thebookishowl.com

Regarding this article about Russian poet Kirill Medvedev in the New York Times by Dwight Garner:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/books/its-no-good-by-kirill-medvedev.html?_r=0

I don’t get it. How can individuals like Dwight Garner and Keith Gessen (or Garth Risk Hallberg at The Millions) be strongly for cultural democracy, dissent, and freedom in Russia but not in the United States? If anything, they’re apologists for the literary status quo in this country; part of the monolith; supporters of the kind of crony capitalism a Kirill Medvedev would loathe.

Do these establishment journalists actually believe the political, economic, and cultural systems in both countries are dissimilar?

The difference is that the corruption, lies, and propaganda—the political and media games in the United States—are vastly more sophisticated. In Russia, the magician plying his trade is a crude amateur. The audience glimpses the rabbit in the hat before it appears. In the United States, the magicians are slick professionals.

If the principles of a Dwight Garner or Keith Gessen aren’t honest, aren’t transferable to our own shores, or their own field, then what are these highly placed apparatchiks up to?
AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

The first week of the crazy new lit blog, The Literary Circus, nears its close. Check out the week’s humorous or not-so humorous posts:

www.literarycircus.blogspot.com

New arrivals include Daniel Handler singing, the New York Times bestseller list, and (up soon) the Jonathan Franzen bird-and-birth-bust controversy.

What could be better than an entire week of Literary Circus?

Only one thing: reading The McSweeneys Gang! Over-the-top literary ebook satire sticking it to ALL the nation’s lit snobs at least those who could be fit into one narrative—EggersFranzenBellerVidaMarcusJulavitsSaundersLopatePlimptonMailerEgan—also The Man in the Black Hat and Mr. Empathy. The line-up is breathtaking.

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Upcoming: Literary Circus looks at the gun control issue.

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

WHILE all Americans await the standard thorough Lawrence Wright-style New Yorker think piece detailing what happened in Benghazi on 9/11, I’m caused to note the absence of mainstream journalism in other areas of American life. Such as in today’s literary scene.

JOURNALISTS OR CHEERLEADERS?

Take someone like Lucas Wittmann at Daily Beast/Newsweek. Journalist or cheerleader?

I’m told there is no literary establishment. Yet a Lucas Wittmann gives voice to the main ideas and major players of one literary viewpoint– the “literary”– such as that of Dave Eggers and the McSweeney’s organization. Any such article by Eggers, depicting how wonderful he and his friends are, is followed by tweets from Wittmann himself pointing people to the article, as if he were a McSweeney’s p.r. person. And who knows– maybe he is.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

What really happened in 2003 with Tom Bissell’s Believer magazine essay is that the Underground Literary Alliance was engaging in actual literary journalism, covering a host of stories uncomfortable to mainstream literati. Some of those stories, yes, involved Dave Eggers and McSweeney’s, or so-called Friends of Eggers.

The Believer, on the other hand, was instituted to shut down real literary journalism and literary debate, to create instead the Dave Eggers personal vision of an uncritical happy face literary scene. Which is what we have today.

Bissell’s Believer essay was a flat-out propaganda piece designed to discredit the literary group looking hardest into the operations of the literary machine. The essay represented a clash of views and visions. For Eggers to have his peacefully lobotomized literary world, the ULA had to be destroyed.

Anyone care to deny this?

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

Literary Rebellion is first a state of mind, not a physical entity. Vehicles have been used for the Literary Rebellion in the past, and they likely will again. But they’re not the Rebellion itself.

Literary Rebellion is nothing more than the ability to think independently. To question current literary dogma, structures, and authority. To stand as an independent writer outside the literary herd. To exhibit the freedom of thought and action which marks the truly free writer—knowing that the true writer can only be free.

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

Where are the literary rebels? Where are the outspoken voices? Where are those who believe that literature first of all must be at the forefront of ensuring this nation’s promise of democracy?

Where are those writers who’ll call for a level playing field, for the breaking of cronyism, privilege, and monopoly? When will it be time for the arts to throw off the domination of a tiny elite, and so bring out and reinvigorate the true source of all authentic art—the voice and aspiration and pain and experience of the people?

When will we see this? In some far off never-to-be-defined-exactly utopian future, as if those who’ve made the claims—while doing the opposite—are scamming? Or will we see it now? Today? Immediately?

