April 30, 2007
Last night at the used bookstore I came across perhaps the greatest author bio I have ever read. I have every intention of using this as my model when someone asks me for a brief description of myself. I am omitting the name on the off chance that this poor bastard is still alive.
"At the age of 14, with a refined palate but limited resources, P______ learned to cook, aided in this endeavor by his residence in Paris. His many hobbies have included, from time to time, printing, bookbinding, gem cutting, most forms of work and metal work, and fishing.
"Dr. P_________ is head of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh, and has published extensively in the fields of vertebrate and invertebrate zoology, microscopical technique, and statistics. During the war, he supervised research in fungus prevention for various military and governmental agencies."
The book, from what I read before my friend took it home, is as strange as the author bio.
Colm Tóibín writes about Henry James's questions about the effect marriage has on writing.
James then wrote: "So it occurred to me that a very interesting situation would be that of an elder artist or writer, who had been ruined (in his own sight) by his marriage and its forcing him to produce promiscuously and cheaply - his position in regard to a younger confrère whom he sees on the brink of the same disaster and whom he endeavours to save, to rescue, by some act of bold interference - breaking off the marriage, annihilating the wife, making trouble between the parties."
In the Scotsman: Women write books that are too domestic and romantic. Also in the Scotsman: Daphne du Maurier has been dismissed for years as too domestic and romantic.
I never really understood marathon runners. All that chafing and pain and bleeding from places that should not be bleeding... A friend reported once she spent the last two miles afraid to look down because she was pretty sure that her kneecap had moved to the back of her knee. Nothing anybody has ever said about running a marathon makes me want to sign up.
I also do not understand those who are going to read the latest Thomas Pynchon just because... well, because it's there. And they're going to keep logs about the experience, as if it were an endurance test, although evidently it is. The Prospect is the latest to join in the fun (just read the headline: "battling his way through" -- what is wrong with you people?). Although there is no chafing and inappropriate bleeding yet, I'm sure there will be by the end.
I just spent the week at the PEN World Voices festival in New York, which proposed an increase in American awareness of international literature and opening the deaf ears of an isolated nation to an international voice. Now, the percentage that just about every moderator gave at the beginning of each lecture was that only about 3% of the books annually published in the United States is of a translated work. That’s pitiful. Did such a festival raise American awareness of international lit? Sure. Can it ever hope to increase such a dismal translation rate? Probably not, but we can always hope.
Throughout the week I had the chance to meet some amazing people and turn myself on to a whole gamut of writers. Dany Laferrière (Haiti) sat down with Alain Mabanckou (Congo) and discussed their works as well as issues regarding language identity (Creole vs. French). I was able to pick up a copy of Laferrière’s Down Among the Dead Men, a chronicle of the writer’s return to Haiti, where he faces his pious mother, US forces and a horde of zombies. It’s not out in the US and won’t be for a while due to copyright issues, but there’s a Canadian edition floating out there somewhere. Mobile Libris was able to import most of the writers’ translated works for the festival since many are currently not available in stores or through Amazon. As stated above, the US has this thing against translation, be it over expenses or some ridiculous collective ideology of which I’m not yet blatantly aware.
I also had the chance to sit down with Marguerite Abouet (France/Ivory Coast), and, once we got over our arduous search for a willing translator, we discussed her graphic novel Aya and the western media’s tendency to portray Africa only as a land plagued by civil war and images of children with AIDS at every turn. I then got to see Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Ames, Pico Iyer, Laila Lalami and Edgar Oliver deliver stories from memory about The Moth’s theme for the night, “Home and Away.” I’ve never seen or read any of Edgar Oliver’s plays and stories, but he has to be the most adorable little foul-mouthed man I’ve ever seen. There’s just this amazing intonation he gives with his delivery than makes you want to squeal in delight. Think of it as a blend of Vincent Price with high royalty.
The next day I got to see two very different conversations back-to-back at the Donner Library: Paul Auster & Guillermo Arriaga and Valentino Achak Deng & Dave Eggers. While the Auster-Arriaga session seemed like a horrible throwaway, seeing Valentino Achak Deng elaborate on his experiences beyond What is the What was really fascinating. Right now Deng is working on an oral history project tentatively titled The Plight of Women in Sudan, which will gather narratives from women whose lives have been changed by civil war. More info can be found through the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation.
On a much lighter McSweeney’s note, the editors at The Believer put together a special event at The New School featuring a performance by Miranda July and an international writers’ speed-dating session facilitated by John Hodgman. Casual homoerotic flirtation over a bottle of red wine between Uzodinma Iweala (Beasts of No Nation) and Yasmina Khadra/Mohammed Moulessehoul (The Swallows of Kabul)… what more can anyone want?
Over the duration of the week I’ve amassed an even larger reading list than I had before, which will probably take several months to get through. This includes the aforementioned Laferrière book, Tinling Choong’s FireWife and pretty much the entirety of Tatyana Tolstaya’s repertoire.
I’m feeling slightly drained, so links will be sparse this week:
Alain Mabanckou’s “Blue, White, Red” can be read in April issue of Words Without Borders.
There’s a Will Eisner doc playing at the Tribeca Film Festival this year. Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist is playing through May 6.
And since my brain no longer works: Dr. Donut vs. USA Woman.
April 27, 2007
Thanks to Carlos and Leo, who ripped my apartment to pieces to fix the gas leak while teasing me mercilessly about my books and discussing Eddie Izzard on the Riches, and Tony, the very nice gas man who okayed it all and allowed me to make a cup of tea for the first time in a week. In their honor: alternate titles for the sunnier and happier movie version of The Bell Jar. Gas jokes abound.
A high school teacher who faced losing her job after a student newspaper published an editorial advocating tolerance of gays can continue teaching at another school.
Amy Sorrell, 30, reached an agreement that allows her to be transferred to another high school to teach English, said her attorney, Patrick Proctor.
"The school administration has said in no uncertain terms that she's not going to be given a journalism position," Proctor said.
If science fiction really is becoming fact like Gwyneth Jones claims in this Guardian article, can someone work on that Jude Law sex bot from the illustration instead of discovering kryptonite? Thanks.
Niall Griffiths has read The Road twenty times. Someone send help. Or a box of books.
The New York Times covers the latest trend in food books: eating locally. Once again, the topic makes a better magazine article than a book. (Gourmet asked a fellow in Vermont to eat locally for a year, and it made a fantastic six-page article. But if you missed it, because the Gourmet archives online are a nightmare, you'll probably have to read the Barbara Kingsolver book. I'm sorry.)
Secret Agent Elizabeth Visits the Dark Side: Writers Tell All
Where do the words come from? Secret Agent Elizabeth investigates dirty little secrets, 7th grade enemies, and the creative trickery writers use to get through the day. A weekly interview feature by Elizabeth Merrick.
THIS WEEK: Ned Vizzini
Ned Vizzini is the author of It's Kind of a Funny Story ("insightful and utterly authentic" --New York Times Book Review), Be More Chill, and Teen Angst? Naaah.... His work has been honored by the American Library Association, BookSense, and the New York Public Library and has been translated into five languages (forthcoming in Chinese). He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
What unpleasant truth do you routinely conceal from young, fresh writers eager to make their mark?
I don't tell up and comers how unattractive a lot of people in the writing world are.
What is it, really, that made you become a writer after all?
Fear of death.
Inquiring minds want to know: what are your daily writing habits (and vices)?
What appalling tricks do you use to get yourself to be productive, and are there any you have discarded?
I used to not eat and just drink diet coke and wake up at 8am and write until like 6 and sweat and freak out. That proved not to be that productive.
What is the most mortifying, worst thing you've ever written and what led you down that path to ruin?
The most mortifying thing I've ever done with my writing is write about my summer camp and get a lot of counselors fired (it wasn't a kind portrayal; it's in my first book Teen Angst? Naaah...). I tried to change the name of the camp at the last minute but couldn't get in touch with my editor, the great John Strausbaugh. In the Venn diagram of my life, there was a small overlap between the kids I went to camp with and the kids I went to high school with; from then on those kids wanted to kick my ass and I hid from them.
Do you have any rituals you use in an emergency or if you're blocked?
If you're blocked, there's a character who's not true-to-life somewhere in the book. (Usually it's your main character.) You need to find that person and fix her/him up and then you'll keep going.
How do you feel about writing sex scenes, and how do you handle it?
I was very surprised that Nerve gave me a Henry Miller Award for a sex scene in It's Kind of a Funny Story. (I think I just got third place, actualy, but it’s Henry Miller -- standards are high.) I didn't think my sex scenes were that good.
However, in my mind, a good sex scene is brought to life by small details, especially humorous ones. For example, a friend of mine was high one time, and he was having sex with a girl -- she was on top -- and her stomach started looking like one of those rock-spitting enemies in Zelda, the Octorocks --
--and that messed everything up. He couldn't finish. That's a sex scene.
What books do you secretly love?
I have no guilty pleasures. I'm straightforward about all the books I love. I don't have any shame about any of them.
And what books do you secretly hate?
I don't have a strong enough position in the literary world to begin trashing people. Maybe in a few years. Generally I don't come to hate books so much as authors, like when they suddenly turn into dicks.
What is the most terrifying task for you -- whether it be a certain kind of scene, character, or subject matter?
Action scenes, where like the cops show up.
Is there some element of your work that you particularly enjoy and that readers or critics seem not to notice so much?
