Tags
ender's game, literature, books, horror, stephen king, the great gatsby, lovecraft, denis johnson
My maid-of-honor-to-be pointed me toward this gem:
Yet so many people seem enchanted enough by the decadence described in Fitzgerald’s book to ignore its fairly obvious message of condemnation. Gatsby parties can be found all over town. They are staples of spring on many Ivy League campuses and a frequent theme of galas in Manhattan. Just the other day, vacation rental startup Airbnb sent out invitations to a “Gatsby-inspired soiree” at a multi-million-dollar home on Long Island, seemingly oblivious to the novel’s undertones.
It’s like throwing a Lolita-themed children’s birthday party.
What’s ridiculous is the responses that have popped up. The article linked to above is amusing and ironic (hopefully?), and it was a little disheartening when people started responding to it and actually defending Gatsby parties. Do we really need to take up air time with defense of Gatsby parties?
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While we’re (sort of) on the subject, here’s an article I’m going to make my students read this week: “The Forgotten Childhood of Jay Gatsby.”
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Here’s the Ender’s Game trailer… if you can get past the douchiness of Orson Scott Card. Truth be told, I’ll be watching it one way or another.
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Jennifer Egan, Francesca Lia Block, Victor LaValle, Anne Lamott, Margaret Atwood, and others participate in a Goodreads game of Exquisite Corpse.
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In Stein’s book, she assumes the guise and clipped syntax of Toklas, her lover, to describe their lives and social circle up until 1933. Noterdaeme similarly writes from the point-of-view of his partner, the German cabaret performer and personal chef Daniel Isengart, on parallel themes—but further complicates the maneuver by maintaining Toklas’ sound. In other words, Noterdaeme transforms his own story in both perspective and style; the resulting “ménage a quatre,” as he calls it, produces a weirdly plural “I,” with Noterdaeme channeling Stein parroting Toklas, all through the mouth of Isengart.
On The Autobiography of Daniel J. Isengart.
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The Great Gender-Switch is both awesome and depressing… and a whole lot of fun to look at.
I think there’s a problem with seeing the covers as “gendered,” though. It’s not as though there are more masculine covers for men and more feminine covers for women and looking at the problem that way is allowing oneself to be boxed into the mindset they’re simultaneously trying to combat. There are acceptable, exciting, universally appealing book covers that tend to be given to male authors, and then there are pastel covers of characters making googly-eyes at each other or women pushing carriages that are often not at all indicative of the book’s content. There is certainly appeal in the “feminine” book covers, but they should be reserved for the appropriate books rather than slapped on any book written by a woman.
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10 Ways to Help Your Favorite Author
1. Buy the book. Amazingly, I’ll sometimes get nice emails or notes on Twitter from people raving about my book…who tell me they’ve checked it out of the library. I’m a huge library supporter, but if you want to keep your favorite author writing, buy the book. I’ll often check out books from the library first to test-drive them, and if they’re good, I’ll buy a copy afterward as a sort of “hat tip.”
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Here’s a badass Stephen King Universe Flowchart for your enjoyment.
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So I grew up playing with Ouija Boards and witchcraft kits. I grew up reading about screaming mandrake roots and searching for hidden passageways. I was an exceptionally quiet child, and my parents worried that I was a bit morbid, but at least I had an active imagination.
OMG, Steph Auteri totally gets me.
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In his 1922 short story “The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter,” a small-town doctor—whose job it is to resist and contain nature in the form of disease—rescues the titular horse-dealer’s daughter from drowning and falls in love with a violent, rapturous power: “his heart seemed to burn and melt away in his breast. ” Moreover, he experiences that violence and that power as an assault on his intellect and his profession. As Lawrence puts it, “this introduction of the personal element was very distasteful to him, a violation of his professional honour.” The “personal element” here is, precisely, sex and bodies, and the gender that connects the two. You may hide in professionalism or honor or aesthetics, Lawrence says, but still gender will find you.
But regarding Aaron Thorpe…
As commenter Aaron Thorpe wrote in response to a piece I wrote last week, “I have never met anyone—ANYONE—who considers the author’s gender when deciding whether or not to read a book.”
Dude’s delusional.
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To-Read:
To Understand the World Is To Be Destroyed By It: On H.P. Lovecraft
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A book’s pleasure is strangely contingent upon one’s context. A paragraph scanned on the subway and swept aside with a yawn can thrill you on the sofa later that same day. Or a cherished novel, revisited years later, can seem to have grown cold, the fire gone out of its prose. Even meaning can morph and shift: That book you loved in college, the one about youthful passion and the road ahead, seems later about the older, more mature characters you overlooked on the first read.
No kidding. But this particular piece is about how the last sentence of Denis Johnson’s “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” has changed for Anthony Marra over time.
