A long sentence is worth the read - latimes.com
"Your sentences are so long," said a friend who teaches English at a local college, and I could tell she didn't quite mean it as a compliment. The copy editor who painstakingly went through my most recent book often put yellow dashes on-screen around my multiplying clauses, to ask if I didn't want to break up my sentences or put less material in every one. Both responses couldn't have been kinder or more considered, but what my friend and my colleague may not have sensed was this: I'm using longer and longer sentences as a small protest against — and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from — the bombardment of the moment. When I began writing for a living, my feeling was that my job was to give the reader something vivid, quick and concrete that she couldn't get in any other form; a writer was an information-gathering machine, I thought, and especially as a journalist, my job was to go out into the world and gather details, moments, impressions as visual and immediate as TV.
Tahmima Anam | The Good Muslim
IS (Roberto Bolaño's) "2666" A MASTERPIECE?
Reading "2666", "it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish Roberto Bolaño's genius from his excess. Indeed, it starts to seem that Bolaño's genius is his excess", writes Garth Risk Hallberg... Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE In his treatise on drama, "Three Uses of the Knife", David Mamet cribs a distinction from Stanislavsky. The late Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño had a foot in each territory. Bolaño, a poet by vocation, had initially (not to say quixotically) turned to fiction as a money-making proposition, and after the success of "The Savage Detectives", he might have settled into a lucrative middle age repackaging his dissolute youth. In real life, Santa Teresa was Ciudad Juárez, and by 1998, it was home to the largest serial killing in recorded history. This 900-page book unfolds in five novel-length sections, each with its own characters, style and chronology. The prose, too, diverges from Bolaño's earlier work. Which brings us to "The Part About The Crimes."
James Baldwin: Witty, Fiery in Berkeley, 1979
Hot on the heels of Independence Day, here’s a chance to listen to one of America’s best writers declaring his own form of Independence — a freedom from some of the more troubling assumptions embedded in the English language. Starting with a dry, mild questioning of phrases like “black as night,” “black-hearted,” and “black as sin,” Baldwin turns quickly to a critique of the name of the civil rights movement itself, which he suggests would be more accurately described as a slave rebellion. The logic and eloquence with which Baldwin makes his case is much better savored than explained. Enjoy the clip, and especially make sure not to miss his remarks on Huck Finn at minute 3:00, or the lovely description of Malcolm X at about minute 5:00. And, to be sure, we’ll add this to our collection of Cultural Icons. Related Content: Great Cultural Icons Talk Civil Rights Malcolm X at Oxford, 1964
Same-as-that—By Dale Peck
From a speech given in December 2011, at the New School, in New York City. Dale Peck is a novelist and critic. The first time I heard the word samizdat was at an ACT UP meeting. The term was applied to the vast stacks of photocopies that every member picked up on the way into the Monday-night meeting: treatment guidelines, drug studies, bureaucratic analyses, action plans, contact lists, and announcements of events ranging from performances and gallery openings to house parties and memorial services. This collection was never referred to as anything other than “the table” (even though it usually spread over two or three), a twelve- or eighteen-foot-long banquet of paper down both sides of which several hundred gay men and lesbians, nearly indistinguishable in their Doc Martens and Levi’s and sloganed T-shirts, bent their spiky or shaved heads and served themselves and one another with the ordered geniality of an Amish wedding. He died of AIDS! My dear Gino, What a wonderful surprise!
Reza Aslan’s New Book, Table and Pen: Literature Bridges Civilizations
One utterly confounding and intriguing question lies at the very heart of 'Mad Men': How many women can one married man sleep with over the course of 92 hour-long episodes? Mad Men, the ambitious, award-winning AMC series, is embarking upon its seventh and final season this Sunday. Throughout its epic run, Mad Men has attempted to answer a myriad of fascinating and complex questions. They include: what is the American Dream? What does it mean to be a man? But one utterly confounding and intriguing question lies at the very heart of the series: How many women can one married man sleep with over the course of 92 hour-long episodes? According to our count, the current number stands at over a dozen—and we still have all of Season 7 to go. Betty Draper Francis (January Jones) Betty Draper burst onto the small screen with an undeniable presence befitting the wife of the enigmatic Don Draper. Don seduced and married Betty when she was a young model working in New York City. Joy (Laura Ramsey)
Saul Bellow - Nobel Lecture
December 12, 1976 Listen to an Audio Recording of Saul Bellow's Nobel Lecture (paragraph 1-3)* 11 min. I was a very contrary undergraduate more than 40 years ago. This fervent statement was written some 80 years ago and we may want to take it with a few grains of contemporary salt. I feel no need now to sprinkle Conrad's sentences with skeptical salt. On an occasion like this I have no appetite for polemics. But I am interested here in the question of the artist's priorities. The message of Robbe-Grillet is not new. The title of Robbe-Grillet's essay is On Several Obsolete Notions. The fact that the death notice of character "has been signed by the most serious essayists" means only that another group of mummies, the most respectable leaders of the intellectual community, has laid down the law. There is no reason why a novelist should not drop "character" if the strategy stimulates him. Characters, Elizabeth Bowen once said, are not created by writers. What is at the center now?
You Owe Me
The children I write with die, no matter how much I love them, no matter how creative they are, no matter how many poems they have written, or how much they want to live. They die of diseases with unpronounceable names, of rhabdomyosarcoma or pilocytic astrocytoma, of cancers rarely heard of in the world at large, of cancers that are often cured once, but then turn up again somewhere else: in their lungs, their stomachs, their sinuses, their bones, their brains. While undergoing their own treatments, my students watch one friend after another lose legs, cough up blood, and enter a hospital room they never come out of again. The M. D. As part of my job I write a yearly reflective journal. Gio’s was the first death I witnessed as a writer, as an outsider who enters into the intimate world of struggling children. For two years after Gio’s death I clung to this vision. How horrible to be able to catalogue the deaths of children in this way. Of course, there are sad days. Because You can.