I've really tried to bring some secret slang from my friends into English. Phrases like "blow up spots." Nobody seems to understand or care. Hey! I wrote about it on my blog!
What project has been the biggest struggle for you so far in your career, and how did you resolve your difficulties?
The biggest struggle in my career took place in November 2004. I got freaked out and went to the psych hospital because I had no patience. (Also, I had a real chemical ailment.) Letting go of unnecessary responsibilities, prioritizing, and saying "no" are all difficult for me.
Describe the arch-nemesis of your youth. How has this person appeared in your writing?
Hm. I didn't have a formal arch-nemesis in my youth, but there was a kid named E.; I have never written about him. He was a little Asian punk in my high school. He kept calling me "cool guy" all the time because he knew it infuriated me. One day while I was walking up the inside stairs at school, he spat on my backpack (later on, he swore he was just spitting on the ground, but I heard it). I turned around, infuriated, smacked him with my (teal, LL Bean) backpack, and knocked him down the stairs. Then I jumped down like seven stairs and started kicking him in the stomach until his big Asian crony showed up. Then he stood up and was like:
"I'm going to get my gang, and I'm going to kill you!"
Later on in school he shot a cab driver.
And, finally, if there is one thing you could change about your writing life or career, what would it be?
If I could change one thing about my career, it would be not quitting my job writing the nightlife column for New York Press that I did 2001-2002. It was called "Since When?" and I really enjoyed it. (I quit to write books.) Here's a favorite installment of mine; it's Mike Daisey's first major press in NYC.April 26, 2007
An update to the "least anticipated poetry movie of 2008", The Best Time of Our Lives: Variety is reporting that Sienna Miller will replace Lindsay Lohan, who couldn't make the money work. I suppose that makes the movie fractionally more interesting; there'll be no getting around Keira Knightley, though, as the movie is "[s]cripted by Knightley's playwright mother Sharman Macdonald." In a Guardian interview, Lyn Gardner asserts that "nobody writes with more poetry about the internal emotional hinterlands of women or with more honesty about learning to live with the presence of death in life" than MacDonald.
From the Fishouse is "an audio archive of emerging poets," where "emerging" means "poets with less than two books." Their March/April 2007 release features readings by some seventeen poets. Two of particular interest are Tyehimba Jess reading poems about Leadbelly, and Kazim Ali reading recent poems. Ali was in the news recently for the self-evident crime of "recycling poetry while brown."
Jan Schreiber on the recent Maxine Kumin book: "It’s as if this old hand at formal verse had contemplated the recent ascendancy of Billy Collins or Mary Oliver and decided theirs was a success (and a technique) worth emulating."
Clayton Eshleman dreams of his mother in the poem, "The Enigmatic Signifier," which he reads during the April 17 episode of The Lumberyard. (Also check out Joan Joffe Hall's hilarious "The Driver's License.")
Next week, an interview with Scott Withiam.
The rest of today will be the continuation of the nightmare of Fixing Jessa's Gas Leak, so go read a book or something. I'll be back tomorrow, god willing.
The writers of How Sassy Changed My Life showed up at Talk of the Nation to talk about the "lifeline" that was Sassy.
You can also read an excerpt from How Sassy Changed My Life on the NPR website.
"How to put a Bookslut notch in your belt"
See, Chris, you're not the only one who tried to order a crap beer and was scoffed at by our lovely reading series bartender. Evidently that is what we're getting our reputation for.
Hey women! Publishers have a theory on why you're not buying books about how you're living your life All Wrong. It's not because each of these books has perhaps 2,000 words of interesting analysis and then chapter after chapter of filler nonsense and smug anecdotes. No! It's because you can't handle the truth.
“I always felt it was something that women didn’t want to look at too closely,” said Jonathan Burnham, publisher of HarperCollins, who was editor in chief at Talk Miramax Books when Ms. Hewlett’s book, which suggested that women who pursued high-powered careers could end up childless, was published five years ago. “It was a problem that touched very complicated feelings, so while they read a magazine article or watched a segment on ‘Oprah,’ they didn’t want to read a whole book about it because it was such a difficult subject.”
Ms. Hewlett's book, if you remember, is that hysterical HAVE BABIES NOW OR YOU'LL BE AN INFERTILE HAG AND NO ONE WILL LOVE YOU book. Yeah, I can't imagine why no one wanted to buy that.
April 25, 2007
Jeff Sharlet looks at the books of Darcey Steinke, including her new memoir Easter Everywhere, over at Nerve.
Steinke once was that child — she sat in the front pew of her father's church reading Mein Kampf — but the author of Jesus Saves had moved far beyond the youthful discovery that the Bible contains blood and betrayal and incest and inexplicable sexual violence, that the Good Book is, like, totally fucked up. Yes, it is; and so? Jesus Saves explores some of the potential responses. If they're not glibly redemptive, neither were those of Flannery O'Connor. And yet O'Connor's stories — populated by monkey mummies and idiot-mad preachers and obese, aging belles wearing upholstery as hats — are both grotesque and earnest: fairy tales with birth defects.
Another excerpt: You can either listen to Elizabeth Hand's reading (MP3 link) of the first chapter of her book Generation Loss (Bookslut review here) or read it at the Small Beer Press website.
You can now read an excerpt from Haruki Murakami's new book After Dark online.
Hey, Chicagoans:
Event: BIBLIOMIX - pages and sounds spun live
Date: Thursday, April 26, 2006
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: Quimby's Bookstore, 1854 West North Avenue
The lineup:
Text Mix by Jessa Crispin of Bookslut.com (http://www.bookslut.com/)
Music Mix by Lance of Permanent Records (1914 W. Chicago Avenue,
http://www.myspace.com/permanentwax)
Performed by
Joel Chmara - poet, teacher and host of Mental Grafitti
(http://myspace.com/mentalg)
Liz Winfield - performance artist, member of 3Card Molly
(http://www.3cardmolly.org/)
Jessica Hudson - actor, former member of Chicago Drag Kings and
writer/performer in such shows as Drag and Impossible Cities.
BIBLIOMIX is a monthly combination of print and music.
Bibliomix combines a "text mix tape" of excerpts from published material chosen by a guest curator and read aloud by performers to a live soundtrack provided a DJ. Each month features a different literary specialist and a variety of musical and vocal talents.
For more info contact Greg Gillam at 773-276-0454.
April 24, 2007
If I could steal a line from PL Travers, I would say that one doesn't need purgatory if one has read Tolkien. But I hear he has quite the fan base. Luckily, the Guardian digests the "new" Tolkien book, Children of Hurin for me.
"Forsooth," he swore. "Henceforth shall I remain a derivative Wagnerian hero and wander mindlessly through the realms of Middle-Earth on a quasi-symbolic quest and, Children of the Eldar, resolve only to talk in sentences of unspeakable leadenness, punctuated by manifold parentheses."
A man and his sons are scarred! emotionally! from encountering The Whole Lesbian Sex Book in their local library. Removing the book from the shelves is not enough, they need cash. Read the story, the punchlines just write themselves.
I'm having that problem where every book that is not White Walls is completely boring. I pick up one novel after another, but it's like when I finished The Thin Place last year. Nothing will measure up, so let's just read Entertainment Weekly instead. I'll get over it.
Tolstaya is interviewed at the New Yorker:
When I was very little, I somehow knew that I was doomed—yes, doomed!—to become a writer. And I was afraid. All Russian writers, in my understanding, died in duels: Pushkin was killed in a duel, in 1837, Lermontov in 1841.… I remember asking my parents, “If someone challenges you to a duel, do you have to accept?” And they answered, “Sure.” So I was horrified. I did not want to die this way.
No Fear of the Future collects random authors showing up in movies you wouldn't expect, like Vonnegut's cameo in Back to School, William Gibson showing up in Wild Palms, Philip K. Dick on Bewitched (?!), and, god help us all, Borges on the Love Boat. Someone get this on YouTube, immediately. For the sake of humanity.
"So, Mr. Borges," says Gopher, "are you traveling alone?"
Borges' lazy, whitened eyes stare through the chipper Iowan, reimagining the universe in the nautical vignette cresting the Purser's cap.
"Can you not see the massing armies of the Heresiarchs?" queries the author.
It seems I've been working in close proximity to a gas leak for a while (it explains a lot), so no wonder I was confused when I started to watch this video of Neil Gaiman's reading at Cody's, as it appears he's reading in front of the largest American flag ever. I kept waiting for him to announce his intention to run for President of the United States. Could you imagine his fan base as a voting bloc? Then I opened some windows and everything became clear.
Another video for you: Ned Vizzini (bearded!) reading at the KGB from his new novel about a lapsed indie rocker. He uses the term "ersatz blonde."
The Telegraph wants you to check your attic for a lost Shakespeare play.
David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who chronicled the Washington press corps, the Vietnam War generation and baseball, was killed in a car crash Monday. He was 73.
April 23, 2007
When bits get lost in the haze of big awards awarding giant grants to well-endowed writers, I try my damndest to make them known. I'll be covering the small press and other et ceteras on Mondays for Bookslut. But first, a comment on last week...
