"I don’t begin a novel with a shopping list. The novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It’s like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn’t a violin. That’s what I do when I’m writing, except somehow I’m simultaneously generating the wood as I’m carving it.
"E.M. Forster’s idea has always stuck with me – that a writer who’s fully in control of the characters hasn’t even started to do the work. …. The sort of narratives I don’t trust, as a reader, smell of homework."
-- William Gibson, Paris Review 197
Saturday, June 18, 2011
"Homework"
"Prewar Green River"
The Chill (Ross Macdonald)
- Highlight Loc. 3257-65 | Added on Saturday, June 18, 2011, 03:17 PM
“How did it happen, Lieutenant?”
“He was cleaning his .32 automatic. He had a permit to tote it on his person—I helped him get it myself—because he used to carry large sums of money. He took the clip out all right but he must of forgot the shell that was in the chamber. It went off and shot him in the face.”
“Where?”
“Through the right eye.”
“I mean where did the accident occur?”
“In one of the bedrooms in his apartment. He kept the roof apartment in the Deloney building for his private use. More than once I drank with him up there. Prewar Green River, boy.” He slapped my knee, and noticed the full glass in my hand. “Drink up your drink.”
I knocked back about half of it. It wasn’t prewar Green River.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Meat overdose
Ate here last night with the offspring, after picking her up at the airport. An accidental find while looking for something else. Can think of at least one HG regular who might also enjoy it. (The pale lump in the middle is a scoop of excellent potato salad.)
Along with the barbecue, Bicycle and Gogi's menu has selections of fried items including ribbons of 'sweet' potato fries dusted with cinnamon and sugar and several Korean dishes listed under appetizers and side dishes -- like a stunningly red kimchi fried rice with a fried egg on top. On our most recent visit we ordered the Budae jjigae, listed in English as "Johnson Soup." Also known as Army stew because ingredients could be bought from the U.S. military bases throughout Korea, Bicycle and Gogi's rendition includes hot dogs, Spam, instant ramen noodles, zucchini and a slice of American cheese suspended in a thick gochujang (Korean chili paste) broth.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Tulkinghorn favorite forsakes the printed word
I've hesitated to express my admiration of Minister Faust's superhero parody From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain: partially because the parody may not be as clever as I (a casual and lapsed fan) think it is and partially because it contains a great deal of black power/hip-hop stuff, which may not, to understate the matter, appeal to all. ("Minister" is definitely not the writer's first name...) Think a young, less crazy Ishmael Reed.
At any rate, Faust is publishing his third novel independently on Kindle alone, and discusses it here with Jeff Vandermeer, who's a fan.
The difference between self-published and indie is that the former is anyone who just wants a physical copy of a book he’s written, and will put in minimal effort with minimal comprehension of book design, cover art, content editing, proofreading, distribution, or promotion. An indie writer wants not just control over those things, but probably wants to learn how to execute as many of them as possible and as well as possible. Using a combination of e-publication and print-on-demand, I can deliver to vast numbers of people, so long as they find out about my books in the first place. Amazon Kindle and other distribution sites tilt the balance in favour of readers. Meanwhile, using the tools and skills I do have under my control, I can promote my book, and on my estore and Amazon’s and the others, I have unlimited shelf-space with my covers always facing out, and unlimited shelf-life. I can also set the prices myself.
So what do I get for going indie? Artistic and business self-determination and the chance to earn a living for writing my own fiction.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
HG Themes a go-go
In what could be the HG mash-up of the year, Salman Rushdie has declared that "quality TV drama has taken over from film and the novel as the best way of widely communicating ideas and stories..."
He's writing a series for Showtime. It's SF.... (but of course not really)
It's a sort of paranoid science-fiction series, people disappearing and being replaced by other people," said Rushdie, 63, best known for Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses. "It's not exactly sci-fi, in that there is not an awful lot of science behind it, but there are certainly elements which are not naturalistic."
As discussed...
