Enjoy!
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Stephen King on TV
The Los Angeles Times looks at the television adaptations of Stephen King's work.
From the piece...
One of the very best versions of a King story is also one of the briefest: Brian Henson’s wonderful “Battleground,” a one-hour episode in the 2006 King anthology series "Nightmares and Dreamscapes." With a teleplay by Richard Christian Matheson (based on a King story that first appeared in "Cavalier"), “Battleground” stars William Hurt as a hitman who, after killing the CEO of a toy company, finds himself attacked by a battalion of toy soldiers. Hurt’s icy performance is brilliant, as are the fantastic digital effects by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, in a high-tech chamber piece all the more remarkable for having no dialogue whatsoever.
Director Mick Garris is King’s most established collaborator on TV projects, directing “The Stand” (1994), “Quicksilver Highway” (1997), “The Shining” (1997), “Riding the Bullet” (2004), “Desperation” (2006) and now “Bag of Bones.” A&E’s two-night miniseries focuses on the story’s deeply felt emotional elements as well as its supernatural ones — a writer dealing with his wife’s sudden death; a single working mother in a custody battle with her child’s grandfather; the legacy of racism in a small New England town. These are the specters that give Stephen King’s work its power.
TV and the Novel: A Match Made in Heaven
Long dismissed as a wasteland, television now promises better literary adaptations than the movies.
From a story on Salon...
The Faulkner acquisition is only the latest prize in a literary shopping spree for HBO and other television companies. The premium cable network is currently at work on adaptations of Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad, and Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods,” in addition to its ongoing series based on the novels of George R.R. Martin (“Game of Thrones”) and Charlaine Harris (“True Blood”). Fox will be turning Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” into an hour-long dramatic series, as well, and Salman Rushdie is at work on an original show, “Next People,” for Showtime. The novel and television are commingling as never before. And it’s about time.
Television and the novel, while not exactly soul mates, have a lot more in common than the novel and theatrical film. Yet any novelist can testify that the second most common question he or she hears from readers (after “Where do you get your ideas?”) is “Who would you like to see playing [main character] in the movie?” Fantasizing about the film version of a favorite book seems to be very common, but you have to wonder why. Rarely are a book’s most devoted admirers satisfied by the film, although when they are — as with the Harry Potter, “Twilight” and “The Lord of the Rings” franchises — popular enthusiasm can certainly be enormous.
Will Read for Food
Trust any fiction with no scenes of meals? Of course not. Pâté, Turkish delight, and venison pies don’t just appeal but also reveal, notes the Boston Globe.
From the article...
“Island of the Blue Dolphins’’ makes us think of harvesting abalone, “Heidi’’ of the goats’ milk that helped cure Klara, “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’’ of Turkish delight, the world’s most disappointing candy. What I imagined as a child to be some sort of intoxicating nougat is instead a powdery gumdrop that tastes like a urinal mint smells. This confection aside, one wonders how much the food we read about in childhood shapes what we want to eat today. In “Little House on the Prairie,’’ for a special dinner the family eats “stewed jack rabbit with white-flour dumplings and plenty of gravy. There was a steaming-hot, thick cornbread flavored with bacon fat.’’ Rabbit with dumplings and bacon cornbread sounds like something that might appear in any of today’s crop of farm-to-table, nose-to-tail restaurants. Is the craze for urban foraging a product of children who read “My Side of the Mountain’’ one too many times?
Food is no less important an illustration in books for adults, of course. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s work, for instance, it connects characters to their homeland and each other. Perhaps no one has written so grimly of food as Jonathan Franzen, whose “Corrections’’ is full of miserable meals that limn one family’s dysfunction. (No one who reads it will ever hear the phrase “mixed grill’’ again without feeling simultaneously depressed and hysterical.) Everything we need to know about the dandy Eugene Onegin is revealed when he dines at a restaurant on “roast beef, red and gory, / and truffles, which have ever been / youth’s choice, the flower of French cuisine: / and pâté, Strasbourg’s deathless glory, / sits with Limburg’s vivacious cheese / and ananas, the gold of trees.’’ Likewise the Cratchit clan in Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol’’ when they exclaim with delight over a dinner of goose “eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes’’ so that it feeds the whole family. Food reveals all - class, character, culture.
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid
Jeff Kinney is interviewed in the Guardian on why his phenomenally successful Wimpy Kid series, which he began as an adult project, is so appealing to children.
From the piece...
