What happens to someone who has read the entire 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary? Here's what happened to Ammon Shea who over the past year did just that:
"I think it turned me into a blithering idiot," he laughs, admitting he often becomes tongue tied and unable to remember the simplest of words, such as – incredibly enough – "milk."
"I would end up stumbling and ask the guy around the counter, 'Where's the white stuff, the white liquid,'" he says.
1. Mel Tillis and Harry Crews have been recommended for the 2009 Florida Artists Hall of Fame by the Florida Arts Council. Interesting combination to say the least.
2. Ron Rash's new novel, Serena, hits store shelves this week. Here's Mr. Rash discussing the book at Powells' From the Author site.
3. The On the Road scroll has landed in Chicago where Columbia College will host a series of events centered around the book and Beat influence on the arts.
The Globe and Mail profiles Nick Cave, who, it appears, has just finished work on a novel:
The book, which Cave finished mere days ago, is called The Death of Bunny Munro, and it grew out of a screenplay that never got made. Munro is "just not a good guy," Cave says.
"But I've always liked things like those Jim Thompson novels, where you've just got [a protagonist who's] flat-out evil. But there's always something a little endearing about him. And Thompson would draw you, chapter by chapter, into this vortex, where your sympathies are stretched finer and finer. I've always found that interesting in his books."
Curiously, Cave says the biggest difference between songwriting and novel writing is that "I find the writing of novels and stuff easier. It's because you're pursuing one idea for a sustained amount of time.
"My problem always is coming up with the original idea - that 'What am I going to write about?' And you have to do that over and over and over again with songs. Every time you finish one, you just have to work out what the next one will be. What's your theme?
"To write a novel, you only need to get a basic idea and run with it. It's the same with scriptwriting. Scriptwriting is even easier, because in most cases you're supplied your theme. Someone says. 'Will you write an Australian western?' Well, yeah, why not? It's not rocket science to do that - you get some archetypes, stick 'em on their head, and do this and that with them.
"But songwriting - I mean, the amount of times I've rung up my friends and said, 'Right, look, will someone tell me what to write a song about?' And someone will go, 'Well, what about trains?' And you go, 'Oh, all right.' "
It looks like the chances of me getting financed to buy that absolutely necessary minivan (gah!) between now and the time of the twins' arrival took a big, sloppy political hit a few hours ago. I may need to go Beverly Hillbillies and strap some car seats to the roof of my car.
So if, like me, you need a good laugh, then here's something for you: Remarks by Charles Bernstein at an event to mark the release of this year's Best American Poetry:
Cultural leaders have come together to announce a massive poetry buyout: leveraged and unsecured poems, poetry derivatives, delinquent poems, and subprime poems will be removed from circulation in the biggest poetry bailout since the Victorian era. We believe the plan is a comprehensive approach to relieving the stresses on our literary institutions and markets.
Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance.
Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature. When the literary system works as it should, poetry and poetry assets flow to and from readers and writers to create a productive part of the cultural field. As toxic poetry assets block the system, the poisoning of literary markets has the potential to damage our cultural institutions irreparably.
As part of its series revisiting some of the landmarks mentioned in the Federal Writers' Project's American Guide Series, the NYT travels to Eatonville, a small town in Florida made famous by Zora Neale Hurston:
Eatonville has long been defined as a paradox of triumph and struggle. It is both a historic model of black empowerment and a community of nearly 2,400 where the poverty rates are twice the national average. It is a literary hub but also an oak-shaded example of rural Southern black culture — sometimes disdained, sometimes praised — that was born of American slavery. Not surprisingly, residents here are both proud and protective.
And the concern about Eatonville’s image really began with Zora, which is all anyone here calls Hurston. She introduced the world to her hometown through heartfelt, dialect-heavy books like “Mules and Men” (1935) and “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1937).
Five paragraphs in the Florida guidebook transformed the town, just off Route 17, a road that runs through the oft-forgotten center of Florida into a stage of black history and human drama. Bold as a bass drum in both life and literature, Hurston led readers to the store owned by Eatonville’s first mayor, Joe Clarke, then veered into more private areas. “Off the road on the left,” she wrote, “is the brown-with-white-trim modern public school, with its well-kept yards and playgrounds, which Howard Miller always looks after, though he can scarcely read and write.”
