The Olive Reader

Is Nabokov’s masterpiece still shocking?

Every now and again it’s probably healthy to crack open the glass, remove a certain world masterpiece from the display case, and in re-reading it recall that—unlike Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, two other novels once deemed obscene by the tribunes of moral upkeep—Lolita is a disgusting book. Furthermore, the day will never come when it is not a disgusting book.

From The New York Times, today

HE REMEMBERS DADA

When the City Commission holds its weekly meeting today in Lawrence, Kan., Mayor Boog Highberger plans to proclaim International Dadaism Month in honor of the provocative, sometimes absurdist art movement that flowered in the 1920’s, The Associated Press reported. But in the spirit of an art movement that declared that “art is dead,” the mayor has chosen not to specify a month of the observance. International Dadaism Month, he says, is Feb. 4, March 28, April 1, July 15, Aug. 2, 7, 16 and 26; Sept. 18 and 22, and Oct. 1, 17 and 26. How did he reach that conclusion? He rolled the dice and picked numbers from a hat. “I just think it is good to acknowledge that there is a place for chance and nonsense in every healthy lifestyle,” Mayor Highberger said. Not all members of the electorate agreed. “It sounds like a waste of time to me,” said Joe Hutchens, a construction worker. “It seems like the City Commission would have something better to do than that.”

My observations:
1) The mayor’s name is “Boog”
2) We should all live in Lawrence, Kansas

The Chicago Sun Times has an interesting article / recap of “the year in books: 2005”. Some decent observations.

Through one of my favorite book bloggers, Maud Newton, I discovered this: Coudal Partners, a company the purpose of which is hard to discern even after extensively searching its site, is asking people to read short poems into an answering machine. Then it’s posting the audio files to its web site. A good idea, methinks.

Go here to listen, and to find out how to contribute.

I think I’ll call tonight, but what to read, what to read? Probably “When You Are Old” by Yeats, a longtime favorite of mine:

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face among a crowd of stars.

It’s either that or, to throw them a curveball, “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” by Stevie Wonder:

“I’ve done a lot of foolish things that I really didn’t mean.”

Tell it, Stevie.

We are the proud publishers of Fast Food Nation, and soon a sister company of ours will be the proud distributor of the film adaptation.

The book is great, and the pretty reliable Richard Linklater is at the helm for the movie, but still, I’m curious to see what he does with this enormous cast — Patricia Arquette, Bobby Cannavale, Luis Guzman, Ethan Hawke, Ashley Johnson, Greg Kinnear, Kris Kristofferson, Avril Lavigne, Esai Morales, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Lou Taylor Pucci, Ana Claudia Talancon and Wilmer Valderrama.

Avril Lavigne? Will she be the one who asks if I want fries with that?

Everyone has a book or two or four that they wish they had been able to publish. The Guardian has an article now that lets some UK editors tell which books got away from them.

They’re making Lunar Park into a movie.

Thanks to the transit strike, I’ve had plenty of time to enjoy my right to be lazy.

“In capitalist society,” he wrote, “work is the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity.” Lafargue dismissed the “right to work” that other socialists demanded. He asked, instead, for the right to lie around on the daybed, the right to read and to nap, the right to feast and to make love. He declared the right to endless leisure.

There’s a nice reading list there for those of you who enjoy leisure as much as I do.

Knut Hamsun has written a few of my favorite books. The New Yorker has a little piece about him in their upcoming issue.

Hamsun was by then the very portrait of a young artist, complete with pince-nez; a contemporary described him as “dangerous for all women, interesting and striking.” One gets glimpses of this in his second novel, “Mysteries” (1892) —an apt title for one of his oddest and richest books. Everything about it is a little mysterious, from the moment “a stranger appeared in town, a certain Nagel, a remarkable, eccentric charlatan who did a lot of curious things.” It’s not clear why Nagel is there or what he’s getting out of staying. He falls obsessively in love with Dagny Kielland, a clergyman’s daughter, and has an affair with an older woman; he carries a violin case, but there’s almost certainly no violin inside. He is probably borderline insane, and definitely suicidal; although the novel has a third-person narrator, it is every bit as inflamed as “Hunger.”

I was going to blog at length about this New York Times article, in which the “public editor” examines the paper’s book review policy. But of course, it ran yesterday, so by now (2:09 Eastern time on Monday), other bloggers have said enough to keep us sated for some time. GalleyCat has analysis, and links to several other bloggers as well, including another blog by the person who maintains GalleyCat.

So I’ll keep this short. The upshot of the Times piece is that the paper no longer automatically reviews books by its writers (how honorable), and hopes to keep making strides in avoiding conflicts of interest. It seems to me the solution would be to not review any books by Times staffers, but I can’t be too outraged about it — my favorite magazine, The New Yorker, publishes a list near the end of every year of books written by its contributors. Arranged on the page in a graceful design, it’s still essentially a nepotistic shopping list. It’s a tacky world after all.

It’s that time of year. Best of lists from: Village Voice, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times……..

Slate has just posted its choices for best books of the year — actually, it’s a list of people associated with the site selecting a book or two each, with some overlap.

Ian McEwan’s Saturday is singled out by several of those polled. Walter Kirn’s novel, Mission to America, is close behind. I’m eager to read that — haven’t gotten to Kirn’s fiction yet, but he’s one of my favorite nonfiction writers.

The humble shepherds of this blog and their humble publishing concern are also well represented: Michela Wrong’s I Didn’t Do It For You, Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, and Jose Canseco’s Juiced (featuring a chapter epigraph from yours truly that makes me look, retroactively, like a die-hard supporter of steroids abusers) are all praised. (If I’m forgetting any of our books, I’ll be roundly punished soon and a correction will be forthcoming.)

My choice for best book of the year, because you’re dying to know, is It’s All Right Now by Charles Chadwick (a novel also published here, but no loyalty required to pick it — it’s one of my all-time favorites).

Here is an interview from The Guardian with Philip Roth.

In a rare interview, Philip Roth, one of America’s greatest living authors, tells Danish journalist Martin Krasnik why his new book is all about death – and why literary critics should be shot

I’ve always been a big fan of James Purdy.

James Purdy, a frail, sad-eyed man seated before the fireplace in his one-room apartment, is an author, poet and playwright who occupies his own pantheon in American letters.

Praised by Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams and many others, he has been called a genius, a visionary, a satirist worthy of Voltaire. He has also been attacked for his “adolescent and distraught mind” and accused of writing “fifth-rate avant-garde soap opera.” He has never won a Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award and is not a member of this country’s official literary shrine, the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

I’m not a big fan of poetry, but poems make a lot more sense to me when I hear them read by their author. If you’re like me, check out The Poetry Archive.

The Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded.