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ELECTRONIC LITERARY ARTS NEWS + DIGEST
From WebdelSol.Com and Algonkian Workshops
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A literary news digest including book reviews, articles, interviews, and general literary happenings. In this issue:
- Fear and Self-Loathing in Chick-Lit
- Atlantic Moving to Washington
- Lit Blogs Go Commercial
- Curse of The Prolific Author
- Who The Hell is Houellebecq?
- D.H. Lawrence: Life of an Outsider
- The World Republic of Letters
- Paris Review Civil War Continues
____________
- Strange Food For Writer Thought
- Papa is Hacking People Off Again
- Lack of Canadian Sex
- British PEN Civil War
- The Living Hell of Living With a Writer
- Houlihan Sets Fenza Straight
- Paris Review Board Terminates Editor
- Whitbread Goes Insane, Chooses Hugh Grant As Judge
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- Borges Was A Mama's Boy
- Five Stars For Maisie Dobbs Mystery
- Is Sci-Fi Really That Bad?
- William Faulkner: NOT An Educated Man
- Redeeming Aspects of "The Da Vinci Code"
- Showboat Yardley Bashes Holden Caulfield
- Nancy Drew Redux
- History Rewritten By Frauds?
- Wolfe Replies to Worst Sex Award
- Strange Food For Writer Thought
 FEAR AND SELF-LOATHING IN CHICK LIT
The books, like their women's-mag forerunners, are a string of outrageous confessionals from women in the grips of dating crises. Their choices are so astoundingly stupid – really? A guy who sleeps with his ex-wife isn't into you? — that the women can only come across as losers. But the confessors, we're told, are secretly sassy, downtown and fabulous; they simply need a little advice to reclaim their fabulousity. [more]
ATLANTIC MOVING TO D.C.
"It's been a long and trying day," the magazine's managing editor, Cullen Murphy, said yesterday, though, he added, the news wasn't a complete surprise. With the assistance of his deputy, Toby Lester, Murphy has spent the last few days holding individual conversations with the nearly 40 staff members who must decide whether to move to Washington. [more]
LIT BLOGS GO COMMERCIAL
Call it Oprah Online. Hoping to promote overlooked contemporary literary fiction, 20 literary bloggers have created Read This! Four times a year, the Litblog Co-op will share its pick with readers, with the first announcement coming May 15.
[more]
CURSE OF THE PROLIFIC AUTHOR
And then along comes a chap like Alexander McCall Smith, who seems to regard book writing not as some rarefied art but as a form of daily exercise, like sit-ups or squats. Where most authors sweat to produce 1,000 words a day without self-mutilation, McCall Smith has been known to bang out three times that in a single sitting. He’s a living rebuke of the notion that novel-writing is the least bit arduous.
[more]
WHO THE HELL IS HOUELLEBECQ?
A number of Anglophone reviewers have been no more kind—the New York Times found The Elementary Particles, Houellebecq's masterpiece so far, "a deeply repugnant read"; the London Sunday Times described it as "pretentious, banal, badly written and boring"; and the London Times said that Houellebecq was no more a novelist of ideas than the British comedian Benny Hill. Such passionate vituperation is hard to understand. Have these people not read de Sade, or Céline, or Bataille—have they not read Swift? [more]
D.H. LAWRENCE: LIFE OF AN OUTSIDER
If there is a characteristic noise in John Worthen's excellent new biography, it is the smash of descending plates or perhaps only the sound of Frieda screaming - "You have no idea how humiliating it is to beat a woman" Lawrence once complained to a friend - and the Stürm und Drang of its end-of-tether brutalities can sometime reach heights of near-operatic intensity. [more]
THE WORLD REPUBLIC OF LETTERS
Like the political sphere, too, the republic of letters is wracked by struggle, rivalry and inequality between the literary haves and the have-nots. There are "peripheral" or "impoverished" literary spheres (Sudan or Bulgaria, for example), which have yet to muscle in on the international literary market through prizes, translations, eminent authors, venerable traditions and canonised genres. [more]
PARIS REVIEW CIVIL WAR CONTINUES
Of course, not everyone is happy about the way things unfolded at The Paris Review in the months leading up to Mr. Gourevitch's appointment, which suggests that the new editor might have some bruised egos to mend. The writer Rick Moody, a longtime contributor and financial backer of The Review, was so outraged over the circumstances of Ms. Hughes' firing that he sent a "resignation" letter to the magazine several weeks ago, declaring that he would have nothing more to do with it after Ms. Hughes'
final issue. [more]
STRANGE FOOD FOR WRITER THOUGHT
Sehnsucht restaurant opened in Berlin recently, catering to people with eating disorders, with a tasty cuisine for anorexics, to encourage weight-gain, but also serving bulimics, some of whom will quickly disgorge the tasty meal.
