Infinite Vocab 101

There are a lot of amazing and interesting words in Infinite Jest. I wrote down a bunch of the ones I didn't know. Not every one, of course. I skipped all of the anatomical & pharmaceutical terms and there were times when I just didn't bother. IJ is big enough for that: for weeks you can read through thickets of pages and not write a word down, and then more weeks come and more huge chunks of pages and you find yourself jotting down every wild word you've never before seen and underlining sentences and whole chunks of prose that surge like tides and resonate and enthrall like 4th of July sparklers and meat on a grill.

enfilade – 13                   fitviavi - footnote 56, 996     

magisculed – 24                 ephebic - 170                  

anfractuous – 39                fricatives - 174

phylacteryish – 47              formication - 177

pargeted – 51                   sephenoid - 182

nystagmus – footnote 5A, 983    callosum - 182      

apocopes – 57                   laryngeally - 182

synclinal – 75                  treillage - 185

leptosomatic – 79               rostral - 185

calliopsis – 80                 lamina - 185

quincunx – 80                   piameter - 186

aleatory – 82                   sulci - 186

candidiatic – 87                chiasmae - 186

pedentive – 91                  oblongata - 186

pedalferrous – 93               meatus - 186

gibbous – 109                   triviumoid - 188

guilloche – 120                 papuled - 190

apercu – 121                    aminating - 195

osseously – 122                 gonfalonish - 208

eidetic – 127                   mucronate - 208

amines – 142                    tumbrel - 225

putative – 142                  wopsed-up - 234

erumpent – 155                  afflated - 235

parping – 159                   squunches - 236

rutilant – 159                  strettoing - 240

narcelle – 170                  acclivated – 241
apotropiac – 243                     ascapartic – footnote 110, 1016

lacuna – 245                    falcate - footnote 110, 1019

coccyges – 257                  bradyauxetic - 313

egregulous – 272                     ablated - 316

mokus – 273                     venulated - 362

Spont-Dissem – 274              cunctations - 368

nystagmic – 281                 arachnodactylic - 376

deafflatusized – 284            mucronate - 376

lordotic – footnote 98, 1003       chyme - 379

felo de se – 286                     aigrette - 380

strabismic – 289                     agnation - 382

ascapartic – 290                     adipose - 383

elisions – 290                  fulgurant - 387

apical – 290                    glabrous - 388

attar – 290                     carie - 410

auracopia – 298                 mafficking - 429

habiliments – 301               cuirass - 431

formicating – 304               dewimpled - 437

bilirubin – 304                 cognomen - 448

candent – 306                   nacreous - 455

quadrivial – 306                misprision - 465

wimples – 310                   ablative - 470

convolved – 310                 mysticetously - 476

xerophagy – footnote 110, 1006  propinquous – 479

anechoic – 503                  phocomelic – 901

coprolaliac – 621               achondroplastic - 901

mobiusizing – 622               entr’actes - 933

saltire – 632                   sinciput - 950

anaclitic – footnote 269, 1048       finial - 950

furcated - footnote 269, 1051        guilloche - 952

deuteragonist – 688                  kyphotic - 953

restenotic – 752                     ciquatoxic - 967

gonions - footnote 324, 1067         fuliginous - 971

colposcope - footnote 324, 1070      

lalating – 788

malcathected – 791

Hal Brushed

actaeonizing – 793

nictitater - footnote 332, 1074

shunpike – 796

quoins – 797

diglobular – 801

inguinal – 803

strigil – 832

anhedonia – 839

skirling – 866

parotitic – 871

ebubblient – 893

1,079 Pages, in Paperback

Let's get the adjectives out of the way first: sweeping, confounding, maddening, enormous, sad, absurd, unparalleled, astonishing, preposterous, cringe-inducing, inspiring, awesome, phat, brilliant, mind-boggling, unique, over-the-top, fucking amazing.

Infinite Jest, at 1,079 pages in the Little Brown paperback edition, the one with the inexplicable blue sky cover (overall a rather insipid cover that in no way grabs your attention or does justice to the novel it embraces) is the longest novel I've ever read. Reading it spanned summer 2011 and went deep into the fall, from early June to late November.