There’s no tomorrow when doing things the true and honest way.

Where are the young rebels, young literary rebels, young writers with true voices and honest, clear-seeing eyes, willing and brave enough to shake off the corrupt system which has produced for this nation’s fiction and poetry only institutionalized and perpetual stagnancy? ART isn’t about the status quo. It’s not about staying the same. It’s about action, about being dynamic, always moving, always changing, mutating, improving, challenging, combating, screaming, crying out loudly again and again for artistic revival and change. Who’s willing to throw off the shackles of intellectual conformity?

All those willing to be literary rebels and make literary history please contact me, or one of the other courageous men and women banding together to restart the ultimate radical writers organization, the Underground Literary Alliance, popularly known as the ULA.

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

Author Junot Diaz spins some of his favorite songs at Alt.Latino.

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Page-Views shares a literary guide to the 2012 NFL football season.

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Macleans.ca lists five films that were better than the book that inspired them.

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Guardian readers recommend songs about advertising.

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Critical Mob recommends 10 books published this fall.

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The Austin Chronicle interviews Lisa Gerrard about the new Dead Can Dance album, Anastasis.

AC: Has working on soundtracks and working in film changed your approach to music?

LG: Well, I find doing music for film really, really exhausting. It’s a wonderful experience, but you have to write a lot of music that has to work within the subtextual reality and space and time emotionally of what the director wants to create in terms of a kind of abstract literary sense. It’s very, very specific, plus you have to create the atmosphere and poetry.

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The Economist, Los Angeles Times, Slate, and the Wall Street Journal review Michael Chabon’s new novel Telegraph Avenue.

The Wall Street Journal interviews Chabon about the book.

How do you approach your research?

Writing a novel is always an education. Research is incredibly pleasurable and seductive and you have to be on your guard against it. It’s very easy to use it as an excuse not to write. There’s always one more fact that could help you and you probably shouldn’t start writing until you find out the boots worn by German troops in World War II, and if I just knew who made those boots then I could write my chapter. So you have to be on your guard against that.

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Baeble previews fall’s hottest music releases.

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Zadie Smith talks to Morning Edition about her new novel NW.

Smith says her decision to return to her old haunts for the setting of this novel was, in part, purely pragmatic. “I knew I was going to write a book which was in some ways difficult stylistically and difficult for me to write, so I just wanted to give myself a break,” she says. “I needed one thing which was stable that I knew — and the streets I do know and they don’t take research and I don’t need to use Google maps; they’re kind of a deep knowledge in me.”

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The Wall Street Journal examines the impact American punk has had on current politically active bands around the world.

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Flavorwire lists famous authors’ school photos.

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DJ and producer Erol Alkan lists his 13 favorite albums at The Quietus.

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The Rejectionist is a new literary chapbook series, the first edition will feature Lidia Yuknavitch and Vanessa Veselka.

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Flavorwire lists 10 surprisingly conservative musicians.

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Novel Sounds is a book blog that pairs a song or two with every review.

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Win D.T. Max’s new book Every Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace and a 0 Threadless gift certificate in this week’s Largehearted Boy contest.

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Amazon MP3 has over 100 digital albums on sale for .

Amazon MP3 offers over 500 albums for sale for .99.

Amazon MP3 offers over 300 jazz albums on sale for .78.

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Follow me on Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (daily news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week’s best new comics & graphic novels)
Book Notes (authors create playlists for their book)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week’s best new books)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN LITERARY APPARATUS

When one reads accounts of the treatment of writers in the old Soviet Union, such as Giovanni Grazzini’s Solzhenitsyn, one sees strong parallels to the way dissenting or nonconforming writers are treated in the United States now. There’s the same divide between Approved and Unapproved writers; the same bureaucratically based intelligentsia condemning writers behind the scenes, silently denying those writers access to the system, including publicity or media attention, while circulating distortions and calumnies against them, as happened to the writers of the Underground Literary Alliance, without those writers able to present their side except in obscure samizdat fashion—as I do through posts on this blog.

The apparatus is shaky, as the Soviet apparatus was shaky. Mainstream journals, newspapers, and magazines, through which the literature of our time is announced and its ideas and names allowed to circulate, face increased popular indifference and plummeting circulation. But it remains a powerful apparatus, its members recruited from the New Class; such membership bestowing largesse and credibility. The apparatus retains the power to make, or banish, individual writers or groups of writers.

