Monday's Body of Work

On The Road To Nowhere

Currently we’re moving from a small house to a big house, which means inconvenience and promise. In the past two days we’ve lugged boxes by the dozen and divorced rugs that’d been married to cobwebs, books frosted in inches of dust and bathroom items that to this day forget their purpose. Despite all this, by writerly news, we’ve got you covered. Hollywood has Bollywood and authors have the New Times of India, which spices up the work of Nanden Sen. Elsewhere, legalese permeates the New Republic, Norman Mailer gets the Huff, and from the grave Tolstoy digests his treatment in the Times Online.  John Lanchester reminds us why we love money, Daniel Nester is interviewed by Bookslut, and Allen Ginsberg sees himself in a movie. It’s time to howl, people. — Kevin Murphy

– The glamorous Nandana Sen will anchor today’s ceremony, which will see the who’s who of the Indian literary scene in attendance, while sarod players Amaan and Ayaan Ali Khan will perform. Says Nandana, “I belong to the fourth generation of a Shantiniketan family. I grew up reading and re-reading Tagore, learning his music, watching his plays. — Nandena Sen in the Times of India

– Justice Anthony Kennedy has power, but he lacks respect. Situated at the ideological midpoint of the Supreme Court, he chooses the outcome when his eight colleagues are evenly divided. He has made his mark in important cases that, among other things, preserved the right to abortion, limited the death penalty, and expanded free speech. But legal commentators complain that he lacks a consistent jurisprudence. He talks a great game about constitutional principles, but tacks to the political winds or votes his ideological fancy. – Anthony Kennedy in the New Republic

In Memoriam Tweed

– In the early part of the summer of 2007 Esquire magazine called to ask if Norman would consider going on the road for a short period to profile Barack Obama. At the time Norman was in the middle of his 84th year, dogged by arthritic knees, lungs that were cursed with what the doctors kept saying was asthma and he was half deaf — mostly so without his hearing aides, or “plugs” as he called them. — Norman Mailer in the Huffington Post

– The journey of this film of my novel The Last Station followed a long and winding road, with many rough and dangerous patches. I was always told that the progress — or regress — from book to film takes on average about five years. For me, 20 full years elapsed from the publication of the novel to its embodiment in the cinema, with Helen Mirren as the wife of Leo Tolstoy and Christopher Plummer as the great man himself. Then again, better late than never. — Leo Tolstoy in the Times Online

– The curious thing about money is that as much as we covet it, obsess about it and chase after it, most of us have a hard time understanding it. At any level above a basic household budget, money becomes an abstraction swimming in a sea of acronyms, operating according to laws harder to fathom than the fundamentals of theoretical physics. Quite a few of the people in charge of managing money at that level — for the sake of simplicity, let’s just call them bankers — don’t understand the more complex and immaterial financial products they deal in; that’s one of the many underlying causes of the current economic crisis. — John Lanchester in Salon

A Poet In The Moment

– This morning I was at the doctor’s in the exam room, reading my copy of How to Be Inappropriate. I found myself nervously glancing up at the door every few seconds, hoping she wouldn’t walk in and catch me with my finger weenie out. I actually skipped reading the book altogether in the communal waiting room, not wanting to scare my neighbors by pulling it out and letting everybody see the front of it. Did you think about the effect the cover would have on your readers’ ability to read it and maintain some level of appropriateness? Have you read this book or carried it around, cover fully exposed to strangers? Who thought of the art? What were your second choices? And most importantly: Is that or is that not your finger? — Daniel Nester in Bookslut

– This gets tiresome. Sven Birkerts, bidding fair to replace Rick Moody as Dale Peck’s “worst writer of his generation,” offers an unbearable template: “Can I possibly convey how those words” — the first lines of “Howl” — “moved in me, how that cadence undid in a minute’s time whatever prior cadences had been voice-tracking my life?” No, he can’t. He wanders on, into “the moment of Shakespearean ripeness.” “Ripeness” would do the job, but you get the feeling it’s important to Birkerts to remind us he knows Shakespeare — or maybe to equate his reading “Howl” with Edgar’s revelation in “King Lear.” — Allen Ginsberg in the NY Times

Video: Allen Ginsberg’s America