Chairs, houses

Interesting bit by Mischa Glouberman at the Paris Review. It is about going to Harvard, and what it means if you are Canadian:

If you go to Harvard and then you live in New York, no matter what you do, the fact remains that you will have old college friends who are in the top positions in whatever field of endeavor you’re concerned with. If you’re twenty-five, you’ll know people who are getting their first pieces published in The New Yorker. If you’re forty, you’ll know people who are editors of The New Yorker. You will know people who are affiliated with every level of government. And across the board, just everywhere, you will know some people at the top of everything.

But in Canada, if you went to Harvard, it’s just a weird novelty, a strange fact about you, like that you’re a member of Mensa or you have an extra thumb. There’s no Harvard community here. There are equivalent upper-class communities to some degree, like maybe people who went to Upper Canada College prep school, but it’s not even remotely the same thing. I mean, partly there just aren’t the same heights to aspire to. There’s no equivalent to being the editor of The New Yorker in Canada, or being an American movie producer or anything like that. Partly, the advantages of class aren’t as unevenly distributed in general.

So while going to Harvard constitutes an invitation to join the American upper class, this invitation is pretty useless if you’re living in Canada. I often think about how I was given this invitation—this tremendously valuable thing—and I just kind of threw it away. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

That's an excerpt from the book The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work and Play in the City, by Misha in collaboration with Sheila Heti; they are doing an event this Thursday in Brooklyn at the powerHouse Arena that I am sure will be worth your while if you are local, and here are details on some other tour events.

On format

Strange to say, I like the first section of BOMH much, much more when I read it through in a double-spaced hard copy than when I'm working through it single-spaced on a small laptop screen.

That is all.

Taste of chlorine

A swimming-pool romance...

Summer thoughts

Just now printing out a next-round draft of BOMH. It is still incomplete, because I don't like editing on-screen and lost patience about halfway through: it is more productive for me to work with a pen on the hard copy, especially as I still need to write some new scenes to sort out this thriller plot and the new character I have introduced.

(In fact I am slightly hating this book right now, but that is all the more reason to work very hard on the revision and get it off my hands by the end of next week...)

"Fosberg's love grass, Franciscan manzanita, giant Palouse earthworm"

From Lydia Millet's (lovely, bleak) How the Dead Dream (highly recommended):

What wings lifted him then, what banks shored him up along the river of work? Not the mechanics of the deal: rather it was the faces and the words of those he moved through and past and with in seeking his object, the nuance of his own approach in knowing and predicting the impulses and calculations behind them, that captured his interest. In pitching his company's plans or services it fell to him to read the tics and quirks of investors as he sat across from them in restaurants, county commissioners as he rode the elevator beside them, urban planners across tables in well-lit rooms. He caught the small tells that accompanied a lie, the fluster and the cover-up that followed an inadvertent truth, the way these varied among persons: but he was most astute in that he gave the appearance of being caught up in his own velocity when in fact his mind was carefully fixed on the other.

Although always watchful, always wedded to the close observation of detail, he pretended otherwise. He projected a confident nonchalance, an air of serene neutrality, and with this attitude would casually make reference to vast sums. The rules for his own comportment were few and simple, and first among them was, always speak as though unimpressed by large figures; always convey the impression that the grandiose is commonplace.

And so it will be.

There is also an unusually beautiful list of names in the acknowledgments...

"Somehow old-fashioned, gladatorial"

Tom Robbins lunched last week with cyclist David Millar for the FT (site registration required). The material is extremely interesting (I am eager to read Racing Through the Dark, but alas, there is no Kindle edition available), and they had a fantastically delicious-sounding and decadent lunch!

51%

Good webchat with Iain Banks at the Guardian.

Carr/Talese

The perils of the magazine publicity shoot as experienced by reporter David Carr. (The whole piece, by Tom McGeveran, is worthwhile if you're interested in the present-day state of newspapers in the US; and the offending shot can be seen here...)

(Via Bookforum.)

Thursday linkage

Settling back into a routine is very good!

A few links of interest:

Maxine offers a useful list of her Twitter likes and dislikes. (I cannot get into the Twitter vibe, it seems; I've had an account for a while, and I look over there occasionally to see if anything has changed that might make it more appealing to me, but it gives me an irritable feeling of being peppered with unwanted pellets of information and really I mostly steer clear of it. For some reason Facebook seems much more innocuous, though I do appreciate Twitter's utility for those who are actually following news closely as it develops - that is not me, though!)

