Ira Glass is the editor of a book called The New Kings of Nonfiction, and I want to read it. You either love him or you hate him and I love him. I'd let the guy program my Tivo. I'd let him marry my old college classmate. Is he too twee? Not for me. [Tip and diverging opinions courtesy of Paper Cuts.]
I miss it here.
I'll just point out how interesting this article on reclusive writers is (stumbled upon via Boldtype). It recasts the enterprise of a retreat like Salinger's in light of Denis Johnson, Paris Hilton, and the reinvention (dissolution?) of privacy in the 21st century. The article quotes heavily from Lee Siegel, whose forthcoming Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, sounded so great to me until I read the book description on Amazon:
"Siegel argues that the Web and complementary developments—from reality television to the emergence of business prophets like Malcolm Gladwell—are giving rise to a new and malevolent mass culture..."
Just: no. Also, I think Paris's new haircut actually looks kind of good. Anyone?
...that invites compulsive typing and clicking, despite it's many flaws:
Courtesy of Miss Snark
I am currently somewhere between the first and last pages of the following books: The Omnivore's Dilemma, Loving, The Rising of the Moon, From Where You Dream, Alternadad (I'm not too proud to admit it), and the Francine Prose book I blogged about months ago. It's pretty pathetic. This will never stop me from adding more books to my to-read pile and now I'm all hot under the collar about James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips.
From the Boldtype review:
Science-fiction enthusiasts know James Tiptree, Jr. as a remarkable, energetic, and inventive storyteller who burst onto the scene in the late '60s with a series of stories that helped define the genre. His tales explored the role of sexuality and gender, and although told from a man's point of view, they were often sympathetic to women. Tiptree carried on lengthy correspondences with editors, as well as other sci-fi heavyweights (notably Phillip K. Dick and Ursula K. LeGuin), none of whom had ever met Tiptree in person. Then, in 1976, James Tiptree, Jr. was revealed to be a 61-year-old woman named Alice B. Sheldon who lived in rural Virginia.
Sound familiar? Her story gets even more interesting (at various points Sheldon was a debutante, a painter, a CIA agent, and a chicken farmer) and ultimately tragic (she took her own life in a murder/suicide pact with her husband). I'm so all in.
I read the Laura Albert/JT Leroy interview in the fall issue of the Paris Review and while I have no idea how manipulative and exploitive the whole thing really is (so many layers of impersonation), or how earnest or truthful Albert is in that interview, I do know that her telling of things (how she invented a fake writer) comes off as a very powerful redemption story, a hopeful one, possibly even a beautiful one. Not the reaction I expected to have, particularly because the reason everyone feels so cheated about the whole JT Leroy hoax is that the non-existence of his life story negates the redemptive nature of his writing. So probably I got played, because even as I was reading it I was thinking "this isn't true" and "I bet she wrote those journal entries [alleged to be from her teen years] yesterday," but regardless, someone who wasn't a really good storyteller couldn't play you that way. Of course, it could be that the really good storyteller is Nathaniel Rich, the senior editor who honed down "many daylong conversations...[interrupted by] digressions, jokes, impersonations, and extended flights of metaphor" into a fairly linear twenty page interview, because when you read some of her other interviews, she's not so compelling. Or maybe she's just really good at adapting herself to the context. And there is something touching about the fact that she gave her interview to The Paris Review, instead of Entertainment Weekly (which reminds me, where is my EW subscription?).
We’re still living at my mom’s, waiting for the water in our collapsed well to run clean (the well guy told us it could take three weeks). My eldest daughter has moved into a "house" resembling an opium den under the dining room table. The only thing I find annoying about this is the fact that she got there first. Pretty much unrelated, except for the general concept of make believe, is The Night Listener, by Armistad Maupin, which I finished a couple of weeks ago. The book is Maupin’s barely fictionalized account of his lengthy relationship with Anthony Godby Johnson, a young writer who endured physical and sexual abuse and was sold into prostitution by his parents, then was adopted by a loving social worker when he finally managed to escape, only to discover he was HIV-positive. Also, he doesn’t exist. Probably. Except as J. T. Leroy’s godparent. Obviously totally up my alley. Even better than the book is this article, since it contains none of Maupin’s boyfriend and daddy issue side plots. All hoax and scandal.
This looks so delicious I could eat it for breakfast. In this first volume in a series of interviews culled from the Paris Review, you get to hear from Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, James M. Cain, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Stone, Robert Gottlieb, Richard Price, Billy Wilder, Jack Gilbert, Joan Didion. Crunchy and full of fiber.
When I was an undergraduate, I wrote a paper bemoaning what
I saw as the over-analysis of literature. It was the late 1980’s, so there really was a fair amount of over-analysis
to bemoan. I asked why we couldn’t appreciate
the story and the craft on a more basic level, than proceeded to quote
extensively from all the assigned reading and lots of related things I had been
reading on my own, and talk about why I liked them. My teacher was impressed by the paper,
because he was more of a writer than an English professor at the end of the day. Everyone else in the class (we read these
things out loud for some reason) was probably appalled by the crude authority with
which I overstated my case and the lack of any coherent thesis. Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those
Who Want to Write Them starts from a similar place, except it’s, you know, like,
really, really good. I had heard/read a
few interviews with Prose about this book and frankly I thought she sounded
like a bit of a pill, with her call to read all the great works and so on, but now
I’m a few chapters in and totally under her spell. The fact that she cites Jane Bowles as one of
the writers she returns to again and again for instruction scored huge points
with me. I love that she has a whole
chapter on beautiful sentences and what it means to write them. It’s immensely gratifying to read her
examples and when one thinks about the task of writing as the construction of
such entities, it’s actually less daunting and more purely pleasurable. In fact I'm considering diagramming sentences as a hobby.
Driving around in my car this morning I happened upon an NPR interview segment with the creators of Hemingway & Bailey’s Bartending Guide to Great American Writers (Hemingway is the grandson of Ernest), which features cheery anecdotes about the amusing alcoholism that writers such as Raymond Chandler and F. Scott Fitzgerald suffered through. And recipes. I got all sucked in even though it might have been the worst NPR segment ever (Steve Inskeep orders mojitos, Hemingway style, midway through the interview, proving that booze and preciousness just don't mix). I loved learning that Carson McCullers used to drink a mixture of hot tea and sherry throughout the day that she called “sonnie boy.” And she was only writing novels. I went to Costco earlier today and frankly I could use a sonnie boy about now myself.
