Following up on my Bernard Cantat post of a few weeks back: Pierre Assouline informs us that a condition of Cantat’s liberation from prison was that he be forbidden to write a book about his experience.  No, this is not a result of the OJ Simpson If I Did It debacle; this is actually a French law, enacted in 2004 after Patrick Henry, condemned to life in prison in 1977 for killing a child, was released in 2001 the day before his book was published, called Do You Regret Anything?.

Assouline also has more on the Goncourt, in case you’re interested. And The Guardian has a piece in English, in case (quel horreur!) you don’t read French.

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Feeling inspired to write a bit of poetry? Or perhaps feeling rather uninspired, but obliged to write some anyway? The Guardian brings us an exercise from poet Eleanor Rees, entitled "Stepping Out." It begins:

This is an exercise in which I want you to reimagine a familiar
environment, somewhere you are drawn to for reasons that aren’t
obvious. The emphasis here is on developing a writing process that
prioritises experience as a starting point for writing poetry, and
foregrounds the materiality of language.

If you come up with something good, you can email it to The Guardian, and if they like it, they’ll print it. Details after the jump.

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Don’t get me wrong; I love the National Book Critics Circle (I am a member, after all) and their blog Critical Mass.  But every so often, as an academic, I feel a little out of place reading it. These days, they’re talking to writers and book critics like John Updike about what works of literary criticism they find most indispensable, and giving answers like Erich Auerbach, Edmund Wilson, and Roland Barthes.  It’s nice, on one hand, to see non-academics reading Barthes, but on the other hand there is something distinctly boastful about these lists. I don’t think academics should have a monopoly on critics like Auerbach and Barthes– in fact I think book critics in general would be better served by making their reviews similarly serious about literature– but because Barthes seems to me so very irrelevant to what’s happening in the pages of your local book review section (and my local book review section is no less than the NY Times), I don’t know how much I care if the book critics are reading him or not. If you’re going to boast that you read Barthes, shouldn’t your criticism demonstrate at least some acknowledgment that structuralism existed and influenced the way some people think about language and literature? I don’t know– I don’t have a lot of time or energy right now to figure out what about this seems a bit off to me, but I thought I would throw the idea out there.

The other critics range from Morris Dickstein to Cynthia Ozick, and their thoughts are delightful and inspiring.

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And on that note: I wrote about melty fatty food for Gridskipper this week! Check it out.