This afternoon

on the Small Press Center writing panel someone asked about a query letter & I instantly thought of Jennifer Weiner's excellent advice to writers. The whole thing is well worth checking out, but here's the relevant bit, in case someone looking for it comes this way first--in my memory, it actually had the whole of the "pitch" letter, but actually it's just this description:

Step four: I wrote a kick-ass cover letter. It began with a paragraph from the opening pages from GOOD IN BED, ending with the line where Cannie reads the phrase 'Loving a Larger Woman' and realizes, with a sinking heart and M&Ms stuck to her teeth, that the larger woman is her. It went on to say who I was, and what I'd done - that I'd published short stories in Seventeen and Redbook and written non-fiction pieces for Mademoiselle and Salon.com. It said that I was currently a staff writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, that I'd finished my novel, and was seeking representation. I sent off about two dozen of these cover letters, sat back, and waited.

(Good In Bed is a great book, by the way. I enjoyed her subsequent two as well, but I think it's one of those cases where the first one was just really spectacular and the next couple are very good but without the special thing that made Cannie such an appealing character. My grandmother loved Good In Bed--I have been sending her books for the last couple of years since she got sort of bedbound and could no longer stagger to the public library, novel-reading runs in the female line of the family--I think it was her favorite new book she read in the last few years. She liked In Her Shoes as well, plus the extra point of interest that my brothers were working on the set for the movie...)

Dipping into

my friend Steve Burt's book about Randall Jarrell, I found this most amazing passage by Jarrell (from an unpublished lecture for librarians), which pretty much sums up my feelings only in more poetic language:

A shrew or a hummingbird eats half its weight in twenty-four hours; when I was a boy I read half my weight in a week. I went to school, played, did the things the grown-ups made me do; but no matter how little time I had left, there were never books enough to fill it--I lived on the ragged edge of having nothing to read.

I still live on the ragged edge of having nothing to read. It's the reason I could never live in a very remote location or a non-English-speaking country. Book supply problem.

There's an excellent

essay by Jonathan Coe at the Guardian site, about his demented long-term obsession with a film called The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Really, a must-read. (I am not at all an obsessive on this level--leave that to the Lethems and the Coes--but I am reminded of the many hours I spent during my freshman year at Harvard trying tracking down the cheap paperback book called The Velvet Underground that provided the name for my then idols; nowadays you could get it on the internet in about 2 minutes, but back then it required ingenuity and a mastery of Interlibrary Loan. Other obsessions of the teenage years: the novels of Anthony Burgess; those Del Ray science-fiction paperbacks that you used to buy at mall bookstores like Waldenbooks in the days before Barnes and Noble. The collector's bane: misleading packaging, especially the annoying habit of publishing novels under different titles in the UK and US. It all seems long, long ago... though I suppose the main difference now is that if I read a novel and want, say, to read the 5 other novels that person has published, I am reasonably likely to be able to get them all within a week or so, often at no expense to myself. My favorite thing, really, if I had to pick one, is a service called BorrowDirect that links Columbia's library to the libraries of Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Princeton, Penn and Yale. And more generally I live 2 blocks from the Columbia library so I don't have to get too anxious about not having pretty much any books pretty much as soon as I want them.)

Tomorrow

I'm speaking on a panel at the Small Press Center First Annual New York Round Table Writers' Conference:

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Writing Process But Were Afraid to Ask (Saturday 2:00 - 3:30 pm; B Session)

A diverse group of talented authors discuss the writing process in a free-form session in which they field attendees' questions about practical matters of concern to writers, including work habits, time management, networking, dealing with agents and publishers, and more.

Jenny Davidson, Heredity
Robert Polito, Director of The New School Writing Program
Rachel Resnick, Go West Young F*cked Up Chick

Should be interesting...

I love

the Chronicle of Higher Education: their reporting is great, they've got an excellent website which I check daily for its advice columns & general stories. And even better, you sometimes catch a story like this one:

An 81-year-old professor of English at the State University of New York at New Paltz has been arrested and charged with sexually assaulting and abusing a female student.

