I’ll stay away from the obvious Fox News/Sitting Bull drama over Obama’s new children’s book and focus on the less irritating side of literature in the last couple weeks.
With The Literary Review’s Bad Sex Awards comes a rather insightful article in The Independent regarding the nature of sex in modern literature. Can it ever really be good sex? What does good sex mean in literature?
John Freeman, the editor of Granta magazine who oversaw a special edition dedicated to sex earlier this year, says that although contemporary fiction abounds with eloquent discussions “around” and “about” sex, there is a level of apprehension among some writers who find themselves searching for a fitting vocabulary to describe its actual mechanics.
“The feeling that sex isn’t fully represented in literature proves to be a false one if you expand just beyond the actual act, to all the things that sex encompasses. But once you get down to writing the act, it’s very hard to do it without sounding like bad erotica or embarrassing self-disclosure. I remember Adam Foulds saying at our event: ‘You can almost see many male writers’ brain chemistry change as they write certain scenes and their ability to judge what is good writing get away from them’.”
Siblings David and Margaret Talbot have formulated a new series of books aimed at teen males, reviving the genre of pulp history. For more information, see the article in The New York Times.
Mr. Talbot explained: “We definitely did not want to make history like spinach, good for you but boring. We wanted to do the stuff that wasn’t good for you, with good guys, bad guys, blood, guts and sex.”
Maureen Freely of The Guardian waxes pensive on the frustrations and elations of her work as a translator.
World literature is the big new thing in literature departments, so you’d think our good name would be assured here at least. Sadly, universities and their regulators tend to be suspicious about translations, possibly because they don’t know what yardstick to measure them by. For the last Research Assessment Exercise, I was asked to explain in precise terms how my translations had contributed to world knowledge. For the next one, I shall also have to demonstrate their economic impact.
And my favorite bit of the week–a previously unpublished interview with John Updike. It’s rare that a young writer stumbles across something so life affirming. Updike’s daily writing routine, his thoughts on politics, his professional relationship with Vladimir Nabokov, and his love of reading, all right here.
I never expected to be a novelist. I knew there were novelists, and that novels appeared, and my mother was trying to write a novel. But I was intent just to try to get into magazines and I was rather slow to undertake writing a novel.
