On the theme of the acclaimed new book by Alex Ross:

In 1908, after being lambasted in the press and cuckolded by his wife, Arnold Schoenberg reinvented classical music. We're still trying to figure out what comes next.

More cuckoldry, maybe?

The atonal century

You may not always like Clive Thompson's work, but he may interest you here.

For whatever reasons — maybe the reality fatigue I've felt — a lot of literary writers are trying their hand at speculative fiction. Philip Roth used a "counterfactual" history — what if Nazi sympathizers in the US won the 1940 election? — to explore anti-Semitism in The Plot Against America. Cormac McCarthy muses on the nature of morality in the Hobbesian anarchy of his novel The Road. Then there's the genre-bending likes of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Susanna Clarke, and Margaret Atwood (whom I like to think of as a sci-fi novelist trapped inside a literary author).

Those aren't writers whose books are adorned with embossed dragons. But that doesn't mean they don't owe that dragon a large debt.

Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing

Here are the nominations for the Golden Guy:

80th Academy Awards

It will be very hard to pick winners here ... most of them are very well matched.

The Oscar Gun Goes Off

When "stand-up philosopher" Slavoj Zizek calls for "repeating Lenin" or praises Robespierre's defence of terror, some observers might be tempted to ask whether his entire intellectual oeuvre is not just some kind of act. No, says John Clark. "It's not just a pose; it's a position."

Acting up

Judith Thurman's book of essays possesses the three cardinal virtues of nonfiction: Its prose is stylish and often witty; it delves into various topics with hungry curiosity, and it is very, very intelligent. Thurman takes her subjects seriously, giving the same respect and in-depth analysis to "Hump the Grinder's Hair Wars" as she does to the novels of Gustave Flaubert.

Many essays are about fashion, treating it not as a trivial pursuit of the chic and moneyed, but as the preeminent domain of beauty and its transgressions, of disguise and invention, of the making and remaking of identity. Her subjects include Madame de Pompadour, Marie Antoinette, Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli, Bill Blass and Ralph Lauren.

Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire

On paper the labyrinth of British dance genres and microgenres can seem hopelessly complicated. But at Love D1 emphasized the basics, and he got a big cheer every time he dropped one of the monstrous bass lines that dubstep is known for. Although “bass line” scarcely seems like the right term: the timbres are scrambled and the tones are obliterated; instead of a melodic groove, you get a huge, serrated blob.

Dubstep is one more aftershock of an explosion that happened in the early 1990s, when British producers drew from electronic dance music and dance-hall reggae to create a furiously syncopated genre called jungle — and, later, drum and bass. Since then the sound has been mutating, spinning off new genres as producers and D.J.s change their priorities: hot declaration versus cool abstraction; voices versus beats; fits and starts versus nonstop dancing.

Evolving and Mutating, Dubstep Splits Cells and Gives Life to Dance Floors

Last night I dreamed that angels stood without
The tavern door, and knocked in vain, and wept;
They took the clay of Adam, and, methought,
Moulded a cup therewith while all men slept.

...

Yet since the earliest time that man has sought
To comb the locks of Speech, his goodly bride,
Not one, like Hafiz, from the face of Thought
Has torn the veil of Ignorance aside.

A poem by Hafez, translated by Gertrude "Queen of the Quagmire" Bell, 1897.

The Angel at the Tavern Door

A few years ago, my first novel was published. It did pretty well, won an award, was translated and sold around the world; the movie rights were even optioned. Now I want to put it online — no charge, no hook, no catch. My motivation is simple: greed.

My publishers are resolutely opposed to this idea. They fear it will “devalue the brand” and set a dangerous precedent. They fear, intuitively but wrongly, that fewer people will buy a book that is also given away for free. But most of all, they fear the future — and with good reason. Book publishing is a dinosaur industry, and there’s a big scary meteor on the way.

Apocalypse Soon

Sasha Frere-Jones will be reading the first piece he wrote for The New Yorker (*) on Wednesday, January 23rd, at KGB Bar, on East Fourth Street. The theme of the evening is “Design Criticism.” The organizers are being more than kind to think that his take on Arthur Russell constitutes a fruitful engagement with the concept of design. But he is told that someone will be playing the Russell songs mentioned in the piece, and that is a thing worth leaving the house for, as is the opportunity to hear his co-readers: Jody Rosen, Rob Giampietro, and Stuart Bailey. Even if you already have the Russell records, you do not have these people on your shelf. So come on out.

People seem to like the place.

(*) To tempt you to click through, I'll excerpt the opening sentence:

This story begins, as many good ones do, with a gay man from Oskaloosa playing cello in a closet in a Buddhist seminary.

SFJ at KGB on 01/23

Here is your chance to weigh in on one of the most troubling dilemmas in contemporary literary culture. I know I'm hopelessly conflicted about it. It's the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died.

Nabokov wanted his last work destroyed. Should it be?