Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

At Amazon, Günter Grass, The Tin Drum.

Today's Shopping

At Amazon, Shop Deals.

See, KIND Breakfast Bars, Peanut Butter, Gluten Free, 1.8 Ounce, 32 Count.

And, CLIF BAR - Energy Bar - Crunchy Peanut Butter - (2.4 Ounce Protein Bar, 12 Count).

Still more, AmazonBasics AA Performance Alkaline Batteries (48 Count) - Packaging May Vary.

Here, Tactical Sabre 2.0 Waterproof Jacket, Polyester Bonded Softshell, Detachable Hood, Style 48112.

BONUS: Philip Roth, The Human Stain (American Trilogy).

Richard Wright, Native Son

At Amazon, Native Son.

Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin

Louis Auchincloss, The Rector of Justin: A Novel.

Credibility Bookcases

Following-up, "Cate Blanchett's Books."

At NYT:

I wrote about the "credibility bookcase," the video background for pundits, politicians and anyone else looking to add a patina of authority to their amateurish quarantine broadcast. https://t.co/oyV13IUvEX

— Amanda Hess (@amandahess) May 1, 2020

And "Credibility Bookcase" focuses mostly on British personalities, but there's some perceptively droll humor:

Michael Palin. By now credibility is so deep in Michael's bones that he could appear naked with a teacup on his head and people would listen quietly and nod their heads. In cases like this there is a reversal, like a tennis ball flipped inside out. The bookcases gain in stature. pic.twitter.com/BVRhxCI4eD

— Bookcase Credibility (@BCredibility) May 3, 2020

Laurence Boone. There is beauty in the gentle arc of the books but the bookcase clings to the wall like an alien stowaway on the return journey of an interplanetary mission. It squats there as if at her command. Knowledge is an unknown weapon, credibility is given through fear. pic.twitter.com/drK4wO8AD2

— Bookcase Credibility (@BCredibility) May 3, 2020

'The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile'

This is amazing, at Althouse, quoting an article at the New Yorker, "'Indeed, a number of exiles fell to scowling under the palms.... The composer Eric Zeisl called California a 'sunny blue grave'":

"Adorno could have had Muscle Beach in mind when he identified a social condition called the Health unto Death: 'The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy.'... Such doleful tales raise the question of why so many writers fled to L.A. Why not go to New York, where exiled visual artists gathered in droves? ... [T]he 'lack of a cultural infrastructure' in L.A. was attractive: it allowed refugees to reconstitute the ideals of the Weimar Republic instead of competing with an extant literary scene.... Thomas Mann... lived in a spacious, white-walled aerie in Pacific Palisades... He saw 'Bambi' at the Fox Theatre in Westwood; he ate Chinese food; he listened to Jack Benny on the radio; he furtively admired handsome men in uniform; he puzzled over the phenomenon of the 'Baryton-Boy Frankie Sinatra,' to quote his diaries. Like almost all the émigrés, he never attempted to write fiction about America...."

More.

J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

*BUMPED*

At Amazon, J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye.

Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, LIsa Haliday, Asymmetry: A Novel.

Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

At Amazon, Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation: And Other Essays.

How My Brooklyn Literary Friendships Fell Apart in the Age of Trump

This is an excellent read.

At Quillette, "Confessions of a ‘Soulless Troglodyte’: How My Brooklyn Literary Friendships Fell Apart in the Age of Trump."

"...he was kind enough to thank me in the book’s acknowledgements. But the novel didn’t sell well. And Daniel found a way to blame the bad numbers on Trump’s presidency." https://t.co/P6yxc3fdAy

— Quillette (@QuilletteM) December 21, 2018

William Faulkner, Sanctuary

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, William Faulkner, Sanctuary (The Corrected Text).

Reading is Fashionable Again

Well, it never went out of style for me, lol.

