“Cova Rasa” é o título do artigo de James Wood sobre Paul Auster, publicado na última New Yorker na esteira do lançamento de Invisible, livro mais recente do escritor.  Considerado por muitos de seus pares o melhor crítico literário de sua geração, Wood é reconhecido pela defesa do realismo literário em detrimento da literatura pós-moderna, e a resenha de Auster concentra grande parte dos argumentos frequentes de Wood em sua cruzada.

O crítico sugere uma fórmula aos “agradáveis, levemente condescendentes” livros do escritor e a toma emprestada para criar o começo de um romance a la Auster na abertura do artigo, dando indício aos leitores de que não será dócil o teor dos parágrafos seguintes.

Há uma longa passagem em que comenta a presença de clichês nas obras de Auster. Ao contrário de Flaubert, em cujos romances as expressões gastas são empregadas com ironia, ou mesmo de Beckett e Nabokov, conscientes do “tomar emprestado” da cultura de massa, Auster “não faz nada com o clichê, a não ser usá-lo”, afirma Wood.

Seus enredos, de forma geral, são caracterizados por Wood como de um realismo pouco convincente e até dotados de certa atmosfera de filme B. As reviravoltas da trama – que, a propósito, Hollywood foi pródiga em consagrar-, fariam de seus romances máximas do surrealismo ou, tomando uma perspectiva otimista, suas histórias traduziriam apenas um realismo diluído, pasteurizado.

E quem esperava do artigo ao menos um final redentor não soube dimensionar o cinismo de seu início.  Aqui, a superficialidade e a futilidade sugeridas pelo título soam como galanteios: Wood traz à tona o conceito da linguagem contemporânea ligada ao vazio, à ausência, apenas para solicitar: mais silêncio, Auster.

Para quem deseja assistir a todos os rounds, o artigo pode ser lido na íntegra na versão digital da New Yorker, que trouxe ainda conto inédito de Don DeLillo.

Här ser vi en annan nidbild på Obamas: omslaget till tidningen “the New Yorker” (från förra året). Som vi ser är denna satirbild allt annat än smickrande. Tydligen så har tidningen publicerat bilder likt den ovan alltsedan starten 1925. Vad gäller Obamas i övrigt så är de medlöpare till den internationella bankeliten som äger oss alla och således kriminella. Att Barack inte känner till vilka han arbetar för är helt uteslutet, och samma sak gäller även hans smarta hustru.

Cover Story: Finger Painting.

Just found this article on New Yorker.  Never imagined that you can create this kind of thing on iPhones.  Incredible.

I’ll probably come up with a Best of 2009 list for books and music in a couple weeks, but for now: The Most OK of 2009!

It’s been an epic year to say the least. Plenty of ups and downs. We all know these, because they’ve received the lion’s share of news coverage. But what about the middle? That band doing solid journeyman’s work. Or the hotly anticipated followup novel that was incredibly mild. These are the people I celebrate today.

10. Central Market by Tyondai Braxton – I love Battles. “Atlas” is one of the best songs of the decade. So I had high expectations for singer Braxton’s solo disc. In what crazy directions would he go, unfettered by the other band members? Would he disappear down the rabbit hole of his own studio wizardry like Brian Wilson? The answer was a resounding not really. Central Market neither disappoints nor enthralls, hanging out at the top of the bell curve, afraid to ski down the slope.

9. “Zombieland” – This is why movie studios exist: I was entertained, I laughed, I left the theater and forgot about the movie a month later. I had to go to Metacritic and look up 2009 film releases to be reminded this existed. And was thoroughly middle-of-the-road.

8. The New Yorker iPhone “Brushes” App Covers by Jorge Colombo – This was novel the first time, though none of them carry the wit of Chris Ware’s Halloween cover. What we have are bland covers fashioned in a unique way. Bravo?

7. Julian Plenti is…Skyscraper by Julian Plenti – Interpol’s Paul Banks came up with a persona as developed and fleshed out as a Michael Bay protagonist. Which is to say, not so much. “Unwind” and “Fun That We Have” were good, the rest was decent. Pitchfork does a great job summing up how solidly ok the whole venture is.

