Hotel Zero

Carver-Lish Revisited, Revisited

When I posted about the NYT story on Tess Gallagher's latest move in the Carver-Lish legacy chess match, Michael Hemmingson was kind enough to e-mail me to say that he had recently sold a book on Lish and was working on a biography of Carver. I asked him if he'd be willing to do a short interview on the matter and I'm happy that he said, "Yes."

Hemmingson is the author of 43 books, including several acclaimed novels, and studies of Bukowski, Carver, and Vollmann.  His study of Lish will be published by Taylor & Francis in 2009. His first produced screenplay, The Watermelon, will be released by LightSong Films and Hand Picked Films in 2008. Check out a trailer here--and Hemmingson's blog about the two-year process from script to production here.

Polar Disorder

I don't care to enumerate the magazines and journals we get at our house--but it's probably either too many or not half enough. Either way, shit gets buried and disappears--sometimes forever. But occasionally a pal will write or call on a sort of cultural mudslide rescue mission and ask, "You see _____ yet?!" Got such a call today about Nicholas Johnson's interview with "Nero," comparing Nero's experience contracting in Antarctica with his more-recent stints in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the November Harper's. Luckily, the issue was resting right there on the kitchen table, just beneath the fourteen new credit card offers and alumni letters and cable TV pitches we get every day.

The version in Harper's is edited down some, but whether you get Harper's or not, go check out the longer interview at Nicholas Johnson's Big Dead Place: it's unbelievably funny and tight and all the things killer writing should be.

Carver-Lish Revisited

The New York Times revisits the Raymond Carver-Gordon Lish saga today, in a piece about Tess Gallagher's desire to publish Carver's first book of stories in its original, pre-Lish state. For those unaware of what's at stake, the piece gives a brief overview and refers to D.T. Max's 1998 New York Times Magazine piece: but curiously fails to link to Max's piece in the body of the story. Max's piece--almost 8000 words long--is one of the essential pieces of literary journalism: it's fantastic. Motoko Rich's piece today is pretty good, but is essentially an update whose most fascinating item is the possibility that some future Library of America volume devoted to Carver (I'm dying for that) will include the original, unedited stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love under a new title, Beginners, and relegate WWTAWWTAL to an appendix. This seems backwards to me, but either way: it's a great idea to include both--it's not as if the cat hadn't long-since left the bag about Lish's heavy-handed editorial instincts and Carver's regrets.

Twin Cities Book Festival

OK, have to check out for the week: a few notes until I return...

1) Am introducing Chris Abani at the Twin Cities Book Festival on Saturday. Chris is an amazing human being, a terrific writer, and a fantastic speaker. If you get a chance, come out to MCTC this weekend. If you can't make it? Check out Chris's stunning TED lecture from this summer. Then go read his books.

2) Spoon concert at First Ave. tomorrow night. Will be great. Hope to see some of you there.

3) Wanted to share this great line from one of my editors (more about this soon): "Make clarity your God; the riff a minor deity." Of course, my early mentor Bill Kittredge put it somewhat more colorfully: "Keep the bullshit to less than 10% of anything you write."

Hitchens in Hell

They are going to have to cut him into many slimy pieces to spread him around the Malbolge, but extensive preparations are no doubt underway for Christopher Hitchens in the Eighth Circle of Hell. His hysterical support of the war in Iraq has been bad, but for this self-serving, sanctimonious piece of shit in the November Vanity Fair alone he's earned his wretched place.

The piece reads, on its surface, as a mea culpa of sorts on Hitchens' behalf following the death of a young man who reversed his anti-war stance after reading Hitch's many op-eds about the need to fight, joined the Army as a second-lieutenant, and then died in Iraq on January 15th, 2007. His name was Mark Daily. Hitchens learned about Daily's death after a friend forwarded Teresa Watanabe's moving L.A. Times piece on Daily, written on February 16, 2007. There is very little factual difference between Watanabe's piece and Hitchens' piece concerning the life and death of Mark Daily--but a moral gulf that may just be large enough to fit Hitchens' enormous ego lies between them.

A Disadvantage of the First Person

The novel on which I am working right now is written in the first person. It is not only the voice in which I learned to write (my first book having been a memoir), but one that carries with it the power of directness, memory, and confession. But it also has one particular--and great--disadvantage: the confinement to the knowledge and experience of a single person (in my case, a young person).