At the Irish Times, "‘Like vinyl, reading is fashionable again’: Bookshops booming as readers turn page to new post-peak-Kindle chapter":

‘Like vinyl, reading is fashionable again’ https://t.co/t5CSITOFcR via @IrishTimesCultr

— Irish Times Culture (@IrishTimesCultr) December 19, 2018

Store manager of the Winding Stair Maire Griffin flits around book-laden tables, clambering over a dog lead, to add another text to the growing pile in one customer’s arms.

The popular bookshop on Lower Ormond Street on Dublin’s north quays is a hub for book fans and international tourists seeking a literary window into Irish culture.

“Seamus Heaney’s 100 Poems has been really popular. I’ve been encouraging everyone to go to the Heaney exhibition at the National Library,” says Griffin.

“You can really influence what people buy because there’s quite a talkative vibe here, which you wouldn’t get in the bigger stores,” she goes on. Books, she believes, are an experience.

The man with the dog lead over which she clambered, and the attached hound, butts in: “I love it here because it’s one of the only places you can bring your dog to.”

Griffins is not alone in believing that readers have reached “the peak-Kindle point”, where they have now begun to resume the love affair with print, not antiseptic e-screens.

Book sales in Ireland are up by 7 per cent this year. In the United Kingdom, sales are up by £22 million, according to Nielson BookScan, which gathers data from 6,500 booksellers across the UK.

Meanwhile, ebook sales, once the biggest threat to high street booksellers, fell by 4 per cent in 2016 and a further 3 per cent in 2017, as part of a 17 per cent drop in Britain’s overall ebook consumer market.

Special edition classics

“We feel the impact of online markets at this time because they are cheaper on price, but we don’t get many people complaining about that. Because we don’t buy in bulk, we go niche,” says Griffins.

The shelves in the Winding Stair are laden with special edition classics, vintage mini-series, Irish literature, old and new, and more recently international books that reflect the growing immigrant population.

“Particularly for children’s books there is increasing demand to show a different range of experiences. Lots of kids are not in your typical Catholic school, so parents are keen to show them the wider world.”

In the back, the Winding Stair has an armchair, a reading lamp and a second-hand book “treasure chest” for bookworms to rifle out a bargain, passing away the hours .

“Like vinyl, reading is fashionable again,” she says. “Suddenly we’re back to the Dead Poets Society days where people are proud to carry a book under their arm.”

Across town, Ranelagh’s tiny outlet, Company of Books, is bustling with shoppers asking for Christmas recommendations. Owner, Gwen Alman knows most of them by name, and by their reading choice.

The store opened in 2009 at the height of the recession and Kindle boom, but business has grown steadily over the years...

Still more.

Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore

At Amazon, Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore: A Novel.

William T. Vollmann, Europe Central

At Amazon, William T. Vollmann, Europe Central.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

An American classic, at Amazon, John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

*BUMPED.*

Following-up from last night previously, "New Interview with David Foster Wallace."

At Amazon, David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.

Albert Camus, The Stranger

At Amazon, Albert Camus, The Stranger.

John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy

*BUMPED.*

Picking up from yesterday earlier, "David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest."

I wasn't planning on a "postmodern literature" jag, but Thomas Pynchon's got me going. I have Infinite Jest on order, and this is my Barth copy below.

At Amazon, John Barth, Giles Goat-Boy.

Cyber Weekend Sales

At Amazon, Deals of the Day.

And especially, Bounty Hunter TK4 Tracker IV Metal Detector.

Also, Pelican 1650 Case With Foam (Black).

More, Bose QuietComfort 35 (Series II) Wireless Headphones, Noise Cancelling, with Alexa voice control - Black.

Here, uKeg 128 oz Pressurized Growler for Craft Beer - Stainless Steel.

And, Sound and Sleep MINI High Fidelity Sleep Sound Machine with AC and Battery Power, Real Non-Looping Nature Sounds, Fan Sounds and White Noise.

Plus, LG Electronics 55SK8000PUA 55-Inch 4K Ultra HD Smart LED TV (2018 Model).

