“RB: You start out with a sense that there is a civilizing effect of thinking and writing and telling stories. It made life somehow better. And looking around today, it may be true but the contemplative life seems to be losing the battle.
EP: It improves the individual life, I think. People who read, people who write–
RB: Wouldn’t it be nice if they were to be salvation for all of us? (Laughs).
EP: I would, but I am not a proselytizer.”

You can read a Rumpus review of her short story collection here and visit her official website here.

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“Where I grew up, most of the people gravitated to becoming criminals. I was surrounded by criminal elements and violence and things like that. And all the boys, they notched up quite a few years in prison, some of them for armed robbery, even murder. It was difficult to swim in that kind of pool without the infectious kind of necessity to prove yourself. And you had to prove yourself by fighting, stealing or doing something outrageous like armed robbery . . . So, you know, I grew up in an impossible place for me to graduate to where I am now.”

More on McCullin’s work can be found here, here, and he can be heard here.

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In his new politically charged television show, Vieni Via Con Me (Come Away With Me), Saviano has included anti-Berlusconi monologues by Italian comic Roberto Benigni and condemned the defamation of the personal lives of politicians. The television series holds an unprecedented audience of 2 million viewers for the RAI 3 state broadcast channel, demonstrating a new growing interest for youth in the political arena. In conversation with The Financial Times’ John Lloyd, Saviano elaborates on both his book and new television show over sea bass and risotto at an undisclosed location.

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Besides their Britainia, they’ve all had lunch with Steven L. Isenberg. If you missed it, Isenberg vividly recalls four mealtime encounters in this lovely essay from 2009 over at The American Scholar.

A snippet from his lunch with Auden:

“Ed Kuhn, the head of the trade editorial department, summoned me to his office. “I have just had a call,” he said, “from Bennett Cerf [I knew who he was from the television panel show What’s My Line?], the head of Random House, asking who the hell you were. I couldn’t imagine why he had heard of you and why he sounded so damn put out. Cerf asked, ‘What does he do for you? He is poaching on one of our authors.’ I asked Cerf who that was. ‘W. H. Auden. He is trying to get him to write a biography.’ I told Cerf you were just a kid out of college, and I had no idea about this, and Cerf said, ‘Well, Auden is having lunch with him.”

Lunch with Forster:

“He suggested a walk along the River Cam. “Would that suit you?” he asked. “Of course,” I said. As we began to walk, he laced his arm through mine. Can you imagine how I felt—a boy from my circumstances, so American, so unfinished—walking along the backs of the Cambridge colleges with the man who wrote A Passage to India and Howards End on my arm as a silent companion?”

Lunch with Larkin:

“He told me he had a friend who visited New York and was mugged outside the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. I told him that when he came, I would get my younger brother, who was a strong guy, a criminologist, and knew a lot of policemen, to see that he was protected.”

Lunch with Empson:

“Ricks was ordered to stay seated, and then the soup making began. First, Empson produced a large, dirty pot, which I had no chance to rinse. He ran water into it and set it to boil. From strange corners he found an onion, leeks, parsley, and some of the browned celery. He threw in some other things, but by then I couldn’t look.”

Read it all here.

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The article touches on the origins of one of her sparsely written short stories (one sprung to life via a housekeeper’s card left on a hotel bed,) the relationship between her fiction writing and her translations, and her youthful feelings towards Flaubert.

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Allen Barra sees Lee’s work as markedly inferior to other Alabama born writers such as Zora Neale Hurston or Walker Percy. According to Barra, the book is perhaps the most overrated in American literature. Author Thomas Mallon remarked in a 2006 New Yorker that the book is a classic taught in schools purely because it acts as a “moral Ritalin, an ungainsayable endorser of the obvious.” Barra, in agreement with Mallon, describes Atticus as the deliverer of one-liners that could have been stolen from high school English papers, citing phrases like:

“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

“If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…”

“I do my best to love everybody.”

Some commentators on Barra’s piece are incredulous towards the critique (“classic,” “height of literary expression,” holds “enduring charm,” etc), but most seem to agree (“saccharine soaked maudlin” or “Atticus Finch is Latin for Bird Brain”).

Barra isn’t the only writer questioning Mockingbird. Instead of instructing us about the world, Malcolm Gladwell sees the book as an instruction in the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism. And journalist Richard King agrees with team critique.

