Collected Miscellany

Another lit blog overview hits the press. My questions is this: when are they going to start hitting the second (or third) tier blogs? Isn’t it time someone else get a little press time? How about a piece on group lit blogs . . .

A couple of useful links in case you haven’t seen them yet:

– Interesting Story in the New York Times about Lilly Tuck and Paraguay. Tuck, author of The News From Paraguay, finally visited the country she wrote about in her award winning novel. But apparently not without some controversy:

No sooner had Ms. Tuck’s visit been announced, though, than a controversy erupted. A business consultant and rancher named Roberto Eaton wrote a letter to the foreign minister and other officials to protest what he saw as an embarrassingly meek response to an insult to Paraguay’s image and history.

“This book is disgusting, absolutely pornographic and a calumny,” Mr. Eaton said in an interview. “People can write whatever they want, but that doesn’t mean we should be honoring the author. Just because her novel won a prize does not make it something magnificent. Yes, the book puts Paraguay on the map, but this is hardly the way to do it.”

In an essay published last week by the country’s main newspaper, ABC Color, María Eugenia Garay, a poet, also accused Ms. Tuck of succumbing to the “typical Eurocentric vision” of Latin America.

The book depicts Paraguay, Ms. Garay complained, as a savage country “populated by uncouth and hairy aborigines, distinguishable from monkeys only by the fact that they know how to play the harp,” Paraguay’s national instrument.

– Beautiful Somewhere Else by Stephen Policoff is one of those books I keep promising to read but haven’t got around to yet. Further wheting my appetite is a review and interview posted at NewPages. The interview is particularly interesting as Stephen talks about his passion for writing and how he balanced teaching, family, and other life issues with his writing. I also found this give and take fascinating:

TD: Your protagonist Paul is provocative and compelling, endearing and irksome, transparent and opaque. Talk a bit about his “genesis” and development (and the “genesis” of the novel and its development). What did you admire about him when creating him? What surprised you? If you were forced to explain your protagonist in one word, what is the word?

SP: One word? I wrote a whole novel about him and you want me to sum him up in one word? I’ve been told Paul sounds a lot like me, and I certainly used a lot of my own verbal mannerisms in creating him, though he is a far darker, more unstrung person than I am. Unstrung might be a good word to define him. He is someone who yearns to be a person other than the one he turned out to be. He is a lovely soul in many ways, but a not entirely competent human being; he longs for that which is good and true and beautiful and yet it seems to elude him at every turn. Certainly, the desire (which I think most of us experience at one time or another) to escape from the prison of the persona we have created for ourselves was one of the central images for me in writing this, and the way we get caught in the mesh of our past experiences and can’t wriggle loose. Edna St. Vincent Millay said, “Life is not one damn thing after another, life is the same damn thing over and over,” and the impulse to try and cut through that Gordion knot of repeated experience is maybe what pushed me along to write Beautiful Somewhere Else.

Phil at Brandywine Books ruminates on Simon Lipskar’s essay on Bookangst 101 on the subject of “Too Many Books.” Lipskar’s essay is in two parts; it’s well written and well reasoned, and if you’re absorbed by the publishing industry’s ongoing efforts to drive itself crazy Lipskar blows the whistle and calls for a time out. In related news P Daddy must now be the hero of the too many books crowd as he took one for the team by not writing one. Before embarking on his non-writing career, though, he collected three hundred thousand dollars from Random House. Genius? Not so fast. Lawyers are humming on the IRT this morning; Random House wants its money back.

Paying celebrities not to write their books might be worth looking into. If the concept isn’t commercially viable then perhaps a series of publicly funded grants should be established. A blue ribbon panel could oversee proposals from individuals in the public eye, award funding based on a sliding scale of relative fame measured against the number of books currently in print divided by the number of days the individual has been famous minus their age. Obviously if the final value is negative the candidate stands an excellent chance of receiving P Daddy’s biography as a consolation prize.

Six year old Allison Jensen is witness to the abduction and murder of her friend Cindi; the assailant is a bearded man with a shotgun. That he terrorizes the girls isn’t a surprise; the fact that he gets away with murder is. Setting is crucial to most novels, more so for this one. Cindi was killed in Utah where the Mormon church is the shadow government and where crime and punishment aren’t always the province of victim and perpetrator or even police and the courts.

The novel traces Allie’s development from six year old girl to her early twenties. The first half of the book describes the aftermath of Allie’s ordeal; it dwells on her father’s iron fisted rule and the community’s unwillingness to seek the truth about Cindi’s murder. These chapters follow Allie through a tumultuous childhood culminating in the death of her mother; she and her siblings are left with dad, a man for whom faith is a substitute for thought.

WIVES AND SISTERS reads like a diary from an exotic place with bizarre customs and the authoritarian trappings of modern day Iran. The author has a background in journalism that influences her style from the beginning; the prose is clear and direct, no punches pulled. The lead is never buried; each chapter has an opening paragraph that hooks the reader into the story. In the latter half of the book this style starts to work against the power of the story. So much occurs that the reader, let alone the main character, suffers from too many major events presented in a cascading style that doesn’t pause to allow much reflection or assimilation. Because the pacing is so relentless it feels less like a novel and more like a memoir.

Despite those problems the book offers a unique perspective into Mormon life and tells a compelling story. As dramatic and eventful as it is, WIVES AND SISTERS unravels the mystery behind Cindi’s death in a courageous and unflinching debut.

This week, Random House has filed suit against P. Diddy for declining to return a $300,000 advance for an autobiography he never wrote, according to the AP. The deadline was Dec 15, 1999.

$300K for P Diddy’s memoir? Good pete, is that realistic? How many books would have to be sold to make back that advance, or was Random House planning to cash in on movie rights? Here, P. Diddy is pictured explaining that writing isn’t his thing.

On this day in 1975, P.G. Wodehouse, 93, died in a U.S. hospital. Patrick Kidd in today’s Times of London begins:

And while the bores at the Romantic Novelists’ Association have this week predictably nominated Pride and Prejudice as the greatest novel of all time, surely P. G. Wodehouse is long overdue recognition as one of our finest romantic treasures.

No writer, not even Shakespeare, has mastered the simile with the power of Wodehouse. Consider such brilliant descriptions as “A tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and forgotten to say ‘when’ “, or “She fitted into my biggest armchair as if it had been built around her by someone who knew they were wearing armchairs tight about the hips that season”.

No writer, not even Shakespeare? Absolutely! Even India’s IT world acknowledges it. As the Daily Telegraph reports, “It has long been said that if you scratch any Indian who has a reading habit you will find a Wodehouse fan underneath. His works are sold on Indian railway platforms alongside the latest blockbusters. Questions about Bertie Wooster and the Empress of Blandings remain staples of every television quiz.”

Biographer Robert McCrum (that’s close to a Wodehouse name, isn’t it?) says the author had a very difficult childhood, which likely compelled him to reject reality altogether.

Living for the most part in the Far East, they parked their four sons with an English nanny who kept them “under a kind of house arrest.” Later came boarding schools and aunts. “Imagine,” McCrum says. “He saw his mother really for the first time when he was 15. The first time he met her, as a boy, he thought she was just another aunt. So what his childhood taught him was that reality was a very painful place, and that the way to avoid reality was to go somewhere else, into a fantasy world.”

As a heads up, Wodehouse birthday is October 15, 1881. Consider that a tip from the stable should you want to have an excuse for anything.