Jessa seems to be rather upset with Daphne de Marneffe’s article in Salon and her book, Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life. She clarifies her position here, though I’m still having trouble reconciling her disgust with de Marneffe with her general admiration for Caitlin Flanagan. To me, they both seem to be gleefully throwing guilt at working mothers.
Terry has posted an excerpt from his upcoming book on Balanchine. It’s from Chapter Five, which is about the choreographer’s fourth wife, Tanacquil Le Clercq, whom he met while still married to Maria Tallchief.
But Balanchine’s eye had already started to wander as had Tallchief’s. They agreed to separate after the London season (their marriage was subsequently annulled), and no sooner did NYCB return to Manhattan than Balanchine began seeing Le Clercq in public. “I just love you to talk to, to go around with, play games, laugh like hell, etc.,” she told Robbins in a letter. “However, I’m in love with George. Maybe it’s a case of he got here first.” Devastated by what he saw as her betrayal, Robbins made The Cage, a chillingly angry portrait of a tribe of insect-women who kill the men with whom they mate. And though Tallchief remained the prima ballerina of New York City ballet for a few years more, it was Le Clercq for whom Balanchine made La Valse (1951, music by Ravel), a darkly unsettling vignette about a beautiful young girl who encounters a black-clad man at a party. He offers her a pair of black gloves into which the girl heedlessly plunges her hands. Then they waltz together with mad abandon until she collapses and dies.
And you thought your life was like a soap opera.
Slate has a profile of Iraqi-born Zaha Hadid, the first woman to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Some of Hadid’s works can be seen on her website.
Northeastern University is closing down its press.
Like many university presses, NU Press has always been subsidzed by the university. Over the past decade it has cost the school from $275,000 a year to a high of $450,000 this year — about 40 percent of the press’s budget, officials said. The subsidy grew this year because the press has been struggling with the economic downturn of the last couple years, said Jill Bahcall, associate director of NU Press.
Details here.
The IMPAC Dublin shortlist was announced today (the longlist was announced a couple of months ago). The finalists are:
The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster
Any Human Heart – William Boyd
Caramelo – Sandra Cisneros
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
The White Family – Maggie Gee
This Blinding Absence of Light – Taher Ben Jelloun
Balthasar’s Odyssey – Amin Maalouf
Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry
Earth and Ashes – Atiq Rahimi
House of Day, House of Night – Olga Tokarczuk
I’m delighted that the Moroccan Ben Jelloun is on the shortlist though I haven’t yet read This Blinding Absence of Light. He’s not a current fave (I prefer his earlier work, like Harrouda) but definitely one worth reading.
In an otherwise uninteresting article about self-publishing, I came across this paragraph:
Publishing a book takes a year because everyone expects it to – not because it has to. Not surprisingly, Amazon is eyeing the self-publishing niche. The Web site has roughly 10% of the retail book market but nabbed 40% of Kessler’s sales. Big self-published books mean big market share.
Is this true? It’d be interesting to see what happens to POD if Amazon throws its hat in the ring.
Depressed employees often avoid talking to colleagues and bosses about their troubles for fear of derailing their careers, a new study says.
That was Colin Attwood’s chief concern. The 36-year-old information technology specialist from Manhattan said he is wary of seeking help for his depression at work.
“I don’t want my mental state to be connected with me too closely,” he said.
Um. Then talking to the NY Daily News about it might not be such a hot idea.
The Village Voice‘s Vivek Narayanan reviews Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists.
The lightly fictionalizing hybrid set pieces Cohen uses can occasionally be repetitive, and her digressions on, say, photographic theory are hardly original. Nostalgia seems unavoidable her subjects are charismatic and beloved. Nevertheless, when her portraits are of figures that are clearly dear to either her or me, as the case may be, she can be very sympathetic and illuminating indeed. As Henry James once wrote to Sarah Orne Jewett, “The ‘historic’ novel is, for me, condemned, even in cases of labor as delicate as yours, to a fatal cheapness. . . . You may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures & documents, relics & prints, as much as you like the real thing is almost impossible to do.” Similarly, these delicately wrought essays can be read as a kind of extended, irresistible People for the literary set.
Yeah, but where are the pictures?
On Diversity: Shelley Ettinger writes in to say that, as little diversity as there is in UK publishing, the situation in New York “is probably even worse. And New York’s population is mostly people of color, which in my view makes the situation here even more outrageous.”
One Year On: The editor of an uninteresting e-zine, whose color approximates that of duck caca, and whose content could well be worse, sent some hate-filled rhetoric about the Iraq war. He also misspelt the blog’s name.
I really hope the poor, poor woman who was assigned the job of reading all these celebrity bios was paid well for her troubles. I can’t imagine being forced to read Geri Halliwell’s work.
It is now dawn. The wrinkles have faded. It is time for therapy. It is time to exorcise the demons. It is time for Geri Halliwell. “Staring up at a cloudless blue sky, I can imagine just for a second that I am on a secret fantasy desert island,” she says. Sadly, she is not. She is in Los Angeles. The Spice Girls “offered me hope in this darkness”, she explains, but “I still knew I wanted to get off the rollercoaster. The Ginger character was my own invention, of course. It was like putting on a uniform. You don’t have to think. You don’t have to deal with being a human being.”
Do you even want the link?
