The Exchange: Arthur Phillips

“The Tragedy of Arthur,” a novel by Arthur Phillips, is a bold and tangled work in two acts. The first is a faux-memoir, in which Phillips’s father, also an Arthur Phillips, has discovered a previously unknown Shakespeare play, also called “The Tragedy of Arthur.” Arthur Sr.—who happens to be a convicted forger—enlists Phillips’s help in getting the work authenticated and published. The second act is the play itself: Phillips has included a full five-act “The Tragedy of Arthur,” warning, “The play is bad. It is bad. Don’t read it.”

What is true and what is not? Authenticity and deception are the themes of “The Tragedy of Arthur,” and if the reader is left a little scrambled—is Arthur Sr. pulling another con? Does the real-life Phillips also have a Shakespeare-loving twin sister named Dana?—Phillips considers his job well done. This week, Phillips kindly took the time to answer some of my questions on the book; an edited version of our exchange appears at newyorker.com.

Cleveland Watches the Finals

Last night, when I heard the Dallas Mavericks had defeated the Miami Heat, four games to two, I cheered. I don’t know very much about basketball, and I didn’t follow the N.B.A. Finals. But I’m from Cleveland, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I will root for any team the Pittsburgh Steelers are playing, and I’ll celebrate any defeat of LeBron James.

I’ve heard it before: Cleveland took his departure too personally, the fans are sad sacks, the city wasn’t good enough to keep him. I’ll agree with the first accusation—and only with the caveat that it’s informed by the others, which I don’t buy. Read more at newyorker.com…

A Tender Age

In her post introducing June’s Book Club selection, “House of Prayer No. 2,” by Mark Richard, Macy cites a passage that includes this sentence:

Sometimes in the orange and grey dust when the world is empty, the child lies in the cold backyard grass and watches the thousand starlings swarm Dr. Jim’s chimneys, and the child feels like he is dying in an empty world.

I remembered this instantly for the line that came after it, the kicker that made me close the book on my thumbs and gather myself:

The child is five years old.

The age checks that occur throughout “House of Prayer No. 2,” especially in the earliest sections, are necessary; the child, as Richard calls himself before switching to the most effective use of the second-person since “Bright Lights, Big City,” is extraordinary, and though he’s labeled defective because of his deformed hips, we know better. Read more at newyorker.com…

Power to the People

Years ago, before it was glutted with reality shows, MTV was the arbiter of pop music. But the channel abandoned music videos around the time the Internet fragmented the music industry, creating niches within niches—and listeners who found themselves increasingly isolated. Recently, YouTube rolled out its YouTube 100, a weekly top-100 chart of music videos ranked by users, which can be played in order of their popularity. Read more at newyorker.com…

Briefliest Noted

Sometimes, I just have nothing more to say here about my Brieflier Noted posts. What, I’m going to summarize a summary of a summary? That reminds me of my junior-year English class, in which we didn’t read great works of literature but instead read something called Masterplots, which, as far as I now can tell, is CliffsNotes wearing a Masterpiece Theater suit. So instead of reading, say, “The Great Gatsby,” we’d read a summary of the book in Masterplots, and then we’d write a two-sentence description of the summary. The exercise seems criminal to me in retrospect.


G-Force

Last week, Google announced its much-anticipated music service, Music Beta by Google, which allows users to upload their personal music collections to the cloud and listen to them on any computer or enabled Android device. Because the songs are stored online, they don’t take up space on a device or hard drive; when users are offline, they still can access their most recently-played songs. But Music Beta by Google doesn’t offer song-sharing between users, or the ability to purchase new songs. “The announcement of Google’s impending Music Beta cloud service is a clear indication that selling functionality will take precedence over selling music,” says Sasha Frere-Jones. Read more at newyorker.com…

Secret Life

Anne Frank lived in hiding in Amsterdam for more than two years, and last April, the Secret Annex Online, a site devoted to the exploration of Prinsengracht 263, launched to show what the house looked like during the time that the Frank family lived there. “I wander from room to room, climb up and down stairs, and feel like a songbird whose wings have been ripped off and who keeps hurling itself against the bars of its dark cage,” Anne wrote of her surroundings. “Let me out, where there’s fresh air and laughter.” Visitors can click their way through the 3-D house using functionality similar to that of Google Street View; icons denote locations with associated stories and narration. Read more at newyorker.com…

Lit Bits

Two weeks ago marked the launch of the Los Angeles Review of Books, an online cultural magazine founded on the belief that literary criticism can flourish on the Internet. “Contrary to the notion that the literary arts are dying off, we believe a reading renaissance is underway in America,” says the founding editor Tom Lutz, the chair of the Creative Writing program at the University of California, Riverside. “While the debate goes on about the public’s commitment to reading and newspapers continue to close down their review sections, book clubs are flourishing, blogs and literary social networking sites are proliferating, and eReaders and apps make reading available in new ways and to a new generation.” The magazine features essays, book reviews, and interviews—and its first contributors include Geoff Nicholson (on Buster Keaton), and Jane Smiley (on Nancy Mitford). Read more at newyorker.com…

Bye, Buy Brownstone

Remember when Lucy tells Charlie Brown that all she really wants for Christmas is real estate? I get it now. From this week’s Briefly Noted review of “The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn,” by Suleiman Osman:

Today, Brooklyn real estate is among the most expensive and coveted in the nation.

Read this week’s Brieflier Noted to hear more about why two-bedroom apartments in Brooklyn sell for $1.2 million.