I read the endnotes. Everyone who cares pretty much already knows there are a lot of
endnotes. 388 over ninety-six pages. There will always be debates about DFW's endnotes and footnotes. How many graduate school dissertations will be written on David Foster Wallace's use of footnotes? Scores. But there's no debate here. The endnotes for Infinite Jest should not be skipped. Read every one.

Confession: it took me a long time to really get into it, I had to struggle through at least two hundred pages. I couldn't keep track of the characters. The narrative thread was a jumpy melange of absurdity and surreal realism that was often confusing and sometimes confounding. The completely weird  and disparate parallel 'stories' - the elite tennis academy with its twisted creepy family founders, the desperate interns of Ennet House (note: not "the Ennet House"), and the downright bizarre Quebecois wheelchair terrorists - were all off-putting in various ways. But I persevered.

The momentum really shifted when I got to the Eschaton part (page 319). Nearly synchronous with reaching the section that introduced Eschaton, I read in the New York Times that a band named the Decemberists had re-created the Eschaton scene for their "Calamity Song" video. I'd never heard of the group before but I found the song compelling, and the visual depiction of the teenage tennis players in their mundane tennis court environment somehow helped bring Infinite Jest into focus, made it suddenly tangible and truthful in a way I hadn't grasped before.

From that point on, I read it in great chunks, awed and completely taken with it. Not quite lethally, of course, (heh heh heh), but absorbed and convinced of its genius. The rhythm became more apparent, the characters became familiar, the weird tics and quirks and opaqueness were no longer bothersome but became endearing. And the writing was just plain extraordinary. Not that a single quote or passage from the 1,079 pages might possibly be representative or somehow indicative of the prose in any adequate way, BUT - how about this description of the Charles River?

"The Charles rolling away far below the windowless bathroom is vividly blue, more mildly blue on top from fresh rainwater that had made purple rings appear and widen, a deeper Magic Marker-type blue below the dilute layer, gulls stamped to the cleared sky, motionless as kites." pg 237

What about the professional building "... the one with bricks the color of Thousand Island dressing"? (pg 252) Or "...a sky the color of dirty glass."? (pg 621)  Or "...the hot slack facial intensity of a sleeping baby."? (pg 925)

Like The Pale King, wherein is an abundance of stupefyingly good sentences and paragraphs, the prose of Infinite Jest at times soars and roars and stuns.

And then there's the vocabulary (list of words I didn't know the meaning of coming soon).

J. Michael Lennon on Why Mailer Matters

J. Michael Lennon, he of long friendship with Norman Mailer and now a Mailer scholar and biographer, gave an address to the Norman Mailer Society on November 10, 2011 entitled "Why Mailer Matters: Three Reasons." The address is short, some 900 words, and brisk in the characteristically sharp and clean prose that Lennon writes.

One of Lennon's provocative assertions is that Mailer's "... actual novelistic achievements, while brilliant, sit in the second row behind his successes in the polemical essay and several kinds of nonfiction narrative  ...". Would Mailer himself agree with that? I think of Peter Matthiessen who has said that he thinks of himself as a novelist (Far Tortuga) first and foremost. How did Mailer view himself? Lennon will no doubt engage this topic in considerably more depth in his forthcoming massive Mailer biography.

The name that comes to mind when considering who else might have made it into Lennon's assertion that:
"Mailer was the most important public intellectual in the American literary world for over 30 years, and along with other figures such as William Buckley, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag, helped establish the creative writer as important a commentator as politicians, pundits and professors." ? How about Allen Ginsberg?

Mailer, Ginsberg, Burroughs, 1983
photo by Jerry Aronson

Mailer, Ginsberg and Ashly Montagu
on the John Crosby Show, late 50s?

J. Michael Lennon

J. Michael Lennon, longtime friend of Norman Mailer, a master editor and writer himself, Mailer's authorized biographer, and this last week of August and first few days of September the facilitator of the week-long creative non-fiction workshop at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony. A man of stentorian voice, "thunderstorm eyebrows," and the most expressive face I've ever seen - if you watched Mike talk but couldn't hear him, you would still get a very good idea of the emotional content of whatever it was he was talking about.

