Linkdump

Time to clean out some bookmarks...

• LitHaven is on fire these days, and recently published a new short story by Aimee Bender, "Night". Be sure also to see their interviews.
  
  
• Neil Gaiman has put his story "I, Cthulhu" up on his site.
  
  
• Jeff VanderMeer offers some thoughts as he reads the new Haruki Murakami novel, Kafka on the Shore:

  Are there books we under-appreciate through no fault of the author's, but because our own imaginations as readers are not up to the task? And are there books we admire in part because we are not imaginative enough to see them for what they are?
  
  In any event, I'm enjoying Murakami's latest novel so far. It is rather beautiful and strange and down-to-earth and surreal and realistic and meandering and focused--everything a good novel should be.

• Want literary links? Go to The Page. Better than Arts & Letters Daily. Utterly magnificent. (via Ron)
  
  
• The Literary Saloon has some Alasdair Grey links, including to full texts of some of his plays.
  
  
• Alan DeNiro takes on Richard Trayson's call for "Whitmanesque poetry".
  
  
• Jim Crace responds to some fans and aspiring writers. (Have I mentioned that I've loved a couple of Crace's books? Particularly Being Dead and Arcadia. I wrote about his latest, Genesis, here.)
  
  
• Ron Silliman thinks about war poems (among other things).
  
  
• CultureSpace points to two excellent articles about Susan Sontag from Offscreen: an analysis of Sontag's film criticism and some thoughts on "Against Interpretation".
  
  
• David Moles has a blog for his series of "Irrational Histories", first published in Rabid Transit: Petting Zoo. I found myself wanting more from the original set, and, thankfully, David is now adding new installments, including the latest, "Showa 20 (AD 1945)"
  
  
• I've been following the Ward Churchill controversy a bit, since I actually found the timelines in Churchill's book On the Justice of Roosting Chickens interesting, sad reading, though Churchill's writings on (against) pacifism seemed to me at best incoherent, at worst a glorification of the joys of killing people, so I've been wary of him. There's an interesting post at Inside Higher Ed that gets views from various sides of a few different controversies. Michael Berube, an amusing writer who seems to be a congenital moderate, also has some thoughts on academic freedom.
  
  
• Two new blogs: DesiLit Daily ("celebrating South Asian and diaspora literature") and Barbaric Document (long, thoughtful posts on books).
  
  
• The Tangled Bank, a roving weekly carnival of links to good writing about biological sciences. And The Carnival of the Vanities just posted the 125th installment. Something tells me we need a Carnival of the Literaries...