Category: Books & Writers

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry…

was born on this date in 1900. In January 2003 Outside Magazine listed its 25 essential books for the well-read explorer. At the top was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

Like his most famous creation, The Little Prince, that visitor from Asteroid B-612 who once saw 44 sunsets in a single day, Saint-Exupéry disappeared into the sky. Killed in World War II at age 44, “Saint Ex” was a pioneering pilot for Aéropostale in the 1920s, carrying mail over the deadly Sahara on the Toulouse-Dakar route, encountering cyclones, marauding Moors, and lonely nights: “So in the heart of the desert, on the naked rind of the planet, in an isolation like that of the beginnings of the world, we built a village of men. Sitting in the flickering light of the candles on this kerchief of sand, on this village square, we waited out the night.” Whatever his skills as a pilot—said to be extraordinary—as a writer he is effortlessly sublime. Wind, Sand and Stars is so humane, so poetic, you underline sentences: “It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.” Saint-Exupéry did just that. No writer before or since has distilled the sheer spirit of adventure so beautifully. True, in his excitement he can be righteous, almost irksome—like someone who’s just gotten religion. But that youthful excess is part of his charm. Philosophical yet gritty, sincere yet never earnest, utterly devoid of the postmodern cop-outs of cynicism, sarcasm, and spite, Saint-Exupéry’s prose is a lot like the bracing gusts of fresh air that greet him in his open cockpit. He shows us what it’s like to be subject—and king—of infinite space.

The clueless

From William Powers in the National Journal, The Church of Best-Sellers:

More and more, the coverage of these massive cultural events is like absurd comic theater. Act 1: Long before publication, the media announce that the book in question will be simply huge, The Biggest Thing In Years, and the drumbeat continues right up to the day of release. Act 2: The public, eager to participate in this foreordained historic moment, dutifully lines up to buy the important tome. Act 3: The media marvel at the popular frenzy, as if it had happened quite spontaneously and they had nothing to do with it.

Link via Bookslut.

The Known World

NewMexiKen read Edward P. Jones’s The Known World this past week. The novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize and that The Washington Post‘s Jonathan Yardley called “the best new work of American fiction to cross my desk in years” is — obviously — excellent and I highly recommend it. It’s available in soft cover.

Set in Virginia in the decades before the Civil War, the novel’s primary characters are members of the extended Townsend family, including slaves owned by the freed-Black Townsends. This mix makes for a rich and complex tapestry of racial-relations — black, mulatto, white and Indian. Indeed, more than any one individual, it is slavery that is the main character. As Yardley wrote:

More than anything else, Jones is concerned with the relationship between master and slave, and with the wholly unexpected permutations this acquires when both master and slave are black. Jones cuts right to the core when he writes: “Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known. He did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master.” A master is a master is a master, and it doesn’t matter whether the master is white or black.

Walter Farley…

was born on this date in 1916. The Writer’s Almanac tells us:

From an early age, there was nothing he wanted more in the world than his own horse. Unfortunately, his parents couldn’t afford one, so he spent all his time reading and writing about horses.

Between the ages eleven and fifteen, he wrote dozens of short stories with titles like “The Winged Horse,” “My Black Horse,” “Red Stallion,” and “The Pony.” He later said they were all rough drafts for the novel that he finally finished while he was a student at Columbia University, which he called The Black Stallion (1941). It’s the story of a boy and a wild stallion who survive a shipwreck and become friends on a deserted island.

The book was so popular that Farley went on to write twenty novels about the horse, including The Black Stallion Returns (1945), The Black Stallion Revolts (1953), and The Black Stallion’s Ghost (1969).

NewMexiKen’s favorites were The Island Stallion, The Island Stallion’s Fury and The Island Stallion Races.

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others

Eric Blair was born in Bengal, India, on this date in 1903. We know him as George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984. This from The Writer’s Almanac:

By then he was already dying of tuberculosis. He spent the last years of his life writing 1984 (1949), about a future in which England has become a totalitarian state run by an anonymous presence known only as Big Brother. He knew he didn’t have much time left to write the book, so he wrote constantly, even when his doctors forbade him to work. They took away his typewriter, and when he switched to a ballpoint pen, they put his arm in plaster.

When he finished it, he told his publisher that 1984 was too dark a novel to make much money, but it became an immediate bestseller. He died a few months after it was first published, but it has since been translated into sixty-two languages and has sold more than ten million copies. With all of his work still in print in so many different languages, critics have estimated that every year one million people read George Orwell for the first time.

My Life

None other than Larry McMurtry reviews Clinton’s My Life for The New York Times.

[B]y a generous measure, the richest American presidential autobiography – no other book tells us as vividly or fully what it is like to be president of the United States for eight years.

