#Michiko Kakutani

[jeffalessandrelli]

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/08/29/archives/everybody-wants-to-be-a-poet-number-has-doubled.html

1979

According to Poets and Writers, a New York‐based clearinghouse for writers, the number of poets (by its definition, those who have published 10 or more poems in three or more literary magazines) in the United States has doubled from 1,500 in 1975 to some 3,000 today. This increase is partly tied, no doubt, to the equally extraordinary growth in the number of outlets for verse. Last year, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded $835,155 to 177 nonprofit magazines and presses; the New York State Council on the Arts, approximately $123,500. And, thanks largely to such increased Government spending, the number of places publishing poetry has grown to nearly 3,000, with editorial tastes and qualities as varied as their names: Antaeus, TriQuarterly, New American Review, Truck, Caterpillar and Mulch.

Often created by poets unable to publish their work elsewhere, many of these publications began as kitchentable operations. As their editors and contributors developed followings, some grew into establishments in their own right. Cid Cornian created Origin, for instance, in 1951 to provide an “adequate outlet to those new/unknown writers who have shown maturity/insight in their medium”; a list of those new/unknown writers who appeared includes Charles Olson, William Bronk, Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov. Similarly, City Lights Books was founded in San Francisco in 1955 by a then rather unknown bard — Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

For hundreds of young poets, then, publication in such small magazines and presses is something to be solicited, coveted and eventually parlayed into a reputation. Jane Flanders, a Washington housewife who this year won the “Discovery/The Nation” award, started out in 1975 by sending poems to Sibyl‐Child, a local magazine. Which led to appearances in Crazy Horse and Prairie Schooner, which led to publication in The Nation, Poetry Magazine and American Poetry Review. Although Mrs. Flanders has earned about $250 so far this year, she figures she has already spent $75 on mailing and submission costs.

‘Have to Keep Hustling’

“It's very discouraging at first,” concedes Don Faulkner, a young poet who helped found the No Mountains Poetry Project in Chicago and who now teaches at Connecticut College. “But you have to keep hustling.”

Indeed, there is growing opportunity for aspiring poets to practice what Felix Stefanile, editor of the Sparrow Press, has called “poetry gamesmanship.” A kind of cottage industry has sprung up, devoted to the care and feeding of poets.

There are $10,000 fellowships awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as prizes ranging from the renowned (the $10,000 Copernicus Award for lifetime achievement) to the obscure (the $500 Edwin Markham Prize for “a previously unpublished poem not exceeding 100 lines dealing with the theme of social justice or protest in the tradition of Edwin Markham or Eugene Debs”).

Universities such as Iowa, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia offer Master of Fine Arts degrees in poetry, and such groups like the Jack Kerouac School for Disembodied Poetics hold summer seminars. In addition, the number of local readings continues to grow: in New York alone, there are nearly 100 groups with regular meetings.

That such programs produce verse is obvious; that they actually create poets is more debatable. Detractors disdain these organized rites as “poetry factories,” manufacturing competent, but uninspired, practitioners of verse. Still, they do furnish the young poet with connections and criticism — two assets most valuable in making the jump from the little magazine world to that of the commercial presses.

The odds of selling a poem to one of the “slick” magazines — The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harpers — are awesome indeed: The New Yorker, which annually prints about 150 poems, receives over 3,000 every week; and the Atlantic, which annually prints about 50, logs in well over 20,000 a year.

[don-simon]

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist." [Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism]

Two of the most monstrous regimes in human history (facism and Stalinist communism) came to power in the 20th century, and both were predicated on the violation and despoiling of truth, on the knowledge that cynicism, weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power.

The term 'truth decay' has joined the post-truth lexicon that includes 'fake news' and 'alternative facts'. Because fake news and lies are pumped out nowadays in such an endless stream, it has become impossible for most of us to separate fact from fiction/truth from lies. It is under such conditions that disorientation, fear, hate and cynicism thrives, as we dance to the tune of our sinister masters.

[frances-baby-houseman]

Read this article about Michiko Kakutani's new book in Slate and genuinely, genuinely thought the pictured section headings were from McSweeney's. Like she had to know this looked like McSweeney's, right?

