Happy Reading
by Steve
Apologies for the lack of content, said the uncommitted blogger, always short of time, inspiration, motivation etc. Work is busy, so less time and energy to write. Well, that’s my excuse. To keep things ticking along, here are some other people’s words that I’ve been reading lately. They are far more illuminating and profound than anything I could produce, so this exercise is probably best for all of us. It also helps generate some kind of myth that I’m well-read and stuff. And there’s nothing an ineffective blogger likes more than stroking his fragile ego.
- Only they don’t often make movies this grand and this good, the type you can watch over and over again and still find new details to appreciate: minor plot points, aesthetic intricacies. It is a production massive in scope and so richly rendered in every particular, like the work of a great auteur afforded an unlimited budget
- Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley, the co-founders of the Necronautical Society and co-authors of the “Joint Declaration on Inauthenticity,” when asked to present their declaration at the Tate Britain, found and trained two actors to pretend to be them. Many people in the audience were angry when they discovered that the actors were not actually the authors… of a declaration on inauthenticity… presented in a museum.
- I understand better how much of writing a novel is about self-examination, self-transformation. I spend vastly more time nowadays trying to figure out what’s stopping me from doing the work, trying to figure out how I can become the person who can do the work, investigating the shame and fear: the shame of self-exposure, the fear of ridicule or condemnation, the fear of causing pain or harm.
- They are obsessed, many of them, by the wish to know how the other half lives. And so they befriend the more interesting of the odd, avoid the downtown dullards on Wall Street, and dip into the world of the junkie, the pederast, the prizefighter, and the adventurer in pursuit of kicks and literature, being influenced perhaps by that glorious generation of ambulance drivers that preceded them to Paris at the age of twenty-six.
- As a reflection of the zeitgeist, hauntology is, above all, the product of a time which is seriously “out of joint” (Hamlet is one of Derrida’s crucial points of reference in Spectres of Marx). There is a prevailing sense among hauntologists that culture has lost its momentum and that we are all stuck at the “end of history”.
Image from State Library and Archives of Florida, via Flickr
Wait until next year 
Thanks for the reading list. I wish I’d checked my RSS feed before lunch; would’ve made for some good lunchtime reading. I had the “What we Carry” story in my queue, and the J. Franzen showed up in the summer Paris Review, but the others are new to me. I’m pretty excited about the Tom McCarthy story. I’d heard about his Joint Declaration but hadn’t read more about it. Have you read Remainder yet? You need to.
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I haven’t read Remainder yet. I did, however, take a short break from IJ to read A Visit From The Goon Squad, and wasn’t disappointed. A great book.
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Save Remainder til after you’ve processed Infinite Jest. I think it’s a sequel of sorts.
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You have no idea how useful it is to have you as a literary guide!
I picked up a copy of The Tiger’s Wife at the weekend to add to the unread pile. Have you read that yet? I’m struggling to get past someone so much younger than me writing such an acclaimed novel.
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The Tiger’s Wife was a Promising Debut about a Young Adult discovering some Magic in her Family Tree (another book in the genre: Everything is Illuminated). I liked it with an asterisk but I’ll put my thoughts on hold so I won’t sully your reading experience.
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