Place is one of the central themes in my life. The importance it holds for me is not normal. So it makes sense that the last few books I’ve cracked–A Man Without A Country by Kurt Vonnegut and Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck–are about place and thus about culture.
Rob Walker’sLetters from New Orleans is a wonderful narrative like the aforementioned titles, concerned like I am, with place. And any visitor to, or resident of, New Orleans will tell you, the Crescent City is quite a place.
Walker, who writes the “Consumed” column in the The New York Times Magazine, started by sending the stories in this volume as emails to friends. He covers a wide swath of material in this book—”the projects,” Carnival, high society, race, music, parades, food and more. One story I particulary like is called “3% Theory.” In it, Walker introduces the reader to performance artist Kal Spelletich. He first encountered Spelletich while a student at U of T in Austin. Given that Spelletich had come to Austin from Iowa, Walker asked if he wasn’t relieved to be in a more diverse place like Austin. Spelletich responed, “There’s always a fringe element. You could go to Waco, Texas, and 3 percent of the people are going to be these experiemental artists.”
Walker tells two tales about legendary New Orleans’ restaurant Galatoire’s. It’s funny stuff. He has a journalist’s eye for detail and nails the crusty oldtimers, drinking heavily and flirting over five-hour Friday luncheons.
It’s clear that Walker’s love for New Orleans is the real deal. I’ve only been there during Jazz Fast–yes five of them–but I know enough to know how important the culture of this most un-American of American cities is to the nation, to my friends and to me personally. Letters deepens the mystery whist revealing it (no easy task).
My real concerns with file-sharing are primarily aesthetic.
There’s a story by Jorge LuÃs Borges called “The Library of Babel.†It describes a fantastical library composed of an apparently infinite number of identical rooms. Each room contains 1,050 books. Printed on the pages are words whose lettering and order are apparently random. Because the library is complete, among the gibberish it also contains every book that is possible, every book that could ever be written. It also contains every imaginable variation of every book possible, whether that variation is off by thousands of letters or by a single comma. Borges adds that it must contain, somewhere, a book that explains the meaning and origin of the library itself – just as it contains thousands of variations of that book, true and false. He writes, “When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure…As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression.â€
The Internet – with its glut not only of information but of misinformation, and of information that is only slightly correct, or only slightly incorrect – fills me with this same weird mixture of happiness and depression. I sometimes feel drowned in information, deadened by it. How many hundreds of bored hours have you spent mechanically poring through web pages not knowing what you’re looking for, or knowing what you’re looking for but not feeling satisfied when you find it? You hunger but you’re not filled. Everything is freely available on the Internet, and is accordingly made inestimably valuable and utterly value-less.
Damn, a rock star made from brains. Who knew?
According to Wikipedia, Sheff was an English major at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota (which explains a lot).
To read more of his writings, visit this Jound.com page.
10 Zen Monkeys has a compelling piece on the interwebs and whether advances in communications technology is any good for writers. RU Sirius asks 10 writers to consider the question. Here are some bits of wisdom from one of the 10 writers, Mark Drey.
On writing as a commodity:
As someone who once survived (albeit barely) as a freelancer, I can say with some authority that the freelance writer is going the way of the Quagga. Well, at least one species of freelance writer: the public intellectual who writes for a well-educated, culturally literate reader whose historical memory doesn’t begin with Dawson’s Landing. A professor friend of mine, well-known for his/her incisive cultural criticism, just landed a column for PopMatters.com. Now, a column is yeoman’s work and it doesn’t pay squat. But s/he was happy to get the gig because she wanted to burnish her brand, presumably, and besides, as she noted, “Who does, these days?” (Pay, that is.)
On breaking through the clutter:
We’re drowning in yak, and it’s getting harder and harder to hear the insightful voices through all the media cacophony. Oscar Wilde would be just another forlorn blogger out on the media asteroid belt in our day, constantly checking his SiteMeter’s Average Hits Per Day and Average Visit Length.
I have become as much in awe of Technology as I am of Nature. And although I blog for free, occasional paid assignments have fallen into my lap as a result.
Media critic Norman Solomon’s book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death has been made into a movie by Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp. It’s narrated by Sean Penn.
Guided by Solomon’s meticulous research and tough-minded analysis, the film presents disturbing examples of propaganda and media complicity from the present alongside rare footage of political leaders and leading journalists from the past, including Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, dissident Senator Wayne Morse, and news correspondents Walter Cronkite and Morley Safer.
Jim Hightower suggests the book, which came out in 2005, is a must read:
If you want to help prevent another war (Iran? Syria?), read War Made Easy now. This is a stop-the-presses book filled with mind-blowing facts about Washington’s warmongers who keep the Pentagon budget rising. It would be funny if people weren’t dying. War Made Easy exposes the grisly game and offers the information we need to stop it.
“Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moment’s torture.” -from Atlas Shrugged
The New York Times Business section is marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
Rand celebrates industry and the power of individual contributions. To her, these are the central engines working for good in the world.
The novel begins in a time of recession. To save the economy, the hero, John Galt (an inventor of a revolutionary new motor powered by ambient static electricity), calls for a strike against government interference. Factories, farms and shops shut down. Riots break out as food becomes scarce.
