http://io9.com/5459999/welcome-to-the-soft-apocalypse
Neglected Books takes up the cause of Irvin Faust, another "mid list" author of the Sixties and Seventies who got lost in the shuffle of reputations:
http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=320
At The New Yorker, Claudia Roth Pierpont holds forth on recent Arabic fiction in translation:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/01/18/100118crbo_books_pierpont?currentPage=all
While the University of Plymouth Press in the U.K. is planning to be busy for the next several years expanding everyone's knowledge of Romanian literature (at a moment when Romanian films are in vogue):
http://www.uppress.co.uk/romanian.htm
Confirming what I've long suspected, that most advertising doesn't work anymore:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-asghar/super-bowl-ads-and-the-ma_b_445480.html
Day Brightener: Petula Clark's "I Know a Place" is my favorite "swinging London" song:
Among notables born on this date are a number of novelists: Paul Auster, James Michener, Richard Yates, Gertrude Stein, Lao She (China), and Henning Mankell (Sweden). Also born on this date are poets Sidney Lanier and Georg Trakl (Austria), dramatist Sarah Kane, essayist Walter Bagehot, journalist Horace Greeley, historian E.P. Thompson, philosopher Simone Weil, composers Felix Mendelssohn, Jehan Alain (France), and Luigi Dallapiccola (Italy), Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, painter Norman Rockwell, actors Blythe Danner and Nathan Lane, and film directors Andre Cayatte, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Kenneth Anger, and Michael Cimino.
In my graduate school course in English grammar I did a presentation on the grammatical structure of the closing page of Gertrude Stein's monumental novel The Making of Americans, a book it is difficult to comprehend being written in the 1903-1911 time period, so utterly advanced and daring is it. In his introduction to the Dalkey Archive Press edition, William Gass does a better job at my analytic task than I did; but we can agree that a book as symphonic as this asks to be read aloud (and becomes much clearer and more moving when it is). Here is the final tremendous paragraph:
Any family living going on existing is going on and every one can come to be a dead one and there are then not any more living in that family living and that family is not then existing if there are not then any more having come to be living. Any family living is existing if there are some more being living when very many have have come to be dead ones. Family living can be existing if not every one in the family living has come to be a dead one. Family living can be existing if there have come to be some eixisting who have not come to be dead ones. Family living can be existing and there can be some who are not completely remembering such a thing. Family living can be existing and there can be some who have been completely remembering such a thing. Family living can be existing and there can be some remembering something of such a thing. Family living can be existing and some can come to be old ones and then dead ones and some can have been then quite expecting some such thing. Family living can be existing and some can come to be old ones and not yet dead ones and some can be remembering something of some such thing. Family living can be existing and some one can come to be an old one and some can come to be a pretty old one and some can come to be comletely expecting such a thing and completely remembering expecting such a thing. Family living can be existing and every one can come to be a dead one and not any one then is remembering any such thing. Family living can be existing and every one can come to be a dead one and some are remembering some such thing. Family living can be existing and any one can come to be a dead one and every one is then a dead one and there are then not any more being living. Any old one can come to be a dead one. Every old one can come to be a dead one. Any family being existing is one having some being then not having come to be a dead one. Any family living can be existing when not every one has come to be a dead one. Every one in a family living having come to be dead ones some are remembering something of some such thing. Some being living not having come to be dead ones can be ones being in a family living. Some being living and having come to be old ones can come then to be dead ones. Some being living and being in a family living and coming then to be old ones can come then to be dead ones. Any one can be certain that some can remember such a thing. Any family living can be one being existing and some can remember something of some such thing.