I thought of this because I had the realization in going over the day's writing that a main character's obsessions could best be described as manufactured, his dreams as kitsch. But: who could say so? No one in the novel. This is but one of the many philosophical or aesthetic or theological concerns that I take to the writing--but am prevented from putting into words. Probably for the better, no? For this disadvantage carries with it the benefit that, as novelist, I am forced to create situations so vivid in their impression that the reader will get the meaning, derive the import, and so on. Still, it's no fun to be forced to play with half a deck... or less: the single Joker of my imagination.

The Artifact as an Object of Hope

The new editions McSweeney's and Virginia Quarterly Review came yesterday and looking at them on my desk I think: "These beautiful objects, these artifacts of our culture, carry with them a kind of hope." I have only had a chance to browse the actual contents of these issues (a kind of double-entendre that), but I know from getting VQR since Ted Genoways took over and from owning every McSweeney's but one or two (subscriptions: would that there were some sort of meta-subscription management service by which you could track all your subscriptions, their expiration dates, etcetera), as well as nearly every issue of Granta (my grandmother gave me the entire back-list last year, all the way back to their first issue) and most of the new Paris Review under Philip Gourevitch's tenure, that so long as quarterlies have not only great writing with in them, but also an amazing taste in design, photography, binding, etcetera, they will continue to work as physical vessels of culture no matter what else happens with the 'Nets onslaught of "free" on the paid bastions of culture. Holding an issue of any one of these quarterlies in your hand is enough, without reading a page, to raise the thought: "This should--no, this will--survive."

Lifestyles of the Poor and Shabby

Had brunch yesterday at The Loft with Jane Hamilton and the winners of this year's Loft-McKnight Fellowship, for which Hamilton was the judge. I was invited because I'd won "Honorable Mention." It would be easy enough to be surly at this near-miss, but I was happy to go. The Loft has been good to me (they gave me my first writing award, way back when, and now invite me to teach/speak) & really: it's such a treasure that it always cheers me a little to walk their halls.

Quick Hits: Reviewery Edition

Yellow Ribbons and Flag Waving

Nathaniel Fick, author of the first-rate memoir One Bullet Away, has a nice piece up at the Poetry website:  a review of recent war poetry. A highlight is Nate's personal use of poetry while commanding Marines in Afghanistan--and his appreciation for Brian Turner's Here, Bullet. I gave Here, Bullet a rave review last year in Rain Taxi.

The Savage Critic

I don't think Heidi Julavits got the credit her essay against snark deserved (it wasn't as namby-pamby as people said it was), but you know: I don't think I could live without snark. I love a good negative review. Especially of over-hyped books or books by famous authors who aren't living up to their talent. They can go overboard, as Michiko Kakutani did with her Caulfield-eque review of Benjamin Kunkel's worthwhile freshman effort, Indecision, a couple years ago. But still: keeping up our USRDA of schadenfreude requires negative reviews, and no one does a negative review better--more accurately, with more humor and understanding--than William Logan. His piercing of Pynchon's Against the Day in this summer's Virginia Quarterly Review is a must-read.

Operator Precedence

A friend recently passed along this link, to a TED demo on Microsoft's work on Photosynth. When the folks at TED call this demo "jaw dropping," they're not kidding. If you have any interest at all in where digital media may be headed, or the possibilities for online narrative could go, you have to check this out.

In a historical vein, Kottke points our attention to Alex Wright's Glut. As Jason says, "Whoa." Guess Vannevar Bush's 1945 Atlantic article, "As We May Think" wasn't the first articulation of the idea behind the Web. Rather, that honor belongs to a Belgian artist, Paul Otlet. Read Kottke's post for more, including a video of Otlet's presenting his ideas.

Finally, while doing a little searching on the history of hypertext novels (and Nabokov's Pale Fire often gets the nod, while I'd give it to Cortazar's Hopscotch, which came just a year later: it's not any more obviously intertextual--but it handles its intertextuality in a way which is much more like the way in which we browse the Web than Nabokov's sequentially straight-jacketed Pale Fire does), I came across this intriguing "History of Hypertext Timeline."