When characters in books get hit, they tend to get hit in the solar plexus. [via vqr]
Category: writing
Over the past 5 years, 32% of the New Yorker’s fiction came from 14 different authors. [via Pete Lit]
Nick Hornby interviews David Simon, of The Wire fame:
There are two ways of traveling. One is with a tour guide, who takes you to the crap everyone sees. You take a snapshot and move on, experiencing nothing beyond a crude visual and the retention of a few facts. The other way to travel requires more timeÄîhence the need for this kind of viewing to be a long-form series or miniseries, in this bad metaphorÄîbut if you stay in one place, say, if you put up your bag and go down to the local pub or shebeen and you play the fool a bit and make some friends and open yourself up to a new place and new time and new people, soon you have a sense of another world entirely. WeÄôre after this: Making television into that kind of travel, intellectually.
Clyde Fans: Book One (review: 5/5)
Clyde Fans: Book One, by the cartoonist Seth, is split into two halves. Each half tracks the memories and relationship between two brothers, both of whom worked for the family business, the Clyde Fans Company.
In the first section, set in 1997, we see the older Abraham walks from room to room in the old Clyde Fans storefront. Abraham keeps a constant monologue. As the only speaker in the first section, and perhaps the only family member remaining, he’s both narrator and the only repository of family history. Abraham reminisces as he wanders throughout the old building telling old jokes or digging up old stories—as you might daydream through your own past, stopping every now and then to pick up a memory and turn it in the light before you move on to another. Although he controls the story, he leaves the building only briefly.
Like Abraham’s nostalgia, Simon’s memory has him trapped, too. The second section rolls back 40 years to follow an anxious Simon, finally given a chance as a company salesman. His narrative, following him as he hoofs it from place to place with display sample in tow, always circles back to his memories: the high expectations of his brother, brush-offs from failed sales calls. The combination of his recurring flashbacks, his obsessive recall of failure, and his own expectations cripple him.
Beyond Seth’s good writing is the attention to detail that helps you trust his writing in the first place. It’s the subtle attention that wins you over. Take a look at this image from the first page. You can see the stars high up in the sky, and as in real life, the lights from the street make it hard to see stars closer to the horizon. There’s that band of darkness that shifts into a field of stars:
And further into the first part of the book, there’s a stream of water from a faucet. Seth illustrates that sweet spot of water flow. At a certain water pressure, the flow is slow enough to not be forceful and straight, but fast enough that it escapes from the thin trickle. Seth draws that exact moment that makes the cool spiraling, helical column:
And the faucet handles even have shadows playing on the tub. Seth drafts some great architecture throughout the book. There are the cityscapes and building snapshots to make the setting, of course. But like the faucet shadows, in the interior scenes you can find all sorts of little details that make the time and place come alive, like molding at the joins of floor and ceiling, or wainscoting, or the floor tiles that aren’t standard squares, but octagons with little diamonds between them. And shadows, always wonderful soft shadows falling and bending together.
The worthy detail makes it happen. When you can trust the writer as an observer, you can trust them as a storyteller that much more. You don’t have to draw or write every detail—Seth leaves out a lot—but a few well-chosen particulars make the rest of the story that much more compelling.
Lapham’s Quarterly looks like a worthy new periodical. Each volume covers a specific theme and the essays come from a wide range of historical texts. The current issue, “States of War,” draws on Patton, Ruskin, Lenin, Goebbels, bin Laden, Virgil, Tim O’Brien, Whitman, Vonnegut, Tolstoy…
The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks is one of my favorite regular reads. It just never gets old for me. I’ve also previously recommended the photo group for “Quotation Mark” Abuse.
“I remember saying once, I canÄôt understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems; itÄôs like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife. Whoever I was talking to said, TheyÄôd do that too, if their agents could fix it.” Phillip Larkin in the Paris Review.
