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Morgan Meis in The Smart Set, Nobody’s a Critic. Or they’re at least terrified to be one:

“Criticism isn’t powerful anymore. It doesn’t drive anything, it doesn’t define what is good and bad in culture. Surely this has mostly to do with all the changes in the media landscape over the last few decades. Basically, culture has been democratized. It has been flattened out and multiplied. There are no longer real distinctions between high and low. There’s just more.

The word criticism has its root in the Greek word krinein, which means — in its most original sense — to divide or separate. It’s about sorting things out and making distinctions. Criticism is thus about doing something that is, in this era, almost impossible to do. It is difficult simply to keep up with the vast global cultural output, let alone to make determinations and judgments.

So the critic lives in terror and humiliation, without purpose, without audience, without platform. Newspaper book reviews are shutting down (as are the newspapers that used to house them). Magazines are less and less inclined to devote space or resources to traditional criticism. The blogosphere and social networking sites allow anyone to communicate tastes and opinions directly to those people with whom an outlook is already shared. Criticism is essentially bottom-up now, whereas it used to be practically the definition of top-down. The audience does not look to an external authority to find out what to think — it looks to itself.”

Times, Ten things you need to know about Haruki Murakami. The key facts about the coolest writer in the world today:

“Haruki Murakami is quite possibly the most successful and influential cult author in the world today. The 59-year-old sells millions of books in Japan. His fifth novel, Norwegian Wood, sold more than 3.5m copies in its first year and his work has been translated into 40 languages, in which he sells almost as well. Last year’s novella, After Dark, shifted more than 100,000 copies in English in its first three months. His books are like Japanese food — a mix of the delicate, the deliberately bland and the curiously exotic. Dreams, memory and reality swap places, all leavened with dry humour. His translator, Professor Jay Rubin, says reading Murakami changes your brain. His world-view has inspired Sofia Coppola, the author David Mitchell and American bands such as the Flaming Lips. He is a recipient of the Franz Kafka prize, has honorary degrees from Princeton and Liège, and is tipped for the Nobel prize for literature.”

ABC News, Haruki Murakami hard at work on ‘horror’ novel:

“Internationally acclaimed novelist Haruki Murakami is working on an extremely lengthy novel, but is cherishing every moment.

“Every day, I am sitting at my desk for five to six hours. I have been writing the novel for about one year and two months now,” he said in a rare interview as he describes his new work.”

(…)

Is the very long novel he is writing now also being written in the third person? He did not directly reply to that question, but gave one important hint about his new novel.

“It is about ‘horror.’ I have a hunch to produce a good novel. I think it will be an important work of mine.”

Now 59, Murakami said: “Like [Feodor Mikhailovich] Dostoevsky who wrote The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov and became productive as he got older, I’d like to do the same thing.”"

The Observer, A thriller in ten chapters:

“The Observer’s literary editor Robert McCrum stood down this month after more than 10 years in the job. And what a tumultuous 10 years. When he started it was a world of ‘cigarettes, coffee and strong drink’. But that has all changed – new writers, big money, the internet, lucrative prizes and literary festivals have all helped revolutionise the books world.”

Der Spiegel, Spiegel Interview with Haruki Murakami:

“SPIEGEL: Are you a better writer because you run?

Murakami: Definitely. The stronger my muscles got, the clearer my mind became. I am convinced that artists who lead an unhealthy life burn out more quickly. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin were the heroes of my youth — all of them died young, even though they didn’t deserve to. Only geniuses like Mozart or Pushkin deserve an early death. Jimi Hendrix was good, but not so smart because he took drugs. Working artistically is unhealthy; an artist should lead a healthy life to make up for it. Finding a story is a dangerous thing for an author; running helps me to avert that danger.”

‘Yeats made these recordings for the wireless in 1932, 1934 and the last on 28 October 1937 when he was 72. He died on January 28 1939. The photograph shows him sitting before the microphone in 1937.’ (YouTube)

Via Smashingtelly.

1 mei 2008: Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. (via)

Zie voor een vroege bespreking Canuck in Asia, Harakui Murakami Talks to Himself While Running, but only in Japanese (So You Can’t Hear Him). En zie verder vooral ook Haruki Murakami Resources: Excorcising Ghosts.

