Sep 052011
 

As a riposte to the doom and gloom about writing these days, the End of Times sentiment let loose by the marketing people of the world who sense, yes, alas, that the current spasmodic writhings of capitalism bode ill for the bottom line, here’s an interview with Tom McCarthy in the magazine The Days of Yore. McCarthy is ever cheerful, smart, well-read and positive–for someone who makes a living dwelling on failure. You might say he has made a success of failure–read the McCarthy interview in the context this Zadie Smith essay in The New York Review of Books in which she contrasts the “successful” well-made middle-brow novel with McCarthy’s novel Remainder, which, as Smith says, rather “gleefully” tears apart everything we’ve come to expect from a good novel.

These aren’t particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked. For Netherland, our receptive pathways are so solidly established that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It seems perfectly done—in a sense that’s the problem. It’s so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait.

via Two Paths for the Novel by Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books.

dg

That’s some good advice. Any other advice for young writers?

I remember seeing an interview where William Burroughs was asked this question and he said, “Learn to type.” Anything I could say would be totally bland. Read a lot. See? That’s totally bland. But that would be the best.

Go smoke hashish on a bed?

[Laughs.] Go smoke hashish on a bed in Paris! No, I don’t know. Read. Read, read, read. That would be the thing. Because, ultimately, it’s not about having something to say. It’s what Kafka said, “I write in order to affirm and re-affirm that I have nothing to say.” Writing is not about having something to say. It’s about an intense relationship with the symbolic. Which means being completely immersed in literature, which means in other literature, but also in the world and all its mediations. So, maybe that would be the advice: Go and get immersed.

Everyone is grumbling about the end of the book. What do you have to say about that?

People who proclaim the end of the book just haven’t read their literary history. I mean, the first novel, Don Quixote, is about the end of the book. That is the premise of literature.

via Tom McCarthy « Visual Artists « The Days of Yore.

Mar 252011
 

Here’s a Julian Barnes essay on memoirs by Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion, both widows mourning the loss of a partner. They are a study in contrasts, and the contrasts illuminate the art of the memoir and personal tragedy.

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“Yet Oates’s A Widow’s Story and Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking could not be more different. Though Didion’s opening lines (the fourth of which is “The question of self-pity”) were jotted down a day or two after Dunne’s death, she waited eight months before beginning to write. Oates’s book is largely based on diary entries, most from the earliest part of her year: so in a 415-page book, we find that by page 125 we have covered just a week of her widowhood, and by page 325 are still only at week eight. While both books are autobiographies, Didion is essayistic and concise, seeking external points of comparison, trying to set her case in some wider context. Oates is novelistic and expansive, switching between first and third persons, seeking (not with unfailing success) to objectify herself as “the widow”; and though she occasionally reaches for the handholds of Pascal, Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Richard Crashaw, and William Carlos Williams, she is mainly focused on the dark interiors, the psycho-chaos of grief. Each writer, in other words, is playing to her strengths.”

via ‘For Sorrow There Is No Remedy’ by Julian Barnes | The New York Review of Books.

Mar 052011
 

Laura Von Rosk alerted me to this fascinating book review essay on James Gleick’s The Information: a History, a Theory, a Flood in The New York Review of Books: information theory, science, the world we live in—things it helps to know when you’re sinking in fast waters.

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According to Gleick, the impact of information on human affairs came in three installments: first the history, the thousands of years during which people created and exchanged information without the concept of measuring it; second the theory, first formulated by Shannon; third the flood, in which we now live. The flood began quietly. The event that made the flood plainly visible occurred in 1965, when Gordon Moore stated Moore’s Law. Moore was an electrical engineer, founder of the Intel Corporation, a company that manufactured components for computers and other electronic gadgets. His law said that the price of electronic components would decrease and their numbers would increase by a factor of two every eighteen months. This implied that the price would decrease and the numbers would increase by a factor of a hundred every decade. Moore’s prediction of continued growth has turned out to be astonishingly accurate during the forty-five years since he announced it. In these four and a half decades, the price has decreased and the numbers have increased by a factor of a billion, nine powers of ten. Nine powers of ten are enough to turn a trickle into a flood.

via How We Know by Freeman Dyson | The New York Review of Books.