11 January 2012
Two things: an essay and a blog post.
My essay on James Salter, “In the Light Where Art and Longing Meet: My Day With James Salter,” is in the current print issue of Tin House Magazine. I couldn’t be more tickled. The project began almost exactly two years ago(!) — with my piece at The Millions (on sex writing by “great” male writers), a stunning email from JS himself, and an ensuing correspondence over the following year. Other amazing authors in this issue, themed “Beauty” — Marilynne Robinson, Michel Houellebecq, Eric Puchner, Paul Willems, Michelle Widgen, Aimee Bender on artist Amy Cutler, and more.
I also have a blog post, “Living and Learning in Bookstores,” as part of Tin House‘s “Book Clubbing” blog series — wherein I describe the independent bookstores in NYC that I love, and the unassuming bookstore in Seattle where I embarked on my literary education, many lifetimes (although really not that many years) ago. Enjoy!
10 January 2011
We’ve been obsessed with the Republican primaries and debates here. I suppose that means I’m not as cynical as I thought I was; I keep looking for candidates to break through with a true voice, to stray from pre-packaged message message message. Newt and Dr. Ron are the ones to watch in this respect, although John Huntsman showed signs of life on Sunday in NH.
Romney‘s electability strategy is clear: I’ve run businesses, I’ve lived “in the real economy,” that Obama guy hasn’t. Another strategy that I imagine the Romneyans will pursue might go like this: I’m a doer, not a hand-wringer, we need real-world action; this isn’t a time for “nuanced thinking,” for professorial passivity.
Ugh.
With the departure of Obama’s Chief of Staff Bill Daley, this dichotomy of character comes up again: Rahm Emanuel was a “ball-buster,” a guy who “got things done.” Again, he wasn’t known as a thinker, a ponderer, but rather a guy with a short fuse and sharp, goal-oriented focus. This is apparently what a good Chief of Staff needs to be, what Daley wasn’t (not enough, anyway).
But what about in the rest of life? I wonder often if we’re all destined to be one or the other, in a final-accounting-of-your-life sort of way, i.e. thinkers or doers. People of process or people of results. An obvious answer is, “Of course not.” Weirdly, the older I get, the more I think (in an unnuanced way), maybe so…
15 December 2011
Can I just say how much I love the siesta concept, here in Latin America (and many places around the world)?
I’m using mine to catch up on… well, to catch up on everything at this point, but at the moment, catch up on blogs and literary periodicals. From Claire Messud‘s review of Michael Ondaatje‘s new novel, The Cat’s Table:
In a rare, distinctly essayistic moment in his new novel, The Cat’s Table, Ondaatje articulates his position thus:
Recently I sat in on a master class given by the filmmaker Luc Dardenne. He spoke of how viewers of his films should not assume they understood everything about the characters. As members of an audience we should never feel ourselves wiser than they: we do not have more knowledge than the characters have about themselves…. I believe this. I recognize this as a first principle of art, although I have the suspicion that many would not.
This view, almost an authorial ethics of representation, explains some aspects of Ondaatje’s literary style: his prose, while gorgeous, is on occasion quite oblique, and his narratives—as is true of The Cat’s Table—can be strikingly fragmented. (It is wonderful and, in these fundamentally homogenizing times, increasingly rare to encounter a writer who does not shape his art to a known and satisfying form, but instead fashions the form around his content.) His goal is to reach toward that elusive complex we might call experienced human reality, and in so doing, precisely to grant each of his characters his own wisdom and autonomy. In an Ondaatje novel, there is much that we do not directly know, much that we cannot know for certain.
I think often about what it means, in this current cultural moment, to be a “literary” writer; and if that terminology even matters anymore. There is a sense that it doesn’t; that it is an anachronistic, old fuddy-duddy kind of categorization; that you will die in dinosaur-like fashion if you hold too tightly to such high-art ideas. But something about Messud’s description of Ondaatje’s literary vision speaks to what I consider to be literary — to be art — in a way that matters. Uncertainty; unknowability; “experienced human reality” as elusive and complex; ultimately a reading experience that effects some discomfort and reminds us that life is a mysterious, unstreamlined business.
2 December 2011
The annual YEAR IN READING extravaganza is on at The Millions. See what writers have been reading (and loving) this year. Up today, Jennifer Egan and Ben Marcus.
