Monday, June 05, 2006
Robert Birnbaum interviews Lawrence Weschler
(surely one of the most interesting & offbeat thinkers around?) at The Morning News. (Thanks to TEV for the link.)
Friday, June 02, 2006
The early 1970s vibe
is beautifully strong in Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, which I have been wanting to read for many months now & seized upon with delight when I could finally obtain it through my beloved Borrow Direct (the original edition is out of print, but that link on the title is a new one that will be published this August, and a good thing too, it's a most delightful book).
I did find myself--not annoyed exactly--but a bit worried about the density of literary allusions in the first fifty pages or so, it happens that I am the dream reader for a novel like this since I have a lifelong obsession with Shakespeare and Keats and the ballad of Tam Lin and T. S. Eliot and Lewis Carroll and so forth, in sum pretty much exactly the same books that are so lovingly invoked here. There is something potentially insidery about writing in allusions, though, and I am not sure it is really likely that we find other people with whom we can speak this way--the novel also invokes another old favorite of mine, Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night, a book which opened up to me in childhood an infinitely appealing and at that point virtually inaccessible world of adult literary life but which came to seem as I reread it in adulthood (I do still ritually reread it every couple years, I love it to this day) to make some annoying assumptions about everyone interesting sharing the exact same literary tastes, it's all a bit cozy and elitist.
However it was not long in this case before I gave myself over to the book's manifest pleasures; I loved it, in spite of potential flaws like pages-long descriptions of a student production of The Revenger's Tragedy (which sent me into a nostalgic reliving of my own experience of acting in that play in college, I was Lussurioso....), and both the sensibility and the narrative voice are extraordinarily appealing.
It cannot perhaps supersede my most-favorite Diana Wynne Jones novel Fire and Hemlock as best Tam Lin reimagining (I must have read that book twenty times, it's another annualish reread--oh, and I've got another favorite Tam Lin reworking, a wonderful novel that I had again and again as a child from the public library & rediscovered five years ago with great delight at the children's bookstore, The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope--when I was nine or ten I thought this the perfect book, and I must say it still pretty much fits the bill).
But on the other hand this one has all sorts of other virtues as well, including its being a great campus novel (set in a college very similar to Carleton, in Minnesota): it reminded me quite a bit of another novel I liked a lot, Matt Ruff's Fool on the Hill. And it made me want to go and reread all sorts of things alluded to here, Hamlet for one which I have been thinking of a lot recently (what was that, the thing I read/heard that made me want to read Hamlet? Oh, those talks at the humanities center in April....) but also something I have not looked at since I was a demented bookfiendish high-school student, Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not For Burning. Which as soon as it stops torrentially raining I am going to go and get from the library.
I saw a good play last night too, John B. Keane's The Field at the Irish Rep. First play I've seen since September, what a relief to be back in New York--of course they have plays in Cambridge/Boston, I know this is quite irrational, but it's a question of the theater-going habit and the theater-going companions and I like how it works for me here much better....
I did find myself--not annoyed exactly--but a bit worried about the density of literary allusions in the first fifty pages or so, it happens that I am the dream reader for a novel like this since I have a lifelong obsession with Shakespeare and Keats and the ballad of Tam Lin and T. S. Eliot and Lewis Carroll and so forth, in sum pretty much exactly the same books that are so lovingly invoked here. There is something potentially insidery about writing in allusions, though, and I am not sure it is really likely that we find other people with whom we can speak this way--the novel also invokes another old favorite of mine, Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night, a book which opened up to me in childhood an infinitely appealing and at that point virtually inaccessible world of adult literary life but which came to seem as I reread it in adulthood (I do still ritually reread it every couple years, I love it to this day) to make some annoying assumptions about everyone interesting sharing the exact same literary tastes, it's all a bit cozy and elitist.
However it was not long in this case before I gave myself over to the book's manifest pleasures; I loved it, in spite of potential flaws like pages-long descriptions of a student production of The Revenger's Tragedy (which sent me into a nostalgic reliving of my own experience of acting in that play in college, I was Lussurioso....), and both the sensibility and the narrative voice are extraordinarily appealing.
It cannot perhaps supersede my most-favorite Diana Wynne Jones novel Fire and Hemlock as best Tam Lin reimagining (I must have read that book twenty times, it's another annualish reread--oh, and I've got another favorite Tam Lin reworking, a wonderful novel that I had again and again as a child from the public library & rediscovered five years ago with great delight at the children's bookstore, The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope--when I was nine or ten I thought this the perfect book, and I must say it still pretty much fits the bill).
