A few Mondays ago, we linked to an interview with famed Russian translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. In case that didn’t slake your interviews of literary translators thirst, here’s The Mookse and the Gripes with Chris Andrews, who has done most of the translating of Roberto Bolano for New Directions Press (although NHP did not have the rights to The Savage Detectives or 2666, which Natasha Wimmer translated for Picador and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, respectively).
In its review of fiction in the Aughts, New York Magazine implicitly compares The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—the decade’s “signature novel”—to Infinite Jest—“the big buzzy signature meganovel of the nineties.” According to Sam Anderson, Junot Díaz’s 2007 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize, represents the Aughts’ literary downsizing, from 1000-page epics like David Foster Wallace’s to 335-page condensed ones like Díaz’s.
Díaz certainly is a meticulous writer and editor: It took him 11 years to write Oscar Wao after his breakthrough 1996 short story collection, Drown. It can take that kind of time, however, when your ambition, like Díaz’s, is to relate the story not just of a single protagonist, but of his lineage and indeed, the culture that created it. In this way, Oscar Wao is a condensed epic: the tale of the de León family as a representative of the Dominican Republic during the Age of Trujillo. It’s a project that would take most writers twice as many pages and Wallace 10 times as many.
The first thing you notice when reading Díaz though is the smoothness of his prose. Liberally using Spanish words and expressions,* Díaz infuses his language with that Spanish quality of words flowing one into the next. There is an effortless fluidity to his prose: Continue reading »
In James Wood’s influential review, “Human, All Too Inhuman,” of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, he discussed what he calls “the littleness of the big novel.” His point, put somewhat crudely, was that as the ambition of novelists grows to include encompassing the entire geographical, political, and philosophical spectrum, works of fiction end up losing their humanity. As Smith herself said, “It is not the writer’s job to tell us how somebody felt about something; it’s to tell us how the world works.” As a result, Wood claims, the movement that he termed “hysterical realism” produces work that “knows a thousand things, but does not know a single human being.”
About a year after Wood’s condemnation of contemporary fiction first appeared in The New Republic, The Corrections was published. Jonathan Franzen’s novel certainly does not lack the kind of ambition Wood talks about: The Corrections spans cities, countries, and continents, covers multiple generations, deals with financial disasters and Eastern European political instability, looks at modern academia and middle-class suburbia. In short, the book does seem to know a thousand things.
And yet Franzen’s story remains wholly grounded and deeply personal. At its heart, The Corrections is a story of a Midwestern family, the Lamberts. The Lambert patriarch, Alfred, is a stubborn, straight-laced, intelligent, and principled man who is suffering from early but unmistakable signs of senility as the novel begins. As Franzen puts it: Continue reading »
We’ve already been pretty extensive in breaking down the top 10 games of the decade in the NBA, NFL, Major League Baseball, college basketball, and college football. But we haven’t yet addressed all those other wonderful sports out there that don’t quite provide us with enough memories for a whole top 10.
Our Top 5 “Other” Games considered events from sports such as golf, tennis, soccer, hockey, the Olympics, college baseball, volleyball, the WNBA, lacrosse, and even the Little League World Series. To trim it down to five, however, we had to cut a few memorable events, most notably Usain Bolt’s victory in the 100m dash at the Olympics (or his 9.58 a year later), Syracuse’s last-second comeback against Cornell in the 2009 Men’s Lacrosse Championship, Texas’ 25-inning 3-2 win over Boston College in last year’s College World Series, the Flyers’ five-overtime win over the Penguins in 2000, the Hurricanes’ buzzer-beater against the Devils in last year’s Stanley Cup Playoffs, and two marathon tennis matches involving Andy Roddick–the first in his quarterfinal victory in the 2003 Australian Open over Younes El Aynaoui (4-6, 7-6, 4-6, 6-4, 21-19), and the second in his 2009 Wimbledon final loss to Roger Federer (5-7, 7-6, 7-6, 3-6, 16-14).
After running through the Teams of the Decade this morning, it’s time to rank the Franchises/Programs of the Decade—those that have consistently churned out competitive and championship-winning teams. My criteria included things like regular-season record, number of playoff appearances, conference titles, and championships into the equation, alongside less quantifiable measures such as historical imprint and landmark players.
