Author: Mark Athitakis

Joyce Carol Oates, Loser

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Joyce Carol Oates

Cheryl Truman of the Lexington Herald-Leader asks Joyce Carol Oates a glum question and gets a glum answer:

Does Oates see herself with that Nobel Prize? No. Her husband is dead now, and so are her parents (“It’s one’s parents who care,” she says). Who’s going to celebrate with her, be proud of her now? Winning the Nobel would be, she says, just a little sad.

“No, I must say, it doesn’t mean much to me.”

Truman’s inquiry stems from a statement she makes early in her piece that “the only major award that she has not received is the Nobel Prize for literature.” Sounds right. Isn’t right. According to Celestial Timepiece, the absurdly granular Web site dedicated to Oates’ work, JCO has never won:

The Pulitzer Prize
The Orange Broadband Prize
The PEN/Faulkner Award
The National Book Critics Circle Award

She did win the National Book Award—in 1970, which means she’s suffering a 38-year drought in which the NBAs passed over (rough estimate) 286 of her books. Her acceptance speech for that prize is worth a read. It’s been a long time since she’s won a big prize, but she hasn’t changed her mission statement:

In novels I have written, I have tried to give a shape to certain obsessions of mid-century Americans: a confusion of love and money, of the categories of public and private experience, of a demonic urge I sense all around me, an urge to violence as the answer to all problems, an urge to self-annihilation, suicide, the ultimate experience, and the ultimate surrender. The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

Paul Theroux, Holding Court

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux has done plenty of press for his new travel book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, but there are some interesting bits in his interview with his neighborhood rag, Cape Cod Today. Every year, we learn, he hosts a reunion party with his Peace Corps buddies at his house in Sandwich, Mass.:

It used to be that we did a lot of beer drinking, but now some have died and divorced. It is a big event for all of us to keep current with each other. Among other things, we play an Italian game of bowls, called ‘Bocce’ (pronounced ‘Bachee’). I found an Italian priest at a church on Route 151 who had a design for the court and I found someone in Falmouth to copy it.

Lucky is the author who can afford his own bocce court (and odd is the writer living near Martha’s Vineyard who feels compelled to tell people how to pronounce “bocce”). There are other interesting details in the interview as well, including his thoughts on being in Boy Scouts with Mike Bloomberg, infidelity, Burma, Georgia (the Asian one).

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Dept. of Self-Promotion note: If you’re in the D.C. area Saturday, Sept. 6 (that’s tomorrow), I’ll be speaking at George Mason University as part of a day-long seminar, sponsored by American Independent Writers, called “Writers–Push the Electronic Envelope:Sharing Your Writing and Selling Your Work in Cyberspace.” I’ll chat a bit on the panel about social networking, mostly in the context of journalism, but I’ll probably blather about books and blogs a fair bit as well.

Roundup: Has “Cute Butt,” Laps Up Porn

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Curtis Sittenfeld, Michael Chabon, Norman Mailer, Porter Shreve

Bloomberg News reviews Curtis Sittenfeld‘s American Wife. Why can’t all book reviews get headlines like this?

Jeffrey Goldberg and Michael Chabon nyuk it up about Sarah Palin and Alaska.

Porter Shreve‘s next novel, When the White House Was Ours, is out soon. I’m not expecting greatness, but it’s next on my list, and I’m hopeful. I interviewed Shreve last year about D.C. charter schools, the subject of the book.

The tentpole article in the latest Bookforum, online now, is an essay by Thomas Frank on Norman Mailer and modern-day punditry, but the whole issue looks worth a read.

Tom Perrotta’s Good Timing

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Mark Twain, Tom Perrotta

If your schedule is free on Sept. 23 and you happen to be in Hartford, Conn., it’d only make sense to attend the fundraiser to help save the Mark Twain House. There’s a pretty good lineup of readers and speakers: The event is led by Jon Clinch, author of Finn (reviewed here), and he’s joined by Stewart O’Nan, Arthur Phillips, Tom Perrotta, and more.

