Albert Mobilio favorably reviews Chicagoan Stuart Dybek’s new story collection, I Sailed with Magellan, in today’s New York Times. “Dybek solidifies his reputation as the rightful heir to Farrell’s gritty realism.”

Also, in case you haven’t seen it, Dybek is on the cover of the most recent Poets & Writers magazine. While you’re at the P&W site, also check out the interview with Chicago writer Harry Mark Petrakis from last spring. Harry’s also one of Farrell’s heirs.

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Renowned poet and translator Richard Howard appears at the Art Institute next Friday night, giving a lecture in connection with the Manet and the Sea exhibition.

Margaret Atwood did a nice piece on Studs Terkel and his new book in the New York Review of Books a couple of issues back.

The League of Chicago Theaters has a new website for tracking local productions (via Gapers’ Block); the interface is maddening but the concept is good.

After more than a week, we’re still trading lines from Twelfth Night and laughing our heads off. See it before it disappears on the 14th.

Take away the fool, gentlemen!

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A final roundup of articles marking Hugh Kenner’s passing, courtesy of A&L Daily:

Hugh Kenner, Modernist Literary Scholar, Dies (Wash Post)
Hugh Kenner: Literary critic with a passion for Ezra Pound (Guardian)
Hugh Kenner (Telegraph)
Hugh Kenner, 80; Scholar of Modernist Prose and Poetry (LA Times)
A Critic Whose Scholarship Gleamed With His Writing (NYT)

From the last, here is where Kenner apparently stood with regard to the debate recently revived by Stephen King:

The dividing line between high and low culture is utterly fictitious. Genuine culture is neither high nor low; it involves ideas you’re happy to keep returning to for the rest of your life.

ADDITION 12/2: One more, from Jeet Heer, in Slate magazine today:

Death of a Polymath: Hugh Kenner’s passing marks the end of an era.

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I was reminded, while writing the Flann post below, that a good topic for extended consideration would be “forewords and afterwords.” Here’s a quote from one of my favorite afterwords, a little remembrance Sebastian Green wrote for a collection of his father’s writings called Surviving:

Nor can I recall him reading anything by his professed idols: Gogol, Turgenev, Doughty, Celine or Faulkner. He only liked novels — he would not read poetry or biography. He loved thrillers and magazines, particularly Time magazine. When as a teenager I was interested in motor racing, he used to read aloud a weekly article called “Pit Stop,” written by a mad car buff and full of quasi-technical jargon, which he had found in one of my motoring magazines. He would shake his head over this and howl with laughter.

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I’m afraid I can’t, with TMFTML, say this is a nice piece on Flann O’Brien. Its the intro to the reissue of a collection of his Keats and Chapman and The Brother pieces. I read it last night but my brain just balked. I read it again this morning, same thing. I think it’s sentences like this, which are either overcooked or undercooked, I can’t tell:

The direction of the extravagance is the pay-off of the pun. But its purpose is the extravagance itself. It goes without saying that these tales were written backwards. The pay-off came first. And the prodigality of the supporting structure is all the more fantastic for having been, necessarily, erected downwards.

This is like my blog on a bad day.

Though I have to applaud any effort to keep more of Flann in print . . .

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Hugh Kenner, author of The Pound Era, A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, Joyce’s Voices, and many other classics of late 20th century literary criticism, passed away yesterday:

Hugh Kenner, Commentator on Literary Modernism, Dies at 80 (NYT)
Hugh Kenner, critic of literary modernism, dead at 80 (AP)

Kenner’s combination of superhuman industriousness and riotous sense of humor will be hard to match. My favorite Kenner book has always been A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers, with its funny index:

Andersen, Hans C., vitalist, 269
Ardilaun, Lord, cautious philanthropist, 211-212
Beckett, Samuel, immobilist, 9, 28, 29 . . .
Beerbohm, Max, depictor, 77, 94
Behan, Brendan, boozer, 9, 324

I bonded with Kenner when I was an undergraduate because, in addition to being a literary critic, he was, like me, a computer nut. I still remember how I discovered that fact. I was in a bookstore and saw the Heath/Zenith Z-100 User’s Guide on the shelf with the name Hugh Kenner on the title page. Could it be? I opened the book and read the first line:

We are expert at all manner of things.

Yep, I thought: same guy.

