I do not have a cell phone. I do not have a BlackBerry. I do not have a—what do you call it—computer—or any of these things. A microwave oven—whatever of these things—all of which seem like the same thing to me, by the way. You know? Like, if you tell me, “Well, the microwave oven, [...]
Every time I read this (which is often—sometimes nightly; from Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat Comes Back; p. 59 in the Beginner Books Book Club Edition, copyright 1958—our copy still in great shape and going strong!): Then the Voom… It went voom! And, oh boy! What a voom! Now, don’t ask me what [...]
1) From last week’s New Yorker, from David Remnick’s lead Talk of the Town essay (“A Man, a Plan,” on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu): Psychobiography in politics is ordinarily a mug’s game. 2) Which sent me to Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter?, which is where I remember first encountering the phrase; he mentions it [...]
(Week-of-unrelated-quotes catch-up post, four of five.) From The Finkler Question, p. 177 in the Bloomsbury paperback: Julian Treslove is the protagonist, who, at this point in the novel, although not born Jewish, feels like perhaps he is Jewish; Finkler and Libor are two old friends, both born Jewish, both men Jewish in very different ways [...]
(Week-of-unrelated-quotes catch-up post, three of five.) From Eliot Weinberger’s critique of a show at the Met, “The World of Khubiliai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty,” which closed last month: Yuan meant “origin”—as in “back to the origins”—and Khubilai [Khan] revived ancient Confucian court rituals and had a dynastic history written in the traditional [...]
(Week-of-unrelated-quotes catch-up post, two of five.) Walking up the stairs to my office at my new job the other day, I walked past two boys talking; I couldn’t say for sure how old they were (nine, maybe ten?—I’ll understand these nuances in 2018; in the meantime, I know very well the differences between, say, 21 [...]
I hesitate to call this found fiction, since the phrase implies inadvertency on the part of the author. What follows is a fiction that was definitely written by Dr. Ferber on purpose, one that I think succeeds as an analogy for what it’s like for a baby to fall asleep under certain circumstances and wake [...]
(She Blows! catch-up post, three of three.) One last note—for now, anyway—about She Blows! And Sparm at That! I never knew my novelist great-grandfather, although my dad did; but in many parts of the novel, while reading it, I had this strange, quasi-mystical sense that I was reading something written by someone I was connected [...]
(She Blows! catch-up post, two of three.) Another thing I wrote about last November, in my first note about one of my great-grandfather’s books, the one with one of the best titles ever, was that it had inadvertent gay overtones—which, again, is not to say that men did not have sexual relationships with each other [...]
(She Blows! catch-up post, one of three.) A year and a day ago, I wrote a post about my great-grandfather’s novel She Blows! And Sparm at That! One of the things I wrote was that I thought he’d had some success as a writer, but that I didn’t really know for sure; I still don’t [...]
From Wonder Boys, p. 275 of the paperback (the movie tie-in edition, with Michael Douglas on the cover): a paragraph that ends with what I think is a great sentence, but one that’s hard to extract from what comes right before it—which, in turn, is somewhat impenetrable out of context. Here’s the opening: I looked [...]
(Quoting-from-articles-I-wrote-and-also-from-interviews-with-two-writers-whose-work-I-admire catch-up post, five of five.) The present-day poetry chapbook has a complex ancestry; its relations include, but are certainly not limited to, photocopied zines of the ’80s and ’90s, mimeographed literary journals of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, small-edition books made with cheap letterpress machines abandoned by the printing industry in the midcentury switch [...]
(Quoting-from-articles-I-wrote-and-also-from-interviews-with-two-writers-whose-work-I-admire catch-up post, four of five.) From a brief, undated (as far as I can tell) interview: The Short Review: How long did it take you to write all the stories in your collection? J. Robert Lennon: About a year, all told. […] The Short Review: Did you have a collection in mind when you [...]
(Quoting-from-articles-I-wrote-and-also-from-interviews-with-two-writers-whose-work-I-admire catch-up post, three of five.) “The interesting thing about taking a lot of young people,” [Edward] Albee says, “is that so many people start out brilliantly, and then their careers just sort of fade away. So we’ve ended up with a lot of people who were wonderful at the very beginning, and then didn’t [...]
