24 January 2010
A backlash against Emerson? Say it isn’t so. I reserve a great fondness for Ralph Waldo, great bard of Self-Trust. I’ve always found his philosophy of how to read — widely, freely, somewhat predatorily, taking what you can, discarding the rest, not getting bogged down by reverence for a static canon but approaching the canon with an “active soul” — particularly helpful and relevant in this Age of Information.
Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul…
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul.
-from “The American Scholar”
20 January 2010
And then, apropos of my last post, I read this article about a hip young liberal Manhattanite coming out of the Christian closet. Actually, I first heard it on NPR’s “Tell Me More,” which is even more interesting, i.e. that this topic got national radio play in addition to the piece at Salon.
Hmm….
I’m not sure how I feel about the author’s inclination toward the notion that it’s better just not to talk about religion:
Not long ago, I told a priest at my church that my friends equated religion with horrible things. I expected her to tell me I had some obligation to stop hiding my faith, but she said, pulling a scarf around her neck to hide her priest’s collar, “Those preachers on the subways make me cringe.” She said she prefers Saint Francis: “Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.”[...]
But faith and religion are hard to talk about; maybe they’re not necessary to talk about.
Well, thank God for fiction as a way to “talk.”
18 January 2010
Is it just me, or is Christianity making a comeback as an au courant cultural topic?
At Bookforum’s “Omnivore,” a sampling of reviews and articles about Christianity. All of them nonfiction-related. I’ve been beginning to think about my next project, and a collection of linked stories, in and around Christianity, is what seems to be rising to the surface. Hmm…
Which is a backhand way of also saying that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel on Sebastian & Frederick (current word count ~84,000, projected word count ~100,000).
14 January 2010
A new(ish) documentary on legendary soul singer Bill Withers, called “Still Bill,” is terrific. I saw it at the Harlem Stage Theater — a gorgeous venue on the campus of City College — with a great crowd.
Special guests for Q&A were percussionist and Harlem native Ralph MacDonald (who also co-wrote “Just the Two of Us”) and filmmaker/producer Warrington Hudlin (HOUSE PARTY).
Mr. Withers is an engaging, complicated, and touching character, as documentary subjects go, and the filmmakers Damani Baker and Alex Vlack capture this well. Performance and interview footage of Withers from the ’70′s and ’80′s is well-chosen. Here’s a lil o’ Bill, performing his hit, “Ain’t No Sunshine.”
13 January 2010
Check out my essay at The Millions, “Sex, Seriously: James Salter Trumps the Great Male Novelists.“
I suspect it’s not the most comfortable topic for most people; maybe even less so for “the younger generation” that Katie Roiphe refers to in “The Naked and the Conflicted”, the article to which the essay responds.
According to the blog stats, the essay (posted yesterday) was widely read (or at least clicked); and yet little commented on. Hmm… I suppose this makes sense, i.e. in the essay I write that talking or writing “about” sex is like “dancing about architecture” (Elvis Costello said this, maybe). Still, I’m curious how readers feel/think about this topic. I did receive a few comments via personal email.
Thanks to Maud Newton for linking to the piece.
Update 1/18/10: comments rolled in, with some great reading suggestions.
12 January 2009
I found Jennifer Egan‘s story “Safari,” from last week’s New Yorker, so very good. Both skillful and affecting. Those are the two punches we’re always going for, yes? I’d add a third: bold (i.e. risky), in both form and content.
Without over-analyzing too much… something about the story’s cerebral voice, coupled with child characters/perspectives, really works. ”Safari” is also I think a triumph of old-fashioned narrative omniscience, layered with contemporary characters and experience.
8 January 2010
A new addition to the book events schedule: I’ll be reading at The Corner Bookstore on Madison at 93rd Street in New York City, March 4th @ 6pm.
I’m excited about this, because I stop in at The Corner Bookstore often, and I’ve always loved it. I also found this lovely “Spotlight on Bookstore” piece about it on a blog, wherein memoirist Nancy Bachrach writes :
Located on Madison Avenue on the upper east side of Manhattan, the Corner Bookstore is a small treasure in a historic neighborhood famous for its elegant townhouses. The bookstore’s tin ceiling and speckled terrazzo floor date from the 1920s, along with the handcrafted wood cabinets. Every detail has been lovingly restored by Ray, an architectural model maker.