She also mentioned the new husband of Widow Dash and wrote that Lee Glenn “sells drinks of all kinds and whatever goes with transient rooms.”
So in just a few hundred words, Hurston linked Eatonville with self-government but also illiteracy, remarriage and sex. Clearly, Fodor’s this was not.
In fact, it was not a portrait everyone appreciated.
I'm as excited as anyone to watch the debate tonight, but if I lived anywhere close to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, I would be watching the debate on tape delay. No way would I miss Barry Hannah's reading there:
“It’s been a long time,” said Michael Martone, chair of UA’s creative writing program, “at least since I’ve been here, and that’s 12 years now.”
Hannah contacted Martone, noting he still has family here and visits often. In addition to the new book, Grove Press has recently re-issued a collection of his older titles, among them “Ray,” written about his time in Tuscaloosa, “Geronimo Rex,” which won the William Faulkner Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award, the story collections “Airships” and “Bats Out of Hell,” and “High Lonesome,” which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
Hannah still has friends here as well.
“We were great friends; we were drinking buddies, is what we were,” said UA English professor Phil Beidler, “although I’m proud to say neither of us has had a drink in more than 20 years. We were co-enablers. We took to each other like ducks. We were just loony for a while.”
Hannah did bring a revolver to class once, in the same case with his flugelhorn. Esquire magazine, in a 1998 article, backs that up. Students apparently tried to walk out on Hannah’s impromptu solo, at which point he waved the pistol, saying “Now this is some bad soul. You guys had better learn the difference.”
The story about Hannah firing into the floorboards of his MG, having let it fill with rain while he drank away an afternoon at The Chukker, apparently has its basis in truth as well.
“I’ve never heard him say it; but it’s almost like it’s in the air,” Martone said.
Fellow former Litblog Co-op'er makes us all proud (and just a tiny bit jealous):
After Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, 29, graduated from New York University with an English degree in 2001, she did what she was supposed to do, which was land a coveted job as an editorial assistant at a major publishing house.
She cried every day.
It wasn’t that Ms. Stockton Bagnulo did not love books enough. She loved them too much. Writing book-jacket copy from a cubicle, sorting files, “I felt so far from the things we were making,” she recalled.
Longing for the part-time job she had in college, at Three Lives, an independent bookstore in the West Village, Ms. Stockton Bagnulo returned to working there on weekends to cheer herself up. At some point she realized that graduate school in creative writing was not the answer (which was good, because she didn’t get in anywhere). “Gradually,” she said, “it dawned on me that the big, important thing I wanted to do was open a bookstore.”
A reporter for the Toronto Star re-enacted the cross-country motorcycle trip that Robert Pirsig detailed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and wrote his own book about it:
Re-enacting the journey from Minneapolis to San Francisco chronicled by Pirsig in his cult classic, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," Mark Richardson digs deep to unearth the motives behind his tormented mentor's search for quality while embarking on a search of his own.
"I sent the first draft to Pirsig," Richardson said. "He read it and wrote back and said it was like being a ghost at his own funeral."
The editor of the Toronto Star's "Wheels" section had to be reached via pay phone at a truck stop in Dakota City, Neb. He's on the road again on a motorcycle, this time promoting his book.
"What was missing," mused Richardson, "was the fascinating story of Pirsig's life. He wrote about finding inner peace, but his actual life was in turmoil."
I'm all for a good reprint, but I had no idea that JFranz was personally responsible for the uptick in their numbers:
The toughest statement about what role reprints are filling comes from Persephone's Nicola Beauman, who doesn't hesitate to say that modern fiction has lost the art of storytelling, an attribute she distinguishes from plot.
"You get to the end of Jonathan Franzen's 'The Corrections' and you haven't been changed in any way," she explains. "You think, 'So what?' "
Beauman, whose "A Very Great Profession" chronicles the British "women's novel" from 1914 to 1939, argues that the writers and novelists she is publishing, Dorothy Whipple and Marghanita Laski among them, are exemplars of that lost art of storytelling. She refers, not disdainfully, to her company's books as middlebrow novels; Persephone's biggest recent success, Winifred Wilson's "Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day" (the basis for the recent film), might qualify. But it's tough to think of a contemporary match for its singular sophistication and generosity.