A fascinating piece, of particular interest to novelists and would-be novelists, by Alex Shakar at the Millions about getting a 300K novel advance in 2000, then having his book come out just after 9/11. Interesting glimpse of Bill Clegg there... (Link courtesy of Sarah Weinman, who by the way has a grasp of Twitter's potential and best Twitter practice that is matched by few of the other users I "follow" there!)

Also at The Millions: highly anticipated books of upcoming months. Lots of extremely desirable stuff there: I think I am especially excited to get my hands on the next installments from George R. R. Martin and Lev Grossman, Colson Whitehead's zombie novel (Colson is also a gifted Tweeter!), new novels from Helen DeWitt and Lauren Groff, Neal Stephenson's Readme and Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, but the biggie there for me is Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, which is already out in England and which I think I will go ahead and order from the Book Depository (free international shipping, to the Cayman Islands as well as the US...).

And after I do one piece of work that cannot be postponed (overdue reader's report on a journal article), I am going to get back down to work on BOMH...

Post-vortex update

It is not quite true homecoming (no New York, no cat!), but it is a tranquil point of rest, something for which I am extremely grateful!

Ottawa was tough, but it was important to be there.

I read some great books in airports and airplanes en route there from Philadelphia last week (in particular I loved Doris Egan's Ivory books - a Jo Walton recommendation - extraordinarily good lucid storytelling and an immensely appealing voice t o boot, making me hope that she had published tons of other books I could now read too, only it seems that really she is [probably sensibly] writing for television mostly these days - her blog is full of interesting things that would be useful for novelists as well as writers of television episodes, though). A mediocre Tanya Huff novel, purchased in the Detroit airport, helped pass the time. Katherine Howell's Frantic is a pretty high-quality rendition of a genre I like very much (in this case, it's paramedics and cops in Sydney, with more of a thriller than police-procedural vibe), and I'm now near the end of the next one in the series: definitely recommended. Daniel H. Wilson's Robopocalypse (Brent warned me!) is markedly inferior to Max Brooks's amazing World War Z: definitely read Brooks instead if you haven't already but are pondering the purchase of Wilson. (Wilson has some notable gifts as a storyteller but he is not truly curious about the more logistical elements of what would happen if robots took over the world, how resistance fighters actually organize their resources, etc., which makes him ill-suited to excel in this particular genre.)

After that we got sucked into the VORTEX, so there was pretty much no time whatsoever for reading or websurfing, thus the silence here. Did manage to read one really amazingly great novel, Megan Abbott's Bury Me Deep. What a book! There is an obvious comparison to James Ellroy, not just because of the nature of the subject matter (and the charge of the writerly investment in that sort of material) but also because it is so unusual to find propulsive storytelling in combination with such an amazingly distinctive writerly voice. For this book Abbott has come up with the most extraordinary idiom, lush and baroque and stylized yet also with the sort of concision and selectivity that one thinks more often of spare prose only possessing: anyway, I really loved it, and am eager to read more of hers, including the brand new one called The End of Everything, which I have pre-ordered for Kindle...

And so it was a great relief to be back in an airport yesterday and with all the time in the world to read books again! I could not resist purchasing a huge armful of real old-fashioned paper books at Chapters in Nepean, many of them on deep discount, and the travel time was honestly at that point just a great respite from what had gone before! Two very good crime novels, really exactly to my tastes: Mark Billingham's Bloodline and Denise Mina's The End of the Wasp Season. Two writers I can't get enough of...

Finally, a couple of links:

The real-world setting for the adventures of Thomas the Tank Engine.

My favorite bit of Roland Barthes on Cy Twombly

I wish I had thought of this!

Judith Klausner has made a series of Oreo cameos.

(Via BoingBoing.)

(The cereal sampler is also particularly effective...)

BOMH update

Just finished typing up round one of edits on the novel manuscript. Have made some decisions about what sort of melodrama to introduce and how to contain it; much work remains to be done, but I think I see my way clear now to massaging this draft into a decent beta version.

Not sure how much opportunity I'll have to work on this over the coming week in Ottawa, but I think there is a very good chance I'll have a version I can send out to my agent by my birthday on July 21 (in hopes that mild sense of accomplishment at getting a biggish thing off my desk will fend off the tailspin effects of turning 40!). That's what I'm shooting for, anyway...

