Expression

“All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it. True expression hides what it makes manifest.”           —Antonin Artaud

There’s an interesting fragmented essay by Rick Moody concerning Artaud in The Believer. Small gripe: I don’t agree with his calling the absurdist or scatological humor in Beckett and others “juvenile.” Such a dismissal is wrongheaded. Just because it actually makes you laugh out loud doesn’t mean it’s juvenile and thus unworthy or embarrassing. It means it’s funny.

Speaking in Tongues

Here is another engaging NY Review of Books essay by Zadie Smith, based on a lecture she gave in December 2008 at the New York Public Library.

Zadie

God bless Zadie! Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth and On Beauty, has written a controversial and very necessary essay entitled “Two Paths for the Novel,” published in the New York Review of Books. She compares the lyrical realism of Joseph O’Neill’s highly-praised Netherland with the experimentalism of Tom McCarthy’s Believer Book Award-winning Remainder. I have not yet read the latter, but I agree with her general premise, that the mainstream literary culture seems to encourage only one type of novel these days: the modest, familiar, lyrical realist novel. She is very right to call for a greater diversity in literature. Without ambition, daring, and experimentation, what is the “novel”?

Modernism Lovers Rejoyce

For an appreciation of The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (first from the left), written by Julian Barnes in the Guardian, look here.

Also check out this interesting 1922 profile and interview of James Joyce (second from left) in Vanity Fair, written by Djuna Barnes.

Finally, there’s a new article on Ezra Pound (third from the left) in the New Yorker written by Louis Menand.