January Believer!

The first Believer of 2011 (!!) is out! (I was at Book Culture yesterday and saw a stack of 'em!)

You must read Andy Selsberg's piece on conscientious clothing—is there a movement afoot? Does said nascent movement need a Michael Pollan (as Andy suggests)? Well, Andy Selsberg is the Michael Pollan of the conscientious clothing movement!

Reif Larsen (on the pleasures of the book, and the possibilities of the e-book) and Theo Schell-Lambert (on what those e-book ads really mean) will blow your mind!

Plus interviews with Guy Maddin, Pharoahe Monche, Bianca Casady, and others!

An excerpt from Deb Olin Unferth's upcoming memoir Revolution (which is great)...Justin Taylor on Bette Pesteky's Lish-edited 1981 collection, Stories Up to a Point...Columny goodness from Greil Marcus, Nick Hornby, and Jack Pendarvis...and much more!

Happy new year!

Let's Read "Uncle"!

Remember Theo Schell-Lambert's great Believer piece on Rohan O'Grady's novel Let's Kill Uncle? (Beg/borrow/steal an issue—you need to read TSL's piece.)

Now Bloomsbury has brought it back into print, as part of their handsome/sprightly "Bloomsbury Group" line. (I reviewed the second in this series, Wolf Mankowitz's A Kid for Two Farthings, last year, and the other titles look like a lot of fun.) The Edward Gorey cover art, so you know, is reproduced inside. I can't wait to read it...some other stuff to get through first—for "some" read" A LOT OF"...

After nature

Sebald: A fragrance for men.

Pickwick and the Bs

I. Dickens turned out a number of Pickwick every month from March 1836 to November 1837--but November of 1836, Dickens also took on the editorship of Bentley's Miscellany, and in January of 1837 he graced its pages with the first installment of Oliver Twist. From there on, for nearly a full year, Dickens wrote both novels simultaneously, a task which, the Companion rather flatly notes,

he accomplished by devoting the first two weeks of each month to the Miscellany and the latter half of the month to Pickwick.

—I've Been Reading Lately

II. The problem is not Baker himself. The problem is that, as long as Baker lasts, the B’s last, because whenever I am onsite I get caught up in Nicholson’s near neighbors—the Pat Barkers and the Julian Barneses and the John Barths of the stacks. The Bolanos and the Brautigans.

—Theo Schell-Lambert, "The Real Cost of Books, Footnoted" (from Flatmancrooked)

Howard O'Who's-that?

The Vancouver Courier ponders "The Curse of Canlit," looking at the work of native daughter June Skinner, who wrote as Rohan O'Grady.

"The closest parallel I can think of to June is Howard O'Hagan," says her son-in-law, chatting after the Courier's interview with June in an upstairs bedroom. "And he would not have survived at all into the Canadian canon if Michael Ondaatje had not found him and championed him."

Along the way the piece provides a glimpse at the story behind Dzyd Theo's Blvr. story about his obsession with O'Grady and Let's Kill Uncle.

Perhaps Schell-Lambert's article will be the spark needed to get Skinner's work back in print in her own country. If one of her books can affect readers the way it did him, she deserves at least a serious reappraisal.

"Apparently [Schell-Lambert] has old school friends as haunted by it as he was," says Mary. "I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I think of 25 years of 10-year-olds being exposed to that."

REMINDER: YOU NEED TO READ THEO'S PIECE.

TRIVIA: What do Ondaatje, P.G. Wodehouse, and Raymond Chandler have in common?

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.