Languor Management

A great sculptor who is hired to do a plumbing job

The University of South Carolina has acquired some 2,000 pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Hollywood scribblings, treatments, sketches, drafts, polishes, and rewrites.

"He took screenwriting very seriously," [said Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli], "and it's heartbreaking to see how much effort he put into it." The new archive reveals, among other things, that Fitzgerald approached every screenplay as if it were a novel and often wrote long back stories for each of the characters before setting down a word of dialogue.

Balaklava Eastern European Poets Series presents: Dmitri Prigov & Charles Bernstein

The Balaklava Eastern European Poets Series presents: Dmitri Prigov & Charles Bernstein

An evening with the acclaimed Moscow poet and visual artist, Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov, one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism and a key figure of the Soviet underground of the 1970s and 80s. with readings in Russian and English and a live discussion/interview between Prigov and Charles Bernstein, who himself needs no introduction.

Sunday, February 29th, 8 PM at the Bowery Poetry Club, 308 Bowery @ Bleecker, right across from CBGB's.

Pasternak's Collected Works. Well, it's about time!

The complete works of Boris Pasternak, best known in the West as the author of Doctor Zhivago, are finally being published in Russia. Pasternak was banned in 1958 from the Union of Soviet Writers after receiving the Nobel prize for literature (which he was pressured to refuse). The ban was lifted in 1988 under Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost policy. All eleven volumes are set to be published by February 2005 to mark the 115th anniversary of Pasternak's birth.

In an open letter to Education Minister Vladimir Filippov in the Izvestiya newspaper last summer, a group of Russian writers and muscians said novelists of the stature of Pasternak are now being recommended for optional reading only in high schools.

Soviet canon continues to push out the historical truth that has been acquired over the past 10 years on the repressive regime and its consequences on the people.

Marina Tsvetaeva, a poet and contemporary of Pasternak, said it best:

Pasternak is a spendthrift. An outflow of light. An inexhaustible outflow of light. In him is made manifest the law of the year of famine: Waste, and you won't want. So we are not anxioius for him, but we may reflect, about ourselves, being confronted with his essence: 'Who is able to contain this, let him contain it.'

Words Without Borders

An excellent profile of Words Without Borders, a terrific site dedicated to introducing exciting international writing to the general public by presenting international literature "not as a static, elite phenomenon, but a portal through which to explore the world."

[A] widely cited 1999 report from the National Endowment for the Arts calculated that about 3 percent of the books published in the United States were translations, compared with 40 to 50 percent in Western European countries.