a jar in Tennessee

My inbox is flooded these days with appeals from PEN, the Authors Guild, all sorts of people who want me to agitate against (among other things) cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts.  I have mixed feelings about this (quite apart from the cluttered-inbox factor), because many of the things that bother me most about the forms taken by support for the arts are off the agenda of every single one of the entities availing itself of my e-mail address.

Having said that,  I was moved and impressed by a piece I read today by Margaret Renkl on LitHub. Renkl talks about the virtual collapse of (what shall I call it?) a public books culture (a hideous phrase, so I wish I weren't settling for it) during and after the recession - newspapers cutting book coverage, bookstores going bankrupt, and the role of the NEH and Federal Government in turning this around. 

Renkl has done such a splendid job of sketching out the importance of regional reviews, of local independent bookstores, and how these fit into the bigger picture (national press, publishers' support), that no isolated quote can do it justice.  It is hard not to warm to a piece, though, which includes the following:

The publication Humanities Tennessee dreamed up is called Chapter 16: A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby. (The name is a reference to Tennessee’s history as the 16th state to join the union.) They built the site in-house by reading a book called Drupal for Dummies, and they hired me to run it.

The whole thing here.

Bookses

Amazing news.

I make myself miserable these days by following people outside the anglophone world on Twitter (publishers, newspapers, magazines, writers, others).  I have already done much to make myself miserable by signing up for newsletters from various online bookstores, also outside the anglophone world.  The source of misery is that I hear of all sorts of books that sound interesting, but which would be prohibitively expensive once shipping costs were added in.  (In the past, when I've succumbed to temptation, I've often found that the cost of shipping was as much as the cost of the book.)

I had often thought how much simpler it would be if I could buy the e-book instead.  But if you are in the wrong territory for a digital product Amazon thwarts you at every turn.  Amazon had refused to process orders for so many other things that I'd never bothered to see if this applied to, as it might be, Italian e-books.  Today I suddenly thought: Wait. English-language books are sold in different markets, territorial rights to which are fiercely guarded; if an e-book is only sold in one territory, and you are in another territory, you may not be allowed to buy it.  But maybe it doesn't work that way for other languages, or at least some other languages.

So I put in a trial order for Calvino's Le città invisibili, Kindle edition, and lo and behold, though I am in Berlin the order instantly went through!  (Not that this book is new to me, but it was the first to come to mind when I wanted something for the trial.)

I don't know whether this would work for books in every language that might interest me, and I don't know whether Amazon would be so accommodating if I were in a different country.  If it really is possible to buy foreign-language e-books in the US, though, this would radically change one's access to  non-English literature.  I understand why books in other languages are thin on the ground in bookstores and libraries, but it's terribly inhibiting to have to figure in obscenely expensive shipping charges every time one wants a book.

This does only help, of course, if an e-book is available, but  it still the good news of the day.

Google Books reviewed

After the settlement failed, Clancy told me that at Google “there was just this air let out of the balloon.” Despite eventually winning Authors Guild v. Google, and having the courts declare that displaying snippets of copyrighted books was fair use, the company all but shut down its scanning operation.

It was strange to me, the idea that somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them. It’s like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of the Covenant back on a shelf somewhere, lost in the chaos of a vast warehouse. It’s there. The books are there. People have been trying to build a library like this for ages—to do so, they’ve said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts of all time—and here we’ve done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it’s 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they’re the ones responsible for locking it up.

James Somers at the Atlantic on Google Books, the whole thing here.

The Library Vaccine (Artists Space, New York)

A couple of months ago Artists Space invited me to contribute to their latest exhibition, The Library Vaccine. They have shipped my library over from Berlin; I have spent the last 10 days organizing books in a new space and trying to incorporate materials which might draw out themes that weren't obvious. Truth to tell I think I need to do more, though the opening was Wednesday night...

The Library Vaccine will run through November 9; Artists Space is at 38 Greene Street, between Broome and Grand, nearest Metro stop Canal.  If any die-hard pp fans are in town this is a rare chance to see a somewhat wayward collection.  (Having the Turkish edition of My Name is Red seems fairly self-explanatory; having The Name of the Rose in Italian, likewise; having Turkish editions of Pride and Prejudice and Zazie dans le métro, a Polish edition of The Name of the Rose, an Italian edition of Lem's Robot Tales, maybe not so much.) Anyone who drops by in the next few days may find me trying to elucidate the connection between The Whist Book and La vie sexuelle de Catherine M.

