a commodity in little supply these days

"I don’t want to overstate this point. These novels [of William Gaddis] demand more effort on the reader’s part than the average page-turner. Above all, they demand attention—a commodity in little supply these days. I read them both for the first time twenty years ago, in college, when I had all day to read long novels, and I have counted them among my favorites ever since. But I returned to them for this essay with some trepidation. I was in quarantine, working remotely with a newborn and a three-year-old at home. If I stopped reading mid-paragraph because a notification popped up on my phone, I would find myself lost and have to start the paragraph or the entire page over. But this problem was easily solved: I set my phone aside. I had hardly noticed how conditioned I’d become to give at best half of myself to whatever I was reading. There was something exciting about returning to books that asked something of me. And they rewarded my investment copiously. I count my second time through these novels—like my first—among the great literary experiences of my life."

~~ from "Because God Did Not Relax: The Difficult Pleasures of William Gaddis" 

      by Christopher Beha

      Harper's Magazine, November 2020

Gaddis and Cravan

Profiles of William Gaddis, in Harper's Magazine, and Arthur Cravan, in The Paris Review, caught my eye this week.

Eating. . . Earth. . .

When Linh Dinh writes food, the world's stomach roars! Enjoy "Earth Cafeteria" and "Eating Fried Chicken" with your weekend desserts.

Celine in Grays Ferry

"That year, I manned up and mainlined Celine’s 

Death on the Installment Plan and his Journey

To the End of the Night. After the first

Paragraph of Death, I knew there were risks

To reading further, but until I could finish all

One thousand-plus pages of these books, I

Didn’t leave the house."

~~ from "Grays Ferry" by Linh Dinh

Reed's Crouch

Ishmael Reed pens quite the obituary in "The Tragedy of Stanley Crouch." It's compelling reading full of rich details, and it captures the way anger lives on well after the subject of it is dead. If I'm not mistaken, it also depicts an extremely well recognized critic and journalist getting evicted from his residence late in life—yet another warning against the writing life—while also describing him as a failed musician and fiction writer. R.I.P. Stanley Crouch. I don't expect Ishmael Reed to find peace on this earth, but he delivers some amusing lines in this writing.

back in business

Writer and publisher Christopher DeGroot is back in business at Taki's Magazine and remains committed to publishing rich literary writing, books reviews, and conservatives so conservative that only Marxists will publish them. I'm told I have fiction in the next issue of DeGroot's The Agonist.

On Chile and China

Daniel Alarcón's "Letter from Santiago" and Peter Hessler's latest installment from his return to China are two recent pieces that have caught my eye in The New Yorker. The Hessler opens with reporting from the Wuhan market that has become so central to our lives.

Cyrus on the scene at Harvard

We're uncertain of how this came to pass, but if Louise Gluck lives in Cambridge, Mass, then she could likely borrow a copy of Fight for Your Long Day from Harvard University's Lamont Library.

Nobel Prize for Literature 2020

The 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to American poet Louise Gluck. 

Bullets and Books: "The Gun is the Motive"

Michael James Rizza takes on Don DeLillo, train rides, guns, and much more at Grub Street. His "Bullets and Books: 'The Gun is the Motive'" appears online, and it will run next spring in a print issue of the same journal.

Klein on DeLillo

If you follow this blog, then you know that my pandemic reading consists mainly of Roberto Bolano's 2666, feminist memoir from the Soviet gulag, and Paul Theroux's travel narratives, but I recently enjoyed learning that novelist and translator Lee Klein has had literature fun forever with his return to the fiction of Don DeLillo.