Sunday update

I've been making myself crazy the last couple days with self-castigation about my missed race: it was painful but straightforward to decide to pull out at the beginning of the week, as I was still feeling so ill that I couldn't even imagine getting myself and luggage on a plane to Idaho on Thursday let alone actually exerting myself on the racecourse today, but as the antibiotics worked their magic and I started to feel more myself again, it was inevitable that I would second-guess myself.

In short, I know that I made the proper decision, but half of me still very much wishes that I were living in an endurance sport vacuum where I could just do things as irresponsibly and self-absorbedly as I wish and have the ill consequences affect nobody but myself!

ARGHHHHHHH!

I am holed up at my mother's house in Philadelphia, keeping my little cat company and getting some work done on my novel. Have been wrestling with certain plot-related obstacles: I am really overlaying the draft with an entirely new more thriller-type plot - Barbara Vine/Joyce Carol Oates thriller, not Lee Child thriller - but having a hard time getting the right balance of melodrama and emotional plausibility; I am working with a fixed quantity, a death at the end of the book, but I need to have it not just come out of nowhere. We will see what can be done.

The days loom rather long here, especially without exercise (I am going to venture out for a short run later and see how it feels - lungs finally almost entirely better), so I have read an implausibly large number of books...

(I did spend a very pleasant afternoon yesterday with my adorable little niece and her parents, and will have oysters tomorrow evening with my dad, so I am not altogether hermited up, much as I feel like skulking and lying low!)

A couple books that I was finishing the night before I left New York, out of desire not to bring excess physical books with me on complicated travels: Michael Gelb's Body Learning: An Introduction to the Alexander Technique (an odd book, worthwhile but strange; I think that this other one which I did actually pack in my luggage is probably in a more modern vein!); Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds, a nice present from Brent.

A couple more actual physical books I brought with me and will now ditch: Charles de Lint, Promises to Keep (minor but pleasant - I think Colleen might have sent me this years ago, though really it is hard to say, books crop up from who knows where...); Margaret Mahy, The Magician of Hoad (I loved this one - but now see I could have had it for Kindle after all! Plucked it from the shelf at the Bank Street Bookstore a few weeks ago on a day when I felt short of anything good to read).

In the couple days before I left New York, I put the call out for light reading recommendations (will welcome more here, too, in the comments, if you didn't see my Facebook one). I need to stock up with a lot of books for the next couple weeks/months! I got a ton of stuff but am unfortunately already burning through it at a slightly worrying rate...

Kate Christensen, The Astral: A Novel. This one was a bit of a disappointment to me. I really loved her last novel Trouble, but somehow I just couldn't suspend my disbelief in the protagonist of this one: I initially thought that Christensen was ventriloquizing this unattractive late-middleaged male character to some more postmodern end that would soon be revealed, and that it would be a novel of multiple voices, and I was mildly dismayed as I realized I was going to have to keep company with him for the entire book. The writing is very good, but there is something deeply unbelievable about the premise and character (or perhaps it is just that I disliked him more than the novel seemed to want me to), so that I don't know I'd recommend it more generally unless it is, as they say, the sort of book you particularly like...

Cherie Priest's Bloodshot was extremely enjoyable: it is a less abbitious book than many of the others she's written, but that makes it fit more perfectly into the light reading mold! I will look forward to subsequent installments of this series.

A couple very good recommendations from Brent, who heard my call and kept the links coming: Suzy McKee Charnas's Dorothea Dreams, which is to a ridiculously exact degree exactly the kind of book I most love (it is a very good book in its own right, but the fit with my personal tastes is slightly uncanny!); and, also very good but less exactly my kind of book (definitely recommended, though - it's great!), Max Brooks's World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. Hmmm, I had better start brushing up my survivalist in preparation for the pending zombie apocalypse...

Next up: a fat little omnibus I got for $6.99 used at Amazon after reading Jo Walton's description of the trilogy as having "a high 'I want to read it' quotient," which is really another way of what I mean when I beg for light reading - it might have serial killers, it might have swashbuckling swordsmen, but it has to have a high want-to-read quotient! Interesting: when I purchased that shortly after reading Walton's post, there were tons of cheap copies, but clearly there was a run on it, now all the copies available via Amazon are significantly more expensive!

Firbankiana and mash

Alan Hollinghurst is not a forthcoming interviewee (FT site registration required), but I am extremely eager to read his new novel....

Staircase thoughts

Great interview with Marco Roth at Full Stop.