Quick Study http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/ Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera en Copyright 2008 Fri, 16 May 2008 16:29:10 -0500 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification Greetings, Friends of Eustace Tilley The New Yorker launched The Book Bench. It has a blogroll in the lefthand column with about two dozen links -- one of them, as it happens, to Quick Study.

So I learn from my friend Emily Gordon, who has made kept a close watch on the magazine over the years. Thanks for the bulletin, Emily.

Well, I certainly did not see that coming. So far this month, posting anything to this blog has been a pretty low priority -- nor have I been doing much at either Crooked Timber or Critical Mass lately. It has not been a matter of going on hiatus so much as being very preoccupied with the sort of considerations described by James Baldwin in that passage quoted here recently.

In any case, I've been meaning to pick up the pace again -- and now there's more incentive to do so. No idea who at The New Yorker reads Quick Study, or how this came to pass. But welcome to any new visitors. By all means look around in the archives.
]]> http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/05/greetings_friends_of_eustace.html http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/05/greetings_friends_of_eustace.html main Fri, 16 May 2008 16:29:10 -0500 Billy Bragg-athon In 1985, a friend lent me a 4-song, 7-inch EP song by Billy Bragg. The name didn't ring a bell. But a couple of years earlier I'd read Christopher Hill's book about the underground groups that had emerged during the English Civil War (the Diggers, the Ranters, the Fifth Monarchy Men) some of which were putting forward a revolutionary socialist vision in religious language -- and here was Bragg bringing that tradition into the present day....

]]> http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/05/billy_braggathon.html http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/05/billy_braggathon.html main Wed, 07 May 2008 15:22:15 -0500 Inquiring Minds Want to Know! another book out "by" David Horowitz.

You have to wonder if he's read it.
]]> http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/05/inquiring_minds_want_to_know.html http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/05/inquiring_minds_want_to_know.html Tue, 06 May 2008 15:18:32 -0500 Recommended Reading posted at Critical Mass. My longer review (for Bookforum) of the title by Richard Sennett was reprinted at the Powell's website. An earlier piece on Victor Serge is here.

In the interest of accuracy, I should make clear that the photo at Critical Mass was taken before the gray hair started taking over (in particular, the beard). My days as a sad young literary man are well behind me.

As a matter of fact, I sometimes carry around a piece of paper containing an extract from an essay by James Baldwin, written in his mid-forties:

"Though we would like to live without regrets, and sometimes proudly insist that we have none, this is not really possible, if only because we are mortal. When more time stretches behind than stretches before one, some assessments, however reluctantly and incompletely, begin to be made. Between what one wishes to become and what one has become there is a momentous gap, which will now never be closed. And this gap seems to operate as one's final margin, one's last opportunity, for creation. And between the self as it is and the self as one sees it, there is also a distance even harder to gauge. Some of us are compelled, around the middle of our lives, to make a study of this baffling geography, less in the hope of conquering these distances than in the determination that the distance shall not become any greater."

I must have gone over this passage a hundred times now. No maps available for navigating through "this baffling geography," alas. But it's good to have one's location so precisely identified.]]> http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/05/recommended_reading.html http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/05/recommended_reading.html main Tue, 06 May 2008 13:25:20 -0500 Garfield Minus Garfield garfield.gif

"Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let's laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb."

"Garfield Minus Garfield" archive here.

Via Obey Your Signal Only.
]]> http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/05/garfield_minus_garfield.html http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/05/garfield_minus_garfield.html main Mon, 05 May 2008 07:21:07 -0500 Spring 2008 "Good Reads" List just been posted. I must admit that I have read a grand total of one of them:

FICTION

1. Richard Price, LUSH LIFE, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2. Jhumpa Lahiri, UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, Knopf
3. Steven Millhauser, DANGEROUS LAUGHTER, Knopf
*4. Charles Baxter, THE SOUL THIEF, Pantheon
*4. Peter Carey, HIS ILLEGAL SELF, Knopf
*4. J. M. Coetzee, DIARY OF A BAD YEAR, Viking
*4. James Collins, BEGINNNER'S GREEK, Little, Brown
*4. Brian Hall, FALL OF FROST, Viking
*4. Roxana Robinson, COST, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
*4. Owen Sheers, RESISTANCE, Nan A. Talese: Doubleday

* tied for this position

NONFICTION

1. Nicholson Baker, HUMAN SMOKE: THE BEGINNING OF WORLD WAR II, THE END OF CIVILIZATION, S. & S.
2. Drew Gilpin Faust, THIS REPUBLIC OF SUFFERING: DEATH AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, Knopf
3. Mark Harris, PICTURES AT THE REVOLUTION: FIVE MOVIES AND THE BIRTH OF THE NEW HOLLYWOOD, Penguin Press
4. Honor Moore, THE BISHOP'S DAUGHTER: A MEMOIR, Norton
5. Susan Jacoby, THE AGE OF AMERICAN UNREASON, Pantheon

POETRY

1. Grace Paley, FIDELITY, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2. Frank Bidart, WATCHING THE SPRING FESTIVAL, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
3. Eric Gansworth, A HALF-LIFE OF CARDIO-PULMONARY FUNCTION, Syracuse University Press
4. Marie Howe, THE KINGDOM OF ORDINARY TIME, Norton
5. Robert Pinsky, GULF MUSIC, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Once again, the titles I nominated did not make the cut. But then again my nomination for best nonfiction book last time was Julian Bourg's From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. Which, by the way, rocks.

The books I suggested this time were, perhaps, slightly easier to find at your nearby strip-mall, but still....I won' t say any more about what they were for now, since the nominations will be posted at Critical Mass at some point.