6. “Entourage” – This season had some good moments (Matt Damon, everything Ari Gold) and some weak moments (we don’t get to see anything from “Gatsby”?). But I watched every episode, and I will watch the next season, probably out of habit. This season was like asking for a beer and getting O’Doul’s.

5. Peppered turkey and monterey jack cheese sandwiches – Consistently there in 2009, my go-to lunch when I was broke or lazy.

4. “I Love You, Man” – Every time I catch myself saying “totes my goats,” I wish I were quoting a better movie. If the director had just excised the “Slappin’ tha bass, mon!” scene, this Paul Rudd vehicle wouldn’t even have made the list.

3. Brooklyn Lager – Get over yourselves everyone. It’s inconsistent from tap to tap. Also, I would expect a beer named after an entire borough to reference more than just the Gowanus Canal.

2. March – Just so-so this year.

1. “Inherent Vice” by Thomas Pynchon – We get it, Pynchon really loves The Big Lebowski. We all do. And I thought aligning Pynchon’s typical miasma of paranoia with an überstoner’s unreliable reportage was a witty touch. But the best thing I can say about this one is it’s a good entry point for Pynchon novitiates, second to “The Crying of Lot 49.”  The less said about this book’s heavy-handed final few pages, the better. (Fog! It’s a metaphor, get it?!)

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Thanksgiving means food, and food means Calvin Trillin. Nobody tells the truth like a good Missourah boy:

I suppose I am programmed to expect that sort of result. I was raised by a man who, although he had never tasted coffee in his life, once told me that blindfolded I couldn’t tell the difference between coffee with milk and coffee without milk. It has never occurred to me that the software drummers who are in the habit of saying to the bartender “J. & B. on the rocks” or “Ketel One with a twist” might actually be able to recognize their favorite booze in a blind tasting. Many years ago, when a friend in England began raising chickens and boasting of the gloriously distinctive taste of their eggs, I secretly replaced the freshly gathered eggs in his larder with eggs from a London supermarket, and I try to remind him at least semi-annually that he raved about the next omelette to come out of the kitchen. In temperament and genes as well as in geographic origin, I’m from the Show Me state.

This article is on wine, which you will probably drink this weekend. For food, here’s Trillin again. Happy Thanksgiving.

Lloyd explains why Pinker and Gladwell don’t agree, which is partly based upon Gladwell’s new book, What the Dog Saw., a collection of essays that were published in the New Yorker.

Ariel Levy nasceu em 1974, e é reporter da New Yorker. Tem um livro, lançado em 2006, chamado “Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture“, uma crítica ao feminismo nos Estados Unidos. Nesta semana, ela escreveu uma matéria de 10.340 palavras (algo que exige, no mínimo, trinta minutos do seu tempo livre) sobre a Caster Semenya, a velocista hermafrodita sul-africana, além de ter participado de um chat no site da revista, sobre o mesmo tema (apenas 2.579 palavras).

E eu li tudo isso por causa dessa foto aí de cima, que o editor do site da New Yorker fez o favor de colocar em destaque no topo página.

Agora, depois de tudo isso, só consigo pensar: “e ela ainda escreve  para a New Yorker”.

On the occasion of the publication of his braided biographical volumes, ‘Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin” and “True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney,” longtime New Yorker contributor Lawrence Weschler describes what it has been like, lo these many years, to be ponging back and forth between these two giants of contemporary art, who disagree about almost everything, in the profoundest of ways, and yet have never actually spoken with each other.

When Fountainheads Collide
Lawrence Weschler on Robert Irwin & David Hockney
Kellen Auditorium 66 5th Avenue, NYC
7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, December 9th
Free and Open to the Public

I read an interesting letter in response to a New Yorker review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, Eating Animals. It provides a different perspective on the idea that killing animals for food is wrong, from a rather unexpected source. It’s also very concisely written. Definitely a good read, as it strongly reinforced my preconceptions, on a psychological level.

