Category: Books & Writers

America, the beautiful (America, the ugly)

You could do a lot worse with the next 220 days of your life than to begin each one by reading an entry from the freshly published “A New Literary History of America” — the way generations past used to study a Bible verse daily. You could do a lot worse, but I’m not sure you could do much better; this magnificent volume is a vast, inquisitive, richly surprising and consistently enlightening wallow in our national history and culture.

Above from a review by Laura Miller at Salon Books.

“[T]hey’ve produced a compendium that is neither reference nor criticism, neither history nor treatise, but a genre-defying, transcendent fusion of them all.”

Neil Sheehan’s new book

His previous book, “A Bright Shining Lie,” which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1989, took him 16 years to finish. His new one, “A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon,” which comes out Tuesday, is a history of the arms race and of American efforts to create a nuclear stalemate with Russia. It took 15 years, so he’s getting faster, but not much.

The Times writes about Sheehan, the man and the book.

Is the Internet melting our brains?

An interesting interview with Dennis Baron, author of A Better Pencil. The introduction includes this:

His thesis is clear: Every communication advancement throughout human history, from the pencil to the typewriter to writing itself, has been met with fear, skepticism and a longing for the medium that’s been displaced. Far from heralding in a “2001: Space Odyssey” dystopia, Baron believes that social networking sites, blogs and the Internet are actually making us better writers and improving our ability to reach out to our fellow man. “A Better Pencil” is both a defense of the digital revolution and a keen examination of how technology both improves and complicates our lives.

Redux post of the day

Ever had a job like Mark Twain once did, where no amount of money would be enough? From Roughing It, 1872.

I will remark, in passing, that I only remained in the milling business one week. I told my employer I could not stay longer without an advance in my wages; that I liked quartz milling, indeed was infatuated with it; that I had never before grown so tenderly attached to an occupation in so short a time; that nothing, it seemed to me, gave such scope to intellectual activity as feeding a battery and screening tailings, and nothing so stimulated the moral attributes as retorting bullion and washing blankets — still, I felt constrained to ask an increase of salary.

He said he was paying me ten dollars a week, and thought it a good round sum. How much did I want?

I said about four hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was about all I could reasonably ask, considering the hard times.

I was ordered off the premises! And yet, when I look back to those days and call to mind the exceeding hardness of the labor I performed in that mill, I only regret that I did not ask him seven hundred thousand.

September 11th

Two immortal football coaches share this birthday. Paul “Bear” Bryant was born on this date in 1913. Tom Landry was born on this date in 1924.

Actor Earl Holliman is 81. Holliman is perhaps best know as Lt. Bill Crowley on Police Woman with Angie Dickinson.

Musician Leo Kottke is 64.

One-time Oscar nominee Amy Madigan is 59. She was nominated for Twice in a Lifetime in 1985.

Sportscaster Lesley Visser is 56. Visser was the first woman to receive the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Pete Rozelle Radio-Television Award.

Oscar nominee for best supporting actress for her performance in Sideways, Virginia Madsen is 48.

Kristy McNichol is 47.

Harry Connick Jr. is 42. He grew up in New Orleans where his father was D.A.

Ludacris is 32.

William Sydney Porter was born on this date in 1852. We know him as O. Henry. According to The Writer’s Almanac last year, “He wrote his most famous story, ‘The Gift of the Magi,’ in three hours, in the middle of the night, with his editor sleeping on his couch.” NewMexiKen had posted that story in its entirety. Another particular favorite is The Ransom of Red Chief.

D. H. Lawrence was born on this date in 1885.

He had an incredibly difficult life. He was a teacher, but he caught tuberculosis as a young man and eventually became too sick to teach. During World War I, the British government suspected he was a German spy, because his wife was German and he opposed the war. Most of all, he struggled against censorship. More than almost any other writer at the time, he believed that in order to write about human experience, novelists had to write explicitly about sex. When he published his first important novel, Sons and Lovers (1913), he found that his editor had deleted numerous erotic passages without his permission. When he published his novel The Rainbow in 1915, Scotland Yard seized most of the printed copies under charges of obscenity. He was blacklisted as an obscene writer and none of the magazines in England would publish anything he wrote. He finished Women in Love in 1916, but couldn’t get it published until 1920, and even then he could only publish it privately.

