Paradise Digest (Early Mid-October)

What I've been reading and listening to, what I've been ingesting these past few weeks.

News and Sundry

• László Krasznahorkai has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, awarded “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art,” as the Swedish Academy states. This is richly deserved. Those unfamiliar with Krasznahorkai’s work should check out his Hungarian novels, particularly Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance, but really any of them will do. Paradise Almanac also recommends his fiction set in Japan, specifically the novel Seiobo, There Below and the novella A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East.

• With all the worry about declining literacy, it’s good to get some good news every once in a while. And much of that good news, at least in America, has been coming from its poorest region. States in the Deep South have seen a dramatic jump in reading scores, with Mississippi rising from 49th place in fourth-grade reading ability to 9th place. The key, writes Kelsey Piper in The Argument, is the adoption, or rather re-adoption, of proven methods such as phonics, along with subject-specific training for teachers. Why aren’t these developments better known, even though they overwhelmingly benefit the most disadvantaged students? Education is a highly partisan field, and many of these reforms, specifically testing and holding back underperforming students, run counter to popular positions within academic pedagogy.

• The publisher First to Knock has announced Know Me to Be Your Superior in Everything—Erik Satie & the Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor, an absolutely wild archival project focusing on the eccentric composer’s art-based religion. Compiled by Sam Kunkel, a scholar of 19^th-century symbolist literature, Know Me to Be Your Superior in Everything is “the first book dedicated exclusively to the story of Erik Satie’s Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor. Drawing upon a multitude of firsthand sources—including documents held in the Erik Satie archives in Caen—the book includes new English translations of all known Church publications and correspondence by Satie as the Parcener. Facsimilic translations of Satie’s Church publications are reproduced herein as well, capturing, for the first time in English, the design and typography of the original productions.” The book even comes with flexi-disc record of Satie’s music. Neat.

• The writer and critic

  Robert Rubsam
  has been busy recently. An excerpt of his as-yet unpublished novel, The Searchers, is available through minor literature[s], highly recommended for its mordant take on the European backpacker scene: “I don’t know why I climbed into the night. Yes, I was young and drunk and hopelessly lost. Yet fool that I was I should still have stumbled back to my room, climbed into my bunk, and awoken that afternoon in agony. But then I would never have met Anna, and I would not be speaking to you now.” Rob also has a long piece about the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata at Liberties Journal. The essay focuses on elusive, fractured nature of Kawabata’s work, which, despite its lack of formal complexity (at least in translation), makes for difficult but ultimately rewarding reading.