A review well-worth reading.

An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces

From The New Yorker, Louis Menand takes apart Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

The first punctuation mistake in “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” (Gotham; $17.50), by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there. “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” presents itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it’s hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax.

More importantly, he goes on to talk about writing and the writer’s “voice.”

Dan Brown…

author of the best-selling The Da Vinci Code is 40 today. According to The Writer’s Almanac:

The Da Vinci Code has gone through more than fifty printings, and there are now more than 7.5 million copies of it in print. Almost 100,000 copies are still being sold each week. The book has sparked a controversy in some religious circles, especially in the Catholic Church. The book argues that much of what we hold to be true about Christianity was actually decided at a single meeting of bishops at Nicea in modern-day Turkey, in the year 325. According to the book, it was at that meeting that church leaders decided they wanted to consolidate their power base and establish dogmas for all Christians to follow—and that was the beginning of the Catholic Church. The narrator says that up until that point not all Christians believed in a divine Christ and an infallible Scripture.

Bad advice

NewMexiKen watched an interview early this evening with mystery writer Tony Hillerman. If he’s unfamiliar to you, I suggest you take remedial action. Suffice it to say that his main characters are Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, and his whole cachet is the Navajo culture where he sets his stories.

Anyway, Hillerman said he sent his first novel, The Blessing Way (1970), to his agent, who had trouble selling it. As Hillerman put it, the novel was caught between genres — not quite a mystery, not quite a literary novel. Hillerman asked the agent what he should do about rewriting the book. “Get rid of all that Indian stuff,” she replied.

Ron Padgett…

was born on this date in 1942. Padgett’s web site tells his story, beginning with:

Ron Padgett was born in 1942 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he attended public schools. His father was primarily a bootlegger who also traded cars, his mother primarily a housewife who also helped with the bootlegging. Around the age of 13, young Ron began scribbling his thoughts and poems in spiral notebooks. This practice followed hard on the heels of his having read, for the first time, “serious” literature.

Padgett is the author of many collections of poetry including Great Balls of Fire (1969), Tulsa Kid (1979) and You Never Know (2002). The following poem, “Album,” is from You Never Know:

The mental pictures I have of my parents and grandparents and my childhood are beginning to break up into small fragments and get blown away from me into empty space, and the same wind is sucking me toward it ever so gently, so gently as not even to raise a hair on my head (though the truth is that there are very few of them to be raised). I’m starting to take the idea of death as the end of life somewhat harder than before. I used to wonder why people seemed to think that life is tragic or sad. Isn’t it also comic and funny? And beyond all that, isn’t it amazing and marvelous? Yes, but only if you have it. And I am starting not to have it. The pictures are disintegrating, as if their molecules were saying, “I’ve had enough,” ready to go somewhere else and form a new configuration. They betray us, those molecules, we who have loved them. They treat us like dirt.

Link and poem via The Writer’s Almanac.

ReJoyce, It’s Bloomsday

On this date in 1904, Leopold Bloom took his epic journey through Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. ReJoyce Dublin tells us:

“Bloomsday”, as it is now known, has become a tradition for Joyce enthusiasts all over the world. From Tokyo to Sydney, San Francisco to Buffalo, Trieste to Paris, dozens of cities around the globe hold their own Bloomsday festivities. The celebrations usually include readings as well as staged re-enactments and street-side improvisations of scenes from the story. Nowhere is Bloomsday more rollicking and exuberant than Dublin, home of Molly and Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan, Gerty McDowell and James Joyce himself. Here, the art of Ulysses becomes the daily life of hundreds of Dubliners and the city’s visitors as they retrace the odyssey each year.

William Styron…

was born on this date in 1925. The Writer’s Almanac tells his story:

It’s the birthday of William Styron, born in Newport News, Virginia (1925). He enlisted in the Marines as a teenager, to fight in World War II, but by the time he’d finished training and set sail for Japan, the war had ended. He moved to Brooklyn, New York, and got a job as an office boy at the McGraw-Hill publishing house. He was supposed to write book jacket copy, but he was so disgusted with most of the books that he filled all his summaries with insults and foul language. After throwing several paper airplanes and water balloons out the window of his office, he got fired. So he decided to try to make it as a writer.

Styron had always wanted to be a writer, but, he said, “At twenty-two … I found that the creative heat which at eighteen had nearly consumed me with its gorgeous, relentless flame had flickered out to a dim pilot light registering little more than a token glow in my breast.” His first idea was to write a novel about slavery. It amazed him that his grandmother could remember when her family owned slaves, and he was always fascinated by the story of the slave uprising led by Nat Turner. But when he told a creative writing teacher about his idea, the teacher said he should wait until he had written a few novels before he tackled something so ambitious.

