1. Research a social issue. 2. Start a blog. 3. ??? 4. Become a public intellectual! Or not.
Four Easy Steps
Joshua Cohen’s Epic
Joshua Cohen, author of the just-published meganovel Witz, dispenses provocations in The New York Observer: "The targets might be Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shalom Auslander... When I started this book, I wanted to sleep with their wives. By the time I finished, I wanted to sleep with their mothers."
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New Eggers Story
Today's second dose of recommended reading: Dave Eggers has a new short story, "The Alaska of Giants and Gods," in The New Yorker.
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A Time of Scarcity
“I realized that there was something wrong with an arrangement whereby a relatively affluent person such as I had become could afford to write about minimum wage jobs, squirrels as an urban food source or the penalties for sleeping in parks, while the people who were actually experiencing these sorts of things, or were in danger of experiencing them, could not.” Barbara Ehrenreich on writing about poverty.
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Netflix’s Evolution
In a move that will likely become more and more common, The Weinstein Company has inked a deal with Netflix to license some of its latest (and most critically acclaimed) films to Instant Watch instead of traditional cable outlets. Coriolanus, Undefeated, and The Artist will be among the first titles released. Elsewhere, Vanity Fair profiles Netflix's "bloody but only slightly bowed" CEO, Reed Hastings.
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The Writing Life Game
How do you become a writer? The Los Angeles Times asked 200 writers participating in their Festival of Books how they got started and created a board game based on their responses. Roll the die to find out if you'll be a successful writer or not.
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Holden Caulfield Has No Friends
Chances are you’ve heard that in a recent interview, Claire Messud responded to a patronizing question about one of her characters -- “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?” -- by giving her interviewer a smackdown that resonated across the blogosphere. At Page-Turner, several authors (including Rivka Galchen, Jonathan Franzen and Year in Reading alumna Margaret Atwood) offer their own takes on the matter of "likeability." (There's also this piece by our own Emily St. John Mandel to consider.)
The second paragraph made me check out. We’re less educated than we were forty or fifty years ago? There isn’t a single example of a public intellectual writing today who is as intelligent or well read or profound as those titans of yesteryear because…what, human beings now are just dumber? Please.