“Why write about sex?” I asked Steve Almond immediately upon sitting down for the interview. I will not deny provoking him on purpose. (Interviewing observation: The shortest path between a question and a passionate answer is a straight line; aim for the respondent’s core interests and obsessions.)
“Why NOT sex?!”
[*NSFW audio] [click to comment]
Years ago, when I was working at Powell’s, a first-time author called me on the phone. We’d never spoken, but I knew about her new book because in a previous career she’d recorded several indie records that made it big in my hometown. I’d recognized her name in the publisher’s catalog.
She was freaking out.
A lifetime of making music had taught her that the most grueling work, and often the most gratifying, begins when your album comes out. After as few as one or two weeks in the studio, a band might spend a year or more on tour, night after night introducing new material to fans and strangers.
The musician-turned-author explained that she was calling me because her book had been in stores less than a month; and now, suddenly, her publisher revealed that they would no longer actively promote it. She wanted to know, Could she blog on our website? Could she do anything? And did I have any idea what she might have done to make them drop her so quickly? For much of our conversation, she was on the verge of tears.
Fast-forward to October 2010. Nearly two hundred authors descended on Portland for the annual Wordstock Festival. It seemed as good a time as any to take the pulse of the industry, so we asked a number of them, “If you could change one thing about the publishing process…”
Joanna Smith Rakoff was at Wordstock to read from the paperback edition of her excellent debut, A Fortunate Age. Her response was one of several that led to me relating the story of that uncomfortable phone call. [click to comment]
Long ago but not so far away — this past October at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland — nearly 200 authors and thousands of their fans gathered for the Pacific Northwest’s biggest and best book festival, Wordstock.
In the course of events, seven featured speakers visited our makeshift studio, a conference room so void of character that the black backdrop we hung kind of spruced the place up. All answered several questions about their writing, but we spent lots of time discussing more common matters. Like bad jobs.
Willy Vlautin was the first author we filmed at the show. His bad jobs — one in particular, the first he describes, for the veterinarian — convinced us to explore the topic further. The very last to visit was Steve Almond, who found similarities between the ethically challenged employment of his youth and professional writing that wrapped up our modest inquiry more cleanly than we’d have imagined possible.
Others we filmed that weekend include David Rakoff, Joanna Smith Rakoff (no relation), Heidi Durrow, Jim Lynch, and Sarahlee Lawrence. More Wordstock videos are on the way. [click to comment]
Earlier this month, the New Yorker published a column called “A Year’s Reading: Reviewers favorites from 2010.” Fifty-one new books were cited; for each, the magazine presented a title, author, publisher and list price, followed by a single line to describe the work.
It struck me that by stripping away identifying details, the editors’ blunt summaries offer a kind of window on our collective attention. What kinds of narratives mattered to us in 2010? What earned our brains’ regard? (And for the truly lit-obsessed among you: How many books can you identify from these brief blurbs? Check your answers here.)
Conspicuously absent from the record: vampires, zombies, and endangered Cerulean Warblers.
NONFICTION
Soviet Jewry’s underground support networks.
Three needless wars and American grandiosity.
On the creator of Time and Life.
The dazzling success of a mid-century art dealer.
Reconstituting the journey.
An argument for smart aquaculture.
How medieval Europe became the modern West.
A quirky hunt for the real detective.
A historical approach to intellectual property.
The subtle shadings of a complicated history.
The Second World War spy caper.
How two decades of haplessness led to the financial crisis.
The history of cancer.
A journalist’s account of the Kashmiri war.
How the man of feeling became the god of finance.
A slurry romp.
The world of the arts in Nazi-occupied Paris.
New revelations about the dancer.
The siren queen, artfully examined.
F.D.R.’s court-packing scheme.
The source of the first undying cell line.
Writings from an adventurous mind and an eventful life.
Antihumanist, polymath, and autodidact.
The heroic exodus from the South.
Finding patterns in the fates of information empires.
FICTION AND POETRY
One year’s turmoil for five appealingly aimless Montanans.
A comic historical picaresque.
On the contours of absence.
A fictionalized memoir.
An art dealer and a precocious ex-addict.
A cynical novel of insider trading.
A horror story redeemed by radiant prose.
A man derailed by a perambulatory illness.
An intricate homage to two nineteenth-century poets.
Romantic entanglements during the dot-com boom.
A hike in the Galilee carries two characters into the past.