When Kinney first had the idea for the Wimpy Kid he thought it would be a one-off nostalgic book for adults. "I never thought I was writing for kids at all," he explains. "It really shocked and unsettled me to hear kids were buying the books. If I'd known I was writing for kids I might actually have spelt things out a bit more and that would probably have killed the appeal."
He thinks the fact his characters have a slightly knowing, adult perspective is one of the qualities children find appealing. "Kids can sniff out when they are being preached to and they don't like it," he says. "So while my books aren't amoral they are not infused with morals or a message either and kids like that. They also like the fact that Greg is awkward and imperfect. He's not better than them at everything; he's struggling to manage life just as they are."
The look of the books is as important as the storyline and characters, he says. "When a kid picks up one of my books it lets them understand straight away that this is not work."
Monday, December 12, 2011
Cheap Classics Boom
People are buying the classics in droves these days. It helps that they're cheap.
From a piece in the Guardian...
As the winds of recession sweep across the UK, a story of the decadent rich in New York has beaten the gloom, with a £1.99 edition of The Great Gatsby selling 232% more than last year.
Elsewhere, publishers are feeling the squeeze, with spending on printed novels down 10%, or £35m, on 2010. But sales in cheap classics are booming, with Wordsworth Editions, which publishes around 200 works of classic fiction for £1.99 apiece, up 10.9% so far this year, with its fiction in particular surging by 18%.
"I think the big reason has to be recessionary," said Philip Stone, charts editor of the Bookseller. "Publishers of more expensive classics such as Penguin, Oxford University Press and Oneworld haven't enjoyed that kind of growth from their classics this year."
Stone pointed to the £1.99 Wordsworth edition of The Great Gatsby, up by 232% year-on-year to 11,550 copies sold, and to the £1.99 Wordsworth edition of Jane Eyre, up by 59.5% year-on-year. Penguin's £7.99 edition of the F Scott Fitzgerald classic saw sales growth of 15.4% to 3,328 copies in comparison, according to book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
The Creator of Joker, Two-Face and Robin Dies
RIP Jerry Robinson.
From a piece in the Los Angeles Times...
Working with Kane — who was a decade older — opened up new frontiers for the gifted young artist, but Kane took the credit when Batman became a sensation. It was Robinson, who started working on Batman in 1939 with Kane and Bill Finger, who came up with the name “Robin” for Batman’s sidekick, and he was the creator or key contributor to the first and formative appearances of enduring characters such as the Joker, Two-Face and Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s butler. As comics historians now credit writer Bill Finger with co-creating the Caped Crusader, they also acknowledge that the polished, high-verve style of Robinson is clearly evident in many issues that do not bear his name.
In those early days of the comics industry, the product was seen as totally disposable and all the original art in the office would be thrown away. Young Robinson, though, so admired the work of his older peers that he fished the pages out of the trash and saved them. That led to Robinson possessing perhaps the most esteemed collection of original art from the golden age of comics. Key artifacts from that pen-and-ink archive were displayed at museums, including the Skirball Cultural Center in 2009, and then sold at private auction in 2010.
Diablo Cody Interviewed
The Hollywood writer of Juno and the United States of Tera sits with to chat with the AV Club.
From the post...
The A.V. Club: Young-adult literature turns out to be more of a thematic backdrop to Young Adult than a major part of the plot. What’s your own history with YA? You’ve been working on a Sweet Valley High movie for several years.
Diablo Cody: The reasoning was twofold. First of all, I was working on Sweet Valley High at the time I was writing Young Adult, so I was in that world and I was thinking about the people who actually produce that content, the people who are hired to write these young-adult novels, and what their inner lives must be like. But I was also thinking about myself, and why I had spent my career writing about teenagers. Like, what’s wrong with me? Why am I totally fixated on adolescence? Honestly, when I thought about it, it seemed like a pretty fucked-up area of interest. I thought to myself, “Am I some kind of stunted woman-child that’s living vicariously through her characters?” And then I thought, “Stunted woman-child—that’s a character.”
Her coming film:
Saturday, December 10, 2011
You Can Judge a Book By Its Cover
The Independent surveys the current state of book jacket design.
From the piece...
CHIP KIDD
Regarded by many in the industry as the king of the designers, Chip Kidd has spent the past 25 years creating the visual identity for some of America's best writers: Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, Cormac McCarthy. He has just designed the US jacket for Haruki Murakami's celebrated IQ84.
"It's a deliberately complicated design," he says, "and not just on the jacket, but across the opening pages, and even in the numbers of the pages themselves. The aim here was to celebrate the book as an object."
Many consider that Kidd has elevated the process into an artform.
