#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.

[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

[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.

[dankusner]

How I Quit Having a Grudge Against Lena Dunham

After we got into a spat on Twitter, I nursed my wounded pride for a decade.

GOT BEEF?

Stories about the grudges we can’t get over (even if we should).

In 2014, I published my first novel, Friendship, about two best friends whose life trajectories suddenly diverge when one of them gets accidentally pregnant and decides to keep the baby.

They lived, as I did then and do now, in Brooklyn.

Unfortunately for me and my book, the HBO show Girls and its creator Lena Dunham had an absolute chokehold on the cultural conversation in 2014, by which I mostly mean Twitter.

Though some of the cultural conversation still did take place elsewhere, like in the New York Times, where Michiko Kakutani wrote of my book, “It doesn’t have the raw, original voice that Lena Dunham brings to HBO’s Girls, a complex series with a funny, visceral sense of the real.”

It wasn’t just me.

For better and worse, every cultural artifact with a whiff of autobiography about it by any youngish woman who lived in Brooklyn had to be measured against Dunham’s monolithic contribution to the genre.

An indie filmmaker, Desiree Akhavan, was dubbed “the Iranian Lena Dunham,” even though if you look closely at that phrase, you can see that it makes no sense and somehow manages to insult everyone involved.

It was like that for several years, and if I’m honest with myself, being compared to Girls was a hard bar to clear.

Sure, my book was different, but was it better?

Was it fair to compare a novel and a TV show, especially if that novel was written by someone who had actually lived in Greenpoint?

Of course it wasn’t fair, but fairness wasn’t the point.

That was just the way things were, and a more emotionally mature person than I was at 33 might have considered simply accepting the unfairness, moving on with her life and creative work, and also maybe being wise enough not to mention Dunham’s name to any journalists who might be interviewing her for a “Styles”-section profile.

I was not that emotionally mature person.

A few months before my book and its shitty reviews came out, I had been invited to a dinner party by a very nice friend who happened to live down the hall from Dunham.

After the party, Dunham graciously invited us over to see her apartment, where I admired her books and shoes.

When, some months later, the New York Times reporter Ruth La Ferla visited me at my day job at an app-publishing startup in the middle of a workday to interview me for a profile and asked me about Dunham, I was perfectly and idiotically candid.

I described the dinner party with Dunham (why??) — which La Ferla then said she had crashed, even though she was invited — and the visit to Dunham’s apartment after.

La Ferla wrote that the experience sent me into a funk, which was true — I was rabidly envious of Dunham’s nice apartment full of lovely things, and I said, as La Ferla quoted, “Every woman around my age who hopes to create something is jealous of Lena Dunham.”

A more emotionally mature person than I was might have considered simply accepting the unfairness and moving on with her life and creative work.

I was not that emotionally mature person.

To Dunham’s then-writing and producing partner Jenni Konner, not to mention the kind friend who’d invited me, my loose-lipped mention of the dinner party and Dunham’s apartment was perceived as an invasion of Dunham’s privacy, and to Konner, the confession of jealousy was an insult.

Konner came after me on Twitter.

“It’s insane to me that the Times is comparing Emily Gould to Lena Dunham. Last time I checked, Lena writes, stars in, produces and directs …,” etc.

Dunham herself DM’d me to convey her disappointment, then blocked me, the ultimate power move.

I tried to go on with my life but often woke up in the middle of the night seething with bitterness.

The whole situation clouded what should have been a happy time — the publication of my first novel! — and made it feel like just another in a series of professional failures.

I was also fired from my job not long after, which left me with plenty of free time to Google myself and ruminate on how persecuted I was.

That summer I mostly spent taking long, angry walks around Brooklyn with headphones on, chain-smoking, feeling wronged by the universe.

By fall, though, I had a whole new set of preoccupations to save me from myself, thank God. I found out I was pregnant — not quite as unexpectedly as the character in my novel had been, but not entirely expectedly either — and four weeks later, dazedly participated in my own wedding day, preoccupied by the poppy-seed-size potential new life growing in my body.

In the ensuing weeks, I barfed and hibernated.

An old friend from my Gawker days reached out with some freelance brand-copywriting work, which prevented me from losing myself in self-absorbed worry and gloom.

I felt unprepared to be a mother, but then I was one, and a new era of my life began, bringing an entirely new set of worries, preoccupations, and status insecurities along with it.