And I’ve always respected those who take up vegetarianism for the health benefits. By combining certain fruits and vegetables together, one can create a very balanced and beneficial diet. Much more balanced than that of a typical omnivore. I’ve actually gone an entire month without eating meat just because. My mom was doing it for temple, and I figured I would just follow suit. As long as you have a general know-how in terms of making food taste good, meat is negligible. That’s not to say I didn’t have an immense craving for bacon, burritos, pizzas, and the like. It’s just I’ve never really been a picky eater, so eating vegetables all the time never sounded like a bad thing to me. Until I realized that in that month, I was never got full.

And I’ve tried to respect, to a degree, activists who become vegan for the sake of these animals who are, rather unpleasantly slaughtered for our ruthless consumption. Yes, the backbone of America is not the most pretty, but it keeps us going. Not all of us can afford to go organic, and not all of us have the time to put in the research of which beans and sprouts make a complete protein. We just don’t have time to worry about that, when we know that even a small amount of cheap meat can provide enough fat and protein to keep a family alive and thriving.

But I don’t like it when people tell me that killing animals is wrong. Because lions do it. And lions are bigger than me, scarier than me, and overall have more potential to induce chaos and catastrophe than me. So if anything, we should be deflecting the attention off of fanatical eaters like myself, and onto the lions and the other scary cats in the world. Pfft. Just because we humans are smart and invented efficient ways to take down our prey. Look. If lions had torpedoes build onto their backs, gazelles and antelopes would’ve been extinct eons ago. With the prowess, the cunning, the general superiority associated with the Lion (…I blame Disney), surely a lion with a torpedo on its back would drive mankind into a inescapable pit of slavery. Would you not agree?

With factory farming and other rather maniacal methods of meat production and packaging available to us, it may seem as though we are playing God, determining life and death. But we are what are. We are human. We are animals. We eat, we hunt, for survival. When we are satiated, that is when we are able to think about others, and about ourselves on a deeper level. And it is precisely that activity that brings us above other animals. The activity of being overly satiated. The fact that we see eating as a routine and not the only means of survival makes us look at the world with an eye that skews. That’s why we see our act of killing animals instead of seeing the man on the street that would kill an animal to stay alive.

We can’t feed the hungry microgreens and expect them to be satiated. When a beast reaches the point of desperation, the only thing that makes sense is to drive another beast into a similar turmoil, or a fate even worse. Meat. Our visceral desire awakens in periods of uncertainty. And that side of us, disregarding our moral beliefs, wants to feast. Because it is the only certainty. The blood of the fallen fuel the blood of those who want to rise to see the sun once more.

So yes, I’m not the biggest proponent of animal rights.I don’t mean to offend, but if we are going to continue to be the dominant species, then we should acknowledge it, accept it, and embrace it. Because I don’t want to live in a world where I am forced to eat soy bacon, or soy meatloaf.

And at some point, I just fall into a depression. Because I know these people are noble in their causes. And I know that what I say won’t mean anything. I’m fine with that. I think we should all have the freedom to believe what we want. It’s just, when I see cute vegan girls sitting on the grass, it really pains me.

Because they will never know what it’ll be like to be on a dinner date with me, myself, and bacon.

A mass of heated discussion is being shouted around the publishing world in the wake of recent announcements by Harlequin and Thomas Nelson to step in the direction of self-publishing.

Responses have exploded across the industry from the New Yorker to Publisher’s Weekly. Crotchety, curious, and shocked are among the many opinions swirling about, with the resurgence of the term ‘vanity press’ included in the semantical outcry of the literati.

Shocking at best. Inevitable indeed. Masturbatory? Opinions will be opinions. While I cannot fault traditional publishing houses from offering genuine detraction of these decisions – they are business too, after-all. As authors we must be wary of drinking the cool-aide. Not an easy thing to do. Writing is a personal, often intimate endeavor, which propagates a natural to desire for validation – something agents and traditional publishers have a monopoly on.