J.Michael Lennon, Mailer Center, Provincetown, MA September 2, 2011

Yet fear not - despite bearing a small resemblance to Boris Karloff & despite the suggestion of a latent volatility in his stern countenance, J. Michael Lennon is a generous, encouraging, perceptive instructor who conducts a hugely positive workshop. Thanks and praises to this man. Go hear him read, buy his books, study with him if you can.

Infinite Study

David Foster Wallace's unfinished, posthumous novel The Pale King has just been published. The web is awash in articles about the new book, about Wallace himself, and about the legacy of the writer who, since taking his own life in 2008, has been almost universally acclaimed as one of the most important American writers of the last two generations.

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin acquired DFW's archives, including manuscripts, notebooks, and many books from his personal library, all of which is available to scholars and enthusiasts. Coinciding with the release of The Pale King, the Ransom Center presents material associated with the writing of the book, accessed here.

One of the plethora of articles that have emerged since Wallace's death  is "Inside David Foster Wallace's Self-Help Library" by Maria Bustillos. When I came upon this piece, my first reaction was 'Gad, this whole DFW scholarship thing sure got excessive and pointless in a hurry.' And then I read the article. It's fascinating and anything but trite or pointless and offers what the best of these sorts of articles can, a unique and considered insight into the life and thinking of an artist hailed, admired, and read by many, many people, any number of whom themselves are serious working artists. The Bustillos article is first rate literary journalism.

Provincetown: Thoughts, Snippets, Recollections

No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better. (Fail Bigger).

"Prepare to make the imaginative leap. But you must be prepared to work and in particular to research. It is all about desire, stamina, perseverance."

For Gogol,  the true, unwritten last line of every story is: "And nothing was ever the same again."

Argh! Novel Panic! Beware! Beware!

Find the most obscure detail and make it yours! Find the small detail that reveals the wider world.

No ideas but in things. For example, what is "joy?" Joy is an idea (or an emotion). But how to represent joy? What "thing" might convey joy? How about a table of writers singing Irish drinking songs and show tune classics around Norman Mailer's dining room table on a Friday night in summertime after a week of hard workshopping? Yes! Carouse and tumult, song and toasts.

"I came home on a Tuesday night, as drunk as drunk could be ..."

"Is that bottle nailed to the table down there?!"

"Art is a way of coping with the world by bringing it under the microscope of detail."

"The specific must reveal the grand canvas."

What is the moment of the story?

Reflections on Colum McCann

Imp grin, eye twinkle, mirth and high jinx (he pick-pocketed a stranger's wallet because he could ... and then gave it back). Broad smiles, shouts, the wisdom of enthusiasm, an enthusiasm for wisdom.

Surfeit of empathy. The result of creating such realized characters? Because he can put himself in the shoes of his characters, it follows that he's able to put himself in the shoes of those with whom he interacts - workshop attendees, university students, friends, other writers, reference librarians.

Always send a thank-you note! The power of expressed gratitude.

Vast reading! A deep knowledge of the work of others. All week referencing particular works to illustrate a given discussion. He was familiar with just about all the authors & novels we brought up in discussions. Astounding! A small list:

Michael Ontaatje Coming Through Slaughter
Ann Michaels
Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Malantes
Peter Carey
DeLillo, in particular Underworld (he considers it the most important novel of the last 25 years)
Stoner by John Williams
Redemption Falls by Joseph O'Connor
Aleksander "Sasha" Hemon
Toni Morrison
Annie Dillard
Roddy Doyle for dialog

A force at the table! Songs songs songs. Fill the glass, raise your glass, give us a song! A poem! Give us a poem! Read the poets. When you're stuck, read the poets. As research for place/time/setting, read the poets.

Read Read READ. There is no substitute, no alternative, no shortcuts.