Then, he learned that a girl he’d once dated had committed suicide. He took a train to her funeral, and on the journey back to his hometown a novel took shape in his head about a girl’s suicide and its effect on her family and community. That novel was Lie Down in Darkness (1951), and it got great reviews. He wrote two more novels before he went back to his first idea, and in 1967 he published The Confessions of Nat Turner, which became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His most recent book is A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth (1993).

Styron’s compelling Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) describes his crippling, nearly suicidal depression at age 60.

Grammar

Brad DeLong believes in the final comma in a series: “The final comma in a list before the “and” or “or” is an important banisher of confusion, ambiguity, and general silliness.”

NewMexiKen used to include the final comma, but generally I don’t now. I am so confused.

DeLong also questions the lack of an apostrophe in the possessive its.

How ironic

Belle Waring at Crooked Timber has a delightful post on the meaning and use of irony.

A recent post on our blog about whether any of the situations in the Alanis Morrisette Song “Ironic” were, in fact, ironic, has garnered unexpected interest. I looked at the lyrics more carefully, and I think perhaps half could be said to qualify in an extended sense, that is, they seem like dramatic irony. So: “rain on your wedding day” is unquestionably not ironic, it’s just somewhat unfortunate. But I’ll give her “death-row pardon two minutes late”, I guess, if we accept a certain notion of irony I outline below.

The comments at both Crooked Timber and John & Belle are worth perusing as well.

The Virginian…

considered the first serious western, was published on this date in 1902. The novel by Owen Wister sold 300,000 copies in its first year. The University of Wyoming (the novel is set in Wyoming) has an online exhibit concerning The Virginian. According to the site:

Since its 1902 publication, The Virginian has left a lasting impact upon the American cultural landscape. In earlier years after its publication, The Virginian did much to popularize the American West. As a result, a romanticized view of the West became an integral part of the American popular imagination and cultural identity. In recent years, The Virginian has come under scrutiny. Wister’s portrayal of the West is seen by many as a myth at odds with reality.

When the San Francisco Chronicle listed the 100 best Western works of fiction in 1999, Wister’s novel was 46th.

Herman Wouk…

the author of The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance is 89 today. Wouk’s twelfth novel, A Hole in Texas, has just been released.

The Caine Mutiny won the Pulitizer Prize for fiction in 1952.

Now, there are four ways of doing a thing aboard ship—the right way, the wrong way, the Navy way, and my way. I want things on this ship done my way.

Captain Queeg

The Maltese Falcon

Mystery writer Samuel Dashiell Hammett was born on this date in 1894. Hammett departed from the intellectualized mysteries of earlier detective novels (Sherlock Holmes for example) and transformed the genre with his less-than-glamorous realism. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

Hammett actually was a detective with Pinkerton for a few years just before World War I. Contracting TB during military service, he realized his health would keep him from resuming as a detective. He turned to writing. He published his first story in 1922, and then about 80 more, many in the popular pulp crime magazine Black Mask. Hammett’s first novel was Red Harvest, published in 1929. His most famous character, Sam Spade, made his appearance in Hammett’s third novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930). (It was the third—and only successful—attempt to turn that novel into a film when Humphrey Bogart played the role in 1941.) The Thin Man (1934) was the last of Hammett’s novels.

By the early-thirties, Hammett was established and famous. He began a relationship with playwright Lillian Hellman that lasted for 30 years despite his drinking and womanizing. Though both eventually divorced their spouses, they never married. Hammett served in the Army in World War II, enlisting as a private at age 48. His involvement in left-wing politics and unwillingness to testify about it before Congress however, and the continued drinking, diminished his stature. He died in 1961.

Leaphorn and Chee

Best-selling mystery author Tony Hillerman was born on this date in 1925. The Sinister Pig is the 17th book in the series centered around the Navajo Tribal policemen.

Hillerman has an excellent web site with excerpts from all the books. He tells us there that:

Leaphorn emerged from a young Hutchinson County, Texas, sheriff who I met and came to admire in 1948 when I was a very green ‘crime and violence” reporter for a paper in the high plains of the Panhandle. He was smart, he was honest, he was wise and humane in his use of police powers–my idealistic young idea of what every cop should be but sometimes isn’t.

*****

Jim Chee emerged several books later. I like to claim he was born from an artistic need for a younger, less sophisticated fellow to make the plot of PEOPLE OF DARKNESS make sense–and that is mostly true. Chee is a mixture of a couple of hundred of those idealistic, romantic, reckless youngsters I had been lecturing to at the University of New Mexico, with their yearnings for Miniver Cheever’s “Days of Old” modified into his wish to keep the Navajo Value System healthy in universe of consumerism.