More and more “serious” “literary” writers are turning to zombies, werewolves, and vampires for inspiration. This could be symptomatic of something dire or something hopeful in the world of writing. We could dither endlessly about the ramifications.

But perhaps we need to stop abstractly generalizing and focus on specifics instead.

Case in point: Colson Whitehead’s upcoming novel about zombies. Which partly resembles a Joy Division song apparently.

Since I have a young adult novel in progress, Confessions Of Tween-Wolf — a harrowing account of a barely pubescent girl’s struggle to control her excessive body hair and abnormal eating habits — I’m encouraged that established writers are not afraid to tackle the monsters that we carry inside ourselves. I’m also aware that books about werewolves, vampires and the paranormal tend to make money. (And now I’m generalizing.)

“A little grave reflection shows us that our first duty is to establish a new and abusive school of criticism. . .There is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation that is not stilled unless a book is suppressed by the police, a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger . . .”

MobyLives excerpts Rebecca West’s commentary about literary criticism, as timely now as when it was written. (Via: Bookforum)

A memorial to the long-standing literary magazine, Open City. (Via: Bookforum)

“. . .there has been widescale attacks on social movements over the last thirty or forty years in response to the very meaningful social movements in the sixties and seventies that had very transformative demands, that were seeking a redistribution of wealth and of life chances in really significant ways.

“What’s emerged in their place is a very thin national narrative about social change that often centers on the law and often says that groups that are marginalized or experiencing subjugation of various kinds should just win lawsuits and pass laws to change their lives.”

A great interview at Guernica with Dean Spade, “America’s first openly transgendered law professor.”

Everyday life is surprisingly full of hair-raising adventures. Sometimes you don’t realize it until you’re in the thick of it.

Waiting for the grocery store manager to confirm that you are not in fact the same guy who stole the roast chicken three days prior.

Finding yourself in your boss’s office, waiting for him to angrily adjust the nodules on his new Executive office chair while you are assailed by a bizarre coughing fit.

And you say to yourself: wow, this is absurd and vaguely like a scene from a novel. You pile enough of these singular details together and you have a comic epic.

Georges Perec was one of those writers who made high (and very playful) art out of the intricacies of day-to-day life. His Life: A User’s Manual is one of the great books of the last century. Today I discovered that this month Verso published an English translation of his 1968 novel,  The Art Of Asking Your Boss For A Raise.

To honor it, please follow this flow chart on how to actually ask that question.

“That it is being considered as book of criticism, rather than as memoir, seems the luck of the draw. Some of the essays in it were originally published in the guise of book reviews, but they always jump the rails of literary journalism and go off on their own course — assessing not just the text but its place in the constellation of her own interests and personal history, which are (respectively) various and knotty.”

In light of all the back and forth about memoirs, I think this appraisal of Terry Castle’s The Professor and Other Writings is pretty enlightening. (Via: Bookforum.)

“The great thing about freelance, of course, is the numerous freedoms it embraces, chief among them being the freedom to work in your underwear. This seems to be the one that everyone knows. I was talking on the phone to an uncle of mine who’s in a nursing home, and when I told him I was working freelance, he said, ‘Oh, the underwear people!’”

Essays like this are the reason I put pants on sometimes.

It’s funny too, isn’t it, how “pants” and specifically “wearing pants” is a cultural marker for maturity, autonomy and not being a total, scum-sucking parasite? The moment I’m caught without pants on I’m compromised in countless ways; it becomes open season on what remains standing of my integrity. Unless I’m not wearing pants for ribald reasons. (Which could conceivably expose me to a different kind of devastating humiliation.)

Also: I have severe freelance envy.

Just like last week, Belgium, for reasons obtuse and inexplicable is on my mind.

I discovered at 50 Watts a guest post by Edward Gauvin about a Belgian writer named Thomas Owen that English-only readers are not going to encounter anytime soon. As a fan of pseudonyms, alter-egos and Pessoa’s heteronyms, I loved this autobiographical description of Owen:

“The story goes like this: there once was a lawyer named Gérald Bertot, who worked all his life in the management of the same flour-milling factory. He held a doctorate in criminology, and a side career in art criticism under the pseudonym Stéphane Rey.

Spared service in World War II, he turned to writing mysteries for money, with the encouragement of Stanislas-André Steeman, a celebrated craftsman of Belgian noir. In Tonight at Eight (1941), he introduced the police commissioner Thomas Owen–a character whose name he liked so much he later took it as his own when he embarked on what he has called his true calling, his career as a fantasist.”