If writing is an art, publishing is a business. In business, components such as, ingenuity, creativity, evaluating risk, and (gulp), diversification have a proven track record. Those elements should be considered on the micro and macro levels – the success of your own book along with the industry in general.

Agent Richard Curtis provides a rather pragmatic perspective on the subject worth taking a look at on his site E-Reads. What are your thoughts?

- Karl

My latest post at The New Yorker’s Book Bench includes this paragraph:

A word cloud compiles ninety or so must-read books, with the most essential ones appearing in progressively bigger fonts. “To Kill A Mockingbird” and “Pride and Prejudice ” come in at about size seventy-two; “The Old Man and the Sea” and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” appear in twelve, or so.

The rest is here.

A review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals” appeared in the New Yorker book criticism section on November 9^th, 2009. The reviewer, Elizabeth Kolbert, seemed to describe Foer as pushing vegetarianism with a moral curling broom. At times she made Foer seem hypocritical “arguing for vegetarianism as the only moral course” while not being completely vegetarian. Foer’s book was also described as postmodern, interspersed with personal vignettes, illustrations, changing typography, et cetera. The author offered her own vignette half way through the review, perhaps a little tongue-in-cheek. She raised chickens, happy chickens. They arrived through the mail in a cardboard box and spent their days pecking, laying eggs, and “shitting on the walkways” of her property. She hoped that having the chickens, along with the eggs, would allow her children to “learn what it’s like to raise what you eat.” She soon learned that the chickens preferred to eat other animals over their given grain, pecking at the ground for newts and even cornering, to no avail, a small, frightened rabbit under a car.

The author presented the chicken anecdote right before describing an argument pro eating meat. The argument’s punch line was that “different animals have different diets” – humans happen to eat pigs and cows.  After all, we are only animals, animals that like to eat meat. “Our ancestors certainly liked a nice bone to gnaw on” and those same ancestors evolved and grew their brains by eating meat. It seemed the author meant to connect this argument with the chicken story. Chickens eat worms, rabbits if they could. What’s the big deal if people get their teeth around a chicken? It wasn’t clear if this argument was her own doing or if she was paraphrasing Foer or someone else. In any case, the argument was as ridden with shit as her walkways or the industrial animal farms that Foer and his activist friends broke into to shed tears over.

Our ancestors lived some 200,000 years ago. What an up-to-date comparison! I, for one, refuse the comforts of indoor plumbing and, like the chickens, love to shit outdoors. And when five of my best friends and I get together we corner wild animals, our fondest hobby. Also, freezing to death and dying of hunger are great ways to go and at 34 years of age there’s never been a better time to die. Right? No. It is completely irrational to justify any action with the fact that our ancestors did it. Ethical systems change with the evolution of society and caveman ethics and contemporary ethics are as different as can be. Most things our ancestors did we no longer do or even deem acceptable to do. Furthermore, our brains aren’t going to get any bigger because of increased protein from meat. There aren’t any selective pressures to facilitate that process. Nobody is picking out young adults with smaller brains and slaughtering them before they have the chance to reproduce. Besides, animal protein is identical to plant protein. The amino acids are not any different in plants and if our ancestors had ample access to tofu the brain growth results would have been identical. Foer’s vegetarian brain would have reached the same size as meat-eating Kolbert’s if we had raised them as otherwise identical populations in an experiment of evolution.