Standing on the street in front of the Mailer House waiting for the Gay & Lesbian Carnival Parade to come down Commercial Street, we talked. He rode a bicycle around the United States in 1986, from Massachusetts to Florida to New Orleans and into Mexico. This was before he'd published any fiction. He kept journals of the ride but has no intentions of publishing from them. He threw away scads of early written work as worthless, embarrassing. He admitted to doing the Kerouac thing - he actually bought a huge role of paper that he fed into his typewriter a la "the Scroll." His view on Kerouac today? Relevance has diminished with time. His favorite Kerouac is "The Dharma Bums." He called it "kind."

"I came home on a Thursday night, as drunk as drunk could be ..."

Firm handshake. Eye contact. No guile there. The glow of the Wide Embrace.

From Let the Great World Spin: "Good days, they come around the oddest corners."

Notes on Norman

Michael Lennon, Mailer biographer and close Provincetown friend, dropped by the workshop and gave an informal talk while leading us through the house. Following are some of the anecdotes and snippets of personal history he told.

Michael Lennon (r) and Peter Alson

Norman bought the house, one of the very few brick houses in Provincetown, in the early 80s. Lennon suggested that 3/4s of Mailer's books were written here.

Norman hated plastic and refused to drink wine from plastic cups.

Norman often ate dinner at Michael Shay's Rib and Seafood restaurant. He enjoyed oysters on the half shell and would generally order a dozen. The odd thing was that he saw the faces of ancient Greek warriors in the oyster shells. He would take the shells home with him. He gave serious consideration to making a book of the shells, perhaps a coffee table book.

He sometimes drank merlot and orange juice.

Front Door, 627 Commercial St.

He enjoyed pot in the 50s and 60s but gradually stopped using it.

He watched TV as a means of staying in touch with contemporary culture - but he hated commercials and always muted them. He liked to watch sports.

He habitually read an enormous amount of magazines and newspapers, all kinds, left & right.

The day for him generally started around 9:00 when he would come down to breakfast and read the New York Times and Boston Globe, work the crosswords, then play a few rounds of an invented solitaire game before heading up to the third floor writing studio. He generally worked in shifts, two shifts a day: 10:30 or so until lunch around 2:00; then again from 3:00 or 4:00 until 8:00, sometimes 8:30.

In his early writing years, he worked Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday but in the latter years he worked six and sometimes seven days a week.

He wrote longhand.

He was impetuous. According to Lennon, he believed in "spontaneity in all things."

The dinner parties, of which there were many, were not infrequently contentious affairs. Mailer liked to instigate, provoke, argue. It was often loud. Food or wine was occasionally thrown.

Mailer the Drinker was an early career incarnation. He drank less as he grew older. Lennon dismissed the idea of Mailer as an alcoholic. There were periods of his life when he drank heavily but on the whole he was a social drinker. At one point he had a serious passion for single malt scotch and, as with any subject that interested him enough, he researched the hell out of the topic. Which, in the case of single malt, meant having on hand a huge variety and learning the nuances of each.

He was relentless, he "tried to dominate Reality with his mind."

Provincetown: Days 3 and 4

Back Deck, Mailer House

Time gets away. There's so much to do, conversations to have, quirky Provincetown streets and galleries to stroll, writing to be done. SO much writing to be done! You're here, you're 100% here, you can go to the Mailer House and sit in chairs that Mailer sat in and BE in the space that housed the Uncontainable, the Mailer Life Force. You exchange work with fellow attendees, discuss phrases, words, sentences, you exult about favorite writers, favorite books, you jot down names and titles that others love, you listen to Colum McCann like you're listening to Miles Davis or Thelonius Monk or Frank McCourt, you cannot NOT listen, you're rapt, mesmerized, awed, you absorb every word, every Irish-brogued pronunciation, you suddenly (or maybe gradually, but eventually) realize embrace admit the most important thing, the thing you've been avoiding, the thing that has terrified you and paralyzed you and daunted you and taunted you - you declare yourself a Writer.

***

All the attendees live in different types of quarters; small rooms in guest houses, or B&Bs on Commercial St or, in my case, in a three floor condo across rt. 6 (a shared condo). Voila - my workspace.