Perrotta, plugging the event in the Boston Globe, figures this week’s political foofaraw over teen pregnancy might help the paperback release of his most recent novel, The Abstinence Teacher (reviewed here). “Everyone’s talking about abstinence,” he says. “It’s like free advertising.” Maybe so: As of this writing the book is #14 on Amazon’s bargain-books list.

Richard Wright’s Haiku

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Richard Wright

Last Sunday marked what would have been Richard Wright‘s 100th birthday. (He died in 1960.) The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette touches on some of the main points of Wright’s biography, and catches up with his daughter Julia, who discusses whether her father ever found peace amid the racial strife he documented:

“Being on the move is a cultural / historical trait that goes back to slavery and our internalized memory of it,” she observes. “Yes, I think he found peace — but not necessarily the way we have been taught to define the word, often in heavily Christian terms.” Wright recalls that during her father’s last years in Paris, a friend introduced him to haiku, an ancient form of Japanese poetry inspired by Zen Buddhism.

“In mastering the writing of these tiny little poems… he did find that sort of Oriental-style ‘peace,’ which finds more meaning in asking the right questions than in finding the right answers,” she says.

Speaking of which, the online companion to the Anthology of Modern American Poetry includes five of Wright’s haiku (via). Lots of unhappy verbs here: “sink,” “soak,” “took,” and (twice) “yearn”:

A sleepless spring night:
Yearning for what I never had
And for what never was.

Labor Day Reading: Ha Jin’s First House

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ha Jin

Looking to find something appropriate to post for Labor Day—and less grim than, say, an excerpt from The Jungle—I was drawn to a bit of an essay by Ha Jin in the new collection State by State. Inspired by the WPA guides to individual states, editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey tapped 50 writers to contribute an essay each. (An interview with Edward P. Jones covers Washington, D.C.) Jin’s piece is on Georgia, where he first lived when he immigrated from China. For anybody who’s read his most recent novel, A Free Life, the essay will have a familiar ring—the stubborn urge to make a living and improve one’s station, the fixation on reading and education, the candor about money. That last point is critical. Jin’s one of the few writers in the collection—maybe one of the few major American writers working today—who’s so open about it costs to live in this joint, and he’s perfectly willing to attach dollar signs to the discussion. That candor pulls double duty for Jin—it emphasizes his outsiderness, but calls attention to an urge to assimilate. Here, Jin discusses buying his home in 1993, just after taking a job at Emory University:

We paid $84,000 for our home, which had three small bedrooms, two bathrooms, a half-finished basement, and a carport. With few exceptions, my colleagues all lived in bigger houses closer to Emory. We bought such a modest place because I wasn’t sure if I could hold my job for long, and didn’t want to take out a big mortgage. I was hired to teach poetry writing, which was a position I felt I had gotten by luck. I had never attended a poetry workshop and had no idea how to fulfill my role as a poet in residence. Poets in other parts of the country often asked me, “Who’s the poet at Emory?” The could not imagine it was me. I felt I might lose my job at any time. Once, I even blurted out to my boss, Frank Manley, a tall, flat-shouldered man in his early sixties, who was the director of our creative writing program, “I will stay in Georgia even if I don’t get tenure.”

“Why?” He smiled, narrowing his eyes.

“Because life is easier down here.”

“Indeed it is.”

Frank drove a pickup truck and owned a small farm, where he didn’t grow anything. He went there every week just to write.

I’ll be taking the holiday seriously tomorrow. Back Tuesday.

David Goodis on Film

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Goodis

I feel mildly mortified that an entire film series dedicated to David Goodis happened and that I failed to hear about it; last week the Pacific Film Archive wrapped up “Streets of No Return,” featuring 10 films based on Goodis stories. You probably know about a pair of them: Dark Passage, which starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and Francois Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. Both are worth renting, though Steve Seid‘s assertion that the latter is “faithful” to the original novel is a little off. (That book was originally titled Down There, which, as I noted in a review of Goodis a while back, is one of the all-time great noir titles.)

I’m eager to see Descent Into Hell, another great noir title, which is based on Goodis’ The Wounded and the Slain. Better still, I’d like to get back to more of the man’s books. For a quick glimpse on the despairing, gritty tone that Goodis mastered, see Duane Swierczynski’s blog, which recently posted the opening passage of Goodis’ final novel, Somebody’s Done For. (Swierczynski’s blog has lots of great Goodis-related content in addition to that.)

