Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

~ Posted by Robert Butler, January 3rd 2012

The British edition of the giveaway newspaper Metro has a two-page spread today about new books to look forward to in 2012. "Top tomes to indulge in ..."  shows how deeply the snowclone permeates publishing. Coined eight years ago, "snowclone" refers to a phrase that serves as a template for endless variations (as in yesterday's brainy is the new sexy).
 
Bloomsbury are publishing William Boyd's "Waiting for Sunrise" in February (which plays off "Waiting for Godot") and Rajesh Parameswaran's "I Am An Executioner" in May (which plays off everything from Soseki Natsume's "I Am A Cat" to Doug Hofstadter's "I am a Strange Loop"). Hamish Hamilton publish Alain de Botton's "Religion for Atheists" this month (which is not unlike "Philosophy for Dummies").

The one that crosses the line is Nathan Englander's "What We Talk About When We Talk about Anne Frank", which Weidenfeld & Nicolson publish next month. It plays off Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" (1981). But that has already been played off by Haruki Murakami's "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running" (2008). It's what we talk about when we talk about snowclones.
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Over half of the world's population lives in cities. There are more, and bigger, cities than ever before. Why, then, are we so wary of them?

Alastair Donald and Austin Williams are two architecture critics who wanted to respond to critics of urbanisation. Their book, "The Lure of the City", is a collection of essays that seeks to explore the role cities play as engines of social change and creativity. Their work celebrates cities as places of uncertainty where great things can, and often do, happen.

“Seldom is there an unabashed hymn of praise to the progress, development and transformational dynamics that urbanisation brings,” says Williams. “Even those who nominally assume that cities are good or efficient places to live and work are somewhat troubled by the pace of change, the numbers involved, the 'damage' caused to the environment.”

Here Austin Williams explains some common misconceptions about cities and looks to the future.

In your book you argue that instead of worrying about the unsustainable growth of cities we should embrace urbanisation. Why?

People are not the problem, they are the solution, but sadly we seem to have conceded that humans are the cause of the planet's imminent demise. Sustainability has become a cloak for this misanthropic attitude. It suggests that we are a drain on resources, a harmful influence.  read more »

Book publishing has its seasons. The easy beach reads of summer soon make way for autumn's weightier tomes from the big dogs of literary fiction: Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, and their ilk. Neither sort of book makes an ideal companion for the commuter—holiday-lit is often too fluffy, whereas autumn offerings are often too chunky to tote around. What is a fiction-lover to do?

One recently published solution is "Luminous Airplanes" by Paul La Farge, a novel of modest length about a sluggish computer-programmer tasked with clearing out five generations of junk from his deceased grandparents' home. Raised by twin sisters, the unnamed man drives east from San Francisco to the fictional enclave of Thebes, NY, a "little town in the Catskills where things happened so slowly that people were still speaking French six generations after the first settlers arrived."

As our narrator re-inhabits the sleepy neighbourhood where he spent his childhood summers, he finds that Thebes has changed quite a bit since he left. The Regenzeits, his former neighbours, have expanded their ski resort to draw rich weekenders from New York. These holiday travellers have in turn created a market for organic apples and exotic coffee. His grandparents have died, his uncle is dying, and his childhood friends have changed, like errant weeds, in strange and sometimes awful ways. Underpinning this journey is the mystery of his father—a shadowy figure gradually revealed by way of anecdotes and unearthed letters as his son clears through the ancestral clutter.  read more »

Poetry rarely causes neck pain, however much you may dislike it. Slight physical discomfort may have marred the 200th issue launch of PN Review on September 12th, as the choice of venue—the Cartoon Museum in Bloomsbury—required the poets to read their work from a balcony above the craning audience huddled below. Yet there was much to enjoy and distract from the occasional crick.

Originally published as “Poetry Nation” in 1973, the PN Review has been championing contemporary poetry, translations and literary debate for over 40 years. Michael Schmidt, one of the co-founders, still edits the magazine, which is run in conjunction with Carcanet Press in Manchester. With their beautifully presented publications and eclectic mix of writers, both Carcanet and PN Review are staggering on in an increasingly difficult financial climate, helped by the continuing (though diminished) support of Art Council England. With international contributors and an increasingly global audience, they have certainly moved on from Carcanet’s original intention to bring together works exclusively from Oxford and Cambridge.  read more »

The Economist's international editor discusses the work and legacy of Vasily Grossman, a Russian novelist.

