Alex Kudera's Blog, page 61

Eating. . . Earth. . .

When Linh Dinh writes food, the world's stomach roars! Enjoy "Earth Cafeteria" and "Eating Fried Chicken" with your weekend desserts.

Celine in Grays Ferry

"That year, I manned up and mainlined Celine’s 

Death on the Installment Plan and his Journey

To the End of the Night. After the first

Paragraph of Death, I knew there were risks

To reading further, but until I could finish all

One thousand-plus pages of these books, I

Didn’t leave the house."
~~ from "Grays Ferry" by Linh Dinh

Reed's Crouch

Ishmael Reed pens quite the obituary in "The Tragedy of Stanley Crouch." It's compelling reading full of rich details, and it captures the way anger lives on well after the subject of it is dead. If I'm not mistaken, it also depicts an extremely well recognized critic and journalist getting evicted from his residence late in life — yet another warning against the writing life — while also describing him as a failed musician and fiction writer. R.I.P. Stanley Crouch. I don't expect Ishmael Reed to find peace on this earth, but he delivers some amusing lines in this writing.

back in business

Writer and publisher Christopher DeGroot is back in business at Taki's Magazine and remains committed to publishing rich literary writing, books reviews, and conservatives so conservative that only Marxists will publish them. I'm told I have fiction in the next issue of DeGroot's The Agonist.

On Chile and China

Daniel Alarcón's "Letter from Santiago" and Peter Hessler's latest installment from his return to China are two recent pieces that have caught my eye in The New Yorker. The Hessler opens with reporting from the Wuhan market that has become so central to our lives.

Cyrus on the scene at Harvard

We're uncertain of how this came to pass, but if Louise Gluck lives in Cambridge, Mass, then she could likely borrow a copy of Fight for Your Long Day from Harvard University's Lamont Library.

Nobel Prize for Literature 2020

The 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to American poet Louise Gluck. 

Bullets and Books: "The Gun is the Motive"

Michael James Rizza takes on Don DeLillo, train rides, guns, and much more at Grub Street. His "Bullets and Books: 'The Gun is the Motive'" appears online, and it will run next spring in a print issue of the same journal.

Klein on DeLillo

If you follow this blog, then you know that my pandemic reading consists mainly of Roberto Bolano's 2666, feminist memoir from the Soviet gulag, and Paul Theroux's travel narratives, but I recently enjoyed learning that novelist and translator Lee Klein has had literature fun forever with his return to the fiction of Don DeLillo. 

Finnegans Pidgin

 "Later, speaking it—saying the days of the week for example—I felt that I had talked my way onto the pages of Finnegans Wake, where Joyce writes the days of the week as moanday, tearsday, waitsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday. In Pidgin, they are mande, tunde, trinde, fonde, fraide, sarere, sande."

~~ from The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific by Paul Theroux