Now when I was awake at 2 a.m. (and 4 a.m. and 6 a.m.), I didn’t have the energy to nurse my grudges, only the little person in the co-sleeper bassinet strapped to my bed.

But I never really let go of my antipathy toward Dunham.

I avoided her work, denying myself the pleasure everyone else around me found in Girls.

I tried as best I could to live my life as though she didn’t exist, except when intrusive thoughts popped into my head about how I’d never be as rich, famous, successful, and well-liked as she was or when I simply couldn’t avoid a subway poster advertising her new book, or a new New Yorker essay, or a text from a good friend who worked at Lenny, Dunham’s newsletter.

Okay, I was stuck in it, and for many years there seemed no way out.

Then, much more recently, two important things happened.

One was that I watched Industry, which I’d previously avoided because Dunham directed its pilot, and I loved it (so much!).

The other was that, during a protracted manic episode, I drank so much that I worried if I stopped I’d have physical withdrawal symptoms.

After I got out of the psych ward, one condition of my release was continued participation in a 12-step recovery program.

On the fourth step, I wrote down a list of my resentments.

In this exercise, you make four columns on a piece of paper.

In the first, I wrote a long list of people, entities, and concepts.

In the second, I wrote down why I resented them.

In the third, I wrote what part of me had been threatened or disrupted by the thing in the first column.

In the last and toughest column, I wrote down what my part was in the resentment.

My list surprised me in its length and comprehensiveness — one item on it was “the state of Vermont,” for reasons too complex to detail here.

But I wasn’t surprised when Dunham showed up on it too.

As part of the next step, I read the list out loud to my sponsor, who responded with nonjudgmental compassion, as though resenting the state of Vermont (among other things) weren’t, on the face of it, totally bonkers.

In the immediate aftermath of completing this step, I felt lighter and better, but I was far from done.

For the next step, I would have to review the list and focus on that fourth column to come up with another list of my personality defects, or defaults, that I was ready for my higher power to remove.

I’m a skilled and experienced procrastinator, and I put off that step for as long as I possibly could.

In the interim, half my colleagues and I watched Industry season three together, delighting in every frame of the show.

I thought about how I would have been denied that pleasure if I’d continued to avoid anything to do with Lena Dunham.

I also read Dunham’s July 2024 interview with New Yorker writer Rachel Syme, which got into what her life is like now, some of the challenges she’s overcome, and her upcoming TV series starring the comedic genius Megan Stalter.

Spending some time out of the limelight seems like it’s been great for her.

“For better or worse, I’ve never been obsessed with other people’s perceptions of me, but I have always been obsessed with being able to do my thing,” she says in the interview.

She also revealed that she’s been “happily sober” since 2018.

When I reread my fourth-step list some months later, I found that I could cross off some of the items in column one.

Vermont may have hosted one of the worst weeks of my life, but I’ve gotta give it up for ice cream and Bernie Sanders.

Alongside some of the weightier, more lifelong resentments on the list, I saw the 2014 kerfluffle with Dunham and Konner in a new light.

I had not, in fact, been wronged and powerless.

I’d been lucky.

My book got published.

It got reviewed in the New York Times.

Back then, I was at the outset of a career that was just beginning, that might, if I’m lucky, be still in its early stages.

For that, I am profoundly grateful.

Even though I’ve just rehashed the whole thing here, I gave Dunham a heads-up this time, and she was gracious and compassionate.

I am now resolved never to think about 2014 again without compassion for my previous self and the previous self of everyone else involved.

I have the ability now to focus on what’s most important: being able to do my thing, no matter who else’s thing it gets compared to.

For that wisdom, I have Lena Dunham to thank.

Even though I might still have to remember to consciously tell myself that every day — as they say in the program — the goal is progress, not perfection.

[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

[nejjcollectsbooks]

books in a totebag

> Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread by Michiko Kakutani. > The Distance of the Moon by Italo Calvino. > Africa's Tarnished Name by Chinua Achebe. > Create Dangerously by Albert Camus. > The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House by Audre Lorde. > Fame by Andy Warhol.

[dailykafka]

Indeed, Kafka's correspondence with Felice has all the earmarks of his fiction: the same nervous attention to minute particulars; the same paranoid awareness of shifting balances of power; the same atmosphere of emotional suffocation - combined, surprisingly enough, with moments of boyish ardor and delight.

— Michiko Kakutani, Kafka's Kafkaesque Letters