Ginsberg in Fiction

On the New York Times book blog Paper Cuts, Gregory Cowell recounts a short conversation with the novelist and essayist Joshua Cohen. Answering a question about his current and recent projects, Cohen replies:

I’ve just finished a collection of stories on two themes: pornography and poetry. The pornography is a long story (a novella? though perhaps novellas can be written only by dead Europeans), set partly in Russia, partly on the Internet. The poetry is brought by two fictionalized biographies: one of Allen Ginsberg in Havana and Prague, 1965; the other of Hart Crane at the time of his suicide, 1932.

The use by other writers of Allen Ginsberg as a character in fiction interests me insofar as I'm doing the same. Ginsberg appears prominently in a long section of my nascent novel tentatively called Pour More On. The section concerns a young 20 something couple living the bohemian life in New York City in the mid eighties and contains, as scenes and setting, the famous 48th Congress of International PEN of January 1986, and Sandinista Nicaragua during the height of the Contra War.

Let The Great World Spin

Just finished Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin while sitting in the fading light on the upstairs back deck of a crisp spring evening, a high white half moon overhead in a milky blue sky. My first reaction was to stand up and look around at the neighborhood, the backyards of the neighbors that I could see from my elevated vantage point, and further, across the way to Priest St and the cars passing there, and it occurred to me how amazing literature can be, how it can reach right in and touch the essential part of us, the core place where humanity lurks within everyone, the love place, love between family members, the amazing place of universal oneness, and I felt sad then, looking across the houses and the parked cars, thinking about the poverty of people’s lives in this culture imbued as they are with the superficialities of sports and television shows, and I wondered admiringly about Colum McCann’s great achievement, his deeply rendered portrait of that human place, I felt it, embraced it, and despite whatever sadness I felt for the lack of this brilliance in the cultural ebb and flow, I also felt euphoric, amazed, enthused, my heart beating with a determined thump, my eye wide open to the beauty around me.

Guardian's Ten Tips for Writing Fiction

The Guardian (UK) asked a selection of writers to provide ten tips for writing fiction (Feb 2010). As one might expect, given that the responses involved a group of disparate writers, the tips ranged from the irreverent to the useful, the pissy to the pretentious. Nonetheless, they can be interesting to peruse.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/ten-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-one

Roddy Doyle, for example, offers rule #1:

"Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide."

PD James suggests:

"Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious."

There is a part II as well, with responses from Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall) ("Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else?"), the ubiquitous Joyce Carol Oates, Will Self ("Always carry a notebook. And I mean always.") and others.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/20/10-rules-for-writing-fiction-part-two

Let the Great World Spin

What's considerably impressive about Colum McCann's Let The Great World Spin is the subtlety with which he weaves the characters' lives into each other's orbits. And he so very ably conjures the world of 1970s New York City, convincingly situates his characters in that time and place. The novel works so well not because of dazzling prose innovation or experimentation but because the storytelling is masterful and evocative.

McCann is teaching a summer fiction workshop at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, Aug 15-22, 2010 called "Becoming Other: Characters Places Scenarios." I'm grateful to be one of the applicants to receive a scholarship to the workshop.

http://www.nmwcolony.org/