On the off chance you take your read­ing cues from rock stars, here’s some­thing from an inter­view with Radio­head at the Observer Music Monthly:

Thom’s read­ing Q by mys­te­ri­ous Ital­ian anar­chist group Luther Blis­set. I tried to read that once, I tell him.

‘Oh it’s fuck­ing ace! But my missus, that’s her spe­cial­ist field, so she’s been explain­ing it to me all the way through. Medieval church car­nage. It’s mental. I want to get it made into a film. That’s my next mission.’

Using the In Rain­bows profits?

‘Mmm-mm,’ says Thom Yorke, shak­ing his head. ‘I doubt it. That would cover basi­cally the catering.’

Not to spoil the mys­tery, but “the mys­te­ri­ous Ital­ian anar­chist group” who wrote Q com­prised four of the five mem­bers of the group cur­rently known as Wu Ming, the authors of 54, Man­i­tu­ana, and the two sto­ries I trans­lated for Chicago Review 52:2/3/4.

The Radiohead/Wu Ming con­nec­tion is actu­ally apt, since Wu Ming makes all their work avail­able as free downloads.

For the record, here’s what the rest of Radio­head is reading:

Colin is cur­rently read­ing Piers Brendon’s new The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Jonny’s re-​reading Gibbon’s The His­tory of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ed’s just fin­ished Man’s Search For Mean­ing by Victor Frankel (’Brilliant. He’s an Auschwitz survivor’), Phil’s read­ing Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother.

Pity the long lead. Quick on the heels of Michael Hirschorn’s Atlantic attack on “quirk” comes a sim­i­lar effort by Melvin Jules Bukiet in this month’s Amer­i­can Scholar.

Hirschorn’s piece saw quirk every­where: in books, movies, and pre­em­i­nently in public radio’s This Amer­i­can Life. Bukiet’s arti­cle goes after some­thing he rather clum­sily calls “Brooklyn Books of Wonder”:

Take mawk­ish self-​indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nos­tal­gia, season with magic real­ism, stir in a com­pla­cency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness….BBoWs are escape novels, albeit gar­nished with intel­lec­tual flour­ishes. They’re kitsch, which Milan Kun­dera defined as “the trans­la­tion of the stu­pid­ity of received ideas into the lan­guage of beauty and feel­ing [that] moves us to tears of com­pas­sion for our­selves, for the banal­ity of what we think and feel.”

But though the éminence grise in Bukiet’s account is Paul Auster, not Ira Glass, it’s clear that he and Hirschorn are talk­ing about the same thing. Sev­eral names (Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s) show up in both accounts. And their diagnoses—in Bukiet’s words, vanity mixed with “mock-naïve astonishment”—are pretty much the same.

I wrote before that Hirschorn went too soft on the soft­ies. Bukiet’s not going to let them escape so easily:

Cod­dled and cos­seted, they’re the first gen­er­a­tion of nov­el­ists who grew up read­ing the young-​adult pap that they’ve now regur­gi­tated with a decon­struc­tive gloss learned in col­lege. Of course, such aspi­ra­tions require equiv­a­lently high sub­ject matter. Hence the BBoWs’s mock encounter with enor­mity. Still, they have no teeth. They’re sheep in wolves’ cloth­ing who manage to write about bad things and make you feel good.

If Bukiet strikes deeper than Hirschorn, it’s prob­a­bly because he work­ing in fields not far from the better-​known writ­ers he’s aiming at. [Read more]

The autumn 2007 issue of Chicago Review is at press and avail­able to pre-​order.

(The issue will be mailed in early October.)

The issue fea­tures: the second half of “Rising, Hov­er­ing, Falling,” C.D. Wright’s long poem about the Iraq war; Book V of Ronald Johnson’s Radi os; an arti­cle on fem­i­nism and inno­v­a­tive poetry by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, and a response from Jen­nifer Ashton; essays by Georges Perec (on real­ism) and Allen Gross­man (on Hart Crane). Plus the next install­ment of Kent Johnson’s twelve-​part crit­i­cal novella, a review of J.H. Prynne’s “To Pollen.” And much much much more.

The full table of con­tents is posted as a pdf on CR’s web­site and is sum­ma­rized below.

Pre-​order the issue now!

[Read more]

Charles Simic had a hell of a day yes­ter­day. Not only was he named Poet Lau­re­ate, an hon­orary post that includes a $35,000/year stipend, but he was also announced as this year’s winner of the Acad­emy of Amer­i­can Poets Wal­lace Stevens Award, which brings with it a some­what more sub­stan­tial $100,000 prize.

It wasn’t until I read the NYT arti­cle announc­ing Simic’s lau­re­ate­ship that I learned Simic’s first poems were pub­lished in Chicago Review when he was 21. We went back yes­ter­day to find the issue, from Winter 1959, and while I was look­ing it over, it struck me: that issue should never have been published.

That’s no dig at Simic. It is, rather, a recog­ni­tion that that Winter 1959 issue of CR was really the second Winter 1959 issue that had been pre­pared for pub­li­ca­tion. The first was sup­pressed by the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago in a cen­sor­ship scan­dal; when the con­tents of that issue even­tu­ally saw the light of day, they did so only under a new title.

The story starts in 1958. [Read more]