For more on Grossman, see The Economist's review of the radio adaptation of "Life and Fate"; see Molly Young's review of "The Road".

The rise of e-readers has already introduced big changes for both publishers and readers. Electronic publications can be turned out faster than the paper kind, and the devices allow for more flexible formatting and pricing. We have already seen, for example, a rise in short books and free-standing articles presented as one-off downloads, as in Amazon's Kindle Singles. One contemporaneous example is Sasha Issenberg's "Rick Perry and his Eggheads". Originally part of a longer book about the science and analytics of political campaigns—called "The Victory Lab" and due next year—the chapter about the Texas governor was brought forward and published electronically just days after Mr Perry announced that he is running for president.
 
What will this mean for traditional books and magazines? Gabe Habash, writing at Publisher's Weekly, is worried. He notes that Amazon has just published a one-off short story from Tom Rachman, author of the novel "The Imperfectionists":  read more »

A “strange ‘non-place’ that we are usually eager to leave”. This is how Alain de Botton, a pop-philosopher and author, described airports in “A Week at the Airport”, the book he wrote after his stint as Heathrow’s writer-in-residence in 2009. Hardly complimentary. Nevertheless Heathrow has decided to repeat the experiment: Tony Parsons, the 57-year-old journalist and author, began his stint as the airport’s official writer earlier this month.

It may seem strange that the world’s busiest airport is getting writers on board at all. But it is something of a trend; writers now reside in all sorts of unlikely places. Eton, an English private school for boys, has collected a few, as have most prisons and the Savoy hotel in London. “My most arduous job as writer-in-residence”, mused Kathy Lette, an Australian-born novelist, “was selecting a dish to be named after me on the Savoy's menu.” She settled for the Kathy Ome-Lette.

What is Heathrow hoping to get out of the scheme? Publicity, certainly. But the airport is also attempting to inject a little glamour back into the experience of flying. Travelling by plane usually conjures up images of a few too many hours spent twiddling thumbs in chairs with unsettling stains. Or worse, a stressful stumble from one bottlenecked queue to another, and then the dreary fumble to collect one’s shoes, belt, bags, computer and other detritus.  read more »

The Economist's literary editor and Britain correspondent, both former judges of the Man Booker prize, discuss the strength of this year's longlist

J.M. Ledgard is that rare writer who elevates hard reporting with unexpected language. Of the tallest building in the world, he observes that it is like a "glorious hypodermic needle". About ants, he muses, "As primitives we ate them, they were our crunch, and now they are lodged in our subconscious." As for exploring the depths of the sea, he suggests that unlike space travel, which "offers a sighted journey towards infinity", ocean descent involves "a blind journey towards finitude".

Based in Nairobi as The Economist's East Africa correspondent, he is also a regular contributor to Intelligent Life magazine, with features about Africa's digital revolution (for which he recently won a Diageo Africa business reporting award), ants and E.O. Wilson, and the ocean's eerily remote floor, among others. Given his affection for the unique turn of phrase, It is perhaps unsurprising that he is also a novelist. "Submergence", his second novel, now out from Jonathan Cape, is a story about a British secret agent who is held hostage by jihadist fighters in Somalia; a woman who has become a leading researcher of ocean life; and their brief love affair, memorable and remote. This is a thrilling work, written with a literary, Sebaldian flair.  read more »

Jason Zinoman's book “Shock Value” succeeds where countless trailers failed: it will convince people who dislike horror films that they are missing out on a vital school of art.

In the late 1960s the genre shook off its Gothic dust and consigned werewolves, caped vampires, swoony ghosts and Vincent Price to the kitsch closet. In their place were ambiguously Satanic babies, hordes of hungry zombies, faceless and implacable serial killers and demons embodied in 12-year-old girls. The most horrifying events took place in familiar worlds.

Revelatory and entertaining, “Shock Value” conveys the thrill of discovery felt by horror-film directors such as Wes Craven, John Carpenter and Roman Polanski as they pushed the boundaries of a stale genre. Zinoman is an incisive critic and a born storyteller (and occasional contributor). I know this also because (full disclosure) he is among my oldest and closest friends; I have been listening to and laughing at his stories since high school. I interviewed him for More Intelligent Life over e-mail.  read more »