Lynne Tillman's New Book in the New Yorker

What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (April 2014) is a new collection of essays and criticism by UAlbany English Professor Lynne Tillman.

Here's a profile of Tillman from the introduction to the new book by Irish writer Colm Tóibín posted on the New Yorker blog:

"She was wearing black; she had a glass of whiskey on the rocks in her hand. Her delivery was dry, deadpan, deliberate. There was an ironic undertow in her voice, and a sense that she had it in for earnestness, easy emotion, realism. She exuded a tone which was considered, examined and then re-examined. She understood, it seemed to me, that everything she said would have to be able to survive the listeners’ intelligence and sense of irony; her own intelligence was high and refined, her sense of irony knowing and humorous. I had not come across anyone like her before...."

More: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/04/on-lynne-tillman.html

Here's a review from Bookforum:

I’ve long admired Lynne Tillman’s criticism. Her writing is founded on curiosity and deep feeling. It’s precise and imaginative, devoid of jargon or cliché. It’s the opposite of what I dislike in criticism, and I know I’m not alone in my appreciation of what she does. “What she does” is hard to pinpoint, though, and the title of her new collection is a good-natured fake-out for all of us who might look to her as a model for how to live—or just how to write.

More:  http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_01/13002

And here's some assorted praise:

"Lynne Tillman has always been a hero of mine — not because I 'admire' her writing, (although I do, very, very much), but because I feel it. Imagine driving alone at night. You turn on the radio and hear a song that seems to say it all. That's how I feel...:" — Jonathan Safran Foer

"Lynne Tillman's writing is bracing, absurd, argumentative, and luminous. She never fails to exhibit her unique capacities for watchfulness and astonishment." — Jonathan Lethem

"Like an acupuncturist, Lynne Tillman knows the precise points in which to sink her delicate probes. One of the biggest problems in composing fiction is understanding what to leave out; no one is more severe, more elegant, more shocking in her reticences than Tillman." — Edmund White

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On Madness and Visual Imagery, Monday

Leading cultural theorist W.J.T. Mitchell, known for his brilliant analysis of the "language of images" and visual culture, presents a talk, “Seeing Madness: Insanity, Media and Visual Culture,” at RPI, Monday, April 29, 4-6PM, in the Darrin Communications Center, Rm. 330., free and open to the public.

W. J. T. Mitchell, Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, is a scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature. Editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, Mitchell has been a key figure in developing the field of visual culture and in exploring the relationship of visual and verbal representations of social and political issues. He has written on the politics of space in the Occupy Movement and the Arab Spring, as well as the question of landscape in Israel and Palestine. His books include  Seeing Through Race, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present, What do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon, Picture Theory, and Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Mitchell has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association, and the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association.

For more information: esroce@rpi.edu.

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J. Hoberman at the Movies this Friday

We invite you to attend our final event of the season, a special opportunity to view and discuss film clips and the future of cinema with major film critic J. Hoberman, a contributor at the Village Voice for more than three decades, and author of the new book about trends in 21^st century cinema, Film After Film (2012).

Among other films, Hoberman will be showing clips from animated adult feature, Waking Life, and the Polish-Japanese video game digital feature, Avalon.

 

J. Hoberman, film critic
December 7 (Friday)
Reading/Discussion — 8:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus

J. Hoberman, one of the most influential American film critics of recent decades, is admired for his wit, intellectual energy and incomparable knowledge of experimental, international, independent, and Hollywood cinema. His new book is Film After Film (2012), which argues among other things that the future of film is animation and digital-image-making, ending “the need for an actual world, let alone a camera.” Senior film critic at the Village Voice from 1988 to 2012, Hoberman started with the paper in the 1970s as a third stringer under critic Andrew Sarris. Jessica Winter of Time magazine praised his work as “elegant, erudite, ambitious, and wondrously droll arts and media criticism,” and credited him for teaching her generation of critics “how to think and write about popular culture.” A portion of the Writers Institute’s fall 2012 Classic Film Series was based on Hoberman’s list of his favorite 21st century films
(see Classic Film Series Listing).

 

For more information contact 518-442-5620 or writers@albany.edu, or visit us online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/ . You may also wish to visit our blog at http://nyswiblog.blogspot.com/, or to friend us on Facebook. 

 

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Rick Moody: Novelist Turned Music Critic

Howard Hampton in the NY Times is won over by novelist Rick Moody's new collection of essays on rock and pop bands, On Celestial Music (2012).

"The book’s best essays wrestle with performers and songs as if they were Moody’s better angels and personal hellhounds. He plunges in, thoughtful and reckless, psychoanalyzing the sounds and lyrics and singers and his own reactions, caught in a blissful, bleary tug of war between the heights of intoxication and the depths of hangover. He writes with enormous reserves of empathy and grace about the Magnetic Fields (fickle, arty, doubling back on themselves like serpent-shaped licorice), Wilco (a time-exposure wedding photo, Mathew Brady via Diane Arbus), the Pogues (an Alcoholics Unanimous meeting) and the deeply peculiar Danielson Famile (a Christian cult band or a band of Christian cultists or maybe some kind of crypto-born-again art project). This is doubly appealing for me because these happen to be bands I’ve never had time or affinity for...."

More.

Moody reads tonight 7/26 at Skidmore with Francine Prose.

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Reading vs. Gazing Out the Window

Geoff Dyer, former UAlbany Writer-in-Residence who just received the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, writes his difficulties finding the motivation to read in his award-winning new book, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews. The excerpt is from the FSG website.

"....I find it increasingly difficult to read. This year I read fewer books than last year; last year I read fewer than the year before; the year before I read fewer than the year before that. The phenomenon of writer’s block is well known, but what I am suffering from is reader’s block. The condition is creeping rather than chronic, manifesting itself in different ways in different circumstances. On a trip to the Bahamas recently I regularly stopped myself reading because, whereas I could read a book anywhere, this was the only time I was likely to see sea so turquoise, sand so pink. Somewhat grandly, I call this the Mir syndrome, after the cosmonaut who said that he didn’t read a page of the book he’d taken to the space station because his spare moments were better spent gazing out of the window."

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