Here's me quoting Adam Roberts, for a change:
[Katie Ward's "Girl reading"] is a novel, not a collection of thematically-linked short stories, howevermuch it initially appears to be so. And the quality of the individual section, though inevitably a little variable, is high; I enjoyed reading them all very much. Nevertheless it took me a long time to finish reading this book, and that was for the following reason. I bought it as an e-book, for the Kindle app in my iPhone. I have seen it suggested that since e-books don't actually lie accusingly un- or half-read on our bedside tables, they fall into an out-of-sight-and-mind hole that actual books avoid. (Have a look at this intriguing John C Abell piece in Wired, 'Five Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet', paying particular attention to reason 1). I must say, I haven't found so: I seem to have no problem keeping going right through, even with quite lengthy books (I read Tim Powers' brand-new-in-2010-honestly Declare on the same app, for instance, and its hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages long). But for some reason I kept not going back to Ward's novel. This is not because I wasn't enjoying reading it, because I was. But I think it had to do with the fact that as I reached the end of each of the seven sections, some box in my sub-brain got ticked, and I subconsciously thought 'done and done!' -- and at next reading opportunity I'd pick up something else. Which is a roundabout way of saying: it may be that reading whole short-story collections, or novels (like this one) that play formal games on the linked-short-story format, may be harder to do in e-book format than in the codex. Not Ward's fault, of course; but an interesting wrinkle in a mode of buying and reading books for which I have hitherto had only praise.Abell makes a couple of other good points, though his number 3 is simply wrong: Kindle, at least, has a feature that saves typed comments as click-and-return footnotes.
4) E-books are positioned as disposable, but aren’t priced that way.
This one is simple, and also easy to oversimplify since people still have to get paid. But until e-books truly add new value, the way Hollywood did with DVD extras, it’s just annoying to plunk down $13 for what amounts to a rental. E-books cost virtually nothing to produce, and yet the baseline cover price, set by publishers, is only fractionally below the discount price for the print version of new releases.
E-books can’t be shared, donated to your local library shelter, or re-sold. They don’t take up space, and thus coax conflicted feelings when it is time to weed some of them out. But because they aren’t social, even in the limited way that requires some degree of human contact in the physical world, they will also never be an extension of your personality.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Ouch!
Will admit I have some sympathy with the views posted here:
I’ve already started to read posts about how hot Rooney is with her nipple ring on full display. That’s enough to start my blood boiling. Lisbeth is not supposed to be hot. That’s one of the reasons why we love her so much. She doesn’t play by the rules and now we have a poster that puts her right back into the girl box.Lizbeth is just about the last person on earth who would ever want to attract sexual attention. In fact, her feral aversion to that and most other forms of human contact is pretty close to the heart of the character.
Of course people realize that this is a Hollywood ad image in a standard format. At the same time, they love Salander and are offended when, in their eyes, she isn't treated with respect. A fanboy-adjacent response, from an unusual demographic, and sympathetic as such.
This angry blast gets it right.
Discussion in progress here.
Bolaño, PKD, and Thoreau
Dwight Gardner reviews a collection of Bolaño's essays (called "Between Parentheses") in this morning's New York Times. Bolaño's genre scorecard was an interesting one: He disliked John Irving and Michael Chabon, but liked Thomas Harris: opinions that are hard to generalize from. He loved Philip K. Dick (I almost said "of course") and had contempt for the very literature professors who now lionize him. A hard-core bohemian to the last..... From the review:
He had a baroque, seriocomic scorn for Latin American professors at American universities. “To attend dinner with them and their favorites,” Bolaño wrote, “is like gazing into a creepy diorama in which the chief of a clan of cavemen gnaws on a leg while his acolytes nod and laugh.” He made plain his lack of regard for the American writers John Irving, Chuck Palahniuk and Michael Chabon.
Some of the crispest writing in “Between Parentheses,” however, is from the newspaper columns in which he appraised those American writers whose work he clutched to his chest. These included genre masters like Dick, (Walter) Mosley, James Ellroy and Thomas Harris. Mr. Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels may be mass-market best sellers, Bolaño said, “but I wish most contemporary novelists wrote this well.” His riff on Philip K. Dick included this sentence: “Dick is Thoreau plus the death of the American dream.”
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Non-canonical Bond
A trail that I never followed: non-Fleming James Bond novels. Most of them sound horrible. This summary article is pretty funny. Kingsley Amis's Bond book got this response from Anne Fleming, Ian's posh, titled, dominatrix, widow:
"Amis will slip Lucky Jim into Bond's clothing," she wrote in a Sunday Telegraph review. "We shall have a petit bourgeois red-brick Bond [who will] end up selling his country."The Gardner Bonds were created according to an interesting formula for hackery:
Gardner went on to write 16 Bond novels, four more than Fleming. All 16 are readable, yet all are dogged by silliness: Bond gets chummy with an unconvincing Maggie Thatcher in Win Lose Or Die; half of Scorpius takes place in the glamourous locale of Chippenham.The novels were a three-way trade-off between Gardner, Gildrose and the American publisher Putnam. Gardner would spend six weeks writing each novel; Putnam would spend six months adjusting it to their requirements. By publication Americanisms were everywhere: a waiter wears "pants" in The Man From Barbarossa; Bond asks "what's up?" in Brokenclaw. Even worse were the titles (1987's Win Lose Or Die pales in comparison to Putnam's suggestion: Oh No, Mr Bond).