More on the exhibition here.

Found in Translation

“I read foreign novels because they’re better,” was a remark I began to expect (surprisingly, a senior member of the Dutch Fund for Literature also said this to me). I asked readers if that could really be the case; why would foreign books be “better” across the board, in what way? As the responses mounted up, a pattern emerged: these people had learned excellent English and with it an interest in Anglo-Saxon culture in their school years. They had come to use their novel-reading (but not other kinds of reading) to reinforce this alternative identity, a sort of parallel or second life that complemented the Dutch reality they lived in and afforded them a certain self esteem as initiates in a wider world. 

Tim Parks at the NYRB

modern times

But, more than the data-compressed brevity and just-the-facts utilitarianism forced on us by our times, it's the etherealization of written communication, and its subsequent ephemeralization, that ensure the demise of correspondence as a social art form. All that was ink on paper has melted into air, and who archives air? For all we know, emails or — less likely — texts worthy of the Golden Age of Letter Writing may be whizzing through the Wi-Fi all around us, but the Elizabeth Bishops and Robert Lowells of the Digital Age — or the Eudora Weltys and William Maxwells, or Walter Benjamins and Theodor Adornos, or Hannah Arendts and Mary McCarthys, or whomever you prefer — are probably hitting the DELETE key after reading, as most of us reflexively do.


That's what many of them were doing before the advent of social media, When Email Ruled the Earth. According to a 2005 New York Times article by Rachel Donadio, writers such as Margaret Atwood, T.C. Boyle, Rick Moody, and Annie Proulx saved their emails only desultorily. Zadie Smith said she kept "amazing e-mails from writers whose hem I fear to kiss" but for whatever odd reason imagined they would one day "go the way of everything else I write on the computer — oblivion," presumably because that's what our prosthetic memories do: inscribe our thoughts on thin air.

Mark Dery on Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer, at the LA Review of Books.


Er, wow. Hitting the DELETE key after reading?  As most of us reflexively do?  I delete offers of penis enhancement and other spam.  Apart from that, I never delete ANYTHING. Why would I? It's not as though my hard drive is short of space. I have have folders and subfolders in my email program (currently Thunderbird); a few people have folders all to themselves (correspondence with David is in the thousands), others are filed in subfolders of Headhunting, Degrees of Separation, Agents, Publishers, Press, DeWitt (members of my family), R, Samurai and so on.   An e-mail comes with the following cheering remark:

 Your comments on your blog did remind me rather of Cicero's Fifth Verrine on the power of the phrase "civis Romanus sum": "apud barbaros, apud homines in extremis atque ultimis gentibus positos, nobile et inlustre apud omnis nomen civitatis tuae profuisset". Go out into the wilds of the barbarian poker players, and one still receives more respect and recognition than you did from Bill Clegg et al. 

How could I possibly delete it?  (Whenever I think of Bill, of course, the regular association of ideas will now bring to mind the phrase 'apud homines in extremis atque ultimis gentibus positos.'  Apud barbaros, Bill, apud barbaros.)

For all we know Mithridates may be one of the great writers of the 21st century - how shocking if I were to destroy our early correspondence.  He may, of course, have saved it himself, but how much better if everything is kept in two places.  Somewhat startled, to tell the truth, to find that my fellow writers are taking such a cavalier approach to the preservation of documentary evidence.

ancient moderns

Going through notebooks, too lazy to translate. Coming across passages I read in the mid-80s (!), thinking How lovely!  And because this was so very long before Tumblr I copied them into a notebook.

Etre avec qui on aime et penser à autre chose : c'est ainsi que j'ai les meilleures pensées, que j'invente le mieux ce qui est nécessaire à mon travail. De même pour le texte : il produit en moi le meilleur plaisir s'il parvient à se faire écouter indirectement ; si, le lisant, je suis entraîné à souvent lever la tête, à entendre autre chose. Je ne suis pas nécessairement captivé par le texte de plaisir : ce peut être un acte léger, complexe, ténu, presque étourdi...