I think it’s a safe bet that Kenner’s book is the only computer manual in the Ransom collection.

Browsing through the Kenner books on Amazon I discover one, The Elsewhere Community, which I’ve never seen before. Perfect for that annoying Chicago-based literary blogger on your list.

ADDITION 11/25:

Feedstering tonight, I turned up a few more comments on Kenner’s death from the blogosphere. Kind of an “instant Festschrift,” if you will.

Hugh Kenner, RIP (Hit and Run)
R.I.P. Hugh Kenner (Fred Sampson)
Hugh Kenner (Splinters)
Hugh Kenner (Languagehat)
In Memoriam Hugh Kenner (Aether)
Hugh Kenner, R.I.P. (About Last Night)

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A French translation of How It Was, Anne Atik’s memoir of her long friendship with Samuel Beckett, was reviewed in Le Monde on the 14th. (Here’s the abstract — the review is now in the paid archives.) It doesn’t appear that the book, which came out in the UK in 2001, has been published in the US, though you can get it from a third-party retailer on Amazon. Looks like a good buy for Beckettophiles on your X-mas list.

The only other references I could find on the web were a brief review in the newsletter of a Dublin bookshop (scroll down), and a slightly longer piece from the Irish Sunday Business Post (scrolling required also). From the latter:

During their last full meeting together, in February 1989, his mind seemed as alert as ever, though his body was failing. He asked them if they’d heard of “a good Irish poet, Seamus Heaney” and recited his favourite line from Keats: “No longer mourn for me when I am dead”. He died ten months later.

The Heaney bit is a nice surprise. But who is it — author, memoirist, or reviewer — who thinks that’s Keats?

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Very cool – I just received the schedule for the rest of the Poem Present series down in Hyde Park. Here are the remaining events:

LISA JARNOT (CHICAGO REVIEW READER)
Thursday, February 12: Reading (Classics 10: 5:30pm)
Friday, February 13 : “The Opening of the Field” (Wieboldt 408: 1:00pm)

LOCAL TALENT
Thursday, March 11: Reading (Classics 10: 5:30pm)

ROBERT CREELEY
Thursday, April 1 : Reading (Social Sciences 122 : 5:30pm)
Friday, April 2: Presentation (Classics 10: 1:00pm)

MARK DOTY (SHERRY POET)
Thursday, May 6: Reading (Classics 10: 5:30pm)
Friday, May 7: Lecture (Wieboldt 408: 1:00 pm)

LOCAL TALENT
Thursday, May 27: Reading (Classics 10: 5:30pm)

I know I’ve become tiresome on this subject, but I do believe that Poem Present is one of the best annual cultural events in town. Paul Muldoon’s reading in the 2002 series was one of my two favorite literary events of that year. (The other was Clare Cavanagh’s lecture on “Poetry and History”). The Chicago Review readings and the Local Talent events seem to be new this year. Go!

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In Ann Arbor this weekend to see The Globe Theater’s touring production of Twelfth Night, so I didn’t get to see the National Book Awards Ceremony on C-SPAN2, which is missing from the dial in A2. I did, however, get to see all six hours of Heritage Classic coverage on CBC. (Hey, in the upper Midwest, it’s our game too.)

According to a piece in the TLS last summer, some think that The Globe has surpassed The Royal Shakespeare Company as the premier interpreter of the Bard’s work. Strange to think that the company was founded by a Chicago actor (Sam Wanamaker) and is currently run by someone (artistic director Mark Rylance) raised in Milwaukee.

Even if you’re not a Chi chauvinist, Twelfth Night is well worth seeing, btw. It opens in Chicago on Wednesday and runs through December 14.

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From the item on the Literary Saloon this morning, you might think that Ilan Stavans trashed Garcia Marquez’s new memoir in the Boston Globe this weekend. In fact, he didn’t. Here’s the sentence that follows the negative comments quoted in The Saloon:

But don’t let yourself be fooled: Though it may be slow, this is a veritable tour de force, as intimate and sincere an exploration of the self as one is likely to get by the man who reinvented an entire continent.

Still, it’s an odd review, full of oblique comments that don’t sound complimentary.

BTW, The Saloon also updated its book review links. Interesting that they say few people use those links. I never did until a week or so ago, but since then have found them to be a very handy way to make your way around the literary press.

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