Monday's Body of Work

Rise Up!

Hey campers, it’s time to gather ’round the fire. It’s warm here, and pretty. Gaze into the flames. Watch them trail off into the sky, feel the warmth on your fingers, toes, face. Take hold of that feeling and now, open your eyes. Are you still in your office? You are? Damn it! Well, even if we don’t have the power to physically transport you from your cubicle, we can provide the literature news that takes your mind to other, better places. To wit: Ashbery does his Dickinson dance in the NY Times, Bookslut reviews The Cry of the Sloth, old school zines are trumpeted in The Rumpus and electronic publishing meets its grumpy forebears in the Wall Street Journal. Elsewhere, Dylan Landis gets his treatment in Bookforum, the New Criterion considers Pop Art and JG Ballard’s daughter writes her dad a moving obituary in the Guardian. Come with us, all ye forest dwellers. It’s time to set this Monday on fire. — Kevin Murphy

– Ashbery has always liked to play games on many planes. This volume is an “A to Z” of life (like the guidebook line, “London A to Z”): we know this because the titles are arranged in alphabetical order, from “Alcove” to “Zymurgy” (“the chemistry of fermentation in brewing” — not a bad description of the making of a poem). Overturning clichés is another familiar Ashberian game: we’re not startled when someone says “King Alfonso of Spain,” but we are when we hear “Alphonse I of Bemidji.” — John Ashbery in the NY Times

– As everyone who’s worked in a literary profession knows, being a writer and editor is glamorous, fun, lucrative, and generally totally awesome. Even if you’re a minor poet whose works are published in tiny literary magazines sponsored by a community college in southeast Nebraska, the biggest problem you’ll have on a daily basis is which car to take to the liquor store to buy your top-shelf Islay Scotch and comically expensive cigars. It’s not a frustrating, soul-crushing career path in the slightest. — The Cry of the Sloth in Bookslut

The Original Zine

– I’m as enthralled by, addicted to and dependent on the Internet as anyone, but a part of me is nostalgic for something that is still being made by hand, with paper and ink and imperfect binding: the zine. I think our country, having been founded by rabble-rousing pamphleteers like Thomas Paine, has an innate love for hard-scrabble, DIY writers and publishers and although we can never overestimate the benefits of the virtual and the cyber, there is something we can still cherish about the tactile and the physical. — Zines in the Rumpus

– Random House has sent a letter to literary agents claiming the digital rights to books it published before the emergence of a thriving electronic-book marketplace. In the letter, dated Dec. 11, Markus Dohle, CEO of the Bertelsmann AG publishing arm, writes that the “vast majority of our backlist contracts grant us the exclusive right to publish books in electronic formats.” Mr. Dohle writes that many of the older agreements “often give the exclusive right to publish ‘in book form’ or ‘in any and all editions.’ ” — Publishing in the Wall Street Journal

– An adult character in Normal People Don’t Live like This, Dylan Landis’s lean, beguiling novel in stories, is a synesthete. “It means the senses work in pairs,” she explains to Leah Levinson, the teenager at the center of the book. “It’s a gift.” Leah can appreciate this—for her, objects and words have their own dreamy weight—but her sensitivity is a product of adolescence, not neurology. — Dylan Landis in Book Forum

What You Can Get Away With

–“Art,” Andy Warhol once observed, “is what you can get away with.” Was he right? Much that happens in the art world—which is not necessarily coterminous with what happens in the world of art—would seem to suggest that Warhol was on to something. Certainly, he dedicated his own career to proving the proposition. And since Warhol’s death in 1987, dealers and a credulous art-buying public have been assiduous about getting away with more than anyone might have thought possible. — Pop Art in The New Criterion

– In 2009 the world lost one of its most original and brilliant authors, JG Ballard. But my siblings and I lost our father, our dearest Daddy. To the world he was this unique writer, with a huge international following, but to us he was simply a father, and the best you could ever hope for. — JG Ballard’s Obit in the Guardian

Video: Interview with JG Ballard