I live in Washington, D.C., where I first came to work as a writer and producer for The Atlantic in 2010 and then covered D.C. transportation for TBD On Foot. These days, I report on state telecom issues for Warren.
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Quick: Whats the most unforgivable sin a writer can commit in fiction? A writerly crime so awful that major, award-winning novelists are condemning it on the pages of Publishers Weekly and inveighing against it in The New Yorker? If you said lazy plotting, dull language, or cardboard-thin characters, well, shame…
The question of how likeable characters should be in fiction is one I find interesting and relevant to how a lot of readers take on a work. And it’s a fine line. Characters shouldn’t have to be likable but there’s a problem if they become too grating. The real sin may not be that they’re bad but those cases when they’re too straight-up annoying.
Recommended Viewing: a 1952 documentary about William Faulkner and his hometown.
Killer accents.
A brief history of typography.
“I think the way to look at literature is as an instrument that sensitizes us to different things. We all know that if five different people are asked to describe one scene, they will all describe it differently. Some will describe the light, others will focus on what people’s feet were doing, others will look at the, you know, material, shape of the room or whatever. A great writer picks up on those things that matter. It’s almost like their radar is attuned to the most significant moments.”
Spot on, Alain de Botton.
The act of vividly recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe this this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait … A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
Congratulations to Don DeLillo, who has won the inaugural Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, inspired by earlier incarnations that awarded prizes for lifetime achievement in the writing of fiction and, for the past three years, Creative Achievement Award for fiction.
DeLillo will be given the prize during the National Book Festival on September 21-22.
…given the prize in person? I’m not the biggest DeLillo fan but that could be a fun moment this fall.
He had a rich, fruity laugh which boomed out, dispelling his underlying sadness. He was a superb lecturer, beginning as he entered Magdalen hall, and continuing after he passed out of the door at the end, and his powerful voice faded away. The girls adored him and crowded out the benches, lying on the boards at his feet as there was no room to sit. He got them excited and, it was said, your best chance of seducing one was the afternoon of a Lewis lecture on medieval romance, the subject of his most famous academic work, The Allegory of Love.
Of course I ended up watching the 80-minute PBS special on Philip Roth’s life. I’m just surprised I didn’t watch it even sooner. There’s nothing particularly revelatory in this documentary, but it’s full of nice interview moments worth sticking through. Naturally depressing enough too, of course, especially once you get to the Old Age is Here part that took over his books in the last decade or so. Be warned.
My conclusion is that literature ceases to save your life when self-interest replaces curiosity about other people. When you stop learning, you curtail your ability to generate (or “artfully arrange”) and surrender your authority to testify on behalf of your era. We can, however, still learn something from Shields: Hunger for reality will never be sated if you insist too exclusively your own version of it. HLSML is a document of what happens when nostalgia for the purely recognizable and selfreferential overruns the present: Time stands still. Qualities particular to any given cultural production are replaced by the noise they generate and coating trumps content. Literature, expanded to include any piece of information or entertainment that exists for our consumption, becomes something to blithely note or condescend to, never something to think about. Such a world has no writing, only commentary. If the novel were to become extinct, mankind would get along just fine. What we can’t get along without is sympathy for other people, the desire, not just to see ourselves in strangers and wonder what they can do for us, but to hear a foreign voice in our heads and dwell awhile with the alien.
Spending my Tuesday evening with some tea and a Bronte
