Jonathan Lethem – The Empty Room

“The Empty Room,” a short story by Jonathan Lethem, appears in the latest issue of the Paris Review.

Nice Echo & the Bunnymen reference towards the end.

Pretty much their best song.

David Foster Wallace Archive

The David Foster Wallace archive opened at the University of Texas this past September.

A video of readings from Wallace’s books, stories, and letters, celebrating the event, appears here, thanks to the Harry Ransom Center.

Belle and Sebastian – Write About Love

Write above love …

Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy’s. She started all that. — Ernest Hemingway, 1926.

Last I heard you had a four floor view … with lots of time … a notebook full of the finest creamy rich girl parchment pages … slowly filled with all your passing days. — Belle & Sebastian, 2010.

Don DeLillo – Reviewed By William Wood

A great essay on Don DeLillo by William Wood appears in the latest issue of The Point magazine. In brief, he likes “Americana” and “Underworld” and doesn’t really like “Point Omega.”

Although DeLillo considers himself to have reached maturity only with White Noise, Americana shows a writer having already perfected his voice at its inception. The author’s departure in Americana from traditional tropes of plot, character development and so on bears witness that the essence of traditional formal conventions was not the extrinsic form itself but the underlying pathetic dynamic they successfully sustained. Critique of this departure is therefore as irrelevant as would be a critique of modern theater on account of its virtually ubiquitous disregard for the Aristotelian unities of place, time and action.

I find the arguments equally persuasive and entertaining. The only thing I’d add, though, is to say that I think it’s a mistake to write-off any of DeLillo’s novels as lesser or minor works. “Great Jones Street” being the leading case in point. Greeted with mixed reviews when it first came out, strong echoes of “Great Jones Street” have been heard repeatedly since then, after “Infinite Jest,” Kurt Cobain’s death, and most recently in Jonathan Letham’s “Chronic City.”

David Foster Wallace Archive

The David Foster Wallace Archive opens later this month at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and in anticipation, the Center has posted a number of high-resolution photos of Wallace’s books and manuscripts. Above, his copy of DeLillo; below, his amazing wit and wisdom.

Werner Herzog – On the Absolute, the Sublime and Ecstatic Truth

This great essay/speech first appeared in the Winter 2010 issue of Arion.

The Point – Issue 2

The Point - Issue 2 - Winter 2010

There are some people who put together pretty good PhD dissertations, but then never write anything else worth reading again. The editors of and contributors to this magazine, The Point, do not belong to that group.

I really liked the first issue, which came out last spring, especially the article about David Foster Wallace. But this new, second issue goes a big step beyond.

Including a fantastic essay on Stendhal by someone named S.G. Belknap, and a funny and insightful piece on Houellebecq by Ben Jeffery. Very nice reflection on philosophy by Martha Nussbaum. Maggie Taft’s review of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Modern Wing deserves to be read with “Daydream Nation” playing in the background, because it mentions Gerhard Richter. And there’s a tribute to/eulogy for John Hughes, nicely put by Sarah Miller-Davenport.

Plus an absolutely brilliant piece by Etay Zwick that brings Veblen to bear on the current crisis, and pretty much hits the nail on the head as far as that topic is concerned.

If these guys keep coming out with writing that’s anything close to this level, their magazine, I’d say, will deserve to be called the best and most important of its kind.

Pantha Du Prince – Black Noise

Hendrik Weber/Pantha Du Prince

In fact, these three reviewers get it pretty much right.

I first picked up “Black Noise,” the new lp by Pantha Du Prince, because of the collaboration with Noah Lennox, “Stick To My Side.” But as great as that track is, the album has stayed on repeat for me over the past couple of weeks because of the others, many of which are even better.

Part of it, I think, is that though I guess you’d call them examples of minimal techno, there’s a lot going on already in these tracks, even without guest vocals. From the field recordings on the opener “Lay in a Shimmer,” to the pinball-machine-like effects of “The Splendour,” to the bells of “Bohemian Forest,” to the layers of percussion on the hypnotic “Welt Am Draht.” That last one being my personal favorite and also an apparent nod to a Fassbinder made-for-tv-movie about a counterfeit world, a work that must surely have also influenced Jonathan Lethem when writing his latest novel.

“Black Noise” is a superb album, and you can stream it through the Rough Trade website.

Greil Marcus/Werner Sollors – A New Literary History of America

Just finished reading the Marcus/Sollors anthology, “A New Literary History of America,” cover to cover.

That sounds a bit crazy, I know, but I learned a lot and was very often entertained.

Here’s a list of my favorite entries, in chronological order:

1. Francois Furstenberg, Washington’s Farewell Address (1796)
2. Robert Clark, The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)
3. James Dawes, The Limits to Violence (1885)
4. Richard Powers, The Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Monument (Memorial Day 1897)
5. Walter Mosley, Hardboiled (1926)
6. Paul Muldoon, Carl Sandburg and the American Songbag (1927)
7. Marybeth Hamilton, Jelly Roll Morton Speaks (May 1938)
8. Robert O’Meally, Billie Holiday, Strange Fruit (1939)
9. George Hutchinson, Letter from Birmingham Jail (April 1963)
10. Anne M. Wagner, Maya Lin’s Wall (1982)

Everyone has their hobbyhorses, though, me included, so I will also say that there should have been more about the last three decades. No entry on David Foster Wallace, despite the fact that he wrote the greatest book of the last quarter century. Nothing about Madonna, either: like it or not, she’s had an enormous influence on American culture over that same period. Her first album was pretty good, too.

Still, it was great in particular to see some American academics and intellectuals writing about stuff that really matters.

Yeti – Volume 8

Just finished reading through Yeti’s Volume 8. A lot of excellent stuff, as always.

Including a great interview with Jim Dickinson, an insightful essay about the lost tapes from the 1981 collaboration between Bernard Edwards, Nile Rodgers, and Johnny Mathis, and a quite interesting short article on synthesizer design by Jessica Rylan. That last piece features my favorite quote: “I spent a long time teaching myself electronics, but eventually I went back to school to get a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering …. It’s helped a lot to learn to analyze things mathematically. Though the most interesting, chaotic stuff that my synthesizers do can’t be explained mathematically. That’s why I know I’m still an artist–I believe in science and magic at the same time.”