“I suppose the truth is I became a little self-conscious about people telling me how much they loved my sentences,” says James Salter in his interview with Jonathan Lee. “It’s flattering, but it seemed to me that this love of sentences was in some sense getting in the way of the book itself.” As it happens, our own Sonya Chung reviewed Salter’s latest book this week, and she, too, remarked on Salter’s desire “to ‘get past the great writer-of-sentences thing,’ and presumably the ‘writers’ writer’ thing.”
#SalterProblems
A Necessary Evil
Is the system rigged? Aaron Bady at The New Inquiry discusses the inherent evil of the canon and the general problem with lists. For more on why we care about literary awards in the first place, here is Mark O’Connell from The Millions.
Birnbaum and Giraldi
Robert Birnbaum talks to William Giraldi, author of Busy Monsters, about Val Kilmer, Diana Ross, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, among other topics.
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The Cosmonaut
Conrad Aiken’s tombstone reads: “Cosmos Mariner — Destination Unknown.” Which raises the question: what exactly does this epitaph say about the poet’s work? In the LA Times, an argument that Aiken deserves a reappraisal.
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Paging Hilla Becher
Recommended Reading: These fifteen short texts in search of Hilla Becher, photographer and life/artistic partner of Bernd Becher: “One of the creations of her and Bernd’s artistic partnership was the seemingly perfect fusion of their visions. ‘No, there is no division of labor,’ they told an interviewer in 1989, in a conversation that pointedly doesn’t designate which of them is speaking. ‘Outsiders cannot tell who has taken a particular photo and we also often forget ourselves. It simply is not important.'”
Margaret Cho’s Advice
Margaret Cho’s advice for “hacking it?” Write what you think is funny, not what you think people will like.
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Oh Doctor
Recommended Reading: Frances Stonor Saunders on Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago.
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The Eye of God
We’re guessing this is the first short story in the history of modern fiction to mention both The Legend of Zelda and a Reddit Ask Me Anything thread.
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