The Japanese company Trane KK recently introduced the "lap pillow," a large foam headrest, in the shape of a woman's kneeling lower torso so that the target audience of men can rest their heads on "her" legs. It was probably created in response to an earlier product from the company Kameo of a pillow with a "man's" arm extending downward, targeted for women to hug the arm as they drift off to sleep.
Paul Kelvin Hardy, 40, was arrested in Martinsburg, W.Va., after he broke into a couple's home on New Year's Eve, robbed them of $540, held them at gunpoint for more than hour, and then, when he noticed a piano in the house, ordered the husband to play two songs while Hardy sang. After the songfest, Hardy suggested they order pizza and meanwhile began playing with his gun. The siege ended, and police were called, when Hardy joined a long list of people chronicled in News of the Weird for accidentally shooting themselves.
PAPA IS HACKING PEOPLE OFF AGAIN
Neighbours in the town of Ketchum, Idaho fear that plans to open to the public the house in which Ernest Hemingway killed himself will "bring scores of tourists who will disrupt their peace and clog up their drives. [more]
CANADIANS GO SOFT AND DRY IN THE LITERARY SACK
Where is the sex in Canadian literature? Even when there is sex, it "is rarely a pleasurable event. Instead, it is often used as a metaphor for politics, identity, globalization, consumerism – almost everything but sex itself." [more]
BRITISH PEN CIVIL WAR
The row began two years ago, when the biographer Victoria Glendinning, as president, announced an intention to modernise. But the move met resistance. The old guard felt that bringing in new employees would change the nature of the organisation and diminish its identity as a writers' body. As the paid executive posts were filled, and new committees were created for Events and Writers in Translation, members of the Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC), at the sharp end of PEN's human-rights work, started to feel they were being marginalised. [more]
THE LIVING HELL OF LIVING WITH A WRITER
I live with a writer, and let me tell you, it's no picnic. She's half-crazed most of the time, spending hours in the most absurd debates with herself: Does this sentence need a comma or semicolon? Is that paragraph too short - or is it so bloated someone needs to stab it with a pin to let out all the hot air? Is it all an exercise in self-absorption, or something someone might actually want to read? [more]
HOULIHAN SETS FENZA STRAIGHT
In his article "Creative Writing and Its Discontents," published in 2000, David Fenza, Executive Director of the Association of Writers &Writing Programs (AWP) observed, rightly, that "No credential makes one a successful artist; the proof is in the work."1 He did not however, extend the logic to the teacher of an art, where the "work" is, in fact, successful teaching of one's craft to others. He maintained that the creative writing MFA program is like MFA programs in the other arts—painting, sculpture, dance and music—and, since they are not blamed for inferior products or students, neither should MFA writing programs be blamed for bad writing. This is a faulty comparison ... [more]
PARIS REVIEW BOARD TERMINATES HUGHES
"The makeup of that board strikes me as dangerously old," said Daniel Kunitz, who worked as The Review’s managing editor from 1995 to 2000 and is currently a contributing editor. "I think they’re out of touch. I don’t think they know what’s going on in the way that George did, or in a way that is best for the magazine, to keep it fresh, to keep it current." [more]
WHITBREAD GOES INSANE, CHOOSES HUGH GRANT
Grant, whose only literary claim to fame had been playing a bookseller in "Notting Hill," confessed that he felt like a student back at Oxford University when put under pressure to read the finalists for the Whitbread Book of the Year award. Asked if he felt insulted by critics who argue it is dumbing down to choose celebrity judges for big literary awards, he told Reuters at Tuesday's awards ceremony: "It is not insulting to me. I am very dumb as everyone knows." [more]
BORGES WAS A MAMA'S BOY
Borges was a man of almost pathological timidity - in his mid-forties, one of his many one-sided, unconsummated love affairs came to an end when the object of his affections realised that the reason he kept nipping out of the room during their evenings together was that he was phoning his mother to give details of his schedule. [more]
FIVE STARS FOR MAISIE DOBBS MYSTERY
The year is 1929, the place is London, and Maisie Dobbs is striking out on her own. Though still haunted by the ghosts of the Great War, Maisie takes over her retiring mentor's private investigation business and sets up shop on Warren Street. Soon Maisie takes on her first case – a concerned husband named Christopher Davenham who suspects his wife Celia of an affair. [more]
IS SCI-FI REALLY THAT BAD?
