Every so often, somebody online shows up to announce a surprising discovery: Roger Ebert is a pretty good writer! Such is the curse of being a TV celebrity, I suppose, where his closest peers have been Gene Shalit and Michael Medved—if you’re running with those clowns, small wonder people reduce to some kind of Fatty McThumb caricature. It may help to have grown up in a Chicago household that received the Sun-Times on weekends to contradict that reputation for shallowness. (The uninitiated or the unconvinced can pick up his 2006 collection, Awake in the Dark.) At any rate, HTMLGiant is the latest to bring the news, inspired by some of his recent personal essays on subjects like cancer and abstinence directives on college campuses. If it takes Ebert’s Twitter feed to get bloggers enthusing, so be it, but even given his emergence as a sharp cultural commentator in recent years, his skill and talent has always been there.
Case in point (and more directly relevant to this blog): The death of Erich Segal prompted Ebert to dig up his 1970 review of Love Story, which includes this gem of an opening:
I read Love Story one morning in about fourteen minutes flat, out of simple curiosity. I wanted to discover why five and a half million people had actually bought it. I wasn’t successful. I was so put off by Erich Segal’s writing style, in fact, that I hardly wanted to see the movie at all. Segal’s prose style is so revoltingly coy — sort of a cross between a parody of Hemingway and the instructions on a soup can — that his story is fatally infected.
Mark Twain was similarly talented at writing a good lede for a newspaper.
Virginia Quarterly Review editor Ted Genoways is so despairing of the fate of literary magazines that he resorts to absolutisms and strange steams of thought: Postmodernism is dead, but it persists, which means nobody wants to write fiction about Iraq, which means university-based literary journals are dying, but to solve that writers need to move away from academia.
Where, Wesley Morris asks, “are any of the promising films to be made from hundreds of years of black writing?”
Yiyun Li doesn’t feel her novel, The Vagrants, is entirely a downer: “There are actually some very funny moments. I was laughing, maybe I shouldn’t have been. Some of the reviewers picked up on the lightness. I’d say about one-sixth of reviewers picked that up, and I was very happy for them.”
Atlantic fiction editor C. Michael Curtis is behind a collection of short stories but writers in Spartansburg, South Carolina.
Daniyal Mueenuddin is working on short stories set in his native Wisconsin, as well as “a novel involving a love triangle, set in Pakistan in the early 1970s, involving a farmer who is married to an American.”
N. Scott Momaday, in a lengthy interview with the Santa Fe Reporter, on winning the Pulitzer Prize for his first book, 1969’s House Made of Dawn: “I was too young to receive it. It was a good thing, all in all. The benefits were very great and continue to be, but I don’t know, I think that if I had won it at 45 instead of 35 or whatever I was, it would have been somehow more appropriate.”
Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson is still in the habit of giving books to his players. Among the authors he’s selected are Larry Watson, Walter Mosley, Sherman Alexie, and Roberto Bolano.
Lastly, the National Book Critics Circle recently announced eight new board members. I’m honored to be among them.
markathitakis.com 