Lawrence was finally allowed to leave England when World War I was over, and he was so happy that he traveled everywhere, to Ceylon [now Sri Lanka], Australia, Tahiti, Mexico, and New Mexico.

He eventually moved back to Europe and worked on his last big novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). It was banned in England and America. One British critic called it “the most evil outpouring that has ever besmirched the literature of our country.” It was not widely available until 1960, when Penguin published an unexpurgated edition.

He said, “Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you’ve got to say, and say it hot.”

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Jim Harrison

Click image for larger version
Click image for larger version

I’m told that Jim Harrison did much of his writing in this cabin on his farm near Leland, Michigan, before moving to Livingston, Montana, and Patagonia, Arizona.

Jim Harrison has probed the breadth of human appetites — for food and drink, for art, for sex, for violence and, most significantly, for the great twin engines of love and death. Perhaps no American writer better appreciates those myriad drives; since the publication of his first collection of poetry, “Plain Songs,” in 1966, Harrison has become their poet laureate. His characters — and, by extension, their creator — hunger for a wild and sinewy abundance: for, in his words, “mental heat, experience, jubilance,” for a life fully lived.

The Salon Interview

Harrison’s work is considered men’s lit I suppose (or whatever the opposite of chick-lit would be called), but he was first brought to my attention by my daughter-in-law Veronica. His fiction is set mostly in rural America, often near places he’s lived.

Harrison’s latest novel is The English Major. I’ve just finished it and am eager to try another, perhaps True North or Dalva. Harrison wrote the screenplay — based on his own stories — for Legends of the Fall.

War Dances

I am a big fan of Sherman Alexie and have read a number of his books including The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and Reservation Blues.

Alexie has a wonderful story in the current New Yorker and it’s online.

The story — it’s called “War Dances” — was so good (funny and touching) that I’ve decided The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven would be a good way to spend a couple of hours today, and I just got it off the shelf.

Kindness

NewMexiKen is taking the day off to celebrate the blog’s sixth anniversary.
The posts today are being written by readers just like you. This is from Rick Chlopan.

Tim O’Reilly (Founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media) twitter post this morning:

Lovely NYT review of book On Kindness: http://bit.ly/v5zF7 2nd para and last line are worth taking to heart. Hegelian antithesis of Ayn Rand.

The last line in the review he references:

Indeed, the ones who pay the largest price for our contemporary cloak-and-dagger relationship with kindness are children, whom adults fail by neglecting to help them “keep . . . faith with” kindness, and thereby sentence to a life “robbed of one of the greatest sources of human happiness.”

She’s the real wizard

The best-selling author ever is 44 today. That’s J.K. Rowling, who has sold more than 400 million Harry Potter books.

According to The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor her first book “started with a print run of 1,000 copies. The last book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007), had a first print run of 12 million copies in the United States, the largest first printing of any book in history.”

What I’ve been and will be reading

After panning Michael McGarrity’s Nothing But Trouble, as being nothing special, I’m pleased to report his Dead or Alive is much better. Yes, all of McGarrity’s good guys are still studly cowboy types, and all his good women are petite hotties. And yes, his bad guys are beyond awful and his victims are too often not worth worrying about. But this one has a good chase and a good resolution. Fun if you like the police procedural genre.

The two food books intervened, but now it’s on to Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s first classic.

What Pretending Is

“Do you know what pretending is?”

For what seemed a long while, I listened to the whir of a 5-year-old’s mind in motion. “Well, actually,” Timmy finally said, using his favorite (and only) four-syllable word, “actually I guess it’s like when you go away on trips. Sometimes I dream about you. I dream about how you’ll come home from the airport and bring me surprises and play with me. I get sad when you go away, and so I pretend you’re not gone. Is that bad?”

I told him no, it wasn’t bad.

Tim O’Brien, from an article in the new fiction issue of The Atlantic, posted at The Second Pass.