Rand said she “set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them†and to portray “what happens to a world without them.â€
The book was released to terrible reviews. Critics faulted its length, its philosophy and its literary ambitions. Both conservatives and liberals were unstinting in disparaging the book; the right saw promotion of godlessness, and the left saw a message of “greed is good.†Rand is said to have cried every day as the reviews came out.
According to the article, Rand’s fans include many captains of industry. James M. Kilts, who led turnarounds at Gillette, Nabisco and Kraft, said he encountered “Atlas†at “a time in college life when everybody was a nihilist, anti-establishment, and a collectivist.†He found her writing reassuring because it made success seem rational.
British writer J.G. Ballard describes his work environment:
On the desk is my old manual typewriter, which I recently found in my stair cupboard. I was inspired by a letter from Will Self, who wrote to me on his manual typewriter. So far I have just stared at the old machine, without daring to touch it, but who knows? The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don’t think a great book has yet been written on computer.
Ballard has worked at the desk pictured above for the past 47 years.
Two of Ballard’s novels–Crash (1973) and Empire of the Sun (1984)–have been made into Hollywood films.
I’d jumped into the social-networking site after a fellow author told me I absolutely had to use MySpace to promote my forthcoming book. “I’d try it myself, but I feel too old to be on that thing,†she said. So here I was navigating though pages of Hello Kitty wallpaper and frat brothers wearing chicken heads. Supposedly, thousands of writers had migrated onto MySpace, but where were they? Eventually, through trial and error, I discovered the best way to find them: if you type the right word into the site’s search engine — say, “Foucault†or “Kafka†— you will tumble through the rabbit hole into MySpace’s literary scene.
Imagine a version of Studio 54 where Jane Austen, wearing nothing but gold panties, vomits all over Harold Bloom’s shoes while infomercials for debut novels flash on the walls. In literary MySpace, most people are cruising: they’re hoping to find cute nerds, to hype a memoir or to indulge some bookworm fetish. Pranksters pretending to be Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein and Ovid rub elbows with authors masquerading as their own characters. Of course, many of the profiles are just glorified advertising pages. And yet, amid all the craziness, readers have formed dozens of groups — for instance, Ladies and Lads of Library Land — to engage in serious bibliophilic conversation.
Rice University professor, Justin Cronin, is an emerging voice in fiction, commanding multi-million dollar deals from both Manahttan publishing houses and Hollywood producers.
His 2001 release Mary and O’Neil garnered the author prestigious literary prizes, but now an unfinished manuscript has people writing big checks.
According to The New York Times, Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions won a biddng war for movie rights to Cronin’s lastest, eventually offering $1.75 million. This is on top of the $3.75 million Ballantine Books is paying for a trilogy from the New England-bred, Houston-based author.
Ellen Levine, a literary agent at Trident Media Group, is the woman orchestrating these deals on Cronin’s behalf. One of her ploys was to send out the new book under the pseudonym “Jordan Ainsley” because Cronin was known more for writing midsize family dramas than for Stephen King-size thrillers, and she didn’t want her client to be typecast by his previous literary success.
Cronin’s new story, a futuristic fable about death row inmates transformed into vampires by a government-spawned virus, has vast commercial potential, Ms. Levine said. She is currently shopping the trilogy to foreign publishers, having already sealed deals in seven other countries.
Mules are noble creatures. This is especially true for the inhabitants of Trujillo, one of Venezuela’s three Andean states.
According to a BBC report, mules are four-legged libraries in these parts, thanks to an innovative service from University of Momboy, a small institution that prides itself on its community-based initiatives.
We reached Calembe, the first village on this path.
Anyone who was not out working the fields – tending the celery that is the main crop here – was waiting for our arrival. The 23 children at the little school were very excited.
“Bibilomu-u-u-u-las,” they shouted as the bags of books were unstrapped. They dived in eagerly, keen to grab the best titles and within minutes were being read to by Christina and Juana, two of the project leaders.
“Spreading the joy of reading is our main aim,” Christina Vieras told me.
Not content to stop at books, Robert Ramirez, the co-ordinator of the university’s Network of Enterprising Rural Schools, also wants to hook the remote villagers up to the Web.
“We want to install wireless modems under the banana plants so the villagers can use the internet,” says Ramirez. “Imagine if people in the poor towns in the valley can e-mail saying how many tomatoes they’ll need next week, or how much celery. The farmers can reply telling them how much they can produce. It’s blending localisation and globalisation.”
Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic, who learned English as a teenage immigrant, will be the new U.S. poet laureate, the Library of Congress announced Thursday.
Mr. Simic taught at the University of New Hampshire for 34 years before moving to emeritus status. He won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1990 for his book of prose poems, “The World Doesn’t End.” He also is an essayist, translator, editor and professor emeritus of creative writing and literature.
Mr. Simic was born in Yugoslavia in 1938, and his childhood was disrupted by World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15 and joined his father in New York a year later, in 1954. He has been a U.S. citizen for 36 years. “I am especially touched and honored to be selected because I am an immigrant boy who didn’t speak English until I was 15,” he said.
Later on Thursday, Simic received another honor, the 14th annual Wallace Stevens Award, a $100,000 prize from the Academy of American Poets for “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.”
