although the two were from vastly different backgrounds, each brought precision and passion to the world of literature, and shared the commonality of adapting a book (Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Eco's The Name of the Rose) to the big screen. Now, the LA Times looks at how that legacy might operate in a cinematic scene experiencing a renaissance in book-to-film adaptations (Room, Brooklyn, and Mr. Holmes, to name just a few of this year's critical successes). 

Flying in the face of the long-heralded "death of print," artists' books -- texts that mingle literature and art, with a special emphasis on the book as cultural object -- are experiencing a resurgence. Here are ten of the most impressive.

David Denby, writer and former New Yorker film critic, explores the effect of foisting great literature on a generation reared on tablets in his new book, Lit Up: One Reporter, Three Schools, Twenty-Four Books That Can Change Lives, based on what he witnessed while shadowing 10th-grade English teacher Sean Leon's students at the Beacon School, an alternative public high school in Manhattan.

If you're thinking about what you read in 10th grade and then put down forever, perhaps now's a good time to revisit this iconic instruction manual for reading the classics laid out by Italo Calvino in 1986. His final question: "While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning a tune on the flute. 'What good will it do you,” they asked, “to know this tune before you die?'"

BURN PILE: Top 20 Books People Lie About Having Read, Mysterious Disappearances, Short Story Vending Machines, McDonald's, and Why Nonfiction

Got an unopened copy of Finnegan’s Wake or Infinite Jest wedged shamefully in the back of your bookcase? Take heart regarding your literary duplicity with this list from the BBC of the top twenty books people lie about having read (20% of which are by Charles Dickens)—and then slap those unread tomes on your bedside table, because 60% of those surveyed said being (or at least seeming) well-read made a person appear more attractive. 

And in China, where it isn’t so much a matter of the books you haven’t read as those you have (illegally): shoppers from the mainland have begun frequenting Hong Kong entrepreneur Paul Tang’s The People’s Bookstore to buy books published legally in Hong Kong but banned on the mainland, mostly those dealing with “high-level political intrigue, sex scandals and the like.” Tang intends to keep his store open despite the recent disappearance of five booksellers at the nearby Causeway Bay Bookstore, which also specializes in banned books. 

Grenoble, France has found a unique way to fill those pesky snatches of time between doing something and doing something else: short-story vending machines. 

In related fast-prose news, McDonald’s has begun its third annual initiative to promote childhood literacy: until February 15th, specially-sized children’s books will replace toys as the prize offered in Happy Meals. This (almost) makes up for the fact that McDonald’s has also recently introduced a kale salad with more fat and calories than a double Big Mac. 

Memoirists Meredith Maran, Dani Shapiro, Ayelet Waldman, Kate Christensen and Nick Flynn explain why they chose nonfiction, as well as the best (and worst) parts of telling the truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIPz625yVYI

BURN PILE: Morrissey's Problem With Sex, Spelling and Class, Trump's Spoken Word, and Let's Just Say I Said It

On December 1st, Morrissey—of The Smiths fame—won the vaunted Bad Sex in Fiction Award for the "giggling snowball of full-figured copulation" in his novel, List of the Lost. While a brillant lyricist, it seems that Morrissey has some way to go with his fiction. Hopefully this will convince my dad that I can't just write the song for which he already has a title—Leftovers Hangover—and make the "big bucks." 

From The Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/morrisseys-bulbous-salutation-wins-the-2015-bad-sex-award/

As the conventions of spelling in English were solidifying in the mid-19th century, S.P Andrews and Augustus Boyle set out to simplify the process (words initially misspelled in that sentence: 4) (words misspelled in that parenthetical: 2). In their eyes, spelling built an unnecessary obstacle towards literacy. Their solution: the creation of a phonetic language.

From the Awl: http://www.theawl.com/2015/11/giant-despair-of-doubting-castl

In poetry that isn't really poetry (see Kobe's retirement announcement: http://www.theplayerstribune.com/dear-basketball/), someone with far too much time and perhaps too little imagination compiled Trump's speeches into a book of poems. 

From The Guardian: http://www.theplayerstribune.com/dear-basketball/

Have you ever proclaimed? What about declared? Hissed? Barked? An easy way to improve your writing is to, with few exceptions, opt for the simple, plain 'said' for a dialogue tag. 

But a procession of she explained and he chuckled and I expostulated—the reporting verbs that clog your dialogue when you follow the “never say said” rule—is worse, because they force the reader’s attention away from the content of the writing and onto the writer’s hunt for synonyms.

From Slate: http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2015/12/02/teachers_banning_simple_words_like_said_is_a_bad_idea.html

BURN PILE: Bad Sex, Stirring Photos, the Formation of a Literary Lesbian Community, Sinatra's Cold, and Award Winners

I have, on several occasions, described sex as "breathing heavily next to someone else's ear." While I fully realize that isn't great, it also won't (I hope) land me a nomination for the Bad Sex in Literature Award. A selected quote from this year's nominees, via the Guardian:

"She rides above him the way she’d imagined that one day she’d ride a boy, a man, a beast.." 