But on the other hand this one has all sorts of other virtues as well, including its being a great campus novel (set in a college very similar to Carleton, in Minnesota): it reminded me quite a bit of another novel I liked a lot, Matt Ruff's Fool on the Hill. And it made me want to go and reread all sorts of things alluded to here, Hamlet for one which I have been thinking of a lot recently (what was that, the thing I read/heard that made me want to read Hamlet? Oh, those talks at the humanities center in April....) but also something I have not looked at since I was a demented bookfiendish high-school student, Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not For Burning. Which as soon as it stops torrentially raining I am going to go and get from the library.
I saw a good play last night too, John B. Keane's The Field at the Irish Rep. First play I've seen since September, what a relief to be back in New York--of course they have plays in Cambridge/Boston, I know this is quite irrational, but it's a question of the theater-going habit and the theater-going companions and I like how it works for me here much better....
Can I just say
that this op-ed by an English professor who happens to be a member of Opus Dei is a very peculiar little piece of writing? My favorite sentence: "I've even made a point of wearing shorts around so that people can see that the thigh band, the cilice, leaves no marks."
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Thoroughly debauched, almost medieval
Alexandra Jacobs takes on Bill Buford's portrait of Mario Batali, at the NY Observer.
On the topic of things medieval, I must commend your attention (if you have not already looked at it, and of course only if you like this sort of stuff) to the fact that Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog and it's very, very funny. I have no clue as to the identity of its perpetrator, but the fact that Light Reading appears on the blogroll (Rotulus bloggorum) has caused at least one medievalist of my acquaintance to send me a desperate plea for clues....
On the topic of things medieval, I must commend your attention (if you have not already looked at it, and of course only if you like this sort of stuff) to the fact that Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog and it's very, very funny. I have no clue as to the identity of its perpetrator, but the fact that Light Reading appears on the blogroll (Rotulus bloggorum) has caused at least one medievalist of my acquaintance to send me a desperate plea for clues....
Lisa Allardice interviews Sarah Waters
at the Guardian. I bought The Night Watch in one of those book-spending-sprees this spring but it then suffered from the mad library-book push; I must move it to the top of the TBR pile, I am curious among other things as to how this Orange Prize will go & it is always enjoyable to have an informed opinion. I've actually only read Mantel and Zadie Smith on that list, but in my (regular old not-informed) opinion it should really be between Mantel and Waters this time round. It will be a great injustice if Zadie Smith wins.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
"When he was on a job he could spend as much as he liked"
Richard Vinen has a wonderful piece (more essay than review) in this week's TLS on a demented book about its author's lifelong James Bond obsession and the cultural significance of Bond as an avatar of Britain's post-WWII trauma: that's Simon Winder's The Man Who Saved Britain. This might just have to be another Amazon UK order, it sounds like an amazing book that I must read as soon as possible and I see that though FSG is publishing it here which is excellent, the release date is October and I do not think I can wait nearly so long. . . .
I can hardly believe it
but I've got wonderfully good news, the best possible news (well, you know what I mean, of course the world is in a dire way & it would be nice to stop global warming/the war in Iraq/childhood mortality etc., but from a strictly selfish point of view I cannot think of anything better): it's now definite and I can say it here, HarperCollins Children's Books will publish Dynamite No. 1. I will be working with a most wonderful editor, Ruth Katcher (aside from her general excellence she also edits one of my favorite writers ever, and a ton of other great stuff too); and my agent is the amazing Liz Gately at Anderson Grinberg. The book will be published in 2008, with a sequel called The Snow Queen to follow.
It occasionally impinges on my consciousness that I am overly book-obsessed, I would not think it at all sound if someone told me that their happiness was almost entirely dependent on whether they (a) got a decent amount of writing done that day and (b) had a publisher for their novel. I would tell that person that she should have a better sense of proportion, that it's bad enough to care so desperately about the work--at least that's in your control, more or less, and surely it's inevitable that how much work you get done will affect how you feel--but it's completely insane to let your state of mind depend on something as out-there-in-the-world as what happens to your novel once you've written it. It is important to have a good balance between different elements in life, and after all other things are valuable too (can you hear how half-hearted I sound as I say that?).
So despite the sensibleness of this advice I have completely neglected to follow it myself, and there is no doubt that I have spent part (sometimes a quite large part) of every single day over the last two years worrying about this novel, either (profitably) in terms of actually working on revisions or (less sensibly) fretting about what its worldly fate would be. It is therefore particularly if not very moral-example-ly delightful to have this happy, happy outcome.
(In fact, this blog was born of my desire as I was finishing the first good draft of the book to chronicle its path towards publication, only I realized in a mortifying but funny vanity-of-human-wishes-type vein that I had been ludicrously premature and that a day-by-day chronicle of the book's path to publication would at that point have been a shameful exercise in self-flagellation! NB since I wrote that post I un-quit smoking, then properly re-quit and have not smoked since the beginning of September, but have consumed vast amounts of very strong coffee in the intervening months....)
