Like many other people, I suspect, I’ve experienced a bit of Kickstarter fatigue owing to the number of requests I receive every week to support one project or another. But Colin Marshall’s new project Notebook on Cities and Culture is definitely one worth our support. Colin’s public radio interview show The Marketplace of Ideas is one of the best podcast series I’ve encountered, and I was honored to be part of it. But never mind me: his interviews with Peter Toohey, Lee Rourke, Gabriel Josipovici, Sarah Bakewell, and Tom McCarthy — among many others — are the kind of smart conversations bound to give you ideas and inspiration. I’m sure the new series will be just as engaging, so I hope you’ll consider lending your support.
The conventional idea is that novels should be driven by the writer’s own experience. You delve into your own past in order to write your fiction. Writers who are like that, well, of course they’re driven. When they leave the office at five o’clock in the evening, they take their subject matter with them. When they talk to their spouse, when they walk the dog, their subject matter is still sitting on their shoulder because they are their own subject matter. I can’t raid my past for raw material because my past is so dull, so I have to make it all up, I have to start from scratch, inventing alternate landscapes to fill with invented people and invented narratives. That also means, of course, that when I leave my office at five in the evening, I’m leaving my subject matter behind. It’s not squatting on my shoulder nagging me, it’s not walking with me and the dog. It’s no longer there.
~ Jim Crace @ Paris Review
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~ Carl Andre, Quincy (via 6 Decades)
This book — which accompanied an exhibition but does not reproduce any of the works shown or make specific reference to them — is not a catalog, but rather an essay in images by Andre on the origins of his personal aesthetic.
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Lake Hitchcock’s existence coincided with the arrival of humans on the North American continent. Crossing the land bridge exposed by receding oceans caused by the Ice Age, early man followed mammoths and other Ice Age animals onto the North American continent. There is no evidence, to date, of human presence at Lake Hitchcock. The native people of the region do have a creation story, however, that tells of a giant beaver killed in the middle of a lake and turned to stone. The “beaver” is a local landform, Mount Sugarloaf. The waters of Lake Hitchcock did indeed surround Mount Sugarloaf ten thousand years ago, just as the Pocumtuck creation story states.
When Lake Hitchcock drained, the Connecticut River began cutting into the old lakebed and forming flood plains. The earliest evidence of human habitation appears along what were the banks of the Connecticut River at that time, about nine thousand years ago.
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I’m instinctively a schematic writer. I want to make moralistic points. I have a purpose. So if you encounter a stone on page one of the novel then you can be damn sure it’s not there by chance. It’s going to show up weighing down a metaphor, on page thirty, and it’s going to crop up again on page two hundred fifty with a moral attached.
~ Jim Crace @ Paris Review
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My 5-year-old nephew, Ezra, sits between his mother and grandmother on a porch-swing covered in old quilts. An expansive view of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Madison County, N.C., spreads out before them.
The porch used to be a really important part of mountain music. Ezra’s mother, Melanie, sings one of the old ballads, just like her ancestors used to do 200 years ago.
The hope is that if Ezra hears the ballads, he’ll start to learn them, just as he’s learned the names of the trees on his farm, says his grandmother Sheila Kay Adams.
@ NPR
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There’s this perception problem where we end up being short-sighted and long-sighted at the same time. So people overestimate the short-term impact of a thing so you get these bubbles like the dot com bubble. People overhype technology but at the same time they greatly underestimate the effect of the technologies on the ordering of society. A good example is the railways. There was a railway mania in the middle of the nineteenth century. Shares did their thing and then collapsed. And people said, ‘Well, that’s railways done with,’ and forgot to take account of the fact that railways made different ways of organisation available. Now there were ways of bringing food in from the countryside into the towns and cities. So now we could support much bigger cities than before. The urban century that we have now, where we have just recently passed the mark where over 50% of the world’s population are living in cities, was made possible by rail. So the effects of that were fifty years and then a hundred years, so we have very long term effects.
~ Diane Coyle @ 3:AM Magazine
Time lapse of the growth of a black-seeded simpson head lettuce.
A key component of the Digital Farm Collective will be an international database, or living library, that shares the films, philosophies and agricultural data. While this library is essentially visual, the greater goal is to spur awareness and provoke public dialogue about the future of agriculture as an international community. Global climate change, continual urban encroachment, and ever-expanding agribusiness models are pushing small growers out of business and further distancing consumers from an intimate understanding that their food comes from the earth. In addressing varied and localized growing practices, the films and interviews preserve a record of cultural methodologies and philosophies and of regional agrarian knowledge. My hope is that this collection of film, narrative and information will be a resource for farmers facing new ecological landscapes as growing zones shift in our warming climate.