NFL
(all information prior to Week 16 of 2009 NFL season)
WORST: Detroit Lions (0 playoff appearances, 0-16 season, 42-116 record)
5. New York Giants (1 title, 2 conference championships, 6 playoff appearances, 6-5 playoff record, 88-70 regular season)
The first 20-30 minutes of Avatar are unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a movie theater. The entire movie takes place on a planet, Pandora, that James Cameron essentially built from scratch and special effects. The closest analog I can come up with for this type of visual creation is the island part of King Kong, but Merian C. Cooper was working with slightly less technology. And even in Peter Jackson’s recent remake, with its gripping use of CGI, we were still dealing with large gorillas and dinosaurs… you know, things that are real.
Pandora’s not like that. Everything is made up, from the plant life to the small animals to the large predators to the indigenous population of humanoids, called the Na’vi. This also doesn’t include the human technologies portrayed in the film, which run from typical “this-is-taking-place-in-the-future” signifiers like extensive use of holograms and things that hover, to more extreme modifications of aircrafts and weaponry. In short, Cameron has done an excellent job creating an entire world. The visual elements of this world, thanks both to their natural richness and the 3-D enhancements, are stunning, and the first act’s introduction of Pandora and its inhabitants is engrossing.
After that, though, you might as well walk out, because there isn’t much story to speak of. Cameron, in his first film since the overwhelmingly successful Titanic, showcases his juvenile sense of dialogue, character, and story over and over again. Continue reading »
Later today, we’ll look into Franchises of the Decade—which is how most people define “Teams of the Decade.” But right now, we’re going to be specific with our terms and figure out who were the best single-season teams in each sport in the Aughts, along with the best teams that fell short of a title and the worst teams that happened to win one.
Their defense was the single best unit of the Aughts—good enough to overcome that weak offense. They won every game in which they scored a touchdown, which included their last 11 after a 5-4 start and a quarterback change.
The first iteration of a seemingly unbeatable Patriots’ squad and the only No. 1 seed to win the Super Bowl in the Aughts, this is the team that ran off 15 straight wins after a 2-2 start en route to their second Super Bowl in three years. It will be interesting to see if this decade’s Patriots are remembered more for this team—similar to the other title-winners, it possessed an excellent defense and a solid offense that wore you down on the ground and always made just enough plays to win—or the ’07 version that stomped teams and ran up the score.*
*Cool Stat: The ’03 Patriots opened the season with a 31-0 loss to the Bills and closed the season with a 31-0 win over the Bills. I wonder if that has ever happened before. Continue reading »
The defining sports game of this decade occurred at University of Phoenix Stadium on February 3, 2008. That night, in a game that moved about as quickly as the clock in Tecmo Super Bowl, the New York Giants upset the unbeaten New England Patriots, 17-14, to win Super Bowl XLII.
It is debatable whether Super Bowl XLII is the single best game across sports in the Aughts; however, it is almost certainly the game that crystallizes the two competing movements in sports this decade: the quest for historical transcendence and the ascension of the postseason underdog.
Sports are too broad and diverse a subject to write a coherent essay that addresses what happened in the Aughts. Too much happened to be melded into a sustainable theme or argument. And although for many the story of the Aughts is what occurred off the field—be it scandals surrounding performance-enhancing drugs, referees, or personal conduct—to me, the defining narrative of sports in the Aughts is of those two competitors in Super Bowl XLII: the unbeaten Patriots and the pedestrian Giants.
Unlike my I-can’t-believe-I-still-call-him-a friend, John S, I love Christmas. It is, without doubt, the most wonderful time of the year.
The week before Christmas, I indulge in one of my favorite traditions: sitting down in front of the television and watching about 12 hours’ worth of Christmas specials. Now, not everyone has the time to consume all that holiday goodness (which admittedly gets a little repetitive at times), so here’s the official guide to what’s worth your time.
Must-See Specials
A Charlie Brown Christmas
The standard to which all half-hour holiday specials should be held, A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) highlights Charlie’s all-too realistic desires to understand Christmas amid the haze of Christmas cards and commercialism—here represented by things such as aluminum Christmas trees, Snoopy’s Christmas decorations, and Sally’s Christmas list (about which she explains, “I only want what’s coming to me. I only want my fair share”). Charlie’s depression around the holiday is legitimate, and its ultimate solution—provided of course by his best bud, Linus—is one of my favorite scenes ever from television, with a little help from Luke. Continue reading »
In 