This is a bookstore with a mission: to support the debuts of local writers… The Corner Bookstore is where Donna Tartt unveiled The Secret History. Jhumpa Lahiri launched Interpreter of Maladies. Lenny threw the book parties for Augusten Burroughs’Running With Scissors and Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle. Lauren Weisberger gave her first reading from The Devil Wears Prada. Every one of these authors was invited long before their book reviews (or movie deals) – so either Lenny is clairvoyant, or she’s a genuine taste-maker.
Lenny and Ray’s most memorable party was the dazzling debut for Frank McCourt, who had been teaching in the New York school system for thirty years before he turned his miserable Irish childhood into Angela’s Ashes, the bestseller that kick-started the memoir genre. The Corner Bookstore was so crowded that night that friends who couldn’t squeeze in gathered on the sidewalk, where Lenny and her staff served Guinness.
In good company, indeed.
7 January 2010
Katie Roiphe‘s piece in the NY Times Book Review on sex and the Great Male Narcissists (GMNs) — Roth, Mailer, Updike — is popping up on pretty much all the blogs I follow. Worth reading, I agree. The subject is endlessly fascinating — sex as “imaginative quest,” an existential bulwark against death (sans irony). The younger generation of male writers is, according to Roiphe, “too cool for sex,” shaped by liberalism and the (internalized) archetype of the sensitive man.
I tend to share Roiphe’s sense of a “vanished grandeur” when it comes to the dissolution of ardent sexual conquest (“not just the triumphs…but also its loneliness, its failures of connection”) in male literature, maybe in all literature; and I don’t think Roiphe and I are alone (Exhibit A: the popularity of MAD MEN among the literary set).
As I wrote last week, I’m just dipping my toes in to the great narcissistic pool of Roth-Updike-Mailer; but James Salter‘s A Sport and a Pastime comes to mind as an example of a powerful and haunting work of fiction that understands sex — in all its dimensions, including the physically and sensorially graphic — as an utterly serious human experience; on this side of life, dark and exuberant and mysterious. Zadie Smith‘s On Beauty comes to mind as an example of a younger writer’s farcical notion — the flip side of the sublime — of male sexual conquest, sympathizing instead with an older woman’s eye-rolling fed-upness vis-a-vis the silly conquesting male. Enough with the perpetual adolescence, the younger generation seems to be saying. Our sexual relationships are going to emotionally grown-up.
Some movies come to mind as well: Bertolucci’s LAST TANGO IN PARIS, Ang Lee‘s LUST, CAUTION, Michael Winterbottom‘s 9 SONGS.
Other books and movies — sexually explicit — that you feel harken back to the “grandeur” of the GMNs, in a compelling way? Me thinks an essay for The Millions is brewing…
5 January 2010
From Publisher’s Weekly, hot off the press!
“…elegant debut novel… Switching deftly between different characters’ points of view, Chung portrays with precision and grace each character’s struggle to find his or her place in the family and in the world.”
1 January 2010
I finished out the year by reading Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist. This is a run-don’t-walk book, I’d say. I bought it in hardcover (from McNally Jackson, where you should buy all your hardcovers, if you live in New York), and I’m so glad I did. All I can think of to say about it is, “I laughed, I cried, it was better than… anything I read this year.”
It also goes down as one of those “books that inspired me to keep going.” Right now, it’s full of post-it notes, i.e. scene and character details for Sebastian & Frederick that came to me as I was reading. A great book will often inspire me in this particular way. It’s not that I read something and then think, “Oh, I should have my character climb a ladder, too.” It’s more labyrinthine than that — an idiosyncratic pathway from details and emotions that are effected by the book I’m reading, to ideas and images that drive what I’m writing. But I am keeping the post-its on specific pages of The Anthologist, to remind me of how those pathways were working.
Among my favorite ruminations by narrator Paul Chowder is this: carpe diem, despite what Robin Williams may have led us all to believe, does not mean “Seize the Day.” Rather, it means something more like, “Pluck the Day.”
What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day’s stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things — so that the day’s stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant — pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don’t freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it.