Last Thursday Jason B. Jones examined the elegiac tradition in regards to mass tragedy. I thought back to some of the 9/11 elegies I've been exposed to over the last year, and for some reason, most of them just don't work. I think it has something to do with proximity (temporal, physical and emotional) to the tragedy. They can be sentimental to the point of obscuring the subject (see Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets), or they can be overtly patriotic (just look at the cover to An Eye For An Eye Makes The Whole World Blind: Poets on 9/11 and you'll catch my drift). Meanwhile, Kamau Brathwaite's "9/11 – Hawk" could be the only successful 9/11 elegy I've ever encountered. If I'm not mistaken, this was written five years after the fact by a Caribbean writer. I think he divides his time between CowPastor, Barbados and New York City now, but I'm not sure where he was when it all happened. That might be something to look into….
On a less dreadful note, we're skipping spring and moving right into summer. My fellow Brooklynites and I have been staking out McCarren and McGolrick Parks with our blankets and tupperware. While some people are discussing how and when to apply the term "philistine" (I kid you not), I've been caught up in Felicia Luna Lemus's Like Son. Not unlike a beached whale, I've been lying out on my side with little hope of moving back out to sea while trying to figure out the connection between Nahui Olin (depicted on the glorious 1924 Frank Weston cover) and Lemus's grieving narrator. Just look into her eyes and tell me they're not mesmerizing, sexual preference be damned!
At any rate, on to sundry linkage:
· Mark Ames (Going Postal) discusses the mass media reaction to last week's shootings at Virginia Tech over at AlterNet.
· Missed it: Another Marguerite Duras story appeared in The New Yorker two weeks ago. It doesn't matter which work I'm reading -- no word she's scribbled has ever failed to move me into complete awe. Both "The Stolen Pigeons" and "The Bible" are accessible through The New Yorker's website.
· Kevin Moffatt, Heidi Julavits and Maggie Nelson will be reading at this week's Happy Ending Series with music by John Wesley Harding. For the uninitiated, all readers at this series must perform a "risk," that is, something they've never done before on stage. Every time's a hoot.
· Chapter 3 of Megan Kelso's serialized graphic novel Watergate Sue is online at The New York Times Magazine. While you're at it, go read The Squirrel Mother and relive those painful childhood moments we all remember so fondly.
· And finally: I've never really been an avid webcomics reader, but Josh Neufeld's A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge may have converted me. SMITH magazine hosts the prelude and first two chapters.
Finally today, from the Onion:
Producers of the long-running Chicago Public Radio program This American Life announced Monday that they have completed their comprehensive 12-year survey of life as a modern upper-middle-class American.
This link is for the nice fellow who e-mailed to tell me I swear too much (Hi, Timothy!): Participate in a survey about which curse words piss you off. It's for science!
Updated: We broke the survey. It's closed now. Sorry about that.
Graham Swift is interviewed at the Scotsman about his new novel Tomorrow.
"I used to think a sentence like 'He sat down' was a bad sentence, the kind you should absolutely avoid. One of the great things about writing is to use a sentence as seemingly banal as that but because of the context make it extremely powerful.
"I don't want my words to be admired. I want them to transmit an experience where the reader says: I was provoked, moved, enthralled. The words themselves are not a substitute for feeling."
Margaret Atwood talks to the Guardian Book Club about her book Oryx & Crake. (MP3 link.)
I'm a little late on this, but here are the Eisner nominees. And like everyone else, I'd like to say well done to the judges.
August Kleinzahler, one of my favorite poets, reviews the new Ed Dorn collection, Way More West: New and Selected Poems, which includes an introduction by former Bookslut poetry columnist Dale Smith.
The Los Angeles Times takes a closer look at the Granta list of young American writers. Scott Timberg examines the diversity of the list (the only diversity not on the list being non-New York writers), and the possible reasons behind the large number of foreign-born writers represented. Daniel Alarcón is certainly more interesting than Jonathan Safran Foer, everything is okay. Then they ask for Laura Miller's opinion. I think it's been a year or so since I read something by her that made my head spin, but here we go again.
"It's nice that it's so mixed in terms of race and national background. And there's certainly a contingent — critics, book section editors, other writers — that thinks that immigrant stories are the compelling stories of our time. I don't really agree with that."
The real themes in American fiction these days, she said, are the seeking of "authenticity" — which sometimes works itself out in stories about immigrant communities — and interpreting the highly mediated, pop-suffused culture.
These themes tend to work against each other: In short, she said, "Writing about immigrants saves you from having to write about mass culture," a topic literary writers, young or white or ethnic or otherwise, generally fear.
"American novels have an extremely ambivalent relationship to mass culture and have a very difficult time coming to terms with it," she said. "Because it's supposed to be the opposite of all the things that people want from literature. People would just rather avoid it," and writing about ethnicity or migration allows them to.
A) Anyone have any idea what she's talking about?
B) I guess it's nice to have just one thing you're looking to read about. It's just too bad that you seem to prefer Claire Messud to, oh I don't know, Tom Bissell.
C) Love the "nice."
You can go to the NBCC website for the latest information on the cutting down of book review sections. While you're there, be sure to sign the petition to help protect Atlanta Journal Constitution Book Review.
April 20, 2007
Where do the words come from? Secret Agent Elizabeth investigates dirty little secrets, 7th grade enemies, and the creative trickery writers use to get through the day. A weekly interview feature by Elizabeth Merrick.
OUR DEBUT!: AURY WALLINGTON
Aury Wallington's television writing credits include Sex and the City and Veronica Mars. Her novel, POP! (Razorbill Books) was named one of the New York Public Library's 2007 Books for the Teen Age. Aury lives in Los Angeles with her dog, Tuesday. Visit her website at www.aurywallington.com
"I only actually started making money as a writer four years ago when I wrote my Sex and the City script. Up until then, I was bartending and writing specs and collecting endless rejection slips, and every time I'd go home for Christmas or whatever, my mom would bring up the suggestion that joining the Army might be a good career option for me ("you'll get in shape, get self-discipline, make money, meet some single guys…")"
What is it, really, that made you become a writer after all?
I really became a writer because it’s the only thing I enjoy doing that I’ve ever managed to do both consistently and well. I have many “Plan B”s, in case the whole writing thing doesn’t work out (make and sell organic cheeses through the Williams Sonoma catalogue! train helper monkeys for people with disabilities! become a truck-stop waitress in Mississippi!) but writing is what I’m best at and like doing the most, so fingers-crossed I won’t ever have to pursue any other career options.
Inquiring minds want to know: what are your daily writing habits (and vices)?I get up as early as I possible can (I aim for 6am, but it’s usually more like 6:30), stagger out to my computer, and start writing before anything else can distract me -- it’s too early for the phone to ring or people to IM me or the dog to need to go out.
If I’m on a deadline or am working on a project that’s going well, I write all day long, taking breaks to walk the dog and fix some snacks, but basically sitting at my desk writing for 14-15 hours, until I’m too exhausted to type another word. Then I have a couple beers and go to bed. Then get up the next morning and do the same thing all over again. When I work this hard, I’ll generally end up with four or five good, solid pages of writing each day.
If I’m not on a deadline, or if I’ve just finished a project and haven’t really gotten a new one underway yet, I still get up early and write for 3 or 4 hours, but then I shut off my computer around 10am, and spend the rest of my day like a normal person (going out to lunch with friends, vacuuming the house, doing pilates, watching America’s Next Top Model, etc.)
What appalling tricks do you use to get yourself to be productive, and are there any you have discarded?
I only actually started making money as a writer four years ago
when I wrote my Sex and the City script. Up until then, I was
bartending and writing specs and collecting endless rejection slips,
and every time I’d go home for Christmas or whatever, my mom
would bring up the suggestion that joining the Army might be a good
career option for me (“you’ll get in shape, get
self-discipline, make money, meet some single guys…”)
So now whenever I’m tempted to sleep in or waste time instead
of buckling down and writing, I thank my lucky stars that my mom
doesn’t bring up my enlisting anymore, and that’s usually
all it takes to get me working…
What is the most mortifying, worst thing you've ever written and what led you down that path to ruin?
Oh dear lord, when I was starting out, I had tons of hubris and very little practical knowledge. One of the very first things I ever wrote was a magazine article about women who have traditionally-male jobs on film sets – female grips, electrics, etc. I didn’t realize you were supposed to query before submitting something, so I wrote it out in its entirety and sent it off to a (now-defunct) entertainment magazine I picked at random from the Writer’s Market.
Turns out, it was more of a – uh – men’s entertainment magazine, and while the editor liked the idea, he asked if I could rewrite it to make it a better fit for the publication. AKA sex it up.
Which I tried to do by just going through and inserting sexy adjectives in front of all my nouns. So “Cheryl, a grip from Burbank” became “Cheryl, a willowy, raven-haired grip from Burbank”… Utterly appalling. (Needless to say, it never got published.)
Do you have any rituals you use in an emergency or if you're blocked?
Mostly my ritual is just refusing to budge from my computer until I get my work done. But if nothing’s coming and I’m freaking out, I’ll try one or more of the following things:
1. I’ll write out the scene or chapter that’s giving me problems by hand -- it doesn’t feel as scary or permanent that way, like I’m not necessarily committing to the lines I’m writing if they’re scribbled on a notepad instead of being typed into the actual script. This is usually enough to get me through the block, and then I clean it up and edit it as I transcribe it into the computer.
2. If I’m just writing the project on spec and no one’s waiting for it, sometimes I’ll back-burner it and move on to something else that’s flowing better. I might come back to the original project a few days -- or weeks, months, even years later. But sometimes I realize there was a reason why the project wasn’t working, and I abandon it altogether.
