Links on Wednesday

 Sorry everybody, yesterday was quite a busy day for me. Here are your Tuesday links on Wednesday. 

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The Marilynne Robinson interview over at The Paris Review has been getting a lot of linkage, but it's well worth another one if it gets you to read it.  There are so many quotable, discussable moments (is that a word? can I make that a word?) that I can't even pick one to excerpt here. Just read it for yourself. I've been having a lot of trouble writing these past few days, what with Mercury in retrograde and all, and Marilynne is helping a lot with morale.

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If you've ever seen the Jussieu campus in Paris and gone "WHAT??" and felt the bile rise up in your esophagus and the shakes take hold of your shoulders, it might interest you to know that this 1960s monstrosity was considered a set of "building blocks for an 'extendable city' in which easily reconfigurable lightweight frameworks would supersede socially oppressive urban patterns, epitomized by Haussmann's Paris city plan of the mid-nineteenth century."

Um.  I'll take Haussmann's Paris ANY day over the postwar architectural avant-garde.

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Woody Allen being snarky in New York Magazine-- in a refreshing way, not in that annoying Gawker way. ("Vicky Cristina Barcelona" comes out here next week, btw.)

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Scott McLemee on "The Anti-Intellectual US Presidency," a review of Elvin T. Lim's new book.

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A great bundle of links from Bookforum on "intellectuals as castrators of meaning."

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Speaking of Bookforum, they have a review of Céline Curiol's Voice Over (Voix sans issue), which has just come out in the US and is gathering buzz. (The review is by one Tayt Harlin. Tayt, do I know you? I think I know you. I never forget a Tayt.) Curiol and Paul Auster read at the NYPL together recently, and Auster wrote a glowing article praising Curiol for Lire when the novel came out a few years ago.

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Finally, a random comment on reviewing. I find it so much easier (not necessarily preferable, just easier) to review non-fiction than fiction, especially debut fiction.  Anyone else feel that way?

Comments

[Stephen Minton]

Yes, perhaps because we perceive non-fiction as primarily objective (although it's really more complicated than that), so we find it easier to write an objective review (although of course our reviews are partly subjective too). Whereas fiction is perceived as more of a subjective art form, and so writing an objective review can be more challenging. So in other words (and at the risk of rambling), it's because our brain wants to regard the process of review as objective, and it's therefore easier to relate that process to a subject matter which is also more readily framed in objective terms.