The ratio of bad to good SF novels is about the same as that of bad to good literary novels, but, for some reason, SF is always judged by the output of its most inept practitioners. In truth, a form that has produced, among others, Stanislaw Lem, J G Ballard, the Strugatsky brothers and, above all, Herbert George Wells has nothing to apologise for. [more]
WILLIAM FAULKNER: NOT AN EDUCATED MAN
For the most part, Faulkner shunned academe. He was self-educated, like Ernest Hemingway and so many writers of his generation. He had been, at best, an indifferent student, never finishing high school in Oxford, Miss. He entered the 11th grade, in September 1915, only to play football. When the season ended (somewhat ingloriously), he dropped out. [more]
REDEEMING ASPECTS OF "THE DA VINCI CODE"
What "The Da Vinci Code" has created should interest us, but not because Brown is right about Da Vinci or the infamies of the Catholic Church or powerful secret societies or the real role of Mary Magdalene as apostle and lover to the Christ. "The Da Vinci Code" is important as an expression of a desire for a spirituality that cannot be had within the confines of the institutionalized church. More simply yet, it is the popular expression of a desire for a kind of meaningfulness to life that is missing for most of us. [more]
SHOWBOAT YARDLEY BASHES HOLDEN CAULFIELD
"The Catcher in the Rye" is now, you'll be told just about anywhere you ask, an "American classic," right up there with the book that was published the following year, Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." They are two of the most durable and beloved books in American literature and, by any reasonable critical standard, two of the worst. The combination of Salinger's execrable prose and Caulfield's jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil. [more]
NANCY DREW REDUX
Like many juvenile heroines of her time, she is missing a mother. (Hers died when she was three.) But there are no shadows behind her “sparkling” bright-blue eyes. The shadows are in the world, and they are easily detected and vanquished, for they have squinty eyes, poor grammar, badly mended clothes, and a habit of wearing too much rouge. [more]
HISTORY REWRITTEN BY FRAUDS?
In his new book, "Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud -- American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin" (PublicAffairs), Hoffer contends that his profession "has fallen into disarray" and aims a polemical blast at his fellow historians for condoning sloppy scholarship and an anything-goes ethical climate. [more]
STUFF ABOUT WODEHOUSE
Some of you who are still with me will already have caught my drift. In the climactic scene of "The Code of the Woosters", Bertie confronts Sir Roderick Spode, the sinister bully who is "founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts." He reduces Spode to a jelly by disclosing that he knows the would-be dictator's ghastly secret -- his ownership of Eulalie Soeurs, a female underwear consortium. [more]
WOLFE REPLYS TO WORST SEX AWARD
It has often been said that Americans have no sense of irony. Now the American author Tom Wolfe has turned the tables, saying that the British literary judges who awarded him a prize for the year's worst sex in fiction simply did not understand that his description of a first encounter was meant to be ironic. "There's an old saying - 'You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her sing'," he told Reuters. [more]
STRANGE FOOD FOR WRITER THOUGHT
In November, the school district in Spurger, Texas, ended its decades-old, Homecoming Week reverse-roles day (in which girls dress as boys and vice versa) after one parent complained that the tradition promoted a homosexual lifestyle; in its place, the school urged kids to dress in military camouflage.
In September, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Judith Retchin ordered Jonathan Magbie, 27, to jail for 10 days for first-offense marijuana possession (a virtually unheard-of sentence in D.C.), despite the fact that Magbie was a quadriplegic with permanent tracheal, urinary and stomach tubes and was often ventilator-dependent, in addition to having various other infirmities. (Magbie died four days later, after what the D.C. Health Department concluded in December was severely inadequate care in jail and in an emergency room.)
New Scientist magazine reported in September that Chris Melhuish (University of the West of England, at Bristol) was readying his EcoBot II, a self-powered robot that runs on energy produced by catching and digesting houseflies (and breaking down their sugars to release electrons). The major downside: The most efficient way to attract flies is with sewage, which makes EcoBot II unfriendly to humans.
The super-reclusive, 280-person German cult Villa Baviera, holed up in Chile since 1961 and worshipping of former army nurse Paul Schaefer (now age 81, with whereabouts unknown), broke into the public eye in a November Reuters dispatch describing how most members have finally, after four decades, come to realize that they were mistaken in their belief that Schaefer is God's messenger on Earth. The cult lived frozen in time, with few modern conveniences, wearing clothing from the 1930s, and in total obedience to Schaefer, who had imposed many idiosyncratic policies, including an ironclad no-intimacy rule.
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