I am intermittently working my way through the archives of the London Review of Books and have now reached late 1984. An article by Alan Brinkley about the Mondale-Reagan presidential race mentioned one of their debates, and I remembered that I might have actually watched that when it happened. Thanks to the miracle of the [...]
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What can be now be said about Inception? I have a serious interpretive problem with films of this type, where there are significant commercial considerations impeding upon what might be the narrative aspirations of the director, considerations absent from Shane Carruth’s Primer, for instance, or even one of the Buñuel films that some reviewer mentioned [...]
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In a discussion of Wallace’s “Mister Squishy,” I believe, a member of the wallace-l discussion list made a comment about how he didn’t seem to understand computer jargon very well, despite his penchant for deep research. I don’t know if I thought that was entirely fair at the time, but I would like to offer [...]
Here’s a neat piece on a Pynchon conference in Poland. The thesis of the paper the author presented sounds somewhat similar to some ideas I had about Lemuria in the book when I wrote about it a while ago. I’ve only been in one gathering of Pynchon specialists before, and they were nowhere near as [...]
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I read Denis Johnson’s Shoppers tonight, a collection of two related plays that were written and performed in the early aughts. The first, Hellhound on My Trail was genuinely good on the page, though I wonder at how well it would translate to the stage in every particular. The other play, Shoppers Carried by An [...]
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Keith Gessen’s preface to this book acknowledges a problem: that, while providing a clearly expressed overview of the financial crisis from a knowledgeable participant who seems to share some cultural characteristics with the interviewer and broader audience at n+1 (humanities major, thoughtful and analytic, likely Harvard graduate, doesn’t own a tv, etc.) and who also [...]
In honor of our fourth wedding anniversary: I started off living in Atlanta very near the Fernbank, then moved two miles or so east. By the time this picture was taken, Clancy and I were living in a rented house not very far at all from a northeasternish curve of the perimeter. It was a [...]
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Such promise. A guru, a fully tuned-in Aquarian, leads a pack of young cheeseheads past a riot into a meadow to perform a ritual summoning. As a result, one young lady becomes an esoteric Straussian without the eyestrain, another has her eyes strained, one becomes a poststructuralist against his will, an ambitious young man is [...]
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I was left very much wanting to know how Mantel intends to handle the final weeks of Cromwell’s life in the next book, which Joan Acocella’s review in the New Yorker, if I have this straight, mentions is coming. (Mantel apparently took more space than she anticipated originally.) The Duke of Norfolk comes across more [...]
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Whenever I read a book in my field, the first thing I ask myself is if the author happened to demolish a concrete patio (and sidewalk) with a ten-pound sledgehammer during its composition. The answer is usually no. I’ve made a number of enemies in the inanimate object kingdom over the years, but rebar now [...]
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I ordered all of the issues of n+1 a while ago, and they arrived today. I’ve never actually read a print issue of it before, though I have followed the magazine’s career with interest. I liked Joshua Glenn’s “The Black Iron Prison” from the first issue, and Chad Harbach’s piece on Oblivion has speculations about [...]
Alex Golub, an anthropologist who’s blogged for a long time, is running a series of personal associations with Library of Congress call letters, which is a truly great idea for a series of posts. He’s starting each one with a color association, and I don’t know if that synaesthetic twist came from the Rimbaud sonnet [...]
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I read this while giving an exam today. I had forgotten to bring anything to write with, and I was angry, for I was struck with what seemed to be an urgent thought about the book: that Dania’s dance was plainly derived from Slothrop’s V2 attraction. I found a pen at rest on a chalk [...]
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This text seems to concern itself at some level with a proposed determinative relationship between finance capitalism and male sadism. Within its fictive logic, the transition from industrialism to a speculative economy is timed more-or-less with the Gottfried Vanger’s death; but Wennström is his true son. Gottfried dies, as I remember, in 1966, which is [...]
I saw a reference to Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask in Benjamin Kunkel’s LRB essay on Fredric Jameson, and it activated my impulse-buy reflex. I had read nothing by Lipsyte before, but I did glance at some of the Library Thing comments and was intrigued by what would seem to have been a relentless and bleak [...]
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I first read Infinite Jest in October of 1996. I had been working for an industrial manufacturing concern after I had graduated in May in a capacity that involved certain manipulations of computers and also the odd bit of filing. I was planning to go to graduate school the next year, and I even retook [...]
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How many people does it take to make a gang? I would guess that it would be more than two, usually, and so I was surprised when Elif Batuman, in a footnote to her amusing and piquant essays, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, mentioned the “gang of thugs” [...]
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