The Believer...

...has a Tumblr!

First post has some Spotify goodness, to listen to while reading Greil Marcus's column. Plus 31 Love Songs to accompany Rick Moody's modest proposal re the Magnetic Fields' masterpiece.

(I will occasionally tumble 4 ya.)

I am the clay

The latest Believer—the Art Issue—is out! The one and only (F.S.) Avi Davis is back, fresh from his appearance in the current Best American Travel Writing, with a terrific piece on the "dubious clay menagerie of Waldemar Julsrud." (Wha?! Just trust me, it's good.) Ed Lin—the man, the myth!—on the secret behind that Bodies exhibition! The International Necrological Society's "Declaration on the Notion of 'The Future.'" Interviews (John Baldessari, Clare Rojas)...Karolina Waclawiak on a dollhouse with tiny but original works by pretty much every British writer who was around in the ’20s that you can think of...C.S. Leigh on Jack Goldstein...David Humphrey on Carol Dunham...plus Lawrence Weschler, the Greil Marcus/Jack Pendarvis/Nick Hornby trifecta—and much more!

What is it?

It's hard to know which part to excerpt here: Rob Sheffield on music criticism (It's a lot more joyous than that sounds), at 17 dots.

I was a librarian. Part of why I loved being in and working at a library is that it meant reading and listening to my Walkman, which were my two favorite things. After I got off my shift, I would go to another room in the library with the microfilm. You could often find Village Voices and Boston Phoenixes archived, back to the ’70s.

You could read Greil Marcus’s [Voice] review of [Van Morrison’s] Veedon Fleece six months after it came out, when he said, “This album came out, I wrote a good review, forgot about it. Then I heard it at a friend’s house the other day for dinner and was like, ‘This is great. What is it?’ ‘Well, it’s Van Morrison. I bought it because you said it was good.’” And he does a whole new review. Writing about records six months after they came out is usually more interesting.

Art issue

The Believer's Art Issue is out!

Michael Paul Mason on an art-world darling—who went on to sell doughnuts at Krispy Kreme...

The grandson of Charles and Ray Eames constructs an alternate universe...

This comics-heavy issue also features Jeff Chang on Morrie Turner (the first nationally syndicated African American cartoonist), the one and only Hillary Chute talking to Aline Kominsky, interviews with Peter Blegvad and Chris Ware, and...a new feature, called "Comics"!

Plus Michelle Tea, Greil Marcus, Joshua Cohen, and much more...

Jack Pendarvis...more...more...

Also!

Disambiguations™ for October 1, 2009

I. October Believer is out! A sorta "travel issue": Avi Davis on Dracula and tourism; August Kleinzahler on Alaska; Ginger Strand and James Wallenstein on Cuba; J.C. Hallman on the history of cruise ships...plus Jonathan Ames interviewed, Sheila Heti talking to Agnès Varda, Jack Pendarvis's "Musin's and Thinkin's" Southernish humor column, and more! (Derek Walcott poem... Stephen Burt poetry review...Greil Marcus as always...Regional fast-food chart from Lincoln Michel...still more...including EYE-POPPING interior art by JING WEI!)

II. Amber Tamblyn is blogging at the Poetry Foundation's Harriet?! It's kind of amazing:

"Look at you, spell-checking the word ‘aficionado’ and correcting it. You can’t even spell. You’re a Hollywood actress who can’t spell, who doesn’t even live in Hollywood but none the less that’s what you are, because I am your subconscious and I say so."

III. I'm astonished—or maybe I'm not??—that there's no Nabokov love in the comments at Paper Cuts (vis-à-vis Rosenbaum/Laura/Slate) in fact there's no mention of Nabokov at all.

IV. Thanks to all who came out to the reading last night — that was a lot of fun!

Impossibly good new BELIEVER is out...

The January Believer has been unleashed! Dzyd Theo has an instant classic, twining personal memoir with the quest for the mysterious author of Let's Kill Uncle; you need to read this piece! Plus there's an unusual interview with Gordon Lish; a potentially life-saving megadose of Gary Lutz—

A word that I remember coming out of my parents’ mouths a lot was imagine—as in “I imagine we’re going to have rain.” I soon succumbed to the notion that to imagine was to claim to know in advance an entirely forgettable outcome. A calendar was hung in the kitchen as if to say: Expect more of the same.

...reviews of Jack Spicer and others; interviews with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and translator Robert Alter; "much more." Greil Marcus inadvertently tells me the name of a song that popped up on my Shuffle the other day—it was great and strange and I didn't know what it was (Fiery Furnaces, "Oh Sweet Woods": ).....Don't miss this amazing Joshua Clover piece (another instant classic!) on the financial crisis—here's how it starts:

We could begin in fifteenth-century Genoa with the invention of fixed currency and modern banking, or with the first foreclosure of this current crisis just a couple years back. I’m going to begin near the middle: in the nineteenth-century United States, with banks and railroads.

Railroads being too pricey even for the well-heeled capitalist, banks that could provide grand lines of credit became major players. This concert of powers dominated the nation’s finances, extending the financial network even as they exerted increasingly centralized control. They were only too willing to loan the money forward, both for stakes in the enterprises and in the happy knowledge that the intercontinental railroad would open up new markets. Credit doesn’t just allow for such expansions; it requires them, to conjure its necessary returns.

The relationship was so intimate that sometimes it collapsed into singularity. Chartered in 1833, the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company built a then-lengthy line from Atlanta to Augusta; the firm survives as a real-estate concern. Its rail system now belongs to massive CSX Transportation; the banking division was a part of Wachovia, which was nearly obliterated this September and has under Federal duress recently merged with Wells Fargo, which started in 1852 as a transport and banking company. Two great tastes that go great together.

The salient point is this: that the expansion of the rail systems throughout physical space, sewing together the continental United States with threads of iron, was identical to the credit-fired expansion of financial networks. Not parallel developments, but one and the same. Geopolitical space and finance space are simply different dimensions of the same structure, the same unified market—what we might call geofinancial space.

New year's resolution: I will subscribe to The Believer for a mere $45 and if I already subscribe I will get subscriptions for my friends.

"The Good Fight"

The new Believer is out—it is just WOW—you need to have it. Adam Thirlwell (whom I've dubbed "too good to blog about")...Jason Boog on GI Joe and war...Greil Marcus on Joy Division and more...short reviews...Bishop/Lowell letters.........interviews with Will Eno, Bruce Jay Friedman (by Amy Sohn), Nico Muhly, Diane Williams....a Joshua Clover poem!?—and this piece by Dzyd James, about a failed run for a state house seat........:

I was a Democrat who disdained most other Democrats—suicide in a Democratic primary—and finally hired my old assistant, a fearless twenty-six-year-old who shared my “I love it because I hate it” philosophy of politics. Aryah’s job for the first few days was to stand behind me while I talked to voters at their doors, then ridicule my performance. I was nervous, talked too fast, apologized when I asked for someone’s email address, and generally squirmed like a kid whose ball had gone through each voter’s window. Aryah’s attitude was that we were trying to help people by interrupting their dinner and telling them about the great James Browning. He told old people that I was going to make universal health care a reality, people with toys in their yards that I was going to get more money for the public schools, people with Chesapeake Bay license plates that I would do something about Maryland’s terrible air quality. Listening to Aryah talk, I started to like the sound of this Browning guy and lost some of my shame.