Escapegrace: “Anyway…at one point, Silverblatt recounted the interviews he had conducted earlier in the week – Mailer on The Castle in the Forest and Dave Eggers on What is the What – and seemed unexpectedly overcome with emotion at the state of the world depicted in the three novels. I don’t think the pathos was necessarily scripted and I was sort of touched.”
Author / Edward Champion
Speculating Upon Gasps
Jonathan Ames: “On the oral-sex front, I then made a concerted effort to lick the labia, which was something I’ve been guilty of neglecting in the past, and again the results were quite good. I also plunged my middle digit in about two inches, counting off the distance with my finger along the inside of the young lady’s vagina the way you march out the steps between your car and a fire-hydrant. I may have actually located the G-spot, if I’m to judge by the gasps of pleasure that were elicited.”
DFW Rewritten
Here is the first paragraph of David Foster Wallace’s “Good People” rewritten:
Lane A. Dean, Jr. and his girlfriend sat at a picnic table. They’d gone to different high schools but attended the same junior college. Now it was springtime and they were near a lake. The air was suffused with honeysuckle and lilacs, almost too much for them to take in. The recent storms had downed trees. One tree had collapsed near the shallows of the lake where Lane and his girlfriend were now sitting. Lane liked his girlfriend and her smell, but he was distracted by another man, whose incongruous hat reminded him of his grandfather. This stranger was still, more like a man than a picture.
DFW’s paragraph is 502 words. My revised paragraph is 107 words.
Perseus Seduces Indie Publishers
This morning, Jim Milliot reports that Perseus has received signed agreements from “more than 10” ex-PGW publishers. Presumably, this is the 70 cents on the dollar reimbursement in exchange for four years of distribution deal that was bandied about like a tainted carrot to the PGW publishers left in the lurch. This does not mean that Perseus has acquired PGW, but Perseus’s goal is to grab 65% of the PGW clients before the February 12 hearing date. Under the deal, the publishers will retain ownership of their inventory, if not their sunny dispositions.
Roundup
- Hitch on One Hundred Years: “For this reader, the most arresting episode in the Macondo saga was the epidemic of insomnia that afflicted the tribe.”
- The Esquire Napkin Project features contributions by A.M. Homes, Jonathan Ames, Aimee Bender, Andrew Sean Greer, and many more authors.
- James Gibbons on Paul Auster: “Novelists, of course, are not obliged to occupy themselves with a fine-grained depiction of external reality, so in remarking on the abstract terrain of Auster’s books I mean primarily to underscore how anomalous his success is. Simply put, neither American writers nor American readers tend to go in for the kind of fiction that Auster has made his specialty, and it’s unsurprising that Auster enjoys not just wide readership but also prestige internationally, particularly in France, that well exceeds his critical reputation in the United States.” (via The Publishing Spot)
- Jeff VanderMeer opines that BSG is beginning to suck. I agree. And yet when Annalee Newitz boldly put forth this proposition late last year, she was greeted by a torrent of denouncements from mad fanboys. The question is when this artistic declivity will be recognized by the more rabid BSG viewers. I don’t know whether to give up on the show or hope that it will get better. I keep watching, but only when I am suffering from insomnia or my brain power has depleted to near zero. Ron Moore has not written a single episode this season other than the two-hour premiere, and I suspect that he’s abdicated on his duties. Do we really need a BSG spinoff? I’d rather see attentions directed towards one good show instead of two substandard ones.
- Charlie Stross on the writer’s lifestyle. (via Speedysnail)
- Flickr has forced its users to get Yahoo IDs. Small wonder that Fotolog has overtaken Flickr. Treat your users as if they are prisoners forced to register for a stalag and they go elsewhere.
- What kind of reader are you? Me? I’m a “Dedicated Reader.” (via Bookblog)
- Sidney Sheldon has passed on, forcing readers to find another prolific hack writer to read on airplanes.
- Flatland: The Movie! (via Books, Inq.
- Over at Mark’s place, Daniel Olivas talks with Daniel Alarcón.
- The Existence Machine on Children of Men.
- Oh! My! Goodness! Radio! Radio! Radio! (via Condalmo)