“Montaigne’s general point is clear: that we have an inbuilt propensity for sympathy and understanding, but that proximity matters. And whilst some could see this as a depressing limit on the jurisdiction of our moral sympathies, we can also see it as something on which to build.”

Recent neurological findings back up Montaigne’s thesis that proximity is a deciding factor in sympathy.

And further: “Montaigne is no political theorist, but rather a man who wishes to remind us of a fragile but significant fact: that the preservation of our moral awareness relies on the preservation of the nearness between us – something that no number of emails or tweets can ever properly replace.”

“Þorsteinn Hallgrímsson, formerly of the National Library of Iceland, had a big idea:  digitize all Icelandic literature all the way to the current day and make it available to everyone interested in reading it.”

Iceland could be the first country to have its complete literature online. (via: Bookslut)

“The two men shared a romance with violence and danger. Rimbaud was shot in the wrist by his lover, Paul Verlaine, as he tried to break off their affair.

Wojnarowicz was shot at by a drag queen who mistook his knock at her door for the arrival of an unfaithful lover.”

At The Millions, a thoughtful inquiry about the parallels between David Wojnarowicz and Arthur Rimbaud.

It’s always exhilarating to stumble on a bookstore in your own city that you never knew existed. Especially a bookstore that is curated specifically around the built environment, ecological sustainability and the intellectual cutting edge.

A bookstore that basically only carries remarkable titles.

And so I discovered The Green Arcade in San Francisco, right where Haight tumbles into Market, in the neighborhood I like to think is called The Deco Ghetto, but I could be mistaken. A fiendishly eclectic selection of urban planning, gardening, architecture, select poetry and fiction, noir, and cultural studies titles are laid out in a cozy and sunny space and the proprietor Patrick is at once an affable, learned and helpful gentleman.

Along with owning and curating The Green Arcade bookstore, he also publishes through his imprint Green Arcade (in partnership with PM Press) socially-conscious noir, like Jim Nesbit’s A Moment Of Doubt.

Here’s an interview with Patrick at Noir City.

Long before David Shields excoriated the strict boundaries between journalism and fiction, espousing, in its place, a loose and open-ended hybrid that is more in keeping with “reality”, a Swiss-born Frenchman with one arm, a Gauloises cigarette forever dangling from his grizzled lips and a swaggering nonchalance befitting only a soldier and a drifter, penned a series of “autobiographies” that blended history, memoir, fiction, poetry, gossip, news clippings and every kind of slipshod arcana into one boisterous melange. …more

“The long-awaited English translation of 1Q84, the writer’s epic novel in three volumes that has proved a huge hit in his native Japan, will be published in English in October. All three sections are to appear together in a single 1,000-page volume, translated by Harvard professor Jay Rubin.”

At The Guardian: all the latest on Murakami’s massive new novel.

“Then the book was fin­ished, or at least a com­pleted man­u­script was turned in—as I was to learn, for Susan, the book is never fin­ished. We spent a week holed up in her apart­ment comb­ing through the gal­leys and then another with the page proofs, tweak­ing and mas­sag­ing the text.

When I say ‘holed up,’ I mean that I didn’t leave her apart­ment for a week. Susan said we’d ‘taken to the mat­tresses, like the Mafia.’”

Via Bookforum: Karla Eoff reminisces about the “intense, rollercoaster years” she spent as Susan Sontag’s personal assistant.

“So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city.”

At Guernica, an insightful article about the ruin-craze, especially the Detroit ruin craze. A worthy read especially if you recently explored these photographs.

I admit to being one of those privileged white persons who has a fascination for ruined buildings. And ruins in general.

But I suspect this fascination — whether it’s for the ruins of Detroit, of Ancient Rome, or Machu Picchu — is fairly innate in most people. Decomposition is both comforting and appalling wouldn’t you say?

In Santa Cruz, I had occasion to meet some hobos. Real or fake hobos: it was hard to make the distinction in a town so enshrined to the misfit ideal.

There was a train bridge near the roller-coaster that you could walk across if you were brave enough. (Yeah, it was the same train bridge that Keifer and his vampire crew jumped from in The Lost Boys.)  That bridge was also where the Union Pacific slowed down just enough for your typical Santa Cruz scum-punk-hobo to leap into an open box car and haul off to an unincorporated sugarbeet-scented town up north.

It seems harder and harder these days to live on the margins of society without being downright destitute or immediately imprisoned.

So as a fan of Boxcar Bertha, William T. Vollmann, and the hobo visions of Grace Krilanovich and David Means, I say to you that hobos are not only NOT dead but they still reconvene every year as they have for over a hundred years.

