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Hemingway’s “Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well” just knocked me down, jumped on my chest and stood there getting heavier. This seems to be a famous sentence, but it’s not one I noticed the times I read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in my teens and my early twenties. That I’m now 38 may explain why I hit rewind on the audiobook, listened to the sentence again and pulled over at the first tattoo shop I passed. In violation of several Seattle ordinances, I have no tattoos. I didn’t expect to get a tattoo. This sentence makes a tattoo plausible. If I get it, I will probably track down the August 1936 issue of Esquire and reproduce the original look of the sentence so that the tattoo says more than its words by reminding me to strive to read old writing like it’s brand new. Click for high-res photo

Hemingway’s “Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well” just knocked me down, jumped on my chest and stood there getting heavier.

This seems to be a famous sentence, but it’s not one I noticed the times I read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in my teens and my early twenties. That I’m now 38 may explain why I hit rewind on the audiobook, listened to the sentence again and pulled over at the first tattoo shop I passed.

In violation of several Seattle ordinances, I have no tattoos. I didn’t expect to get a tattoo. This sentence makes a tattoo plausible. If I get it, I will probably track down the August 1936 issue of Esquire and reproduce the original look of the sentence so that the tattoo says more than its words by reminding me to strive to read old writing like it’s brand new.

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The thing that drew me to blogging was the conversational tone, the feeling that you were talking with - and not at - an audience who were no better or worse than you were. It’s typically a wide divide that otherwise turned me off to journalism. The New York Observer has always been intent on having a conversation, no matter how ridiculous it is, and much in the same way NY1 creates one or that Jen, Joe, and I worked really hard to make with Runnin’ Scared, it’s a publication that makes this city feel like a small, character-driven town like any other, and also, the most important, ridiculous place in the universe. …

This will either be a terrible fiasco or a terribly awesome fiasco, but either way, I intend on having a lot of fun.

- Foster Kamer on being named senior editor of The New York Observer 

(Source: soupsoup)

(this post was reblogged from fek)
“
I’ve written about this song before, but I owe this band so much — “Little Motel” was the only song I listened to while I wrote my Roger Ebert story earlier this year — I’m going to give them plug after plug after plug, whether they need it or not.

- Esquire’s Chris Jones, plugging Modest Mouse whether they need it or not, in “My 2010 Midnight Writing Playlist.”

The “Roger Ebert story” he mentions is from last February. It’s here. I hope you’ve read it.

Jones also wrote “The Things That Carried Him,” which I can only cheapen by summarizing. This interview gets into how he reported and wrote that story:

ESQ: This was a pretty emotional story to read.

CJ: It was hard to write. I had several bouts where I really just lost it.

ESQ: Like, literally, crying and typing?

CJ: Yeah …

So, yes. Modest Mouse. “Little Motel.”

As Jones puts it, “I’ve received a lot of e-mails asking me how I write. The simple answer is, I write late at night, with my headphones on, listening to music.”

It’s quiet as I type this, unless we pretend that the dishwasher is making a kind of music. But my vote for writing music goes to Radiohead’s “Just,” which shuts out the world, sharpens the mind, and cranks up typing speed like nothing else I know.

Aside from the sheer pleasure of it, part of why I’m listening to Jesse Thorn’s interview of Mavis Staples is to smother my urges to:

1) write an entire post on the specific and general wrongness of “Twitter Can’t Save You,” a review in Sunday’s NYTBR. That’s for the best because, upon reflection, there really are people who should read the review. It should be read by any and all apocryphal beings who think of Twitter not as a tool but as the magic ingredient in the equation Apathy + Disorganization + Twitter = Successful Revolution. It should also be read by anyone who doesn’t choke on the extremism-begets-sanity premise of this sentence: “But the pendulum has swung so far and so long to the cyberutopians’ side that a little extremism is needed to correct the imbalance.”

2) spend a bunch of time and a bunch of words doubling down on last night’s post about the “if gulags don’t sound like your idea of fun” guy who’s griping in Esquire that there’s not enough sex in modern novels. Today it hit me that he conveniently ignored the sexual bluntness of Freedom, arguably the biggest novel of 2010. Then I thought that maybe, in spite of being someone who gets paid to write about books, he doesn’t know about Freedom. But he does. Six months ago, he praised Freedom for dealing with issues such as “the way sex can both create love and destroy it.” So to leave Freedom and its author out of a piece bemoaning the lack of sex in novels seems sloppy or dishonest. Thank you, Mavis Staples. Thank you, Jesse Thorn. You’ve spared me from spending more than a paragraph on a guy who — in that same Freedom review — nodded toward the fact of David Foster Wallace’s suicide with the phrase “David Foster Wallace may have cashed in his chips.” Grrrrr.