He smiles. "Well, that's debatable. Jacket design is ultimately a piece of art serving a more important piece of art: the writing itself."
If most authors crave a Kidd design, not all of them are immediately easy to please. "I did about five jackets for Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child," he says. "He didn't care for the first four."
Friday, December 09, 2011
Five Lies They Tell You About Writing
The lies, care of the Huffington Post.
From the piece...
3. Fiction is a lie.
If we are going to be persnickety and literal-minded, we might say that fiction is a made-up story about events that haven't technically occurred to people who don't physically exist. But that doesn't mean fiction isn't honest.
Pundits and reporters routinely abuse the word "fictitious," as in, "The Senator's statement that he never took campaign contributions from a foreign government turned out to be fictitious," when what they really mean to say is, "The Senator is a big fat liar."
My point is that the word "lie" implies a certain duplicitous intent, whereas fiction is designed to be playful and even visionary. So it's a bit disingenuous when a novelist himself announces rather grandly, "We all know that fiction is a lie." Is he just hoping that you'll view him as a romantic, roguish con artist, instead of a slightly nerdy fellow who spends his time ensconced in a small room while making little pecking noises at his computer? Or is he slyly assuring us that his fiction isn't so serious that it will rock the boat with genuinely challenging ideas?
The truth is, good fiction takes us beyond the realm of "facts" and into a greater understanding of the fundamental truths of human existence. In a world where facts as we know them are routinely distorted and conflated by vested interests, fiction can be a gold standard.
Has Literature Stopped Evolving?
For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.
From an article in Vanity Fair...
Go deeper and you see that just 20 years also made all the difference in serious cultural output. New York’s amazing new buildings of the 1930s (the Chrysler, the Empire State) look nothing like the amazing new buildings of the 1910s (Grand Central, Woolworth) or of the 1950s (the Seagram, U.N. headquarters). Anyone can instantly identify a 50s movie (On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai) versus one from 20 years before (Grand Hotel, It Happened One Night) or 20 years after (Klute, A Clockwork Orange), or tell the difference between hit songs from 1992 (Sir Mix-a-Lot) and 1972 (Neil Young) and 1952 (Patti Page) and 1932 (Duke Ellington). When high-end literature was being redefined by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, great novels from just 20 years earlier—Henry James’s The Ambassadors, Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth—seemed like relics of another age. And 20 years after Hemingway published his war novel For Whom the Bell Tolls a new war novel, Catch-22, made it seem preposterously antique.
Now try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992.
Watchmen - a Prequel?
Perhaps. And one with out its creator, Alan Moore.
From a piece in the Guardian...
Watchmen – Moore's and artist Dave Gibbons' vision of an alternate America populated by deeply-flawed superheroes as the world edges towards nuclear destruction – has always been a thing out there on its own. Moore even refused to have his name on Zack Snyder's big-screen adaptation. Despite most comic-book characters passing through the hands of creative teams faster than a pass-the-parcel game at a children's party, the Watchmen – Nite-Owl, the Comedian, Silk Spectre, Rorschach, Ozymandias – have been Moore's and Gibbons' alone.
Until now.
The news that DC comics – which owns the characters – is planning a series of Watchmen "prequels" was broken by Rich Johnston at his regular gossip-and-news column on the website bleedingcool.com.
Back in October, Johnston wrote: "I was told before New York Comic Con that it might be back on and that DC were drawing up a wishlist of creators for a series of Watchmen prequel comics."
Johnston followed up with several more revelations, attaching names to the project including Andy Kubert, Darwyn Cooke, John Higgins and even original artist Dave Gibbons. He says the prequels are likely to be in the form of mini-series focusing on the individual characters, before the events of Moore's Watchmen. DC Comics has, as yet, not commented on Johnston's stories.
Thursday, December 08, 2011
How Sex Magazines Made the World a Better Place
So says Mike Edison on the Huffington Post.
From the article...
Hefner supposedly pinched freely from Esquire and the lesser-known Man's World -- both former employers -- to come up with his own version of the modern men's mag.
Snootily aiming above the heads of the jocks who had beaten him to all the trim in high school, the first issue planted its stake as the handbook for indoor living -- no tromping through the woods and drinking beer in cans for the Playboy! -- and therein lied its genius, promoting cosmopolitan sophistication for the much-neglected urban male, and fabulizing a lifestyle that included actually talking to women about art and philosophy before luring them into your well-appointed boudoir.
