Monday's Body of Work

Big Things

Big things are in the works. Big big things. All we can say is that next week at this time much will be different, and better. It’s exciting, mind-blowing, and nerve-wracking, all at the same time. If we compared these big things to the writing life, it would be akin to having a novel published, a novel that’s taken many years to write, one that’s required a strong sense of personal commitment and just a little bit of good luck.  Soon, the results of all this work and luck will be revealed to the world. Yikes, big things indeed! At any rate, to be a little less cryptic, here’s today’s roundup of literature news, which, in its own right, is just as big and important as anything else that’s happening. Stephen Burt gives us the lowdown on four new titles from the world or poetry. The MC Journal examines the future of literary publishing and wonders what the fuss is all about, Jonathan Lethem is to begin teaching at Pomona College next fall, Zadie Smith’s third novel is a ‘beautiful’ achievement, and Benjamin Black’s latest tale is excerpted in the Elegant Variation. Elsewhere, academic writing is taken to task in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the importance of high-quality literary translation is reiterated by Tim Parks in the Observer. If that’s not a marriage of literary culture, we don’t know what is. — Kevin Murphy

– Despite his collaborations with John Ashbery and his friendship with Frank O’Hara, and their shared place in the midcentury New York School of poets and painters, Schuyler took a while to get noticed — maybe because of his disarmingly playful style, his apparent lack of ambition and his struggles with mental illness. Now, 19 years after his death and 17 after his “Collected Poems,” this trove of previously unpublished work shows just how much fun (and how unsettling) Schuyler can be. — Stephen Burt in the NY Times

Says Here Print Is Dead!

– This point of literary production, the publication of texts through university presses, has traditionally been preoccupied with the publication of scholarly work. However, a number of movements within the publishing industry towards the end of the twentieth century resulted in some university presses shifting their objectives to incorporate trade publishing. The globalization of the publishing industry in the early 1990s led to a general change in the decision-making process of mainstream publishers, where increasingly, publishers looked at the commercial viability of texts rather than their cultural value. — Publishing in MC Journal

– Pomona College has hired author Jonathan Lethem to become the second occupant of the Roy Edward Disney ‘51 Chair in Creative Writing. Lethem, an author of novels, essays, and short stories, is best known for his novels Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, a New York Times best-seller. — Jonathan Lethem in Forum

– One of the running jokes in On Beauty, Zadie Smith’s third novel, is that its main character is philosophically opposed to beauty. Howard Belsey is a professor of art history at Wellington College, and like all middle-aged professors in campus novels, he is a ludicrous figure–unfaithful to his wife, disrespected by his children, and, of course, unable to finish the book he has been talking about for years. In Howard’s case, the book is meant to be a demolition of Rembrandt, whose canvases he sees as key sites for the production of the Western ideology of beauty. — Zadie Smith in the New Republic

A Black Novel

– Quirke’s flat had the sheepish and resentful air of an unruly classroom suddenly silenced by the unexpected return of the teacher. He put down his suitcase and walked through the rooms, peering into corners, examining things, not knowing what he expected to find, and found everything as it had been on the morning of Christmas Eve when the taxi had come to take him, sweating and shaking, to St. John’s. This was obscurely disappointing; had he been hoping for some outrageous violation, the windows smashed, his belongings plundered, his bed overturned and the sheets shat on? — Excerpt from Benjamin Black/John Banville’s New Novel in the Elegant Variation

– I’ve heard that song from graduate students in every discipline, and from faculty members, junior and senior, at universities across the country. The message: You have to write the same way as others in your field. You must use multisyllabic words, complex phrasing, and sentences that go on for days, because that’s how you show you’re smart. If you’re too clear, if your sentences are too simple, your peers won’t take you seriously. — Academic Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education

– Who wrote the Milan Kundera you love? Answer: Michael Henry Heim. And what about the Orhan Pamuk you think is so smart? Maureen Freely. Or the imaginatively erudite Roberto Calasso? Well, that was me. The translator should do his job and then disappear. The great, charismatic, creative writer wants to be all over the globe. And the last thing he wants to accept is that the majority of his readers are not really reading him. — Literary Translation in the Observer

Video: High-Quality Translation?