Barthes, Le plaisir du texte

Le Nouveau n'est pas une mode, c'est une valeur, fondement de toute critique : notre évaluation du monde ne dépend plus, du moins directement, comme chez Nietzsche, de l'opposition du noble et du vil, mais de celle de l'Ancient de du Nouveau ... Pour échapper à l'aliénation de la société présente, il n'y a plus que ce moyen : la fuite en avant : tout langage ancien est immédiatement compromis, et tout langage devient ancien dès qu'il est répété.

motivation...

Il faut cependant fair droit, hors narrativité, à l'éventuelle fonction immédiate du discours motivant. Une motivation peut être onéreuse du point de vue de la mécanique narrative, et gratifiante sur un autre plan, esthétique par exemple: soit le plaisir, ambigu ou non, que le lecteur de Balzac prend au discours balzacien...

Genette, Vraisemblance et Motivation

prime time

It’s one of the most meticulously covered stories of the moment, except for one its more particularly disturbing implications:  Amazon‘s announcement that it has “licensed the right to lend digital versions of all seven volumes in J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series in the U.S.” — meaning that people who have ponied up $79 to join the Amazon Prime cult — is a huge step forward in the privitization of the American public library system.

Dennis Johnson at Melville House blog, the rest here.

the stork brought it

LM: What gave you the initial impulse to make Severian a torturer? Was it that abstract notion of wanting your hero to deal with the nature of pain and suffering?

Wolfe: No, the possibility of having a character who was a torturer was one of those initial ideas that wasn't tied to anything for a while. It first came to me during some convention I was attending at which Bob Tucker was the guest of honor. For some reason Bob felt obliged to go to a panel discussion on costume, and since he wanted someone to accompany him, I went along (otherwise I wouldn't ordinarily have gone since I'm not a costumer). So I went and heard Sandra Miesel and several other people talk about how you do costumes—how you might do a cloak, whether or not it's good to use fire as part of your costume, and so forth. As I sat there being instructed I was sulking because no one had ever done one of my characters at a masquerade. It seemed as though I had done a lot of things that people could do at a masquerade; but when I started to think this over more carefully, I realized there were few, if any, characters who would fit in with what Sandra and the others were saying. That led me to start thinking about a character who would fit—someone who would wear simple but dramatic clothes. And the very first thing that came to mind was a torturer: bare chest (everybody has a chest, all you have to do is take your shirt off), black trousers, black boots (you can get those anywhere), black cloak, a mask, and a sword! Here was an ideal, easy SF masquerade citizen.

Gene Wolfe (in conversation with Larry McCaffery) on the inspiration for Severian in The Book of the New Sun

not satirizing anything

TM: I was really struck by the tone of the book. It seems weirdly refined in a way that was oddly familiar to me, but that I couldn’t quite place.

DR: That’s because it’s the voice that God speaks to you with when he answers your prayers. But for years, I have collected early-to-mid 20th-century industrial manuals and how-to guides. And a lot of those books are written in a slightly elevated, gentlemanly tone. Like, “The reader will be forgiven for thinking that this die cast mold will produce…” And for me, that tone is just so intoxicating. It’s slightly aspirational, like it’s written for the gentleman plumber or something. It’s fascinating, because these are blue-collar manuals, but the writing is often so much more ambitious and literary than what you would expect if you went to a Home Depot today and just bought a book called How to Put Up Fucking Drywall. That’s why I wanted the book to have poems in it and references to Biblical verses, because I really wanted to pay homage to all those books in my personal library.

Mark O'Connell interviews David Rees on The Millions.  (Continent cut off, I had never hears of DR's book Get Your War On, which I have now ordered on Amazon.  Where have I been all these years.) (DR's new book is How to Sharpen Pencils: A Practical and Theoretical Treatise on the Artisanal Craft of Sharpening Pencils.)

over the rainbow

My job is not only watching film. The most interesting part will be in June, July, and August when I meet the filmmakers, read scripts, and talk to the technicians, the producers, and the directors of photography. [I want to] follow the project and know that if a film is finishing shooting in September, it could be ready for us. The idea is to say "We can premiere your film in Tribeca," if we like it.

