March 4th, 2006
Literary zines, book blogs and Banville in the Guardian
Seeing as there’s been so much book chatter over the last couple of days, let me point you in the direction of a new discovery. Belfast-based Susan Tomaselli runs Dogmatika, a literary zine that includes book reviews, features, interviews and a blog that’s updated daily. It’s like a cross between the book section of the old Sigla Magazine, Danny Yee’s book reviews and Bookslut.
Also, via Ms Bookish, another absorbing book blog: Out of the Woods Now.
And in today’s Guardian, readers tackle John Banville on shirking social history. Richard take note.
March 4th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
As a fan, (guess where I’ve lifted my nickname from) I listened to that Banville podcast the other day and found myself more and more in disagreement with his conception of the function and purpose of art and the artist - it seemed he had a tendency to universalise from his particular experience in a not particularly illuminating way. But then it’s not his job to separate himself as dancer from his dance.
I think he must have been playing a bit of a joke on his audience because a lot of what he had to say was patent balls (that comment about the Nazis was so horribly contructed and bizarre for example and yet here is a man who always has time for Prufrock’s “hundred visions and revisions”). I imagine the coldness is a purposed pose and that he doesn’t really believe in expressing himself in the circumstances of an “audience with”. “Fuck off and read my books”, I hear his inner voice declaim. Of course he’s entitled to have his own conception of the artist’s life and the crafting of its public face, it’s just that the level of gamesmanship involved in his particular iteration of it seems on occasion to be immediately post-adolescent.
He has a big family and you can kind of tell by him that he’s not the prose-crafting ice-maiden his image as an artist suggests.
I see Mr. B the odd time in Dunne and Crescenzi on Frederick Street. Maybe next time I’ll make the tossy arm gesture at him.
March 4th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
8-| “a new discovery. Belfast-based Susan Tomaselli runs Dogmatika”