The new conventional wisdom
A line from an article in this morning's LA Times about prominent directors working in television:
DreamWorks convinced (Neil Jordan) that his concept for a movie based on the 15th century papacy would be better suited for television, with its older, more sophisticated audience.As though the "older, more sophisticated audience" of television almost went without saying.
The new David Milch horse-racing series, starring Dustin Hoffman and produced/directed by Michael Mann looks interesting -- as does the production of "Parade's End" that David mentioned a little while ago. I liked Curtis Hanson's work on "Too Big to Fail" -- and, of course, "Game of Thrones" occupies an honored Sunday night position here chez Tulkinghorn.
I think it would be amusing if these television productions were given fake releases like documentaries to qualify as "motion pictures".... Would make the tedious Oscars a lot more interesting. (Paul Giamatti's performance as Ben Bernanke has Best Supporting Actor written all over it... And I understand there are enthusiasts for a number of the performers in "Justified.")
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Friday, June 3, 2011
Thursday, June 2, 2011
The Egan-Naipaul Smackdown
V.S. Naipaul was asked the other day whether he considered any woman writer his "literary match". His simple and typical answer was "No." Asked if that opinion included, say, Jane Austen, he said that all women writers were doomed to inferiority (compared to him) because of their "sentimentality."
Pretty amusing stuff.
Even more amusing was Jennifer Egan's (of current Goon Squad fame) response when reached by phone by the WSJ:
These comments are a reminder of what we all know. If someone is a perceptive, nuanced writer, it does not mean that the person, as a perceiver of the world, manifests the same qualities. Reading those comments you have no interest in engaging in this person’s sensibility. You wouldn’t think this person has anything to reveal. But as a writer he’s much more than that, so that contradiction is interesting. To condemn these comments gives them more weight, endows them with more authority. They just sound like one’s man cranky, outmoded point of view
A long way from the Tardis....
The Guardian reviews the West End production of "Much Ado About Nothing" starring Catherine Tate and David Tennant. A pairing for the ages? Says the review:
Down the ages people have always gone to this play to watch the verbal sparring of Beatrice and Benedick which anticipates 1930s Hollywood screwball comedy; and here Tate and Tennant give just the right suggestion that their byplay is the product of some past bruising encounter. Tennant is especially good at showing Benedick's transition from the self-conscious madcap of the officers' mess into a man capable of love......Tate gives an excellent account of Beatrice as the kind of larky, high-spirited woman who uses her wisecracking gifts as a defence against emotional engagement...
....the gaiety of the evening suggests the Tate-Tennant partnership should be pursued. Why not try their hand at Restoration comedy or Coward's Private Lives?
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
"I'll tell you one thing I learned about movies?"
Samaritan (Richard Price)
- Highlight Loc. 3224-42 | Added on Tuesday, May 31, 2011, 10:52 AM
“You don’t want to get deeper into TV work yourself?”
“As what, a seasoned receptionist?” Danielle said with a twist of the lips. “Well, actually what I do is more interesting than it sounds. Like, three days after I got hired, OK? My boss Krauss, he buzzes me, says to come into his office, bring a notepad. I go in, he’s auditioning this actor for some movie, like a disease movie, a virus movie, or some such. I go in, he points to a chair in back, says, ‘Take notes.’ And I’m thinking, ‘On what?’ “So, the guy reads his lines with an actress, the audition lasts maybe ten minutes, Krauss gets up, says, ‘That was wonderful. We’ll call,’ the guy leaves, the actress leaves, it’s me, Krauss and this other producer, Krauss looks to me, says, ‘So what you think?’ I’m like, ‘About what . . . ?’ Krauss says, ‘Would you fuck him?’” lowering her voice on the f-word. “And I’m, in my mind, I’m, ‘How dare you.’ I mean I was shaking I was so insulted, but scared too, because I needed that job. But all I say is, ‘I don’t know. Would you?’ “And at first he’s like, his face is, ‘Who the hell are you to . . .’ But the other guy starts laughing like, ‘Hey, good one, Hal,’ and I guess that broke the tension. He never actually apologized to me but he’s been kind of, I don’t know, tasteful about things ever since.”
“Tasteful.”
“I mean he still calls me in every time he’s auditioning actors, you know, ‘Take notes,’ but after they leave, all he says to me is, ‘So what do you think?’ and all I give him is thumbs up, thumbs down. But I’ll tell you one thing I learned about movies? It all boils down to ‘Would you fuck him, would you fuck her.’ Everything flows out of that.”
