Month: March 2008

Banks en Francais

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Russell Banks

Four years of public-high-school French has made me only vaguely capable of translating an interview that France’s Mediapart recently conducted with Russell Banks. Happily, videos of the interviews are toward the end, clarifying where Banks comes down on post-9/11 American fiction, American empire, and why his 94-year-old born-again mom is big on Obama.

See also Jennifer Schuessler‘s fine piece on Banks’ new novel, The Reserve, in the New York Review of Books; her review nicely clarifies just how far Banks has fallen off his game when it comes to writing about class.

Ann Patchett Will Have Her Revenge on Iowa City

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ann Patchett

Bel Canto author Ann Patchett tells the Palm Beach Post about the nonfiction book about cops that didn’t come off, her friendship with opera singer Renee Fleming, and, most pointedly, why the Iowa Writers Workshop wasn’t for her:

Who were your teachers at the Writer’s Workshop in Iowa?

That’s not an interesting question. The interesting question is who were my teachers at Sarah Lawrence: Allan Gurganus, Grace Paley and Russell Banks. All three were just incredible and life-changing. By comparison, Iowa was anti-climactic. At Sarah Lawrence, those three people were on the faculty; they were committed to the school and the students. The Iowa people were trying to get by with as little contact with the students as possible.

Roundup: Boy, Are My Arms Tired

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Carson McCullers, Edwidge Danticat, George Saunders, Junot Diaz, William Faulkner
  • Catching up with a lot of things after returning from NYC last night. It was a good year for books I actually read (and liked) at the National Book Critics Circle awards: Alex Ross‘ The Rest Is Noise won in criticism; Edwidge Danticat‘s Brother, I’m Dying won in autobiography; and Junot Diaz‘s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won in fiction. The NBCC’s blog, Critical Mass, has a complete list of winners.
  • George Saunders pokes a few holes in the notion of realist fiction.
  • And discusses Lost, hard-ons, and other sundry matters with Etgar Keret.
  • The Guardian has an extensive study of Carson McCullers‘ dark side(s).
  • Absalom, Absalom: Still impressing college professors.
  • “To be a significant American writer you need to be an engaged citizen of the world,” says poet Scott Cairns in an interesting piece on the growth of literary translation in the U.S.

Posting Will Be Light…

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dept. of Self-Promotion

…to nonexistent for the next few days. Today I’m flying up to New York, where I plan to spend the remainder of the week sightseeing, catching up with colleagues, and taking in some of the various National Book Critics Circle awards week events. I suspect that a few of you who are here at this blog will likely be there at those festivities; if you’d like to say hi, drop me a line.

Powers vs. Jobs

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Richard Powers

Lucky folks in Seattle get to see Richard Powers speak and read a short story on Wednesday night. There’s a quick Q & A with him in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and it reminds me that Powers’ plots can seem forbidding on paper but often are quite elegantly turned. (“Often,” not “always”–I couldn’t hack it through Prisoner’s Dilemma.) Here’s the plot summary:

It’s about music in the iPod age and what happens to old music (in that age). It’s a kind of quartet for four voices about a virus that’s aimed at portable music players. It’s a fantasy, but those types of viruses do exist. I just create four different people with four different musical tastes, on the advent of this event, and what the appearance of the virus does to these people’s need for music.

If it was anybody but Powers writing this, I’d be terrified.

Hester Prynne: Still Interesting!

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Nathaniel Hawthorne

I catch NPR only intermittently, so I’ve missed the boat on its “In Character” series, which focuses on some of the most compelling characters in literature. (“Literature” defined broadly: Last month they flooded the zone on Darth Vader.) The latest one, on Hester Prynne, is a hoot; attempting to connect The Scarlet Letter to Juno is a bit of a reach, but if ever an NPR feature was designed for AP students, this is it. John Updike, interviewed for the feature, calls out a tryst between Prynne and Dimmesdale as one of the best scenes in American literature:

“First she throws away the scarlet letter,” Updike recalls. “Then, quote, ‘By another impulse, she took off the formal cap that confined her hair; and down it fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its abundance and imparting the charm of softness to her features.’

“How wonderful, the power of the hair,” Updike says.