Still more, Sherwood DANISH DELIGHTS Butter Cookies, In a Nice Gifting Tin, box (340g).

More here, Black Rifle Coffee Company Complete Mission Fuel Kit, Coffee Rounds for Single Serve Brewing Machines (96 Count) Coffee Pods Cups.

BONUS: Roberto Bolaño, 2666.

New Interview with David Foster Wallace

Actually, it's not "new." It's an interview by Eduardo Lago from 2000, previously unpublished.

Wallace is most famous for his novel, Infinite Jest.

At Electronic Literature, "A Brand New Interview with David Foster Wallace":

"The internet is almost the perfect distillation of the American capitalist ethos, a flood of seductive choices with no really effective engines for choosing." https://t.co/IPHPRMjtfV

— Electric Literature (@ElectricLit) November 20, 2018

Eduardo Lago: I know you’re not teaching right now, but can you talk a little bit about the reading lists of your courses?

David Foster Wallace: Most of what I teach is writing classes where we’re concentrating more on the student’s own writing. When I teach literature classes, I’ve taught everything from freshman literature, where the department will buy an anthology and I will teach them John Updike’s “A & P,” and John Cheever’s “The Five-Forty-Eight,” and Ursula le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas,” “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, a lot of very what I consider to be very standard stories that are in all the anthologies. I’ve tried teaching more ambitious or strange or difficult fiction, but with freshmen and sophomores their preparation isn’t very good and it doesn’t work well. Graduate literature courses are usually themed courses, so what the reading lists are depends a certain amount on how I design the course, as I’m sure you know. I’ve taught a fair amount of Cormac McCarthy, who’s a writer I admire a great deal, and Don DeLillo and William Gaddis. I’ve taught quite a bit of William Gass, but usually his earlier books, and I teach poetry … I’m not a professional poet but I’m an avid reader of poetry, so I teach most of the contemporary poetry that’s available in book form.

EL: Do you consider yourself an accessible writer, and do you know what kind of people read your books?

DFW: That’s a very good question. I think the sort of work I do falls into an area of American fiction that, yes, that is accessible, but that is designed for people who really like to read and understand reading to be a discipline and to require a certain amount of work. As I’m sure you know, most of the money in American publishing gets made in books — some of which I think are very good — that don’t require much work. They’re almost more like motion pictures, and people read them on airplanes and at beaches. I don’t do stuff like that. But of the American writers I know who do some of the more demanding fiction, I think I’m one of the more accessible ones, simply because when I’m working, I’m trying to make it as simple as possible rather than trying to make it as complicated as possible. There’s some fiction that’s very good that I think is trying to be difficult by putting the reader through certain sorts of exercises. I’m not one of those, so within the camp people usually talk about me being one of the more accessible ones, but that camp itself is not regarded as very accessible and I think it tends to be read by people who have had quite a bit of education or a native love of books and for whom reading is important as an activity and not just something to do to pass the time or entertain themselves.

I think I’m one of the more accessible ones simply because when I’m working, I’m trying to make it as simple as possible rather than trying to make it as complicated as possible.

EL: I’ve read in a number of places that you intended Infinite Jest to be a sad book. Can you talk specifically about that aspect of the novel and what else were you intending to do when you started writing it?

DFW: I think what I meant by that was that there are some facts about American culture, particularly for younger people, that seem to me to be far clearer to people who live in Europe than to Americans themselves, which is that in many ways America is a wonderful place to live from a material standpoint, and its economy is very strong and there’s a great deal of material plenty, and yet — let’s see, when I started that book I was about 30, sort of upper middle class, white, had never suffered discrimination or any poverty that I myself had not caused, and most of my friends were the same way, and yet there was a sadness and a disconnection or alienation among I would say people under 40 or 45 in this country, that — and this is probably a cliche — you could say dates from Watergate, or from Vietnam or any number of causes. The book itself is attempting to talk about the phenomenon of addiction, whether it’s addiction to narcotics or whether it’s addiction in its original meaning in English which has to do with devotion, almost a religious devotion, and trying to understand a kind of innate capitalist sadness in terms of the phenomenon of addiction and what addiction means. Usually I would tell people I meant to do it a sad book because when I did a lot of interviews about Infinite Jest all people would seem to want to talk about was that the book was very funny and they wanted to know why the book was so funny and how it was supposed to be so funny, and I was honestly puzzled and disappointed because I had seen it as a very sad book, and that was my attempt to explain to you the sadness that I’m talking about.