It's back. First link post in ages. I forgot how long these can take when one is distracted:
McSweeney's is eulogizing David Foster Wallace. Here's Tom Bissell:
I had one thing in common with Dave Wallace: we both dipped tobacco. Actually, we had something else in common: we were both from the Midwest. That, and I probably stole more from him than any other writer. But our friendship, such as it was, was mostly based on the fact that we both dipped, and used dip while writing, and often hated this about ourselves. The last time I saw him, in the spring, I had just had mouth surgery—my third mouth surgery, as it happens. We had talked about dipping a lot but we had never dipped together, and this was the first time we had seen each other in several years. We were acquaintances more than friends. It is hard to be friends with someone you admire as much as I admired Dave, and it speaks to his grace and kindness that, knowing full well what I owed him as a writer, he let me into his life at all. However. The tobacco. He had quit for a while but was back on it. I had quit for three weeks. After prolonged negotiation, we agreed we could probably have one dip together. We did, and then we played chess. He whipped me two games in a row, all the while expressing shock that I was so bad. (He had said before we started playing that his friends always expressed shock that he was so bad.) When, after the games, I asked him to sign my copy of Infinite Jest (which I bought in 1996, while in college, when spending $30 on a hardcover was a real bankrupter, and which book I have basically taken with me everywhere since, including Uzbekistan for the Peace Corps, which also wasn't easy, given luggage and space restrictions), he did sign, very tenderly and beautifully, but also somewhat tartly, drawing a little diagram to show our chess game progress, as if to imply a whole future of chess games with Dave Wallace to look forward to, drawing two check marks underneath his name and leaving the space under mine blank. Right before the weekend was over, though, I finally beat him. I forgot to ask him to amend his little chart. I figured the next time I saw him I would do that, and maybe we would even play again.
Jonathan Lethem takes a break from writing novels about music to write...lyrics for music:
"You Are All My People," which comes out today on Bloodshot Records, is the first album by I'm Not Jim, a collaboration featuring the vocals and guitar of Walter Salas-Humara, more widely known as the front man of the Silos, a highly literate and slyly humorous rock act that also happens to be a favorite of Mr. Lethem. The writer penned most of the lyrics for the unusual assortment of songs and spoken-word interludes that appear on the new record, but he doesn't actually sing or otherwise perform — unlike some of his peers.
"Rick [Moody] is a musician; he can play," Mr. Lethem, sitting at a table in a coffee shop around the corner from his Boerum Hill home, said recently. "I'm at pains to make it clear that I'm not pretending to be that."
You can read more about the collaboration and order the album at Bloodshot Records.
And because I'm in a good mood, for now, here's a song to sample.
+ I'm Not Jim--"Drink Til I'm Sober"
Ed has collected the thoughts of numerous folks for a nice remembrance of David Foster Wallace. I especially liked what Christopher Sorrentino had to say:
It does a disservice to Wallace and his work to remember it as a sustained exception to the “rule” pigeonholing postmodern work: that it is severely technical, devoted exclusively to games and to the algorithmic execution of formal steps. Time and again Wallace demonstrated that it is only through daring acts of creativity that we can be drawn into the human heart securely: via the questions he raised about the nature of storytelling; via his upending of reader’s expectations; and especially via his implicit condemnation of conventional narrative as the perfect formal delivery system for conventional wisdom. These approaches are not exceptional; rather, they go directly to the essence of the writing, and reading, experience.
It would be a further disservice if this great writer’s life, and career, were to become circumscribed, and defined, by his terrible death. Reading over the hasty hagiographic tributes which have appeared since Saturday night, many of which include ickily fannish scanning of Wallace’s works and public utterances for clues to his ultimate intentions, it seems to me that such tributes don’t appear to be the product of true “reading” at all. Wallace would have wanted such romantic horseshit shunted to the side — shredded and burned, if possible. Wallace wrote for the same reasons any writer does: to launch his preoccupations on the tar sea of composition, and to be read. That he is read, and even revered, has always struck me as a reason for hope — I gather that, tragically, it didn’t strike him the same way. Yet his output is not a 3,000 page suicide note, and even in the darkest corners of these fecund and exuberant works we can find no more evidence of the suicidally depressed individual Wallace evidently became than we can detect the impoverished and out-of-favor Mozart in his own exuberant late works.