[lascapigliata]

realizing i could never actually have been a book critic because i'm desperately trying to figure out how to phrase "bored out of my mind" in such a way that it actually contains real feedback

[nejjcollectsbooks]

s u m m e r r e a d s

i walk the dog and then i read a little

Ex-Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread by Michiko Kakutani.

[dailykafka]

Over the course of the next five years, Kafka and Felice would continue their nervous dance, moving toward and away from each other several times. For Kafka, Felice was a shadowy representative of the world that lay beyond the walls of his literary cellar, and in loving her, he'd toyed with the idea of embracing the ordinary realities of daily life. Eventually, however, he returned to the solitude he felt so necessary for his work. He apparently believed Yeats's dictum that ''the intellect of man is forced to choose — Perfection of the life, or of the work'' and in the end, he embraced the latter.

— Michiko Kakutani, Kafka's Kafkaesque Love Letters

[meandmybigmouth]

Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims during his first year in office – an average of 5.9 a day

The GOP seen another german people's hitler moment joining the maga cult and could not pass up the power grab moment!

[fireflywitch]

current tabs open for finishing chapter 17 of 19 (?):

TV: WEDDING COVERAGE DONE IN A REGAL MANNER (John J. O’Connor, NYT, July 30, 1981); BOOKS OF THE TIMES (Michiko Kakutani, June 4, 1984); and a 4-star Chili Mac Casserole Recipe from Taste of Home Cooking

[eggtrolls]

book asks + 11 but I would like to slightly rephrase the question as "what kind of non-fiction books do you usually like?" (if you prefer feel free to stick to the original!)

11. what non-fiction books do you like if any? what kind of non-fiction books do you usually like?

(much improved from the original, thank you.)

I have three main categories that I really like in non-fiction:

1. Science and nature writing (Entangled Life by [ya boi] Merlin Sheldrake, Arctic Dream by Barry Lopez, The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan)

2. History outside of the US (Cuba by Ada Ferrer, Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt, The Year of Lear by James Shapiro, Cafe Europa Revisited by Slavenka Drakulic)

3. Something I'm calling "low brow material culture studies" about how humans have interacted with specific objects/classes of objects (A Brilliant Commodity by Saskia Coenen Snyder about the Dutch Jewish diamond trade, The World in a Grain by Vince Beiser about sand, The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum about food additives, etc.)

Biographies, autobiographies....most of the time, no thanks. I take the Michiko Kakutani stance on memoirs ("The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one.”). Books about war....eh. Looking for the Good War by Elizabeth D. Samet was good and had some excellent references but that's as far as I've dug into it.

[jadbalja]

The following lines were culled from Michiko Kakutani's New York Times book reviews by Christian Lorentzen. This appeared in Harper's. Limn an entire life in a couple of pages Limn the trajectory of an entire life in a handful of pages Limn the suffocating atmosphere of small-town life and the alienation experienced by those who defy its provincial mores Limn the last days of an alcoholic frontiers-woman living in a small western town Limn a man's sudden apprehension of vulnerability and loss--all brought on by his discovery of a dead rat on his kitchen floor Limn his inner life or probe the sources of his equipoise Limn the inner life of people, surprised by the deceptions of time Limn, with tenderness, wisdom, and humor, a vast array of human relationships, both straight and gay Limn the rituals of hunting, trapping, planting, and canning with a wry mixture of amusement and respect Limn the daily minutae of life Limn the human condition Limn the complicated emotional geometry Limn the delicate geometry of emotions Limn a marriage of enduring passion and shared ideals Limn Willy's fears of losing Biffs love and his own longings for immortality Limn the brutal, perilous, and harrowing art of killing a forty-ton creature with a hand-thrown weapon Limn some of its burgeoning manifestations Limn the social and geopolitical fallout Limn the surrealness of contemporary life Limn the rhythms of the universe and an artist's inner state of mind Limn a future in which Pop Art gives way to Poll Art Limn the nervous, almost flirtatious banter Limn a hero's efforts to achieve self-understanding Limn girls' secret struggle for womanhood in the post-sexual-revolution world Limn the dangers posed by emerging diseases Limn the spiritual yearnings and dislocations of an entire nation as it lurched from the certainties of the World War II years toward the confusions of the 1970s Limn the irrationalities of history Limn the impermanence--and emotional chaos--that threatens to overwhelm ordinary people Limn the fabulous Limn the ordinary with seeming nonchalance Limn this deeply felt, if somewhat limited, theme with clarity and moral vigor.

