Monday's Body of Work

Matisse: The Bookish Modernist

Back on the horse this Monday morning and into the fields we ride. The grass is tall and the flowers pretty. The sun is high in the shimmering sky and look, just beyond the bend, it’s a media horde. And they want to talk literature! Here we are. Let’s dismount. Steady boy. Reporter number one: “We’ve caught wind of literature’s influence on modernist art. Care to comment? And, is the movie version of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt bad enough to buckle Michael Douglas’ acting career?” Seems so, but Wall Street 2 should revive him. Next question. Hey, Larry, good to see ya. Nice trench coat. What’s that, The Elegant Variation is waxing nostalgic for the typewriter, Litquake is going to rattle SF this year, and the Skellig Michael site in Ireland has historians in a squabble? Jeesh. All right, boys. Time to push on. But before we go, one question. Who here’s got the scoop on The Boston Globe blogging about a book about blogging? Or n+1 saluting David Foster Wallace on the anniversary of his death? Or Bookslut thinking about sex, and the 1960′s? At least one of you has got to know about the odd, potent tale from Georges Simenon that’s being reviewed in The Observer. No? Time to get to work, boys. See the links below. Us, we’re heading for the hills. — Kevin Murphy

– “Thinking about Picasso”, which embodies a generation’s anxiety of influence. Chagall, arriving in Paris from Russia in 1911, immediately assimilated cubism’s geometric foundations to give volume and depth to his hallucinatory, fantastical compositions: “Paris Through the Window”, “The Cattle Dealer”, “Homage to Apollinaire”, where Adam and Eve stand straight like the hands of a clock within a massive central disk seeming to rotate like a planet. — Art and Literature in the Financial Times

1928 Corona. From Our Collection

– The market is truly overwhelming, an endless mix of cheap disposable goods and high end antiques.  I was browsing in one of the stalls when the typewriter caught my eye.  Somehow, with my then less-than-basic French, I managed to haggle the proprietor down a few hundred francs.  (At least, I think I did – my French was so poor, for all I know I bid myself in the wrong direction.)  But I left the market happily with my typewriter. — Typewriters in Elegant Variation

– San Francisco’s annual Litquake literary festival was founded by Bay Area writers as a week-long literary spectacle for book lovers, complete with cutting-edge panels, unique cross-media events, and hundreds of readings. Since its founding in 1999, the festival has presented close to 1400 author appearances for an audience of over 32,000 in its lively and inclusive celebration of San Francisco’s thriving contemporary literary scene. — Lit-fest in Litquake

– Blogs have been around for only about 15 years, but they warrant a hardcover history because whether or not you’ve ever read one, their very existence has affected your life as their influence has grown in the marketplace of ideas. — Blogs in the Boston Globe

– Maigret fans be warned: this is a far cry from Simenon’s cosy French detective series. Though Commissaire Maigret is the Belgian writer’s most famous creation, Simenon also wrote many romans dur, as he called them; bleak stories of human weakness and moral deterioration. Tropic Moon was the first of these, originally published in 1933. — Georges Simenon in The Observer

– After David Foster Wallace’s tragic death last September 12, while unburdening my shelf of his works to give them a good nostalgic thumbing-through, I remembered an LP in my collection—plucked several summers ago from the dollar bin of a liquidating Cambridge record store—by an artist with the same name as one of Wallace’s most memorable characters. — DFW in n+1

Skellig Michael: What Does It Mean?

– Near the top of a half-submerged mountain, jutting out of the Atlantic on the south-western tip of Ireland, stands a set of monastic remains that present historians with a puzzle. They are among the most revealing and the most elusive remnants of the early Christian era. — Skellig Michael in the Economist

– Humans in every recorded era seem to have had that after-the-end feeling. Some of them had special words for it. And at any given moment, there’s usually at least one group of radical utopianists who believe we can turn the world into something beautiful, and a group of fascists who want to cleanse it, and a group of leftists who want an underclass uprising, and a zillion groups of religious fanatics who create weird rituals around food and sex and money and prayer. — The 60′s in Bookslut

– The gushy production notes for Peter Hyams’ remake of Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt suggest that Hyams set out to rework a noir classic for kids. Film heritage plus desirable demographics in one shiny new package; what’s not to like? — Beyond a Reasonable Doubt in NPR

Video: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt Trailer