The winter round of the LBC is now underway. This week, Valerie Trueblood’s Seven Loves is being discussed. Trueblood herself made an appearance today. Good stuff.
Goings on at the LBC
Birnbaum and Jonathan Safran Foer
At The Morning News, Robert Birnbaum interviews Jonathan Safran Foer. In his email announcing the interview, Birnbaum tries to elevate the current level of discourse surrounding Foer, who seems to have a target painted on his back these days: First, a word about what you will not read here – no reference to Steve Almond’s kvetchy and disingenuous hand wringing about Jon Foer’s new novel (at MobyLives.com)or the exponentially vile and bombastic heaving by Harry Siegal about the same at the loathsome and vile NYC weekly that produces journalistic marvels such as “50 Loathsome New Yorkers” and includes novelists on that hit list.The interview is long, and once again portrays Foer as thoughtful and unwilling to respond to criticism or praise, preferring to concentrate on just the reader and the writer:Foer: Really good books are books that have two authors, the reader and the writer. Or maybe the idea of an author is actually just a combination of two people, the reader and the writer? So when writing you use the word “tree.” Four letters. Very, very short word. Fits a couple millimeters on a page. But in the reader’s mind it becomes a kind of idealized version of a tree, and that tree is different for each person who reads the book and because of that a book is customized for each person in a way a song never could be and as a painting never could be.
Portraits and illustrations
Two new books from Princeton Architectural Press crossed my desk recently. Jason Bitner is one of the guys behind Found Magazine, where bits of discarded ephemera are turned into art or maybe a decontextualized historical record of the present day. Bitner calls it “a show-and-tell project.” When he found over 18,000 studio portraits from the 1950s and 60s in the back of a diner in a small, Midwestern town, they became the star of a new show-and-tell project. La Porte, Indiana is the name of the town where Bitner found the photos and the name of the book he made from them. As Bitner describes it in his introduction to the book, “we rifled through an entire town’s population, as if it were a card catalog, a huge visual archive of Midwestern faces.” As with looking at any of the FOUND crew’s finds, flipping through this book leaves one with odd sensations. We’re not used to seeing stuff like this so lovingly presented, so it makes us look a little harder. As I flip through the book, I enjoy the unintentional artistry of the black and white portraits, but more so I wonder who these people are or were. There’s more about the book at this Web site.A Year in Japan by Kate T. Williamson is an illustrated travelogue. Williamson, an illustrator and filmmaker, spent a year in Japan, filling notebooks with her illustrations and observations. This book is like peering into those notebooks. Williamson’s curly cursive elaborates on her rich, colorful drawings. Most of the illustrations are of details of every day life: foods and clothing, but they are exotic both in being from in Japan and in the care Williamson lavishes upon them, presenting them in close up on the page. But there are also portraits, collages and abstract compositions.
Article in Poets & Writers
I have a short article in the latest issue of Poets & Writers.The piece grew out of a post here on the blog a while back about LibraryThing, the Web-based book cataloging community. For the record, I haven’t yet put all of my books into LibraryThing, though I probably will at some point. I’ve been putting it off because I know that once I get started I won’t be able to stop and, well, I just don’t have the free time at the moment.
Comics on the Web
Some of you may know that I’m a pretty big fan of comics, or to put it more broadly, stories told in a visual format. I’m not heavily into the superhero stuff, but I love newspaper comics and graphic novels as well as cartoons and animation of all kinds. So, naturally, I was pretty excited when I discovered Scott McCloud a couple of years back. McCloud is the author of two fascinating books, the first, Understanding Comics, is a study of visual storytelling. It is presented in a very clever comic format, and even if you never intend to create your own comic one day, it brings up a lot of interesting stuff about how we convey perceive narratives. A second book called Reinventing Comics addresses the many doors that have been opened to the medium by the advent of computers and the internet. Today I happened upon McCloud’s website. I’m not sure why I never thought to look for it before, but I’m glad I found it. There’s a blog, a daily improvisational comic, and tons of other comics by him and others. Check it out. It’ll keep you busy for a while.
David Foster Wallace and The Pale King
It can only be with mixed feelings that we reiterate what you’ve probably already heard: David Foster Wallace was indeed well into a new novel at the time of his death last fall. At The New Yorker, D.T. Max’s long fact piece (accompanied by an excerpt) reports that the novel was to be called The Pale King and concerned the I.R.S., as we had speculated last year. “Good People,” which appeared in The New Yorker, and “The Compliance Branch” (whose publication in Harper’s triggered those speculations) were both parts of the novel-in-progress.The Howling Fantods (the preeminent website for Wallace readers) lists a couple of other fragments that may or may not have been linked to this longer work. Of the uncollected Wallace fiction I’ve read, “Three fragments from a longer thing” and especially the “Peoria” pieces from TriQuarterly (which I don’t think anyone has connected to the longer manuscript) strike me as remarkable, and thematically of a piece. That the “Three fragments” are no longer available online suggests they are part of the incomplete Pale King manuscript, which Little, Brown will publish next year. The resulting book will probably be more like The Arcades Project than 2666 – a blueprint, rather than a raised edifice. The fact that Wallace was already reading and publishing from it may allay some of the queasiness associated with posthumous publication. Still, as of this writing, that seems at best a complicated kind form consolation.See also: David Foster Wallace 1962 – 2008