Among The Jumbled Heap

Book Objects – Wallace Stevens

Luke came into two handsome editions of Wallace Stevens. The Friends of the Library Booksale at the Fateville Public Library is a place where you can buy tattered paperbacks from Patterson to Grisham and first-edition hardbacks from the likes of Stevens. (Used book sales in university towns are always a good place for a find.) The book featured in the photos is one Luke kindly let me borrow. Transport to Summer was originally published in 1947, but the edition pictured here is from the s...

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

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...

The Perils of Describing Technology

The Brothers: a novel / Frederick Barthelme. I've reading Barhelme (Frederick not Donald). Never read him before, but I heard about him on the blogosphere because of the kerfuffal over his departure from the Mississippi Review. Did he quit? Was he fired? Read about it here. I'm drawn to Southern writers. I especially like Mississippians. I thought Barthelme might be a good reading fit for me. I have been underwhelmed by Brothers. Maybe it's just a one-off wonder and the rest of his st...

Vargas LLosa on Writing

Mario Vargas LLosa is the first Nobel Prize winner I've had the pleasure of reading before he won the medal.  The one regular reader of my blog may remember a post from about a year ago quoting a perfectly pitched scene of defecation.  I posted that in the midst of a Vargas LLosa obsession. I came to Vargas LLosa by a circuitous route.  I was doing a bit of research, reading the communiques of SubComandante Marcos when I happened upon a footnote, written with Marcos usual ironic contempt an...

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

Jose Saramago 1922-2010

This seems to be a big year for the literary dead. Jose Saramago, Nobel prize-winning author, died last Friday June 18th. Check out the NYTimes obit. I immersed myself in Saramago a few years back whilst living in Chicago. I read his novels riding the El to and from work and in the few spare minutes at the end of my work day. Our apartment had a deck built between the two crumbling edifices that our landlord generously called carriage houses. One of those was ours. I remember vividly ...

Rejection

The past year, I have been diligently sending out my short stories to various journals.  This is a major psychological step for me.  My stories have always been just that, mine, and I have not wanted to share them with a larger audience.  A feeling, I'm sure, that is partially rooted in my own fear of rejection.  So far rejection is all my stories have found in the wider world. This past week I received yet another letter saying "no thanks."  This one came from Cezanne's Carrot, a journal who...

Michelle Huneven

There are novelists whom I read for the pleasure of their words, others I read for the beauty of the stories, and, if I'm honest, there are some I read simply because I feel like it's a cultural must (that damned Western Cannon), but then there are novels that I seem drawn to for psychological reasons--often as not with no rational basis. Michelle Huneven's books fall in this category. I read her to be a better human. I read to find some solace. Huneven's novels are positive, weighty thing...