“NaNoWriMo”

 

NaNoWriMo is a catchy acronym for National Novel Writing Month.

I first heard of it last week, a day or two into NaNoWriMo, and I thought it totally absurd – based upon my own ideas of what should go into novel writing (expressed best by Mr. N) .

Certainly 50,000 word novels have been written in a month, but I guess my first impression was based upon the fact that the person who told me, a participant, had never written before and had every expectation of getting her novel published. Groupthink: read Ann Lamott, get together with a bunch of folks and churn out a novel. Why not?

Just for the sake of giving the program the benefit of the doubt, I went to the website and at least found some references to educational links. However, it looks more like a promotional gimmick. Chris Batey, NaNoWriMo’s founder, happens to sell a book called No Plot, No Problem. My guess is that the person who profits most from NaNoWriMo is not the white-knuckled novelist, but Mr. Batey.

Signed,
Still Skeptical in Skokie

TEV on NPR

 

Mark Sarvas (TEV) and Jessica Crispin (Bookslut) were on NPR’s “Day to Day” show today in a segment titled Bloggers’ Influence on the Book Publishing Industry.

All this attention makes my contrarian side a bit nervous, but it’s great to see some bloggers making a name for themselves outside of the political/media sphere.



Read widely, think well, and write often.

Eating at the big kid’s table

 

…or drink, as the case may be.



Catching up on lit blogs yesterday, I stumbled across a link to the Gaddis Drinking Club.


Hmmmm. Intrigued from the beginning, I found on the site some familiar names all gathering together to collectively read and discuss William Gaddis’ The Recognitions.

Paris Review Interviews: The DNA of Literature

 

Last week I mentioned the Paris Review Interviews, which were announced but had not appeared. Thanks to the editors of the Literary Saloon, I found that they were indeed forthcoming. As promised, The Paris Review has posted the following announcement:

The DNA of Literature

The Paris Review has interviewed almost 300 authors whose work has defined the literary landscape of latter half of the twentieth century. From its first interview with E.M. Forster, the Writers at Work series has, in the words of The New York Times, “set the standard for literary interrogation.” Now the Paris Review Foundation proposes to make this vast archival resource—what has felicitously been referred to as the DNA of Literature—available online, for free, to anyone who visits the Paris Review website. In addition to the interview itself, the website will feature author photos, images of original manuscript pages, a special forum in which authors will be able to revise or expand their original interviews, and links to pages that provide up-to-date biographical information about the authors. A customized search engine will allow a reader not only to search by name and date, but also to search the full text of the interviews so that, for instance, a search for Gabriel García Márquez will turn up his interview along with every other interview in which his name is mentioned.



The project will launch in mid-November of 2005 [2004?], beginning with the interviews from the 1950s. These will be followed by interviews from subsequent decades, until all the interviews are available.

  • January 10, 2005: The Complete Paris Review Interviews from the 1960s
  • February 14, 2005: The Complete Paris Review Interviews from the 1970s
  • April 4, 2005: The Complete Paris Review Interviews from the 1980s
  • May 16, 2005: The Complete Paris Review Interviews from the 1990s
  • July 1, 2005: The roll-out will conclude with the publication of
    The Paris Review Book of People with Problems (Picador, Trade Paperback Original)

Thanks Paris Review! It’s amazing that these interviews will be made freely available because they have been released in book form. Some are still in print, such as Latin American Writers at Work, featuring the usual suspects and Women Writers at Work, with Marianne Moore, Toni Morrison, Dorothy Parker, Maya Angelou, Susan Sontag, Joyce Carol Oates and others.

p.s. I think there’s a typo on the site’s announcement:The project will launch in mid-November of 2005
 should probably read 2004.



Read widely, think well, and write often.

Dracula’s Irish Heritage

 

Stealing today, an entire entry from The Writer’s Almanac. Because it’s interesting.

It’s the birthday of Bram Stoker, born in Dublin, Ireland (1847). He was working as a clerk for the civil service when he saw an unknown actor named Henry Irving in a play that changed his life. He became obsessed with Irving’s acting career, and began writing freelance reviews of every play in which Irving appeared. Eventually, Irving became one of the most famous Shakespearian actors of the era, and he invited Bram Stoker to be his manager at the Lyceum Theater in London.