Slyly witty stories in a posthumous collection.
A lucid new translation.
A Jamaican’s enslavement.
Satirizing America after the meltdown.
A formidable historical novel.
The consequences of grief.
Irish boarding-school life, told with grinning morbidity.
A capacious Holocaust love story.
A taut retelling of “The Ambassadors.”
The novel as Möbius strip.
The 1944 polio outbreak is the backdrop for a tragic fall.
Economical, melancholy poems.
A novel of manners about modern motherhood.
A woman constrained by marriage to an eccentric scientist.
Adolescent attachment in an ambitious monologue.
It’s been nine months since the first ReadRollShow video appeared: a nearly 14-minute, long-form (for us) interview with Joshua Ferris on Vimeo. Topics ranged from Cervantes to coworkers who announce their bowel movements. An auspicious start for the program, no?
Nine months, a healthy gestation. And now: life beyond the womb! Expect lots of changes from ReadRollShow in 2011. All for the good, we swear! In time we think you’ll even trust us without that baby gate at the top of the stairwell.
One note about our year-end rankings: Mr. Ferris likely would have edged out Sam Lipsyte for the #5 spot if only we hadn’t divided the aforementioned long clip into four shorter ones for YouTube; cumulatively, Ferris garnered more than enough views — almost enough to catch Sloane Crosley at #4. So we’re giving him a Most-Watched honorable mention. (Okay, we just like Ferris a lot. We’re not too proud to admit it.) [click to comment]
“A wave might seem to be a simple thing, but in fact it’s the most complicated form in nature,” Susan Casey writes.
In The Wave, the author recounts an experience at a symposium in Maui, after a session about storm surge behavior, when she encountered two scientists in the lobby.
At the break I went outside, where I ran into Dave Levinson and John Marra, another scientist…. When Levinson introduced me and described my project, Marra had a question. “Those guys who want to launch their melons off a hundred-foot wave,” he said, “are they mentally ill?”
“Does that mean you think it can’t be done?” I asked.
“I don’t know the phase speed of a hundred-foot wave,” he said, turning serious in an instant and citing advanced math theory about breaking waves. “I’d have to actually calculate the celerity. I don’t see why not, I guess—if you’re moving fast enough. But is it human nature to want to do that?”
I defended the tow surfers’ sanity for a few moments, then steered the subject to climate change….”
I asked Casey, “How did you defend the tow surfers? What did you tell the scientists?” [click to comment]
In The Wave, Susan Casey sets out to understand giant waves through the eyes of people who know them best: mariners, scientists, and tow surfers.
“Her writing on wave forces and maritime disasters is masterful,” says Outside magazine. And Entertainment Weekly (among many others) agrees: The Wave “delivers a thrill so intense you may never get in a boat again.”
Laird Hamilton helped to invent tow surfing, where a jet ski, driven by a partner, tows the surfer to the start, enabling them to catch waves far bigger and faster than any they could catch by hand-paddling. Laird’s feats in the water are the stuff of legend. But then one event during Casey’s research surpassed all others. [click to comment]
“Writing—I can only speak to writing here— always, always only starts out as shit: an infant of monstrous aspect; bawling, ugly, terrible, and it stays terrible for a long, long time (sometimes forever). Unlike cooking, for example, where largely edible, if raw, ingredients are assembled, cut, heated, and otherwise manipulated into something both digestible and palatable, writing is closer to having to reverse-engineer a meal out of rotten food…. Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up….
“Funny thing about words. Regarded individually or encountered in newspapers or books (written by other people), they are as lovely and blameless as talcum-sweet babies. String them together into a sentence of your own, however, and these cooing infants become a savage gang straight out of Lord of the Flies. A sullen coven with neither conscience nor allegiance….
“The truest depiction of the writing life remains Nicholas Cage in the movie Adaptation, crippled by fear of inadequacy into near-complete inaction, opting to masturbate for the umpteenth time that day. His legs are the only thing visible on-screen, shaking, defeated, his off-camera body working its way to a sad and dribbling (anti)climax, the only thing he will produce the whole day.”
—from Half Empty
In Portland? Rakoff will read at Wordstock on Saturday, October 10th at 4:00pm.
Later that night, at 7:30pm, catch him at the Aladdin Theater on the special Wordstock edition of Live Wire! with Jonathan Lethem, Kristin Hersh, and Paul Provenza, among others.
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