Harry Mulisch:

“X. Gij zult niet begeren uws naasten huis; gij zult niet begeren uws naasten vrouw, noch zijn dienstknecht, noch zijn dienstmaagd, noch zijn rund, noch zijn ezel, noch iets dat van uw naaste is

„Wat schiet je op met verlangen? Je moet het doen of je moet het niet doen. Ik heb een betekenis achter willen laten, onsterfelijk willen worden. Daar heb je niets aan als je dood bent – Beethoven is onsterfelijk voor iedereen, behalve voor zichzelf – maar het is voor nu wel een prettige gedachte.(…)”"

Bernard Malamud in 1985.

Joyce Carol Oates (TLS), Bernard Malamud, tireless craftsman:

“When Bernard Malamud was in his late fifties, a Pulitzer Prizewinner (for The Fixer, 1966) and National Book Award winner twice over (for the story collection The Magic Barrel, 1959, and The Fixer), at the height of his acclaim and yet, as always, assailed by self-doubt, he once remarked to a friend “completely out of the blue” that he regretted not having known the love of several beautiful women. The story is told in this wonderfully readable, illuminating and entertaining biography, the first full-length Life of Malamud to appear. Malamud remained married to Ann de Chiara from 1945 until his death in 1986, though the two were not consistently faithful to each other: their marriage was, by Malamud’s description, a “nervous” one; indeed the sharply opinionated Mrs Malamud was in the habit of assuring her insecure writer-husband that “though a good writer, he was not a great writer such as Faulkner or Joyce”. Knowing of Malamud’s lifelong preoccupation with routines, schedules, and devoting every possible hour to his work, his companion replied that such love affairs would have taken up a good deal of Malamud’s time: “Which of your books would you have given up for these loves?”. Malamud was silent for a moment and then said, “None”.”

Lee Siegel (NYT), The Fixer-Upper:

“For Davis, one of Malamud’s aphorisms sums up the obsession driving his work: “There’s more than morality in a good man.” The sentiment is, in fact, almost identical to Norman Mailer’s belief that the best lies close to the worst in people. Malamud believed that the stuff of goodness lay in the education roughly administered by life’s warps and woofs: the fatality of character, the irony of good intentions, the realization that right versus wrong is often a matter of hurt versus hurt. Davis knows that there’s nothing narrowly virtuous about that.”

Philip Davis, Bernard Malamud. A writer’s life.

Bibliothèque Nationale, L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque, Eros au secret (pdf):

Dans les années 1830, les ouvrages imprimés dits « contraires aux bonnes moeurs » publiés sous le manteau, poursuivis ou condamnés, sont séparés du reste des collections de la Bibliothèque royale et rassemblés afin de constituer une section distincte intitulée Enfer et conservée à la Réserve des livres rares. Quelques années plus tard, le cabinet des Estampes procède à l’identique.

Dès lors, l’Enfer devient un lieu mythique, objet de toutes les curiosités et de tous les fantasmes. Pour la première fois, la Bibliothèque nationale de France expose cette part obscure de ses collections et lève le voile sur l’Enfer.

Info: 04 décembre 2007 – 02 mars 2008. Site François-Mitterrand / Grande Galerie. Dossier de presse, een pdf met kleine plaatjes.

The Independent, Sex please! (we’re French): Paris’s dirty secret:

“The “Enfer” section of the Bibliothèque Nationale – books and prints and photographs purchased, confiscated or donated over almost two centuries – is believed to be one of the largest and richest collections of pornographic and erotic materials in the world. The Vatican’s secret stash is said to be even larger but that, presumably, will never be opened to the public.

How strong can this stuff be? Given what appears daily on the internet, on cable TV, or in the pages of the Daily Sport, is it possible to be shocked by exquisite, but explicit, 17th-century porn?

The answer is, yes. The exhibition is an eye-opener: a quietly and intelligently displayed but garish cornucopia of sadism, masochism, bestialism, scatology, bums, tits and staring genitalia. It is also a fascinating, and sometimes beautiful, expedition through the dark, winding corridors of the human psyche.”

Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (980-1037) (Wikipedia)

Kalima Translation:

“Every year Kalima will select 100 candidate titles of classic, contemporary and modern writing from around the world to be translated into Arabic.”

The Guardian, Translation project to bring cream of foreign writers to Arabs:

“The first 100 are from 16 languages, including Greek, Japanese, Swedish, Czech, Russian, Chinese, Yiddish, Italian, Norwegian, Latin and ancient Greek. Half the candidate titles are English.”

