Month: May 2005

I don’t know how I managed to miss Jonathan Yardley’s piece on Joseph Conrad in Monday’s Washington Post, part of his “Second Reading” series, in which he re-examines classics. Surprisingly, in Conrad’s case, it’s not Heart of Darkness that made the cut:

If a cruel God ordered that I could have only one of Conrad’s novels to read now and in the future, the painful choice would be between his masterpieces, “Heart of Darkness” (1899) and “Nostromo” (1904), and by the narrowest of margins my choice would be the latter, not least because it is so much longer than “Heart of Darkness” and thus would give me so much more Conrad in which to immerse myself. Yet when I raced through one Conrad after another as a student in the 1950s and a young man in the 1960s, it was “Victory” that I loved most, and thus “Victory” to which I turned for this Second Reading.

I’ve always been impressed with Conrad’s rich and precise language (all the more so because he was a non-native speaker of English. Nabokov is the other example that comes to mind.) I myself didn’t learn English until high school, at the age of fifteen, and I still have trouble sometimes with the language. Interestingly enough, my troubles are usually not with complicated structures or expressions, but with the more pedestrian, idiomatic expressions.

Ruminator magazine just posted a longish and quite funny excerpt of an interview with Fran Lebowitz, from their upcoming fall issue.

SM: I find [Vincent D’Onofrio’s] monologue at the end of every episode [of Criminal Intent]-where he wraps everything up neatly and corners the bad guy into confessing’comforting, even if it’s the most unrealistic part of the show.

FL: You know, the reason it’s comforting is that it provides people who are disturbed with how idiotic the world is, with the idea that’should there be a very smart person in a terrible situation’ that person would be listened to. That’s the thing that really attracts me to this show. Now, we all know that this guy would never be a cop. But we also know something much, much worse than that: anytime a person that smart appears someplace useful in society, they are not going to be listened to. Whereas, on this TV show, everyone, including his superiors, listens to him. More than that, they completely defer to him’ the D.A., his captain. Why? Just because he’s smarter. We know the world works in exactly the opposite way. So, this kind of show provides a parallel universe for people who wish that were true. If life were anything like that TV show, George Bush could never be President. It just couldn’t happen if exceptional intelligence were highly valued. In fact, we live in a culture where intelligence, exceptional or not, is reviled.

The Guardian has a little fun with the news that Patricia Cornwell’s The Trace finally knocked off Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code from the No.1 spot.

Actor and playwright Wallace Shawn has received a career achievement award awarded by PEN. Other award winners are listed in this Seattle Times article.

This is what the Tehran Book Fair is like, according to the Daily Star (via Agence France-Presse.)

Scooby Doo, where are you? If you’re at Tehran’s book fair and looking for something for the kids, you’ll find the stand right next to Islamic Jihad’s and around the corner from the stands of Hizbullah and Hamas. Iran’s massive annual literary fest has something for everyone: Thomas the Tank Engine, interior decorating, Microsoft Windows programming, “How to Kill an Israeli” and Jean-Paul Sartre.

“We have a stand here every year,” explained a young man at the Hamas booth, which featured T-shirts emblazoned with the portrait of their late spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, replica suicide bomber headbands and posters featuring mugshots of Palestinians who “blew themselves to bits.”

The literary message, explained the Hamas rep, was that “they blow themselves up so others can have a better life.”

The man at the Islamic Jihad booth was offering a history of Palestine pamphlet and a rather bloody CD-Rom on “Martyrdom-Seeking Operators.”

Publishers from the United States are also represented at the packed book fair at Tehran’s sprawling international exhibition center, albeit by their Iranian import agents, and drawing large crowds.

Ugh.

L.A. Observed reports that the L.A. Times will finally get rid of the silly subscription wall over its Calendar section, calendarlive.com. The only question I have is: Does that mean that one will be able to go directly from Mark’s LATBR thumbnail to the actual reviews?

Link cribbed from Publisher’s Lunch.