Find more: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/18/bad-sex-award-2015-the-contenders-in-quotes

A reflection on Robert Mapplethorpe's work from the Guardian. The photographer is described: "As for the personae, Mapplethorpe by all accounts was a good boy harboring bad boy fantasies." 

From the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/nov/17/robert-mapplethorpe-the-perfect-moment-25-years-later

The New Republic examines the fascinating history of The Price of Salt, a pulp novel focusing on a lesbian relationship in which the protagonists do not end up ruined, dead, or morally flagellated. In that way, it was different than its salacious predecessors, and created a genre. 

"As an act of secretive reading, the lesbian pulp novel formed an invisible lesbian community."

From the New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/article/124220/patricia-highsmith-offered-gay-readers-hopeful-ending

A profile of Gay Talese, a prolific profile-writer himself and one of the most important figures in the development of non-fiction as a literary genre. He wrote what many consider the liminal text of New Journalism, "Sinatra Has a Cold." When Talese arrived to interview Frank Sinatra for a profile in Esquire, he was told the singer had a cold, and wouldn't be able to see him, ever. So Talese mastered the "art of hanging out," constructing Sinatra from the corners, from overhead conversations, across crowded rooms: 

"When he heard that Sinatra was going to Las Vegas, he took a plane and followed him wherever he went. He lurked in the shadows, eavesdropping on conversations, hastening to the men’s room to jot them down before they slipped from his memory." 

From the Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/gay-talese-interview/

You can read the original piece on the Esquire website: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a638/esq1003-oct-sinatra-rev/

In other news, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Adam Johnson won the National Book Award, in nonfiction and fiction respectively on Tuesday. At the same ceremony Don DeLillo received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. 

For a full list, from Time: http://time.com/4119748/national-book-awards-tanehisi-coates-adam-johnson/

BURN PILE: Smell, taste, death obsession, medieval books, sentence destruction, and how our romanticization of rejection may forgive prejudice in publishing

In an article that flirts with Whorpianism, a writer at The Atlantic points out how our vocabulary when it comes to the sense of smell is woefully lacking. "All of our other scent descriptors are really descriptions of sources: We say that things smell like cinnamon, or roses, or teen spirit, or napalm in the morning." From The Atlantic (with only one Apocalypse Now reference.)

Smell and taste are linked, I've heard and transitions are hard. An article that starts with a mother's funeral and Seamus Heaney's potatoes, and talks about food in literature: "People talk too much about the writing of old white men, but if you could never taste again, it is Hemingway who could tell you about food." From The Irish Times.

On my bookshelf, a space will always be reserved for a book I purchased called "Death in The Grand Canyon," when I was twelve and wanted more than anything to alarm my parents. In the New York Times Magazine, a writer recommends this "series" to their upper-crust readership. "Over the years, deaths from clashes with Native Americans give way to deaths from dehydration suffered by lost, hallucinating hippies. All the while, human nature remains constant: People (particularly, it must be said, young male people) walk too close to the edge — often literally." From the New York Times.

If you were at a cocktail party – young and rubicund as you are – and someone asked you the manner in which you'd like to die, would your answer be as good as the following? 

"Skydiving while high on heroin for the second time (because you want to have fun the first time, according to a colleague)." 

In an essay that becomes a lot less fun but much more interesting, a writer explores the reasons behind our preferences for certain sorts of death. From the Wilson Quartley.

A history of books and the mechanisms of locating salient information: "And so tools were developed to help the reader do just that, such as page numbers, running titles, and indices. As familiar as these aids may be, they are older than you think." From Medieval Books.

If you want to read someone pithily pick apart first sentences from cherry-picked volumes, I have the article from you. Regarding Rick Moody's Hotels of North America: A Novel and it's first sentence, the critic has this to say: "With every new book of his, we in the reviewing business hope that Moody will give us reason to overturn Dale Peck’s judgment that he’s the 'worst writer of his generation,' but this novel, narrated in the form of hotel reviews by a divorced alcoholic father, doesn’t look like the one." From Vulture.

And finally, Kativa Das for The Atlantic takes those of us who romanticize writers overcoming rejection. Using an anecdote that ran in the Guardian regarding  Marlon James and how his first novel was rejected eighty times, Das points out the whimsy we afford these stories overlooks the insidious prejudices that exist in the publishing industry: "Not only is it harder for writers of color to get published, but when rejecting our work, publishers tell us that what we’re writing about is too narrow and niche and won’t appeal to mainstream audiences. It’s hard not to perceive this as both a rejection of the relevance of our work as well as ourselves." From the Atlantic.