3. I’ll reread the chapter on “Shitty First Drafts” in Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird and the chapter on “Do It Anyway” in Lawrence Block’s book Telling Lies for Fun & Profit, and try to follow their advice (which is basically just: get ANYTHING down on paper, and go back and fix it later.)
4. I’ll rent every single movie that reminds me of my story at all, and watch them to see how other people have handled the subject that’s giving me trouble.
5. I’ll get 3 beers and drink them while I type like mad – by the time I’ve finished all three, I’m usually in no condition to write – but they’ll have loosened me up enough that I’ll have broken through the block, and the next day I can go back through what I’d written and find the kernel of the scene.
How do you feel about writing sex scenes, and how do you handle it?Well, I enjoy the research part of it…
Seriously, I feel like 90% of the things I’ve written have had tons of sex in them – Sex and the City, obviously; my novel POP! is about a girl losing her virginity; one of my Veronica Mars scripts was about “purity tests”; even the first thing I ever had published, a short story called “Day of the Dead,” was about a girl whose vegan boyfriend refuses to go down on her because he “doesn’t eat animal products.”
I’ve never had a problem writing about sex – like, I’ve never worried that my mom would read it and be horrified or whatever. I think it helps that I’m a comedy writer – sex isn’t as scary if you can laugh about it. (Both in writing and in real life!)
The first drafts of everything I write tend to be overwrought, and it’s especially bad with sex scenes – lots of cringe-worthy descriptions about the character’s limbs turning to lava and that sort of thing. So for me the key to making the sex ring true is to temper the histrionic physical descriptions by paying attention to all the other stuff that’s happening at the same time as the actual sex itself. Like, are his arms inadvertently pinning down her hair so she can’t move her head? Is he sweating and it’s dripping on her, and she’s kind of grossed out by it but also secretly kind of turned on? Does she feel like she should be making noise but feels stupid moaning like a porn star? (Okay, clearly none of the characters I’ve ever written are any good in bed at all…) (Oh -- Samantha from SATC being the exception, of course!) But I think that’s the sort of detail that elevates it from being just a sex scene and makes it become an integral part of the story.
What books do you secretly love?I completely adore children’s books from the seventies where the main characters die in terrible, heart-breaking ways – by falling off horses and breaking their necks, or by getting leukemia and dying the day before prom, or by getting lost in a blizzard and freezing to death while they’re actually less than ten feet from their own front doors. I like to lie in bed and eat candy and cry while I read them (exactly the way I did when I actually was a child in the 1970s and read them for the first time.) Oh – stung to death by bees is good too. Or anything where a girl dies moments after kissing a boy for the first time. Love, love, love it!
And what books do you secretly hate?Um, it’s a little embarrassing to admit, but I’ve never been able to make it the whole way through any of the novels by the Russian greats – Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, etc. I can’t ever keep any of the characters straight -- I find all the names and nicknames and diminutives baffling. And while the language is beautiful, it’s so dense and my attention span is so short that I really have a hard time getting through it.
What is the most terrifying task for you -- whether it be a certain kind of scene, character, or subject matter?
I have a really difficult time writing nonfiction, personal essays or whatever. I’ve pitched and sold a number of them, but when the time comes to actually write them, I really struggle. Part of it is that I’ve never really understood where the line falls between adding life and color to the story or committing an out-and-out fabrication, so I usually try to err on the side of caution and end up disappointed in what I’ve written -- I always think the details would be better if I could just make them up.
But I also find it terrifying to write a story without having a character to hide behind. No matter how much of my self and my own feelings and experiences I put in my fiction, it’s never ME doing or saying those things – it’s the character. Which I guess (I’ve never actually thought about this before until I just started answering this question) is a form of self-protection or cowardice or something – it’s like, oh, I never personally would be so petty and mean or act so slutty or be such a pushover – it’s the character – she’s the one who’s flawed or insecure or bat-shit crazy, not me. I made it all up. Even if whatever the character is doing is pretty much a flat-out transcription of how I spent my day.
Maybe that’s why I always feel the compulsion to invent details – it’s a way of saying, at least to myself, that even though the person I’m writing about happens to be named Aury Wallington, it’s not really me.
(Wow – I feel all… enlightened now, like I just went to therapy or something. Who knew?)
Is there some element of your work that you particularly enjoy and that readers or critics seem not to notice so much?
I think my author photo is exceptionally flattering, but no one’s ever remarked on how hot I look in it.
What project has been the biggest struggle for you so far in your career, and how did you resolve your difficulties?
The one that was the biggest struggle actually ended up being the most rewarding: working for four seasons as the script coordinator (sort of an upper-level writers assistant) on Sex and the City. It was an amazing job, but it wasn’t WRITING, and that was all I wanted to do. Four years of going into the writers office every day and working hard and doing the best job I could, but with no expectation that I’d ever actually get to write an episode of my own.
It was hard sometimes not to get frustrated and impatient, but I knew I was also really lucky – I was surrounded by these amazingly talented writers and producers, and I learned a ton about TV writing and comedy in general just from seeing the way they’d beat out and write and revise each episode.
What also helped was just the knowledge that everyone has to pay their dues. None of the other writers on the show were overnight successes. Okay, maybe a couple were… but for the most part, all of the writers on that show, and on every other show I’ve ever worked on, spent years struggling and worrying and writing script after script while they waited for that one amazing life-changing break that would mean that they were honest-to-god WRITERS.
And believe me, when they told me Season Six that I was going to get to write an episode, it made every minute of the previous four years totally worth it.
What unpleasant truth do you routinely conceal from young, fresh writers eager to make their mark?
Oh god, this is going to make me sound like an ogre… but I think for a lot of them, being too concerned about “making their mark” is going to keep them from finding success. You need to understand the rules before you can break them, and I meet far too many new writers who think following the rules means compromising their vision. I’m not saying they need to sell out or abandon their artistic integrity, but a writer just starting out will have a much easier time getting published or produced if they look at what is currently commercially viable, and find their original individual voice within those confines. This especially applies to television, where there are very specific rules about structure that you absolutely one hundred percent have to follow if you want to sell a script. And everyone follows them – not just beginners or hacks, but everyone – David Chase, JJ Abrams, Matt Groening, Shonda Rhimes, Greg Garcia – all these executive producers who have created shows that are startling and original and have made a gigantic mark on television, they all follow the rules. It’s so difficult to break in, that unless you write a script that’s fresh and distinctive and original within the traditional TV structure, you’ll never even get the chance to make your mark.
I don’t know if I conceal this truth from new writers as much as they refuse to hear it…
Describe the arch-nemesis of your youth. How has this person appeared in your writing?
When I was in the seventh grade, I had the worst best friend ever. Juliet (not her real name -- but a name I frequently give my mean-girl characters) was the one who, after I confessed my secret crush on Andy Sinclair to her, wrote him a love note asking if he’d go to the school dance with me, signed it with my name, then egged him into coming over to where I was sitting and turning me down in front of the entire homeroom. Then, of course, she came rushing out of the room after me, and made lots of “he’s a jerk” and “you’re too good for him” and “you can come to the dance with me and Billy – it’ll be fun!” noises while I wept in the girls room.
(The truly sad thing is we’re still friends. She currently works in a yarn store in Tampa. When I called to tell her I was writing for Sex and the City, her only response was “I don’t have HBO – premium cable is a waste of money.”)
She appears in my writing over and over and over again – she belittled Carrie’s column in Sex and the City, spread rumors about Veronica Mars, tormented the main character in POP!. I wouldn’t use her as the model if I were writing about an ax-murderer or anything, but whenever there’s a little voice in my character’s ear, whispering that she just made a fool of herself, and maybe her work isn’t as good as she thought it was, and the other girls are just pretending to like her, but they’re not really her friends, in fact they all talk about her and laugh whenever she’s not around? That little voice is Juliet all the way.
And, finally, if there is one thing you could change about your writing life or career, what would it be?
I would like to have to clear off my mantel to make space for an Emmy.
April 19, 2007
Yesterday on campus a group of us hosted a poetry marathon in honor of the month. (We did this last year, too, though we had better weather then.) Earlier this week, one of the organizers wrote to ask for a "fitting poem" to read in honor of those murdered at Virginia Tech.
One of the last holdovers of poetry's oral & sacramental roots, elegies are ritually demanded at almost all public forms of mourning. Private ones, too: Remember how "September 1, 1939" became practically the official poem of 9/11? Usually, the demand is for elegy to perform its traditional role: To repair the hole in the world left by the dead. Commemorating the departed, traditional elegies--the routine examples here are "Lycidas" or In Memoriam or "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"--contribute to what Freud called the "work of mourning." We usually feel consoled, even uplifted after reading a traditional elegy.
Many 20thC poets, though, wrote a species of poem that Jahan Ramazani has called "the modern elegy": Elegies that seem less consoling than angry or frustrated, and act less as "mourning" than as contributing to melancholia: They don't bury the connection to the dead in reparation, but fiercely, even senselessly keep it alive. Ramazani's Poetry of Mourning identifies many such poems: Hardy's "Emma" poems, Hughes's "The Weary Blues," Rich's "A Woman Mourned by Daughters," and so forth. Ramazani argues, correctly on my view, that such elegies do more justice to the dead--by refusing to acknowledge them as dead, we can honor their struggle, for instance--and they also implicate the poet in the death. We become, either obscurely or directly, responsible for these lives.
