Among The Jumbled Heap

Joseph Heller Wrote Slowly…

...I write slowly. Therefore, I am Joseph Heller. Vanity Fair has an excellent article on the publication history of Catch-22, a book that is on my all-time favorites list. (Catch-22 the movie also has the distinction of being the only place I can stomach Art Garfunkle's acting). How different would the novel have been as Catch-18? http://m.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/08/heller-201108?printable=true

James Joyce’s Dirty Letters

This is how they sexted in 1909. http://loveletters.tribe.net/thread/fce72385-b146-4bf2-9d2e-0dfa6ac7142d It is difficult to choose a favorite quote but here's a sample: The smallest things give me a great cockstand - a whorish movement of your mouth, a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers, a sudden dirty word spluttered out by your wet lips, a sudden immodest noise made by you behind and then a bad smell slowly curling up out of your backside. At such moments I feel mad to ...

Hating Olivia — Big in France

If America doesn't understand your art, France might. Mark SaFranko labored in obscurity for years.  He wrote songs, plays, novels.  He supported himself with a series of shitty, thankless jobs that kept the creditors at bay long enough for him to write a bit more.  His youth passed to middle age like this. I started writing, and all the while, no matter where I was and what my circumstances, I took notes and wrote. Novel after novel, song after song, story after story, play after play. It...

Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell

Brief yet marvelous interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell at the Chicago Sun Times: http://blogs.suntimes.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/36628 My favorite part: I went right back to writing about Michigan! Still, I get letters from readers saying “you’re writing about my hometown in West Virginia,” or “you’re writing exactly about where I came from in Alabama.” I think by writing about a place with great specificity, you manage to make it universal. I was one of those people! I wrote and said, "you're ...

Lore Segal’s “The Reverse Bug”

Every month the New Yorker chooses a short story from their archive and asks a writer to read the story for their Fiction Podcast. This month Jennifer Egan reads "The Reverse Bug" by Lore Segal. Jennifer Egan Reads \"The Reverse Bug\" If you've got 30mins to spare, give that time to Segal ala Egan. Delightful to read and delightful to hear, "Reverse Bug," written in 1989, contains prophetic echos to our own age of terror, but it does so in a subtle, pleasing way.

Orhan Pamuk and Politics

Every Tuesday I work late.  This means my commute to and from work takes place during an NPR dead time.  To compensate I listen to this podcast: http://www.cbc.ca/writersandcompany/ .  I like Eleanor Wachtel's accent as well as her Nancy Reagan hair.  I also like the writers she interviews.  There's a great one with Coetzee where he only agrees to the interview when Eleanor consents not to ask him about his personal life, his novels, or South African politics.  Even with these restrictions, it's...

Martini Lips

In the 20th century, it was fashionable for awhile for men to sell plot short in relation to character. Character-driven literature was seen as superior to plot-driven narrative. That may have been because the male literary elite attempted nothing more strenuous than lifting martinis to their lips and jumping their friend's wives. (I think, particularly, of John Updike) From Carolyn See Making a Literary Life

Why I love Bill Murray

Bill Murray reading poetry to construction workers.

If a body see a body…

Salinger, J.D. (Jerome David) 1919-2010 J.D. Salinger and I go way back.  It was he who stuck "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a poor sinner" into my little brain.  Yep, this is that damned Jesus Prayer that drives Franny Glass bonkers in Franny and Zooey. As much as I hate the man for giving me that ear worm, i'm sad to see him gone. My good friend The Hamster has the best remembrance of the man I've read.  Go check it out http://wheresmyhockeymask.blogspot.com/2010/01/...

Gin Phillips, Hawthorne Books, Book Objects:

Barnes and Noble Gets It Right. My friend Anthony is--to put it mildly--a bookslut.    The type of fellow who has so many books that when he buys more, he has to hid them from his wife because she'll get mad.   (That's Gin Phillips to the right, though, not Anthony.  More on her ins a minute.) Not content with mere collecting, Anthony has turned his addiction into an admirable scholarly pursuit.  His research focuses not on the content of books as much as human interaction with books.  How we f...