A profile of William Langewiesche. I’d never heard of him before today, but now I’m curious to see what he’s been writing. “This is the golden age of nonfiction, now. It’s not in the future sometime. It’s not in the past. It’s better now. This is the time.” [via bookslut and vqr]
Here’s an interesting idea: setting an end-date for your blog.
An excellent essay on John Updike and the work of book reviewing. [via tim walker]
E.M. Forster: “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then queen died of grief’ is a plot.”
“Reader and writer are in jail together. And the more they cooperate, the more easily they can move together through the complex masses of verbal symbols and levels of grammar that we call writing.” Arn Tibbetts, Ten Rules for Writing Readably (pdf)
“In ninth grade I looked like Gollum. Not much has changed, really, but in ninth grade it was more like fetal Gollum.” In Salon, a few stories by teenage girls from the book Red: The Next Generation of American Writers—Teenage Girls—on What Fires Up Their Lives Today. It runs the gamut from funny to sad to disturbing to touching. I wonder what the guys would write (are writing?). [thanks, kevin]
Liz Danzico analyzes the closing phrases we use in e-mail. My most common reflex closings: Thanks, Later, Rock and roll, Don’t stop believin’, Heh, See you soon, Etc., Ciao, Yours. I do like to mix it up every now and then with a tongue-in-cheek rendition of the earnest and baroque.
I’ve never watched the show before, but after reading this article about The Wire, I think I need to track down a few episodes. [via andrea harner]
Making Memes
Tim Walker writes about meme entrepreneurship. I love it. Go read it. Unless I misunderstand the point, it seems like a lot of folks are already working in that vein—writers. Just glancing at my bookshelf, there’s Florida and his Creative Class, Friedman and his Flat World, Weinberger‘s Miscellany, Anderson‘s Long Tail.
I don’t mean that to sound flip, because I think these all occupy an interesting middle ground. The ideas aren’t quite as heady and broad as, let us say, praxeology (brilliant though it is). But they’re a step up from the mundanities of something like Six Sigma. For the most part, the far ends of that bell curve can be safely ignored, unless it happens to be your pet interest. But if you’re paying attention, strong arguments in that middle ground can force a conversation. That is what great memepreneurs do well.
Tim brings out a political example to contrast bad memes with fruitful memes. “Bush is stupid” vs. ÄúBush pursues dangerous ideas—expensive dangerous ideas.Äù The latter is more effective because it comes across as not a simple couched argument or opinion, but an invitation to explore. Provocative, sure. Good memes usually are. But more than that, it’s actually a functional starting point. The best memes are forward-looking.1 That’s one reason I always liked political theory more than any other field of political science. I get to escape those messy details of policy and history and think about what could be.
I’ll let Tim close it out:
We need better memes in the world to counter all the stupid ones that drive so much of our behavior. I would say Äúthat drive so much of our thinking,Äù but in fact the purpose of many of these memes is to relieve us from thinking, so that we reflexively reach for the products weÄôve had marketed to us, or reflexively reach for the attitudes that favor certain special interests within the society. (Note that these special interests can be political, commercial, religious, or what have you. I take the broad view here.) But those of us who are awake to these tendencies can work to shape them in other, better directions.
—
1. Bureaucrats and pundits are not. Though I’m willfully ignorant talking-head culture, I’ve seen enough to convince me that they tend to be far more concerned with digging up old grievances and winning now than actually caring about the future. It’s the nature of the gig. See “Property Rights and Time Preference” [pdf]
A long essay on Errol Morris’ long, three-part investigation of a Roger Fenton photograph: “Fenton’s mild rearranging of some cannonballs presumably went unremarked because no one at the time would have thought it worth remarking on. To subject him to the standards of our own time is otiose; it’s like complaining that Wagner’s Ring cycle is missing a backbeat.” But, then again, that’s rather beside the point: “I don’t care why he chose to pursue this particular topic at such fantastic and disorderly length. It’s a great thing to find in a newspaper.”
Mark Larson 