New York’s NPR affiliate, WNYC, has posted downloadable audio of last weekend’s 75th Birthday celebration for Philip Roth. Featured speakers include Jonathan Lethem, Charles D’Ambrosio, and Hermione Lee. Alvin Pepler, unfortunately, had a prior engagement…
When He Was Good…
A Guy, His Brother, and the Broken Mental Health System
My neighbor and friend Jacob Lambert wrote a powerful piece for Philadelphia Weekly recently about his brother David, who has been diagnosed with acute bipolar disorder:I was at home in Bella Vista when he called. Last I'd heard he'd "eloped" from the hospital and was wandering his old East Village haunts. This was nothing new; many times over the years, his ward status had been upgraded, giving him a bit of freedom - and he'd simply walk off, winding up in Manhattan, then Bellevue, then back at the hospital he'd started from.Today, though, he wasn't calling from a pay phone on Bleecker Street. He was on a cell phone at Seventh and Pine, saying he was browsing apartments, was owed $100,000 and would be buying me a new Mercedes. He sounded as bad as ever, and the call ended when he set down the phone to talk to a stranger.Incidentally, Jacob also runs the hilarious Philly Turkey, a must read for Philly natives.
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Save the Bloggers
We all work very hard at The Millions. But writing about books, despite being, uh, serious business, is not necessarily life threatening. Blogging for the 24/7 news cycle is, apparently.Sticking with journalism's good-old "three is a trend" praxis and using three bloggers who suffered heart attacks, two of them fatal, the New York Times published a front-page story Sunday, highlighting the strains and risks of strenuous blogging for Web sites like TechCrunch, Gizmodo, and Gawker, among others.I am beginning to suspect that the Gray Lady is attracted to this hot young thing. A month ago on Sunday the paper published a story about politicos blogging from DC. In what read like a oh-look-at-my-fabulous-blogging-life article, the Times described life in assorted "flophouses" where 20-somethings all cohabitated and blogged together, having parties on Super Tuesday to celebrate - and, of course, write about - the primaries. OK, there's only one flophouse, but the assorted houses do exist.And while DC bloggers help shape the political landscape, their Wall Street cousins are said to be moving markets, according to this academic study. Tip of the day: following financial blogs and short selling stocks accordingly may make you a quick buck - not a bad deal in this economy.Alternatively, you can tune in to The Millions, where we shun heart attacks and continue to post at our leisurely - and hopefully satisfactory - pace.
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Survey Says: People Are Reading
Here's news. In a new survey conducted by polling firm Harris, "over one-third of Americans read more than ten books in typical year." As regulars on the literature-is-a-dying-art beat, we know that this flies in the face of countless other surveys which have found that the typical American home contains just six books, all of which are used as doorstops.To pull a couple such surveys at random from Google, a National Endowment for the Arts study "Reading at Risk" (PDF) found that in 2002 only 56.6% of Americans had read any book at all that year, while the percentage having read a work of "literature" was just 46.7%. An AP-Ipsos poll last year found that one in four hadn't read any books over the prior year (though presumably three out of four had).To compare apples and apples, Harris finds that 91% of Americans read a book over the last year, though of those, only 27% read "literature."Can anything be made of these surveys other than that they are a little silly?
