BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE #10

On READING

jjhON READING
 
I like to read on the beach. Once I took a “Neuromancer” paperback to Bora Bora
 and it was so humid there that every time 
I turned a page it came unglued and fell 
away from the book. I was slowly leafleting 
the island with William Gibson, although 
I like to think you could read single pages 
and still get the gist. As the last page fell 
away from the spine I was holding what 
looked like a gluey fish skeleton.
 
Laurie Anderson, in “By the Book” 
(The New York Times Book Review,
February 2020)
 **


THE DECLINE AND FALL
OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
ACCORDING TO THE DICK
& JANE READER


See S.P.Q.T. run.

 **
First time around, my eyes were opened 
to something important about who I  was 
at the moment of reading; later, to who or 
what I was becoming. But then I lived 
long enough to feel a stranger to myself – 
no one more surprised than me that I 
turned out to be who I am.”
 
Vivian Gornick, on reading Natalia Ginzburg.
“Look Again” by Alexandra Schwartz 
(The New Yorker, February 10, 2020)
 
‘**
 In the nineteenth century, when its literature
equaled that written at any place at any one 
time in history, Russia had no 'great' woman
writer--no Sappho, no Ono, no Komachi or
Murasaki Shikibu, no Madame de Stael or
George Sand, no Jane Austen or George 
Eliot--or so we might say when surveying
the best-known works of the age. But we
now know this truth to be less than true.
  Karolina Pavlova, born Karolina Karlovna
Jaenisch in Yaroslavi in 1807, died in
Dresden in 1893, after having lived outside
Russia for four decades....

Barbara Heldt. "Karolina Pavlova: The Woman
Poet and the Double Life" -- Introduction to
A Double Life by Karolina Pavlova, translated
by Barbara Heldt (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2019).

**

ON MICHAEL CONNOLLY & THE HARDY BOYS
  In  Number 3 of  The Hardy Boys Series  
-- THE SECRET OF THE OLD MILL – as the 
story gets underway, there is a plug for the 
previous two adventures:
 
      "However, the Hardy boys had inherited 
much of their father’s ability and deductive 
talent. Already they had aided in solving 
two mysteries that had kept Bayport by 
the ears. As related, in “The Hardy Boys: 
The Tower Treasure,” they had solved 
the mystery of the theft of valuable jewels 
and bonds from Tower Mansion… In 
the second volume of the series, “The Hardy 
Boys: The House on the Cliff,” has been 
told how the Hardy Boys discovered the 
haunt of a gang of smugglers…"
 
Now, if that isn’t an example of post-modernism 
in literature,  I do not know what is.  It is also 
smart marketing. Any reader starting the 
series at any point beyond the first volume 
would soon be hustled back to buy the 
books he missed.  I have to admit that 
age 11,I had no idea what bonds were, 
but at least I knew they were valuable.


 
GOING BEYOND THE BOUNDS OF FICTION IN MICHAEL CONNELLY’S  THE CROSSING
 
If   the creators of THE HARDY BOYS SERIES 
were clever and postmodern in promoting 
books in their series, Michael Connelly goes 
them one better in crisscrossing the 
boundaries of fiction and reality. In 
Chapter 12 of Connelly’s Hieronymus 
Bosch novel The Crossing, Connelly’s 
other famous character The Lincoln Lawyer 
(Mickey Haller)  steps outside the novel 
to become a living person who has had 
a film made about him:
 
  ‘Haller missed the entire session with Foster. 
He was either a celebrity lawyer or a notorious
lawyer, depending on how you looked at it. 
He had received the ultimate imprimatur 
of L.A.  acceptance – a movie about one 
of his cases starring no less than Matthew McConaughey.”
 
   The more I think about the above paragraph, 
the more confused I get about the blurred 
boundaries of fact (the movie) and fiction (the character who has a movie made
about his adventures). Obviously a ton 
of fictional characters have been brought 
to life on the screen, but the movies never 
became part of those characters’ 
identity/biography in the books they appeared.

**

                                ON WRITING
 
    I think  it is the fault of all American books, 
including my own. They pant so after meaning. 
They are earnestly moral, didactic; they build
 them ever more stately mansions, and they 
exhort and plead and refine, and they are,
insofar, books of error. A work of art should 
not rest on perception. “Here,” in other
words, “is my vision, be meaning what it may.”
 
Saul Bellow in a letter 
to Ruth Miller (July 27, 1955)
 
**
 
  I write for self-entertainment, and perhaps 
to afford the world after I have left it, some 
notion of what strange beings may pass 
through it without its knowledge.
 
         George Darley
 **
 
 
I am not a scientist and don’t deal in formulas, 
but as a writer I would, in the words of 
Henry James, take to myself “the faintest 
hints of life” and convert “the very pulses 
of the air into revelations.”
                           E.L. Doctorow
                   The Nation (July 14, 2008)
                                                           
 

I was recently asked what it takes to become 
a writer. Three things, I answered: first, one
must cultivate incompetence at almost 
every other form of profitable work. This 
be accompanied, second, by a haughty 
contempt for all the forms of work that 
someone has established one cannot do. 
To these must be joined, third, the nuttiness 
to believe that other people can be made 
to care about your opinions and views and 
be charmed by the way you state them. 
Incompetence, contempt, lunacy--once 
you have these in place, you are set to go.
 
 JOSEPH EPSTEIN
 
Commentary (April 2004)
**
 
 
     “Ernest Hemingway once said that an 
author must know the entire iceberg to 
write about only the tip. This has become 
a basic tenet among suspense novelists: 
Learn everything about an important topic 
but include just the fraction of details 
relevant to the story.”
 
Lisa Gardner. “A Visit to the Body Farm” in
The New York Times Book Review 
(July 28,2019)
 
 
 
The consideration governing the presentation 
of popular information may be reduced to 
three fundamental laws:  The Law of Irrelevant 
Details, which maintains that the writer can 
interest any reader in the commonplaces 
of everyday occurrences by adding even more commonplace details about them; Mencken’s 
Law of the  Boobeosie by which the writer
 assumes that the reader knows virtually 
nothing; and the Law of Conservation of Space,
by which the writer is compelled to pack 
a sentence like airline  luggage, with 
no superfluous articles.
 
Dr. Leo Hamalian. “The Case of the Missing 
Articles” in American Mercury  (March. 1957).
 
 
THE FUTURE OF WRITING & READING NOVELS
 

"Laura Esquivel physically incorporates music 
in her novel The Law of Law,which includes 
a CD. Indicators on pages refer to specific 
tracks, signalizing the points to pause and listen. 
This not only better appreciate the arias 
recorded in the book but also engages the 
audience in a way that wouldn't be possible 
without music."
 
Kevin Moises Suarez. "Author's Playlist" in World Literature Today (Winter 2020)