New Article Online Today

I've got a new essay up at Bookslut today. This one looks at the life and career of Stefan Zweig:

Most literary revivals fail. Some don't -- sometimes Edmund Wilson edits a few posthumous volumes of F. Scott Fitzgerald's work and succeeds in saving the author of The Great Gatsby from oblivion. But most "lost" writers stay that way, despite the efforts of the editors, publishers, and critics who try and reintroduce them. Stefan Zweig is not quite obscure in the English-speaking world -- several of his books remain in print and he still attracts high-profile fans like Joan Acocella, Clive James, and the late John Geilguld -- but he seems forever perched on the cusp of a revival that never quite comes.

You can read the whole think here. Enjoy!

A Quick Update, and a New Essay

I had hoped to get the new version of the site going by now, but things have been crazy so... Anyway, to tide you over, I have new essay up at The Millions today called Fragmentary: Writing in a Digital Age. I actually wrote another piece for them a few months back, celebrating Shakespeare's Henry V on St. Crispin's Day.

If you're new to the site, I've got some links over on the right to some selected pieces elsewhere online. I'd especially encourage you to check out my article archive at Bookslut, which has got a lot of my reviews from the last few years. Thanks!

Changes Coming

The blog is going to remain dark a little longer. I have an idea for a new iteration of the site, and will probably not resume posting until it is fleshed out. In the meantime, you should follow me on Twitter, for all my latest book-related thoughts.

New Article Online Today

Hello. I wanted to check in to let everyone know about a new article I have at Bookslut. This one is a feature looking at the work of Victor Serge:

It would be a stretch to say that this is Victor Serge’s moment -- he remains largely unknown to the general public -- but his work is certainly enjoying more attention now than it has for quite a while, especially in North America. Though never the household name his fans and supporters George Orwell and Andre Gide were, Serge holds an important place in twentieth century letters. After all, Wallace Stevens wrote poetry about him, and no less a personage than Susan Sontag declared him to be “one of the most compelling of twentieth century ethical and literary heroes.” He participated in almost every major radical political movement of the first half of the twentieth century, from the Russian Revolution, to the Spanish Civil War, to the French Resistance during World War II, before dying in Mexico in 1947, isolated and broke. In fact, one of the reasons Serge isn’t more widely read is that details of his fascinating biography sometimes overwhelm any discussion of his writing.

Born Victor Kibalchich, politics dominated his life literally from the beginning -- he was born in Belgium only because his anti-czarist parents had been exiled from their Russian homeland. Serge saw himself first and foremost as a revolutionary, beginning his career with the European anarchist movement before traveling to Russia in 1919 to join the Bolsheviks. Most of his career was spent writing nonfiction tracts in favor of revolution, or in advancing radical ideas. During the early days of the Soviet Union, Serge worked for the Communist International (Comintern), writing propaganda on behalf of the Party. Despite his early, vocal support for the Soviet state, however, Serge became one of Stalin’s earliest and most ardent critics -- he is reputed to be the first person to call the Soviet Union a “totalitarian state” -- which led to his repeated imprisonment and, in 1936, he was permanently exiled from the USSR.

Serge first turned to fiction during his long battle against Stalin, beginning his first novel, 1930’s Men in Prison, at the age of thirty-nine. Though he came to the form late, Serge’s novels are among his most powerful, and most significant, works, and in recent years, his fiction has finally begun to earn him a wider audience.

Read the full article here. Thanks!

I'm still alive

Sorry blogging's been so light. I've got some other projects going on, and they've been eating up my time. I'll be back blogging soon, but In the meantime you can follow me on Twitter here.

Song of the Week

I saw PJ Harvey twice this week, so I figured I'd make "Down By the Water" song of the week:

On Rereading and Rereading Again

I've talked a lot about Faulkner lately, but I've got two reviews on Bookslut this month. I wanted to touch on the other briefly. John Armstrong's In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea makes an effort to revitalize discussion of the concept of "civilization." The thing that struck me most about the book was Armstrong's discussion of rereading, a subject that is important to me too. As I say in the piece:

Armstrong wants us to invest all experience with the seriousness with which an artist invests her work.

This seriousness can often be downright countercultural, such as when he examines the reading habits of the artist Poussin. In contrast to contemporary readers, who have a limitless digital library available to them online, the painter is said to have owned only nineteen books, which he reread continuously. Armstrong calls this a “beguiling” situation, and meditates on the virtues of rereading: “Rereading [books] allows for the thoughts in them and one’s own thoughts to grow together; for the secrets of the works to be carefully and slowly appraised, for the content to be thought over and thought through.” The point is not that the reader should emulate Poussin and limit oneself to only a handful of books, but that Poussin’s example offers an inspiration for us to reread more ourselves.

I enjoy reading new books, of course. But there is something profound about returning to the same books over and over again. We usually have our most profound conversations with friends and loved once. In part, this is because we already know their thinking so well, and that gives us a certain freedom to push an argument we might not have otherwise--we have already gotten the basics out of the way and are able to dive deeper, building on previous conversations and experiences together.

Books are the same way--each reading builds on the last, allowing us to see something new in the text we weren't ready for the first time around. It allows a certain intimacy with the work. As Armstrong points out, "the thoughts in [books we reread] and [our] own thoughts to grow together" over time, as each reading allows to go further and further into a given text. Which in turns helps us to develop our own thoughts. Whether you call it "civilized" or not is up to you, but it is certainly valuable.