Yes folks: a hobo convention. (Via: Bookforum)

Lately I’ve been wanting to watch more documentaries about writers. Any suggestions?

In the meantime, thanks to Galley Cat, I found this documentary about H.P. Lovecraft which is worth ninety minutes of your time.

“I’m going to go way out on a limb here and say this: The short story is not experiencing a renaissance. Our current and much-discussed market glut of short fiction is not about any real dedication to the form. The situation exists because the many writers we train simply don’t know how to write anything but short stories.”

At The Millions, Cathy Day exposes the prejudice to the short story form in the creative writing classroom.

How did Los Angeles, that haven of low-culture and strip mall malaise beat us (San Francisco) to the punch with high-brow coffee? (I jest. L.A. is great if you want to buy human bone jewelry, guzzle incredible garlic sauce, and hang out with famous porn stars in a 24 hour Jewish deli.)

How did not one of the six new cafes that opened  last week on Valencia Street contain even a passing reference to Thomas Pynchon and his mythical post-bugle as featured in The Crying Of Lot 49? (A book that almost made snail mail cool again.)

Carolyn Kellogg ponders Pynchonian coffee without answering any of my questions.

The founding editor of Bookslut offers an eclectic selection of books that might help us confront our own deeply American sense of political alienation.

One of them I especially want to read: Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life by Nina Eliasoph, a book title that speaks to the person inside of me who would prefer to stay home all day, read books and update my Facebook account instead of having to confront the brutalities that my privileged repose rests upon.

“Blood will spew out and coat the screen in the spectacular drunk scene that ends with Myrtle getting punched in the nose.

Vampire Weekend will score the film for full anachronistic effect.

You’ll be able to count all 500 threads in Gatsby’s sheets.”

Just some of what the Book Bench envisions might be in the improbably plausible The Great Gatsby in 3-D.



This last year Ishmael Reed published a book of satirical essays targeting the current American media: Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers.

Despite being a MacArthur Fellow, a critically-acclaimed author of nine novels and numerous other volumes of poetry, essays and criticism, Reed, a long-time resident of Oakland, CA had to go to a Canadian publisher to publish this book.  This morning I discovered a recent interview with him that was at once insightful and provocative.

Is?

That’s what Luna Park asks. And comes up with Dirty Realism!

I just found out that James Franco is set to direct the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian which is the most violent novel I’ve ever read.

So I pose the obvious questions: how will he pull it off? Who will play The Judge? What will the rating boards think? Just how many scalpings can an audience endure?

Blood Meridian was the first McCarthy book I read — it was assigned in a college course — and by the end of it I was pretty much numb to anything, be them flirtatious glances or front page atrocities. We planned to read it in tandem with a screening of Clint Eastwood’s western High Plains Drifter but, at the last minute, the teacher couldn’t screen it because of the not very ambiguous rape scene in the movie that was presided over by the midget mayor.

Still it was fine for us to read three hundred pages of scalpings and rapings and hangings and beatings and various other American-style barbarisms.

I wish Franco the best of luck but sometimes I wonder if certain books aren’t just film-proof. (Although Passolini did manage to adapt Marquis de Sade’s One Hundred Twenty Days of Sodom and turn it into an allegory about fascism — or so I’ve heard yet concern for my sanity has stalled from seeing it.)

As The Millions keeps rolling out their amazing Year In Reading series, I’d thought I’d offer my own attempt at doing justice to the books in my life, and not just the ones I read this year but the ones that keep piling up on my desk, on my floor, in my bed with the furor of a contagion, not to mention the ones I peddle during daylight hours at the bookstore I work at. …more

“Sebald is brilliantly visual.

He makes you realize with some discomfort that you often fail to look attentively enough at what you see.

Another novelist referred to the “phenomenal configuration” of the author’s mind and what astonishes and delights in Sebald’s sentences, superbly rendered by his translators, is his ability to convey not just the detail of so many things hitting the senses in a rain of fleeting simultaneous impressions, but the precise emotional shading and personal import of each of these moments.”

Photographer Rick Poynor offers a dazzling commentary on the “embedded images” in the late W.G. Sebald’s masterful Austerlitz.

Reading Sebald for me, beginning with The Rings Of Saturn was truly catalytic.

Who knew that photographs, mementos, fiction, travelogue, memoir and essay could coexist in the same book? And that such a rich melange, when done as well as Sebald could be utterly enchanting even if nothing really happens?

Of course, my love for Sebald also flagrantly betrays my love for Kindle-proof books, for books as objects and for the continual hybridization of forms in the service of fine art.

