This morning: talking This is Spinal Tap with Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen, an Ellen Willis essay, talking with Melissa Broder, Elizabeth Ellen and Juliet Escoria in conversation, and more.
In our morning reading: a 1989 Ellen Willis essay, thoughts on the new edition of Slint’s Spiderland, talking with Mimi Pond, and more.
I had read a few Ellen Willis essays on music in the past, but until Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music (University of Minnesota Press) was released last year, I’d never had a chance to sit down and immerse myself in her writings. Simply put: Reading Ellen Willis’ thoughts on music was a revelation. Willis had this ability to mix the personal with the political when talking about music that I can’t recall ever reading before–she was truly in […]
Sasha Frere-Jones, Emily Gould, and Sara Marcus talk Ellen Willis in a roundtable discussion at Bookforum. Ruth Franklin at The New Republic wonders if Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was really about childbirth. Will John Carter be a huge bomb? If it is, what will Michael Chabon do? The violin maker of Brooklyn. Woody’s getting back in front of the camera. The five best quotes from the Bradford Cox interview at Pitchfork. Alexei Navalny, part of the Yale World Fellows Class of 2010, […]
Posted by Tobias Carroll This is the first of two lists of the books I read this year that I most enjoyed. This one focuses on books released this year; the other will focus around books that I encountered for the first time in 2011 that first entered the world in preceding years. [fragments] Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia is an intentionally messy book with shifting and sometimes overlapping narrators and a sense of history, both familial and musical, looming in […]
“I guess it’s more accessible, or at least a little less willfully disingratiating than my other books, which had more than a touch of solipsism. ” Gary Lutz is interviewed about his new collection Divorcer in The Paris Review. Kyle Ryan chats with Bob Mould. Talya Cooper, writing in Dusted, talks about Ellen Willis and the Woods/Vivian Girls side project Babies. A number of literary New Yorkers, including one Vol.1 editor, suggest some gift ideas for the weeks to come. Folks from Fucked Up […]
Posted by Jason Diamond I’ve written and read my share of year-end lists, and I’m at the point now where I’m not totally sure what sort of purpose they serve, but I continue to read and write them anyway. I’m not trying to sound jaded about peoples roundups of the year that was, in fact I rather like them and really enjoy doing my own. I guess my issue tends to be more of the way you’ve got to dig […]
“From where I sit inside the whale, ’70s rockmags and alternaweeklies generated a lost trove of American criticism. With Willis and Nelson added to the eight other names now compiled one way or another — Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, Robert Palmer, Richard Meltzer, Dave Marsh, Nick Tosches, Jon Landau, and myself — the early record is in a sense complete.” Robert Christgau on recent books by or about Ellen Willis and Paul Nelson. Joe Hill on where he does his […]