BURN PILE: Ellipses, Nabokov’s uxorious letters, two essays concerning photography, and reading through the internet archives

A short, short history of the ellipses, where it has been, where it’s going. Surprisingly, good writers use them well while bad writers use them poorly. Sure, some ellipses feel hammy and overwrought. But others allude to charged material with superlative restraint (as in Fitzgerald or Joyce). From Slate.

Now, I know it seems as if being married to Vladimir Nabokov would’ve been a breeze. Turns out, he was a little needy. He wrote to his wife Vera every day, sometimes twice, to which she rarely responded.

Through the 1920s he wrote to her of his admiration for Madame Bovary, of the color of snow, of Lenin’s death, about that quack Freud, the half-eaten chocolate in his hand, Longfellow, the yapping of a dog with a tail like a French horn, the rasp of his palm on his unshaved face (it sounded like a car braking), about—it was Nabokov in a nutshell—his fear of the post office, the etymology of the word “tennis,” the “thunderstormy tension that’s the harbinger of a poem.” From the New York Review of Books. 

An old article about Teju Cole’s journey to recreate a photo in Brazil: From a height in any central district of São Paulo, what you see is an incessancy of high-rises, as though someone had invented the high-rise and then forgotten to stop. This city of work and hard edges, I found, was the Brazil I preferred, and I somehow convinced myself that Burri’s photograph, so keen in its evocation of capital, must have been taken on Avenida Paulista. From the New York Times.

Sophie Calle, more than any paparazzo, blurred the line between photography and stalking. A fascinating account of how this renowned artist followed a stranger to Venice and documented his movements around the city.  

In 1980, the artist tried to follow and photograph a man on the street but quickly lost sight of him. That night, she ran into him at a party. The man told Calle he was going to Venice. She decided to pursue him there.

She stands outside his hotel and watches as he comes and goes. When he tours Venice with a woman, she shadows the couple. “He points toward the canal as if to show something to the woman. I take a picture in the same direction.” From the New York Review of Books.

The chronicle of one man reading his way through the absences of the internet: "What I like most is to skim through things that were intended to be transient. The ads, the newsy bits from beekeeping journals, the announcements of 1940s automobiles. You could call me an ephemera list." From the New Republic.

BURN PILE: Phantoms on the internet, What remains of Baldwin's home, Romanian prisoners publishing for freedom, Lynch learning to talk, and obligatory Halloween concerns

Memory and mourning in the internet age: An essay about a man seeing his deceased mother on his childhood street from two-thousand miles away and two years in the future. "I'll treat these Street View adventures as mini treasure hunts, attempting to come up with the most obscure and faintly held memory of a place, to make my search for that location as difficult as possible." 
From the New Yorker.

The New Yorker publishes an essay about the inception of "The New Yorker Story," authored by Jonathan Franzen. Two "o" words that would appear in a New Yorker story to describe this article: onanism, omphaloskepsis. "In a country recovering from one war and entering others, living under a nuclear shadow, awaiting large-scale social upheavals, no scream could do justice to the American middle-class predicament. Only understatement could." From the New Yorker.

Romanian white-collar criminals exploit a law that offers relief for prisoners who produce published work while incarcerated. From The Economist. 

An essay on gothic horror novels, which are a hoot. The author describes the genre excellently and thusly: "These are stories that couldn’t exist outside a culture obsessed with sin and hellfire, and yet they’re not morality tales: the only lesson to be drawn from most gothic romances is that the supernatural can be easily substituted for the divine." From the Paris Review. 

Baldwin's French estate is falling apart while his stature in intellectual circles has never been in better shape. An account of likely trespassing, and the undulations of Baldwin. Warning for lovers of Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, etc. They say some terrible things. "But what remained of the three-hundred-year-old farmhouse and the gatehouse, where Baldwin’s Swiss lover, Lucien Happersberger, lived, had lapsed into a powerful state of disrepair. Birds flew in and out of the second level, and Shahin hoisted himself through a rectangular opening in the side of the first, reporting back that it was trashed and stripped bare." From the New Yorker.

Suburban Satanism: "Satanism is many things—contrary, ironic, sophomoric—but it is not serious. At least not as serious as it should be, given its beliefs: we’re talking about a fallen angel who decided he’d had enough of heaven’s righteousness, and descended—literally, metaphorically—into eternal darkness, determined to wage war against the pesky Nazarene. The deck is stacked, of course. Satan knows he can’t win, but he fights on." From the Paris Review.

David Lynch's limited vocabulary: "In Lynch’s own speech and in the speech patterns of his films, the impression is of language used less for meaning than for sound. To savor the thingness of words is to move away from their imprisoning nature. Lynch has said, more than once, that he had to “learn to talk,” and his very particular, somewhat limited vocabulary seems in many ways an outgrowth of his aesthetic." From the New Yorker. 

