Literature & The Arts

If someone had told me what Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale was about, I don’t think I would have read it.

Written in 1983, the plot is three parts Gangs of New York, two parts Age of Innocence, with a dash of Dickens and a pinch of Lord of the Rings.

A turn-of-century “period piece” set in and around the city of New York, with swash-buckling swamp dwellers and flying horses.

Two strikes.

But Peter Lake is such a compelling character, who finds himself in such classical literary circumstance...

I hate William Gaddis.

As a would-be writer, Gaddis has had no direct influence on me. And yet, pretty much everything I have done, or planned to do, or started to do, as a writer, which I genuinely thought to be fresh or innovative, I have come to discover has pretty much already been done by Gaddis. The invasion or interruption of action or speech with sounds, voices, lyrics, television programs, or signs (J.R.), the depiction of dialogue which is more competition than cooperation, (J.R....

Milan Kundera begins with a somewhat abstract and philosophical exposition on the unbearable lightness, or weight, of being. It is pretty much all tell, and no show. And yet I loved it. I thought it was pure genius.

Putting it negatively, the myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing....

A Frolic of His Own has some of the funniest passages I have ever read.

I’m not sure whether, if I were not a practicing attorney, I would have appreciated them less, or even more.

But the formal pleadings and deposition colloquies, for example, were exaggerated enough to bring out the comedy, yet genuine enough so as not to be absurd.

As in JR, I found the legal aspects of the novel very authentic, both in substance and in form. It is surprising that Gaddis did not go to law school, at t...

I was at Starbucks the other day and saw a Dylan greatest hits type collection which seemed to be mostly a compilation of eighteen songs from the Greatest Hits and Greatest Hits Vol. 2 records, along with a few more recent tracks like Hurricane.

For some artists, the Greatest Hits are pretty much the only songs you would ever want to listen to. In fact, for many bands, even the Greatest Hits would only “hit” your turntable, or i-Pod, around 2 or 3 times out of 10.

But for our favorite arti...

There’s really not much to this book. You know exactly where it is going. And yet, when you get there, it’s still moving.

At the beginning, McCarthy pretty much tells you, flat out, what the dilemma is. (Will the father be strong enough to do what’s necessary, when the time comes?) Which, at the time, I thought was fairly “on the nose” and unnecessary.

Yet I wonder whether, absent the explicit set-up, the rest of the narrative would have held its dramatic tension. It might have just fe...

I think I would have probably liked and appreciated Herzog more had I read it a long time ago.

I read Philip Roth’s introduction, and noted his comment that Herzog was like an American Leopold Bloom, except that “in Ulysses, the encyclopedic mind of the author is transmuted into the linguistic flesh of the novel, and Joyce never cedes to Bloom his own great erudition, intellect, and breadth of rhetoric, whereas in Herzog Bellow endows his hero with all of that.”

My “criticism” of the book, ...

As someone from New Orleans, (host of the Sugar Bowl), I am admittedly biased in favor of the traditional bowl system.

But there seem to be several reasons, aside from money and tradition, to favor it over a play-off system.

First of all, it’s generally pretty clear who the National Champion is. There is sometimes a lot of debate about who should get to play for the title in the No. 2 spot, but usually, things shake out and you have a clear No. 1 team.

(Parenthetically, let’s note that LS...

I don’t think there is really any comedian around who does what Richard Pryor did. Comedians tell jokes. They make observations. Sometimes they do impressions, or impersonations. But Richard Pryor was like a method actor. He would get into character. Or multiple characters. And play them out. A lot of what he said was funny in the “ha-ha” sense, but a lot of it was also “funny” in the pleasure that comes with enlightenment or revelation.

I obviously don’t know what it was like in the...

The moment I lost any last bit of respect I might have had for John Kerry is when he got on tv and actually apologized for the Swift Boat incident. Who was he apologizing to? For what? Being on the other side of the river? Who cares? He’s getting shot at. He should have said, “I don’t really know exactly where I was. It’s not like you’re on the Interstate and they put up those signs. ‘Welcome to Cambodia. Rest stop ahead.’ I know one thing: I was serving my country. I was getting shot at. A...

Despite taking Latin for five years, I still managed to eke out only a 3 on the AP. Not having placed out of the language requirement at college, Latin was an appealing alternative to the spoken language requirements, which consisted of three quarters instead of only two, as well as a pretty intensive early morning lab. Latin 1 was a breeze. But when Latin 3 came around, I was serving as pledge trainer in my fraternity, and was also taking an extra class at the time. After doing okay on t...

I never understood the news reports that someone has been paid a bunch of money for the rights to his or her story. Your “story” is not something you own. It’s just something that happens.

When I published A Day in the Life of Timothy Stone, I wrote to all of these authors and publishers for permission to use all of these pieces of song lyrics and other fragments from books or movies or magazines. I wasn’t sure if I needed it, but I figured I might as well be on the safe side. Austin &am...