Responding to Reviewers

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

Conventional wisdom has long dictated that writers aren’t supposed to respond to reviewers—except, perhaps, in cases where egregious errors of fact are involved. But Jack Pendarvis addresses a middling review of his debut novel, Awesome, in the New York Times Book Review sensibly. Which is to say he notes the complaints and preserves his sense of humor. Perhaps only satirists should get to do this:

Then the reviewer ends the paragraph like this, as if she were put up to a dare of some sort: “Fee fie foe fun!” (Exclamation point hers.) I will go out on a limb and say that “‘Fee fie foe fun!’ – The New York Times” is going to be plastered all over the cover of the paperback. So be it! The reviewer is less entranced by my “***** jokes” (WARNING: the “link” is full of racy quotations), of which she gives several examples, some of which, truth be told, appear kind of shameful when they’re laid out there cold on the slab like that. As a counterweight, I’d like to “link” here to some kind words from a feminist (she starts out suspicious but I win her over by the last paragraph) who mentioned some of the same ***** jokes and seemed to appreciate what I was “going for” in context. Why do I feel the need for a “counterweight”? It’s untoward! Nobody likes a whiny writer! No book review is ever good enough for a precious, precious writer like myself! The New York Times reviewer did a fine job!

Related to reviewers and reviewing: I have a post up on the National Book Critics Circle blog, Critical Mass, about writing about books for alternative weeklies. The timing is a bit awkward: I wrote the piece a couple of weeks back, and if I knew then what I know now, perhaps I would have changed a few things. But I do think that the basic point of making oneself flexible as a writer—yes, fine, “media producer”—still stands. If anything, that point is more critical than ever.

Ken Kesey’s Screenplay Suit

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ken Kesey

Portland, Ore., alt-weekly Willamette Week has an extensive story about the legal squabbling over Last Go Round, a screenplay about an Oregon rodeo written by Ken Kesey. Kesey was commissioned to write the script in 1983 by MiSchelle McMindes and Mike Hagen, who had done some research into the event; the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest author delivered a manuscript, but the question of who owns the rights to it has been much argued-over and deposed-over in the years since.

Stories about dead writers (Kesey died in 2001) and estate battles are rarely very engaging. But the story does reveal some of the reasons why Kesey soured on writing fiction:

“Kesey abandoned prose as ‘archaic’ and set off to make The Movie,” says Mark Christensen, a Los Angeles writer and former WW staffer who’s completing a study of Kesey, Timothy Leary and other ’60s narcotics gurus titled Acid Christ for Schaffner Press. “He bought into the dream, which is the old cliché of Hollywood: What I really want to do is direct. In other words, he wanted into the movie business! This was in the wave of all that French New Wave shit, where people literally believed the novel was dead, and cinema was going to be the new medium. And Kesey bought that dream.”

The story also includes video of a feature by Oregon Public Broadcasting that captures Kesey in 2001 expounding on visual arts at the expense of more writerly ones: “So much of the writer’s effort has gone into decorating the place—setting the scene, getting the lighting just right, putting the sofa there so it frames that one area of the room,” he says at one point. “A lot of what we think of as storytelling is just window dressing.” Video here:

Let’s Save Edna St. Vincent Millay’s House

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Edna St. Vincent Millay

One more author’s house in need of some upkeep: The Lower Hudson Valley Journal News reports on a nascent effort to refurbish the home of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. (She also wrote short stories and essays as Nancy Boyd; the Poetry Foundation has a nice biography.) As Millay’s reputation has faded, so has Steepletop, her home in Austerlitz, N.Y.:

The grounds are open, as is a trail to the Millay family grave site, but the house won’t be ready for public tours until at least 2010, [Millay Society executive director Peter] Bergman says. He reckons it will take more than $3 million to repair the house and gardens. For now, he is raising money to pay for a garden historian to document how the garden was planted and used.

More on the project is at the society’s Web site. (All of this calls to mind D.C. indie publisher Vrzhu Press’ recent “Millay Project,” in which area writers mimicked Millay’s famous pose by a dogwood tree.)