Hefner not only legitimized the nudie magazine, he made it cool to be smart. Unfortunately, it was all a put-on -- Hefner's track record of dating the most negative-stereotype-reinforcing bimbos, almost all of them on the Playboy payroll, is the dead giveaway that he really has no respect for the elevation of the fairer sex. At the end of the day, despite a run of incredible writers and a puffed-up intellectual agenda that was often at the vanguard of left-wing progressivism (and the genius of art director Art Paul, who elevated magazine design to something resembling fine art), Playboy was all about boys and their toys.
Did You Hear That, Like, Gossip is Everywhere in Journalism These Days?
Salacious reporting used to be the freak show of journalism. Now it's everywhere. How did this happen?
From a piece on Salon...
“Sometimes, there’s news in the gutter” was the condescending headline of the public editor’s piece on the New York Times’ failure to pick up the adultery story of John Edwards. I write “condescending” because, as anyone who reads the daily press and watches television cannot fail to recognize, journalism, electronic and print, is itself everywhere more and more in the gutter. The day on which I write this, the Times has a small item in its Arts section about the actor Richard Dreyfuss suing his father and uncle for return of an $870,000 loan he made them in 1984. Why is that, in a serious newspaper, news, and what does it have to do with the arts? Isn’t this a matter among Dreyfuss, his family and the law courts, and distinctly not that of the New York Times?
Apparently not, at least not so long as Richard Dreyfuss has achieved modest celebrity in his career as a movie actor. Because of the way we now live, Dreyfuss is probably better known to lots of Americans than people who live down the block from them in the suburbs or one floor below them in an urban high-rise. One of the dubious rewards of celebrity is that strangers become interested in aspects of your private life that, strictly speaking, are none of their business.
How this came about is a long and complicated story.
Wednesday, December 07, 2011
The New Pamphleteers
E-books are more than a publishing platform—they’re a whole new literary form.
From an article in New York Magazine...
Amid all of 2011’s obits for the 300-page object, it’s easy to forget just how limiting the one-size-fits-all template has been for publishing (that one size being about 100,000 words). Why should magazine articles, horror stories for children, and scholarly theses all be molded into one Procrustean bed? The great hidden virtue of e-books—hidden beneath the chatter about their effect on the bottom line—is that they allow stories to be exactly as long as we want them to be. It turns out that many of them work best between 10,000 and 35,000 words long—the makings of a whole new nonfiction genre occupying the virgin territory between articles and hardcovers. It may even be the case that Americans can tolerate serious policy work by academics (like economist Cowen’s e-book hit The Great Stagnation) so long as it isn’t padded out to 500 pages.
From one angle, the short book might look like another manifestation of the shrinking American attention span. From another, it speaks to our longing for a lot more depth than shrinking periodicals can handle.
Tuesday, December 06, 2011
Monday, December 05, 2011
Selling Books by their Gilded Covers
Publishers are fighting back against e-books by making print books look sumptuous.
From a piece in the New York Times...
“When people do beautiful books, they’re noticed more,” said Robert S. Miller, the publisher of Workman Publishing. “It’s like sending a thank-you note written on nice paper when we’re in an era of e-mail correspondence.”
The eagerly anticipated 925-page novel by Haruki Murakami, “1Q84,” arrived in bookstores in October wrapped in a translucent jacket with the arresting gaze of a young woman peering through. A new novel by Stephen King about the Kennedy assassination, “11/22/63,” has an intricate book jacket and, unusual for fiction, photographs inside. The paperback edition of Jay-Z’s memoir “Decoded” features a shiny gold Rorschach on the cover, and in March the front of “The Song of Achilles” by Madeline Miller will bear an embossed helmet sculpted with punctures, cracks and texture, giving the image a 3-D effect.
Publishers in recent years have had a frugal attitude about so-called special effects, but that attitude has begun to shift, said Julie Grau, senior vice president and publisher of Spiegel & Grau, part of Random House.
“We’re rethinking the value in certain cases of special effects and higher production standards,” Ms. Grau said, citing “Decoded.”
“Now in some cases, creating a more beautiful hardcover or paperback object is warranted.”
Is the New York Public Library in Serious Financial Trouble?
That's the question recently posed by The Nation.
From the article...
The New York Public Library, which comprises four research libraries and eighty-seven branch libraries, has seen other cutbacks as well. Since 2008 its workforce has been reduced by 27 percent. In a recent newsletter to library supporters, the institution reported that its acquisitions budget for books, CDs and DVDs had been slashed by 26 percent.
