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I'm shutting things down here until the New Year - not that you'd notice it these days, I know, but I brim with good intention. I do have, at a minimum, new material (at last) for the Recommended sidebar and updated readings all coming in January.
Until then, I thank my loyal readers for your patience, your wit and your friendship during 2010, a trying year around here. To better times ahead.
Stay safe, be well and READ JAMES SALTER!
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What are the odds that two writers should chose a 1967 novel to note in The Millions' Year in Reading project?
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Before I leave you for the weekend, a few last choice bits regarding my latest obsession. You should check out James Salter on Charlie Rose, where he is far too polite to tell Rose how appallingly stupid his questions are ... then read an account of Salter's recent appearance at the PEN USA dinner (thanks, LC), which to my great regret I did not attend, in which he said ...
“But I’m working on a new novel. And I think it’s pretty good. Sometimes books by novelists in their later years are thin or unsurprising. But there’s a photo I keep above my desk, it’s of a race horse…” It is of Red Rum, he said, a horse whose youth was unremarkable, but who won the Grand National late in life–much older than most horses are when they win championships. “So it reminds me,” he said, “sometimes in old age you can still get into the winner’s circle.”
That's a book I am looking forward to. Finally, you will want to read this 2009 American Scholar essay which excerpts a number of the letters between Salter and Robert Phelps, letters which have been collected in Memorable Days. How I wish people still wrote letters like this:
I’m tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I’m hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don’t want to have the same vocabulary I’ve always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful. If I could only forget myself and work! That’s how things are.
(My only grumble, if I may be permitted, has to do with Richard Ford's oft-quoted idiotic formulation that Salter “writes American sentences better than anybody writing today." First, can someone meaningfully explain to me what the fuck an "American sentence" is? Hemingway or Bellow? Or both? Which is different from a French or Italian or Russian sentence how? And assuming such a beast actually existed, would any writer worth his or her salt seek to define himself or herself so absurdly narrowly? All the writers I know think about writing good sentences - clear, meaningful, occasionally melodic; nationality doesn't enter the picture. I hereinafter christen this sort of nonsense "Idiot Praise," the sort of thing that seems lofty and meaningful at first blush and, upon closer examination, collapses upon its idiotic self. OK, end of grumble.)
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I had, oddly, no idea that John Banvile's birthday was the same day that John Lennon was murdered. That is, I suppose, a convergence of some significance for me, these two great influential Johns in my life, but I can't quite say what. Any ideas? (Via.)
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A comment by TEV reader (and FSG Online Marketing Manager) Ryan Chapman sent me over to the Paris Review archives, where I came across this interview with my current obsession James Salter. The icing on the cake: the interview is conducted by Edward Hirsch, the wonderful poet whom I got know and become a fan of when we appeared on Titlepage together. Like all the other Paris Review interviews, this one is freely available to you:
INTERVIEWER
If you could choose to be remembered by two books of your own, which two would you choose?
SALTER
I would think A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years.
INTERVIEWER
When did you first start writing A Sport and a Pastime?
SALTER
The first notes for it, probably in 1961; I began seriously writing it in 1964 or 1965.
INTERVIEWER
Where were you?
SALTER
At that time, I had a studio in the Village. We were living in the suburbs, and I went into the city to work.
INTERVIEWER
Was it dislocating to be living in New York and writing about France?
SALTER
Not particularly. It takes a few moments perhaps to disassociate yourself from quotidian life, but afterwards you are completely with the book. In any case, my method is to go in with a lot of ammunition. I had a lot of notes.
INTERVIEWER
It’s almost as if in writing that book a cluster of notions or terms came together at once, about sensuality and eroticism, food and alcohol, the landscape and culture of France?
SALTER
I suppose so. Despite what I said earlier, the cities of Europe were my real manhood. I first saw them in 1950. Apart from New York, a bit of Washington and Honolulu, I had lived in no other cities, and Europe’s were a revelation to me. I liked living in them. I like Europe because the days don’t punish you there.
And this, from Hirsch's intro, is priceless, my new mantra:
Coming down the stairs past the photograph of Isaac Babel I grew once more wildly excited about Salter’s work-in-progress. He demurs: “Hope but not enthusiasm is the proper state for the writer.”
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The Danish actor who is believed to have served as the inspiration for TIntin has died.
According to many accounts in the European news media over the years, Tintin exists, at least in part, because a young Danish clerk in search of adventure happened to answer a newspaper ad one day.
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My entry in The Millions' Year in Reading project is up already. Check that shit out, yo.
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My mate Rowan Somerville writes about the dubious honor of winning the 2010 Bad Sex Award in the Guardian.
But let's be frank … this ridiculous award had put my novel in newspapers and websites across the world and although, when the deputy editor of the mag emailed me to ask if I'd enjoyed the party, I replied "as much as a televised visit to a proctologist", I don't think the publicity is going to do me, or the book, any harm either. So although it surprises me to say it, I am very grateful to them.
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The always-worthy "A Year in Reading" series has kicked off at The Millions, commencing with no less a luminary than John Banville. (I've got my own entry in the series that will pop up sooner or later, and there are many, many contributors far more cultivated than I, so pay close attention this month.)
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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.