“Understanding what you just said?” Ray aching for her. “That’s a six-figure salary right there.”
==========
Soul Substitute
Some denizens of the HGB will be gratified to learn that Brown's Baccalaureate Service was so painstakingly multi-denominational that even included a reading for atheists. As follows:
From the SilenceForced to admit this particular passage didn't do much for me -- not half as much as the bit in one of the student Commencement Orations the following day about a series of studies of squirrel behavior in the 1950s that pointed to the evolutionary survival benefits of altruism.
SELF COMES TO MIND: CONSTRUCTING THE CONSCIOUS BRAIN
by Antonio Damasio
Read by Tomas Rocha '11
And what is the ultimate gift of consciousness to humanity? Perhaps the ability to navigate the future in the seas of our imagination, guiding the self's craft into a safe and productive harbor. The greatest of all gifts depends, once again, on the intersection of self and memory.
Memory, tempered by personal feeling, is what allows humans to imagine both individual and the compounded well-being of a whole society, and to invent the ways and means of achieving and magnifying that well-being. Memory is responsible for ceaselessly placing the self in an evanescent here and now, between a thoroughly lived past and an anticipated future, perpetually buffeted between the spent yesterdays and the tomorrows that are nothing but possibilities. The future pulls us forward, from a distant vanishing point, and gives us the will to continue the voyage.
This may be what T.S. Elliot means when he writes: "Time past and time future / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end which is always present."
The book, Self Comes to Mind, is the latest hot Cog-Neuro tome for the rest of us. It is in fact reviewed, unfavorably, in the issue of NYRB already quoted at length below. Cool quote:
...a common mistake is to assume that because science is objective and consciousness is subjective, there cannot be a science of consciousness. Science is indeed epistemically objective, because scientific claims are supposed to be verifiable independently of anybody’s feelings and attitudes. But the ontological subjectivity of the domain of consciousness does not preclude an objective science of that domain. You can have an (epistemically) objective science of an (ontologically) subjective consciousness. Much confusion has been created by the failure to see this point.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Friday, May 27, 2011
NPR reads The HG
Amusing interview with Gary Shteyngart yesterday on All Things Considered on the occasion of his winning the Wodehouse Prize. (Note that Shteyngart mispronounces "Wodehouse"...) The book is a riot, however, set in a wonderfully dystopian near-future America of complete economic and cultural collapse.
Best neologism is 'verballing', which elevates conversation to the level of 'texting'......
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Bookstore Paradise or a Hangout for Poseurs?
Only a drive over will tell. (Looks like the place might be on the Gold Line...)
Where better to start a Los Angeles–based culture diary than on the city’s enpretzeled freeways? I leave an editorial meeting and take the 101 to the 5 to the 10 to Boyle Heights, en route to David Kipen’s Libros Schmibros, “a community bookstore and lending library.” It’s pretty much the best bookstore in the world, not so much for its scope (its stock is superb, but it’s an average-size storefront), but for its curation and spirit. Not only is every book in the shop one that any sane reader would covet, but if you happen to empty your pockets while you’re there, you’re free to borrow books you don’t buy.The author is the editor of something called "The Los Angeles Review of Books", and represents a kind of epicene man of letters that I have never actually met here.... The entire blog entry is worth reading for that alone. More:
Whiskey! Why haven’t I thought of it sooner? I go to Musso & Frank with the excellent Katherine Taylor. We drink Maker’s Mark Manhattans. We keep our eyes peeled for the battling ghosts of Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, who apparently together wrote Double Indemnity here, “both drinking heavily because they couldn’t stand each other.” I understand the temptation. Last time I was in, I was almost carted out in a wheelbarrow.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
As discussed.
