American mapmaking’s most prestigious honor is the “Best of Show” award at the annual competition of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society. The five most recent winners were all maps designed by large, well-known institutions: National Geographic (three times), the Central Intelligence Agency Cartography Center, and the U.S. Census Bureau. But earlier this year, the 38th annual Best of Show award went to a map created by Imus Geographics—which is basically one dude named David Imus working in a farmhouse outside Eugene, Ore. (via)
Steve Donoghue discusses a recent article published at Slate written by Katie Roiphe.
Our old nemesis Katie Roiphe fires off a piece wailing about the dimming of John Updike’s literary reputation in the three years since his death – at least, I think that’s what she’s wailing about (the essay is more eager to push all the buttons than a kid in a department store elevator). She begins:
Exactly three years after his death, it’s sad to see that John Updike has subtly fallen out of fashion, that he is left off best novels lists like the Modern Library’s, and that a faint sense of disapproval clings to his reputation, even as his immense talent is recognized.
It’s obviously not a promising beginning (‘subtly’? ‘faint’?), and things only get worse – Roiphe spends her next two paragraphs demonstrating how a faint sense of disapproval has always clung to Updike’s work, mainly “harbored” by carping critics who are unnerved by just how exquisite that work is:
Critics and writers hold the fact that he writes beautiful sentences against him, as if his writing is too well crafted, too flamboyantly, extravagantly good.
There are a lot of great resources for insightful and intelligent literary criticism. It’s disappointing to see major publications publish things as awful as the piece by Roiphe. If there’s anything wrong with literary criticism, it is that major publications are publishing crappy literary criticism that completely misses the mark. The article by Roiphe isn’t insightful and it’s ridiculously laughable.
(via Conversational Reading)
A photo taken by Cecilia Majzoub in SF.
Anyone with eyes open knows that the gangsterism of Wall Street — financial institutions generally — has caused severe damage to the people of the United States (and the world). And should also know that it has been doing so increasingly for over 30 years, as their power in the economy has radically increased, and with it their political power. That has set in motion a vicious cycle that has concentrated immense wealth, and with it political power, in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1%, while the rest increasingly become what is sometimes called “a precariat” — seeking to survive in a precarious existence. They also carry out these ugly activities with almost complete impunity — not only too big to fail, but also “too big to jail.”
The courageous and honorable protests underway in Wall Street should serve to bring this calamity to public attention, and to lead to dedicated efforts to overcome it and set the society on a more healthy course.
(via)
— Noam Chomsky
Currently Reading
Taken with my iPhone
I’m still reading The Alienist as well as The Finkler Question. I did finish The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch and I’ll have a review of that posted shortly.
I only bought one book this past week, but that was for The Rumpus Book Club. I did acquire a few books.
- The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch
- Beautiful and Pointless by David Orr
- The Anti-Romantic Child by Priscilla Gilman
My to-read pile is still out of control, but I plan to slowly work on that in the coming months.
Web Reading
- The amazing Zadie Smith makes her debut at Harper’s. She reviews Harlem is Nowhere by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, My Prizes by Thomas Bernhard, and While the Women Are Sleeping by Javier Marias. Harlem is Nowhere is currently somewhere inside my to-read pile.
- It’s a hot month for Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts because Kaiama L. Glover reviews Harlem is Nowhere for the NYTimes.
- The National lists their 10 most overrated literary classics. I’m not a fan of their list at all, in fact I only agree with a couple of their picks, but I do enjoy their suggested reading.
- A web reading classic: Instant Message, Instant Love. I was blinded by the common belief that somehow a relationship forged on the Internet isn’t real. When I saw that fated text message — “I love you” — I realized the truth. The Internet is not a separate place a person can go to from the real world. The Internet is the real world. Only faster.