1 December 2011
Lisa Peet, whose blog Like Fireyou should add to our blog feed, contributes to our “Post-40 Bloomers” series at The Millions with a terrific piece on Isak Dinesen.
14 November 2011
At The Millions today, how I feel about the National Book Awards selection controversy, and about spinach. Thanks to Laura Miller and Victor Lavalle for giving me some, ahem, food for thought.
Update: Laura Miller offered a thoughtful response in the comments section of the piece.
12 November 2011
I’m glad that there’s some buzz about re-reading on the blogs — prompted by Patricia Meyers Spacks‘s recently released On Rereading. A couple of related posts at the Book Bench, and at The Millions.
Teaching has forced me to re-read a number of books and stories – not just twice, but three and four times. It’s a fortunate convergence of necessity and pleasure. I suppose the re-reading experience depends highly upon what sort of reader you are the first time around: I consider myself a pretty close, slow reader (as opposed to a skimmer or page-turner), and yet still, re-reading is invariably rewarding and illuminating. That sounds cliche and predictable, like saying you’ll feel better if you exercise and eat vegetables, but both are still profoundly true. As a writer, re-reading almost always yields a richer reading experience; I find my admiration for the author deepens as the layers and textures reveal themselves. Wow, I missed that and that the first time around. Only occasionally does a book not hold up upon re-reading — which of course makes sense, i.e. we tend to select our re-reads carefully.
I do find it surprising that the further along I am in my reading and writing life (in my life in general is I guess what I ultimately mean), the more open and generous I seem to be as a reader; which is to say that — within a subset of recognized published books — I go in as a student of writing who wants to learn from what other writers are doing and trying (the varying levels of success all equally instructive), and as a person who wants to meet interesting, complex characters who feel, for those x-hundred pages, like real human beings to me. On the one hand, it’s not much to ask; on the other, if you think about it, and if you’re working at writing yourself, it’s a whole lot.
Is it a “luxury” or an “indulgence” to re-read? Not an easy question in an era of economic recession, multitasking, and information overload; but the question feels related to that of whether art itself is an indulgent luxury.
My previous thoughts on re-reading here.
14 October 2011
A convergence of things: reading/teaching Susan Choi‘s American Woman, watching Sidney Lumet‘s Running on Empty, listening to Ben Marcus read Kazuo Ishiguro‘s “A Village After Dark” on the New Yorker podcast. The title of this post is taken from the Ishiguro story, a dream-surrealist sort of story where a man revisits his past, is reminded of the (unspecified) activism of his youth, and confronts those whom he harmed or disregarded in those days.
Both Choi and Lumet also look at youthful activism – that is, an activism that embraced violence (in the 60s). The characters look back on what they did, who they were, how they justified their actions; consider whether they stand by their acts of “conscientious violence.” They consider, in short, whether they can be held accountable for what they did when they were very young.
Most of us haven’t planted bombs, but maybe we’ve naively or unknowingly – like Ishiguro’s Fletcher – ruined people’s lives. It’s a bit terrifying to think about how earnestly we move through each day, each season of our lives, deciding and acting (and not acting) and intuiting. I suppose that’s why it makes for such good literary/cinematic material…
11 October 2011
At the New York Review of Books, James Salter reviews Paul Hendrickson‘s Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost. A rather clunky title for a book that sounds well worth reading if you are a fan of the man, or at least the work.
This I did not know about Hemingway’s son Gregory:
[I]n the final riveting act, there enters a grotesque, almost demonic figure, tortured, mesmerizing, a doctor with the prodigious wreckage of three wives, seven or eight children, alcohol, drugs, and adultery trailing behind him, a transvestite who finally has a sex change operation and ends up dying in jail: the always troubled, gifted youngest son, Gregory Hemingway.
He is last seen sitting on the curb in Key Biscayne one morning after having been arrested the night before trying to get through a security gate. He’s in a hospital gown but otherwise naked with some clothes and black high heels bunched in one hand. He had streaked, almost whitish hair that morning, painted toenails, and as the police approached was trying to put on a flowered thong. Five days later he died of a heart attack while being held in a Women’s Detention Center. He was listed as Gloria Hemingway. This was in 2001; he was sixty-nine years old.
More here.
