Category Archives: books

books, writing

“lily bart is dead!” – anguished early Wharton reader

I went to the library a few days ago for John Updike, but he was all checked out. Instead, in the last 72 hours, I have read, for the first time, PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT, SISTER CARRIE, and THE HOUSE OF MIRTH. Thematically, it made a nice seminar on the futility of mating.

Roth, Dreiser, and Wharton are novelists who I’m not sure would often be compared to each other in terms of style, but they have made a nice picture of contemporary confusion for me. Topic: a bunch of young people trying to live, trying to fall in love, and all ending up either alone or dead.

This subject matter is one which has consumed my writing lately. The only thing I have to write about, other than young humanoids trying – and failing – to mate with each other, is theater.

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books, writing

the future of fiction

“And what will that fiction look like? Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer–electronic books aren’t bound by physical constraints–and they’ll be patchable and updatable, like software. We’ll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don’t linger on the language; you just click through. We’ll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.”

– Lev Grossman, “Books Gone Wild: The Digital Age Reshapes Literature,” TIME

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books, politics

the disbelief suspended

The British barrister and author John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole, defender of playwrights, the Sex Pistols, and free speech, is dead at the age of 85.

“Doing these cases,” he wrote, “I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate. I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying. I was no longer entirely what my professional duties demanded, the old taxi on the rank waiting for the client to open the door and give his instruction, prepared to drive off in any direction, with the disbelief suspended.”

– NYT

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books, L'Internet

my world is happy

Interview with Jessa Crispin on The View From Here:

“First of all, congratulations for coming second place in the Weblog awards behind Neil Gaiman! How did you feel about the result?

It’s an unfair match up, me and Neil Gaiman. He’s got legions of fans. If he asks them to do something, politely in that accent of his, it’s just over. I should challenge him to something I have an actual chance of winning. Like a pie eating contest, or thumb wrestling.”

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books, quotes

the height of skyscrapers

The smallest things made him happy – a blue sky, bicycle bells in the morning, the change of seasons, even the height of skyscrapers.

Pride filled her wrinkles.

– Diane Wei Liang, THE EYE OF JADE

My parents gave me an extra copy of this mystery, having somehow accidentally acquired two (this happens to our family a lot!) in Thanksgiving, and I only just read it now. I found it hard to get into a lot of the writer’s style, but those two lines stood out to me.

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books, politics

the watchful eye and patiently attentive ear

In politics, “realism” is usually just another term for pragmatism, or Realpolitik. But “Dreams From My Father” suggests that for Obama the word is rooted less in a political than in a literary tradition, where it has a far richer meaning. It signifies the watchful eye and patiently attentive ear; a proper humility in the face of the multiplex character of human society; and, most of all, a belief in the power of the writer’s imagination to comprehend and ultimately reconcile the manifold contradictions in his teeming world. It’s not much to go on, but, so far, naming his cabinet and organizing his inauguration, incorporating into the narrative characters and voices quite different from his own (like Hillary Clinton’s or Rick Warren’s), Obama has demonstrated an impressive consistency between his instincts as a writer and his performance as president-elect. He reminds us that novelists, no less than apprentice politicians, are in the business of community organizing.

– Jonathan Raban, “All The Presidents’ Literature,” WSJ

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books

some poet

Ms. Urban said some of the more lavish [publishing] practices could not be sustained by a slow-growth, low-margin industry that can’t charge luxury prices. “Books can only support a certain retail price,” she said. “It’s not like you have books that can be Manolo Blahniks and books that can be Cole Haan. Books are books. A book by James Patterson costs the same as a book by some poet.”

– “The New Austerity In Publishing,” NYT

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