too many Daves

"I’d also been wondering about how to write fiction whose structure would lend itself to..."

Sun, 27 May 2012 02:07:00 -0700

“I’d also been wondering about how to write fiction whose structure would lend itself to serialization on Twitter. This is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one—because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in a hundred and forty characters. I found myself imagining a series of terse mental dispatches from a female spy of the future, working undercover by the Mediterranean Sea.”

- - Jennifer Egan, explaining her latest New Yorker short story, which the magazine is tweeting via @nyerfiction.

One example:

Throwing back your head and closing your eyes allows you to give the appearance of sexual readiness while concealing revulsion.

I’m not sure yet how I feel about this story, but A Visit From the Goon Squad left me ready to follow Egan anywhere.

sights from Saturday

Sun, 27 May 2012 01:12:00 -0700

sights from Saturday

Photo

Thu, 24 May 2012 14:29:55 -0700

The trailer is out for the new Gatsby movie. If you feel weird...

Wed, 23 May 2012 20:57:52 -0700

The trailer is out for the new Gatsby movie. If you feel weird watching what is, after all, an advertisement, here — free of charge — is some pseudointellectual cover to legitimize your viewing experience:

1) My 7/30/11 (possibly crackpot) explanation of why I’ve come to believe that Gatsby wasn’t rich.

2) My 1/12/12 “A 3-D Gatsby?” and my catchily titled 1/15/12 “‘a 3-D Gatsby?’ ctd.”, in which I argue, respectively, that Baz Luhrmann might conceivably make a film worthy of The Great Gatsby and that Luhrmann can’t ultimately harm what is “as close as any novel that I can think of to being indestructible.”

sights from Monday morning

Mon, 21 May 2012 13:34:10 -0700

sights from Monday morning

"It’s very easy to fool yourself that you’re working, you know*, when you’re really..."

Mon, 21 May 2012 13:24:45 -0700

“It’s very easy to fool yourself that you’re working, you know*, when you’re really not working very hard. I mean, I’m very lazy. So for me, I would always have an excuse, you know*, to go - quit early, go to a museum, you know*. So I do everything I can to make myself remember this is a job. I keep a schedule. People laugh at me for wearing, you know*, a coat and tie to work.”

- - biographer Robert Caro

Caro is one of my few heroes, so I can’t help toying with the (admittedly facile) notion that I can be like Caro if I start wearing a coat and tie every day.

It might even work. Not because the coat matters. Not because the tie matters. Ritual matters. Any clothing could serve as my daily reminder that there are sentences to write, that there are imaginary people to make real, that there is work to be done.

This brings us to Tin House blog’s “Super Sad True Habits of Highly Effective Writers: Part Two” and the writing wear of essayist Chloe Caldwell:

There’s a mirror above my desk, so sometimes I put on a trucker hat and/or bright lipstick, so I can imagine I’m someone else. It makes me braver.

Therefore, be it resolved that I will sit down to write each day wearing a coat and a tie and a trucker hat and bright lipstick.

* Back when I was a newspaper reporter, KUOW invited me to come on the radio and talk about transit policy. Until I heard my voice played back, I had literally no idea how often I say “you know.” I say it a lot. So I wince for Caro when the NPR transcript shows him using “you know” four times in 76 words, but I also take secret pleasure — OK not secret if I’m blogging about it — that the master and I lean on the same verbal cane.

"Between numbers, she coughed like a consumptive. During the songs, she sounded like no one else."

Sun, 20 May 2012 21:43:36 -0700

From Wyatt Mason’s smart, engaging “Regina Spektor Has Piano, Will Travel” in the NYT mag:

On a cold night in late February, Spektor was preparing for a benefit concert in New York for HIAS, the organization that helped her family immigrate. Spektor had bronchitis, and the day before it looked as if she might have to cancel.

In the dark, she sang song after song, many from her new record, but not “How.” Her manager had heard her at sound check playing through most of the new record and suggested, strongly, that she keep some things in reserve, fearing that recordings would pop up on the Internet the next day (they did). Between numbers, she coughed like a consumptive. During the songs, she sounded like no one else.

The way Spektor sang reminded me of something she told me earlier about the kind of art that matters to her. “I love worlds that are so complete that you just can relax,” Spektor said, “because when the art is that complete, it makes something in me just calm. But a lot of new things … there’s this tension. I’ll take everything that is awesome from it and leave everything that I don’t like. It can be an uneven piece and still worth it. But you put on ‘Rubber Soul,’ or ‘Sgt. Pepper,’ or ‘Freewheeling Bob Dylan’ and it’s just … solid. From the first note you hear, it never goes wrong. Why can’t everything be like that?”

Thanks to Austin Kleon and Maria Popova for the links that brought to Mason’s piece.

"It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but after many years, to start a story..."

Fri, 18 May 2012 22:47:00 -0700

“It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who is not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.”

