Nabokov Knew His Butterflies

He was right about their appearance on this continent, it seems, and, according to the NY Times, we have the Russian Revolution to thank for his not becoming a full-time lepidopterist.

It fascinates me -- the juxtaposition between brilliant writer and lepidopterist. Why that should be more striking than poet and doctor (William Carlos Williams) or poet and insurance executive (Wallace Stevens), I am not sure. Maybe because Nabokov did not need it as his day job? It was not his day job, but another thing he loved. Butterflies are gorgeous, but he killed a lot of them, loving them as he did. Kind of like Humbert Humbert "killed" the thing he loved...creepy.

Porn for Book Lovers

No words, just look at the pictures.

Keeping Books Out of Landfills and the Secret Threat of E-Readers

Sounds like a good idea. Someone will buy them. Like me, e.g. Buyer of Used Books at yard sales, etc. Even if I and everyone else who can switches to Kindles and Nooks, there are still people off the grid who will appreciate actual books for a few more years, I think. And I really have no plan to switch exclusively (or at all, to be honest) to any kind of e-reader anytime soon. I have too many real books backlogged.

That said, I spent a very pleasant half hour talking with a knowledgeable clerk and playing with the Nooks at Barnes & Noble the other day. The color Nook is definitely nice. The black and white one had side buttons I found annoying, as they have functions that you can trigger unintentionally. As soon as you try to bend the Nook like a paperback, okay, admittedly not a good idea for an expensive electronic item, there goes the page... I'm not used to handling books *that* carefully, tho I guess I could get used to it. I don't beat my books up, either.

Devotee friends claim their Kindles are great for travel, and I don't doubt it. I have lugged novels and guidebooks back and forth on long trips -- not always the same books, as I often leave the old and cannot resist the new when I'm in another country and not sure the same title is available back home. You can't duplicate that situation with an e-reader. So, are e-readers part of the whole world getting to be the same, then? Is that their secret threat? Amazon and Barnes & Noble just following GAP, Old Navy and other big retailers? Am I surprised? Are you?

Put Up Your Dukes and Write

Kerouac's letter to Brando, asking him to make a movie of On the Road, and play Dean to Kerouac's Sal. I guess the most interesting part of this is that Kerouac chose Brando, a sex symbol at the time, to play real-life sex symbol Neal Cassady. The letter was found among Brando's files after his death. Click on it to get a larger version.

Steve Almond on the Arizona Shooting,

the movement toward fascism, hatred of anyone who disagrees with you and the hateful comments right wing readers have spewed at him. This article and its links should be required reading. Why is it that the insatiable rich can convince right wing American working people that a more egalitarian system of medical care is an assault on their freedom when it's actually saving them money and not harming their medical care?

The historian Robert Paxton, who studied Europe during World War II, defined fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy, but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Steve Almond at the Rumpus.

Irish, Italian, Brown, Zombies, et al.

Reading outside your comfort zone to be a better person... list of 2011 reading challenges.

My favorite, and it's not an easy choice with Chunksters and Quirky Brown competition, is your very own To Be Read pile challenge. Read twelve of those, one a month. Of course, I do this anyway. The real challenge would be not to add to my TBR pile in 2011. I have over 100 on the TBR list. At the rate of only one book a month, it's like making minimum payments on a credit card balance. Hm, I have til Jan 15 to sign up...

Which twelve books shall I rescue from the pile of the unread? Actually, from the several bookshelves of the unread. Madame Bovary, the Aveling translation (I hope different translations count) will be on the list I think.

Snow Haiku

From readers of the NY Times.

Here's one that is not about last month's blizzard and lack of trash pickup:

In falling snow
a red bird sings
a song without a name

— Ben Connelly


and here is mine:

snow falling softly
lightly, covers the dog's coat
until he shakes

Hakuin Ekaku in New York: Monkey Writers at the Ink Stone

In the days before typewriters.

"What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before the ink stone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head." -- Yoshida Kenko.

While this may make the 14th century priest sound like a writer's patron saint, he is satirized as a monkey by Hakuin Ekaku, as reported by a NY Times article about the Zen master's art, now at the Japan Society thru January 9.