Stoker became the devoted servant of Henry Irving, writing his speeches, ordering his lunches, and planning his every appointment. He was a hard worker and a meticulous bookkeeper and always kept the theater out of debt, and didn’t have much ambition to do anything else. But one night, in 1890, he dreamt that a woman was trying to kiss him on the throat, and an elderly Count interrupted her shouting, “This man belongs to me!” Stoker woke up and immediately wrote about the dream in his diary. He couldn’t get it out of his mind for weeks, and kept thinking about whom the Count might be.



Over the next several years, he began to make notes for a novel about the Count. He spent seven years gathering material, reading Transylvanian folklore, visiting graveyards, and studying the behavior of zoo animals. He named the Count after a Romanian historical figure, Vlad Dracula, remembered as the last warrior to defend Europe against the Turks after the fall of Constantinople.



Dracula came out in 1897 and got mixed reviews. It only became a minor best-seller in Stoker’s lifetime. When he died in 1912, the obituaries about Stoker focused on his career in theater, and not a single one mentioned his authorship of Dracula. Stoker’s wife made a fortune when the first Dracula movies started appearing in 1922, but she lost most of the money in the 1929 stock market crash. She used her remaining savings to build a bathroom in her basement, and she named the bathroom “Drac.”



Count Dracula went on to become one of the most enduring fictional and cinematic characters of all time, appearing in more than 250 movies. Today there is a World Dracula Congress, many Dracula societies, and Romania has recently developed a tourist trade around Dracula, leading tours of Vlad Dracula’s castle, where visitors can purchase Dracula goblets, Draculina soft drinks, paintings of Dracula, and bottles of blood red Vodka.

I Spent the Mourning in San Francisco…

 

or where I diverge a moment from books and get these swarming thoughts from my head.

November 2nd was inauspicious in so many ways. Two out of the three of my group destined for San Francisco missed our flight (I being the one that made it), and the last thing I did before going to sleep in the wee hours (of my time zone) was to see Awnold gloat over his many ballot issue victowees.

I am in SF for a variety of reasons, one of which is to attend some fund raising events for my friend and client, Mitch, a documentary filmmaker, whose weblog I recently created.

But despite the fun of being here and meeting new people, we are all walking around with a Charlie Brown cloud over our heads.

The Man You Elect Today May Get You Killed Tomorrow.



As we all know, November 3rd didn’t start well either, and I share the grief felt by so many people around the country and world. Interestingly, I heard a caller on NPR voice my own feeling that “don’t those people [that voted for Bush] get it?” My guess is that sentiment is wide.

But I realize this collective gut reaction of grief and amazement needs to be brief and informative. Mourning should never last too long. We must put aside the emotion and sport of politics and begin today to fight for the next election. It simply isn’t enough to get hot and bothered once in a while and talk about how you think this president is stupid.

The fact is, for all his lack of intellect, he’s been an uberPresident in pushing his agenda against all opposition and solidifying his constituents. All the Bruce Springsteen concerts in the world can’t change that.

I heard one commentator say that the lines at some polling places were too long for many of those young impatient people who were supposed to rock the vote. I have a hard time reconciling that statement in my head when I know that there are countries around the world where voters stand in line for woefully long hours, often in intense heat, and often too, risking their lives or limbs.

If anything, this year’s election cycle and the events surrounding our unfortunate invasion of Iraq should inform us that politics is not a quadrennial superbowl with playoffs every two years. The man you elect today may indeed get you killed tomorrow.

So don’t give up all you “blue-state” smarties. Stay informed, vote in the local elections, write a letter to your representative – in fact, make a habit of it. Pardon my tone of condescension, but I find it striking the number of impassioned people out there who don’t understand that politics happens everyday, and I feel like these fair-weather johnsons are the reason why we thought we could win, but didn’t.

We need to forget about swing states and swing voters and do as the Republicans have done; build a solid, wide reaching base of un-swaying voters.

And now, back to books.

Too Good to be True? Paris Review Posting Entire Series of Writers at Work?

 

Poets & Writers reports on their site that The Paris Review “recently made all of the magazine’s Writers-at-Work interviews from the past 51 years available on its Web site. The free feature, titled “The DNA of Literature,” includes 10,000 searchable pages of text.”

I can find no trace of these literary time capsules at The Paris Review Website, so perhaps the editors of Poets & Writers, despite using the past-tense in their notice, has gotten ahead of themselves.