It occasionally impinges on my consciousness that I am overly book-obsessed, I would not think it at all sound if someone told me that their happiness was almost entirely dependent on whether they (a) got a decent amount of writing done that day and (b) had a publisher for their novel. I would tell that person that she should have a better sense of proportion, that it's bad enough to care so desperately about the work--at least that's in your control, more or less, and surely it's inevitable that how much work you get done will affect how you feel--but it's completely insane to let your state of mind depend on something as out-there-in-the-world as what happens to your novel once you've written it. It is important to have a good balance between different elements in life, and after all other things are valuable too (can you hear how half-hearted I sound as I say that?).
So despite the sensibleness of this advice I have completely neglected to follow it myself, and there is no doubt that I have spent part (sometimes a quite large part) of every single day over the last two years worrying about this novel, either (profitably) in terms of actually working on revisions or (less sensibly) fretting about what its worldly fate would be. It is therefore particularly if not very moral-example-ly delightful to have this happy, happy outcome.
(In fact, this blog was born of my desire as I was finishing the first good draft of the book to chronicle its path towards publication, only I realized in a mortifying but funny vanity-of-human-wishes-type vein that I had been ludicrously premature and that a day-by-day chronicle of the book's path to publication would at that point have been a shameful exercise in self-flagellation! NB since I wrote that post I un-quit smoking, then properly re-quit and have not smoked since the beginning of September, but have consumed vast amounts of very strong coffee in the intervening months....)
Monday, May 29, 2006
Thoughts on late style
Sort of: you know how writers who get really successful often end up producing these books that are like strange unedited self-parody? I've just read two, both very enjoyable though. The first was the insane Patricia Cornwell's latest Scarpetta novel, Predator (Nico brought it for a house-rewarming present, we share an obsession with Cornwelliana). The first few in that series were so good, and then they got all crazed and paranoid and high-tech (though the anthrax threats in the months following September 11, 2001 made me feel retroactively that I had been too hard on the one where she's got those smallpox aerosol thingies, can't remember what it was called), and then--much worse--she moved to writing them in this third-person present-tense voice that moves waywardly from one point-of-view character to another and that is definitely not a good thing. But I found this one better than the last couple, it's got a very intense mood and all of the demented stuff we've come to expect (lesbian bar pickups! main character gets brain tumor! Marino yet again with completely different personality and physique than in previous iterations!); it's got a Cornwell-on-acid kind of feel, none of it really makes sense and yet she gets that insane paranoid mood so right.
The other was the long-awaited Wicked! from Jilly Cooper, which I just finished with great pleasure and yet of course it is not really a very good book (and it includes flippant and politically incorrect handling of race stuff & also pedophilia that is frankly bizarre). The book's politics can be summed up in this sentence (Emlyn is the Welsh history teacher, love interest for Janna who's the feisty young headmistress of the failing school which offers the main plot--of course I like it that it's set in a school!): "Brought up to loathe the Tories, it confused Emlyn that, for some ulterior motive, it was Tories who were coming to Janna's aid and New Labour in their sharp suits, quite unrecognizable from his dad's beloved cloth-cap party, who'd palled up with the beige, open-toed-sandalled Lib Dems to grind the faces of the poor." (This book follows closely on the "Will Venturer get the TV franchise?" model from that earlier one....)
Herewith a few more samples of the inimitable Jilly Cooper style. In the first one, the delinquents from the comprehensive are having their first encounter with the posh public-school kids at Bagley:
Feral, to appear more menacing, had, like Paris and Graffi, left up the hood of his black tracksuit. Then he clocked the three Bagley Babes, who looked as though they'd been fed on peaches and fillet steak all their lives, who had glossy hair cascading from side partings to below their boobs and gym-honed bodies in cobalt-blue tracksuits and pale ochre T-shirts, which evoked the sea and sand of endless holidays.
Peaches and fillet steak--it's not really good descriptive writing at all and yet there's something so appealing....
Here's a funny description of another Bagley pupil (and the book is filled with flippant but also somehow quite heartfelt quotations and literary inclusions, including the inevitable joint school production of Romeo and Juliet):
Anatole was in fact very clever and loved Pushkin, Lermontov and Shakespeare as much as vodka and Marlboro Lights.
And here's another one of Emlyn, this is pretty much exactly the Cooper style in a nutshell (all characters are sex-mad and fairly beautiful or else quite revolting if they are villains):
Hands shoved into his pockets, he showed off a surprisingly taut, high, beautiful bottom. He had terrific shoulders too and the bulldog face had charm if you liked bulldogs. Janna longed to throw herself into his arms and tell him how Ashton and Crispin had warned her off. Instead she said, 'I've got a school to save.'