He may well have thought writers were and are like monkeys, but master Hakuin is revered and perhaps best remembered for his famous koan:

An ant goes round and round without rest
Like all beings in the six realms of existence,
Born here and dying there without release,
Now becoming a hungry ghost, then an animal.
If you are searching for freedom from this suffering
You must hear the sound of one hand.

Clapping, or perhaps, in NYC, waving down a cab.

The final word on genre

Should probably go to Margaret Atwood:
Genres, anyway, are inventions of people who need to rank things on bookshelves. Genres aren’t closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time. You know that part on the back of the book where it says “Romance,” for example? That’s so somebody knows what shelf to put it on. It has nothing to do with anything else, really.

from Narrative. You may have to log in to read the interview, but it's free.

The Literary Fiction Argument vs. Stieg Larsson

I don't really get the point of the lit fic vs. genre argument-for-argument's-sake -- people are going to read whatever we want, anyway -- but I love the comments on this article:

It's ridiculous to assert that literary is the most difficult genre to write in. It's the easiest. The world and the people you write about are at your fingertips, at your disposal, everywhere you look; you spend twenty-four hours a day living and breathing them; it frees you to focus on the mysteries of the human heart. Writers of science-fiction and fantasy have to do everything writers of literary fiction do, they just have to re-imagine the entire world as well -- the language, the history, the future, the science and technology, biology. You know, the universe. Those who write in the literary genre get all that pre-packaged for them gratis.

Pick up any three literary magazines at random and give the fiction a read. You will find a few good stories that stick with you, a few that are somewhat memorable even if you don't like them as a whole, and a lot that sound as if they were written by the same person: the narrator is a self-afflicted, self-obsessed loser drifting aimlessly through awkward, ugly, and annoying encounters narrated in flat, listless prose that reflects the flat, listless lives in which they are trapped. The other end of the spectrum is the hyper-observant story whose every detail is a mildly offensive grope at profundity. I've read those stories a thousand times, and they never get any better in the retelling. And it demonstrates that 'literary' is very much a genre of fiction: if re-using the same character types, the same narrative techniques, and the same faux-artistic description isn't 'genre', then I'd like to know what is.

Silly article by man with silly name.

Reading Yenta

I love knowing what other people are reading and visualizing who they are. That is why I love these:

Book Spy

and at the NY Times. I hope the Times makes a regular feature of this.

I want to *know*, dahling.

Dostoyevsky, Ken Follett and Scott Turow

"Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire.

But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire."

Michael Cunningham, at NY Times.

Also, you can't imagine what people will make of it -- the author describes how he found his ideal reader, the one he writes for:

"...some years ago, when I was working in a restaurant bar in Laguna Beach, Calif., ...I discovered a better method. One of the hostesses was a woman named Helen, who was in her mid-40s at the time and so seemed, to me, to be just slightly younger than the Ancient Mariner. Helen was a lovely, generous woman who had four children and who had been left, abruptly and without warning, by her husband. She had to work. And work and work. She worked in a bakery in the early mornings, typed manuscripts for writers in the afternoons, and seated diners at the restaurant nights.

"Helen was an avid reader, and her great joy, at the end of her long, hard days, was to get into bed and read for an hour before she caught the short interlude of sleep that was granted her. She read widely and voraciously. She was, when we met, reading a trashy murder mystery, and I, as only the young and pretentious might do, suggested that she try Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” since she liked detective stories. She read it in less than a week. When she had finished it she told me, 'That was wonderful.'

"'Thought you’d like it,' I answered.

"She added, 'Dostoyevsky is much better than Ken Follett.'

'Yep.'

"Then she paused. 'But he’s not as good as Scott Turow.'”

Paralyzing Inhibitions and Middle-Aged Emerging Artists

One of the great things about getting older is that other people's opinions have less power over us than they once did. I work with a physical therapist who recently told me, "When I turned 40, I stopped worrying about offending other people. When I turned 50, I started enjoying offending other people." In many ways this is the best time to do something that others might view with skepticism, and to risk a little ridicule that might once have been unendurable.

Robin Black, at Oprah.com.

For the love of ...books

Confessions of a Used-Book Salesman at Slate.