Modern Library Revue

Modern Library Revue: #43 Dance to the Music of Time

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Instead of Mary or Jesus or anybody, I suddenly thought only of Anthony Powell, whose beautiful Dance to the Music of Time I was then rereading, and felt an overwhelmingly sense that this is really all we get–that if everything else is taken away, the beauty of someone’s vision of the world is our meager but abiding solace for being in the world.
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The Millions Interview

Back from the Land: The Millions Interviews Donald Antrim

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My ambition is to disappear entirely, as much as I can, from a reader’s awareness.
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Modern Library Revue

Modern Library Revue: #38 Howards End

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Just before Forster’s novel I read Austerlitz, a book whose construction around a portentous negative space has the effect of drawing neighboring books into its central darkness, like a dying star. Everything becomes tinged with this darkness.
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Screening Room

Darren’s Ark: On Noah

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On the second day, I attended a Seder, with 14 pounds of beef brisket. On the fifth day, I saw Noah, with Russell Crowe looking like 14 pounds of brisket in a distressed denim bag.
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Modern Library Revue

Modern Library Revue: #19 Invisible Man

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In America it is the privilege of the white man to rollick, even if he is a poor Jew born into moderate squalor. The black man, in this novel at any rate, can only be fucked around; his hope, in this novel, is to discover his own way of doing things.
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Reviews

Hot Beats and High Genre: Submergence by J.M. Ledgard

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High genre is fiction that allows you to investigate an individual text, because it is full of its own traits and merits, whether in its characterizations, its plot, or its prose. Regular genre, I suppose, is something you can only talk about as a family -- tracing the themes shared collectively among its members. High genre will always be vulnerable to the taint of its lower peers, because it shares the equipment, the same beats. This is why people are drawn to True Detective, and yet can accept assertions that it is just another dead naked lady show.
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Essays

World History and Family Dinner: On Rachel Laudan’s Cuisine and Empire

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I'm a known pig, but over the course of my 20s I have been successfully indoctrinated against certain kinds of fast food and most grocery items that come in packages, which leads to confused, contradictory, and offensive positions on things. I won’t eat a Keebler Snack Cake, but I will eat an entire salami. I spurn the Olive Garden, but regularly eat a calorie-laden burrito filled with God knows what. I see fellow bus-riders with translucent McDonald’s bags to be fed to young children and feel sad, disregarding my past encounters with the Quarter Pounder and the Whopper.
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Year in Reading

A Year in Reading: Lydia Kiesling

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When I wasn't reading a bunch of depressing shit, I read some strange and wonderful things.
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Modern Library Revue

Modern Library Revue: #26 The Wings of the Dove

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Let’s say that my previous efforts with this book were equivalent to the disappointing herbal cigarette from a store called Groovy Vibes, or a bag of mulch obtained at the concert from someone’s questionable cousin. But this time I got, so to speak, the good shit. You eat the Henry James mushrooms, you look upon his dense thicket of sentences, his plodding parade of commas, and suddenly the text, and the entire world, come into insane focus.
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Reviews

A Little Bit Beta: On Dave Eggers’s The Circle

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The Circle occupies an awkward place of satire and self-importance.
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Essays

Franzen and the Twitter Bog

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Twitter somehow encompasses both sides of the Emily Dickinson dichotomy. On Twitter, the Nobodies have seized hold of the mic and managed to occupy the bog.
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Essays

Everything I Know About America I Learned from Stephen King

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I never see a 7-11 Big Bite and don't instinctively desire to eat it. I know that Heinz ketchup is unmistakable and precious. A new paperback purchased with crisp American dollars? That's bliss. A Stephen King book? That's Shangri-la.
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Reviews

Lyrical Gangster: Charlie Smith’s Men in Miami Hotels

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Trying to find a name for Charlie Smith's genre or style, I come up with "Disordered Lives of the Poets." But how to pigeonhole this new novel? Lapsarian Lyric? Casuarina Crime? Key Noir? James Wood would think of something good.
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Notable Articles Reviews

Modern Life is Rubbish: Tao Lin’s Taipei

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There is a small, deadly class of book that makes you never want to set pen to paper again. Tao Lin's novel is a grave case of this kind, where you are faced with the consequences of writing down all the things you do or think. What if they sound like this? Colorless, witless, humorless. Picking out individual passages cannot express their cumulative monotonous assault on the senses.
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Modern Library Revue

Modern Library Revue: #30 The Good Soldier

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One hundred years later, Modernism seems like a biggish tent. But really, it's about as descriptive a term as "sandwich;" reading the learned essays invoked, in my crude mind, a long-running argument that my friends have about what is or is not a sandwich. Is a taco a sandwich? A hotdog? It is all a darkness.
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Screening Room

You Can’t Repeat the Past, Old Sport: On Leo, Baz, Gatsby, and Me

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When I read Chronicle critic Mick LaSalle opine recently that Romeo + Juliet was 'too contemptible even to be called a desecration,' I know that he never lay in virginal bed with headphones and discman, listened to Thom Yorke utter the eternal invitation, "I'll be waiting, with a gun and a pack of sandwiches," and just felt so much.
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In Person

Young Novelists, Old Institutions: Granta at the Book Club of California

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The Book Club is not hip, but on Monday evening, I felt the bibliophilic glamour of a place, which, despite its age and sometime pokiness, is founded on the fundamentally sound principle that if you have three glasses of wine in a plastic cup and listen to something beautiful or see it, it can change the whole complexion of the world.
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Essays

Paucity of Art in the Age of Big Data: A Dispatch from San Francisco

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My quest to find the great tech novel -- something sprawling and social and occurring inside the Teach-Up and outside the restaurant and around the home of the displaced shopowner and the H1B-visa programmer -- is in itself a kind of solutionism. Novels are captured social data. You want a snapshot of nineteenth century French provincial bourgeois life? There’s an app for that: it's called Flaubert. And that's before we consider the novel as an aggregator of human data of the biggest, most nebulous kind. You want a map of the human heart? Whose heart? What century? There's an app for that too.
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