It isn’t as though the act of ingesting meat is unethical (perhaps you could make the argument but it would be difficult). The only things we can ascribe ethical value to are the acts that lead up to the consumption of meat. There are three essential points where an anti argument can be produced: the death of the animal, the way the animal is slaughtered, and the environmental effects that result from animal farming. There is no need to delve into environmentalism and the industrial “cowschwitz” as these topics as they are extensively discussed by authors like Singer, Schlosser, and Foer himself. What may be added on the ethics of animal slaughter is how it is relates to evolution. Humans and other animals have evolved to persist. The proof for this lies in their present existence. We, just like all animals, have an evolved, innate thirst for life and we are prepared to do anything in our power to continue living. Hence, we exist presently. We eat anything at hand when we are starving; we thrash around when we are drowning; we drink our own urine if we find ourselves desiccating in the desert. And this life-thirst emerged very early in our evolution. The great-grand ancestors of our common ancestors must have had the same desire to live as we do now. Chickens absolutely have it too. And when we slaughter and eat them we are ignoring this fact, sharing the same thirst for life but being entirely unsympathetic. While this may not be the most pressing of arguments or the most pragmatic it should not be ignored. Imagine throwing a cow into a lake and listening to its horrified, primal screams at the precipice of death. The resulting cheeseburger would seem a lot less appetizing knowing that if it was you in place of the cow you would have felt the same.  Even if the cow was killed “humanely” and had no idea of the impending end, he still had to die against his will for life. Human beings exert every possible effort in order to prolong their existence and cows would follow suit if they could. Even though the dreamless sleep is painless it is still the black end for people and cows the same. Knowing this, should we not be a little bit more sympathetic? There must be a little room for improvement in the life condition of cows as thousands of them are destined for the death-rod each day.

from this isn’t happiness>

A matéria “Estrangeirismo às avessas“, publicada na revista Língua Portuguesa de novembro, trata do uso de palavras brasileiras pela mídia norteamericana como sintoma de uma cultura indigesta a paladares estrangeiros.

O texto faz uma análise dos termos que foram mantidos em português por Jon Lee Anderson em seu famigerado artigo Gangland (versão em pdf), publicado pela New Yorker pouco antes de o Rio de Janeiro ser escolhido para as Olimpíadas de 2016.

A reportagem de Anderson usou palavras como “feijoada”, “dendê” e traduções literais de funks cariocas como forma de preservar o a sonoridade peculiar da variante brasileira do idioma.

I had a crappy day. Work was slow. Before and after work I had to change my 10-month-old son’s diaper five times because he kept crapping. In the evening he just kept whining. When my wife came home, she bitched me out for not making dinner. Once things settled down I read this week’s New Yorker story, “Indianapolis (Highway 74),” by Sam Shepard.

Now I feel better.

I really enjoyed the story! In my little reviews, I don’t typically outline the storylines, and I’m not going to this time, either. Why ruin the surprise? But I was impressed with how Shepard artfully created who is main character is. Or at least, who he is at this moment in time. And he achieved this through “showing” not “telling.” (Note: I can find the whole showing vs. telling obsession annoying, but I appreciated how it was done here). The ending, in particular, really rang true for me.

And now the prose…

The story is told in first person, present tense. I think this is one of the easiet ways to write a story. For me, it is also very compelling. But more importantly, the prose is clear, easy-to-read; prolix fiction turns me cold.

This Week’s Best New Yorker cartoon.

It’s a particularly strong week for the food issue, so we want to note three honorable mention cartoons.

Damon Johnson after his solo show at cvz contemporary gallery alongside Debra Anderson of Culture Shock Marketing

The jobless women of nolita.

Came across some real nice Ezo wheat pastes.

3 bedroom crack castle in chelsea.

Nice coffee table. now all i need is the statue of lionel richie’s head from “hello”.

Last night I sat down to read last week’s New Yorker short story, “Alone,” by Yiyun Li, but after reading just a few hundred words I stopped. It wasn’t that the story was bad – what I had read was actually pretty compelling. But it was dense and long and I’m busy and didn’t have time to read it. Gripe, gripe…gripe!

Also, I was really drawn to the article on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failed attempt to be a successful Hollywood screenwriter, “Slow Fade.” The author of the piece, Arthur Krystal, writes: “Fitzgerald, to put in mildly, did not impress the studio bosses. The rap against him was that he couldn’t make the shift from words on the page to images on the screen. His plotting was elaborate without purpose; his dialogue arch or sentimental; and his tone too serious – at times, even grim.”