[moonwaif]

My toxic trait is frothing at the mouth when people misuse "magical realism."

It is NOT fantasy tropes like wizards and ghosts in a realistic setting; as in it is not urban fantasy (genre fiction). It is extremely literary and specific. It is about unsettling strangeness that defies reality (or disrupts our understanding of reality, showing a reality in which the strange exists side by side the mundane), often taking elements from indigenous folklore and beliefs (as in indigenous to the setting of the story, heavily influenced by the history and culture).

👏educate yourselves👏

The term magic realism is broadly descriptive rather than critically rigorous, and Matthew Strecher (1999) defines it as "what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe."[10] The term and its wide definition can often become confused, as many writers are categorized as magical realists. The term was influenced by a German and Italian painting style of the 1920s which were given the same name.[2] In The Art of Fiction, British novelist and critic David Lodge defines magic realism: "when marvellous and impossible events occur in what otherwise purports to be a realistic narrative—is an effect especially associated with contemporary Latin American fiction (for example the work of the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez) but it is also encountered in novels from other continents, such as those of Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie and Milan Kundera. All these writers have lived through great historical convulsions and wrenching personal upheavals, which they feel cannot be adequately represented in a discourse of undisturbed realism", citing Kundera's 1979 novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting as an exemplar."[11] Michiko Kakutani writes that "The transactions between the extraordinary and the mundane that occur in so much Latin American fiction are not merely a literary technique, but also a mirror of a reality in which the fantastic is frequently part of everyday life."[12] Magical realism often mixes history and fantasy, as in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, in which the children born at midnight on August 15, 1947, the moment of India's independence, are telepathically linked.

...magical realism is often associated with Latin-American literature, including founders of the genre, particularly the authors Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Juan Rulfo, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Elena Garro, Mireya Robles, Rómulo Gallegos and Arturo Uslar Pietri. In English literature, its chief exponents include Neil Gaiman, Salman Rushdie, Alice Hoffman, Louis De Bernieres, Nick Joaquin, and Nicola Barker. In Bengali literature, prominent writers of magic realism include Nabarun Bhattacharya, Akhteruzzaman Elias, Shahidul Zahir, Jibanananda Das and Syed Waliullah. In Kannada literature, the writers Shivaram Karanth and Devanur Mahadeva have infused magical realism in their most prominent works. In Japanese literature, one of the most important authors of this genre is Haruki Murakami. In Chinese literature the best-known writer of the style is Mo Yan, the 2012 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature for his "hallucinatory realism". In Polish literature, magic realism is represented by Olga Tokarczuk, the 2018 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_realism

[iishtar]

Articles no. 17

We've Forgotten What Human Faces Actually Look Like by Katherine Gillespie Paper Magazine September 2019

Gabriel García Márquez wanted to destroy his last novel by Alexandra Alter The New York Times March 2024

The 'mob wife' trend is fake by Jo Piazza Back Row February 2024

Tainted love: why women still pay for adultery by Molly McCloskey The Guardian August 2017

The rise of the unapologetic female adulterer by Shanda Deziel Chatelaine October 2018

How infidelity helped create the novel by Daniel Mendelsohn Town and Country May 2019

'An act of betrayal': Gabriel García Márquez's son on publishing his father's work against his will by Alex Clark The Guardian March 2024

The Sadness of Jean Rhys by Mariah Kreutter Gawker December 2021

The Hyperlinked Hyperfeminine by Michelle Santiago Cortés Lux Magazine Issue no. 9

Storytelling and Deception in a Magic Kingdom by Michiko Kakutani New York Times June 2008