Wade C. Thompson, who has taught at New Paltz for 40 years, has denied the charges, saying that he did have sexual relations with a 41-year-old student but that the encounter was consensual.

In a written statement, the New Paltz Police Department said that Mr. Thompson had struck the woman repeatedly around the body with a blunt object and had subjected her to unwanted sexual contact during the early-morning hours of April 19.

Mr. Thompson, who is married, resigned from the university on Tuesday and was released from police custody.

He said that the student, who was taking one of his courses, had been 'pursuing him in a sort of weird way,' sending him candy and flowers. He said that during the April 19 encounter, they did engage in 'sadomasochistic' sexual behavior, involving 'spankings and whippings with a belt,' but he said that there was 'no coercion of any kind' and that it was entirely voluntary on her part.

While the former professor acknowledged that his behavior was unprofessional, he said there was nothing illegal about it.
Mr. Thompson said the woman had walked out of his house 'very happy.' 'She kissed me goodbye,' he said. He plans to fight the charges.

A spokesman for the university declined to discuss the matter in detail, citing privacy concerns, but he said that Mr. Thompson has been barred from the campus.

Here's

my review of Dutch sexologist Jelto Drenth's book about the vagina. I thought this book was excellent, but I'm afraid it's not going to reach its proper audience. It's written in a very smart and slightly demented version of a Guinness-Book-of-World-Records type thing, and I strongly suspect that male readers will be more attracted to the tone and methodology than female. (It's an informative and sensitive book, no reason female readers shouldn't like it too, but the style leans the other way.) But the publishers have made a perplexing decision to put it into a lurid hot-pink jacket that is seriously going to stop many or most men from even picking it up and looking at it. Well worth checking out, though, if you like the "strange and interesting facts" kind of book.

In the cracks

of a ridiculously busy week I did read a few novels. Most amazing is Shannon Hale's The Goose Girl, a magical fairy-tale-retelling on the same level as the gold standard for this sort of thing, Robin McKinley. I spotted this when it came out but felt it was excessively extravagant to buy in hardcover, bought it on Friday while purchasing several presents at the Bank Street Bookstore
for sort-of-family-related kids my mom wanted to send Passover gifts to, then forgot about it, and seized on it with delight at midnight this evening when I'd reached my limit on work. It is so good! I can't wait to read her others.

Also read Stephen White's Missing Persons, a loan from my friend M., who (to my great good fortune) buys lots of mysteries in hardcover & is generous about loaning. I like these ones, though I think that using the rule of the psychologist's patient confidentiality obligation as the main source of suspense is slightly maddening. These are like a much better version of Jonathan Kellerman's books (Kellerman's early ones were good, but of late they've become ridiculously narcissistic).

Actually, now I come to think of it, I read a couple other novels too, on the way to and from Philadelphia: Margaret Mahy's Alchemy (YA real-world fantasy, very good and well worth reading but not as good as her best ones) and my old favorite Dick Francis For Kicks. I have largely given in to my novel-reading addiction, occasionally resolve to forgo them due to pressures of work (as I did last week) but then often find they slip in anyway without me noticing. Fiction is certainly a dangerous drug. I am constantly amazed that there are such things as free public libraries. Nobody's lining up to give you free (a) alcohol (b) cigarettes (c) delicious meals (d) movies etc.; how very lucky it is that we can get books that way....

An interesting interview

with Ahdaf Soueif at Guardian Unlimited Books. A small taste: "It is quite interesting how people can be sympathetic to a character in a novel and indifferent to people in life. I think I have always looked at life as though it were a novel. As to how I would have felt or what I would have been writing if I weren't writing in English, I'm sure my subject matter would have been quite different. The core, the heart would have been the same, but things would be seen from a different angle. I might not, for example, have been so concerned with how the west perceives the Arab world." There's lots more good stuff there about the current situation and other matters. I have loved the novels of hers that I've read: The Map of Love was wonderful, and In the Eye of the Sun one of the best novels I have read in the last four or five years (very nineteenth-century in its conception; Hollinghurst: James :: Soueif: George Eliot).

