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categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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PLEASING IMAGE
As we move away from traditional publishing, what are we moving toward? Half of the top-ten bestselling print novels in Japan recently were originally cell-phone novels [LINK MOTOROLA], full-length, sent out to millions of subscribers text-by-text, fifty or a hundred words at a time, mostly dialogue. And several groups are vying to write the first novel created on Facebook—a line or two and pass it along, with no editorial influence, and certainly no commercial potential. [CONSIDER PARAGRAPH BREAK] Twitter can’t be far behind. Part of the new aesthetic seems to be Continue reading →
We are all poets now
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
32 comments
Stop the presses! Alert the media! Big news has come down.
And what’s all the fuss about?
Haven’t you heard?
New York, the all-knowing all-powerful publishing capital, somehow missed out on publishing an important literary book.
How could it happen? Has it ever happened before? Could it possibly ever happen again? What does it all mean?
Luck and Pluck and WTF
categories: Cocktail Hour
22 comments
I’ve been thinking about how much of any career is luck and accident, especially a career in the arts. You get an idea or you don’t. You meet the helpful person or you don’t. You listen to good advice or fail to. You ignore bad advice or don’t. You connect with a mentor or you don’t. You move here, you move there. You’re hired, you’re not. You get a little affirmation, you get a little discouragement, or a lot of one or the other, despite simply being who you are all along. Slowly you learn what you’re good at, but always you insist on trying things you’re not good at, on doing the thing you can’t do, on reaching higher. It’s the Peter Principal applied to the arts, though it’s entirely self-imposed. Call it the Bill-and-Dave’s-Cocktail-Hour Principal.
I’m interested in hearing about other people’s trajectories. What did you used to do and what are you doing now to sustain and nurture the writing bug? How’d you get where you are, or aren’t? What did the early years look like? What accidents Continue reading →
Reading Under the Influence
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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In fact, I can’t read very successfully under the influence. Generally I fall asleep within about a page and half—though I can get pretty passionate about whatever I’m reading in that time. When I wake up, a half-hour or so further along of an evening, sobered and abashed, a little groggy, I might make some tea and walk outside, then back to the book or article or whatever it is I’m reading. And then it clicks. But it’s a catchy title. Continue reading →
The Humbling
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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Philip Roth in The Humbling (Houghton Mifflin 2009) manages to dazzle and depress me at once. His central character is familiar from earlier novels, but different, too, so solipsistic and narcissistic that the other characters are barely even there to notice. Axler is an actor in his middle sixties who’s lost his stuff, can’t act, has blown two big Shakespeare roles at the Kennedy Center, and not only in his own mind but in the mind of critics, too, and audiences, and no doubt bloggers and twitterers, though these contemporary types don’t exist in Axler’s world. Continue reading →
The Anthologist
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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I love Nicholson Baker. So much that I’ve been putting off reading the rest of his books, just re-reading and savoring the ones I’ve already devoured. That’s a nice thing about books, having the cake and eating it. U and I is where I started, his paean to John Updike, with many amazing moments and great humor, my favorite (in memory at least) being when he claims he can recite whole passages of Updike from memory, and then proceeds to do so, a long paragraph. But of course the paragraph he recites is recited on the page, that is, not recited at all, letting the reader in for a little amused skepticism. Later in the book, though, Baker decides he better check the passage and finds he’s got it all wrong. Continue reading →
Wolf Hall
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel got my attention because of a lauditory review in The New York Review of Books. It had won the Man Booker Prize in England, too. I’ve also got a passing interest in Henry VIII, I don’t really know why—Shakespeare, no doubt—and in old England in general, dating from childhood. Continue reading →
The Wives of Henry VIII
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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I bought the The Wives of Henry VIII (Knopf, 1994) when it was new and never got to it, though I really, really wanted to learn more about Anne Boleyn, in particular, and the other wives, too. Antonia Fraser is a noblewoman in England, if they still talk like that. Anyway, she’s Lady Antonia, and who better to take on the subject of the women of the court. Continue reading →
Beginning Is Terrifying Business
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
12 comments
I’ve been thinking a lot about apprenticeship lately, though I’m not sure exactly why (old age? sentimentality?) I don’t think I ever actually used the word “apprentice” when I was one: all I really knew or thought about was making the book I was working on great, and getting it published so that it would change the world forever. As it turned out, I wrote three books before getting the fourth one published, which ended up taking about thirteen years, and the world did not seem particularly changed. Continue reading →