He was the best we had. In perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.
One of the first promises I made as a blogger was that I would read and report on the results of my reading of Infinite Jest. I'd started and stopped the novel at least a half dozen times. In September 2004, I made it to the end...
It's hard to believe we've lost this great talent.
According to reports, David Foster Wallace hanged himself last night. He was 46.
Update: Sarah says something I wrote in this post originally, but then deleted, thinking it perhaps hyperbole or overreaction or shock. She writes, "It feels like when Kurt Cobain died."
But the more I think of it, and for those of us who love reading, who love great writing, who appreciate the folks who pour their every cell onto the page for our enjoyment and elucidation, the news of DFW's death is probably sadder. At least for me at this point in my life and my career I think it is more of shock and sadder than Cobain's suicide was to me at the time. Where is Kurt Loder when you need him?
I'm actually cautiously optimistic about the adaptation of Revolutionary Road. Here's something of a preview but beware that this is brought to you by Entertainment Tonight.
The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas has opened a new exhibit, "The Mystique of the Archive," which gives visitors a peak behind the scenes of the fabled archives that the center hosts:
There's much in this exhibit that rewards close reading, but there's also plenty that's simply fun to look at.
Take the particularly filthy laptop computer that arrived as part of the Norman Mailer archive. Mailer, apparently, dictated his novels onto cassette tapes, had his secretary transcribe them and then he would mark up the printouts. The secretary in question was a heavy smoker, and the computer she used is encased in a layer of grime you'd like to scrape your thumbnail against — an amalgam of bodily oils, miscellaneous detritus and cigarette smoke.
"When it first got here, you could smell it," says Henderson. (The computer is now encased in glass, so you'll have no such luck.)
Then there's an accounts ledger into which the poet Charles Tomlinson stuffed various of his manuscripts (it looks like a book that has made a quick, sloppy meal of another book); a vivid series of obsessive revisions of a poem by Robert Lowell that shows his clinical mania in full splendor; and, perhaps best of all, a pair of stockings, a pair of socks, a pair of razors and a pair of pills from the Isaac Bashevis Singer archive.
You can watch a video preview of the exhibit here.
Robert Giroux, a titan of the publishing world, passed away on Friday. From the NY Times obituary:
How many masterpieces Mr. Giroux discovered will be for the future to decide. As he himself insisted, it can take decades for a book to become a classic. Still, one of the first books he edited is now on any list of the century’s best, Edmund Wilson’s work on 19th-century socialist thinkers, “To the Finland Station” (1940); Mr. Giroux judged the manuscript to be nearly flawless.
He was also T. S. Eliot’s American editor and published the American edition of George Orwell’s “1984,” accepting it at once despite the objection of his immediate superior, whose wife had found some of the novel’s passages distasteful.
Mr. Giroux introduced a long roster of writers who would achieve fame, publishing first books by, among others, Jean Stafford, Robert Lowell, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Randall Jarrell, Peter Taylor, William Gaddis, Jack Kerouac and Susan Sontag. He edited Virginia Woolf, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg, Elizabeth Bishop, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Derek Walcott, Louise Bogan and William Golding.
In one episode he persuaded William Saroyan to transform “The Human Comedy” (1943) from a film script into a novel by suggesting that he simply remove the camera directions from the manuscript. The novel sold well and became a book-club selection.
But to his lasting chagrin, Mr. Giroux also saw two major works slip from his grasp, J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” and Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”
If you're looking for some some Internet-related fun today in between hitting refresh on the satellite images on Hurricane Gustav, check out Maud Newton's Southern Culture Trivia Quiz. And if you must know, I scored a horrendously low 22 out of 34.
Ever walked in on your wee one sitting in the middle of the floor tearing out every other page of your cherished first editions? Not that it's ever happened around here, but the odds that it will are going to go up and keep going up starting in March. If it does, I'm comforted to know that I have an online resource for simple book repair. And in case I need it, I'm putting the fix for torn pages here {via}:
Not more than a day goes by that I don't dream about opening a bookstore (complete with a full grilled-cheese and soup bar in the back), but I'm beginning to think that if I don't hurry and if I keep reading stories of doom and gloom, like this report on the hard times faced by Seattle indie bookstore owners, it might just remain a dream instead of eventually turning into a nightmare:
The bookstores that have closed had survived the advent of online book retailer Amazon and the incursion of chain bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders, plus competition from big-box retailers like Costco and Wal-Mart, which sell discounted books cheek by jowl with baby clothes and bath mats. Will Seattle's ever-rising cost of living and doing business eat further into the already low margins of bookselling, putting the city's "literate city" reputation in jeopardy?
