- William Kittredge wins LA Times Kirsch Prize: William Kittredge (his collected stories reviewed on this site here) is being honored on April 27th for his fiction and memoirs exploring themes of the American West; though I’ve read only his stories and am not yet familiar with his non-fiction, I can say that this is a well-deserved honor indeed.
- The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency by Mahmood Mamdani in the London Review of Books: a fascinating and troubling exploration of how the words we choose affect the policies we pursue and vice versa. “. . . Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur.”
- Reading With Kundera by Russell Banks from the New York Times Sunday Book Review: one of our best contemporary novelists reflects on the reflections of one of our best contemporary novelists. I’ve been a Kundera fan since 1989, when I first read The Art of the Novel and The Unbearable Lightness of Being simultaneously; his new essay on the novel, The Curtain, has now shot to the top of my reading list.
- Benefit for the Brackett Park Rocket: of entirely local interest, the friends of the Brackett Park Rocket–a hunk of retired playground metal that is being repurposed as an art object at Brackett Park–is screening October Sky at the Riverview Theater, 42nd Avenue South and 38th Street East in Minneapolis, on March 24th. There’s just too much local goodness for words in this: a great cause, a nifty park, a classic theater, and you can get your tickets at the Birchwood Cafe, one of the best vegetarian-friendly restaurants in the Midwest.
- Smells like teen spirit–Anthony Goicolea in Whitewall Magazine: kind of an old link–from the Fall 2006 issue of Whitewall. I was waiting in the swanky lobby of my workplace for my insurance agent to arrive (the less said about this the better; I classify insurance agents as slightly better than multi-level marketing hucksters, slightly worse than used car salesmen) and found this mag on one of the tables. Since it was more interesting than the usual corporate propaganda, and seemed frighteningly out of place in our lobby (we’re a pretty staid company in the ‘burbs, and this magazine had pictures of boys in underwear and other such threats to the American Way of Life), I read it. And Mr. Goicolea’s frighteningly twisted visions of adolescence were lodged in my head: they’re wonderfully absurd.
Posted by
Michael Hartford |
Mar 11, '07 |
let us go |
Leave a comment