Another Festival of Books has come and gone...I may have more commentary at some point, but I'm going to let photos and my panel coverage for Jacket Copy do the talking for now.
The first panel I covered on Saturday was Rebooting Culture with Ander Monson, Nicholas Carr, and David Shields, moderated by David Ulin..You can read the coverage here.
That afternoon was Carol Burnett...
And on Sunday, I had the pleasure (ahem) of covering Bret Easton Ellis.
"Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for truth." - Benjamin Disraeli
"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive." - Anäis Nin
Ridiculous! I cannot believe I've only read four books this year so far. Time to step it up...
This novel is the epic undertaking critics claim, painting a great world within the borders of Manhattan. Characters converge around the 1974 walk of Philippe Petit between the World Trade Center towers, and while some characters are more memorable than others, the whole book is greater than the sum of its parts. More balance between the chapters would have made it a bit better read for me, but others may disagree.
Alice Sebold was this year's editor, and she chose some memorable selections, especially "Hurricanes Anonymous," which I can't get out of my head. Unfortunately, the pace of the collection staggers somewhat dramatically toward the end. I've never seen this happen before in a BASS collection, and I don't think Pitlor, Sebold, or the last 3-4 writers alphabetically are singularly responsible, but it was not a strong finish.
I adore Michelle Huneven's writing. It's as simple as that. She takes the stuff of ordinary life and seemingly does nothing all that groundbreaking with it, but her novels stick with me in a way few do. I also stop and linger over some of her sentences and think, "Damn. I wish I had written that sentence." I can think of no other writer - except maybe Francine Prose - who infuses the accessible with insight and truth quite as well.
I can't tell whether the hype for this book ruined it for me, or whether I hate nature writing, or whether I just wasn't in the mood for such indirect prose after Blame, but at times, I almost walked away without finishing it. Yes, there is some beautiful writing, and I admire what Harding was attempting, but the narrative just did not flow for me.
Maria Bustillos compares the hatin' on Dave Eggers to that directed at Wyndam Lewis.
Part of the reason it took so long for the Vorticists to come into their own is that Wyndham Lewis was a very questionable specimen. Lot of things to dislike about this guy. He was wildly anti-Semitic; he even managed to write a whole book in favor of Hitler in 1931 (Hitler, it is called.) The man just shot his mouth off like crazy. As you can imagine, Lewis felt pretty bad when he found out what was actually going down in Nazi Germany when he went to Berlin in 1937! So he took it all back, which is at least something. (His idea of contrition was to write a book called The Jews: Are they Human?, in 1939.) Wilde’s friend Robbie Ross called Lewis “a buffalo in wolf’s clothing.”
All this brings me to Dave Eggers, you may be surprised to hear. Dave Eggers, though evidently not an openly combative or buffalo-like person, is like Lewis in being both talented and roundly disliked; an outsider in his own circle.
Dave Eggers is a thorn in many a side in today’s America, my own included. His bizarre combination of fame, enthusiasm and sentimentalizing drives a lot of people up a tree. It’s safe to say that Eggers is currently the most detested man in American haute-literary circles. To support this contention, I’ve made a table of Google searches using the phrase “I hate _________,” and put in a lot of divisive-seeming haute-literary names...
“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human … is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.” - David Foster Wallace (via Slaughterhouse 90210)
Here's the trailer for Strange Powers: Stephen Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, ten years in the making.
And here are my two favorite Magnetic Fields songs.
David Mitchell's forthcoming novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet won't be out until June, but you can read an excerpt here.
"Everybody loves money! That's why they call it money!" - David Mamet
J.D. Salinger has died at the age of 91.
Mr. Salinger...perfected the great trick of literary irony — of validating what you mean by saying less than, or even the opposite of, what you intend. Orville Prescott wrote in The New York Times in 1963, “Rarely if ever in literary history has a handful of stories aroused so much discussion, controversy, praise, denunciation, mystification and interpretation.”
The above quote is from the New York Times obituary. Some other noteworthy links...
From The Onion: Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger
Virginia Heffernan: "Mountain Man"
David Ulin on Salinger's gift of words and silence
How Salinger's NH neighbors had his back
Lillian Ross on "my long friendship with J.D. Salinger."
Kim Morgan: Salinger Inspired Cinema
Michiko Kakutani on teen angst and an author's alienation
A round-up of songs about Catcher in the Rye
A William Wiegand review from 1959: "The Knighthood of J.D. Salinger"
Secret J.D. Salinger Documentary Revealed
Today is the fifth anniversary of escapegrace. It's sort of amazing to think of all the opportunities I've had and the people I've met as a result of something as simple as a URL and some typing. The future of this blog is uncertain, but I hope it keeps going strong and grows into something even better than it's been. Thank you for reading!
"The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions." - Ellen Glasgow