July 21st ought to be a national holiday

On July 21, 1959, Judge Bryan ruled in favor of Grove Press and ordered the Post Office to lift all restrictions on sending copies of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” through the mail. This, in effect, marked the end of the Post Office’s authority — which, until then, it held absolutely — to declare a work of literature “obscene” or to impound copies of those works or prosecute their publishers. This wasn’t exactly the end of obscenity as a criminal category. Into the mid-1960s, Barney Rosset would wage battles in various state courts over William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” other Grove novels now widely regarded as classics. But the “Chatterley” case established the principle that allowed free speech its total victory.

Excerpt from Fred Kaplan, “The Day Obscenity Became Art” – NYTimes.com.

A holiday not because of Lawrence’s book, but to celebrate the expansion of freedom this decision represented.

Fired from the Canon

The Second Pass drops ten classics from your must read list.

If you’re looking for reading suggestions in bulk, you’re spoiled for choice. There are classics, like Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan or Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon. And in recent years, a cottage industry has sprung up of books that recommend books — The Top Ten, Book Lust (and its follow-up, More Book Lust), The Modern Library, etc., etc.

Some of these efforts are quite good and owned by the authors of this feature — but a problem arises: Such guides are presumably meant to save readers time by pointing them in the right direction, but the guides themselves amount to several months or years of reading. The books they recommend add up to several lifetimes. What starts as an attempt to save hours ends as a commitment to more hours than you probably have.

That’s where we come in. Below is a list of ten books that will be pressed into your hands by ardent fans. Resist these people. Life may not be too short (I’m only in my mid-30s, and already pretty bored), but it’s not endless.

Read about the ten.

Twenty-six

Forbes says Heather Armstrong is the 26th most influential woman in the media. OK. But writing about it she proves she is the first most humorous woman in the media.

I know, I know, you all have the good sense to read dooce without my encouragement. Still, whenever I wipe tears of laughter from my eyes, I link.

Besides, the 26th most influential woman in the media puts the whole post in her RSS feed like good bloggers everywhere. And she does rely on ads.

Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.
. . .

You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony?

The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.”

Pogue’s Posts Blog – NYTimes.com

I did get my 99¢ back, though.

Redux post of the day

Posted here originally two years ago today.

Last week NewMexiKen read Daniel Gilibert’s Stumbling on Happiness. This is an informative and funny book by a Harvard psychologist that explains how our brain, mind, memory and emotions work — and why they lead us to such poor decisions about what makes us happy.

As Malcolm Gladwell has written about the book, “If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me.”

Trust me, too.

First, because Gilbert is an amusing writer, throwing in unexpected delights.

Emotional happiness is like that. It is the feeling common to the feelings we have when we see our new granddaughter smile for the first time, receive word of a promotion, help a wayward tourist find the art museum, taste Belgian chocolate toward the back of our tongue, inhale the scent of our lover’s shampoo, hear the song we used to like so much in high school but haven’t heard in years, touch our cheek to kitten fur, cure cancer, or get a really good snootful of cocaine.

… [O]r trying to predict how proud you will be of your spouse’s accomplishment without knowing which accomplishment (winning a Nobel Prize or finding the best divorce lawyer in the city?) …

“There are many good things about getting older, but no one knows what they are.”

Second, because Gilbert writes about us, human beings, “the only animal that thinks about the future.” Able to think about the future, we make predictions; we make predictions so that we can control our future. Gilbert explains we are captains of a boat on “the river of time.” We get pleasure from controlling the boat. We also get pleasure from controlling the destination, the place that will bring us happiness. The problem is, our future destinations are “fundamentally different” than they appear.

The book explains why. Happiness itself is subjective. Our imaginations are defective — our memory unknowingly fills in details that didn’t happen and forgets details that did; we base too much on the present; we rationalize outcomes, good becomes better, bad becomes worse. We are unable to recall our real feelings once an event has passed.

Stumbling on Happiness is not a self-help book. You may learn how you make decisions about future happiness, even why you make those decisions, but not how to make better decisions — at least not directly. But just learning may be a good start.

Balance

I read both Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness yesterday.

I was thinking maybe a couple of Bugs Bunny comic books ought to do it today.