Some insanely good music

I've been listening to a pair of albums by Antony and the Johnsons ("an utterly genderqueer musical sensation"),
the album of the same name and
I Am A Bird Now. This is ridiculously good music, really quite indescribable (sort of gospel-y and lushly orchestrated, but imagine a weird combination of the Benjamin Britten-Peter Pears sound plus the Smiths of The Queen is Dead plus Tom Waits plus... well, I think you just have to listen to it). My new favorite song is "Cripple and the Starfish," which is equal to the Velvet Underground "Venus in Furs" as best masochistic love song of all time ("I am very very happy / so please hurt me").

As often with good things, this has come my way via Nico, whose own Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis don't seem to be available yet on his website but were broadcast (as performed by Girton and Clare College choirs, Cambridge) on the BBC Choral Evensong program in February. Really beautiful stuff--I was just listening to it again recently and marveling.

Another musical post to follow later in the week.

Musical entertainment

Despite pressures of work, I saw a couple of good things this weekend. First of all, a sort of musical revue called Flight, done by David Jackson (a family friend) at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. It's shaped as the story of how a black kid in West Philadelphia fell in love with the Broadway musical and went on to have a career singing & dancing on Broadway, performing in shows with his idol Tommy Tune and many others. David's a warm and attractive performer with a lovely voice and it's a very enjoyable evening--includes some interesting historical stuff as well as a nice mix of songs (my favorites are the Duke Ellington Orchestra ones).

On Saturday, thanks to the generosity of a former student with an extra ticket, I saw one of my very favorite things in the world, The Magic Flute at the Met. It was quite excellent (barring only a weak performance in the part of Sarastro, who was singing so flat it was almost unbearable). The dancing Julie Taymor animals are really incredible--the dance with Papagena is quite extraordinary--the female singers are particularly strong, too, with Pamina making a strong showing as well as the Queen of the Night (can't remember anyone's names, can't be bothered to link). The music of this opera is the most magical thing in the world, it is really quite an experience. I saw the David Hockney production years ago--could it be more than ten years ago?--and the sets for that were gorgeous but I think this one adds up to more of a whole. It is a fable of enlightenment that resonates with my academic stuff too; an excellent, excellent evening.

I've been listening to some good other music recently, will post soon. Meanwhile I will just express my perplexity that there is no equivalent for "light reading" when you're talking about music. Light reading, trashy novels, these are on the whole celebratory phrases, and I think you can say something is "eye candy" without it being necessarily disparaging. But "easy listening" is always an insult--I wonder when it came into use as an actual genre category?--and if you said "ear candy" it's sort of like "bubblegum pop," you could deliberately use it positively but its natural affiliations are all negative. Is there any phrase that I'm missing that would work as a musical analog?

Human plus

I've got a great group of four non-fiction books to review for the spring VLS; I must restrain myself on the novel-reading front meanwhile. They're loosely grouped around ideas of human bodies and genetic and technological enhancement: Michael Chorost's Rebuilt : How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human; a collection edited by Marquard Smith and introduced by William Gibson, Stelarc: The Monograph; Ramez Naam's More than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement; and Pete Shanks, Human Genetic Engineering: A Guide for Activists, Skeptics, and the Very Perplexed. This is just my kind of thing. It's going to be fun.

Female noir

A friend loaned me Susanna Moore's In the Cut; why didn't I read this book before?!? (Well, I see it was published in 1995, and there were a few years in the middle of grad school where I was so immersed in, ah, you know the kind of thing, Shakespeare-Milton-Locke-Swift-Hume-Burke-type stuff, that light reading was for once in my life severely curtailed.) It's great. Sort of a perfect book for me--bleak, well-written noir with an emotionally repressed but slightly decadent female narrator who is obsessed with non-standard English words and syntax! Seriously... Opening lines: "I don't usually go to a bar with one of my students. It is almost always a mistake." Another early paragraph that delighted me: "The wrong words are sometimes so close to a truer meaning that they are like puns. Many of the words have to do with the body, or disease. For example, Old Timer's Disease, rather than Alzheimer's. Abominal for stomach. Athletic fit for epileptic fit. Chicken pops. Very close veins. The prostrate gland." It's a great novel. Don't read it unless you have a pretty strong stomach and like gruesome and gory developments, but I loved it.