If it is true, this is exciting news. These are some of the most interesting literary reviews ever published and they have the air of something created for posterity. Each is written from a writer’s perspective, typically going into details of the author’s workday and habits, for example this excerpt from the Spring 1958 issue:

Hemingway: “When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.”

The interviewers tend to cultivate their subjects over a period of time, sometimes years, like Olga Carlisle’s three interviews (culminating in one for the journal’s Summer 1960 issue) with Boris Pasternak, who had no phone and lived in Peredelkino, Russia, far outside of Moscow.

Although the 1958 Hemingway interview, conducted in a Madrid cafe, is the most famous, many of the others I’ve read introduced me to writers that I had never thought about reading before or brought new insights to those I had.

William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Aldous Huxley, Marianne Moore, Henry Miller, Boris Pasternak, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ralph Ellison, and Dorothy Parker are a few of the pickings from the first two editions collected in book form. Later interviewees include Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Paul Auster, Richard Powers and myriad others.



If they post them on their site, all the better, but if they don’t, it’s worth while to pick up some of those that are in print in book form. Otherwise, if anyone knows more about this, please post a comment here.



Read widely, think well, and write often.

Dependent Children of Independent Bookstores

 

After moving in August, Gotham Book Mart has finally opened their main floor. I had made many hopeful visits in the mean time and found only a smallish first floor that was too nice and too small to make a decent bookstore.

Now it really is everything that an independent bookshop should be: overwhelming shelves packed with new and used books with a focus on serious literature. The space is huge and if I had any complaint it would be that the dimmish fluorescent lights detract from the otherwise warm room.

Gotham has retained their old system of segregating some of their favorite authors to thorough sections of their own and mingling the used with the new. Poetry lovers will rejoice over the unparalleled selection of major and little-known writers and just so everyone feels special, classics – as in the Greeks – have their own section too.

There are still boxes laying about and there’s not yet any signage. In fact, when I was there, there weren’t even any customers. So if you live in the City, head over and make them feel welcome in their new home. Buy something. I did.

The address:
16 East 46th Street (less than 200 yards from the old location)


Subways in order of proximity:
7 5th Ave/42nd<br /> B, D, F, V 47th St.
4, 5, 6, S, 7 @ Grand Central Station



Read widely, think well, and write often.

Today’s Oxymoron: War Poetry

 

Election season is thankfully drawing to a close, but just to be in the spirit of things, I thought it worth mentioning the latest issue of Poetry Magazine (now the richest little poetry magazine in the world), which features an article by Eleanor Wilner called Poetry and the Pentagon: Unholy Alliance? where she expresses her dismay over the NEA’s Operation Homecoming: Writing the War Experience, described as a project to help soldiers write about their experiences in war by bringing writers to military bases to conduct workshops for soldiers returning from combat.

Although I at first countered her dismay with the thought of the poignant WWI poetry of Wilfred Owen, among others, I was soon convinced of Ms. Wilner’s argument that As poets, we do not choose our subjects; the imagination is a force which can be invited, but it cannot be commanded. Language, as it should be in this context, is the issue here:

When promoting a war, which means authorizing the killing of other human beings, it is necessary to use a language which robs them of their humanity. There are several ways this is done. One is by seeing them as members of another species—something bestial, primitive, predatory. Perhaps that is why most animals do not murder their own kind: they are not subject to this confusion. Another way, which is characteristic of military language, is to denature the enemy by the use of a detached, Latinate, and bloodless language, so that one “neutralizes” opposing forces, or the burning, mutilation, and killing of civilians is masked as “collateral damage.

Of course, her main concern, shared by many whom she quotes is the politicization of that language: Operation Homecoming threatens to move the NEA into the business of supporting the generation of propaganda, a wartime exercise that is not part of its mission, and does writers, veterans, and the public a great disservice.

The article is available on-line, so you can draw your own conclusions.



Read widely, think well, and write often.

Two Interesting Sites

 

Sure, NewPages: Alternatives in Print & Media has been around for a while, but it’s new to me.

New Pages is a portal to independent media, including bookstores, publishers, periodicals and record labels. They have original articles, and naturally a weblog on the site too.

It seems to me that the whole idea is a vast undertaking; a portal after all, should be all-inclusive and implies the first stop or entry-way. Unfortunately, not all of the site is updated as frequent as one would hope for a portal. The “Literary Magazine Stand” and “Online Magazine Stand” have not been updated since mid-September and the “Zine Rack” was only updated last August.

