Robert Coover's Fable Land discussion
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Robert Coover
Links, Resources, Oil, Interviews, and Such-like
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The Spring 2013, Web Issue 15, or Flashpoint has collected an immense pile of Coover stuff ;; including some of the contributions to The Review of Contemporary Fiction: Robert Coover Festschrift: Spring 2012. http://www.flashpointmag.com/
An interview at McSweeney's :: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/no...A bookslut interview from 2010 :: http://www.bookslut.com/features/2010...
This comment perhaps falls in the "Oil" portion of this thread :: probably Snake=Oil.I created this group in part to perform penance for the fact that my own Coover=Reviews have performed very poorly in the way of promoting Coover=Reading. But, if you don't mind picking at skinny chicken wings, you can browse the few Coover=Reviews I've written by directing your good self hither ::
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list...
I understand that this kind of Bulk=Self=Promotion is the deepest of tastelessness and I will not do it very frequently in the future. Meanwhile, freely post links to your own Excellent=Reviews in the corresponding Fable Land threads, etc etc etc.
A bevy of coover=booze from the NYT Book section ;; reviews of and by Coover ; and an essay or two :: watch your Archival as you descend :http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27...
why was I not at this event? curse my temporal and geographic limitations! http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27...
Nathan "N.R." wrote: "A bevy of coover=booze from the NYT Book section ;; reviews of and by Coover ; and an essay or two :: watch your Archival as you descend :http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/27..."
Thanks for this link!
Coover's brief essay "Tale, Myth, Writer" appears in Kate Bernheimer's Brothers Beasts—a collection of male writers on fairy tales and such (published 2007).It's a nice little essay in a nice little book. teaser:
Tale is the underbelly of myth. Myth is head, tale body; myth power, tale resistance; myth nice, tale naughty; myth structure, tale flow; myth king, tale flow; myth sacred, tale profane; myth father, tale child (though the child, as always, is the father's father); myth tragic, tale comic.
Short interview ::"Robert Coover prefers to write in cafés — other countries" ::
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books...
Highly to recommend this short, recent Interview::"Told and retold" by Lydialyle Gibson
The U of Chicago Magazine ::
http://mag.uchicago.edu/arts-humaniti...
"I ran into an argument between the theologian Rudolf Bultmann and the philosopher Karl Jaspers. Basically, Bultmann wanted to de-mythologize Christianity, to rid the Bible of the folk and fairy tales and its dubious histories, and reduce the Christian story to its so-called facts, its indisputable essence, its indispensable dogmas. Jaspers felt that was a kind of false rationalism, that the stories that Bultmann wanted to keep had no more validity than those he wanted to throw out, but each had equal mythic or tale-telling value. Bultmann’s way of critiquing the tales from the outside with a set of orthodox standards was the very opposite to that of Jaspers’s notion of living inside stories to search out their potential insights, free of any dogma. This notion of invading stories experientially on their own turf appealed to me, if Jaspers’s transcendental aims perhaps did not, and I began that summer to work my way into the kind of writing I’ve been doing ever since."
Nathan "N.R." wrote: "Highly to recommend this short, recent Interview::"Told and retold" by Lydialyle Gibson
The U of Chicago Magazine ::
http://mag.uchicago.edu/arts-humaniti...
"I ran into an argume..."
Coover's interviews are so quoteworthy!
"The characters in your books and stories often seem frustrated with their traditional fairy-tale roles. Each of these characters is trapped in a story not entirely their own that they’re struggling against, and that’s meant to be a kind of metaphor for everyone’s personal existence. We are all caught up in tales dreamed up by others long dead. Most people accept these imposed narratives; it’s easier to get through life that way. But that mindless surrender to one’s mythic environment is what these characters are resisting, and they might show the way for readers to recognize and resist their own entrapments."
That's an interesting link made even more interesting by the related links provided therein. And it was lovely hearing Coover's own thoughts on his Going for a Beer story.
How do you keep track of all these interviews & personal appearances?
Mala wrote: "How do you keep track of all these interviews & personal appearances? "I use the latest in cooverian technology :: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...
Can't wait for In Bed One Night, and Other Brief Encounters.
An old Coover interview (phone!) newly posted ; from John's Wife era -- http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2013/03...
"Here is an interview I did with Robert Coover in 1996 shortly after the publication of his novel John’s Wife. We were talking over the phone; the interview starts slowly as we feel each other out. But as it gathers steam Coover says marvelous things about his forerunners, Ovid, Kafka, Rabelais and Cervantes. He talks about how, when he planned the novel, he actually started with a paragraph count and the idea of a Bell curve. He also does a lovely reading of a passage — as he says, his first “telephone reading.”"
I wonder how long the interviewer had been waiting to use "polymorphous perversity"?
Robert Coover's Fable Land
Books mentioned in this topic
In Bed One Night, and Other Brief Encounters (other topics)Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales (other topics)
Review of Contemporary Fiction: Robert Coover Festschrift, Volume XXXII, No. 1 (other topics)
For example ::
"Robert Coover: a life in writing: 'I didn't think of "realism" as realistic. It used modes of response to the world that had become stultified'" by Hari Kunzru in The Guardian, 2011 ;; http://www.theguardian.com/culture/20...