The first week of June, I will be in Tel Aviv on the jury of the biggest student film festival in the world. I didn't know the festival but it's fantastic to meet the people from the film school. I will go because I'm working for Tribeca, but also for me. I just want to meet them. I want to say, "I'm here. I'm looking at your film. I'm respecting what you're doing."

Meeting the filmmakers is the most interesting part to me. Especially the filmmakers who are premiering here for the first time. The mother, the father, the brother, everybody will be here. It is something so beautiful. It is extremely important to support them.

Why anyone thinking of writing a novel would be better off making a film . . .

Frédéric Boyer talks to Noah Davis at the Awl

bookseseses

A London book market founded by independent booksellers is to launch in Hackney, selling new and second-hand titles.

Goldsmith Row Book Market will be held every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the junction of Hackney Road and Columbia Road, at the beginning of the "mile of markets", which includes the famous flower market. The first event will take place on 13th May.
 

Around 15 booksellers have signed up to take part in the market so far, including Pages of Hackney, Donlon Books, Artwords Bookshop, photographer's agency nbpictures and Muatta Books. The event's founders are inviting around 25 more stallholders to join them. Photography and art publisher Dewi Lewis has also taken a stall; pitches are £40.

 
Lisa Campbell at The Bookseller, the whole thing here.

Siu Kam Wen

¿QUÉ SIGNIFICA PARA TI, UN CHINO DE PRIMERA GENERACIÓN, ESCRIBIR EN ESPAÑOL? ¿HAS INTENTADO HACERLO EN CANTONÉS O EN MANDARÍN?

Comencé a escribir ficción a los diez años, pero en chino. Sólo a partir de los 29 decidí hacerlo en español. En esa época el panorama literario de los chinos en Perú era desolado; no había poetas ni novelistas; y se me ocurrió que si los de segunda o tercera generación no estaban dispuestos a asumir ese reto, lo haría yo. Fue una actitud un poco arrogante pero dio resultado. Por supuesto, antes de poder tomar la pluma y sentarme a escribir mi primer cuento en español, tuve que pasar por un largo y penoso proceso de aprendizaje del idioma. Yo no aprendí el español en la forma ortodoxa que conocemos, en la calle y en el colegio, sino haciendo traducciones de textos clásicos, del español al chino y viceversa, durante mis vacaciones de verano. Eso fue entre las edades de once y dieciséis. Cuando ingresé a un colegio nacional a los diecisiete, ya podía expresarme literariamente en español. 

Luis Pulido Ritter interviews the Chinese-Peruvian writer Siu Kam Wen

[it's 3.32]

Meg Wollitzer has a piece in the NYT about the rules of literary fiction for men and women.   I really don't pay enough attention to what's published to know whether she is generally on the right track, but I did think being a woman was a handicap in various ways when my first book was published. 

When my editor bought The Last Samurai he told me it was essentially a love affair between the mother and the little boy.  Well, I was strapped for cash, and it didn't seem to matter desperately if the editor misread the book in this way - but as it turned out this meant that neither he nor anyone on his staff took seriously the formal aspects of the text.  As I've said (this really is getting old, sorry), when there was a disagreement over punctuation I drew attention to The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; my editor explained that "That was a very special book," and he said it in the presence of his production manager, who seems to have thought this gave her license to override the terms of my contract.  (It seems unlikely that Cormac McCarthy got this kind of response to The Road.) 

I started doing exercises on the Khan Academy about 8 months ago as a way of taking my mind of crazymaking things I can do nothing about.  I now have 1,755,000 exercise points and loose change; this gives some idea of how crazy I would have been if I had not been working out fiddly little exercises in kinematics and such.  I feel a bit guilty about this, because I could long since have gone past the mathematics I already know by watching videos. The problem is, though, that I hate videos as an instructional tool, and the whole point, after all, was to soothe the savage breast.

The other day, though, I succumbed to the gamification which some see as a flaw in the enterprise. At the time I had every badge it was possible to win without watching a video.  There are many more badges, but these all require watching videos, and I do so LOATHE videos.  Still, I thought I would look at the list of videos and see if there was anything I could bear to watch.  And what should I see but a whole slew of videos on Laplace Transforms!  Something I had never covered in the days when I was studying mathematics!