Seattle is an exceptional reading town, but national trends are not encouraging — even in cities with highly educated populations like Seattle's. Miller, who runs the "Most Literate Cities" survey, recently reviewed five years of survey results, and found what he called a "disturbing" trend: "While Americans are becoming more and more educated in terms of their time spent in school and their education level accomplished," Miller wrote, "they are decreasing in terms of literate behaviors. This is particularly obvious in our lack of support of bookstores and the constantly diminishing circulation of newspapers."
In his five-year review, Miller noted that 43 out of 59 of the cities studied had a higher percentage of high-school graduates than they did five years ago, and 46 of the cities a higher percentage of college graduates. But "not a single city in our survey has more independent bookstores now than five years ago," Miller writes. "Fifty-seven out of 60 cities reported fewer retail booksellers in 2007 than in 2003; in several, the number of booksellers per capita dropped by half of what was reported in 2003."
Of urgent concern in other national surveys of America's reading habits has been a pronounced decline in reading among young people, and Couth Buzzard manager Theo Dzielak noticed a trend among his customers: They included families with young children, and legions of baby boomers, but a noticeable gap in young-adult shoppers: "We get a lot of moms and dads with their kids; but if someone comes in who's 30 years old, we want to genuflect and thank you for coming in."
The Bread Loaf Writers; Conference gets some AP attention:
When they're not taking in poetry readings, learning about character development or getting other pointers from Pulitzer Prize winners, they can be found in the dining hall of the Victorian-era Bread Loaf Inn, taking orders or racing in and out of the kitchen.
"We're wearing aprons, but everybody who's here — the agents, the editors, the faculty, the fellows, the other contributors — knows that this person who's waiting on you is going to be a very important writer in four or five years," said Tiphanie Yanique, 29, a poet and fiction writer from New York who's the head waiter in this year's group. "So for us, it's kind of amazing. And I think for everybody, it's kind of amazing."
Founded in 1926 and named for a nearby mountain, the August Bread Loaf takes place at an idyllic campus about 10 miles east of Middlebury College, up a winding mountain road in a land that cell phones forgot. Its yellow-and-green wraparound porches, Adirondack lawn chairs and slamming screen doors.
Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, William Carlos Williams, Truman Capote, Isaac Asimov and Toni Morrison have taught or lectured here. Past waiters include novelist Julia Alvarez, National Public Radio's "voice of books" Alan Cheuse and short story writer Amy Hempel.
The practice of making less established writers and poets work for their bread began in the 1950s, when Bread Loaf organizers at Middlebury College began steering students to the waitstaff jobs. Soon, that became competitive, drawing applicants from all over.
I'm sure you all know that Denver has a rich Beat legacy. After all, there is a condominium complex in the city named after Jack Kerouac. Now comes word that this legacy will extend to the Democratic National Convention next week:
David Amram, the ``composer in residence'' at next week's Democratic National Convention in Denver, is famous for creating his own gigs.
He and Jack Kerouac pioneered jazz and poetry readings in the 1950s. Along with Julius Watkins, Amram was one of the first to improvise on a French horn. And he was one of the first musicians to seriously explore what came to be called ``world music.''
With his talent and youthful optimism, Amram, 77, has been called (by me) ``the world's oldest teenager.'' (He likes to say ``never trust anyone under 70.'')
Amram says he was ``inspired by Bach, Berlioz, Charlie Parker, Antonio Carlos Jobim, great Arabic singers, Lakota traditional singers, Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt and ancient Gaelic music.''
He explained the responsibilities of a composer in residence in an e-mail this week while ``hiding out'' at his farm in upstate New York composing a piano concerto.
``My musical contributions will include `Three Songs for America,' settings of speeches by John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy for bass voice and orchestra,'' Amram said. [links from original article]