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From the Newsstand: Workshop Porn
Its laudatory impulses notwithstanding, Louis Menand's worthwhile essay in the current New Yorker on Mark McGurl's The Program Era - an account of the rise of the creative writing program - doesn't quite save the book from sounding depressing. For those with ambitions to write fiction, Menand offers a whirlwind tour of a sausage factory. Except that in this case you're not the guy who likes to eat sausage, but the guy (or gal) who raises the hogs. Or maybe you are the hog itself. Reading Menand reading McGurl, you get the very same sense of a vast, tentacular, and mildly deterministic academic-industrial complex you might get in... well, a creative writing program. Which speaks to the characteristic thoroughness of Menand's writing. And, presumably, of McGurl's book.Largely absent from Menand's account (and Mark Grief's review in Bookforum), however, is the question of money. Even for those who agree emphatically with Menand that "there is no 'craft of fiction' as such," the value of two or three years of subsidized writing time is hard to understate. Rilke had the Princess of Thurn and Taxis; we have AWP. And though the rise of the M.F.A. program may well exert a systemic pressure on the writer, it need not, as Menand is at pains to point out, vitiate the visionary. By far my favorite nugget in the Menand piece is his mention of two workshops filled with idiosyncratic talent:Ken Kesey, Robert Stone, Larry McMurtry, Ernest Gaines, Tillie Olsen, and Wendell Berry taught by Wallace Stegner at StanfordJohn Irving, Andre Dubus, Gail Godwin, and John Casey taught by Kurt Vonnegut at Iowa.I've also heard tell of a workshop that includedJhumpa Lahiri, Ha Jin, Peter Ho Davies, and Marshall Klimasewiski taught by our guest contributor (and National Book Award finalist) Joan Silber at Boston University.If any of you out there have taken, or know of, similarly stacked workshops, we'd be curious to hear about them, if only as a way of letting M.F.A. applicants cling to a little of the glamor McGurl and Menand have done the rest of us the great favor of dispelling. Somehow the prospect of participating in an aesthetic of "class-based self-consciousness" pales next to the thought of getting drunk with Richard Ford and ripping on Jay McInerney... and hasn't that always been (along with the financial assistance, of course) the most compelling reason to apply to a writing program?
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Ian McEwan: How could we have forgotten that this was always going to happen?
Sitting here in Chicago, there's not much I can write about the terrible events that occurred in London yesterday. But I think Ian McEwan does a good job of capturing both the inevitability and the sadness of yesterday's bombings in his piece in the Guardian: Those rehearsals for a multiple terrorist attack underground were paying off. In fact, now the disaster was upon us, it had an air of weary inevitability, and it looked familiar, as though it had happened long ago. In the drizzle and dim light, the police lines, the emergency vehicles, the silent passers by appeared as though in an old newsreel film in black and white. The news of the successful Olympic bid was more surprising than this. How could we have forgotten that this was always going to happen?Read it here.
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The New York Times ‘Funny Pages’
No the Times isn't getting comics, but they are taking a cue from the New Yorker by adding a graphic novel-type comics section to the Sunday magazine. Everybody's been saying for years that "graphic novels" are on the cusp of taking the book world by storm. Is this a step in that direction? The first artist to appear will be, you guessed it, Chris Ware. Get the gory details here.
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From the Newsstand: Ian McEwan Week
Last week, The New Yorker ran a profile (subscription required) of Ian McEwan that was scarcely shorter than McEwan's most recent novel, On Chesil Beach. For all its expansiveness, however, the article failed to offer readers the supreme pleasure of McEwan's best fiction: a kind of psychological X-ray. And where writer Daniel Zalewski did manage to see inside McEwan the man, he seemed to discover there - perhaps unwittingly - a certain metaphysico-aesthetic complacency. For example, of John Banville's quite valid complaint about Saturday's "rosy" view of marriage (the wealthy and brilliant protagonist starts his day with wake-up sex), McEwan remarked, "The critic was revealing far more about himself and his wife's teeth-flossing habits than anything about the book."A measure of pride may be in order - Atonement sold 2 million copies! Still, self-satisfaction represents one of writing's occupational hazards, in both senses of the phrase. Doubt is for the novelist what faith is for the priest.Anyway, I'm pleased to report that my worries about McEwan were short-lived. His meditation on John Updike in the New York Review of Books shows us an empiricist still capable of wonderment. Better yet, unlike the New Yorker piece, the NYRB essay is free to all online. If time constraints force you to choose between reading Ian McEwan and reading about Ian McEwan... well, you know what to do.
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