Kurt Vonnegut dies at 84. It was bound to happen. But that doesn’t make it any better.
Apr 112007
Feb 282007
When I take to the road in a big way, big things happen. For example:
1989: As I’m driving from California to Rhode Island, Chinese students gather in Tiananmen Square demonstrating for increased democratization. Tanks and troops advance; although 4 tanks are briefly stopped by a single man, the demonstrators are dispersed, shot and imprisoned.
1991: Returning from Rhode Island to LA with a stopover in New Orleans. I finally get my hands on a New York Times, but I can’t believe it’s real: Mikhail Gorbachev is “under house arrest” (kidnapped?) and there is a coup, entirely real. The coup falls apart. So does the USSR.
2007: Driving from Pittsburgh to Atlanta for AWP, in a focused, no-fun 12-hour marathon: leading litblogger Mark Sarvas announces the sale of his first novel, Harry Revised, to Bloomsbury.
Finally, some good news!
Feb 072007
Thanks to Bookfox I now know that Steve Erickson’s got a new website, and a new book — Zeroville — coming out this fall, they say. I’m always ready to read Steve Erickson’s latest.
When I was an undergrad (the next-to-last-time) I wanted to write my honors thesis on books by Thomas Pychon and Steve Erickson. Pynchon wasn’t exactly listed in the phone book, but Erickson was. One day I picked up the phone, and somehow I talked him into meeting me for coffee — I think he was too polite to say no. It was my first author interview.
Undoubtedly the worst author interview since some caverperson walked up behind another chiseling rock and grunted “huh?”
Then, when I was an undergrad for the last time, I wrote my honors thesis on books by Thomas Pynchon and Steve Erickson. I didn’t call anybody, but I finished it, which was more to the point. And Aimee Bender gave me an A.
Maybe if I can figure it, I’ll get a chance to talk to Erickson about the new book. That is, if he’s forgotten about the nervous undergraduate who once asked him incredibly lame questions over coffee.
Michael Chabon is the most illustrious Pitt writing program alumnus; perhaps that’s why none of us expected him to stop by campus. Until we got the secret, hush-hush news that he and Ayelet Waldman would be having morning coffee with fiction students in an undisclosed Pitt location (OK, it was the Cathedral of Learning. Where else?) Anyway, I was there, moleskine in hand.
That’s Michael Chabon on the left, Chuck Kinder on the right. Ayelet Waldman, who was entirely charming, had scooted off out of camera range.
Jan 032007
Some people write fast — Joyce Carol Oates, for example, has written 34 novels since 1964. In her own name, that is — she’s also published 11 pseudonymous novels, dozens of short story collections, a couple of YA and kids books, plus a zillion articles and reviews. Thomas Pynchon is not a fast writer: he got started a year earlier and has written just seven books. Seems like quality and speed aren’t really connected.
Case in point, as music producer Rick Rubin tells Esquire:
I was talking to Leonard Cohen, and he was saying it takes him typically three years to write a song. And he said that once he was having a conversation with Bob Dylan, comparing songs of each other’s that they liked. And Bob said, “Well, how long did it take to write ‘Hallelujah’?” And Leonard said, “Three years.” And then he asked Bob, “How long did it take you to write ‘I and I’?” And Bob said, “Fifteen minutes.”
Dec 122006
If you’re lucky like me, you heard Richard (The Echo Maker) Powers on Fresh Air while caught in traffic today. And if you weren’t that kind of lucky, click on the link.
At first I was worried about Ms. Gross’ questions, which seemed to focus on just one aspect of the book, but the interview opened up and Richard Powers got to talk about identity and narrative. Not to be missed.
Dec 042006
At The Happy Booker, author Katharine Min (Secondhand World) takes up the truth-or-fiction question:
No, my childhood home did not burn down; my parents are still very much alive; I’m not horribly disfigured; and — reluctantly, I disclose — I’ve never engaged in a menage a trois.
While at The Elegant Variation, author Salvador Placencia (The People of Paper) answers questions, including why a novel instead of a memoir:
Why would I write a memoir? When I was writing The People of Paper I was a twenty-something kid who came from kind and generous parents, I never fought in a war, and I had nothing but the support and love from my friends and family. What business would I have with the memoir? I’m much more interested in the works of the imagination than in my mundane reality.
Nov 222006
That’s Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Music Hall and Jhumpa Lahiri doing a Q&A for the Dru Heinz Lecture Series Monday night.
Nov 202006
Add yours to the list that’s going over at The Elegant Variation.
Nov 072006
This election day my thoughts have turned to Hunter S. Thompson, whose Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail is both smart and hilarious, and never matched up to the mumbling, addled Thompson I remembered. So of course I turned to YouTube.
I think the BBC captured the true Hunter S. Thompson in this interview (I’m guessing 1976, since they mention Carter in comparison to Nixon). It begins with him saying Richard Nixon stands for the dark side of the American dream (poetic, but he’d written it before), shows him smoking pot and, behind the slate between takes, doing a line of coke off his hand, all the while being two steps ahead of the interviewer. When he knocks his whiskey over into the lawn, he cracks a joke about rolling his ice in chlorophyll, and the poor reporter can’t see he’s kidding. Stay with it until the end, to hear the cogent, sharp journalist Thompson admit “When I speak at universities, I’m not sure if they’re inviting Duke or Thompson; I’m not sure who to be.” Seems like it wasn’t long before Duke took over completely.
Ah well, as drug-damaged as he got, HST was against the war in Iraq. Which reminds me, it’s time to go vote.