Condo Bedroom Office, #1 Seashore Park

Provincetown: Day 1

Outstanding opening workshop, candor, Irish charisma, rules for writing, the Basics Who What When Where Why and How and what they Mean for the story the novel the Work. Perceptive reader commentary, individual insight proffered heard received. We sit around the large square table that is poorly lit. One whole wall of the room is glass and looks out onto Provincetown Bay. Colleagues sitting across the table are silhouetted against the window's light pour, become shadows, outlines. No lamps to fill the room's confines or suffuse the room from above. Though no matter finally. Everyone's engaged, no blather, bluster, blah. There is the Master, Colum McCann, and there are the nine of us, and we are all assembled in the home of the megalomaniac himself, Norman Mailer, the Colossus, the novel's Champion, our benefactor. We're walked upstairs to the third floor by Guy Wolf and shown Mailer's attic writing studio, a room in situ, an artifact placement, a preserved moment when Norman Mailer actually sat and wrote at this desk in this chair alone for the last time, that's what we see. The last throes of the Master's vibe in a room of his own. The papery shards of evidence, his handwriting. An animal skull of some kind. A toy soldier, Napoleon-like, standing defiantly, one leg on the ground and one propped on a miniature drum. A stone-carved rhinoceros figurine.

Later, after the afternoon session ends, cycle to Race Point and all around the dune roads and bicycle paths. The day started with rain but cleared as the day progressed. We're surrounded by the sea. This is the very tip of the peninsula, the last little lanes and mews on this eccentric spit of landscape. The dune wash. The shifting sands and light spill and vision games.

Arrival in Provincetown

Arrived in Provincetown this afternoon and checked in at the Norman Mail House at 4:00 to get my condo assignment and meet Jessica Zlotnicki, the liaison for the Norman Mailer Writers Colony workshops. Unfortunately for me, because I have a car, I've been slotted into a big condo on the other side of rt 6, at least a couple miles out of downtown. What's worse, I have a condo-mate, a guy named Paul from NJ. Not what I'd bargained for. I'd been imagining a quaint little writer's studio apartment where I'd cook delicious meals for myself, spread my stuff all over, keep odd hours, make mail art, and, most importantly, write. Instead, I'm in a summer condo rental, big yes but just more space to be shared. Being hyper-considerate, now I'm hesitant about making dishes, being too much in the kitchen, am self-conscious about drinking a beer (or more), about leaving my stuff around, etc.

BUT ... the workshop. That's the point of my being here at all. Tonight the nine attendees gathered at the Mailer House and met with Colum McCann. There are some very interesting people among us, accomplished ones as well, people who've published books, who work in publishing, who have literary resumes. I'm in the deep water now and need to remind myself that I can swim pretty well myself and not to worry. Among us is a UN international aid worker; a Black guy from Philadelphia who reminds me for all the world of Walter Mosely; a psychologist from Northampton; a gay Indian guy who works for HarperCollins. We all went around the table and talked a little about ourselves. At Colum's behest, we all noted who/what we like to read. When my turn came, I said I recently enjoyed reading Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives, that I'm reading the Ginbserg/Kerouac letters (just released), and that I was considering having a go at Infinite Jest (a comment that brought sighs and expressions of recognition, as if others had either read it or tried to).

Then there's Colum. Instant good vibe from him. Strikes me as very intelligent but with a round, sort of quilt-like intelligence, soft, not like, say, a whip smart debater's honed intellect. Colum has depth, intensity, is well-spoken, confident, obviously skilled at what he does, comfortable in the workshop setting (he teaches at a college in NY too). Really looking forward to listening to him this week. When he looks at you, he really looks right at you and talks right to you; no whiff of posture or pretense; sleeves rolled up, he has strong forearms.

Sunday night's first session is about an hour, mostly we decided who gets workshopped when. I'm up on day two. The schedule is: 2 stories worked tomorrow, 4 on Tuesday (of which I'm one), and 3 on Wednesday.

Oh, and I'm not the only one who brought an excerpt from a novel, I think two others have as well.

