Long overdue

My LA Times review of a not-so-good book. I like that I'm special to the LA Times. It's nice to be special.

Alix Cleo Roubaud

Thought Catalog has just posted my article on Alix Cleo Roubaud's journals. Read it here. Don't delay.

Birgit Jürgenssen

My consideration of Austrian feminist artist Birgit Jürgenssen is up at Thought Catalog. I even have a bio pic!

Dan Clowes

My interview with Dan Clowes, years in the making, is in the latest issue of The Believer. It's not available online, so you'll have to spring for a copy. So worth it!

Review-a-Day

My review of Rebecca Jo Plant's Mom was Powell's Review-a-Day pick yesterday!

Mom

My review of Rebecca Jo Plant's new book, Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America, is up now at The Millions. Read it here. Do it now.

If the Guggenheim were a bookshelf

Dezeen features an amazing translucent white bookshelf spiraling up a two-story staircase. It holds 6,000 books. The house belonged to a nineteenth-century Portuguese poet and was recently converted into a literary center.

Dubravka Ugresic

I have a review of her latest book, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, in the new issue of Time Out New York. It's online here.

Tony Judt in 'New York Magazine'

The latest issue of New York Magazine has a profile of Tony Judt, also available online. Judt, the author, most recently, of the brilliant Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, was diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehring's disease, in 2008 and has since lost the use of his body. Though the disease inexplicably stopped short of destroying his ability to speak (he does so with the aid of a microphone) and eat, he's essentially left with only his mental faculties intact. But what a mind. Judt is an aggressive, provocative, and stimulating thinker. He's also widely criticized, not least for his views on Israel. He's made enemies of friends, but I greatly admire his fearlessness and his belief in the intellectual's responsibility to stand apart and, often, alone.

“I think intellectuals have a primary duty to dissent not from the conventional wisdom of the age (though that too) but, and above all, from the consensus of their own community. . . . So liberals should look especially hard at the uninterrogated assumptions of liberalism. Otherwise we are just hacks for a party line. If I have an Archimedean ethical standpoint, it really just consists of telling the truth as I see it even if I don’t much care for the implications, or if it offends my friends and my political allies.”

The magazine has judiciously let stand lengthy, unbroken passages of Judt speaking, and it makes for great reading:

One thing I always felt very strongly empathetic about in my reading of [the Italian chemist and Holocaust diarist] Primo Levi was his absolutely clearheaded sense that none of what had happened to him in the camps had any meaning. You might draw lessons from it in terms of experience, you certainly might draw political lessons. But at the existential level of one man’s life, it had no meaning. This has no meaning. What I do with it is up to me.

Memoirs

I'm not one for memoirs. I've read very few, though I have just cracked open Patti Smith's new one, Just Kids, which, so far, is an exquisitely written book. That said, I enjoyed Mary Karr's interview in the latest issue of the Paris Review. It marks the first installment of the journal's "The Art of Memoir," a complement to their long-running "The Art of Fiction" interviews.

On why she doesn't pray everyday, despite knowing it would make her a happier person:

I think it's because my big smart mind likes the idea that it's running the show, and any conscious contact with God plugs me into my own radical powerlessness.

And on the recent rise in memoir-writing:

In the forties, the memoir was akin to history, which was absolute. One reason for a surge in memoir is the gradual erosion of objective truth, which makes stuff like assembled dialogue seem more acceptable. We mistrust the old forms of authority—the church and politicians, even science. The subjective has power now.

Poe Toaster

I love the story that's been making the rounds since last Wednesday, the day after the Edgar Allen Poe's 201st birthday, about the mystery fan who failed to show at the poet's Baltimore gravesite, after having left roses and cognac there for the past sixty years. The numerous "nevermore" puns are hard to take, but the fact that dozens of people from all over the country flock to his grave in the middle of the night to pay tribute is awfully nice.

Ilf & Petrov

My LA Times review of The Golden Calf by Ilf & Petrov, published by Open Letter.

Frank O'Hara

The New Republic's book blog features a video of Frank O'Hara, one of my favorite poets, reading "Having a Coke with You," one of my favorite poems. The film is from 1966. He died later that year.

Fine Print

The Etcht Miniature Monthly Magazine. Tiniest books ever.