I should say at once that I had no idea at this point what a Laplace Transform actually was.  The appeal of the topic was simply the name "Laplace Transform."  For reasons that I can't defend, mathematics appeals to what I suppose boils down to a love of kit.  Glamorous names are good, as is some novel sort of notation.  (The Laplace Transform, of course, offers both.)   So I watched 6 or 7 videos, racking up several badges in the process - but the fact is, I really don't like videos.

It was at this point that the policy of giving house room to unread books came into its own.  Back in 1997 I would appear to have bought a book on differential equations under the impression that I would quickly be reading up on differential equations.  (Readers familiar with my publishing career will, I hope, not hold it against me if this optimism was unfounded.)  Now, though,  I pulled the book off my shelf and found a whole chapter on the Laplace Transform!  A chapter which I did find much easier to follow than the video, though without the video it might have gone unread for further countless years. 

the ‘p' is silent, as in pshrimp

Norton will be publishing a new release of Leave it to Psmith in July.  (The phrase 'pterodactyl with a secret sorrow', another favourite, turns up in Right Ho, Jeeves, another winner.)

pa pa pa PAAAAAAAAA pa

n+1 held a panel discussion at Fordham back in late October last year, a reprise of an earlier discussion of "What we wish we'd known."  Moderated by Keith Gessen.  Participants, HDW and J.D. Daniels.

(An edited transcript of the event is now available on the n+1 blog, here.)

One thing I will say is that if you ever have the chance to hear J.D. Daniels talk about anything you should go.  You live in Seattle?  He's giving a talk in the inconveniently located Portland?  Expedia is your friend. This will sound crazy only to those who have not heard J.D. Daniels. You may feel like an idiot when you book the flight; when the lights go down you'll be pitying all the friends who stayed sensibly in Seattle.  Click.  Walk out the door. 

Another thing I will say is that Keith Gessen is a saint.

rerererereading

 As I've said, a journalist wrote to me back in November asking if I'd reread any books that mattered to me and asking various questions about the importance of rereading to writers.  I wrote an insanely long e-mail in reply which some readers have said they would like to see.  


I have doubts about this, which strike me more forcefully now that I have read Sheila Heti's piece for the Globe and Mail.  I find that the business connected with publishing a book makes it hard to do any serious writing, which means that I am increasingly cut off from the things I actually care about (one of which is, of course, reading); but in the meantime it is necessary to construct and deploy a social self as a matter of professionalism.  This somehow ends up being a tapdancer with a Gene Kelly grin.  (That's the way it feels, anyway.)  I don't know if Heti feels that way too; when she shows up for public engagements she somehow comes across as genuine, so then I feel there is something wrong with me for covering up alienation with a lot of flippant remarks. Still, I have written 5000 words of a story in the last day, so perhaps the thing that used to be there is coming back.


Maybe if I had taken more time I would have written less manically and at a more sensible length; I had the feeling that if a journalist has a deadline to meet it's unhelpful to spend too much time self-editing. That might not be true. Anyway, this is what I said at the time, with some afterthoughts:

more bookses, precioussss

Back in November a journalist wrote asking if there were any books I had reread, why rereading might matter to a writer, a few other questions.  I spent about 8 hours, I seem to remember, writing an insanely long e-mail.  Of this, two points made it into the piece: the fact that I had reread Nancy Drew as a child; an amusing quotation from Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love.  I was a bit demoralized; what I had been trying to show was the way that the books one reread obsessively at a particular time marked different stages of the self - some one could go back to (Alice in Wonderland), others not (not, at least, without recognizing that the self who had loved them no longer existed). 

I thought this mattered for writers because agents and editors are always offering comments with a view to "the reader" - "the" reader does not exist. The 9-year-old who discovered The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is genetically identical to the 54-year-old who cannot travel without Calvino's Invisible Cities and the OCT of the Iliad; if these are not the same reader -- if between them lie many, many obsessives to whom the current occupant of the body can never return -- the project of improving a book with a view to "the" reader is obviously a non-starter.

I recently got an e-mail from Sheila Heti asking about books I had read as a young reader that one might recommend as an alternative to YA.  Her piece is now available at the Globe and Mail.  She has said much better the things I was trying to say to David Bowman about the growth of a reader.  (Not to be too hard on myself, I assume she did not write the piece in an 8-hour blitz.  I thought a quick reply would be helpful to a journalist with a deadline.)  The whole thing here.