Category: Books
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In Theory, there is no beauty
Anyone who has ever tried to read Derrida or other cultural theory, and come away baffled, or even a bit disgusted, should read Brian Boyd’s article “Getting it All Wrong.” It’s a fabulous and bitter attack on modern literature departments’ love affair with deconstruction and cultural critique, to the absolute exclusion of alternative means of…
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Disaster in the publishing biz
Violet Blue in SF has an utterly horrifying post about the bankruptcy of the biggest publishing distribution company in the U.S., and the subsequent fallout on indie publishers and authors. Royalties aren’t coming. Small houses are laying off their entire staff. Even at the large houses, trouble is serious. Random House is owed $43 million.…
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Help a writer. This is why the Net is groovy.
Here’s a confession: I’ve never made it through the Illuminatus trilogy, despite trying several times, despite it being a canonical text (or maybe symptom) of the conspiracy prone, paranoid culture that led also to Gravity’s Rainbow and, say, Dick Cheney. Now its co-author, cult hero Robert Anton Wilson, is apparently sick and poor, and close…
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Fart jokes of the ancients
Every kid should read Aristophanes in junior high. When I’m dictator of the world, this will be done. It will re-open generations of young minds to the possibilities of literature. What? they’ll say. South Park isn’t original? You mean they were doing this stuff 2500 years ago? I picked up a few of Aristophanes’ plays…
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The fake JT Leroy is the interesting one
A long profile in Salon of Laura Albert, AKA drug-child-prodigy author JT Leroy. She was an East Village punk rocker, a San Francisco Net sex writer in the 1990s, and a consummate role-player who invented new identities for herself whenever needed. She’s more interesting than the author she invented. Links: She is JT LeRoy |…