The only book by Owen translated into English can be purchased to the tune of 300 some dollars on the internet. Which, if I had the money, might be worth it.

There’s an indispensable book called About Writing by Samuel R. Delany. In the first essay he cobbles together an eclectic list of authors that, ideally, the aspiring writer should read. Because Delany has read everything, you can bet his tastes are wide and varied.

And it’s thanks to that book that I discovered Anna Kavan. …more

Never heard of the ancient, wonderful and criminally under-acknowledged Pilcrow?

Then go savor the musings at Shady Characters, a blog about unusual punctuation. (Via: Book Bench)

“Writers love to watch their online listings. First, there’s watching the rankings that can be ginned up by a one-day spike.

Then noticing, sometimes within days of being listed, used and like new copies of their books for sale by some seller, like, in the middle of Michigan. And last, watching the price of their book go down, down, down, until it reaches the ultimate bargain basement price level save it being offered for free: one penny.”

At We Who Are About To Die, Daniel Nester wonders why his books are being sold for pennies.

“If reading heightens your responses, shapes your idea of the world, gives you a sense of the purpose of life, then it is not surprising if, over time, reading should come to play a proportionately smaller role in the context of the myriad possibilities it has opened up.

The more thoroughly we have absorbed its lessons, the less frequently we need to refer to the user’s manual.”

Via The Millions: an essay by Geoff Dyer on the affliction known as “reader’s block,” from his forthcoming essay collection, Otherwise Known As The Human Condition.

Strangely, this is also the fourth time in as many days I’ve heard or seen a reference to The Book Of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, a wonderfully melancholy, ruminative little book I read in my mid-teens and since forgot about. Until recently that is.

I’m only a little bit Belgian but enough to have pride when “my country” celebrates a new record: going the longest of any country without a functioning government.

To honor this record, I suggest a monastic ale paired crash course in terrific Belgian writers: Luc Sante, Raoul Vaneigem and the very strange Henri Michaux just to name a few.

Comes from Gary Snyder from his influential and beautiful book of essays, The Practice Of The Wild.

It’s in the opening essay, “The Etiquette Of Freedom” where he says:

“Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actually existing world and its wholeness.”

There is something in that statement that I can’t stop thinking about even as it rains in sheets this morning, thus preventing me from wandering around and bringing my boldness and gratitude into play with the outside world.

“So I guess I don’t feel like I seek strangeness out—I feel like we’re all surrounded by it—but there’s so much bewildering noise in our culture right now, at such a deafening and constant volume, that it’s easy for me to become inured to the strangeness of any ‘ordinary’ Tuesday.”

The Book Bench talks to the young and very talented Karen Russell, author of the recent and what’s certainly one of the more intriguing new novels out now, Swamplandia!

I assume it’s intriguing because it’s about swamps, madmen and alligators — among other things. Plus the cover is just gorgeous.

“Fiction needs intellect, but it can’t survive on intellect alone. . .It has to arrive at the other embarrassing things, things that seem too banal to talk about in like the appreciation of small details of things that other people leave at home because they’re not worth discussing…Questions that intelligent people would find too dumb to ask like, ‘Am I really alive?’ or ‘What does it mean to be good?’”

Via Bookforum, Zadie Smith talks about writing and cultivating the banal.

Paris Review announces it’s Spring Issue which will include the first part of a serialized novel by Bolaño!

“But even from the inside of a human life, it’s possible to see when you’ve made a baby seal out of thin air, and someone is coming along to bash its head in with a club, because its coat is silky, and because you have the awesomely exploitable ability to rearrange matter, to have creatures explode from your skull, to utter inutterable things.

So maybe this is what prose should be — writing as unimpeachable as logic.”

At Bookslut, Elizabeth Bachner, yet again, offers captivating evidence of a lively and versatile intellect.

Remainder by Tom McCarthy can only lazily be compared to Kafka or Murakami, Ionesco or Calvino. Really, there is an English dryness about it that is more like Graham Greene having a surrealist fit. Or Iris Murdoch as edited by Raymond Carver.

But the most apt comparison might be to J.G. Ballard. …more

As a writer trying to write about “America,”  my biggest struggle has been fully grasping the variety of spaces that is contained within America.

Which is why I’ve been an avid supporter of the Center For Land Use Interpretation for many years.