“For when we are interested in the beauty of a thing, the oftener we can see it the better; but when we are interested only by the story of a thing, we get tired of hearing the same tale told over and over again, and stopping always at the same point — we want a new story presently, a newer and better one — and the picture of the day, and novel of the day, become as ephemeral as the coiffure or the bonnet of the day.

Now this spirit is wholly adverse to the existence of any lovely art. If you mean to throw it aside to-morrow, you can never have it to-day.”

-On the Condition of Modern Art, lecture (1867) by John Ruskin

Recently, I’ve been reading John Ruskin, a really terrific essayist from the late 19th century. It’s amazing the unforgiving light he shines on our own post-post-modern age.  His writings on economics — which I’m only now investigating, mostly online — seem particularly illuminating.  But hard to find! Even for a bookseller like me.

I haven’t followed Vice magazine in a long time. I used to pick it up at the video store, The Naked Eye in the Lower Haight back before it closed up.

Vice always seemed somehow noxious the way it both mocked and personified sleazeball hipster culture. We’re all scum, it proudly announced, just some of us are wittier and prettier than others.

At the same time it held up a grimy mirror to all the gaudiness that seemed so novel when I first moved to San Francisco. The years passed and right when I started getting tired of drinking shitty beer at Molotov’s, I couldn’t find Vice anywhere anymore so I ceased thinking about it.

That is, until today.

At least it’s publishing what appears to be good fiction.

Once more from The Millions “Year In Reading:” Sam Anderson shares his marginalia.

I particularly like what he wrote in the margins of a certain Twitter-referencing page in Franzen’s Freedom: “OMG! ROLLING EYES SO HARD!”

This encourages me to write more in books which, however, will make the books virtually unsellable once my money runs out. Some things are worth sacrificing though. For my love of reading I will gladly give all, including my life savings.

Don’t miss it! The Millions “A Year In Reading” is underway with contributions from John Banville and Lionel Shriver, among others.

For me, having been inculcated with pictures of a bloody, naked man nailed to a tree since I was five, any discussion of obscenity, homo-eroticism or sexual violence begins with Jesus, or at least the Jesus that hangs in churches, around necks and is furiously waved in the faces of “sodomites.” …more

“To be dangerous is to remind the world of what our humanity means to us, rather than allowing everyone to settle into complacency.  To challenge us to dig deeper into reflecting on our lives, instead of just accepting what we’re told about what means what to us. At one point in the discussion, Jennifer Barone made a comment I agree with, that to be dangerous a poet must “upset the current world order.” She also made a point that made me think – is being a subversive poet in a place like San Francisco preaching to the choir? Have people here already heard (and understood) enough of voices like mine?”

Maisha Z. Johnson, a poet I recently saw at the last Quiet Lightning, wonders about the danger and risk-taking inherent in art.

Just to let all discriminating book-buyers know: Rebecca Solnit’s new gorgeously-illustrated and highly-collaborative book, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas is out now at all independent bookstores. …more

Invoking theorists Helen Cixous and Avital Ronell, The Millions tackles a recent favorite of mine: The Orange Eats Creeps.

(I particuarly like this turn of phrase from Ronell: “they rerouted the hunting grounds of the cannibalistic libido.”)

“I first met Dean not long after Tryscha and I hooked up. I had just gotten over a wicked fucking hangover that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with a six-foot-five douchebag and a beer bong. . .

This is all far back, when Dean was not the crazy fucking jagoff he is today, when he was a young Communications major shrouded in Axe Body Spray. Then news came that Dean was out of ASU and was transferring to OSU; also there was talk that he was bringing some slam piece named Marylou. . .”

It vaguely pains me to link to this, having once been a fan of On The Road (when in fact, Dr. Sax is vastly superior in my opinion) but the fact remains: this is a book for dudes, even quite possibly for bros.

Sure, it’s a cheap bit of satire but maybe instructive for those of us (myself included) with unspoken and tragically unquestioned bro-tendencies.

I’m a huge fan of tandem reading: reading two books at a time, one of which is usually a novel, the other of which is usually a book of stories, essays, poems, fragments or lyric randomness. I find the dialogue between the two books can be quite illuminating. How one chooses which books to pair depends on deliberate and unconscious motivations, external circumstances and inner strife. …more

David Talbot, former editor-in-chief of Salon.com, came into Red Hill Books recently to drop off his latest creation, Devil Dog: The Amazing True Story Of The Man Who Saved America, one of the first installments in the Pulp History series — a series that will blow minds left and right now and in the coming months. …more