Still, the idea of a portal for independent press is great because so many of these little gems go unnoticed by the world at large. Independent journals tend to be expensive as well, so having updates and reviews is helpful when trying to figure out which to buy.

(link via TEV guest author Mark Cunningham)



I also want to mention this Poetry site I stumbled across. It’s focus is on international poetry in translation and interestingly has editors from 12 countries around the world. The site also includes poetry news and editorials.



Read widely, think well, and write often.

Page 94 of 108 pages    « First  <  92 93 94 95 96 >  Last »


random longer posts/reviews

links saved, etc.

me posting elsewhere

You'll find me posting at the
Words Without Borders Blog

my twitter

  • @softskull diito @booksquare Technology books have done that for a while, I think
  • This Thursday: Words Without Borders' Conversations on Great Contemporary Literature on Yoko Ogawa's The Diving Pool. http://is.gd/eC5C
  • [dlevine] fixed it.. hehe here is that blog i wanted to show youhttp://tinyurl.com/a97mp7
  • [MTeplitsky] hey look at this funny blog http://rosalierebyb.blogspot.com/
  • [dlevine] hey look at this funny blog http://rosalierebyb.blogspot.com/

find stuff at this site



Recent Comments

Hi Bud,

This is so bittersweet to read. I wish U of Penn more than luck in tackling the collection and making an exhibit for the books. I can’t wait to see the store again. I used to work at Gotham (all too) briefly, from the summer of 2001 to the fall of 2002 when I was 19 and in school for illustration. The building, the books, and especially the people (I had amazing co-workers, plus some really lovely customers) have a special place in my heart. I’m was hoping the link would mention Andreas (Andy) Brown, the last owner of GBM, but no such luck.

I was going to venture a guess that if the old man you met at the store was a GBM employee it might have been Phillip Lyman, but my understanding was Mr. Lyman was notoriously well-read (and had substantial library himself) so I suppose he would not have been reading Dante for the first time when you met him. More likely it was one of our splendid customers. It happened more than once that one customer on the floor would ask me about an author or title and I would meet them with my perfectly hopeless stare ‘n stammer—until another customer that had overheard the plea would effortlessly proffer the desired answer or suggestion. I learned so much working there, from everyone, but was a pretty useless specimen while the learning percolated. One of the more useful employees (our resident poetry expert) recently got a shout-out over at the New Yorker’s book blog after being made famous at the splendiferous Kwik Meal #1 cart:

New Yorker Link

One more book nerdy bit before I cut off the nostalgia trip. The above-mentioned Marc was the first person to Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino in my hands; I read it up in the 2nd floor gallery on my lunch breaks (lunch from Kwik Meal #1, of course), surrounded by art books and Edward Gorey paraphernalia. That book took (and takes, I’ve re-read it many times) me so many places, but when I’m lucky it takes me back to Gotham’s gallery, by the 2nd floor window where the constant refrain of the gold and diamond sellers coming in through the window mingled with the dulcet tones of NPR from a radio bigger than a microwave and the smell of old paper—all unchanged almost more than a decade later. At least in my mind. It’s still one of my favorite books (and authors), ever. Marc also blessed me with recommendations of Wallace Stevens’ Palm At The End of the Mind, Moby Dick with the Rockwell Kent illustrations, and my first ever NYC apartment: a little studio over in Astoria, Queens. Everyone at that store was overflowing and generous with knowledge, stories and history.

Places like Gotham do more than provide fodder for sentimental blog comment drivel though; I hope the lessons learned from the ongoing troubles are shaping a new generation of booksellers and customers that can find ways to thrive. Bookstores don’t belong in museums. Wise men fish there.

– (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
on “Well That's That”


Best wishes for the holidays, Bud.

I used to work in the Pan Am/Met Life Building in Manhattan.  I would walk over to Gotham at lunch and browse, browse, browse.  Books were the only thing I ever bought on that stree.  It’s a shame it’s gone.  Thanks for the update for those of us no longer living in NYC.  Atlanta is not so much a book haven.

Best,
Jim H.

– Jim H.
on “Well That's That”


Yeah, for all of our technology - which is great - I mean you and I are talking about this from two ends of the country - but there’s nothing like being there.

– Bud Parr
on “Well That's That”