It’s a sort of tepid name for an eclectic and useful nonprofit organization that “is dedicated to the increase and diffusion of knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.”

And their latest full-color newsletter, The Lay Of The Land is now available for free.

At The Book Beast, Sean Manning wonders why The New York Times Book Review “would review his memoir about his mother’s terrible illness in such a snarky and dismissive way.”

In school I took a class on female poets and was instantly taken with the poetry of H.D., especially her later work Trilogy, a savage and mythic poem about rediscovering meaning in the ruins of war. One of the founding Imagists, H.D. was Ezra Pound’s muse, D.H. Lawrence’s “platonic lover” and friend and one-time patient of Sigmund Freud.

Her eventful life was mirrored in a poetry that was at once impressionistic, mythic, occult and sensual.

…more

Breaking news from the world of AWP and everything associated with it:

“To provide a haven for those either too broke, too busy, or too disillusioned (with the fact that really it ought to be AWWP, jeez) to attend the massive four-day conference in Washington, D.C., an assortment of Brooklyn writers and editors are taking over Brooklyn Winery from 8pm to 10pm on Friday, February 4th. Even as AWP tackles some of the most pressing issues facing authors, publishers, and academics, Fake AWP will be addressing brunch, snark, literary crushes, and whatever it is Jim Behrle thinks about all day.”

Readers include Tobias Carroll and Jason Diamond among other upstanding Brooklynites.

Bonus: a cautionary lecture about the dangers of brunch by Caitlin MacRae.

For more information, go to Slice magazine.

“I do not believe that apparent authoritative literary voices of validation would ever make such a grand claim about a novel written by a woman.  I say this because I believe there are many novels by women that are about the same sort of world as presented in Freedom.  Sadly, the culture usually calls these books domestic or family sagas.  Are the novels of Anne Tyler, Marilynne Robinson and Mona Simpson any less white and middle “American” than Franzen”

At VIDA, author Percival Everett explores the big assumptions and unpsoken prejudices behind Great American Novels (like Freedom.) (Via)

“Aswany has participated in the protests with a passion. He will will write a book about the events still unfolding here: ‘It has been a unique experience not to read about history but to live inside history,’ he told The Independent yesterday.”

Egyptian author Alaa al Aswany talks about the uprising in Egypt and about how a revolution is like falling in love.

“I love that discussion about Coca-Cola spending $450,000 to have Coke in space because carbonation is not lighter up there. Everything weighs the same. The gas stays in the middle, it doesn’t rise to the top, so they spent $450,000 making carbonation work in space so they could say, ‘Official Carbonated Beverage of the International Space Station.’

And then they realized that in the human stomach, if gas doesn’t rise to the top of the stomach, you can’t burp it out. So your stomach expands, you feel uncomfortable, you finally burp it out, and get a liquid spray. So nobody wanted to drink this very expensive Coca-Cola. They have this huge technology and then you’re undone by a simple fact.”

A fantastic interview with author Mary Roach (Stiff, Bonk, Spook, and Packing For Mars) at The Morning News.

“It’s a shaggy-dog tale, one that eventually—boldly—invites comparison to its great progenitor, Don Quixote. In cutting a classic wide swath, Pacazo exposes itself to risk, a tricky balance between hilarity and horror. By and large, though, this rangy novel earns its claim to the old knight’s inheritance.”

John Domini at Bookforum gives a great review of the Rumpus January Book Club pick: Pacazo by Roy Kesey.

“FoundSF is a wiki that invites history buffs, community leaders, and San Francisco citizens of all kinds to share their unique stories, images, and videos from past and present. There are over 1,800 articles here presenting primary sources, essays, and images from history. . ”

In my attempt to write about marginalized histories and forgotten anecdotes of San Francisco, I keep returning to a wonderful source: FoundSF.

Today I read about the hidden mural of Mission Dolores.

Do other cities have their own history/storytelling wikis?

The Baltimore Sun suggests some great new titles for Black History Month. (via: Book Bench)

“The inevitable conclusion to be drawn is that the rise of radical Islamism was always the other side of the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries.

“When Afghanistan is portrayed as the utmost Islamic fundamentalist country, who still remembers that, 40 years ago, it was a country with a strong secular tradition, including a powerful communist party that took power there independently of the Soviet Union? Where did this secular tradition go?”

The irrepressible Slavoj Zizek on the Egypt and Tunisia uprisings.