Colossus of Maroussi

New Directions is re-issuing Henry Miller's The Colossus of Maroussi, one of his lesser known books, yet one of his finest. Richard Rayner of the Los Angeles Times writes a good piece on it. He plucks some terrific quotes from the book that illustrate well the enthusiasm and vigor that Miller brought to this work. Rayner also succinctly brings into focus the lineage that Miller established:

"The incantatory style, with its rolling sub-clauses, mixed Hemingway and D.H. Lawrence in a way that was fresh at the time; it seems familiar now because it predicts Kerouac, Ginsberg and Snyder. Like the Beats who would follow him, Miller looked out for the possibilities of human holiness. Like them, he embraced risk and never minded going over the top."

Well worth checking out.

David Foster Wallace, Book Reviews, and the Need to Believe in One's Work

The review by Wyatt Mason of David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace in the July 5, 2010 (vol LVII, num. 12) issue of the New York Review of Books is interesting on many levels. What struck me, however, is Mason's discussion of some of the earlier reviews of Wallaces's books, reviews that disparaged Wallaces work as "not edited," "excessive," "self-indulgent," "gibberish," "nonsense," etc.

Though Mason generously accounts for how some of those reviewers might have come by their opinions (deadlines that required hurried reading, for example), what stands out, in light of how we're beginning to understand Wallace today, is how un-generous and shortsighted those reviews were. Could it have been otherwise? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps only in time do we come to fully appreciate, or re-evaluate, a writer's work. Perhaps something truly new, truly innovative, must inevitably endure ridicule and misunderstanding before the prevailing culture catches up with its genius. The Beats, Kerouac in particular, come to mind.

Of course, the object lesson here for aspiring writers, writers willing to chart new territory, to experiment with form, to break with tradition, is to believe in oneself and to disregard the tenor and substance of negative reviews. It's a daunting task to be sure, one that, in Kerouac's case, could not be achieved. It seems clear that, despite Wallace's suicide, his belief in his work never wavered. Though in interviews Wallace admitted to  doubts he had about his fiction, the work itself belies those admissions. The force of certainty pervades his novels, stories, and essays and while every writer is to be afforded his or her apprehension about their work, ultimately the work stands on its own.

In the case of the reviews that Mason cites, what comes through clearly are the peevish, harried, pedestrian minds of the reviewers. Genius comes to light slowly while banality is always plain to see.

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.

48th International PEN Congress, January 1986

 The 48th International PEN Congress (January 12-18, 1986) was a contentious affair. The event brought writers from countries around the world to New York City to discuss/dissect/examine "The Writer's Imagination and the Imagination of the State." The theme itself sparked controversy among many invitees and others who complained of its ambiguity. But discord over the theme soon gave way to other imbroglios.

Norman Mailer, as President of PEN and one of the leading organizers, was at the center of just about every intellectual scuffle and participant complaint. His unilateral invitation of then Secretary of State George P. Shultz to deliver the opening remarks and inaugurate the congress drew widespread anger and vitriol. Shultz's actual speech was disrupted by jeers, shouts, whistles and other expressions of protest.

As the week of panel discussions, readings, interviews, and parties progressed, a further controversy erupted over the lack of women panelists. Again, Mailer was widely blamed for this and a contingent of feminist writers was very vocal in denouncing him and, by extension, PEN for the female disparity.

In the months following the Congress, Norman Mailer was interviewed by Richard D. Heffner on the PBS show Open Mind. The interview is wide-ranging and not specifically about the PEN Congress but Heffner does ask Mailer about it and Mailer responds to some of the controversies. He takes particular umbrage with Betty Friedan, asserting that her protest over the lack of women panelists was more about grandstanding than about any serious affront to women writers. PEN is an honorable organization, he maintains, and in his opinion Friedan should know that and not besmirch it by accusing it of deliberately excluding women panelists.

You can watch and listen to the interviews here (parts I and II):

Part I: http://www.guba.com/watch/3000097079/
Part II: http://www.guba.com/watch/3000097081/NORMAN-MAILER-THE-WRITER-II

A young Salman Rushdie participated in the event later wrote about it for the New York Times Book Review:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/books/review/17RUSHDIE.html

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/