UPDATE:  Here are my recommendations
]]> http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/05/good_reads_1.html http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/05/good_reads_1.html main Sun, 04 May 2008 11:55:41 -0500 Who's Gonna Build Your Wall?

Thanks to Shane for the tip....

]]> http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/05/wall.html http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/05/wall.html main Fri, 02 May 2008 10:52:21 -0500 Happy 75th Birthday to the Catholic Worker The Catholic Worker appeared, promising to take seriously the church's program to "reconstruct the social order" according to the teachings of a certain revolutionary, anti-imperialist, and egalitarian organization from the Palestine, long ago
]]> http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/05/happy_75th_birthday_to_the_cat.html http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/05/happy_75th_birthday_to_the_cat.html main Thu, 01 May 2008 11:21:56 -0500 May Day! Money speaks for money, the Devil for his own.
Who comes to speak for the skin and the bone?

See also this post at Crooked Timber

]]> http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/04/may_day.html http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/04/may_day.html Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:19:33 -0500 You Don't Hear Much About the Symbionese These Days Limited Inc. is urging Britney Spears to read up about Patty Hearst.

Not entirely sure I follow the logic here, but what the hell...Any excuse to post Patti Smith's cover of "Hey Joe" as Symbionese anthem is fine by me:

Being kidnapped by urban guerillas championing a make-believe revolutionary movement as an experience of personal liberation from the Establishment..... In so many ways, this version of the song is the ultimate expression of half-baked 1960s countercultural ideology in its most reductio ad absurdum form.

Then again, that is perfection, of a kind.

]]> http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/04/symbionese.html http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/04/symbionese.html Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:34:56 -0500 Every Effort Helps An email message sent to the listserv of the Association of American University Presses by its current president, Sanford G. Thatcher, encourages AAUP members to contact newspaper editors to try to persuade them to publish reviews by local writers, rather than just using syndicated material. http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/04/every_effort_helps.html http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/04/every_effort_helps.html main Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:58:11 -0500 Geek Out! kb-sm.jpg

Although not an academic, I hereby submit this picture as a contribution to the latest endeavor by Phil "Production of Presence" Ford.

For background....
]]> http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/04/geek_out.html http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/04/geek_out.html main Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:22:11 -0500 Stampede!
What happened is that on Thursday morning Andrew Sullivan linked to last week's post "Yo, Yo I'm a Cowboy Now", which seems then to have been picked up by two or three social networking sites. None of this did I seek out. In fact, I could not have made it happen if I'd tried.

For that matter, it's been kind of frustrating to look at the site log and find that barely one visitor in a hundred then looked around at other Quick Study content. The whole thing makes for a very striking bar-graph -- with Monday through Wednesday being little molehills in front of Himalaya Thursday. But it leaves QS itself no better situated relative to what I guess could be called "mainstream blogging."

So it goes. And on that note, we return to our usually scheduled broadcast. Or narrowcast, rather.

Presented for your consideration: An interview with left-wing country singer Steve Earle, from the pages of Socialist Worker newspaper.

Yeah, now that's more like it....
]]> http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/04/stampede.html http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/04/stampede.html main Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:29:25 -0500 Presenting the Awesomeness That is Wanda Jackson Two clips from fifty years ago. If you've never heard Wanda Jackson before, better buckle up....

]]> http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/04/wanda_jackson.html http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/04/wanda_jackson.html main Tue, 15 Apr 2008 15:20:39 -0500 Of Blurbatology last week, "does anybody really care?" My impression so far is, not really.

If there is nothing else to learn from the case of Houston Baker's dust-jacket encomium for Michael Eric Dyson -- and there isn't -- then at least this much is clear: If you are going to blurb a book you haven't actually paid much attention to, the important thing is to be consistent. Don't even look at the book again. If for some reason you happen to see it, don't read it. And if, perchance, you do read the book and realize it's terrible, just keep this belated realization to yourself. That's only being fair to everyone.

But in the meantime, Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber has started a thread inspired by some of the blurbs for War and Decision -- the new book by strategic genius Doug Feith about how necessary and well-thought-through the Iraq war was, all appearances to the contrary. The jacket features various luminaries using superlatives such as "controversial" and "readable," as well as "not nearly as delusional as you might suppose."

Okay, I made that last one up -- but it's more an exaggeration of the general drift than something spun out of thin air. "And these were the blurbs they chose to promote the book," as Henry points out.

But the Crooked Timber item is less a matter of discussing War and Decision than it is a pretext for encouraging readers to nominate other great moments in the history of dubious endorsements. A few are obviously snippets from reviews, rather than blurbs. The highlights:

"Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterrley's Lover has just been reissued by Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-by-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping." -- Ed Zern

"I have been stunned and baffled by Roger Lewis's vast biography of the stunningly baffling Anthony Burgess." -- Jan Morris, author of The Meaning of Nowhere

On a volume about Social Security: "This is the type of book that, once you put it down, you will not be able to pick it up again."

"The covers of this book are too far apart." -- from a review by Ambrose Bierce.

And finally, The Irish Times on Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory: "It is a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparallelled depravity. There is no denying the bizarre fertility of the author's imagination: his brilliant dialogue, his cruel humour, his repellent inventiveness. The majority of the literate public, however, will be relieved that only reviewers are obliged to look at any of it."

As Henry Farrell then says: "How could you possibly, possibly refuse to buy a book with a blurb like that?"

(crossposted from Critical Mass)
]]> http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/04/of_blurbatology.html http://www.artsjournal.com/quickstudy/2008/04/of_blurbatology.html main Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:00:00 -0500