First Thoughts on Titlepage.tv

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Charles Bock, Colin Harrison, Daniel Menaker, Richard Price, Susan Choi

The first episode of Titlepage, an online video site featuring much-decorated literary editor Daniel Menaker in conversation with writers, is up now. Featured in episode one: Richard Price, Charles Bock, Colin Harrison, and Susan Choi. I haven’t had a chance yet to process the full hour-long conversation, but there are a lot of things to like: Menaker is an engaging host who’s clearly familiar with the books he’s talking about, he’s made some good choices in writers to feature, and the video format allows you to easily skip ahead to the interview with each author.

Not so great:  The “Talking Together” bit at the end, which makes me wonder why four authors  are sitting together in the same room if they’re not going to engage with each other too much. Much of the conversation is polite and round-table-y, and while I wasn’t hoping for a Price-Choi cage match, the energy level doesn’t change a whole lot throughout, and one-on-one conversations can be more fun to watch (even if Charlie Rose is the guy doing the interrupting).

Coming Soon: Kerouac/Burroughs Collaboration You Won’t Want to Read

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs

The Telegraph notes that in November, Penguin will publish And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a book that Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs wrote in 1945. It’s never been published, but nobody seems particularly enthusiastic about it seeing the light of day, though:

Gerald Nicosia, who wrote Memory Babe, the widely recognised definitive biography of Kerouac, said the pair would find it funny such a juvenile work was seeing the light of day.

“This was one of the first books they wrote… it’s probably pretty bad. But I’m not surprised it is being published now because it’s a sure-fire way of making money,” he said.

Roundup: You May Have the Falcon…

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Adrian Tomine, Dashiell Hammett, Dept. of Self-Promotion, Nicholson Baker, Richard Price

Stephanie Salter tries to get her head around Dashiell Hammett‘s The Maltese Falcon. My old place in San Francisco was just a couple of blocks from the apartment where Hammett wrote that novel; back in 2001 I wrote a story about the guy who lived (lives?) there.

Nicholson Baker writing “Wikipedia is just an incredible thing” is like Rick James saying “Cocaine is a hell of a drug”–the dude’s found the thing that’s going to reshape his life for years, for better or for worse. As he points out: “All big Internet successes—e-mail, AOL chat, Facebook, Gawker, Second Life, YouTube, Daily Kos, World of Warcraft—have a more or less addictive component—they hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you’re trying to sleep.”

A couple of DoSP notes. I have a brief review of Adrian Tomine‘s Shortcomings in Washington City Paper; Tomine is at Politics and Prose on Wednesday. My review of Richard Price‘s excellent new novel, Lush Life, is in today’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune. At the National Book Critics Circle blog, Critical Mass, I’ve been gathering up various materials related to Price’s Clockers; an extended version of the interview with Price that first appeared on City Paper’s Web site is running in three parts. Parts of that interview dedicated specifically to Lush Life are now up at the Chicago Sun-Times Web site. Many thanks to NBCC president John Freeman for proposing the idea, and to Price for giving up so much of his time to weather a fusillade of questions about something he did three books ago.

And So to TED

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Amy Tan, Chris Abani

TED 2008–a self-proclaimed conference about technology and ideas that’s currently underway in Monterey, California–has made a handful of novelists part of its large mix of speakers. Among them is Amy Tan, who spoke about storytelling. BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder reports:

She got some B minuses in school for her creative writing. Parents pushed her to be a doctor, or to be a pianist on Ed Sullivan show. Her father and brother were both diagnosed with brain tumors. Her father was a baptist minister and said God would take care of them. He died soon after and so did her brother. Her mother believed that she and Amy would be next. She then became very creative “in a survival sense.” (This could be why she is so interested in “luck and fate and coincidences and the synchrony of mysterious forces.”)

Yesterday there was also a discussion of the question, “What Stirs Us?” The TED blog is currently on the fritz, but among the speakers was Nigerian-born author Chris Abani:

My search is to find stories of everyday people that transcend us, that don’t look away at the reality: we are never more beautiful than when we are ugly. What I’ve come to learn is that the world is never seen in the grand gestures, but in the accumulation of the simple, soft, selfless acts of compassion. In South Africa they say “Ubuntu”: the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me. Which means that there is no way for us to be human without other people.
So Abani tells stories of people. People standing up to soldiers wanting to kill them. People being compassionate. People being human, reclaiming their humanity, recognizing that we are surrounded by amazing people, who offer all of us the mirror to a whole humanity.

Abani spoke about his writing, the commonalities between Africa and America, and why Things Fall Apart is like Gone With the Wind last June at TED.