The system also pushes forward its approved models of a proper writer. Sholokhov, notably, in the first instance. A Jonathan Lethem or Lorrie Moore in the U.S. today. Within the bounds of the particular system, what’s certain is that the proper model will be appropriately safe.

Revealing to me was discovering Sholokhov’s three choices regarding Solzhenitsyn; his stated three ways to handle the man: as 1.) A madman; 2.) not a writer; 3.) an anti-Soviet slanderer.

Substituting “System” for “Soviet,” these are the three ways the current U.S. literary system depicted writers of the Underground Literary Alliance.

ORIGINS

Sixty years ago two giant opposing systems, centered around the Soviet Union, in one instance, and the United States, in the other, waged an intense ideological war. The Cold War was a fight of ideas and ideologies. On the literary plain, the Soviet Union embraced Stalinist-style Socialist Realism. The liberal capitalist world, through the actions of men like George Plimpton and Robert Silvers, countered with a literature of the opposite; what could be called Irrelevant Postmodernism. Writers were encouraged to focus on the personal, the trivial, or the nonsensical. (The French author Robbe-Grillet was maybe the ultimate expression of this viewpoint.)

Pushed aside in the United States was that literary form which had dominated American letters for the previous fifty years: populism. As the Soviet Union’s ideological contortions narrowed and damaged Russian literature, the very same thing happened to American literature. That different kinds of writing were excluded only showed the two systems to be mirror images. As, of course, the opposing military complexes were built in opposition to, but were similar to, the Other.

One can study the education and career of the conforming working class American writer Raymond Carver to see how every shred of populism and activism was wrung from his mind and his work, leaving a compliant, beaten-down shell.

The problem, from an American standpoint, is that the Soviet Union and its moldy bureaucratic systems and decayed ideologies collapsed—but our literary system continued on, to this very day, more repressive of counter-ideologies, nonconformity, and dissent as ever. 

THE FUTURE?

Those Approved literary groups who try to break from their restrictive box face unresolvable contradictions. The elite (Ivy League-spawned) journal n+1, for instance, claims to want a return to populist American art. But its very intellectual foundations—Partisan Review and New York Review of Books major influences—are with the organs of past American liberal/neoconservative Cold Warriors. Their postmodernism philosophy in all its aspects, premises, jargon, and aesthetics, stems from the anti-populist camp.

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

Here are some quotes from Philadelphia sports writer and radio host Angelo Cataldi, printed yesterday in the Philly edition of the Metro newspaper:

“Joe Paterno created that environment with pure, unadulterated bullying. . . . It’s why he snapped at the most benign questions from timid reporters for the last 20 years of his tenure.”

“What is happening now– the sanctions, the protests, the national disgrace– is long-overdue payback for years of obnoxious behavior cloaked in cranky charm. Paterno thought he could get away with anything in the domain that he ruled. And for a very long time, he did. But there is a limit even to this kind of hero worship.”

What do you think? Unquestioning hero worship? Are there any powerful persons in the literary world who resemble these descriptions?

Examine those puff pieces carefully.

AttackingtheDemi-Puppets

The Scotsman interviews Kathleen Edwards about her new album, Voyageur.

Is this your most personal album to date?

I don’t really know how else to write songs but this time round I definitely broke the bank. I ended up writing songs about a period of my life that was really difficult. I had just split up with my partner of seven years and there is something that happens to you – you get a feeling of starting over that makes you feel ready to try anything musically.

Edwards also shares her literary influences with Clash.

Do your literary influences have a direct impact on your songwriting?

Not so much. I see songwriting as such a different craft as short stories or novels. I am in awe of the elaborate process that writing a book or short story must entail. I feel like a sprinter, and authors the marathon runners.

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The Globe and Mail offers a brief history of “great book to bad film” adaptations.

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CHARTattack offers a primer to the albums of Tom Waits.

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IGN lists the top 25 indie rock love songs.

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The National Post profiles Canadian independent publisher House of Anansi Press.