It's a powerful argument, and one that, as I've said, intellectually strikes me as wholly correct. It teaches well, and it can get students excited about poetry's connection to the world, without turning poetry into a handmaiden of politics. (For example, a "modern elegy" about 9/11 would resist assimilating that event into a triumphant political rhetoric.) I will say, however, that this week I have found it harder to be enthusiastic over it. Confronted with a truly senseless act, embracing willed melancholia seems wholly inadequate.
In the event, I was late to the reading, and so didn't hear the tribute. I gather one colleague read the opening of "Lycidas," and another read "Do not go gentle into that good night" (audio link below). If we had had CNN in the room, we could have watched Nikki Giovanni's "We Are Virginia Tech" (via silliman's blog), which obviously struck a powerful chord with its audience.
Some other elegies, read by their authors:
- Berryman, "Dream Song I"
- Laure-Ann Bosselaar, "Stillbirth"
- Thomas, "Do not go gentle into that good night"
- Patricia Traxler, "The Dead Are Not"
- Brian Turner, "Ashbah"
If I could direct your attention to the left sidebar, you'll note the line up for our next reading series: Tao Lin, Gillian Flynn, and Spencer Dew. As always, see the Reading Series page for more information on these authors.
Also, Ander Monson has been rescheduled for the June 6th reading with Andrew O'Hagan, or as he's known around here, Mr. Book Crush. (Seriously, have you read Personality? God damn.) Also in June: our first comic book themed night, with graphic novelists (with slide shows! Hopefully of their art and not pictures of their trip to Mt. Rushmore!) and novelists who use superhero themes in their books. See, it's the juxtaposition that makes it work.
Lordy, I need a nap.
The Washington Post has the transcript of Michael Dirda's online chat about Kurt Vonnegut.
Also: Columbia Journalism Review takes on the Fox News Vonnegut obituary.
I just found this Jonathan Yardley appreciation of Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart, one of my favorite novels. Yardley highlights out one of the best descriptions of a character I have ever read: "He had the cloudy, at some moments imperious look of someone fulfilling his destiny imperfectly." And this one of Eddie, a close runner-up: "a bright little cracker that, pulled hard enough, goes off with a loud bang." Oh damn, now I want to reread the whole novel.
Steven Hall writes about the musical influences on his novel The Raw Shark Texts for Largehearted Boy.
Shalom Auslander on his love for motorcycle racing.
When I first became interested in motorcycle roadracing, my wife understandably attributed it to the opportunity it afforded me to wear leather pants in public. She was only mostly right.
Nathan Whitlock, that's the review editor of Quill & Quire, responds to Yann Martel's little book scheme.
What Martel is saying here is that the Canada Council is the only thing keeping us from becoming robots in a post-historical, totalitarian world that also somehow possesses a pre-industrial feudal economy. It's like an early Rush album, without the drum solo.
Now I am officially bored with this story.
April 18, 2007
Crooks and Liars has the video of the Fox News Kurt Vonnegut obit. (Thanks to Marty for the link.)
Last week the Atlanta Journal Consitutition did a staff reorganization, eliminating its book editor position, which is demoralizing beyond speech. The AJC's section was run by long-time NBCC member and former board member Teresa Weaver, who put together one of the best-edited literary pages in the country, giving Atlanta -- which was #15 on the list of most literate cities in the U.S. (far ahead of New York(#49) -- the cultural dialogue it deserved.
Peter Kuper talks to Publishers Weekly about his not-quite-a-memoir, Stop Forgetting to Remember.
PWCW: Why did you invent the alter ego of Walter Kurtz to tell the story instead of creating a straight autobiographical comic?
PK: Deniability. Also, making everyone a semifictional character gave me the freedom to deviate from reality when it helped the story.
Chicago's Women & Children First bookstore is in danger of closing.
The main thought in my head today is, "Gosh, isn't it great to live in the same world that Jarvis Cocker lives in?"
And I'm trying to think literary today, but everything I read reminds me of the book I love, and I imagine a thousand more posts about White Walls would get annoying. When I read this:
As the title suggests, the narrator of [James Fenimore Cooper's] "Autobiography" is an inanimate object, a sentient pocket handkerchief. Raised by the Connecticut River, transported to fields in France, and conveyed to markets in Paris and New York City, the "exquisite" handkerchief passes through the hands of middlemen, shopkeepers, genteel women of taste, and worldly women of fashion. Along the way, it delivers incisive observations about Victorian women's "attachment" to their "valuables."
I thought of this, from White Walls, natch:
Woman, woman, do you exist?... What are you?... High up a Siberian tree your hat blinks its eyes in fear; a cow gives birth in suffering so you may have shoes; a lamb is sheared screaming so you can warm yourself with its fleece; a sperm whale is in its death throes; a crocodile weeps; a doomed leopard pants, fleeing. Your pink cheeks come from boxes of flying dust, your smiles from golden containers with strawberry filling, your smooth skin from tubes of grease, your gaze from round transparent jars... He bought Yevgeniya Ivanovna a pair of eyelashes.
Like I said. Obsessive tendencies. But you should read the James Fenimore Cooper thing. I'm going to go watch the Jarvis Cocker video a hundred more times.
If you want to convert someone to reading, I'm not sure dropping him into Tolstoy is the best way to start. Come on, Yann, can't you find something a little less... LITERATURE-y? If Oprah can make her audience read The Road, I'm sure the prime minister would be open to it. (Thanks to everyone who sent in the link.)
April 17, 2007
NPR has pulled out a conversation with Gwendolyn Brooks from their archives for their Poetry Month series.
Also, since we're back on poetry: John Donne was a dirty man, but also hopelessly romantic.
This week's Guardian Digested Read: Blenheim Orchard by Tim Pears.
Sheena Pepin took her husband's phallus in her hand. Barely awake, Ezra rocked backwards and forwards. Undulating in the dark, they made somnambulistic, aquatic love. "That's how lyrically sex ought to be described at the start of a great literary novel," he sighed, his orgasm flushing the synapses of his brain.
"Now ram home the juxtaposition of the sublime with the quotidian by making me a cup of tea," Sheena murmured.
Michael Ondaatje speaks to the Globe and Mail about his new book Divisadero.
The prize-winning Canadian author Yann Martel is so worried about prime minister Stephen Harper's apparent lack of interest in the arts, he sent him a book yesterday ... and will do so every fortnight.
We want to know what book, Scotsman.
NYRB has put up a sample short story from Tatyana Tolstaya's collection White Walls, called "See the Other Side." (Only available as PDF.)
You can also read a sample chapter from her book The Slynx, which was also just released by NYRB in paperback. I started reading it last night. Just say the word "post-apocalypse" and I'm there.
Chris Mooney (The Republican War on Science) and Matthew C. Nisbet make a plea for scientists to get some publicity departments, or at least to stop letting Richard Dawkins speak for them.
Leave aside for a moment the validity of Dawkins's arguments against religion. The fact remains: The public cannot be expected to differentiate between his advocacy of evolution and his atheism. More than 80 percent of Americans believe in God, after all, and many fear that teaching evolution in our schools could undermine the belief system they consider the foundation of morality. Dawkins not only reinforces and validates such fears -- baseless though they may be -- but lends them an exclamation point.
Oh right. The Road won the Pulitzer. Carry on.
This year is Daphne du Maurier's centenary, and the Guardian updates us on what is going on in her honor. If it could include a better cover for Rebecca, that'd be swell.
Don't bother reading the New Yorker review of The Feminine Mistake, it's not very good. (It's one of the "but if the women like staying at home, what's the big deal?" reviews.) But what was interesting is this paragraph about the book's title:
In 1967, “Alice in Womanland, or The Feminine Mistake,” by the pseudonymous Margaret Bennett, provided a satirical overview of the condition of the American woman, its chapters on marriage, family, and work framed within an extended allusion to Lewis Carroll—a tactic that, like the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” might once have made sense but these days indicates a culture that was on the verge of losing its collective mind. By 1971, the feminist movement was sufficiently well established to merit a parodic counterblast from the humorist Cal Samra, whose own “The Feminine Mistake” was, he claimed, “perhaps the first true masculinist tract since the Koran.” When Judith Posner’s “The Feminine Mistake” appeared, in 1992, it was time for feminist one-upmanship. Posner, a sociologist influenced by the burgeoning New Age movement, argued that those women who had followed Friedan’s counsel and sought to enter the workplace on a par with men had gained nothing but their own subjection to corporate culture, and would do well to cast aside career in favor of personal growth, forming a vanguard for the wholesale reformation of consumer capitalism. “We can even say that the glass ceiling was a blessing in disguise,” she maintained. “Today, women can not only see to the glass ceiling, they can also see through it.”
Mohsin Hamid talks to John Freeman about his book The Reluctant Fundamentalist at the NBCC blog.
April 16, 2007
Granta editor Ian Jack is on the NPR Weekend Edition talking about the Young American Writers.
A friend and I recently had coffee after a year apart, and we found ourselves scribbling down lists of books that we have loved since we last met. She tried to sneak away with my copy of What the Bee Knows (it's out of print and currently around $100 for a beat up copy), and I left with TATYANA TOLSTAYA written on a slip of paper.