Despite these austerity measures, NYPL executives are pushing ahead with a gargantuan renovation of the Forty-second Street library, the crown jewel of the system. The details of the Central Library Plan (CLP) are closely guarded, but it has already sparked criticism among staff members, who worry that the makeover would not only weaken one of the world’s great libraries but mar the architectural integrity of the landmark building on Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, renamed the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building in 2008, following the Wall Street billionaire’s gift of $100 million. (Every staff member I spoke with demanded anonymity; a number of them talked openly about their fear of retribution from management.)
These are arduous times for public library systems. More people are using libraries during the economic downturn, but state and local legislators are steadily cutting their budgets. The American Library Association notes that since 2008, “more than half the states have reported a decrease in funding, with cumulative cuts averaging greater than ten percent.” Library systems of all sizes are under pressure. The Los Angeles County public library system, which serves 3.7 million citizens, faces a structural deficit of $22 million a year for the next decade. Budget cuts have forced the Seattle Public Library, one of the nation’s finest, to shut down for a week in late summer. Thomas Galante, CEO of the bustling Queens Library, which serves hundreds of thousands of immigrants in New York City, spoke reverently about one healthy and outstanding public library—in Toronto.
Read It Again, Sam
Lots of authors reread their favorite books. Again. And again and again.
From a piece in the New York Times...
Lots of writers reread their favorite books — and not just once or twice. Stephen King, who wears a T-shirt with the slogan Quot libros, quam breve tempus (“So many books, so little time”), has read “Lord of the Flies” eight or nine times, he said via e-mail, and “Lord of the Rings” three or four. King has also read Ian McEwan’s “Enduring Love” and Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” three or four times each; James M. Cain’s “Double Indemnity” four or five times; and John D. MacDonald’s 1960 thriller “The End of the Night” some half a dozen times. Of that book, about a college dropout’s killing spree, King said: “It’s one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century. This is a novel Émile Zola would have relished.”
Writers are not the only ones who reread books, of course. In her recently published “On Rereading,” the retired English professor Patricia Meyer Spacks cites a friend who “claimed that she hated to reread. When I pointed out that I have known her to reread Jane Austen, she looked surprised. ‘Everyone rereads Jane Austen.’ ” (Everyone who reads her in the first place, maybe: King said in his e-mail that “I have never read a single word of Jane Austen.”)
Sunday, December 04, 2011
Can Science Fiction Lead Us Away from Economic Collapse?
That's the question recently posed by the Guardian.
From the article...
If western capitalism is the victim in much of contemporary science fiction, then China is often the beneficiary. Maureen F McHugh's China Mountain Zhang is surely among the most prescient SF novels of the last century. In McHugh's future, China's command economy dominates the world, and the US has become a secondary power following the Cleansing Winds Campaign, a socialist revolution similar in nature to China's own cultural revolution. At a time when the Occupy movement has taken centre stage in the battle against unbridled capitalism, it's an all too credible scenario (but one McHugh paints in both bright colours and deep shadows; she shows how many of the freedoms and civil liberties now taken for granted in the west might easily be lost in a swing back toward state socialism).
Too often, science fiction views the future from the macro scale, from the standpoints of the movers and shakers shaping its invented worlds. Conversely, McHugh opens China Mountain Zhang with a quote from Albert Camus' The Plague: "A simple way to get to know a town is to see how the people work, how they love and how they die." The novel's protagonist Rafael Zhang faces the dual problems of a mixed-race heritage and being a homosexual in a world where the first defines him as a second-class citizen, and the second merits "re-education" or even execution.
Saturday, December 03, 2011
When Field and Stream Reviewed Lady Chatterly's Lover
Huh? 'Tis true!
From a post on Booktryst...
But why did they bother?
1959 was the year of Lady Chatterley; it was big news; the talk of the nation. More than any other novel, perhaps, it was, because of its decades-old notoriety as a novel with hot parts, the most widely known book in the country, the title familiar to everyone, even those who had little interest in reading or literature. The Grove Press issue (published May 4, 1959 with three printings of 15,000 copies each, before publication), was the first complete, unexpurgated, legal, openly distributed and sold American edition published, and it was a signal event in the contemporary United States. The erotic walls of Jericho came tumbling down - or, at least, began to crumble - in the wake of the Supreme Court's Roth decision of 1957.
Roth was a landmark case that redefined the Constitutional test for determining obscene material under the First Amendment.
Friday, December 02, 2011
The Dragon's Egg
The great Adam Gopnik, for the New Yorker, discusses high fantasy for the young adult.
From the piece...