The Independent, Two cultures, one language: Arabic translation of great works aims to bridge divide:

“The greatest Yiddish-language writer of the 20th century features on a list of 100 books chosen to inaugurate a daring, long-term project to bring landmark foreign works to Arabic-speaking readers.

The Collected Stories Of Isaac Bashevis Singer, by an author who was raised in Poland but for decades dominated Yiddish writing in New York, will join titles ranging from Sophocles and Chaucer to Stephen Hawking and Haruki Murakami among the first selections of the Kalima translation programme.

The Kalima (meaning “word” in Arabic) project aims to revive the art of translation across the Arab world and reverse the long decline in Arabic readers’ access to major works of global literature, philosophy, science and history.

“The choices reflect what we consider are the real gaps in the Arab library,” said Karim Nagy, the founder and chief executive of the project, which was launched yesterday in Abu Dhabi. “We shy away as far as possible from best-sellers.”"

De 100 titels zijn:
Read More →

Céline vivant – 2 dvd, 1932 à 1969, 177 min, couleurs. (via)

The Daily Telegraph:

“The handsome house in the corner of St James’s Square, which now has 8,000 members and one million books, has for the past 160 years been the best ‘place on the civilised earth’, but it no longer caters for those who are ‘not rich’. Carlyle’s insistence that readers pay only a ‘small annual sum’ has seemingly been forgotten, and the annual fee is to rise by nearly 80 per cent to £375.”

The London Library

The Guardian, Terrible poet, laughable terrorist:

“Kamoze Ini’s Lyrical Gangster ditty kept popping in to my head last week every time Samina Malik, the “lyrical terrorist“, flashed by on a news bulletin. To be honest both the Lyrical Gangster and the lyrical terrorist have about as much to do with poetry or terrorism as each other – which is next to nothing.”

(…)

“What had she done? Well, she downloaded various documents from terrorist websites including weapons manuals and The Mujaheddin Poisoner’s Handbook, niftily designed with a skull and crossbones on the cover (I’m still not sure if this is a spoof). Compounding all of this, Malik went all Web 2.0 and posted poems – terrible, terrible poems – on various websites. That’s about the extent of her terrorist activity. But never fear. The judge and prosecutors went the extra mile to give her a notoriety that her very, very bad poetry and infantile fantasies about being a terrorist really don’t warrant.”

New Yorker, Age of Reason:

“Barzun began to appreciate the transience of civilization almost as soon as he learned what the word meant. Born outside Paris in 1907, he was six years old when the First World War broke out. Early on, he had a sense that, in Paul Valéry’s harsh aperçu, “a civilization has the same fragility as a life.” The war shattered the world that he knew and, as he later wrote, “visibly destroyed that nursery of living culture.” This isn’t entirely a figure of speech. On Saturdays before the war, his parents’ living room had been a raucous salon where many of Europe’s leading avant-garde artists and writers gathered: Varèse played the piano, Ozenfant and Delaunay debated, Cocteau told lies, and Apollinaire declaimed. Brancusi often stopped by, as did Léger, Kandinsky, Jules Romains, Duchamp, and Pound.”

Slate, Paradise Lost:

“Why is it not acceptable, for example, for me to write “the novelist Cees Nooteboom,” without having to attach that ubiquitous appendage, “the Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom”? Because we assume his novels express some trace or essence of Dutchness, some distinct, if ineffable, coloring that makes them necessarily different from German, Swedish, Danish, or, for that matter, Japanese novels? Because, as readers, we resist the idea of an undifferentiated world culture, dominated by instantly recognizable (primarily American and European) brands, i.e., “Things go better with Philip Roth”? These are difficult, perhaps even slightly ridiculous, questions, but they are entirely relevant, as it happens, to the work of Cees Nooteboom.”

Bible Sex Stories:

“The Bible includes countless tales of raw, forbidden sex. We’ve gathered some of the best bible sex stories here, filling in what you didn’t learn in Sunday school.”

The Smart Set: The Meaning and Meanness of Mencken.

“He had to show us in our dumbness, engaged in the same fruitless struggle that lays low every beast in time. Funnily, and in spite of all his maddening missteps of judgment, Mencken — in being such a relentless bastard year after year — gave the American voice back a little of its humanity.”

Meer H.L. Mencken: Menckenmania