“Such are the perfections of fiction...Everything it teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can’t prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness...There is more profit in an hour’s talk with Billy Graham than in a reading of Joyce. Graham might conceivably make you sick, so that you might move, go somewhere to get well. But Joyce just sends you out into the street, where the world goes on, solid as a bus. If you met Joyce and said 'Help me,' he’d hand you a copy of Finnegans Wake. You could both cry.” – Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things


Thursday, March 24, 2011

Literary Links: In Which Everything Is Awesome Or Not Awesome

The other week, I was complaining about the (in my opinion) absurdity of the arguments advanced by the likes of Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. I had been considering writing a more studied response to this, but – good news! – I don’t have to because the London Review of Books has done it for me. (N.B. I still think the argument that the internet may inhibit creativity, which is advanced at the end of this review, is, in a somewhat complicated way, total crap.)
• As I noted the other week, Sergio De La Pava will soon release his second novel, Personae (which I’m hoping will have awesome references to Ezra Pound and Ingmar Bergman). In the meantime, though, why not read his awesome essay in the also awesome journal, Triple Canopy.
• Sorry, Google, computer says no.
• Here’s a handy scorecard to use when reading any and all articles about the ‘future of publishing’.
• I want these books in Australia. Now. Seriously, dudes. Oh, and here's a slightly creepy dutch video of these books in action. Also, promotional material is here.
• More stuff written by that Roberto Bolano guy.
• Here’s a profile of the publisher at one of my favourite presses in the whole, wide world, The Dalkey Archive. If you aren’t buying their books, then you aren’t reading good books.
• Emerging authors, take heart in your bad reviews!
• Self-publishing on the Kindle is awesome! Self-publishing on the Kindle is not awesome! Self-publishing on the Kindle may or may not be awesome!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Finnegan's (sic) Wake? I don't think so!

Emmett Stinson said...

Erm, thanks for the noting the apostrophe error?

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