Famously, one of the best selling apps in England was about T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland.
Now, in Mexico, Octavio Paz is storming the iPad app world.
Still waiting to find out the best selling app in America is something about Walt Whitman. Should I hold my breath?
Harriet Monroe, founder of Poetry, our country’s most prestigious poetry mag, was born on this day in 1860.
Salon put up a post about DC’s own Politics & Prose.
Among other things, the bookstore was asked to create a list of recommended books that fit the arbitrary theme of ‘American Spring.’
Well, at least their list looked pretty good.
Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity by Jeffrey D. Sachs
Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges
The Change I Believe In by Katrina Vanden Heuvel
Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob S. Hacker & Paul Pierson
Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life by Thomas Geoghegan
The Enigma of Capital And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey
I can definitely vouch for Ill Fares the Land as being an amazing, though heartbreaking book.
Yes, these things would make me miss it more.
But I still miss two bookstores, Small Adventures and Inkwood. And the quiet beach in Gulfport. Yabba Dews Beach Bar. Cool Beanz Coffee. The Globe Coffeehouse. Monday night at the Castle.
Bill O’Reilly Is An Intellectual. So Is Rush Limbaugh.
Not that I don’t appreciate them having hypocrisy highlighted but, um, well… okay.
You can tell I’m talking about the movie because the book puts commas between the words and the movie doesn’t.
My mother is a big fan of the Smiley novels and finally convinced me to read them. I’ve been excited since I heard the movie was coming out – at least once I’d established it had a talented director and an all star cast.
You can’t really compare it to the old Alec Guiness BBC miniseries. This movie is, after all, something like 40% as long as that production.
And they are playing the role in significantly different ways.
LeCarré characterizations in the novel had a certain cold distance to it. While clearly delineated, that distance does allow for some leeway in how an actor could play folks.
Guiness’ Smiley had a certain goofy, cherubic, and avuncular charm to go with his piercing intelligence and wounded soul.
Gary Oldman gives, beyond a doubt, the quietest performance of his entire career. In fact, he barely has any lines. And when not speaking, his expression is so tightly controlled that you find yourself intimidated, even as you try and ferret out what he’s thinking or feeling. This is a cold, dangerous Smiley. He’s still a physically unimpressive specimen – looking very old and even a little feeble. But, without giving anything away, never has an old man awkwardly taking off his shoes looked quite so frightening. It’s not a capacity for violence, but the capacity to see violence done.
Because it’s the small details help keep the plot moving at a surprisingly quick pace, while keeping the attentive viewer abreast of what was happening. Taking off shoes, unwrapping a mint, going for a swim. The little things.
In a stylistically telling note, while Smiley’s wife, Anne, appear in the BBC version, in this movie, she expresses herself as absence, seen only in short glimpses from obstructed angles. We never see her face. This both enables to movie to stay concise and also fits the style of this particular Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and this particular Smiley.
Salon.com, that online epitome of what Dwight McDonald referred to as ‘midcult,’ had a nice little fluff piece on the death of the clerk. Specifically, those record, comic, and book store clerks who were the gatekeepers and guides to the worlds of literature, ‘zines, small presses, alternative music, and jazz.
I wasn’t much into comics when I was in high school and I never went to the clerks at RTO for musical advice. I was too much of a quiet browser and have always hated sales pitches.
Later though, I became friends with a couple of clerks at a Barnes and Noble in Montgomery, Alabama (that store is apparently gone now, by the way). One was a bit of an expert in southern literature and hosted occasional poetry groups in the store and also collected ‘found poetry’ with a southern gothic tinge. The other was closeted anarchist with a taste for political lit.
These two probably were the clerks who influenced me the most.
A third was the owner of the used bookstore in Clearwater, Florida, A Blue Moon. He and my mother sometimes went out, so the clerk-customer relationship was a little weird. But he had a wonderfully curated store with a lot of great stuff and he wasn’t afraid to point out interesting books. He also used an old fashioned camera that took ten or twenty seconds to take a picture and required a photometer to use properly.
Take a tour of DC Writers’ Homes. There are more than you might think.
Let first note this bit of stereotyping and backward sexual politics by the gray lady: the LGBT-centric literary salon is portrayed as hotbed of raw, sexual energy and frisson, whilst the more or less straight one is comfortably asexual and strictly focused on critical theory.
But I have to say, as someone who is not in a position to personally sample the atmosphere at either group’s gatherings, that The New Inquiry is a great new literary website and you should be reading it. Really. It’s much better than mine.
As a place to start, I found this article to be of particular interest.
the coffee philosopher 