Author: S.J. Howard

Marcus via Harper’s via The Observer on the Novel

In the October Harper’s, Ben Marcus offers a lengthy state-of-the-novel essay, subtly titled Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It: A Correction, in which he spends 13 pages beating up Jonathan Franzen–snubber of Oprah and William Gaddis alike–and the middlebrow fiction establishment he represents.

I paged through this essay at the newsstand (a Lost Illusions scene). My conclusion… Who has time for all this contemporary fiction wrangling? There’s such a backlog, so many other things to do. The best I feel I can hope for is to grab some occasional choice bit by chance, like Gilead.

Catholic Howl

Check out Gen X Revert’s rewrite of Howl:

I saw the best Catholics of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving
hysterical naked
dragging themselves through the streets at dawn looking
for beautiful Liturgy
…
who threw potato salad at Jesuit lecturers on Dogma and subsequently
presented themselves on the granite steps of Groeschel’s
Friary with
shaven heads demanding true religious life.
…

(the whole thing)

(there’s probably a technical poetics term for this kind of thing, but I don’t know it)

He’s on the sidebar now too…

Saw Capote Sunday afternoon. Was solid, a bit too disturbing to be called a straight up entertainment. But not displacing enough to fully embody its (internal somewhat) billing as a “problem [movie]”. Eh…a solid movie, but not a classic. A character actor of a movie.

Upcoming Vacation

I’m off work at 12:30AM on October 13. I’m back at 1AM on Oct. 22, but may try to get it changed to coming back at 12:30AM on Oct. 21.

Travel plans to be worked on later today.

From the Oct. 3 Observer column “The Eight Day Week”:

September is the new August! Or so it would seem, as every frilly girl or fruity boy is insisting on continuing to wear flip-flops and tank tops and flaunting their tattoos, which often just look like some toddler puked on their ankle–look, folks, this isn’t Miami, grow up and be a New Yorker, or move the hell out. We’ve had enough of your sunny, brainless disposition–New York is for dark, angry people, O.K.?! When was the last time you saw Patti Smith in flip-flops, for god’s sake!

On Gore Vidal

Duncan Fallowell writing in Prospect (UK):

In fact, if you believe his autobiography, not much has happened to him since he fell in love with a schoolmate at the age of 16. The adored one was exceptionally beautiful but killed, alas, in the second world war. Vidal, on his own admission, never again knew love. Instead he had gone to parties in the evenings and during the days has sat at a typewriter getting his own back on reality or on Norman Mailer or Truman Capote or whoever the enemy of the moment might be. Since he has never known love as an adult, he cannot exist without an enemy.