News
Night Train‘s Tom Jackson talks to author Grant Bailie (Cloud 8), who is taking part in an unusual experiment with writing residencies:
According to Flux Factory, Bailie, Laurie Stone (“Starting with Serge,” “Close to the Bone”) and Pushcart Prize-winner Ranbir Sidhu will be locked from May 7 through June 4 in individual cubicles designed to meet the specific needs and interests of each of the writers. The three will be released for short periods each day to use the bathroom, shower, etc., but they must remain in their respective cubicles while they write a complete novel, from start to finish. Food, snacks and other supplies will be provided to them as requested.
Public readings of the novels-in-progress will be held every Saturday evening, and public viewings/press briefings will be held at other times each week.
You can read the interview here.
Tingle Alley describes the allure of Nicole Krauss’s History of Love (I still haven’t bought a copy!).
As Tingle Alley continues in work hyperdrive, Nicole Krauss’ History of Love is calling from the TBR pile. Its call sounds something like this: ‘Yoohoo, CAAF! Tuck me under your arm and let’s board a bus for Las Vegas ‘ P.S. Don’t forget the afghan.’ The book has received warm praise from astute critics Claire Messud (via TEV) and Emma Garman, Maud has assured me it’s fantastic, and nothing Laura Miller said here convinced me otherwise (was I the only one who found that review offputting?).
More of Tingle Alley here.
A couple of academics are getting their knickers up in a twist over John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, arguing over whether the famous “Ask Not” piece was written by a speechwriter, and Edward Wyatt at the NY Times reviews their arguments.
In “Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America,” Thurston Clarke wrote last year that “important and heretofore overlooked documentary evidence” proves that Kennedy was “the author of the most immortal and poetic passages of his inaugural address,” including the famous line that gives the book its title, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”
But in “Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address” (Ivan R. Dee), to be published in July, Richard J. Tofel, a lawyer and a former assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal, concludes that “if we must identify” one man as the author of the speech, “that man must surely be not John Kennedy but Theodore Sorensen.”
Me, I still believe Kennedy cribbed it from Arab-American poet Khalil Gibran. These lines were translated in 1958:
Are you a politician who says to himself: ‘I will use my country for my own benefit’? If so, you are naught but a parasite living on the flesh of others. Or are you a devoted patriot, who whispers into the ear of his inner self: ‘I love to serve my country as a faithful servant.’ If so, you are an oasis in the desert, ready to quench the thirst of the wayfarer.
I don’t know how I managed to miss Jonathan Yardley’s piece on Joseph Conrad in Monday’s Washington Post, part of his “Second Reading” series, in which he re-examines classics. Surprisingly, in Conrad’s case, it’s not Heart of Darkness that made the cut:
If a cruel God ordered that I could have only one of Conrad’s novels to read now and in the future, the painful choice would be between his masterpieces, “Heart of Darkness” (1899) and “Nostromo” (1904), and by the narrowest of margins my choice would be the latter, not least because it is so much longer than “Heart of Darkness” and thus would give me so much more Conrad in which to immerse myself. Yet when I raced through one Conrad after another as a student in the 1950s and a young man in the 1960s, it was “Victory” that I loved most, and thus “Victory” to which I turned for this Second Reading.
I’ve always been impressed with Conrad’s rich and precise language (all the more so because he was a non-native speaker of English. Nabokov is the other example that comes to mind.) I myself didn’t learn English until high school, at the age of fifteen, and I still have trouble sometimes with the language. Interestingly enough, my troubles are usually not with complicated structures or expressions, but with the more pedestrian, idiomatic expressions.
Ruminator magazine just posted a longish and quite funny excerpt of an interview with Fran Lebowitz, from their upcoming fall issue.
SM: I find [Vincent D’Onofrio’s] monologue at the end of every episode [of Criminal Intent]-where he wraps everything up neatly and corners the bad guy into confessing’comforting, even if it’s the most unrealistic part of the show.
FL: You know, the reason it’s comforting is that it provides people who are disturbed with how idiotic the world is, with the idea that’should there be a very smart person in a terrible situation’ that person would be listened to. That’s the thing that really attracts me to this show. Now, we all know that this guy would never be a cop. But we also know something much, much worse than that: anytime a person that smart appears someplace useful in society, they are not going to be listened to. Whereas, on this TV show, everyone, including his superiors, listens to him. More than that, they completely defer to him’ the D.A., his captain. Why? Just because he’s smarter. We know the world works in exactly the opposite way. So, this kind of show provides a parallel universe for people who wish that were true. If life were anything like that TV show, George Bush could never be President. It just couldn’t happen if exceptional intelligence were highly valued. In fact, we live in a culture where intelligence, exceptional or not, is reviled.