Pages

Saturday, October 09, 2021

Uh Oh – A Looming Book Shortage?

The cliché goes that the cold war ended with barely a shot being fired. More precisely, it ended because barely a shot was fired.


       Victor Pelevin profile 

       At Russia Beyond Valeria Paikova profiles Victor Pelevin, Russia's most mysterious modern writer
       Apparently, he really does qualify as reclusive: "No one knows where Pelevin lives, where he goes or what he eats for breakfast". 
       Several Pelevin titles are under review at the complete review:


Le Carré realised that artful complexity, creative bafflement and surprising revelation are at the core of the serious espionage novel, and these aspects are nowhere better exemplified than in Schoolboy. It’s not a perfect novel – as ever, le Carré has his own idiosyncratic writerly flaws mixed in with his overall mastery of the detail and the considerable moving parts of the plot – but Schoolboy does show him at the height of his powers. It’s a very ambitious, dense and confident novel, and the fact that it’s never been filmed is a telling, backhanded tribute to its scale and heft.

‘The twists and turns are riveting’: Stephen King, Paula Hawkins and others on their favourite le Carré The master of espionage wrote 26 novels – top authors share the books they love the most


He was the greatest English novelist of his generation, yet just before his death he became an Irish citizen of the EU. The reasons were both political and deeply personal, but at their heart lay one thing: betrayal


       Jonathan Franzen Q & A 

       Jonathan Franzen has a new novel out -- Crossroads --, the first in a trilogy, no less, and so the publicity machine has revved up, including now with Merve Emre's Q & A with the author at Vulture, Jonathan Franzen Thinks People Can Change
       Among much else he once again bangs the drum for Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children:

I have written about it, and I have remained confounded that it is not universally regarded as canonical. It’s Christina Stead’s great novel from the mid-20th century. It has three world-class characters. Most novelists don’t produce any world-class characters. There are three in that one book. It seems to me an undeniably feminist text; I don’t understand why it’s not canonical in women’s studies programs.

       I haven't seen Crossroads yet but I do hope eventually to come by a copy and cover it; I do have a pile of Stead's novel, including The Man Who Loved Children, and should get around to covering that at some point, too. 



The Deepest Escape Tunnel Underneath the Berlin WallThe Deepest Escape Tunnel Underneath the Berlin Wall


Europe won’t become a military power. What’s more, it shouldn’t

The continent should play to its strengths, from sanctions and diplomacy to soft power


Anyone trying to sound weighty about European defence has to recite a set of traditional mantras. The speaker ritually mocks Europeans as naive vegetarians who need to understand that they live in a carnivorous world where the US won’t defend them any more.

Robert Kagan famously wrote that Europe doesn’t have a hammer so it doesn’t want anything to look like a nail. In fact, though, Europe’s weakness has helped defuse tensions. Imagine how the world looks from Moscow or Beijing, says Dan Plesch of London’s Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy: they see an almighty US military abetted by hostile little neighbours snapping at their heels. When Russia scans Europe and sees (at the risk of overdoing the phallic metaphor) a rusty hammer hanging in the cobwebbed shed, that’s relaxing. The cliché goes that the cold war ended with barely a shot being fired. More precisely, it ended because barely a shot was fired. A western attack could have entrenched Soviet military power. Today, the hawk dream of deterring Russia by sending many more western troops to the Baltics could prompt terrifying escalation.



Uh Oh – A Looming Book Shortage?


Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop launches new ‘DTF’ female ‘sexual desire’ booster.


The pressure to stay relevant has driven Playboy executives craz


I am here.”  “Missing man in Turkey accidentally joins his own search party before realising he was the person they were looking for.”


LaBoissiere podcast chatted with me.  And Noah interviews Jason Crawford about Roots of Progress(written).


 One stunning photo



Newscientist: Marie Antoinette's Censored Love Letters Have Been Read Using X-Rays


“The other side of that is – I was telling someone the other day – if Paul hadn’t been in the band, we’d probably have made two albums because we were lazy boogers.

“But Paul’s a workaholic. John and I would be sitting in the garden taking in the color green from the tree, and the phone would ring, and we would know, ‘Hey lads, you want to come in? Let’s go in the studio!’

“So I’ve told Paul this, he knows this story, we made three times more music than we ever would without him because he’s the workaholic and he loves to get going. Once we got there, we loved it, of course, but, ‘Oh no, not again!'”

There you go, that is a very simple and correct theory of The Beatles.  I don’t care if you like “I am the Walrus” more than “Penny Lane.”

And via Bill Benzon, here is the new The Journal of Beatles Studies.  And here is my earlier post Paul McCartney as Management Study.


Articles of Note

Email: It gives license to verbiage and turns simple conversations into an exchange of over-crafted essays. It’s time to close our inboxes for good... more »


New Books

Why did Jean Sibeliusstop composing in his early 50s? Was it alcoholism? Insecurity? The dissipation of his powers?... more »


Essays & Opinions

The mystery of smell.The human nose can theoretically detect up to a trillion smells, yet we struggle to describe them with any precision... more »


Articles of Note

The radicalized university. Manifestos grow like mushrooms, but scholarship that isn’t promoting some form of social justice is an odd fit... more »


New Books

The new literary memoir is less confessional, less cathartic than its predecessor, and more invested in pushing the form’s limits... more »


Essays & Opinions

A Cambrian explosion in the world of natural-language processingraises a question: How much of what we write is essentially autocomplete?... more »


Articles of Note

"To my own retroactive surprise, I seem to have a taste for controversy," says Steven Pinker. Why does everyone want to argue with him? ... more »


New Books

Richard Wright's reputation was destroyed by attacks from Baldwin and Ellison. He blamed the white publishing industry for encouraging them  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

The ABCs of AOC, Chelsea Clinton's She Persisted - beware the proliferation of didactic and unimaginative political books for kids... more »


Articles of Note

The Arabian Journal of Geosciencespublishes hundreds of peer-reviewed papers. Why are so many of them nonsense? ... more »


New Books

When the counterculture becomes the culture, what’s left for The New Criterion to do? Fight on... more »


Essays & Opinions

As discreet defecation became a mark of civilized refinement, a taboo topic plagued big cities: dog droppings... more »


Articles of Note

The puzzle of human rationality. Despite our capacity for reason, we are flooded with reminders of our fallacies and follies... more »


New Books

“Show me a scholar who claims that science can explain all of literature, and I will show you someone who is performing schtick”  ... more »


Essays & Opinions

Ian Fleming said he wrote for "pleasure and money." True enough, but it shouldn't detract from his literary craftsmanship... more »


Articles of Note

How have books changed? “They became tedious redoubts for the pious certainties of a besieged, over-educated and underemployed intellectual class” ... more »


New Books

Good criticism draws out the nuances within the ideas one finds the most noxious, the most difficult to dignify... more »


Essays & Opinions

For readers, E.M. Forster was a stately, mild-mannered bachelor with a staid personal life. When he came out as gay, many felt betrayed... more »