And another great one, Liz Jensen's The Ninth Life of Louis Drax. This one's more unusual than Susanna Moore's, and both stranger and more suspenseful than I'd anticipated. It's really well-written and the plot is most gripping as well. But the best thing about it is the voice of Louis Drax (who reminded me a bit--the whole novel reminded me, a little, though they're really nothing alike--of a particular favorite novel of mine, Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai, which is a book that absolutely everyone should read BTW). Here's Louis early on: "There are laws and you go to prison if you break them but there are secret rules too, so secret no one ever talks about them. Here's a secret rule of pet-keeping. If you own a small creature, say a hamster called Mohammed, and he lives for longer than a small rodent's lifespan, which is two years, then you're allowed to kill him if you want to, because you're his owner. This secret rule of pet-keeping has a name, it's called Right of Disposal. You're allowed to do it with suffocation, or with poison if you have any, say weedkiller. Or you can drop something heavy on him, like volume three of the encyclop'edie m'edicale or Harry Potter et l'Ordre du Ph'enix. Just as long as you don't make a mess." This is a really memorable and unusual novel, also a very good read.

Monkeys redux

I think Slate has had its Explainer feature for quite a while, but for some reason the guy who's doing it recently (or perhaps I'm wrong, and this is new) always catches my interest. Here, Daniel Engber talks about monkeys: "A police SWAT team in Mesa, Ariz., has applied for $100,000 from the federal government to buy a capuchin monkey and train it to perform law enforcement duties. Until now, monkeys have only been on the other side of the law, but officers say a police monkey could search buildings, find bodies, and gather information with a video camera and two-way radio. The officer who wrote the application says the monkey itself would cost $15,000, with the rest of the grant going toward equipment and upkeep. Are monkeys really that expensive?"

And there's lots more...

An interesting NYT article

by Tom Zeller about employees fired for blogging, "When the Blogger Blogs, Can the Employer Intervene?":

Mark Jen, who was fired from Google in January after just two weeks, having made some ill-advised comments about the company on his blog (Google would not comment on Mr. Jen's dismissal, but confirmed that he no longer works for it), is now busy helping to draft a blogging policy for his new employer, Plaxo, an electronic address book updating service in Mountain View, Calif.

'It was a very quick education for me at Google,' Mr. Jen said. 'I learned very quickly the complexities of a corporate environment.'
With Plaxo's blessing, Mr. Jen is soliciting public comment on the new blogging policy at blog.plaxoed.com.

Most of the points are the kinds of common-sense items that employees would do well to remember, particularly if they plan on identifying themselves as employees in their blogs, or discussing office matters online: don't post material that is obscene, defamatory, profane or libelous, and make sure that you indicate that the opinions expressed are your own.

The policy also encourages employee bloggers to use their real names, rather than attempting anonymity or writing under a pseudonym.

Bad idea, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Two weeks ago, the group published a tutorial on 'how to blog safely,' which included tips on avoiding getting fired. Chief among its recommendations: Blog anonymously.

'Basically, we just want to caution people about how easy it is to find them online,' Ms. Newitz said, 'and that they are not just talking to their friends on their blogs. They're talking to everyone.'

Just finished

a crime novel I liked a lot, The Dead Sit Round in a Ring by David Lawrence. It's really good--at first I couldn't shake the feeling of how similar it is to other recent grungy London law-enforcement underworld novels (think Mark Billingham, Simon Kernick, Mo Hayder) but it's really well-written, both in terms of style and plot, and it is set apart from those others by having an appealing and persuasively characterized female detective as its main protagonist. This should be a really good series--I expect the next one must be out by now?