Author: Mark Athitakis

Watch Your Back, Mr. Bezos

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Steve Jobs

There’s been a lot of back-and-forth about Steve Jobs‘ recent comment about how most Americans don’t read books. I’d argue that Jobs voices a valid concern, but a couple of recent pieces serve as a reminder that Jobs is speaking as a businessman, not as a person with any particular interest in literacy, and it may be that he’s setting the stage to compete with the Amazon Kindle. John Markoff, probably the smartest tech reporter the New York Times has, suspects that Apple is working on its own reader; in TidBITS–still around! I was reading it back when I owned a Mac Classic II–Adam C. Engst makes the case for an iPod Reader:

The iPod already gives us access to Beethoven and Bob Dylan, to snapshots of our children, and to The Incredibles and episodes of Lost. Let’s add to that The Hobbit and Harry Potter, 1984 and Catch-22, and the complete works of Dr. Seuss. Book publishers have been waiting for a mass-market ebook reader for years, the newspaper companies are dying for a new online business model, and normal people just want to read on the train to work.

Hey, whatever saves publishing, I’m for it. (Thanks to Andrew for the link.)

The Slows of Kilimanjaro

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ernest Hemingway

I’m starting to fall deeply in love with Voice of America Special English, a radio programming feature that combines the lightly chastising tone of NPR’s Morning Edition with the  two-thirds-speed wooziness of a screw tape. (I’ve written before about a feature VOASE did on Thomas McGuane and Cormac McCarthy.) New on the site is the first of a two-part piece on the life of Ernest Hemingway. The transcript is a nice enough read, but you really do have to download the MP3 and listen to comprehend the program’s pleasures–the sense that you’re back in an eighth-grade classroom, the languorous Calgon-take-me-away slowness, the assured and comforting voices of Shirley Griffith and Frank Oliver. When they get around to the bit about the shotgun in part two it’s gonna be agony, and it’s gonna be beautiful.

Lesson: It’s Perfectly OK to Steal Your Mom’s Pack of Kents

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Michael Cunningham, Virginia Woolf

Old news to many fans of The Hours, I’m sure, but news to me: Michael Cunningham explains how he came to read Virginia Woolf in the first place.

We lived in Pasadena [Calif.]. I seemed to be growing up to be sort of a skateboard kid. I wasn’t opposed to books — I thought they were fine, but I wasn’t especially interested in them.

One day, when I was a sophomore, I was having a cigarette, in a dusty little section between buildings. I was 15, smoking a Kent stolen out of my mother’s purse, trying to look as dangerous as possible.

I was standing next to this girl, a senior I can only describe as the Pirate Queen of my high school – every high school has one: tough, beautiful, sarcastic, impossibly cool. I, being more ambitious than realistic, started talking to her. I started talking about Bob Dylan vs. Leonard Co hen, that Cohen was undervalued, and she looked down at me and said, “Have you ever thought of being less stupid?”

I had, but I was happy with the stupid I was. She asked, “Why don’t you read a book? Have you even heard of T.S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf?”

Later on, I went to the school library, a Band-Aid-colored trailer, and there was no Eliot and one Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway,” and that was the one I checked out. I couldn’t make sense of it or tell what was going on, but I could see the beauty and clarity and muscularity of those sentences. I had never seen writing like that. It never occurred to me that you could do with words what Jimi Hendrix did in music.

“Mrs. Dalloway” made me a reader, turned on a little light bulb in my head. . . . I’ve come to think that most of us had a first book, not necessarily a great book, that cracks the world open for us.

About Those Fakes…

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Thomas Mallon

Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller may be responsible for the hokiest lede to ever appear in a Pulitzer-winning story, but she’s pretty good when it comes to literary affairs, and she has a thorough piece on the latest round of fake memoirs. Among those quoted is D.C.-based novelist and critic Thomas Mallon:

The current crop of faked memoirs and fib-filled autobiographies may emanate from the complications of the Internet era, Mallon says. “As George Orwell noted, people write as an assertion of the ego. And when people fabricate memoirs, it’s an homage to the fact that writers still have stature in the culture.” Ironically, though, “the Web has made authorship a much less exclusive club. You can self-publish now so easily.”

And we may only be at the threshold of the Internet’s effect on literary originality, Mallon warns. “We’re not that far into it, and we just don’t know. It’s still very unsettled.”

That Stegner Fellow

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Wallace Stegner

I lived for eight years in San Francisco, a famously beautiful city that famously has a chip on its shoulder when it comes to getting respect from the alleged “East Coast establishment.” The San Francisco Chronicle once ran a Sunday magazine piece about the Bay Area’s culture of young writers, and the story’s author found multiple ways to say, “You won’t find this kind of writing in that snobby/elitist/hermetically sealed New York culture!” I suspect most of the writers profiled now live in Brooklyn.

Anyway, one of the main talking points in this debate, at least when it comes to books, is Wallace Stegner, who wrote one of Northern California’s defining novels, Angle of Repose. You heard about it often out in San Francisco, where it’s the point of reference for any novel about the American west that picks up themes of pioneering and the environment; on the East Coast, you’ll hear nary a peep about it. The New York Times gets at this divide a little in a piece on a writers’ gathering dedicated to Stegner in Point Reyes, Calif.:

The East’s perceived dismissal of Stegner’s Western-ness was another leitmotif during the conference. [Stegner biographer] Mr. [Philip L.] Fradkin made repeated references to the failure of The New York Times Book Review to publish a review of “Angle of Repose” — and the dismissive column about it in The Times (“a Pontiac in the age of Apollo, an Ed Muskie in the fiction sweepstakes”) written by John Leonard after the book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1972.

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.