Month: November 2019

This is making my palms sweaty. Better scroll back today to have a looksee at what I wrote way back on page 1.

The first line can be a beast to get right whether you’re composing a dating profile or drafting a workplace pitch – but when it comes to longform fiction, the stakes are vertiginous. Think of all that goes into writing a novel, from conception to final edit and beyond; then picture a prospective reader, besieged by competing demands from rival books, never mind films and binge-worthy boxsets. Imagine next that reader miraculously reaching for our author’s work, scanning its jacket blurb, opening the cover…

This writer, who I believe just won an NBA last night for non-fiction, rambles (eloquently) about rambling (eloquently). This is something I needed to read today, he said, looking down the double-barrelled shotgun of chapter 11.

The unfinished work is no less real, or necessary, or powerful than the book. How we need it, this work, these long, beautiful digressions, these surprises. May we continue to gift writers with the time for wildness. May they ramble, digress, go beyond the edges of all the known and touted maps, may they hew close to the question, to unearth the questions beyond.

Note: not a basketball post. The National Book Awards went last night. Twitter is a soup of people live tweeting it. Anyway, here’s a long story shortened: the winners. I like Sze’s poetry and I heard the Choi is good.

Well, now that the Giller is gone by, we’re back to regular Canadian book news: kittens who live in a bookstore. (Listen, it was either that or the latest guy we all used to like who turns out to be a predator.)

When I was starting out, we were pretty careful to not write political poems. But that might be a Gen X thing, more than a poetry thing. Here, what changed the poet soldiers of that generation are examined.

Clearly, the combination of loneliness and sense of betrayal that so many of these poets experienced was a central component of their work. As Ehrhart described, “each soldier went to Vietnam alone and unheralded, and those who survived came home alone to an alien land—indifferent or even hostile to them—where the war continued to rage no farther away than the nearest television set or newspaper, or the nearest street demonstration.”

This short opinion essay’s title gets right to it: Sadly, I Like Reading Books on My Phone Now. Personally, I still can’t, though last year I bought a tablet in anticipation of the day I’ll need to size up the font to be able to read it. (I swear, my mother-in-law’s phone shows like one word at a time, they’re so zoomed.) Listen, as an early generation nerd, I have been sitting in front of computer screens since about 1982. My eyes are tired, man. Tired. So I’ll stick with paper as long as I’m able. Anyway, all this is to say that I fall asleep within two paragraphs even when reading paper, so I think it’s more about age than medium.

When I was a kid I used to read for five or six hours straight without incident, except for having to get up to pee or get a snack, but now I can’t seem to make it more than 20 minutes without falling asleep. I love to read, and I’m very worried about reading enough books before I die, so this bothers me a lot.

Tweets and emojis are seeping into and changing our fiction like microplastics swirling in your baby’s bloodstream for a future condition we haven’t yet diagnosed. Happy Wednesday. (Ferrante and Knausgaard analysis in here for those inclined to skip anything with the word “emoji” in the headline.)

…who could contest the idea that communications, behind a ceaseless inflow of data, have been continually evolving to target ever more primitive brain functions? Think of the obscurely nauseous casino ping of tugging downward on Instagram and seeing it refresh with a notification, the instant dopamine rush. The scroll and the ideogram died out because of their simplicity, only to have been revived for that reason. The scroll is a frictionless waterfall on the screen. And while an entire alphabet of ideograms would be unusably bulky, a handful of key ones, scattered into our language, condense thousands of complicated reactions into a few dozen universal symbols.

The Walrus has a neat piece on the making of Margaret Atwood, who has recently turned 80, as explored through anecdotes from those who have known her best, including friends, broadcasters, and other authors (Eleanor Wachtel, George Saunders, Tom King, Esi Edugyen, the douchey office of Jonathan Franzen, etc.)

It’s remarkable that Atwood, who turned eighty in November, has reached this crest after spending six decades writing into an ever-shifting cultural landscape. When she was starting out, writers, for the most part, didn’t get published in Canada. Canadian literature as a concept didn’t even exist. To understand how Atwood grew into the literary celebrity she is today, we reached out to some of the writers, publishers, and friends who know her, and her words, best.

Restoring the glory of the public library as a balm against the rampant stupidity that is current American life. Huh. Looks like it might check out. (Check out? Get it? …. No?…. Pfft. Philistines.)

Libraries are an example of what I call “social infrastructure”: the physical spaces and organizations that shape the way people interact. Libraries don’t just provide free access to books and other cultural materials, they also offer things like companionship for older adults, de facto child care for busy parents, language instruction for immigrants and welcoming public spaces for the poor, the homeless and young people.

Do you know the story of Blade Runner: A Movie? Probably not. Given that we now live in the actual month the original Blade Runner movie was set, I think it’s time we started having these conversations.

Have you read the book Blade Runner: A Movie? It’s not the book of the movie Blade Runner – the book of that movie is called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Blade Runner: A Movie isn’t even a movie. Though it was meant to be. The movie of a book called The Bladerunner. Another book, written by someone else entirely, unconnected to Blade Runner, the movie, or Blade Runner: A Movie, the book.