Except that I received some of these for Christmas and used gift cards for the rest.

List

It Chooses You by Miranda July

Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

Zazen by Vanessa Veselka

American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Shopgirl by Steve Martin

Swamplandia by Karen Russell

A Moment in the Sun by John Sayles

Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Grantland

Kurt Vonnegut, writing in response to Jonathan Franzen’s April Folio on American novelists, “Perchance to Dream,” claims that “Novelists are people who believe they can dampen their neuroses by writing make-believe. We will keep on doing that no matter what, while offering loftier explanations.” This makes Vonnegut look humble and lovable, but as a response to the stuff Franzen was talking about is total horseshit.  If Vonnegut’s sound bite were the whole truth, nobody at all would read novels - who would want to devote hours of brain work to something somebody had written just to dampen his own neuroses?

Good art is a kind of magic. It does magical things for both artist and audience. We can have long polysyllabic arguments about how to describe the way this magic works but the plain fact is that good art is magical and precious and cool. It’s hard to make good art, and it seems to me wholly reasonable that a good artist should be concerned with their work’s cultural reception. I thought it was brave of Franzen to offer not only “lofty explanations” but honest and intimate descriptions of how it feels to try to make good, serious art in a culture that doesn’t seem to value it much. And I was disappointed that the Harper’s Letters editor chose to run only sneery, disparaging letters about the essay. I’ve spoken with way too many readers and writers who admired Franzen’s piece to believe disparaging letters were all that Harper’s got. I suppose one reason it was brave of Franzen to publish his essay is that it made it easy for other writers to look humble and adorable at his expense.

David Foster Wallace in reply to a letter Kurt Vonnegut wrote w/r/t an article, “Perchance to dream,” Jonathan Franzen published in the April 1996 issue of Harper’s.

(via Printed & Bound)

Have you ever faked a restroom trip to check your email? Slept with your laptop? Or become so overwhelmed that you just unplugged from it all? In this funny, eye-opening, and inspiring film, director Tiffany Shlain takes audiences on an exhilarating rollercoaster ride to discover what it means to be connected in the 21st century.

More food for thought: Interdependence and Declaration of Interdependence.

(via Laughing Squid)

When Joseph Bloch, a construction worker who had once been a well-known soccer goalie, reported for work that morning, he was told that he was fired. At least that was how he interpreted the fact that no one except the foreman looked up from his coffee break when he appeared at the door of the construction shack, where the workers happened to be at that moment, and Bloch left the building site. Out on the street he raised his arm, but the car that drove past — even though Bloch hadn’t been hailing a cab — was not a cab. Then he heard the sound of brakes in front of him. Bloch looked around: behind him there was a cab; its driver started swearing. Bloch turned around, got in, and told the driver to take him to the Naschmarkt.

Rowe goes on to say that:

We only have words for things that bother us. Language is anxiety given material form. Or, rather, words designate those things about which it is possible to think, those things we have to deal with. If things were inert, not worthy of notice, we wouldn’t mention them and wouldn’t be able to. There’d be no words. That there is a word indicates a snag, a hitch we have to consider. In the opening paragraph of The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Handke’s narration presumes the meaning of Bloch’s raising his arm before really understanding the intent. Bloch was, after all, just raising his arm. What does anyone know about what that gesture means? What is the word for it? “Hailing”? But, of course, Bloch ended up hailing a cab anyway. The point is: what do Bloch’s intentions matter? Language doesn’t care about us. Conventional meanings are always at the ready. Perhaps it is not so much that the narration is lagging behind Bloch’s actions as lagging around Bloch’s actions.The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, being a novel, will record the forward momentum of a plot in which Bloch goes some “where,” does something, murders someone, wanders some “where” again. But even if a fictional narrative is the case and the context, Handke’s opening paragraph suggests Bloch’s alienation from the plot in which he’s helplessly snared. He tries the gestures for reasons other than their meaning. It’s a stretching of muscles. But it’s raising your hand or opening your mouth that gets you in the worst kinds of trouble.

I’m spending the weekend getting caught up on my currently reading pile which is a bit out of control at this point. The Pale King by David Foster Wallace is priority right now.

Here is my reading pile currently:

It’s a pretty heavy pile and I haven’t made it very far into any of them. It’s somewhat overwhelming considering I also have a couple if to-read piles that take up my desk as well as a couple piles on the floor.

Currently listening and obsessing over.

This explains an uncanny aspect of unfinished novels: the way their real-life back stories usually seem like something the authors themselves might have written. Max Brod’s famous nonburning of Kafka’s unpublished writing, for example, only reinforces one lesson of the unincinerated work: that the suffering individual is no match for the big bullying system of the world. Similarly, Nabokov’s “Original of Laura” (the blockbuster unfinished novel of 2009) played out like something out of “Pale Fire”: a mysterious manuscript written on index cards, squirreled away from the public for decades, then released with an elaborate apparatus that makes you wonder, slightly, if the editors were actually crazy. The publication of Roberto Bolaño’s “2666” (the blockbuster posthumous novel of 2008) mimicked a Bolaño story: porous and unresolved, with the tantalizing possibility that there’s still more of it secretly out there somewhere, getting ready to leap out at us and unsettle everything. It’s as if an author’s unfinished work is his last and best (or the least improvable) fiction.