It seems hard to believe. Modern Library lists Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” as the second best novel of the 20^th Century. I love that book. I am a huge fan of Fitzgerald’s prose. How could someone that talented not transfer his ability in one related area to another? I suggest you read the article and find out…

From BikeSnobNYC

If one were sitting on the toilet while perusing the artwork of Mike Giant only to find oneself out of toilet paper, one would not sit there shouting helplessly until a friend came to one’s aid with a roll of arcal and a 3wrencho; instead, one would simply do the logical thing and clean up after oneself using the Mike Giant art. I’ve found myself in a similar predicament many times while reading The New Yorker, and in each instance I was tremendously grateful for the work of Sasha Frere-Jones. I won’t go into too much detail, but I will say that while Frere-Jones’s writing may not be that engrossing from a literary standpoint, it is tremendously absorbing when it comes to personal hygiene. Sure, it’s kinda scratchy, but that’s nowhere near as irritating as actually trying to read it.

I feel the same way about Peter Schjeldahl. The difference is that reading SFJ is sitting at the Council of Elrond: there’s a lot of references to the old times that you don’t get, but the conversation eventually gets around to Isildur –> Déagol –> Sméagol –> Bilbo. Reading Schjeldahl is like being airdropped into the middle of The Silmarillion.

It started over 35 years ago as an experiment.  Back then, in 1974, there were just three kinds of athletic shoes: tennis, basketball and running. That was it. The idea of a sneaker collection, with different types, styles and models, was unheard of. No-one had even really thought about it. Except us. So we took a deep breath, crossed our toes, and made it happen – introducing a range of sneakers to the world for the very first time.  http://footlocker.eu

VAIBA want to give effective solutions to business. Who need to attack the crisis and to have competitive advantages in its model of business taking advantage of the last social trends, thanks to our coolhunters. Who is a “Coolhunter”?

The “Coolhunting” born in the early nineties in the United States was the New Yorker magazine that created the name or Cazatendencias coolhunter in 1997 to describe the work of Dee Dee Gordon, a pioneer in this specialist and founder of the first coolhunting agency in the world “Look-look” and now VAIBA.

El perThe profile “Coolhunter is increasingly required by businesses and brands, why?. Because it is he who has the tools to detect patterns, practices and meanings emerging in society, culture, consumption and everyday life. Your contribution allows delineate the beginnings of what later will be trends in key areas of marketing, communications, advertising, design and related fields. Put a “Coolhunter” in their business.

I always felt the New York Times was kind of the jack-of-all-trades paper more than the paper of record: somewhere approaching fair in its coverage of every subject, but not a standout in any subject.  Their book reviews would be the exception: They are far and away the best articles in the paper.

Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker provides an excellent and fair review of Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures, and in effect provides a review on the author himself.

I very strongly agree with Prof. Pinker in his praise of Gladwell as an essayist in prose, style, and his ability to provoke thought.  I am equally concerned with Gladwell’s somewhat lackadaisical approach to science (his writings tend to be in the realm of pop psychology, and the scientific rigour of his assertions seem to match that field).

The boldness — and counter-intuitive — nature of Gladwell’s assertions make the claims interesting and provoke further thought, perhaps the primary objectives of a writer or essayist, but tend to fall apart within the theses of his collected works (such as Blink, The Tipping Point, and Outliers).  As a result, I have always preferred Gladwell in the smaller units apportioned by The New Yorker over the lengthier helpings of his books.

Steven Pinker’s reasoned criticism is much needed considering the scope of Gladwell’s influence (I can hardly enter a bus or train without seeing one rider reading one of his books.  Which isn’t a bad thing considering the alternative would be Dan Brown or Harry Potter) and, as should be clear from my comments above, I agree strongly with Pinker’s review.

Simply put, enjoy Prof. Pinker’s review and keep it in mind the next time you read Gladwell’s excellent articles or somewhat unconvincing books.  Gladwell is a fantastic essayist, an extremely interesting and inquisitive author, but his writings are perhaps more properly viewed as very constructive than well-constructed.

[Nonetheless, I am always happy to see a new article of his appear at The New Yorker]

… and the cow goes moo