- - John Steinbeck in a letter to his creative writing professor

(via Stephanie Richter)

sights from Monday

Tue, 15 May 2012 06:40:00 -0700

sights from Monday

sights from a Saturday visit to @Ravenna3rdPlace and...

Sun, 13 May 2012 07:30:14 -0700

sights from a Saturday visit to @Ravenna3rdPlace and @Vios3rdPlace

We entertained ourselves yesterday by spinning an empty key ring...

Wed, 09 May 2012 11:10:19 -0700

We entertained ourselves yesterday by spinning an empty key ring on a tabletop and shooting motion-blurred photos. I recommend it.

"I didn't realize we were bragging"

Wed, 09 May 2012 10:24:00 -0700

Maybe I’m the last to know about David Rees. He’s the guest on the latest episode of Brad Listi’s “Other People” podcast. He turns out to be very funny. If you ever hear me attempt to droll up a conversation by saying “I didn’t realize we were bragging,” you will know it’s because I stole the line from Rees …

REES: Well, first of all, I never had any kind of sports memorabilia on my wall. Wasn’t really my scene. I did have some pretty amazing Lamborghini sports-car posters on the wall because I went through a phase where I was obsessed with Italian sports cars.

LISTI: I had a Porsche.

REES: You literally had a Porsche? Or you mean a poster?

LISTI: No. I had a poster.

REES: I was gonna say. It must be nice. I didn’t realize we were bragging. Yeah, I used to have two Izod button-down shirts.

The interview also features a surprisingly elaborate dialogue on the aesthetics of phone numbers. And there’s still about 25 minutes to go.

"I know you've been worried," she said. "You don't have to worry anymore."

Tue, 08 May 2012 10:36:00 -0700

Last month, because he has a great knack for knowing what I’ll want to read, my dad emailed me a link to the Robert Caro profile Chris Jones wrote for Esquire. I’ve been so absorbed in reading one of Caro’s books that I managed to forget to read the profile. Until yesterday. David Dobbs sent me a message, summing up Jones’ piece as “So so so so good.”

And so I read it. It’s splendid. I’m tempted to pay it the highest compliment I can think of: that it manages to be worthy of Caro. But that may not be quite right. While it’s a gorgeous profile, any profile strictly worthy of Caro would — perversely — require hunting and hunting and hunting for the least sympathetic details of Caro’s life. Maybe Jones tried. Maybe he tried hard. Here, as Jones writes, is how a journalist would have tried even harder:

How, Gottlieb asked Caro, did he get that quote?

Caro told the story. Moses had instructed friends and close associates not to talk to him. Shut out, Caro then drew a series of concentric circles on a piece of paper. In the center, he put Moses. The first circle was his family, the second his friends, the third his acquaintances, and so on. “As the circles grew outward,” Caro says, “there were people who’d only met him once. He wasn’t going to be able to get to them all.” Caro started with the widest circle, unearthing, among other things, the attendance rolls and employment records from Camp Madison. Now some four decades later, Caro tracked down, using mostly phone books at the New York Public Library, every now-adult child and every now-retired employee who might offer him some small detail about Robert’s relationship with his parents. One of the employees he found was the camp’s social worker, Israel Ben Scheiber, who also happened to deliver The New York Times to Bella and Emanuel Moses at their lodge each morning. Scheiber was standing there when Bella had expressed her frustration with her deadbeat son, and he remembered the moment exactly.

“So that’s how,” Caro told Gottlieb.

“Every step of that story is by all ordinary standards insane,” Gottlieb says today. “But he didn’t say any of it as though it were remarkable. We’re dealing with an incredibly productive, wonderful mania.”

I love that part. Two other passages really hit me. Both deal with propping Caro up during those bleak times when the publishing world still saw his “incredibly productive, wonderful mania” as a pointless obsession with a doomed book.

This:

Block after block he walked, past 96th Street, 110th, 126th, 168th. Had he made a terrible mistake? Had he written a bad book? Caro felt trapped: in too deep to abandon his book, too far away from finishing it to continue. Ina remembers receiving her husband that night, ruined. Her anger is still in her voice today: “I was livid,” she says. “I just thought they’d treated him miserably.” They sat down and talked into the night. “He’s such a beautiful writer,” she says. “I just always felt everything would work out.”

And this:

Nesbit, today one of the principals of Janklow & Nesbit, sits in her sunlit office, and the iconic names of her clients jump out from the shelves: Michael Crichton, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, Jeffrey Eugenides. But she can still remember sitting down to read those first five hundred thousand words of Robert Caro’s.

“I thought, Who’s Robert Moses?” she says. “I was young and hadn’t been in New York City that many years. I didn’t really know who he was. And then I started reading the manuscript, this incredibly compelling narrative about this man I knew nothing about. He came alive.”

She turned the last page and made two phone calls. The first was to Caro. He remembers it as one of the great moments of his life. “I know you’ve been worried,” she said. “You don’t have to worry anymore.”