Still, many people have flurried to defend Boo, Atticus, Scout, and Lee. Some notable responses:

“Morality in literature is not very fashionable today — too many complexities, too many shades of grey, a sense we have argued it all out long ago — but there is something about Mockingbird that still rouses fresh and horrified indignation.” –Jane Sullivan

“Few contemporary literary American novels have such a sweep and fewer have the confidence to take on social issues in the way Harper Lee does. Much literary writing today about racism is cloaked in irony or in so much lyricism that it becomes gaseous. Lee refuses to hide behind aesthetics. “– Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie

“Many of those who feel most passionately about the book left their last classrooms long ago. Perhaps is it not in English class where this book lives but in our hearts and minds. Here we hold Atticus and Boo and Scout, alongside the idea of certain justice done in a familiar place, and done well. This is where we hold a uniquely American sense of ourselves in America and as Americans.”–Lee Carpenter

So what do you think, readers? Classic or overrated?

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I just listened to Woods’ At Echo Lake, the fifth album from this Brooklyn borne band of tambourine savvy musicians. A quick listen at just under a half an hour, Woods plays with fuzzy tones mixed with electronics, a combination that’s good for sinking into nostalgic summer. Coined as “pop” by some, the Neil Young vocal homage of lead singer Jeremy Earl and the folk musicality of acoustic guitar point to the difficulty of categorizing Woods’ sound.

This album will not drive you insane with obsession, (it’s not going to replace Jonie Mitchell or Led Zepplin or Bob Dylan or Britney or whoever as your new number 1) but some of the guitar riffs and vocal harmonies do recall the joy of a Pet Sounds-filled summertime. The warmth of the track “Time Fading Lines,” or the loose and fast “Get Back” will get you in your summertime groove. There is also some slightly darker material, such as track ‘From The Horn’ with its funky guitar improv. ‘Death Rattles’ includes bird song twitters and waling vocals, adding another less bubbly track to the album.

Without clean-cut studio luster, Woods’ fifth album, has a homespun type of sound, one that is accessible and oddball. This purposeful low fidelity, muffled sounds of  musical fuzz, essentially contributes to the charm of this album.

Singer Jeremy Earl’s own label, Woodsist, has also been enjoying success overall lately, organizing indie music fests nationally and releasing bands like San Diego based Wavves, Vivian Girls, New Jersey quartet Real Estate, and San Francisco’s Moon Duo.

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Vonnegut on Cinderella:

“No matter what happens after that she’ll remember when the prince was in love with her and she was the belle of the ball. So she poops along, at her considerably improved level, no matter what, and the shoe fits, and she becomes off-scale happy [draws line upward and then infinity symbol].

Vonnegut on Kafka’s Metamorphosis:

“A young man is rather unattractive and not very personable. He has disagreeable relatives and has had a lot of jobs with no chance of promotion. He doesn’t get paid enough to take his girl dancing or to go to the beer hall to have a beer with a friend. One morning he wakes up, it’s time to go to work again, and he has turned into a cockroach [draws line downward and then infinity symbol].”

On Hamlet:

“But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here [indicates blackboard]. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”

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Photojournalist Felice Quinto, who passed away recently in mid-January, inspired the creation of the character named “Paparazzo” in the Federico Fellini film La Dolce Vita. Quinto and his friends caught the eye of Fellini while zooming around on motorcycles to catch celebrity candids. Fellini is said to have offered the role of Paparazzo to Quinto, a role later played by Walter Santesso, but Quito rejected the offer.

Quinto immigrated to the United States, where his photographs of celebrities at the Studio 54 club assisted in cementing its notorious reputation. Co-founder of Studio 54 Ian Schrager has said that it was Quinto that transformed the club into a “media phenomenon, with these pictures that would make it around the world.” In response to questions regarding his moral stance on the invasion of the privacy of celebrities, Quinto had no qualms. He believed that such characters relied just as much on him for publicity, as he did on them to earn his livelihood.

Quinto became involved in the life of a fotografo d’assalto (assault photographer) through his father’s camera shop, where he enjoyed experimenting with the cameras. Quinto never attended a formal school of journalism or photographic education, emphasizing his belief that a love of the craft was all that was required. You can read more about Quinto via the Times Online article here, and via the Financial Times here.

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Running at the AC Institute in New York through March 13, Keats hopes his installation will give the plants an escape from New York.

Prior to this installation Keats created a story that takes 1,000 years to read in an attempt to rejuvenate attitudes toward literature. Keats has also copyrighted his mind and attempted to genetically engineer God in a petri dish. In his creation of the latter, he gathered bell jars, light meters, cyanobacteria and 160 caged fruit flies.

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