In the fall of 1989, I was living in Washington D.C. and had purchased a cassette tape of A Child's Christmas in Whales from a record store on Wisconsin Ave, which I listened to while falling asleep at night. A paid intern at the DSCC, I had some time on my hands during the day, and started composing some prose/poems in that vein. Nov. 22, 1989 was done on or around my birthday, shortly followed by Thursdays in Late November and a few other "Work Songs". Obviously no comparison to...

When I turned 21, I was living in Washington D.C. working at the DSCC. Inspired, I guess, by A Child's Christmas in Whales, I starting typing this out, followed soonafter by Thursdays in Late November. Obviously no comparison to Dylan Thomas, what I find interesting, as several of these words come up red on the Spell-Check, is the "Impressionistic" meaning they retain, (at least for me), separate and apart from the formal definitions you would -- or, more to the point, would not -...

I don't really consider photography "art", at least in the same way I would view an oil painting. Particularly with the development auto-focus and one-hour processing and now especially with the advent of digital photography, things have become so democritized that it's virtually impossible to set oneself apart as an "artist".

Yet I find photographs themselves aesthetically pleasing and, (in an "artistic" sense), have the potential to change the way in which you...

Chris Anderson must have a great press agent. There were reviews of his book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, in the Economist, the New Yorker, Newsweek and BusinessWeek, all at the same time.

From the perspective of a store like Wal-Mart, the music industry stops at less than 60,000 tracks. However, for online retailers like Rhapsody the market is seemingly never-ending. Not only is every one of Rhapsody’s top 60,000 tracks streamed at least once each mon...

I love the last sentence.

“What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”

I love the Swede Levov character.

I don’t know if I have ever identified with a fictional character (or even another real person) in the same way I identified with Levov.

(Who, whether coincidentally or by design, is a literary alter ego of sorts to the Rabbit Angstrom character.)

As a reader, I like this book.

But the way this book is written makes no sense.

You start out with I guess what is ...

The Age of Wire and String is, apparently, the “period in which English science devised abstract parlance system based on the flutter pattern of string and wire structures placed over the mouth during speech.”

“Patriarchal systems and figures, including Michael Marcuses, were also constructed during this period – they are the only fathers to outlast their era.”

First Reading:

I think this book probably deserves a closer read than I was prepared to invest on a flight from St. Louis to New O...

When I was living in D.C. during my junior year of college, I found, somewhere, a recording of Dylan Thomas reading A Child’s Christmas in Whales and listened to it over and over again. I had this really boring internship at the DSCC, and would spend spare time at my desk working on these “lyrical” or “poetic” pieces in prose. There’s a certain voice I can do sometimes, (although I seemed to be able to do it a lot easier when I was younger), that I really appreciate. I was trying to figure...

JR, by William Gaddis, is really an ingenious book.

Funny. Interesting. Thought-provoking. Novel, in style. And captures, both substantively and in form, many elements of modern society.

It is, in many ways, like A Day in the Life of Timothy Stone. The dashes. The absence of chapters, or other section breaks. The interruption, or inspiration, provided by sounds streaming in from radio or tv. He also does something I had thought was fairly "original" in the The Gordian Knot...

I would think that years from now One Dead in Attic will be but a footnote to the Hurricane Katrina story. Someone important will write the “authoritative” account – which will, itself, be to most of the world little more than a footnote to Bush’s failed presidency.

But for the people living in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina, Chris Rose’s columns in the Times Picayune have served as a kind of public diary for the city’s representative observations and reactions, the almost u...

The thing that caught my eye about U.S.! was the blurb on the back cover from Heidi Julavits, who was at Dartmouth when I was there. I am not sure if I ever actually met or even saw her in the flesh, but I do remember always hearing people refer to her by her nickname, "Heidi the '90." (She was also at the center of my now infamous toast of Bill Chisholm the night before Graduation, although it really had nothing to do with her at all.) I saw her first novel, The Mineral Palace, b...

From: Steve Herman
To: Bill Chisholm
Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 12:36 AM
Subject: Book of Last Ten Years

What was "the" book of the last 10 years I am supposed to read?

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From: Bill Chisholm
Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 11:12 AM

infinite jest by david foster wallace

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From: Steve Herman
To: Bill Chisholm
Sent: Sunday, March 05, 2006 7:59 PM
Subject: Infinite Jest

I picked up my copy.

"I am ...

The Castle is one of those books that is sitting on a shelf which I have been meaning to read for years.

It really wasn’t as Kafkaesque as I would have expected.

Why didn’t the guy just leave?

But the book did have those great passages.

The Castle, whose contours were already beginning to dissolve, lay silent as ever; never yet had K seen there the slightest sign of life – perhaps it was impossible to recognize anything at a distance, and yet the eye demanded it and could not endure that ...