I am not sure that these sentences really conjure up the book's undeniable charms, but I really did enjoy it very much & in fact I think I will make an offer, I want someone else to read it & enjoy it after I paid for that wretched Amazon UK shipping and all: if you would like it, drop me an e-mail at jmd204 at columbia dot edu with your regular mailing address and I will send it to you, I like my books to go to a good home where they will be enjoyed....
The other was the long-awaited Wicked! from Jilly Cooper, which I just finished with great pleasure and yet of course it is not really a very good book (and it includes flippant and politically incorrect handling of race stuff & also pedophilia that is frankly bizarre). The book's politics can be summed up in this sentence (Emlyn is the Welsh history teacher, love interest for Janna who's the feisty young headmistress of the failing school which offers the main plot--of course I like it that it's set in a school!): "Brought up to loathe the Tories, it confused Emlyn that, for some ulterior motive, it was Tories who were coming to Janna's aid and New Labour in their sharp suits, quite unrecognizable from his dad's beloved cloth-cap party, who'd palled up with the beige, open-toed-sandalled Lib Dems to grind the faces of the poor." (This book follows closely on the "Will Venturer get the TV franchise?" model from that earlier one....)
Herewith a few more samples of the inimitable Jilly Cooper style. In the first one, the delinquents from the comprehensive are having their first encounter with the posh public-school kids at Bagley:
Feral, to appear more menacing, had, like Paris and Graffi, left up the hood of his black tracksuit. Then he clocked the three Bagley Babes, who looked as though they'd been fed on peaches and fillet steak all their lives, who had glossy hair cascading from side partings to below their boobs and gym-honed bodies in cobalt-blue tracksuits and pale ochre T-shirts, which evoked the sea and sand of endless holidays.
Peaches and fillet steak--it's not really good descriptive writing at all and yet there's something so appealing....
Here's a funny description of another Bagley pupil (and the book is filled with flippant but also somehow quite heartfelt quotations and literary inclusions, including the inevitable joint school production of Romeo and Juliet):
Anatole was in fact very clever and loved Pushkin, Lermontov and Shakespeare as much as vodka and Marlboro Lights.
And here's another one of Emlyn, this is pretty much exactly the Cooper style in a nutshell (all characters are sex-mad and fairly beautiful or else quite revolting if they are villains):
Hands shoved into his pockets, he showed off a surprisingly taut, high, beautiful bottom. He had terrific shoulders too and the bulldog face had charm if you liked bulldogs. Janna longed to throw herself into his arms and tell him how Ashton and Crispin had warned her off. Instead she said, 'I've got a school to save.'
I am not sure that these sentences really conjure up the book's undeniable charms, but I really did enjoy it very much & in fact I think I will make an offer, I want someone else to read it & enjoy it after I paid for that wretched Amazon UK shipping and all: if you would like it, drop me an e-mail at jmd204 at columbia dot edu with your regular mailing address and I will send it to you, I like my books to go to a good home where they will be enjoyed....
Envy
If you didn't read it when it was first published in Granta, do go now and take a look at Kathryn Chetkovich's painfully brilliant essay "Envy" (about her relationship with a never-named successful writer who is actually Jonathan Franzen). I was reminded of it by a book I'm reviewing which treats similar issues, went back just now and re-read and it is stomach-wrenchingly good. Oh, I feel so grateful that I have been fortunate both in my life & my temperament so I am almost entirely spared this soul-corroding emotion, when I do get a shot of it now and then it is absolutely the most horrible thing in the world (because you are ashamed of yourself as well as feeling awful in the first place).
The Martian perspective
Hadley Freeman interviews Mark Haddon at the Guardian. I must say that I loved The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, I thought it was ingeniously conceived & beautifully executed & in parts so funny I cried.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Brooklyn's indie publishers
Jessica Winter at the Voice on Brooklyn's thriving small-press scene (including some good stuff about my beloved Soft Skull).
On late style
Jackie Wullschlager reviews Edward Said's posthumous work at FT.com. I am fascinated by the idea of late style, I must get this one and read it....
(Several more things have to happen before I feel quite at home again: [1] the cat is arriving this afternoon courtesy of my excellent mother; [2] I must hit the library and take a lot of books out--I haven't set foot in Butler this whole week, I have been too busy and tired--perhaps I can stop in briefly this afternoon and check out a few books by Lionel Shriver, my new obsession.)
(Several more things have to happen before I feel quite at home again: [1] the cat is arriving this afternoon courtesy of my excellent mother; [2] I must hit the library and take a lot of books out--I haven't set foot in Butler this whole week, I have been too busy and tired--perhaps I can stop in briefly this afternoon and check out a few books by Lionel Shriver, my new obsession.)
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