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)

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 38^th 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)

You can order a copy of the map to hang on your wall.

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

A photo taken by Cecilia Majzoub in SF.

(via)

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)

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.