What did Tolkien do to this stale stuff to make it so potent? Another British don, Christopher Ricks, once dismissed Tolkien as “our Ossian,” referring to a third-century Irish bard, supposed to be the author of “Fingal” and other Gaelic epics, and wildly popular in the eighteenth century, whose works were actually written by his supposed “translator,” James Macpherson. Dr. Johnson knew it was a fraud, and when asked if any modern man could possibly have written such poetry replied, “Many men, many women, and many children.” Ricks meant the comparison to Ossian as a putdown—that there is something fraudulent and faddish about Tolkien’s ginned-up medievalism.
But the remark helps bring out Tolkien’s real achievement. When you actually read the Ossian epics, you find that they are shaped entirely to neoclassical tastes. The work is heavily Homeric, remote and noble, full of gloomy gray seas and doomy gray mountains, and ribboned with bardlike epithets. “The Lord of the Rings,” by contrast, begins in lovable local detail, birthday parties and fireworks and family squabbles. Tolkien’s early works—“The Silmarillion” and “The Children of Húrin,” published only after his death—are devoid of Hobbits and humors and pipe-smoking wizards; they really are like Ossian, and as dull as dishwater in consequence. Even if, as Johnson thought, a child could have written Ossian, children were never meant to read it. There’s no bright foreground to the story.
This is surely the most significant of the elements that Tolkien brought to fantasy. It’s true that his fantasies are uniquely “thought through”: every creature has its own origin story, script, or grammar; nothing is gratuitous. But even more compelling was his arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and “The Wind in the Willows”—big Icelandic romance and small-scale, cozy English children’s book. The story told by “The Lord of the Rings” is essentially what would happen if Mole and Ratty got drafted into the Nibelungenlied.
Genre Bending Trending
Vanity Fair takes a look at recent books that are hard to categorize.
From the piece...
So, what does one call this book? A semi-autobiographical novelistic take on the real life of an iconic public figure (with a memorable point-of-view shift to the consciousness of the White House dog) with digressions into the challenges of writing fiction and assorted tips on narrative technique? Egads, it’s a marketing nightmare. That speaks to me; I’m hooked, but your average reader?
In an age when publishers take so many cues from booksellers, bowing to the might of Barnes & Noble’s known vetoing of covers and passing on books it doesn’t think will sell, even with an author as popular as Ann Beattie, Mrs. Nixon represents an enormous gamble. I can buy only so many copies.
Thursday, December 01, 2011
When Does a Writer Become a Writer?
Before they became celebrated authors, most literary figures had day jobs. When did they start thinking of themselves as "writers"?
From a piece in the Atlantic...
Franz Kafka was a legal secretary at the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague (later: In the Czech Lands), where he wrote reports like "Accident Prevention in Quarries," and rose to a top office position, Obersekretär. Though his bureaucratic labors bore literary fruit—providing context and imagery for his fiction writing—Kafka came to feel bogged down by the daily grind. "Writing and office cannot be reconciled, since writing has its center of gravity in depth, whereas the office is on the surface of life," he wrote to his fiancée in 1913. "So it goes up and down, and one is bound to be torn asunder in the process."
T.S. Eliot, on the other hand, was inclined to keep his day job even after it was financially necessary. When the Bloomsbury group offered to set up a fund that would allow him sufficient funding to become a full-time writer, the poet turned them down. "This idea that Eliot should be freed from the drudgery of work misses the point that he was actually very interested in the minutiae of everyday life—he was a commentator on the quotidian," British Library curator Rachel Foss told The Guardian.
And then there were the young writers with unrealized ambition and bills to pay. Anton Chekov was a physician. Laura Ingalls Wilder taught a class of five students in a one-room schoolhouse, and later became secretary-treasurer of the Mansfield Farm Loan Association in Missouri. John Steinbeck spent the summer of 1928 giving tours of a fish hatchery in Lake Tahoe, where he met his future wife. After losing that job in the fall, Steinbeck followed her to San Francisco, where he became a warehouseman at the Bemis Bag Company factory. Margarite Duras wrote technical reports as an assistant in the French Colonial Office, and then worked on publicity for French bananas and tea. Anne Sexton was a fashion model. At an evening writing seminar taught by Robert Lowell, she met Sylvia Plath, who was working by day as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital. Harper Lee shelved books and rang up sales in a shop, and then got a gig as an airline ticket clerk—first for Eastern Airlines, then for the British Overseas Air Corporation. Unable to afford a real desk, she wrote on a door that she lay across two sawhorses.
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