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!
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.
21 July 2011
This spring I had the great privilege of being interviewed for “James Salter: A Sport and a Pastime,” a new documentary from Checkerboard Films – directed and produced by Sandy Gotham Meehan and Edgar B. Howard, also directed and edited by Tom Piper. It was a pleasure to speak on film about my admiration for Salter’s work.
Others featured in the film include the late Reynolds Price (whose on-camera readings from A Sport and a Pastime are unforgettable), Robert Redford, Nick Antosca, Salter’s daughter Nina Salter (a publisher in Paris), several other editors, writers, and friends, and, of course, Jim Salter himself.
You can purchase the DVD of the film directly from Checkerboard here.
I also had the privilege of attending the film’s premiere back in May. Thanks to Checkerboard’s Executive Director Muffie Dunn for sending along these photos from the event. A most memorable evening…
Greeting Jim Salter
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Listening to Ed Hirsch tell a great story about another Salter admirer, Susan Sontag
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After the screening, with director Ed Howard
All Salter
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8 April 2011
The Paris Review online has published a lovely series of essays on James Salter – by Jhumpa Lahiri, Porochista Khakpour, Ian Crouch, Geoff Dyer, and more. All this leading up to their annual Spring Revel, where Salter will be honored with their Hadada Prize.
If you’ve been in and around my blog, you know how I feel about Mr. Salter. It all started with A Sport and a Pastime, a few years back, and I’ve read all his work since (the stories perhaps amaze me most). I spent a very memorable day with him at his home in Bridgehampton last winter, and I’ve written (am in the process of revising) a profile, which will appear in Tin House in December 2011.
Also, Checkerboard Films is making a documentary on Salter, which will premiere at an event in late May. If I make the cut, you’ll see me as a talking head.
I’m so delighted to see this “writer’s writer” receive (at 85) all the recognition and accolades he deserves.
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.
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…
Not Me
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5 April 2009
I.
A student in one of my online classes writes about Don Delillo‘s “opaque” male narrators and characters, many of whom are somewhat unknown to themselves while at the same time seen in lucid flashes by the reader.
I think of Delillo often as I write Sebastian & Frederick, my first serious foray into male protagonists. Other writers who accompany me on this journey–hovering quietly–include James Salter, Hemingway, EL Doctorow, Cormac McCarthy, and Denis Johnson. The greatest difference I am sensing in writing male characters is precisely that they are less known to themselves than my female characters have been. They seem to do more than they reflect. Or it takes more action to lead them to reflection.
II.
This fall I will teach a course called “True Fiction,” focusing on writing autobiographical fiction. I am nervous about it. Initially, I pitched a class exploring the opposite — writing characters who are distinctly not ourselves, set in worlds which our far from our own. My experience with beginning writers (including myself) is that much better writing comes from the latter than the former. My college students did a first-person exercise in which they recalled a childhood memory from the perspective of a character of different gender, race, or culture. The level of writing instantly shot up a notch.
We settled on “True Fiction” because — get ready — it seemed more “marketable.” So many people are already writing fictionalized memoir, we projected we’d more likely get full enrollment. My fear is that it will turn into writing-class-as-therapy, which can produce bad, lazy writing. My intention is to assign exercises like the one my college students did (variations on their own characters, perhaps) as a way of emphasizing that one must use the imaginative muscles just as much, if not more, when writing autobiographically-based fiction.
III.
I don’t go to readings as much as I used to, partially because they started to seem very formulaic, and the writers seemed to hate being there. Invariably, the audience would try to get the writer to “admit” that the novel was really a veiled memoir. “How much of this is autobiographical?” someone would always ask. “How much of Gustave/Jill/Sammy is really you?”
The best answer I ever heard was from the novelist Chang-rae Lee who said, “All of it. And none of it.”
IV.
I’m pitching a class at a different school called “Writing Self / Writing Other.” Here’s my pitch blurb:
How do we write compelling fiction based on our lives and true experiences? And how do we write characters who are vastly different from us? In this course we will see how these two seemingly opposite approaches to fiction are in fact closely related and can fruitfully inform one another.
You’ll be the first to know if it flies.