Burn Pile: Brodsky and the water of Venice, the sea and surrealism, “He’s-at-Homes", Proust’s honey bread, and Marlon James talking about Toni Morrison

Brodsky sighed when churches were closed for the night. 

Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel-lauerate emigre poet, wasn’t buried in Russia, his motherland, but Venice, in which he found less a second home than an imaginative companion. In an essay from The Smithsonian, a walk through Venice with the great poet is recounted; a wandering through half-finished ideas and revisions inspired by the city.   

“Time can be an enemy or a friend,” [Brodsky] said, quickly returning to the subject of the city. He argued that “time is water and the Venetians conquered both by building a city on water, and framed time with their canals. Or tamed time. Or fenced it in. Or caged it.”

A quick recommendation. Although she needs no help, like at all, Valeria Luiselli wrote a beautiful mediation about walking, sidewalks, Brodsky, Venice, Mexico City and graveyards: Sidewalks. From Coffeehouse Press. 

The sea washes up unexpected objects. And in that way, in much more complex terms, the poet Agnieszka Taborska argues that in the sea one finds an organizing principle for surrealism. "It is no accident that the Surrealists' map of the imagination had more water than lands.” From Asymptote. 

A whaler's wife might as well be a widow. However, certain issues can be worked around. An article about the fascinating history of “He’s-at-Homes,” more commonly know as dildos, and whaling culture. 

She unwrapped the stony phallus from its pink tissue paper and handed it to me. It was heavier than it looked. The head had been painted wild-berry red. The shaft was off-white and touched with light brown stains. Through the center was a hole no thicker than a straw, as if it had been skewered for drying. Saw marks streaked the cross section of the flat base, and it had been circumcised with whittling scrapes. “No mistaking what it is,” Connie said, as I turned it in my hand. From LitHub. 

A fun fact for those times when you pretend you’ve read In Search of Lost Time: The famous madeleine (of whose fame I just learned of) that triggers the “deep-dive” into memory was almost not a madeleine at all. "A first draft of Proust’s monumental novel dating from 1907 had the author reminiscing not about madeleines as the sensory trigger for a childhood memory about his aunt, but instead about toasted bread mixed with honey." From the Guardian. 

Marlon James has this to say about finishing Morrison’s Song of Solomon (and more): 

 "I finished that novel thinking I could fly."

From the Guardian (again).

BURN PILE: Too much voice, too many pictures, the Nobel, writers who don't write in cinema, and other concerns from around the Web.

To be filed with Problems I'd Like to Have - joining such travails as "embroiled in a love parallelogram" or "needing an accountant" - is the horror of having a distinctive style. I do see the author's point though in this article about authorial parochialism - a fancy way to say "all the shit you write sounds the same" - although he puts it more elegantly. "There’s something undeniably great about having Voice like that, a voice you can’t escape, like Tom Waits. Or Cher...There’s a downside to that much voice. An unsurprisingness. A feeling of sloggy repetition and even self-parody." From the Millions. 

George Scialabba is a critic's critic, whatever that means, and he's just quit his day job which prompted a celebration by his admirers. To join them, here's a particularly apt description of Christopher Hitchen's writing:

 "of course, not all of Hitchens was very good, even before 9/11 drove him mad. He was always too ready with abuse (‘stupid’ and ‘tenth-rate’ were particular weaknesses). He is a compulsive name-dropper: In his very short Letters to a Young Contrarian, for example, the words, ‘my friend,’ followed by a distinguished name, appear dozens of times, giving the reader’s eyebrows a considerable workout." From the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has commissioned a translation of the Bard into modern English. And of course, many many people have an opinion. The Wall Street Journal elucidates why this is not such a terrible idea. 

You think that's a pretty mountain, eh? You think the light has never broken through the aspens like that before? How about we go take a photo of the most photographed barn in America? Camera Restricta, is a speculative design of a camera that would preempt compulsive photographers from snapping away at well-snapped vistas. Because do we really need another picture of the Louvre? From Hyperallergic. 

And, for context, an article by Teju Cole, who has an excellent column on photography for the New York Times, about the glut of digital photos and their artistic potential.  

Much like digital photos, there's a surplus of films about writers and writing, in which younger writers are apprenticed by older writers who are, surprise, surprise, damaged. From Electric Literature. 

More importantly, on the Harper's Blog, there's a conversation with Bryan Doerries, Creative Director ofOutside the Wire, who brings classic tragedies to intimate venues. The embedded video of Paul Giamatti performing Steven Mitchell's translation of The Book of Job speaks to concept better than I can. If perhaps you have a subscription to Harper's, first of all, good for you, second, can I borrow your username, there's an excellent article about Doerries from a year ago. From Harper's. 

And lastly, Svetlana Alexievich was awarded the Nobel Prize. Here's a profile from the New York Times. 

And here's an excerpt of her writing from the Paris Review.