Mark Sarvas's Blog, page 28
December 7, 2009
Katherine Taylor Rounds-up. From Bed.
Early last week, I realized I have too much time on my hands. I realized this because I Googled "tiger woods voicemail slow jam remix." Obviously, the only rehabilitation for having become the sort of person who Googles "tiger woods voicemail slow jam remix" is guest-blogging here at The Elegant Variation.
Hi there, TEV readers!(Does the verb "to Google" have a capital G? If I ever knew this, the slow jam remix has done me in.)
The first order of Monday business: the round-up.
The El...
December 6, 2009
THE RETURN OF KATHERINE TAYLOR
So I tell you, this blogging-and-being-a-new-dad thing is tough, tougher than I thought. And just as I was entertaining thoughts of beginning this year's holiday hiatus earlier than usual, a lifeline came my way in the form of Katherine Taylor, gifted novelist (Rules for Saying Goodbye) and TEV guest blogger emeritus. She'll be taking the reins for the next two weeks and will be weigh in on topics ranging from Second Novel Woes to the latest on college football and everything in between.
I...
December 2, 2009
A YEAR IN READING
Our favorite of the many annual roundups, The Millions' A Year in Reading, has begun posting and is very much worth your while as we scramble around to prep another Marginalia posting.
Our contribution to A Year in Reading can be found here.
AYEAR IN READING
Our favorite of the many annual roundups, The Millions' A Year in Reading, has begun posting and is very much worth your while as we scramble around to prep another Marginalia posting.
Our contribution to A Year in Reading can be found here.
December 1, 2009
END OF THE ROAD
Cormac McCarthy's trusty Olivetti typewriter - which looks awfully familiar - has given up the ghost.
Lately this dependable machine has been showing irrevocable signs of age. So after his friend and colleague John Miller offered to buy him another, Mr. McCarthy agreed to auction off his Olivetti Lettera 32 and donate the proceeds to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit interdisciplinary scientific research organization with which both men are affiliated.
November 24, 2009
HOLIDAY GIVEAWAY: THE INTERROGATIVE MOOD
Padgett Powell's latest, The Interrogative Mood, is getting much deserved attention all over the place these days. (Lamentably, too much comes from reviewers who think it's clever to frame the review in question, mimicking the book's format - it's not, we assure you.) We're fans of Powell's, but even we were skeptical that he good sustain the conceit for the length of a novel, even a short one, but he manages beautifully, and the book deserves a berth alongside the likes of David...
November 23, 2009
MORNING WOOD
James Wood on the novels of Paul Auster.
Although there are things to admire in Auster's fiction, the prose is never one of them. (Most of the secondhand cadences in my parody—about drinking to drown his sorrows, or the prostitute's eyes being too hard and having seen too much—are taken verbatim from Auster's previous work.) "Leviathan" (1992), for instance, is supposedly narrated by an American novelist, a stand-in for Paul Auster named Peter Aaron, who tells us about the doomed life of...
November 18, 2009
WEDNESDAY MARGINALIA - THE HIT & RUN EDITION
November 17, 2009
GO!
November 16, 2009
JB ON VN
Whilst we prep a large-ish Marginalia post, you'll want to cozy up with John Banville on Nabokov in the latest Bookforum:
Aptly, we may begin with the title. The dust jacket has it as The Original of Laura: A novel in fragments, while the title page varies this to The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun). However, the author himself, at the top of the first of the 138 file cards on which the novel—let us call it a novel, for now—is composed, calls the book merely The Original of Laura. The...
