From today's New York Times:
At its heart, “TITLE REDACTED” is a book about a marriage and the journey through grief that a widow [name redacted] makes after the death of her husband, [name redacted], also a rock star of the book world.
You know this book, right? The title, author and link after the jump.
With this here internet, I can get the scoop on this JG Ballard appearance, uh, somewhere (I think in the UK?).
While the man is, apparently, old, fat and deaf, he's no dummy; when asked where to find vital writing today, he says, "on the internet" (of course).
Say you want to go to an artist's colony to get some quiet time to work. There's a long list, topped by the prestigious Yaddo and MacDowell colonies, which are free for attendees. Aspiring writers, visual artists and composers can apply to those two just once a year, and, for the last year that numbers were published for MacDowell (2003), only about 16% get in. But a careless aside in today's NY Times story on residencies implies that the application process isn't for everyone.
[Michael] Chabon and his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, take turns going to the MacDowell colony for two-week stretches each year.
Sigh. Looks like once you win a Pulitzer, getting into competitive residency programs is as tough as getting reservations at the Motel 6.
This week Ron Hogan adds a little levity to the ongoing hotties of publishing debate with a Writer's Digest piece called Does This Book Jacket Make Me Look Fat? Technically, Galleycat's winenrs were NAL/Roc editor Liz Scheier and Stephen Barbara, an agent with Donald Maas. But when people in the publishing world are hot, don't we all win, really?
And news is out that Matt Cheney will have a story in One Story this fall. Actually, he'll have THE story in One Story, since that's how One Story works. Hooray for Matt!
All of which made me think, hey, didn't I see Ron and Matt in the same place earlier this year? And didn't I have a camera? Why yes! That was when I snuck into AWP with Kassia (we were at SXSWi, but the two conferences were in the same building). Seems to me like Kassia ought to have some cool news on the way, too.
If you missed the NPR segment this morning with Infinite Jest author David Foster Wallace talking to Scott "Mr. Poignant" Simon about tennis star Roger Federer, do check it out online (audio available today at 1pm Eastern). It's an awkward mismatch for the ages.
He's had a column in the Washington Post for longer than I can remember. He's 80. He was a plaintiff in what was perhaps the most high-profile writer vs. Hollywood studios lawsuit -- and he won. And after making sure he wasn't cheated by Hollywood, he himself cheated death. People don't check out of hospices, but that's exactly what Art Buchwald did last month.
So they took a leg. Whatever. He's summering at Martha's Vineyard and working on a not-dead-yet book. He is, apparently, playing ukelele for his adoring family.
I didn't know that he was a fellow USC alumni until I read his Wikipedia entry. Until late last year, we shared not-quite-graduated status. Alas, now I actually have a diploma. So I have nothing in common, really, with him. I can't even play the ukelele.
This week, Art Buchwald is profiled in the NY Times home section at his summer haven, almost post-humously. But not quite.
Video interview: "The job I have, writing, makes it easy to be an alcoholic. I get up when I want to, I write when I want to. I write about 3 hours a week. That's a good job ... three hour, three hour job. And I get away with it."
"I wanted to ... put on the page a memorial to the family that I loved. A huge, violent, working-class family that had problems with liquor and poverty and generally being thought poorly of."
Yes, that's Mickey Spillane, who died yesterday at age 88. And yes, that's Karen Black, ubiquitous '70s film actress, now Scientologist. A quick imdb search indicates they never worked on the same movie, so I'm not sure what she's doing on his lap. Your hypotheses are welcome in the comments.
Sure, Spillane was a major writer of crime fiction, but I don't agree with Sarah at Galleycat that "Without him, amoral characters would not have become iconic archetypal heroes." His first book, I, The Jury, came out in 1947, 8 years after Chandler's book The Big Sleep, in which detective Philip Marlowe may not be amoral, but he is both morally ambiguous and our hero. And back in 1931 The Public Enemy -- in which James Cagney, the gangster, smashes a gradpefruit half in his wife's face -- was a wildly popular film with an amoral hero. Spillane was a tough, sloppy writer with an outsize ego and a sense of humor, but in my book, he wasn't an innovator -- he did what other people were doing, just more brutally. And he got lucky.
That said, Sarah's got great, exhaustive coverage of Spillane across the web on her blog. And most people have higher opinions of Spillane than I do.
LA poet SA Griffin gets his due with the cover story of LA Alternative this week. Well, it would be nice if it were the NY Times Magazine instead, but at least it's some attention. SA has been a generous and kind fixture on the LA literary scene for years. He met Bukowski, he let Beck play his little songs at poetry readings, and has even has been the minister at a number of weddings. He was on Pinky's Paperhaus once, too, but sadly the recording was lost to a technical glitch.
SA has the heart of a true poet -- beat or punk style, that is. Basically, he does his thing. He doesn't care if you're cool, and he doesn't care if you think he's cool or not.
SA started doing southwest poetry tours in the '80s, ending with the grandest of them all, a 1991 bus tour that flopped horribly. Part of the flop was that they were freaks in a breaking-down bus that was painted freakishly -- we all got together with spraypaint (I had a lot of spraypaint then, and I wasn't the only one) and made sure the bus would stand out. Out in the desert, they didn't like that so much. I don't think it helped that the bus was full of drunken poets. Drunk drunk drunks.
I would quote one of SA's poems here but his website is down -- too busy. Hooray! Good for SA Griffin!
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