Lucky for me, NYRB just published a collection of Tolstaya's stories called White Walls. I'm over the moon about this book, although I wish it looked more like Tolstaya's original Russian covers, and less like a box of tampons. Her paragraphs are breathless and exhausting, landing you in completely different places than where you left. Last night I actually had to drug myself to get to sleep, because every five minutes I would creep back into the living room to read one more page. (When reading Cloud Atlas, I awoke at 2am one night, completely awake and ready to read more. I read until nearly passing out at 10am. I have obsessive tendencies, I don't know if you've noticed.)
Here she writes about her grandmother in the New Yorker:
I’m really thinking about the whale: how he dove into the cold Norwegian waters suspecting nothing, not a thought for the red-bearded northern fishermen; how he wasn’t on his guard when he rose up to the gray surface of the sea, to the unextinguished yellow sunsets in the overflow of the northern waters, fair-haired girls, pines, stones, Grieg sonatas, to that sea sung by fashionable writers in the modern’s minor key. He didn’t need those baleens, those horny formations on his palate, those so-called whiskers or bones intended as an instrument for filtering plankton; the northern girls found a better use for them. A slender waist; luxuriant hair; a difficult love; a long life; children dragged by the hand across seas and continents.
I do have a very colorful work history. I’ve done just about everything you can imagine. Once an interviewer asked me, “_Why_ were you a bouncer?” I thought it was a very strange question, because naturally I took that job for the same reason I took most of my jobs: because it was a necessity. And yet I couldn’t let the question pass, so when the interviewer—it was for a very prestigious radio program—asked me that question, I said because I thought it would look good when I came up for tenure.
Martin Espada (The Republic of Poetry) is interviewed at the Brooklyn Rail.
Over at the Critical Mass blog, I have a small e-mail exchange with Anne McLean about her translation of Javier Cercas's The Speed of Light, her latest Julio Cortazar project, and whether one prize celebrating translation is enough.
Lots of Spanish and Latin American writers tend to enjoy sentences that go on about ten times as long as the average English or American sentence and it's always a dilemma how far to go, or close to stick, when trying to transform foreign prose into something intelligible and palatable for English-speaking readers. Obviously, we strive for fluency and lucidity and all those things reviewers often praise in translated prose, but if you work with a writer who values complexity over lucidity, then you’ve got to try to convey the complexity without letting things get any more complicated than they were in the original.
If you read Kurt Vonnegut when you were young — read all there was of him, book after book as fast as you could the way so many of us did — you probably set him aside long ago. That’s the way it goes with writers we love when we’re young. It’s almost as though their books absorbed some part of our DNA while we were reading them, and rereading them means revisiting a version of ourselves we may no longer remember or trust.
Last night I read Dan Rhodes's Anthropology for approximately the 15th time. I always think I'm only going to read a handful of the stories, and then I'm starting over at the beginning and reading it through. (Also spent a good part of yesterday flipping through Brian Eno's A Year with Swollen Appendices to find all the dreams he writes about, but that's another conversation.) I have yet to figure out how he does so much with so few words.
Rhodes talks to 3:AM Magazine about the inspiration for his new novel, Gold.
I’d heard about this radiator spray paint you can get, and I thought: I’m going to spray that silver, so that it looks like a nice, shiny new silver radiator rather than a skanky old one. And I sprayed it silver, and it looked fantastic. It looked really, really good. I was really, really impressed with myself, having sprayed this thing silver. And then I looked at the rest of the hall, and I thought: wouldn’t it be nice if I sprayed it all silver.
April 13, 2007
When I was living in Ireland, I was lucky enough to meet a woman who pushed all sorts of Irish poets on me. (I am also now lucky enough to have a friend who trolls used bookstores looking for affordable copies of the out of print books by these poets.) Recently I came across a stack of Xeroxed poems in my closet, and I remember she apologized for not being able give me the full books. It's full of poets writing in Gaelic, an amazing poem by Austin Clarke, and women left out of the large collection edited by Thomas Kinsella. "Oh yes, Tom," she'd sputter. "There have only been three Irish women poets in the history of our country. Bastard." And don't mention Yeats in front of her. Her eyes would roll so hard her entire head would move.
One of the poets I was able to find the books of in America was Eavan Boland. Her book In a Time of Violence is still the one I reach for on my poetry shelf late at night. She has a new book out, Domestic Violence, and her poem "Atlantis -- A Lost Sonnet" is featured on the NPR website as part of their National Poetry Month series.
I love this photo of Katherine Mansfield -- the open mouth, the stare. Then I noticed the caption, and I loved it even more: "Katherine Mansfield's spirit was awesome." I don't know who was responsible for that, but I thank them for the laugh.
Subterranean Press is offering a free audio book of Kage Baker's Rude Mechanicals (reviewed positively by Colleen Mondor in this month's issue of Bookslut) on their website.
Oh quit complaining, Amazon user. £17.50 for a rabbit vibrator is a really good deal.
A pre-Easter email from marketing bods at Amazon.co.uk raised the hackles of one Reg reader with its subject line: "Bonking like a Spring Bunny? Rampant Rabbits from £17.50 at Amazon.co.uk."
The Rampant Rabbit is not, we are reliably informed, an actual Easter Bunny. The email arrived complete with eye-watering pictures of "Spring Bunnies of a different sort", love eggs, clitoral stimulators, butt plugs, and a range of goods called "male pleasure sleeves".
The Booker International Award for fiction has announced the longlist for the $120,000 prize: Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, blah blah blah. Yes, give it to them. They obviously need the cash.
Though this article has problems -- I'm not sure totalling up who managed to write the most books before death should have anything to do with a literary reputation -- Kelly Jane Torrance's exploration of why Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Dawn Powell are not as highly regarded as Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway is at least worth reading.
Citing his concern for "the morals of our society," Burlingame schools Superintendent Sonny Da Marto has stopped four eighth-grade classes from reading "Kaffir Boy," an award-winning memoir of growing up in a South African ghetto during apartheid. (Thanks to Stephanie for the link.)
April 12, 2007
I apologize if this is a slightly terse post: I'd intended on writing it from San Francisco, but mechanical difficulties on US Airways have meant that I'm writing this from the home office.
Least anticipated poetry movie of 2008: The Best Time of Our Lives, a biopic about Dylan Thomas that stars Keira Knightley and Lindsay Lohan.
More anticipated poetry movie of 2008: Bright Star, a biopic about John Keats and Fanny Brawne, written and directed by Jane Campion. (via book/daddy)
Over the next three weeks, I'll have approximately sixty students filing into my office to recite poems from memory. (40 lines or so to qualify for an A.) Here are four smart essays on memorization and recitation, which I think is the fundamental building block of reading poems: John Hollander's "Committed to Memory", Heaney's "Crediting Poetry," Billy Collins's "How to Read a Poem Out Loud," and Jerome McGann's "Preface: Recitation Considered as a Fine Art."
Some links:
- Peter Anastas's "self-interview" has some interesting comments on Olson and regionalism, and Olson's relationship to Thoreau.
- Ami Greko has been posting lots and lots of audio at "The Best Words in the Best Order," Farrar, Straus, and Giroux's promotional blog for National Poetry Month.
- Since I'm apparently plugging corporate poetry sites, here's the latest production from Cumbria Tourism: MC Nuts's cover of Wordsworth's "Daffodils." A giant squirrel, parading around Lake Ullswater, rapping Wordsworth lyrics. (via Choriamb)
- The Princeton Public Library has a podcast series this month featuring "local poets," including such obscure figures as Paul
Muldoon. - One last podcast series: The "Poets on Poets" series, hosted at Romantic Circles, has posted the first recordings in their new quarterly format. Kevin Goodan and Mark Yakich atone for the MC Nuts & Bright Star items above.
Since it is official Bookslut policy to link, when possible, to VQR, I'll leave today with a link to my new favorite poem:
Like hellor hello, homonym
or homophone, who prey
on each other’s predicate,what can we know
of the world
but every measure of regretcarried in a word
with the gravity of air:
begot, beget, begin..
(Any typos today can be blamed on the 18-month old on my lap currently feeding my keyboard pistachio shells.)
Yesterday I received an e-mail from Ander Monson saying he was snowed in in the Upper Penninsula. This is not something you think will be a problem for an April reading, but this is the Midwest. We are currently working on rescheduling him for a future reading, and thank you to the audience for not throwing chairs through windows and rioting, demanding their Ander Monson. (We briefly considered asking a large, bearded man to pretend to be Ander, but thought the audience was not drunk enough yet to be fooled.)
Luckily, Catherynne M. Valente was able to unbury herself from the snow, and Jeannine Hall Gailey was able to get in from Seattle. Jeannine opened the evening with her incredible work from Becoming the Villainess, reading a selection about Snow Queens to go with the weather. Valente and Gailey work in similar dark fairy tale territory, and Valente followed with a story about Boy Meets Witch from The Orphan's Tales. It was a perfect night for black, sticky poems and stories filled with monsters and step-mothers and princes with formulas. I'm so thrilled that both authors were able to make it, and thanks for everyone for coming out. I'll keep everyone updated on when Monson reschedules.
The phrase "So it goes" became famous when it appeared in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) every time a death was reported. Its author was Kurt Vonnegut, who has died aged 84, following brain injuries incurred several weeks ago in a fall.
Alasdair Gray is on the BBC speaking about Vonnegut's death. (Real Audio link.) Thanks to Peter.