Here, from an Associated Press story about Wallace’s memorial, is Freedom author Jonathan Franzen:

Franzen spoke of Wallace’s final months, when his depression had “metastasized” and phone conversations became lifelines. “Tell me a story,” Wallace would ask and Franzen recalled conjuring a “stubborn control freak and know-it-all” (“So are you!” Wallace interrupted at the time) and how he suffered terrible pain, but would come through and write better than ever.

“I like that story,” Wallace replied, but soon he wasn’t listening, or even answering the phone. He had fallen into a well of “infinite sadness, beyond the reach of story,” Franzen said. What remained was a “beautiful, yearning innocence.

“And he was trying.”

Cashed in his chips. Right.

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If gulags don’t sound like your idea of fun, be forewarned: Martin Amis’s new novel, House of Meetings (Knopf, $23), is not a fun book. It’s something of a labor, actually—forced labor, collective labor, the labor of love.

- Benjamin Alsup for Esquire in 2007

Well. What to say? Maybe … nothing. Yes, I’ll go with nothing.

If jokey if-gulags-don’t-sound-like-your-idea-of-fun openings don’t sound like your idea of fun, maybe you’d prefer Alsup’s new Esquire piece, which brought him into my life a few minutes ago: “The Complaint: Sexless Novels.” You could read it. But why not make your own? Here’s the recipe:

1) Boil Katie Roiphe’s flawed 2009 “The Naked and the Conflicted” until its original 3,220 words are reduced down to 678 words.

2) Don’t mention Roiphe.

3) Add some my-MFA-doesn’t-mean-I-wear-a-skirt stuff like “if you’re gonna commit all of yourself to reading a book, a writer has gotta give all in return. He’s gotta use his hips. Maybe put a little back into it. Jonathan Safran Foer is a lovely cat and all, but Jesus, does that guy ever break a sweat?”

4) Own it. Maybe you’d really want a sweaty Jonathan Safran Foer using his hips and putting a little back into you. Maybe you wouldn’t. But the line is money. Don’t over-think this.

5) Employ the phrase “the itchy unkindness of synthetic fibers against the skin,” which will even get an appreciative smile from any jerk who might devise a fake recipe about your writing.

6) Find a few sex-scene quotes. Roiphe had quotes. But if you just took hers wholesale, you might have to mention her. (See #2.)

7) Wonder who you are.

“

INTERVIEWER
Do you feel competitive with novelists?

TALESE
Yes, I do. Journalism is not given much respect. Journalists themselves, particularly in my generation, didn’t take their jobs very seriously. I take it very seriously. This is a craft. This is an art form. I’m writing stories, just like fiction writers, only I use real names. If you chopped my books into single chapters, each one could be a stand-alone short story. You could take the chapter about McCandlish Phillips in The Kingdom and the Power, Garibaldi in Unto the Sons, and Harold Rubin in Thy Neighbor’s Wife, and they would work together as a short-story collection.

Nonfiction writers are second-class citizens, the Ellis Island of literature. We just can’t quite get in. And yes, it pisses me off.

- from “The Art of Nonfiction No. 2,” an interview with Gay Talese in last summer’s issue of The Paris Review

Thanks to my massive, short-lived, amicable dispute with Doreen Marchionni about creative nonfiction and New Journalism, I picked up Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties, a book which, at this moment on Amazon, can be purchased new in hardcover for $262.91 or used in hardcover for 86 cents. My copy is from the library.

It’s huge and I’ve read little of it. The first few pieces I started didn’t hook me. Then I noticed something by Gay Talese called “Looking For Hemingway.” These days I will taste at least a spoonful of any substance whose ingredients include the name Hemingway. So I started the Talese piece, which turns out to be about the earliest days of The Paris Review. I could just say that it’s great, but maybe it’s more useful to say that the piece left me primed to taste at least a spoonful of any substance whose ingredients include the name Talese. That’s how I got to the interview I quoted at the top of this post.

Meanwhile, someone at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, who may or may not have permission, posted Talese’s “Looking For Hemingway” here. Whether via that link, your local library, an 86-cent book, or a $262.91 book you should find a way read it.

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UPDATE: I kept looking and found a way for anyone who’s interested to get “Looking For Hemingway” while putting some money in Mr. Talese’s pocket: 2009’s The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits & Encounters.