EL: How would you define your literary generation?

DFW: Boy.

EL: If you believe in that.

DFW: Can you explain the question a little bit, say who are the writers of the generation?

EL: Perhaps I mean that you belong in a certain age group that has inherited a literary tradition that you are trying to transform somehow. In other words, what are young American writers today like yourself — in a certain type of fiction because there are many different approaches to literature — doing. Do you think you belong in a group where your original work plays a role, or something like that?

DFW: Well, I don’t know. See, when people would ask me that question before it was because I was very young and I was in the youngest generation, and I think there’s probably a whole new generation now. A generation in American fiction is probably every five or seven years. Usually when people talk to me about my work, the other younger writers they lump it in with are William T. Vollman and Richard Powers, Joanna Scott, A. M. Homes, Jonathan Franzen, Mark Leyner. Those are all — I think Powers and Scott are in their early 40s, I’m 38, I think it’s all sort of writers now in their later 30s and early 40s and I think we all started publishing books at about the same time. And that group of younger writers, as I’m sure you know, we’re only a small percentage of the younger writers who are out there. There are plenty of active, productive young writers who do what I think is called Realism with a capital R: the sort of traditional, third person limited omniscient, central character, central conflict, classically structured kind of fiction. I know a couple of the other writers I get lumped in with, whom I just mentioned to you, and if there seems to be something in common, it seems to be that we all, particularly in college, were exposed to a great deal of first of all literary theory and continental theory, and second of all, classic American postmodern fiction, which means Nabokov and DeLillo and Pynchon and Barth and Gaddis and Gass and all these guys. And both of those exposures, it seems, make it constitutionally more difficult to do traditional stuff, because some of the best classic postmodern fiction really, at least for me, exploded or destroyed the credibility of a lot of the sort of conventions and devices that classic realism uses. Nevertheless, I think that what gets called classic American postmodernism — which would be, you know, metafiction or really high surrealistic fiction — has a very limited utility. Its essential task appears to me to be to be destructive — to clear away, to explode a lot of hypocrisies and conventions — but it gets rather tiresome rather quickly. Now that’s being kind of general. I myself personally find John Barth’s first few books interesting and then it seems to me that all he’s done since is work out certain techniques and certain obsessions over and over and over and over and over and over again. I don’t think any of the writers that I’ve mentioned, myself included, are comfortable with the idea of simply doing more of that kind of fiction. On the other hand we’ve all been influenced by it a great deal and I think for a whole lot of different reasons don’t see and understand the world in the way that classic realist fiction tries to capture or mirror.

So I think what I’m trying to say, in a long-winded way, is [that] probably the group I get lumped in with has been heavily influenced by American postmodernism, and of course by European postmodernism too — I mean Calvino — or Latin American writers like Borges and Marquez and Puig. But nevertheless we are also uncomfortable with some of the self-consciousness, and for me in particular some of the intellectualism, of standard postmodernism, and are interested in trying to do fiction that doesn’t seem to be formulaic or “traditional” but nevertheless has an emotional quality to it; is not meant simply to be about language or certain cognitive paradoxes, but is supposed to be about the human experience, what it is to be particularly an American and yet not be a John Updike or John Cheever traditional story.

More.

Hat Tip: The Young Hegelian, at the comments at Althouse, "At the Thanksgiving Café..."