- Meaghan Winter interviews Dean Spade for Guernica. The average life span of a transgendered person is twenty-three years. The statistic is shocking, until it begins to make sense. Gender non-conformists face routine exclusion and violence. Transgendered people are disproportionately poor, homeless, and incarcerated. Many of the systems and facilities intended to help low-income people are sex-segregated and thereby alienate those who don’t comply with state-imposed categories. A trans woman may not be able to secure a bed in a homeless shelter, for example. Spade writes that just as the feminist movement tended to “focus on gender-universalized white women’s experience as ‘women’s experience,’” the lesbian- and gay-rights movement has focused primarily on a white, middle-class politic, centered on marriage and mainstream social mores. This really is a shocking statistic, even for me. I’m trans and I’ve been out for eight years now. I had no idea that the average life-span was so low.
- I posted a write-up of Oregon Bike Trails and Lord Huron at Music Mind Zone.
- Bookslut has an interview up with Deb Olin Unferth. A memoir is about time and the imperfectness of memory and the invention of the self. And it is from those considerations that you find your tensions.
- Going For A Beer by Robert Coover is probably one of the best short stories I’ve read this year. You can read it online over at The New Yorker.
- Speaking of short stories, Roxane Gay has a new one up at fwriction:review called Girls With Eating Disorders.
I’m trying to patiently wait for Spring to arrive, for warmer weather. For some reason, this reminds me of Spring.
Currently Reading
I broke down and bought a Kindle. I’m going to mostly use it for travel purposes; it will be much easier to carry around a Kindle than it will be to carry around 4-5 books. My back is getting old. The first book I bought was The Finkler Question to get ready for the Tournament of Books, which begins today.
Taken with my iPhone
I still haven’t decided if I like reading on a Kindle. Maybe I just don’t like The Finkler Question enough to like reading it on the Kindle. I had to start reading one of the many books in my to-read pile in order to feel like I wasn’t losing my mind (or soul). I’m also reading The Alienist.
Taken with my iPhone
I’m only 30 pages into this but I am sort of into it. I’ve never really been able to get into Historical Fiction so much, maybe the only exception was The Lacuna.
I also finished a collection of poems this week — Things Come On. I won’t say too much about it other than I wouldn’t recommend it.
Taken with my iPhone
Books I Bought
I think I am going on a book buying moratorium starting ASAP. I have too many books in my to-read pile and I could use the extra cash. I have a problem and that problem is buying books. I did buy some books this past week though.
- Consider The Lobster by David Foster Wallace
- Model Home by Eric Puchner
- The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa
- The Alienist by Caleb Carr
No more books for awhile. At least until The Pale King is released in April.
Web Reading
- This post of mine was linked over at The Morning News and also over at Coudal Partners which are two of my favorite sites (and have been for some time).
- I found this gem of an editorial by Stephen King on the short story: Last year, I read scores of stories that felt … not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers. The chief reason for all this, I think, is that bottom shelf. It’s tough for writers to write (and editors to edit) when faced with a shrinking audience. Once, in the days of the old Saturday Evening Post, short fiction was a stadium act; now it can barely fill a coffeehouse and often performs in the company of nothing more than an acoustic guitar and a mouth organ. If the stories felt airless, why not? When circulation falters, the air in the room gets stale.
- An excerpt of Pacazo by Roy Kesey is up at The Collagist. You can read my review of Pacazo over at The Rumpus.
- Roxane Gay writes one of the best reviews I’ve ever read and it happens to be a review of the next selection for The Rumpus Book Club, The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch.
- The Rumpus Book Club had a chat with author Jim Shepard about his new story collection You Think That’s Bad. You can read my review of the collection at The Rumpus and you can view my notes from the discussion at my tumblr. Shepard had a lot to say about empathy and writing.
- David Foster Wallace on grammar. And is a conjuction; so is so. Except in dialogue between particular kinds of characters, you never need both conjunctions. “He needed to eat, and so he bought food” is incorrect. In 95% of cases like this, what you want to do is cut the and.
- An excerpt of The Late American Novel: Writers On The Future of Books was posted at The Morning News. Who the hell doesn’t share books they own with other people? I can’t be friends with those people.
We added a new member to our family this weekend. Say hello to the new puppy.
Taken with my iPhone