(Quoting-from-articles-I-wrote-and-also-from-interviews-with-two-writers-whose-work-I-admire catch-up post, two of five.) From the Glimmer Train Web site*: Aaron Gilbreath: You still get rejected, as you mentioned earlier. What’s your ratio right now, your miss-to-hit? Steve Almond: Probably five-to-one, something like that. Aaron Gilbreath: That’s pretty damn good. Steve Almond: It’s pretty damn good. It used to be like thirty-to-one. It [...]
(Quoting-from-articles-I-wrote-and-also-from-interviews-with-two-writers-whose-work-I-admire catch-up post, one of five.) The production of the full print run of each chapbook tends to cost hundreds of dollars, all of which comes out of [Ryan Murphy's] own pocket. But spending the money doesn’t bother him, nor is he bothered by the idea that the work isn’t reaching a wide audience. ‘For [...]
‘If you want to be a writer, it’s dangerous to have a job,’ [Wallace Shawn] says. ‘My own father was an example. He wanted to be writer. He ended up getting a job, and his life followed the direction of the job.’ Back then, Wally was forced to follow his own quirky, unconventional path. He [...]
I copied down the following years ago from a photograph of sketches on the wall of Philip Guston’s studio (plate 70, specifically, bet. pp. 178 and 179 of Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston, by Musa Mayer, Penguin, 1988): I hold my inventive capacity on the stern condition that it must master my whole [...]
When J.D. Salinger’s obituary was published on the Web site of The New York Times a week ago this past Thursday, if you, like me, have an ongoing fascination with the practice of writing—with the details of why and how writers write, or don’t write, and when in their lives and careers they write and [...]
From The Writer’s Almanac last Thursday—Alice Munro’s birthday: “She was trying to write fiction, but her schedule was very tightly managed. She couldn’t find time to do it, though she did try to get her kids to nap a lot.” I imagine there must be an un-Googleable interview or introduction out there somewhere where she [...]
Here’s a theory. If more of us took public transport, short stories would become the latest micro-trend. Glance around next time you ride. The John Cheevers and Flannery O’Connors of this world wouldn’t have much competition: newspapers stain your fingers, hardcover biographies are unwieldy, and poetry can make you quit your job and move to [...]
Many of these stories first appeared in The New Yorker, where Harold Ross, Gus Lobrano, and William Maxwell gave me the inestimable gifts of a large, discerning, and responsive group of readers and enough money to feed the family and buy a new suit every other year. —John Cheever, from the preface to The Stories [...]
We had lived, from 1957 on, in Ipswich, a large, heterogenous, and rather out-of-the-way town north of Boston, and my principal means of support, for a family that by 1960 included four children under six, was selling short stories to The New Yorker. —John Updike, from the foreword to The Early Stories (p. x). (N.B.: [...]
Dan: By 1995, you’ve published two more collections of stories, and the latest, Seeing Eye, includes three sections and thirty-four stories—your work is getting more economical piece by piece. Do you look back and see that you were becoming less interested in writing longer, maybe more traditional stories, at this point? Do you consider the [...]
‘It would be so much easier if we could say, “Well, if we approved this one project or this action, the problem would be solved,”‘ [Peter Clavelle] told me. ‘But there’s no silver bullet. There’s no one thing we can do. There’s no ten things we can do. There’s hundreds and hundreds of things that [...]
Every writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence, or a hundred. What I am interested in is the ugly sentence that is also somehow beautiful. I agree that this is a highly specialized enterprise, akin to the manufacture of merkins, say—but it’s what I do. Probably I have missed the point of the [...]
Two older men outside the Cadman Plaza Post Office: Man #1: How long have you struggled with God? Man #2: Since, ah—since January. Man #1: Oh, of this year. Man #2: Yeah. Man #1: Oh.
The literary magazine in America does awesome and vital work: in a culture dedicated to sweeping any trace of virtue up into the smokestack of big media, the literary magazine makes a home for the Good but Offbeat. Or the Wonderful, Present in Nascent Form. Not to mention the Wild But Undisciplined. Or, most importantly: [...]
Almost twenty years and seven books after getting my MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine—and seventy years after the founding of the original, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop—I still get questions about writing programs, as if my having come through one was a flukey detour like a hitch in a Goofy suit [...]
I told one of my classes the other day that I’ve been reading E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, but that I did not recommend it, as it has the somewhat musty air of being exactly what it is, which is a transcript of a series of lectures the novelist gave at Cambridge in the [...]
Two high school kids, seemingly not unintelligent, arguing by the catalog terminals in the public library of a small New England town with a healthy tax base. (Note: this is paraphrased, since I was trying to figure out what the hell they were talking about, rather than trying to remember what they were saying, but [...]