This review of The Millennium Trilogy, by a writer of lit-fic, Tim Parks (Vaguely familiar. Canadian?), is predictably snooty about Larsson's clumsy prose. (The apposite comparison, after all, is with Dumas, not Nabokov.) But then, against all odds, it goes on to get almost all the major points right, chapter and verse as to why the books are wonderful anyway. Parks is especially good on the importance of the lifestyle details some critics have dismissed as indulgent:
Not all is lurid. Food is important. Shopping. Furniture. Domesticity. Larsson invites us to identify with his heroes by filling in the ordinary moments of their lives, the humdrum aloneness that makes colorful sexual encounters so desirable. A cookbook could be compiled from Blomkvist’s efforts in the kitchen in the first novel of the trilogy. Salander prefers to get herself pizza and Coke. Both of them are used to eating alone in front of a computer screen. As independent spirits, they prefer Apple to Microsoft. Both pay more attention to technical stats than nutritional value. Replacing her computer after an accident, SalanderElsewhere in the same issue, Alison Lurie outlines the art-fiction consensus that a writer like Parks has to buck to say anything nice at all about a writer like Larsson:
set her sights on the best available alternative: the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in an aluminium case with a PowerPC 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 MB Ram and a 60 GB hard drive. It had BlueTooth and built-in CD and DVD burners.One is reminded of the frequently cited technical specs of guns in Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? [The citation of Mailer, rather than Tom Clancy or Stephen Hunter, is proof positive that Parks thinks he's slumming. - DC] The computer is Salander’s weapon. Unlike firearms, however, this is a weapon every ordinary reader handles every day:
Best of all, it had the first 17-inch screen in the laptop world with NVIDIA graphics and a resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels, which shook the PC advocates and outranked everything else on the market.It is through the computer screen that the free individual can hack into the evil world of the great corporation with its corrupt practices and pedophile porn rings and begin the duty or the fantasy of striking back. Not quite Alice in Through the Looking-Glass but not unrelated; when Salander goes online she is transformed, omnipotent.
Many novels have captured the global imagination by presenting modern man as in thrall to a vast international conspiracy; one thinks of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum or Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. The hidden organization that conditions and controls us is the antithesis of individualism and its natural enemy, an evil extension of the potentially perilous family that wields such power over us from birth, or the traditional marriage that restricts our sexual encounters, or the incompetent if not nakedly evil state that tangles us in a web of bureaucracy and is always complicit with organized crime. From all these things, Salander shows us how to be free, with inspired use of our laptops.
It is the ingenuousness and sincerity of Larsson’s engagement with good and evil that give the trilogy its power to attract so many millions of people.
In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) Miss Prism says of her three-volume novel, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” When Miss Prism composed this work—presumably at least twenty-eight years earlier, before she unfortunately left it in a perambulator, and the baby in a handbag at Victoria Station—this rule prevailed. Readers of Dickens, Trollope, and their contemporaries, after suffering through many misfortunes and hardships with heroes and heroines, could usually expect a happy ending.Later, on the other side of the NYRB firewall, and after trudging through an entire volume of Julian Barnes stories that all end grimly, she adds:
As time passed, Miss Prism’s Rule began to be challenged. Today only genre fiction usually ends happily, though often after generous helpings of death and violence, or a great deal of jealousy, despair, and damage to female clothing (hence the colloquial term “bodice-ripper”). Best sellers typically have an upbeat conclusion that nevertheless leaves the hero and heroine somewhat tired and regretful as a result of the terrible events they have lived through. As in the Victorian novel, it is often the case that the happier the principal characters are at the beginning, the worse are the things that will occur to them later, though they may be partially rewarded at the end. Even if they do not survive they may be portrayed as looking down benevolently from heaven at the material and emotional contentment of the other good people in the book.
Literary fiction, however, now tends to conform to Tom Stoppard’s addition to Miss Prism’s Rule, first stated in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966): “The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.” The scale of the tragedy, of course, varies widely. When we begin a story by a known and admired writer in a known and admired journal, we do not always expect a major disaster, but we know that something unpleasant is going to happen to the main characters, and/or that they will end up understanding something unpleasant about themselves, their friends or family, or the world in general. (Years ago, a Harvard student called Speed Lamkin described the latter tales to me as “stupid little realization stories.”*)
It is disheartening to think that today the choices for a gifted writer are often unconsciously limited to satire and tragedy. Not all stories end unhappily or unluckily, and to assume that they must do so it to take as false a view of life and fiction as Miss Prism's.A tiny hint that the consensus might be shifting; that even lit-fic purists are finally getting fed up.
The world takes its cue from The HG
From the breakthrough of Jo Nesbo to the canonization of China Mieville, you'll read it here first. And today we learn that Gary Shteyngart has become the first American to win the Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction..... I love the prize, mentioned in the last paragraph below:
The author's winning novel, Super Sad True Love Story, is set in a dystopian, near-future America, where the 39-year-old Russian-American Lenny Abramov is attempting to persuade the 24-year-old Korean-American Eunice Park to fall in love with him. It "leaves you wondering whether that dull ache in your stomach is from laughter or just plain sadness", wrote Chris Cox in the Observer.
Prize judge and Hay festival director Peter Florence called the book "great literature" and "wild comedy".
"Gary Shteyngart's writing is thrilling. He's a staggeringly clever satirist who manages to create worlds and people of perfect coherence and outrageous misfortune," said Florence.
Shteyngart wins a jeroboam of champagne and a set of Wodehouse books. The author will also be presented with a pig named after his novel.
Monday, May 23, 2011
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