April 11, 2007
(She says, not mentioning she once grew faint at a self-trepanation scene in The Underground Man...)
Hanne Blank, author of Virgin: The Untouched History offers a playlist of songs about virginity for the Largehearted Boy's Book Notes.
Poets & Writers has a tiny excerpt from Ander Monson's "Outline Toward a Theory of the Mine Versus the Mind and the Harvard Outline." You can read the whole thing in his book Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, and you can hear him speak tonight at the Bookslut Reading Series in Chicago. What else are you going to do tonight? Sit around, watching the snow and weeping? It's April, Chicago! Give it up!
Also, I can't remember if I ever linked to this profile of Tom Bissell and his new book The Father of All Things, also in Poets & Writers. I obviously need to clean out my bookmarks.
"I was reading a new novel the other day when it struck me that the author might as well be a murderer. It wasn't a bad novel, it was just too long."
Dan Rhodes on his appreciation for short books.
It is difficult to type with a large chunk for your finger missing, but we'll see what we can do. (I made a casserole last night. I should not be allowed near my own kitchen.)
Jessica Francis Kane appreciates the literary qualities of gardening catalogs.
For a scarlet beauty called the Prince of Austria: “It’s one of history’s most fragrant tulips (violets? orange blossoms?), and on a sunny day it will draw you across the garden.”
I like that poetic parenthetical, reaching yet failing to define the scent. Would that book publishers’ catalogs were sometimes so honest and vague. For the next wunderkind’s debut: “It’s one of the decade’s most forceful novels (sledge hammer? Norman Mailer?), and if you leave it open on your nightstand it will draw you a mongoose.”
April 10, 2007
NPR reports on the story of the closure of the library system in sections of Oregon.
I hope you can one day find the happiness you deparately need, because the real feminine mistake is believing that being a wife and mother is not signifigant and that the only way a woman can be validated is to have her career and dismiss the value of her contribution to her family.
You know, I thought that Leslie Bennetts was being a little hysterical when she called the reaction to her book The Feminine Mistake a "witch hunt." Then I scrolled down to the comments section.
Genius Chris Onstad talks to Salon about the inspiration for his book The Achewood Cookbook.
"I was sitting there looking at that massive "French Laundry Cookbook," which is essentially useless to any home cook, and I thought: Well, fuck this. I think it would be fun, and it would be a great challenge, to take on a project for guys who are just out of college and have one pan and one electric burner."
Rupert Thomson talks to the Scotsman about his upcoming book (released in August in the States), Death of a Murderer.
"I started thinking about the nature of the gap between a so-called ordinary person and a so-called monster," he says. "We all like to assume that the gap is wide and a word like 'monster' is used to make it sound like that person bears no resemblance to us. What I was interested in was how narrow that gap could be, if you look very honestly at yourself."
April 09, 2007
She flipped the pages of her book idly; it was not interesting. She knew that if she asked her husband to take her to a movie, or out for a ride, or to play gin rummy, he would smile at her and agree; he was always willing to do things to please her, still, after ten years of marriage. An odd thought crossed her mind: She would pick up the heavy glass ashtray and smash her husband over the head with it.
I'm reading Shirley Jackson. Little makes me happier.
I don't know who thinks of these things... Atheist Sam Harris (The End of Faith) and Rick Warren (The Purpose Driven Life) sat down with Newsweek to answer "Does God Exist?" You don't really even need to read the article, do you?
SAM HARRIS: There's no evidence for such a God, and it's instructive to notice that we're all atheists with respect to Zeus and the thousands of other dead gods whom now nobody worships.
NEWSWEEK: Rick, what is the evidence of the existence of the God of Abraham?
RICK WARREN: I see the fingerprints of God everywhere. I see them in culture. I see them in law. I see them in literature. I see them in nature. I see them in my own life. Trying to understand where God came from is like an ant trying to understand the Internet. Even the most brilliant scientist would agree that we only know a fraction of a percent of the knowledge of the universe.
Etc., etc.
You can read the new Joe Sacco story "Down! Up! You're in the Iraqi Army Now" at the Harpers website... if you subscribe. It's worth buying the issue for, at the very least.
Salon.com has an excerpt from Darcey Steinke's Easter Everywhere available online.
April 06, 2007
I am in St. Louis, so don't expect much here today. Better to spend your time reading this essay about Edith Wharton at the London Review of Books. Or catching up on Alasdair Gray's blog, because yes, he is blogging again. I'm busy eating complimentary Nutter Butters in my complimentary bath robe watching complimentary cable television in my hotel room. I'll see you on Monday.
By way of starting, thanks to Jessa for letting me post to the blog once or twice a week, primarily about poetry-related matters. I am not a poet, just someone who
reads poems. There are plans for this spot but if there're stories or links you think Bookslut readers should know about, e-mail.
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It's more than a bit awkward to start a poetry-themed blog section during National Poetry Month, but that's the way the calendar worked. The good news: Newspaper editors start cranking out theme pieces on poetry's "vital place in American culture".
First up is the Houston Chronicle, which recently ran a piece on
"cowboy poetry" (Via Hal Gordon.) Cowboy poetry can be summed up as poems by or about cowboys, typically story-driven and with a familiar rhyme and meter.
Joel Nelson
asserts "cowboying" to be "more compatible with poetry than most other professions. Cowboys live and work in solitude and have a lot of time for self-reflection. Besides, riding horses is rhythmic, he said, and so lends itself to verse."
Of course, my favorite cowboy poem is Bret Harte's "Dickens in Camp" (1870), which suggests that cowboys would rather listen to The Old Curiosity Shop be read aloud than recite cowboy poems.
Windows users can catch up on their cowboy poetry by listening to highlights from the 2007 National Cowboy Poetry Gathering.
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Media trendiness is of course hardly being restricted to poetry, of course: The internet service of the moment is Twitter, which even Time has a story about. Twitter lets people post what they are doing *right* *now*, in a way that's quick and easy.
Like any other new communications tool, Twitter has been hijacked for poetry. Gavin Heaton's TwitterPoetry account, to which anyone can post, is a sort of improvised communal poem. It also confirms a lingering suspicion I've had: Any communally-written poem will rapidly transmute into limerick. More conventionally, Tom Watson has written that "Twitter is a poetry machine," because it gathers these very concrete details about the ephemera of our lives. He uses Twitter as "a way to plumb the common mindset," to get words, phrases, and other little bits of reality; he then arranges them into poems.
My love/hate relationship with Caitlin Flanagan got a little more complicated. It was at hate for a long time after To Hell with All That, but now she's back at the Atlantic, writing about the books The Choices We Made: Twenty-Five Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion and Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away. If you just read the first page of the article, you can fall in love with Caitlin Flanagan, or, more accurately, Flanagan's mother. It's that second page that gets tricky...
The endings of these stories, with their dangerous abortions and forced adoptions, may have little bearing on the world of today. But their beginnings, with all the emotions and impulses and desires that have always combined to leave some women pregnant when they don’t wish to be, are as timeless as anything in human history. They reveal something about the eternal and dangerous nature of being female, and because of this, they merit a great deal of our attention.
What's the dangerous nature of being female, you ask? It's our pesky habit of getting pregnant. The article devolves into a rambling maternal instinct something or other, and she lays all of the blame at the feet of predatory male sexuality. (I'm almost sympathetic to this section of her review, as after spending years counseling girls and women who needed abortions, I really heard it all.) She doesn't seem to have absorbed The Girls Who Went Away, either, as she doesn't appear to understand that putting a child up for adoption is not a simple decision not to continue a pregnancy. It's a whole other issue.
Someone send her a copy of Leslie Cannold's The Abortion Myth, as it was (sadly) revolutionary for Cannold to state plainly, an unintended pregnancy is really not the woman's fault, nor the man's unless there was rape involved. But more importantly, she explains the morality of the decision and how, even in the age of 3-D ultrasounds and extending how premature a baby can be and survive, the decision to have an abortion can still be the moral one.
April 05, 2007
Janet Browne was on Talk of the Nation to discuss her book Darwin's Origin of the Species. (Read Bookslut's take on Browne's book here.)
Darker Matter has a 1979 interview with Douglas Adams up. (Link from Locus Mag.) (Now just from typing it, I'll have "Dark Matter" by Andrew Bird stuck in my head all day.)
What the Brits think the female brain looks like.
The Boston Globe speaks with Hermione Lee about her new biography of Edith Wharton.
Yet her own life plays through in many complicated ways in all her writing. She was wedded to the idea of objectivity, control, shape, form -- she's a great shaper of sentences, sentence by sentence on the page; at her best she's a remarkable stylist. But at the same time she didn't want to be classified as a sentimental woman novelist, in the way that often happens in that period: she's harsh, strong, powerful, direct, often kind of barren and plain.
An anonymous reader responds to this month's Spec Fic Floozy column:
In her recent column about the Hugo awards, Adrienne Martini described the committee of this year's Worldcon as "bastards" because she didn't like the list of nominees. I suppose Ms. Martini might be one of those people who enjoys shooting the messenger, but I'm going to assume that she's just badly confused about how the Hugos work. You see, Worldcon committees are not responsible for drawing up the list of nominees. Nor is there any other secret cabal that does the job. The Hugos are a popular vote award, with thousands of people eligible to vote each year, and anyone allowed to join them. If anyone deserves to be the target of Ms. Martini's ire it is the voters, not the Worldcon committee.
