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Jim Crace, whose Being Dead is a TEV favorite, announces his plans to stop writing fiction.
Most writers would say that they are driven to write and know no way to fill their time or make sense of the world. Crace is amused by their presumption. "My belief is that I will be quite happy not writing. JD Salinger once said, 'You've got no idea the peace of writing and not publishing,' but I am going to go one better and find the peace of not writing and not publishing. I'm looking forward to it."
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Margaret Atwood joins the Twitterati ...
They’re sharp: make a typo and they’re on it like a shot, and they tease without mercy. However, if you set them a verbal challenge, a frisson sweeps through them. They did very well with definitions for “dold socks”—one of my typos—and “Thnax,” another one. And they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that “Own the podium” was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested “A podium might be nice.” Their own variations poured onto a feed tagged #cpodium: “A podium! For me?” “Rent the podium, see if we like it.” “Mind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?” I was so proud of them! It was like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!
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Help me, spirits, to penetrate his dream
and ease his restless passage.
Lay back the darkness for a salesman
who could charm everything but the shadows,
an immigrant who stands on the threshold
of a vast night
without his walker or his cane
and cannot remember what he meant to say,
though his right arm is raised, as if in prophecy,
while his left shakes uselessly in warning.
My father in the night shuffling from room to room
is no longer a father or a husband or a son,
But a boy standing on the edge of a forest
listening to the distant cry of wolves,
to wild dogs,
to primitive wingbeats shuddering in the treetops.
- Edward Hirsch, "Lay Back the Darkness"
(In memoriam, one year later.)
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What happens when an interviewer obviously hasn't read the book. Go watch it at You Tube - the video format is wider than my blog supports. (Double-clicking on the image below will open it in a full You Tube window.)
And forgive my little Harvey Korman slip at the end ... Remember, Sam is at Vroman's this evening, and Sheila Heti is at the Hammer Museum. Agony!
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As the number of people who have actually witnessed an atomic bomb detonation decreases, Jeremy Bernstein records his own experiences at the NYRblog.
What I saw defies description. The photograph above gives some sense but not of the scale. At first there was no noise. Then came the shock wave that made a disagreeable click in my ears and finally the rolling thunder of the noise. The Joshua trees were aflame as if in some obscene pagan rite. The bomb had evaporated the tower. The fire ball rose and above it was a dark and very menacing radioactive column. It seemed to come towards us and I wondered if we should seek shelter. Above it was the mushroom cloud. We were all very silent when we returned to our bunkhouse for a little more sleep.
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The London Review of Books weighs in with its appraisal of Ian McEwan's new novel Solar.
The elements of farce in Solar have the unintended side-effect of pointing up how farcical many of the events in McEwan’s previous, more serious novels are: the lengths the children go to in The Cement Garden to try to conceal their mother’s corpse, inexpertly disposed of in the cellar; the drunk ex-husband in The Innocent falling asleep in his ex-wife’s wardrobe while waiting for her to come home with her new fiancé; the nervous young man, also in The Innocent, struggling round Berlin failing to get rid of a pair of suitcases stuffed with body parts; the young man in Atonement sending the drastically wrong draft of a letter to the young woman he’s just realised he’s in love with. In The Cement Garden or The Innocent, the incongruous elements of farce make the stories darker. But McEwan hasn’t been interested in that kind of darkness for some time, and in his more recent novels, such as Saturday or even the intermittently dazzling Atonement, the farcical elements are merely incongruous. At least Solar is meant to be funny.
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I'm marveling this morning at yet another piece of history unfolding that I'm fortunate enough to have witnessed firsthand. The fight was long and messy with too many mistakes along the way, but the finish line has been crossed and I'm awfully proud of the steps taken, flawed and modest though they may be. So most of my thoughts today are about health care, not literature, and I leave you with Paul Krugman (note to self - no blogging before coffee) Tom Friedman - who talks out of his ass as often as not who really nails it:
But that’s not the point I want to make today. Instead, I want you to consider the contrast: on one side, the closing argument was an appeal to our better angels, urging politicians to do what is right, even if it hurts their careers; on the other side, callous cynicism. Think about what it means to condemn health reform by comparing it to the Civil Rights Act. Who in modern America would say that L.B.J. did the wrong thing by pushing for racial equality? (Actually, we know who: the people at the Tea Party protest who hurled racial epithets at Democratic members of Congress on the eve of the vote.)
Better angels. Call me an old sentimentalist but I'm on their side. Back to the world of letters tomorrow.
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Well, isn't this always the way? You can go weeks without a compelling reading around here, and then - WHAM - not one, but, of course, two fantastic readings on the same night. And, in a possible TEV first, both writers are long term residents of my Recommended sidebar.
For you guys way out east, Sam Lipsyte touches down briefly to discuss his new novel, The Ask, at Vromans. Details are here.
Over here in the 310, Sheila Heti, author of TEV favorite Ticknor, appears at the Hammer Museum as part of the New American Writing series. Details are here.
It makes the head spin. Flip a coin, get your passport stamped, but make sure you are at one of these. If you're not, I'll hear about it.
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In his recent TEV guest review of Home Land, Jim Ruland called Sam Lipsyte the "funniest writer of his generation," and we're quite inclined to agree. We tore through Home Land in two joyful sittings and can't remember the last time we've laughed so hard. Lipsyte's constellation of oddly sympathetic losers is rendered with a sparkling, inspired prose style that's sent us off in search of all his prior work. In Lewis Miner's (a.k.a Teabag) woeful epistolary dispatches to his high school alumni newsletter ("I did not pan out."), we find an anti-hero for the age. Highly, highly recommended.
