Conversation in its true meaning isn't all wagging the tongue; sometimes it is a deeply shared silence.
COMPARI
I would like a few men to be at peace
with.
Not friends, necessarily, they talk so
much.
Nor yet comrades, for I don't belong to
any cause.
Nor yet "brothers," it's so conceited.
Nor pals, they're such a nuisance.
But men to be at peace with.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 19 Older Adults Are Sharing The Best Things About Being In Your 60s, And As A Younger Person, I Feel Immense Relief
Discussing the New Tom Wolfe Documentary: 10 Blocks podcast | City Journal.
In The Observer Hephzibah Anderson has a Q & A with Jonathan Coe: ‘People say, where’s the anger? It’s still there’.
His Bournville is coming out in paperback in the UK, and will finally get to the US in October; all his other fiction is under review at the complete review and I should be getting to this one soon as well.Amusing to hear:
I was slightly horrified when the Granta Best of Young British novelists was announced to realise that I didn’t know a lot of these names [.....] I’d had a little private shortlist of writers I thought were going to be on it and none of them was. Then I went on Wikipedia to find out why and it’s because all these “young” novelists are in their 50s, so that was a wakeup call.
Biographical and Autobiographical Writings review
The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Leon Battista Alberti's Biographical and Autobiographical Writings, just about out from Harvard University Press, in their I Tatti Renaissance Library.
Michal Ajvaz Q & A
At The Collidescope George Salis has Cosmic Creations: An Exclusive Interview with Michal Ajvaz.
Among Ajvaz's explanations:
I prefer to talk about the area of Central Europe whose Bohemia is a part. Central Europe is roughly identified with the area of the former Habsburg Empire (the Austrians are Central Europeans, but not the Germans, even though they speak the same language), and the “spirit” of this area has features of absurdity, irony, and mistrust of all “great ideas. In this sense, I think my work has its roots in this Central European atmosphere. And by the way, I do not like the tag “magical realism” used in relation to my work; I do not think it has much in common with the work of writers like Márquez. I feel an affinity with Central European authors like Kafka or Bruno Schulz.
MA: As Kafka, in my opinion, is not only the greatest modern author but also somebody who is utterly interesting and important for me as a man; it is a kind of a miracle for me that I walk every day in the same streets as he walked. And by the way, Prague is a relatively small town where everybody knows everybody, and it so happened that my godmother was an aunt of Kafka’s lover Milena Jesenská. Prague was an important center of cultural life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a time when it was a city of dialogs and fights among three nations (Czechs, Germans, Jews), but it lost a great part of its soul when Nazis expelled or killed the Prague Jews and, after that, Czechs expelled the Prague Germans. But Prague is still a pleasant city to live in. Prague is the setting of my first four books, but then I had a feeling that I had said enough about Prague and began to write about other—real or imaginary—cities.
GS: In the spirit of Calvino’s Invisible Cities and your own The Other City (translated into English by Gerald Turner), which imaginary city would you like to be a resident of if you had to choose? Why? Several of Ajvaz's works are under review at the complete review -- e.g. The Golden Age -- but I haven't gotten to Journey to the South yet.Here's hoping that she does go through with that science-fiction project !
In recent days the paperback edition of Jordan Peterson's Beyond Order -- no links; you don't want to be buying this shit -- has been attracting renewed attention, as several reviewers have found their opinions rather misrepresented in the blurbs that publisher Penguin put on the back cover. (This edition has actually been out for over a year, but no one seems to have noticed until recently.)
At The New Statesman 'The Chatterer' has a good overview/run-down of just how creative the Penguin publicists were, in Jordan Peterson's rules for selective quotation.
Blurbs scraped from reviews are, of course, always to be considered only with great caution -- one reason I try to provide more representative review-quotes in the review-summaries of books under review at the complete review -- but this really is taking things to impressive extremes.
