Monday's Body of Work

Where's Lenin?

We took the weekend off from all things internet — No online book reviews, no Web profiles, no social media or email. Nothing, completely off the grid. And we have to say, it was rather pleasant. But like all good things, our disconnectedness must too come to an end. So now it’s Monday. And, man, do we sure have a lot of catching up to do! We’ll start off by reading about Jane Austen’s rise to literary stardom, and then shift gears a little and learn about James Earl Ray’s tormented and evil life. Next on the list: Playwrights. And how the ambition to learn, produce excellent drama and get it into the hands of people in the know results in an epic struggle, one that still manages to trip up the likes of David Mamet. Another David, this one with the last name of Mitchell — you know, the novelist — is chatting up his latest effort in the Times Online, Lydia Davis’s collection of short fiction is spotlighted in the New York Review of Books, and the murky death of Federico García Lorca is revisited by Harper’s Magazine. Finally, in what will appropriately finish our internet-reading-dominated morning, we turn to the one and only Christopher Hitchens, who casts fresh appraisal on Animal Farm, and then begs the question, “Where is Lenin?” Pray tell, Mr. Hitchens. Pray tell. — Kevin Murphy

– “There is no way a ten-cent white boy could develop a plan to kill a million-dollar black man,” said the civil rights leader James Bevel of James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. on April 3, 1968. Even if you aren’t inclined to credit the conspiracy theorists on this one — and Hampton Sides, the author of a new book about Ray, “Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin,“ is not — you can see how the pairing of killer and victim would stick in the craw. Ray was a nonentity, a toxic loser from a long line of the same, incapable of forming even the most basic relationships, while King had the power to capture, embody and mobilize the better self of a nation. — James Earl Ray in Salon

A Colorful Author

– Benjamin Disraeli said he read “Pride and Prejudice” 17 times. William Dean Howells was the first to call its author “the divine Jane.” An imprisoned French anarchist named Félix Fénéon translated “Northanger Abbey” into French and defended himself with Austenesque wit at his trial: When accused by the judge of surrounding himself with anarchists X and Y, Fénéon replied, “You can’t surround yourself with two people. You need at least three.” (He beat the charge.) B.B. King is a fan: “Jane Austen! I love Jane Austen!” — Jane’s Fame in the Washington Post

– I got David Mamet’s new book, Theatre, and figured I would master the art of playwriting from there. I read it. I showed it to an acquaintance (a musician, not an actor), and he said, “Oh, yeah, I know what that book says. It says actors shouldn’t mess with the script. He wants everybody to act like Rebecca Pidgeon.” After a few days, it became clear that whatever David Mamet did or didn’t say, in order to become a famous playwright, I would probably have to write and finish some plays, when in fact, for some reason, I just keep writing prose, or poems. — Playwrights in Bookslut

– The book’s most poignant episodes concern a boy of mixed race “too Japanese to leave, but not Japanese enough to belong”. Mitchell is himself the father of half-Japanese children. In 2006, he and his wife experimented with resettling there. “Japan’s still a somewhat xenophobic country,” he says. “If you happen to be white, then you’re at the courteous end of that, but you couldn’t not notice it. There are lots of admirable things about Japan, but the ability to choose what path you take through life isn’t one of them. It’s much more prescribed. And the invisible social voice of Japan tends to dictate what you can and cannot do. Kids of mixed marriages are only accommodated in certain professions — academia, the entertainments industry or modelling. Why would you do that to your children when you have two passports?” — David Mitchell in the Times Online

Big Little Fiction

– Lydia Davis is best known for two accomplishments: translating to acclaim Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann and writing short stories, some of them among the shortest ever written. These would seem to be incompatible enterprises. Davis’s shortest stories, only a sentence or two long, float like little dinghies on the white of the page. They can’t be followed the way stories ordinarily are followed, nor are they “told” in the usual sense of that word. They belong to the class “fiction” but also to the larger class made up of all things isolated in time or space: specimen creatures in jars, radar blips that promise interstellar life, Beckett’s characters on a desolated stage, or John Cage’s notes dispersed across silence. — Lydia Davis in the New York Review of Books

– Federico García Lorca, perhaps Spain’s greatest poet, died under murky circumstances on August 19, 1936. It’s assumed that his republican sentiments angered the Falangist (fascist) leaders then asserting their power across Spain in a great wave of terror, and they decided first to ban his poetry, and then to eliminate him. — Federico García Lorca in Harper’s

– There is a Stalin pig and a Trotsky pig, but no Lenin pig. Similarly, in Nineteen Eighty-Four we find only a Big Brother Stalin and an Emmanuel Goldstein Trotsky. Nobody appears to have pointed this out at the time (and if I may say so, nobody but myself has done so since; it took me years to notice what was staring me in the face). — Animal Farm in the Guardian

Video: Orwell’s Political Novel