BookTV ran a three-hour interview with John Updike on In Depth on Sunday, and it was very interesting. He is very charismatic. Very intelligent. Engaging. A perfect blend of good humor and modesty in the sense of speaking plainly and unapologetically about his strengths and talents without coming off as arrogant or pretentious, (although I’m not so sure I would say that he never comes off that way in his writing). Perhaps it’s just the age, (I think he said he was 73), but he’s got that appea...

John le Carre has always had great titles. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. The Little Drummer Girl. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

The title of his new book sounds like a liqueur ad. Maybe in a hundred years Aboslute Friends won’t sound awkward, but in today’s day, it’s hard not to think of clever product placement by the vodka company’s public relations firm. Which is a credit, I guess, to the power of branding in 21st Century America, and to the strength of Absolut’s advertising campai...

When I was a senior in high school, there wasn’t just about anything I wanted to say that I didn’t think could be said better in a Bob Dylan song. Even the stuff I knew was sappy like Lay Down Your Weary Tune or on-the-nose like My Back Pages seemed to strike a ringing truthful sappy chord. Me and all of my friends were the “little boy lost” in Visions of Johanna who took themselves too seriously. Grayson Taylor was A Big Girl, Now; Elizabeth Kellogg was the Girl From the North Country; if ...

It seems like every piece of literary criticism I read lately uses Updike’s work as some sort of benchmark for great literature in the 20th Century. (X is the new Updike...; as Updike and X replaced Faulkner and Joyce...; there isn’t a clear figure from the latter part of the century whom you can point to like you could point to X and Updike...; etc.) Sure The Witches of Eastwick is a fun movie and all, but when I tried to read Rabbit, Run once I only got to about page 40 before putting it ...

There is an interesting article in the October Harper’s by Ben Marcus on experimental fiction, publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and life as we know it. The argument is essentially that the novel is certainly dead if the leading novelists (such as Franzen) intentionally avoid trying anything new, (and attack those who do). “The notion that reality” he says, “can be represented only through a certain kind of narrative attention is a desperate argument by realists themselves, who seem to have dec...

When I read the back of the book jacket to Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, I was jealous.

Yambo, a sixtyish rare-book dealer in Milan, has suffered a loss of memory – he can remember the plot of every book he has ever read, every line of poetry, but he no longer knows his own name, doesn’t recognize his wife or his daughters, and remembers nothing about his parents or his childhood. In an effort to retrieve his past, he searches through boxes of old newspapers, comics, re...

How can you pass up The Great American Novel? I didn’t really want to read the thing about what if Charles Lindbergh had become President and we joined with Hitler. Woulda coulda shoulda. But I wanted to see what this Roth guy (who frankly I had never heard of) had written, and I came across “this ribald, richly imagined, wickedly satirical novel” in which Philip Roth “turns baseball’s status as national pastime and myth into an occasion for unfettered picaresque farce, replete with herois...

In the new John Sanford mystery, the protagonist receives an i-Pod as a gift, and refuses to load it until he has determined exactly which 100 songs he wants to include. He spends the novel composing his list, while entertaining suggestions and defending against criticisms from his friends. At the end of the book, he publishes the list. To his credit, Sanford goes out of his way to exclude the Beatles. (I have always said that I would put up Side Two of Bringing It All Back Home against t...

Just when I start complaining that there is nothing new in narrative style, along comes Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Listen to this:

"This is a murder mystery novel. Siobhan said I should write something I would want to read myself. Mostly I read books about science and maths. I do not like proper novels. In proper novels people say things like, 'I am veined with iron, with silver and with streaks of common mud. I cannot contract into the firm fist wh...

I like reality TV. It is "modern" in the sense that the players are largely who and what you make of them. Joey on Friends is pretty much Joey. If you asked ten people who or what Joey is, they would all come up with pretty much the same description. You don't spend a whole lot of time wondering whether, or to what extent, Matt LeBlanc is really like Joey, or what Joey does when he is off-screen. With reality TV, by contrast, there is an added dimension. The constant question ...

The back of On the Street Where You Live says the book is about this:

Following a nasty divorce and the trauma of being stalked, criminal defense attorney Emily Graham leaves Albany to work in Manhattan. Craving roots, she buys her ancestral home, a Victorian house in the seaside resort town of Spring Lake, New Jersey. Her family sold the house in 1892, after one of Emily's forbears, Madeline Shapley, then a young girl, disappeared. As the house is renovated and a pool dug, a skeleton is ...

My favorite tv show, other than the Apprentice, is a show called Project Greenlight. Unknown screen writers enter a competition, and a screenplay is selected to be produced into a motion picture. An unknown director is selected to direct. The process is filmed in traditional Real World fashion. The show is interesting, because people love movies and want to see how they get made. And because most people believe that, if given the opportunity, they could write, or direct, or star in a mot...