...about the creative process:
"Things come into the mind and wait to hook up with other things."See also: "Whatever talent I have for writing lies in being friends with my head."-- Russell Hoban, "Afterword," "Riddley Walker: Expanded Edition" (Indiana 1998).
"It's tempting to give up on our liberal studies before even making the attempt, the better to continue on our merry way, fighting, drinking, and all the rest. At least, then we we have the satisfaction of a little short-term pleasure instead of a lifetime of feeling inadequate."More excellent Smith here. I've been shying away from this writer for years, fearing either the Second Coming of Rushdie (Multi-Culti Magic Realism) or a new addition to the Hitchens/Amis Patronizing Smarty Pants School. But I've loved a couple of her recent essays.-- Zadie Smith, "Some Notes on Attunement," "The New Yorker," December 17, 2012, 30-35.
My other source of daily pleasure is—but I wish I had a better way of putting it—”other people’s faces.” A red-headed girl, with a marvelous large nose she probably hates, and green eyes and that sun-shy complexion composed more of freckles than skin. Or a heavyset grown man, smoking a cigarette in the rain, with a soggy mustache, above which, a surprise—the keen eyes, snub nose, and cherub mouth of his own eight-year-old self.As a paragraph written by a novelist this is promising. Last week I dug out the copy of "White Teeth" I've owned for something like fifteen years. Any day now...
These cool clips are being posted around to celebrate the publication of a book that looks like an HBO series waiting to happen.
Est-ce Que Tu Le Sais - Scopitone Sylvie Vartan by samandari
The author of "A Feast of Love" on the novelist who is both the literary eminence John Banville and the would-be thriller purveyor Benjamin Black, who each have new books out.
A reading of the two books, the Banville novel and the Black novel, might inspire in some readers a consideration of the way that plot on the one hand and eloquence on the other have taken their leave of each other and have set up separate realms, if that is indeed what has happened. But the real mystery at the center of these books has more to do with the question of how to freeze time so that it partakes of the eternal, which is Banville’s true subject, and with the problem of consequences of actions in the here and now, which is Black’s. Eloquence is not the point of [Black's] "Vengeance," though it contains passages of verbal legerdemain, and plot is almost irrelevant in [Banville's] "Ancient Light," although it contains a surprise ending.A larger distinction can be inferred between literary novels that seek to "freeze time so that it partakes of the eternal" and entertainments, which exploit a sense of time rushing onward to generate excitement. While there could be cases in which the merely stiff or frozen is mistaken for the timeless, the association of the temporal and the contingent is pretty well locked in; a key issue for us OG liberal artists.
UPDATE: I think the distinction between stop-time novels that seek stasis and/or the eternal and "temporal" plotty ones is too suggestive to be reduced to an art vs. entertainment squabble. Slowing time down to an extreme close-up crawl or speeding it up to gets hearts racing aren't the only alternatives. Some of our favorite books, from "War and Peace" to "A Suitable Boy," somehow manage to evoke the exact, flowing, forward pace of life, without hype in either direction.
He almost gave up [bicycle riding] after a week. But then Doc Barkhuizen gave him the "five-minute" tip. "This is what I do, Benny. If I'm not in the mood I tell myself, 'just five minutes,' and if I don't feel like going on, I'll turn around and go back home." He tried it -- and never once did he turn around. Once you were going, you went on.-- Deon Meyer, "Thirteen Hours" (Grove Press 2011)
Anthony Lane on the new film "Killing Them Softly:"
Why haven’t more movies stolen from George V. Higgins? He died in 1999, but his work remains a trove, begging to be raided for linguistic loot. If you want to grade postwar novelists on the strength of their ears alone—how fast they prick up at the crackle and blare of American speech—then Higgins and Elmore Leonard, you could argue, lead the pack, ahead of more distinguished names.Writing about the same film, around the same time, for the same magazine's online edition (cold looks when they pass in the hall?) Richard Brody proves himself to be a true hipster by asserting that "storytelling is the most overrated value and misattributed term in the world of moviemaking." Luckily, by the time he gets to his big finish, Brody is saying something a bit different, making a point that reflects a degree of cluelessness about how the process of film production actually works:
…this mode of bare-bones storytelling—in which a pared-down framework of facts is presented, tightly and narrowly, as if foregrounding the plot and locating all traces of character in the actors’ performance—is one of the dominant trends of contemporary filmmaking. It doesn’t just serve the goal of brisk entertainment: it reflects the desire to pass the fiction off as objective truth—in order to convey as all the more self-evident the filmmaker’s political point.Read more.
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