~ Matthew Moore @ Places
I really admire this new mission statement from Two Ravens Press, and look forward to seeing the books it produces:
Two Ravens Press came into existence in November 2006 and since then has gone on to publish an impressive list of contemporary literary fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Our focus always has been on work that was challenging, innovative, and full of new ideas. Five years on, in November 2011, we have refocused the company to take into account what we have learnt about publishing, about the power of some books and the impotence of others, and to reflect world events which have seen the dominant narratives of western culture begin to dissolve and lose their relevance. We plan now to publish books — whether fiction, nonfiction or poetry — that face head-on the new certainty that ‘business as usual’, as a society, is not going to hack it. We’re looking for books that are wilder. Books which reflect the fact that the division of the world into the human versus the natural was always a dangerous fiction. Books that explore ways of living and being human outside the paradigm of growth-addicted consumerism. If we have to put a label on it, we’re looking for ‘eco-books’ — ecofiction, ecopoetry, ecophilosophy and ecopsychology. But really we’re looking for something much broader than that. We’re looking for books that are capable of challenging and unpicking the status quo, of shifting the worldview of their readers away from the creed of ‘Progress is Growth is Consumption’.
There have always been prolific writers as well as slow-moving, blocked, gin-addled or silent ones. It’s worth suggesting, though, that something more meaningful may be going on here; these long spans between books may indicate a desalinating tidal change in the place novelists occupy in our culture. Suddenly our important writers seem less like color commentators, sifting through the emotional, sexual and intellectual detritus of how we live today, and more like a mountaintop Moses, handing down the granite tablets every decade or so to a bemused and stooped populace. We roll our eyes at how seldom Time magazine puts writers on its cover — it once did so quite often — and sense this is evidence of the public’s shrinking appetite for quality literature. Perhaps it has got more to do with our novelists’ lagging output, their eroded willingness to be central to the cultural conversation.
~ Dwight Garner @ NY Times
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Lit = Ile
~ Michael Leiris, via Georges Perec
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Richter’s most famous series is October 18, 1977. Painted 11 years after the events they address, the 15 works — grey, small and undramatic — show members of the Baader-Meinhof group: a youthful picture; a post-capture mugshot; the record-player in which a gun was smuggled into prison and so on. Derived from press and police photographs that Richter, naturally, has blurred, the images are remarkable for the dual pull they exert towards, on the one hand, monumentality and, on the other, monochrome monotony. In another recent interview, Richter uses the term ansehnlich (“considerable”) to describe the effect of rescuing an image from the endless rush of media and paying it the attention — the devotion, we could say — of crafting it into a unique work of art.
~ Tom McCarthy @ Guardian
~ Jan Jörnmark, Creative Destruction
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Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It’s not just capitalism’s endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours.
More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base – the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring.
But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we’re only now struggling to cope with.
~ John Gray @ BBC News
According to a study in the journal Current Biology, every polar bear alive today can trace its ancestry to one mama bear that lived in Ireland during the last Ice Age. And what’s more, she wasn’t even a polar bear: She was a brown bear.
~ NPR
What rider is like him? Mount him on the camel or the boisterous buffalo the victory in a hack canter is still his. But let us bear it as was the ancient wont. Mercy on the luckless! Poor Sceptre! he said with a light sigh. She is not the filly that she was. Never, by this hand, shall we behold such another. By gad, sir, a queen of them. Do you remember her, Vincent? I wish you could have seen my queen today, Vincent said. How young she was and radiant (Lalage were scarce fair beside her) in her yellow shoes and frock of muslin, I do not know the right name of it.
~ Ulysses
I’m pleased to be participating today in a blog tour for David Maine’s new fantasy novel, Gamble of the Godless. A few years ago I read David’s first novel, The Preservionist, a reimagining of the story of Noah and his ark. Since then, he’s gone on to write more Biblical reimaginings as well as Monster, 1959, which plays with the tropes of the midcentury atomic monster film (one of my favorite genres) as thoughtfully — if perhaps more irreverently — as his earlier books grappled with the Bible.
So when I learned that David’s next novel would be firmly in the genre of fantasy, I was curious: what I’ve enjoyed so much in his fiction is the dismantling of genre, and the reopening of stories that have often become so familiar we too easil overlook their complexities and take them for granted. How, I wondered, had he made the transition to writing in one of the most clearly “defined” genres? After his earlier novels offered readers lenses onto history, religion, science, atomic-age American anxieties, and so much more, would his new novel further that direction or take a different tack? Would he “dismantle” the tropes of fantasy, or embrace them?
So I asked him, inviting David to share his response to my loosely defined questions about the trajectory of his novels, and here it is. Enjoy. And then check out “The Gamble of the Godless:http://thechroniclesofavin.com/.
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