Those might be the most wonderful words I’ve ever heard attributed to an agent.

sights from Saturday morning’s dog walk

Sat, 05 May 2012 13:16:15 -0700

sights from Saturday morning’s dog walk

sights from Friday morning’s dog walk

Fri, 04 May 2012 12:38:38 -0700

sights from Friday morning’s dog walk

"dignity was a luxury in a fight with Lyndon Johnson"

Wed, 02 May 2012 11:56:00 -0700

The ongoing pleasure of reading Robert Caro’s masterful Means of Ascent inspired me to post something sincere but (arguably) goofy on Twitter this morning: “Just in case my tweets control the future, I think HBO should do a miniseries on LBJ’s 1948 Senate race.”

Why do I want to watch a miniseries about a campaign that pitted the helicopter-flying, weekly-poll-taking, good-name-smearing, slick-radio-spot-buying Congressman Lyndon Johnson against the drive-from-town-to-town-and-shake-hands-with-folks simplicity of revered ex-Gov. Coke Stevenson? I could answer that with any number of excerpts from Caro, but I’ll limit it to three.

This …

Sometimes the reaction of such targets of opportunity to the totally unexpected roar from the sky and the abrupt descent upon them of the weird-looking machine was not one of unbridled enthusiasm. In East Texas, for example, a dozen cotton-choppers, seeing the Flying Windmill suddenly wheel and head for them, dropped their hoes and ran in terror for the shelter of a nearby wood. Such reactions did not, however, deter the candidate. The helicopter was too fast for the cotton-choppers; before they could reach the wood, it was above them. As they froze in their tracks, he shouted down over the microphone: “Hello, down there! This is your friend, Lyndon Johnson, your candidate for the United States Senate. I hope you’ll vote for me on Primary Day. And bring along your relatives to vote, too.”

… Nothing in his path could escape. Was there an isolated farmhouse ahead? In the midst of a peaceful farm setting—wife in her kitchen, baking, perhaps; farmer milking under a tree—the S-51 would suddenly swoop with the Pratt & Whitney roaring. “The chickens thought it was a bird coming down to get them,” Busby recalls. “They would go berserk, flying up and hitting the fences.” Cows would gallop awkwardly away in panic …

And this …

Never before had there been a campaign in which the same phrases were drummed into voters’ consciousness so constantly all through June and July. “Secret deal”? Perhaps Coke Stevenson felt he wouldn’t dignify the charge by denying it. But dignity was a luxury in a fight with Lyndon Johnson, a luxury too expensive to afford. Perhaps Stevenson had too much pride to deny the charge. Pride was a luxury that an opponent of Lyndon Johnson could not afford. Once Johnson found an issue, true or untrue, that “touched,” he hammered it—until people started to believe it.

And finally, this scene from Johnson’s protracted battle against an especially big kidney stone:

… when (speechwriter Paul Bolton) entered the apartment, the Congressman was standing in the middle of the living room, “mother naked—obviously sick, and obviously he had been shot full of painkillers.” He began to rant, his arms flailing. Lady Bird was attempting to soothe him, and to get him dressed for the speech, but with little result. “I was aghast,” Bolton recalls. “I was scared half silly.” During the few minutes before Lady Bird shooed the speechwriter out, Johnson kept saying he was determined to give the speech, but Bolton remembers that he did not believe that was possible. The speechwriter drove to Wooldridge Park “very much in turmoil.” But then, right on schedule, Lyndon Johnson’s car pulled up to the park and the Congressman got out. … He didn’t merely walk onto the stage, which had been cleared of everybody except his wife and his mother (both dressed completely in white); he ran onto it, “head thrown back,” Bolton recalls, “hands in the air,” flung his Stetson into the crowd with a carefree, sweeping gesture; “he was a great figure of a triumphant warrior going to war.”

DSLR in DC Lately, I take more photos with my phone than with my...

Tue, 01 May 2012 14:37:00 -0700

DSLR in DC

Lately, I take more photos with my phone than with my supposedly “real” camera. These two, though, were shot the old-fashioned way — by which I mean, shot with my digital SLR. Both are from our April trip to D.C.

sights from Monday

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:56:00 -0700

sights from Monday

sights from Saturday (downtown Seattle edition)

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 17:31:00 -0700

sights from Saturday (downtown Seattle edition)

"It’s a weird thing about New York: The moment you say “God, I hate New York,” it..."

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:42:53 -0700

“It’s a weird thing about New York: The moment you say “God, I hate New York,” it gets rid of you. It puts you in your car and shoves you in the Lincoln Tunnel.”

- - Mark Richard, digressing memorably while introducing John Jeremiah Sullivan at Skylight Books in Los Angeles.

I heard this and pictured New York City’s Pesci-voiced, funny-like-I’m-a-clown?! reaction to getting dumped by a young, wrung-out Joan Didion: “Goodbye to all that? Goodbye to all that?! No. All that says goodbye to you!”

You can listen to Sullivan’s appearance here. And you should. It’s roughly an hour. If you care about great writing, you’ll be glad you spent the time.