I confess, I didn’t discover the author’s note at the beginning of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel: A Story of the Buried Life because I read the novel, but because Ethan Hawke’s novelist character talks about it in the opening scene of Before Sunset, when he’s fielding questions from journalists in a bookstore in Paris. [...]
Another quote that rattles around in my head all the time, from the Paris Review interview with James Thurber (which I first read in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series, but which is now available as a PDF download as part of the magazine’s amazing DNA of Literature project, here): I never [...]
One of the best things I read this past summer was a small collection called The Ghost Stories of Muriel Spark. (It’s a slightly misleading title, in my opinion, although one that probably sells better than, say, “stories by Muriel Spark that contain, to varying degrees, phantasmagoric elements, such as the supernatural, a few of [...]
I just got How to Write Short Stories [with Samples], by Ring Lardner (Scribner, 1924). The book is a collection of Lardner’s stories; the joke of the ironic title (suggested, apparently, by the author’s friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald) is built on with both a preface that purports to explain the art, and brief introductions to [...]
The dictionary in the barn in Montauk was an old one—designed, I think, for students in the middle of the last century; it had no swear words, and the definition of the word “lesbian” was something along the lines of “having to do with the island of Lesbos; sensual.” But the following definition was really [...]
[…] it is not possible to get outside the age you are in to judge it exactly. Indeed it is as dangerous to try to get outside of anything as large as an age as it would be to engorge a donkey. Witness the many who in the attempt have suffered a dilation from which [...]
I think Cortázar had the last word on the too-many-writers, not-enough-readers problem over forty years ago: As the scribes will persist, the few readers there are in the world are going to have to change their roles and become scribes themselves. More and more countries will be made up of scribes, and more and more [...]
Woman #1: Did you let your boobs out? Woman #2: [muffled response] Woman #1: Then you did good!
The last couple times I’ve walked down Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights, I’ve passed union organizers handing out leaflets in front of a grocery store, asking people not to shop there, as the employees, they say, are poorly paid. But I love what they shout at passers-by: “Boycott the Garden of Eden!” they holler, over [...]
It is actually pleasant on such an evening [at a reception at Gerald Ford's White House] for a writer to pass half disembodied and unmolested by small talk from room to room, looking and listening. He knows that active public men can’t combine the duties of government with literature, art, and philosophy. Theirs is a [...]
…and possibly paraphrased slightly: A: Think about it! Fratricide, patricide, matricide. There is no word for a woman killing her sister. B: There’s also no word for a parent losing a child. There’s widow, widower, orphan… A: There really is no word for killing a woman. B: Maybe you should do your PhD thesis on [...]
There’s a preacher who sets up shop on the corner of Broadway and Havermeyer in South Williamsburg on the weekends, some days with a band backing him up, some days without. Today he was working solo, and as I was walking by I swear I heard him say this: Some folks saying, ‘God is having [...]
[…] I think art’s project is fundamentally meliorative. The aim of meditating about the world is finally to change the world. It is this meliorative aspect of literature that provides its ethical dimension. We are all Upton Sinclairs, even that Hamlet, Stéphane Mallarmé. —Donald Barthelme, “Not-Knowing,” Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (Kim Herzinger, ed.)
From the authors’ concluding remarks: …people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves. We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Although we feel [...]
[…] On the other hand, there are very beautiful things: I was in Barcelona a month ago, walking around the Gothic Quarter one evening; and there was an American girl, very pretty, playing the guitar very well and singing. She was seated on the ground singing to earn her living. She sang a bit like [...]
[…] I have never described this to you before, not so much, I don’t think, from lack of truthfulness as that, just naturally, one is not going to explain to people at large that from time to time one vomits up a small rabbit. Always I have managed to be alone when it happens, guarding [...]
A brief and most excellent excerpt from the new Lemony Snicket, borrowed from the fabulous Ms. Daphne’s post of a couple days ago, here [N.B. Link removed; no longer extant]. The elder Baudelaires sat quietly for a moment, looking at the cabinet in the sideboard, and then, without a word, the two siblings stepped onto [...]
It’s a patchwork. Like ice floes sliding and then becoming solid, and locking. Because once the story started, the engine of the story was Brooklyn itself… —Paula Fox on Desperate Characters in Paris Review #170 [N.B. Link removed; no longer extant]. In the dressing room afterward, I asked Rawlings how he would describe his playing, [...]