Monday's Body of Work

Our Kilimanjaro

A cat sleeping on a cushioned chair. Sheets hanging from a clothesline, flapping in the wind. Mt. Rainier on the horizon, white and austere and intimidating and completely captivating. We pondered each of these seemingly simple sights over the weekend. Despite being commonplace ( at least in these parts ) they have influenced our thinking and now serve as a theme/inspiration for the week. That said, let’s turn our attention to literature news — a topic that is comfortable, fresh and austere — all at the same time. The LA Times dives down the conspiracy rabbit hole and emerges holding a deceptively poignant book review. Herta Müller used to meet her proofreader in the woods, the Seattle Times discusses a book-eating author, and Jeff Kinney defies Hemingway’s advice about Hollywood. Elsewhere, André Aciman’s new novel is reviewed in The Second Pass, Barry Miles revisits the 60′s, and Edward Hopper is painted in a modern light. All good things to consider, people. Maybe it’s a theme. — Kevin Murphy

– The most salient thing about “The Watchers” is its feel for the practical reality of intelligence gathering, the operational nuts and bolts of designing and implementing systems that could allow men and women to connect some of the dots instead of merely collecting an infinite and intractably random amount of them. How does someone or something go about isolating particles of genuinely suspicious “transactional information” from the vast indiscriminate ocean of metadata out there? — Conspiracy in the LA Times

– Nobel literature prize winner Herta Mueller, used to meet her German proof—reader in the forest to hide from Romania’s Securitate communist secret police, she told readers at the Leipzig Book Fair, which ends on Sunday. “So nobody could listen, we always went to the forest and proofread there,”the Romanian—German author said of the meetings with her German proof—reader. — Herta Müller in The Hindu

Hungry?

– The motives of British explorers searching for the Northwest Passage in the 19th century could be summed up by adapting the remark supposedly made by George Mallory about climbing Mount Everest: “Because we were sure it was there.” Practicality was of little consideration; exploration for its own sake was the goal. — The Man Who Ate His Boots in the Seattle Times

– Ernest Hemingway’s advice to authors who sell their books to Hollywood was this: Drive to the California border, grab your check, throw the manuscript across the border and drive away in the opposite direction as far and as fast as you can. Jeff Kinney, 39, didn’t heed the novelist’s counsel. The author of the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series, which has sold more than 16 million copies, embraced the cinematic process. He has emerged without bitterness or resentment. The movie based on his books, “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” opened in area theaters Friday. — Jeff Kinney in Cleveland.com

– Aciman is often successful in capturing something that is off-putting, especially a certain kind of paralyzing emotional attraction. As they spend the next several days circling each other, Clara and the narrator are by turns cowardly and brazen; confused and confusing; withholding and lacerating. They might even remind you of people whom you’ve loved. But the charm of examining their courtship at such length—whether they will ever properly kiss, much less sleep together, forms the novel’s titanic psychological struggle and the entirety of its plot—is highly dependent on whether or not you find them compellingly damaged or insufferably solipsistic. — André Aciman in The Second Pass

Rough Footage

– Never believe the old saw, “If you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t really there”. Barry Miles remembers the 60s in vivid detail, down to the dress with “zebra stripes” that George Martin’s wife wore at a dinner party given by Paul McCartney and Jane Asher in 1967, and he certainly was there. Indeed, the saying might be made more accurate by adjustment: “If you don’t remember Miles in the 60s, you weren’t really there.” — Barry Miles in the Guardian

– The arrested moments on Hopper’s canvases invite speculation. To invoke the persona of the artist, to imagine autobiographies for the men and women depicted, or to emphasize qualities of light, horizontal architecture, and the filmic sensibility underlying his compositions could be expected approaches to a tribute. While Farrés does present the artist as a figure whose emotions and state of mind inform many of the scenes, and does remark on themes such as the “urban dream” (“East River, c. 1920-1923”) where the “metropolis rages” (“New York Movie, 1939”) as well as alienation, he also diverges from the expected when he combines the larger narrative about Hopper with personal touches that reveal his Spanish-language influences and his own contemporary circumstances. — Edward Hopper in Words Without Borders

Video: Edward Hopper Documentary