The gaffe particularly unfortunate because this year is the first time in over 20 years that Worldcon is taking place in a non-English-speaking country: Japan. The committee that Martini castigates includes a large number of Japanese SF fans who are working hard to put on what is one of the world's largest all-volunteer-run events. Although hundreds of Japanese were eligible to vote, it would seem from the lack of non-Japanese nominees that they politely sat back and let us Westerners do all the voting. So Ms. Martini is calling a group of Japanese "bastards" because they did their job in reporting how a group of predominantly American fans voted. Goodness only knows what they will think of us if they feel Martini is typical of American attitudes.
Finally I note that I'm just as disappointed as Martini about the lack of women writers on the ballot. But I did my part. I voted, and I had a number of women writers on my ballot. The Hugos are, after all, determined by popular vote. Feminism will never get anywhere just by whining. You have to act. So I'm hoping that in future Martini will put her anger to some use and participate in the process. And perhaps also use her position of influence as a high profile reviewer to recommend top women writers, and encourage other people to vote for them.
April 04, 2007
Proof that I am the biggest dork in all of humanity: We got our weekly delivery of mail today, and after my initial excitement about finally getting Veronica Mars, I squealed with delight at receiving the Freud (The Psychology of Love) and John Stuart Mill (The Subjection of Women) that I ordered. I'm just going to go ahead and tattoo DORK across my forehead.
I think I'm supposed to feel some righteous anger about this book The Average American Male. Instead all I think is "Dude needs to meet some real women." Then there's this comment he made at Nerve:
"Obviously I want people to buy it and read it and like it. I don't want too many people to be mad. I hope people enjoy it, and I hope Oprah doesn't read it."
He's not all testosteroned out, beating his chest about his need for anal sex and blow jobs from multiple women a day. He's just scribbled on the wall and realized when mommy (or Oprah) gets home, she'll be disappointed in him. We should start a collection for his therapy bills now, get a head start.
I listed five books coming out this spring that I want to read for the NBCC blog, but that doesn't really cover it. Here are the five creaky old books covered in dust that I will be reading this spring, as if spring existed in Chicago and it wasn't just winter winter winter winter ONE NICE WEEK winter again summer.
What the Bee Knows by P.L. Travers
One must make something of an investment to read this book, as the cheapest you'll find it at Abebooks.com is $50+. The book collects Travers's (best known for Mary Poppins) essays about myth and storytelling originally printed in Parabola. I started reading it last night. It's worth the $50.
Poor Things by Alasdair Gray
One must be prepared for his first novel in ten years, to be published this fall. Plus, it's fucking Alasdair Gray.
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
I started to read this in New York, but then assumed I lost it when I searched everywhere for it, except for that one pocket in my bag that I never use, so why would I look there? (Besides the Lewis, I also found $10 and five pots of lipgloss.) Why do more people not read Lewis? Every time someone saw me carrying the book, they'd ask, "Oh god, why are you reading that?" They just don't know good.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Every spring, I turn to a Jackson book. There's something about the warped worldview that suits the weariness that sets in at the end of a long winter.
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
I read Letty Fox, Her Luck, reprinted by NYRB, a few years back, but have never gotten around to this one, reportedly Stead's best.
Link from Journalista: Sketchbook battles.
Barbara J. King answers the question "Did religion evolve?" at the Washington Post, as part of their On Faith series.
Michelle Tea (love!) interviews Eileen Myles about her new book of poetry, Sorry, Tree. Myles explains the title:
I was mowing the lawn, and I backed into it and almost knocked it over. It reminded me of my government and all the developers killing the world, killing the little tree. It reminded me of my love life. Killing me and inventing me again. Also, you know, when I was a baby poet one of the extended family of beats, a poet named Ray Bremser, came to St. Marks Poetry Project to read. He was really drunk, and he was sitting on a chair, and he couldn't even sit up. He kept falling off the chair and beginning his reading again. He kept saying, "I am a tree, I am a tree."
Leslie Bennetts The Feminine Mistake might be the book I'm most conflicted about this year. Yes, yes, it's good that someone finally mentioned that this ideal of staying home to raise your children will eventually bite you in the ass, financially and emotionally. But does the book have to be so dull? Or so full of completely unsympathetic, pampered women? It should have stayed a magazine article, I think, but published somewhere other than Tango, the magazine most likely to make me puke when I see it. ("The Magazine for Couples!" No man has ever read that magazine.)
Even reviews of the book irk me a little, like this Joan Walsh review at Salon. I am so goddamn picky about my feminist reviews, I know, but it's because there are so few people who do it well. There are just tiny little moments in the review, like: "In the other corner are women who could be their evil twins, bright, privileged wives who threw it all over to raise their children and enjoy their suburban Colonial houses -- and all too often, lord it over the rest of us." Really? Lord it over the rest of us? I don't remember the last time I was lorded over by a woman with a baby and an SUV. The little moments add up to a tone of spite, even while she insists it's the writers who are the smug ones.
While we're on the topic, I'll mention that Peggy Orenstein's Waiting for Daisy might have been the first infertility memoir that actually dealt with a lot of the issues like privilege, identity, the occasionally gray area of international adoption, health risks, marital problems, (and on and on) that come with the mission of conquering infertility. But what else would you expect from a writer like Orenstein?
I believe this issue is the first time we've ever published a story written in a whorehouse. I could be wrong. My writers could just be keeping this information from me. But it seems like something you would share. When Heather Smith originally used the whorehouse as the reason her Judging a Book by Its Cover was going to be late, it's really not something I can fault her on.
It's a hell of an issue, with interviews with Gillian Flynn, Danielle Dutton, Muharem Bazdulj, Kevin Sessums, and Tim Willocks. Paul Morton sat down with New Yorker writer Hendrik Hertzberg to discuss the current political climate, and after I read it I almost had a little bit of hope again. Colleen Mondor spoke with David Griffith about the images of the Iraq War and how our culture absorbs them. And Barbara J. King smacks down Nina Malkin's book about feral cats.
As we approach our fifth anniversary (that would be in approximately 27 days), we're going to be changing things up. We will be adding other writers to the blog this month, because I am as sick of the sound of my voice as you are. (I know this will spark another round of "Where's Michael Schaub?" e-mails, so let me just say that I know you love and miss him. I love him dearly and miss him, too. He's still dealing with family issues, and I hope to have him back when he's ready.)
And by the way, we are looking to add another sf columnist, so if you're interested, e-mail.
April 02, 2007
No one in Chicago appears to be receiving mail anymore. The postal system in this city is fucked. Today, however, I stepped downstairs and it was like Christmas. A big crate of mail! Our first delivery of mail in 10 days! But instead of the new Virginia Quarterly Review, the London Review of Books, or a readable novel (or, let's be honest, what I'm really waiting for is the Veronica Mars DVD from Netflix), I mostly got books along the lines of Pornology: A Hilarious Exploration of Men, Relationships and Sex. Now the post office bastards are just taunting me.
Columbia Journalism Review talks about the media's neglect of the Midwest.
Elaine Pagels speaks to Salon about her new book, co-authored with Karen L. King, Reading Judas.
The Gospel of Judas is a kind of protest literature. It's challenging leaders of the church. Here the leaders are personified as disciples who are encouraging people to get killed, to "die for God," as they called martyrdom. This gospel is challenging them and saying, when you encourage young people to die for God, you're really complicit in murder.
A. M. Homes: "Some years ago, I remember seeing posters of a vivisected monkey in restraints, and that was how I felt writing the memoir." And that is exactly how I felt reading The Mistress's Daughter, like I was watching that monkey. I read many memoirs, but never have I felt so much like a voyeur. I wanted to find the people that Homes was writing about and apologize for knowing these things about them. I kept waiting for some philosophical insight or larger theme to rescue the book and make it worth the discomfort, but the book never went anywhere. It felt mean spirited and raw, and I left Mistress's Daughter on an airplane just so I wouldn't have it with me anymore. It's been a while since I've had such a visceral reaction to a book, and it's a shame that it was also mixed with boredom instead of respect.
Nadine Gordimer is interviewed at the Virginia Quarterly Review website.
In South Africa, we are very solitary. We have no sorts of schools of writers, we live in our big country, spread around the place. In other countries, at different times, you had the Bloomsbury Group. You had Jean-Paul Sartre’s group and so on, just during and after the war. And now Márquez telling us what it was like. They exchanged ideas. I can never get over the fact that Thomas Mann would read the day’s pages, gather the family round at night and read to them what he had written during the day. I am absolutely aghast, because I have spent three years in this house, writing a book, and Reinhold, my husband, I never discussed it with him, he never saw a word of it.
It didn’t seem to matter that this guy had grown a beard, bought an AK-47 and joined the Kashmir Liberation Front, while I had gone to L.A. to purchase a Starbucks loyalty card and write movies. In the eyes of the U.S. authorities, it appeared, we might as well have been the same person.
LA Weekly has the story of a screenwriter who had trouble re-entering the United States because of his name, an increasing problem for British trying to come here.
Once again, I can't seem to get the Critical Mass permalinks to work, but if you have the patience to scroll down, you can see a short e-mail interview I did with Bookslut's resident evolutionary anthropologist, Barbara J. King. Tomorrow, when the new issue goes up, it will mark two years that King has been writing for Bookslut. She makes me smarter every month, and we're blessed to have her.
