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June 28, 2007

THURSDAY MARGINALIA

* The American Humanist Association has named Joyce Carol Oates Humanist of the Year.

* A long-lost typescript of The Good Earth - which may have been stolen - has been found and turned over to the FBI.

* J.M. Coetzee is among the authors who have lent their names to a proposed worldwide reading in protest of the regime of Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe.

* Is the "Rock Novel" the third rail of literature?

Amos20oz_p_2* Amos Oz has been awarded the prestigious 2007 Prince of Asturias Award for Letters.

The prize recognises international excellence in fields ranging from sports to science.

Oz helped found Israel's Peace Now pacifist movement in 1978 after fighting for the Israeli Defence Force in the 1967 Six Day War and 1973 Yom Kippur War.

* In other prize action, Elena Poniatowska has won the Romulo Gallegos literature prize for her book El Tren Pasa Primero (The Train Passes First).

* And in still more prize news, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's deserved hot streak continues with her nomination for the James Tait Black Memorial prize.

* Salon takes a look at the ongoing fallout from the AMS bankruptcy.

* As our revisions continue, we kinda know how Elie Wiesel feels.  (Are we allowed to say that?)

* Stuart Walton suggests some literary inspiration for Tony Blair as he exits 10 Downing

The reported death of Falstaff in Henry V, told among his lowliest friends outside a London tavern, is of a troubled but reconciled valediction to a world run out of temptations. Not sack nor women, nor the God to whom he cries out, quite comfort the old hellraiser after "the King hath kill'd his heart". Nonetheless, there is a celebrated dignity in his passing, a dignity only enhanced by the fact that Shakespeare spares us the sight of it.Street.

* In this interview, Amy Tan talks about bouncing back from Lyme Disease and continuing on with a novel-in-progress.

* Amid the brouhaha surrounding Salman Rushdie's knighthood, Andrew Anthony offers this consideration at the Guardian.

It's easy to attack the retailers for their failings, but The Satanic Verses affair has shown that there are plenty of other people, including writers themselves, whose support for literature cannot be relied upon. Not just ridiculous figures like Lord Ahmed, who said last week that he was 'appalled' by Rushdie's knighthood, though I suggest not quite as appalled as I am by Ahmed's peerage, because the author had 'blood on his hands'. Yes, that's right, not the demented Islamists who murdered Hitoshi Igarashi, the book's Japanese translator, and wounded the Italian translator and Norwegian publisher, and burned to death 37 Turkish intellectuals in a 1993 hotel attack in an attempt to kill Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator. No, the blood is on Rushdie's hands, because he wrote a work of fiction.

* The auction of the typewriter purported to have been used by Christy Brown (My Left Foot) has been called off as relatives attest that he originally wrote the book in pencil.

* V.S. Naipaul, the crankiest man in modern letters, gives a brief interview to Reuters.  More or less what you'd expect:

"I stopped reading contemporary writing with the last generation of writers, you know, the Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene kind of generation," he said.

* We always knew David Kipen would amount to something - the NEA's Big Read is the largest federal literature program since the days of the WPA.

* Note to Shannon Byrne - when we said the problem wasn't going away, this is exactly what we meant.

* In the Late-to-Link Department, do check out Carlin Romano's profile of Michael Ondaatje.

"It allowed me to write full time if I wanted to write full time," he says of The English Patient. "It was a kind of gift. You don't want to waste it, you know? It allowed me to write the kind of book I really felt should be written."

By that he means The English Patient didn't drive him to write with an eye to the movies, or, he jokes, "The Return of The English Patient." Books, he says, "are very, very different from film. If I tried to write a book that was a film, it wouldn't interest me at all." His attitude after The English Patient's box-office triumph, he insists, was, "Let me write the next book so that it can only be told as a book. Otherwise, why not just write a screenplay?"

* And, finally, you can get the same first-rate advice we get from our first-rate agent Simon Lipskar - and you don't have to pay commission to get it:

So, should you throw yourself wholeheartedly into becoming a world-class marketer of your books? Should you begin writing a daily blog that’s pithy and brilliant and specific enough about a certain topic to begin attracting readers and then holding their attention? Maybe. But, remember: as an author, your most valuable commodity is time, and this stuff takes time, and lots of it.

Posted at 12:20 AM in Marginalia |

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Comments

Sebastian

Uh, Mark, I think actually the American Humanist Association named Oates Humanist of the Year, not Princeton.

Posted by: Sebastian | June 28, 2007 at 08:45 AM

TEV

Crap. The perils of late night blogging. Thanks for the catch - fixing it up.

Posted by: TEV | June 28, 2007 at 08:57 AM

Steven Augustine

Re: The Rushdie Affair Redux:

I was involved in a heated exchange with three or four commenters at the Guardian blogs on the very subject of Rushdie's renewed troubles (I'm very strong against decapitating him, smirk or no smirk; not everyone on that thread was).

What struck me especially was that the same commenters who held the position that deeply sincere death-threats against the writer are *not* to be abhorred as barbaric (in case the would-be neck-trimmers from "another culture" have a righteous beef with Rushdie)...cried foul at my merciless ridicule (though I never once used a word more profane than "idiotic") of their position.

In other words: not being NICE in a comment thread is an unforgivable breech of decorum. Threatening to behead a "blasphemous" writer with every intention of actually doing so, on the other hand...

The counter-intuitive moral hierarchies of the PC Left!

Should Ken Saro-Wiwa have "known better", too?

Posted by: Steven Augustine | June 28, 2007 at 02:48 PM

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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