“In this commercial climate, if a writer hasn’t broken out, in terms of sales, by a certain time, the big houses do have trouble hanging on to them,” says Jackie Kaiser, a Toronto literary agent who represents Hough. A place like Anansi, she notes, can take a chance on such a writer. “So a writer who might get lost between the cracks at a big commercially driven house, like Random House, can in fact be really appreciated, and get a lot more time and attention and space, from a place like Anansi.”

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The New Yorker deciphers the rules for the Oscars’ “best original score” category.

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The New York Daily News reports that actor Billy Bob Thornton is writing a memoir, and that his ex-wife Angelina Jolie will write the forward.

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The Guardian profiles the band Sleigh Bells.

You could argue that the whole idea of Sleigh Bells depends on a considered trashiness. Their music is obnoxious and anarchic, a crossbreed of pop, beats and hardcore that’s half pumping jock-rock and half rave abandon. “Most of my tastes are middle to low,” he agrees. “I’m uncomfortable with sophistication. I’m inherently drawn to things that are inclusive like pop music. Or pizza.”

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Scholars and Rogues explores the intersection between sports and songs.

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The New Straits Times lists “gimmicky reads,” books that “successfully blend style and substance, form and function.”

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St. Vincent’s Annie Clark tells the New Zealand Herald the genesis of her stage name.

“I’m a big Nick Cave fan, and on There She Goes My Beautiful World, he’s kind of singing about the glory and the squalor of being an artist. And he sings ‘Dylan Thomas died drunk at St Vincent’s hospital’ and to me, that kind of encapsulated the darkly comic aspect of being an artist, I guess. I love Dylan Thomas and Nick Cave, and I guess it’s my subtle way of implanting myself among my heroes.”

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The Telegraph examines digital books’ current effects on the reading experience.

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NME lists the 10 worst songs of the 90s.

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Thomas Mallon talks to Weekend Edition about his new novel, WatergateThomas Mallon talks to Weekend Edition about his new novel, Watergate.

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Shearwater visits The Current studio for an interview and live performance.

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Amazon MP3 has 100 digital albums on sale for .

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Follow me on Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (daily news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

List of Online “Best Books of 2011″ Lists
List of Online Year-End 2011 Music Lists

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week’s best new comics & graphic novels)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week’s best new books)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy

Flavorwire shares a literary mixtape for The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen.

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Crossfade lists the ten worst music trends of 2011.

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The List of Online Year-End 2011 Music Lists was updated yesterday with 105 year-end music lists added to the master aggregation, including several lists from the Los Angeles Times’ music blog Pop & Hiss, Folkways Magazine’s best albums, Rolling Stones’ best under the radar albums, and many others.

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The List of Online “Best Books of 2011″ Lists was updated yesterday with 43 year-end book lists added to the master aggregation today, including GOOD’s best books, the Dayton daily News’ best fiction, Comics Bulletins’ best graphic novels, and many others.

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Complex lists 50 movies that are better than the book.

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SPIN lists the 10 “most contagiously viral musical web sensations” of 2011.

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3:AM Magazine interviews author Scott McClanahan.

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The Guardian shares its favorite music stories of the year.

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SFX lists the best science fiction and fantasy quotes of 2011.

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Reuters examines the U.S. success of the streaming music service Spotify.

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Chamber Four compares iPad and iPhone ereader apps.

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The Harvard Independent explores how online streaming services are changing the way we consume music.

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The Periscope Post recaps the year in books.

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Pop & Hiss interviews Axl Rose.

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Oprah has named Sara Levine’s debut novel Treasure Island!!! one of the 16 books to watch for in January.

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The Record looks back on a 2011 filled with profanity in pop music.

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Singer-songwriter Alina Simone has an essay in the New York Times today about changing her name.

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Amazon MP3 has 100 digital albums on sale for .

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Follow me on Twitter, Google+, and Stumbleupon for links (updated throughout the day) that don’t make the daily “Shorties” columns.

also at Largehearted Boy:

previous Shorties posts (news and links from the worlds of music, books, and pop culture)

List of Online “Best Books of 2011″ Lists
List of Online Year-End 2011 Music Lists

100 Online Sources for Free and Legal Music Downloads
Atomic Books Comics Preview (the week’s best new comics & graphic novels)
daily mp3 downloads
Largehearted Word (the week’s best new books)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from this week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

Largehearted Boy