May 19, 2015 Events Knausgaard, Rock Star By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Anders Grønneberg I also bought a teach-yourself drums book, carved two sticks, placed some books around me in a circle on the floor, the one on the left was the hi-hat, the one next to it the snare drum, and the three books above the tomtoms. —My Struggle, Book 3 Reporting on a Karl Ove Knausgaard reading last summer, The Baffler wrote that “two young men kept comparing the event to a rock concert and complaining that they should have brought 40s … Knausgaard has become a rock star.” The writer himself has told of a German journalist “who compared me to a rock band. He said, the books don’t really have any focus, it’s just loose, it’s like just having some songs about drinking and they don’t have anything else … he saw pictures of me, he said, ‘You pose like a rock star.’ ” But all this is soon to leave the realm of mere comparison. On Wednesday and Friday, as part of the Norwegian-American Literary Festival, Knausgaard will play the drums with his reunited college band, Lemen, thus sundering the flimsy membrane that separates him from full-on rock stardom. For this is what rock musicians have done throughout history: sundered membranes. Read More
May 19, 2015 On the Shelf Sing It, Walt! and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Whitman at age twenty-eight, 1848. After seventeen years, Judy Blume is publishing a new novel—for adults. “In so many of Blume’s books, her main characters’ bodies insist on their inherent, primal messiness; they crave, they ooze, break out in rashes as strange and humiliating as desire itself. The body is reckless, but telling.” Walt Whitman, pop-music critic: in 1845, the poet published a brief review in Broadway Journal, where he pays a hearty compliment to a family of singers: “The sight of them, as they are, puts one in mind of health and fresh air in the country, at sunrise—the dewy, earthy fragrance that comes up then in the moisture, and touches the nostrils more gratefully than all the perfumes of the most ingenious chemist.” Herman Wouk turns one hundred this month. Give the guy a break. “Readers under forty know Wouk, if they know him at all, as a name on the spine of a paperback shoved into a cottage bookshelf at the end of someone else’s summer vacation—or perhaps as the supplier of the raw material for Humphrey Bogart’s epic performance as Captain Queeg of the USS Caine. What they don’t know is that Herman Wouk has a fair claim to stand among the greatest American war novelists of them all.” “Often when I’m home alone, only the thought of how my dead body might be found helps me act proper … I thought of this while going to the local deli to buy a carrot and a couple of onions. A long time ago, when I started living by myself, before my wife-to-be and I moved in together, I used to be very careful when I went to the grocer’s for a carrot or a courgette to buy more than one—for who, when cooking for one, ever needs more than one carrot?—in case the grocer thought I had improper designs on the vegetable … These days, I do not give a damn. I am too busy palpating my solitude, as the tongue probes a gap in the teeth.” Paul Ford on “No Manifesto for Poetry Readings and Listservs and Magazines and ‘Open Versatile Spaces Where Cultural Production Flourishes,’ ” a new collaborative poem: “My own opinion of whether the poem is good or bad doesn’t matter. The poem makes me squirm; it makes me roll my eyes; it makes me angry at the world; and it makes me tired. I keep coming back to it. This poem indicates a lot of things at once about how cultural work is done now, in form, content, and means of production.”
May 18, 2015 Correspondence A Perfect Baby By Dan Piepenbring Bertrand Russell in 1916. A letter from D. H. Lawrence to Bertrand Russell, February 1916. When the two men had met the previous year, they became fast friends, and had even planned to give a lecture series together—but their friendship quickly soured. “Gradually I discovered that he had no real wish to make the world better, but only to indulge in eloquent soliloquy about how bad it was,” Russell later wrote of Lawrence. “If anybody overheard the soliloquies so much the better, but they were designed at most to produce a little faithful band of disciples who could sit in the deserts of New Mexico and feel holy. All this was conveyed to me in the language of a fascist dictator.” Read More
May 18, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent He Was a Very Close Friend of Mine By Sadie Stein Your Monday needs something. But what? Could it be … a 1974 clip of Orson Welles reminiscing about his “friendship” with Ernest Hemingway? It has everything: titanic ego-clashing, disingenuous concern-trolling, bullfighting, damning with faint praise, posthumous character assassination. Welles claims to have been the only one with the courage to mock the great man. Welles is chomping on a cigar. Read More
May 18, 2015 Fiction Same Time, Another Planet By Gunnhild Øyehaug Image: Santos Gonzales, via Flickr Read More
May 18, 2015 On the Shelf Ovid Is Not a Safe Space, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Deucalion and Pyrrha in an engraving by Virgil Solis for Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book I. Dag Solstad will appear at our Norwegian-American Literary Festival this week—isn’t it time you get to know him? “A literary provocateur and a national icon, an experimental writer who is also a favorite with the country’s top comedians, Dag Solstad’s belated international breakthrough is in curious contrast to his position in his native country. Only three of his books have been translated into English (a fourth is on its way), but in Norway, Solstad has, at least since the mid 80s, been held up as a paragon of literary merit, his style a kind of gold standard of prose fiction.” Columbia students believe that Ovid’s Metamorphoses should come with trigger warnings—the myths of Persephone and Daphne, after all, include rape. “But the core [curriculum] is not a form of therapy; it’s a form of exposure to diverse ideas, and it should not have the aim of making people feel ‘safe.’ In fact, that’s precisely the opposite of its aim.” Rare book experts are assembling a kind of scholarly justice league to stop the theft and vandalism of historic books worldwide. “Lawyers and librarians, booksellers and auctioneers will descend on the British Library next month for a major conference whose title—‘The Written Heritage of Mankind in Peril’—conveys the seriousness of the problem.” Émilie Du Châtelet, a seventeenth-century scholar of Newton, religion, science, and mathematics, earned plaudits from Kant and had a very visible relationship with Voltaire—but today no one reads her. “It is possible to major in philosophy without hearing anything about the historical contributions of women philosophers. The canon remains dominated by white males—the discipline that some say still hews to the myth that genius is tied to gender.” How to turn fifty if you’re Rob Pruitt: have a barbecue, just like everyone else. But your barbecue will be art. “Pruitt has been able to embrace a peculiar irony that is omnipresent in the art world today: the paradox of a crass, hypervalued luxury market for the world’s super rich, wedded to a left-leaning ideology that sees art as a public good for the common folk … In this curious art world of limousine liberalism, Mr. Pruitt is happy to play chauffeur, more interested in reflecting modern culture than critiquing it.”