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My writing isn’t experimental. When I’ve nodded to the reportoire of avant-garde effects, I took it for granted that the experiments in question were conducted by others, in the past. Now they’re part of the palette. A literary critic who puts the word “experimental” within a mile of my stuff is either in bad faith or ill-informed about a century including Oulipo, Language poetry, and, well, surrealism.

- a quote from Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence that I like in spite of being so thoroughly “ill-informed about a century including Oulipo” that I don’t think I’d ever seen the word?/surname?/floor wax?/dessert topping? “Oulipo.”

Wikipedia’s list of “Oulipian constraints” includes:

Replace every noun in a text with the seventh noun after it in a dictionary. For example, “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago…” becomes “Call me islander. Some yeggs ago…”. Results will vary depending upon the dictionary used.

Youngling can always count on a murrain for a fancy proselyte stylist.

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UPDATE (moments later):

And now I’m questioning whether “you,” being a pronoun, should have been made into “youngling” or not. Never mind.

Sightings of great literature in cheap paperback format make me unreasonably happy. I love colored endpapers and a two-color foil-stamped cover as much as the next guy. But I hate the thought that a one-size-fits-all price would ever prevent someone from buying a book they’d love. Only yesterday I couldn’t get myself to hand over 22 bucks for Wislawa Szymborska’s 96-page Here. Offer me a paperback. Offer me motel-room-Bible-grade paper stock and a binding I’ll need to mend with duct tape midway through the first read. I won’t come crying when a few pages rip. The photo above is from today. I found this copy of Pale Fire on a nonprofit’s 25-cents-a-book cart. I talked it up. I declaimed “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure of the windowpane” to an audience made up of one third-grader, one fourth-grader, and one fellow dad. The dad shelled out his 25 cents and bought the book, which will only encourage my grating evangelism. Click for high-res photo

Sightings of great literature in cheap paperback format make me unreasonably happy. I love colored endpapers and a two-color foil-stamped cover as much as the next guy. But I hate the thought that a one-size-fits-all price would ever prevent someone from buying a book they’d love.

Only yesterday I couldn’t get myself to hand over 22 bucks for Wislawa Szymborska’s 96-page Here. Offer me a paperback. Offer me motel-room-Bible-grade paper stock and a binding I’ll need to mend with duct tape midway through the first read. I won’t come crying when a few pages rip.

The photo above is from today. I found this copy of Pale Fire on a nonprofit’s 25-cents-a-book cart. I talked it up. I declaimed “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure of the windowpane” to an audience made up of one third-grader, one fourth-grader, and one fellow dad. The dad shelled out his 25 cents and bought the book, which will only encourage my grating evangelism.

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… if you want to drive a person mad in a fame culture, offer him only a little fame, the very least amount you can scrape up. This happens every day, but it happens in slow motion to novelists. We’re like the guy who gets voted off first on Survivor, except instead of departing the island we walk its beaches forever, muttering.

- from Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence

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Your parents are the first memo to come across your desk, on a page so large you can’t see past its edges.
- from Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence
Not available on Kindle at this time. Click for high-res photo

Not available on Kindle at this time.

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Affenlight didn’t hate David, not anymore. Not that he had much regard for the man, but he’d spent more time thinking about David in recent years than about anyone in the world besides Pella and Owen, and that kind of constant mindfulness, over time, could mellow into sympathy. He would never forgive David, but David had become a part of life, and Affenlight had achieved a grudging acknowledgment of the fact that David would continue to live and breathe whether he wanted him to or not.

- from Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding

I wrote a paragraph explaining why this passage speaks to me during this phase of my life, but it’s clumsily, uncomfortably personal. So I followed the advice you’ll read later in this post: I axed it.

Meanwhile, to distract you from my clumsily, uncomfortably personal disclosure that I wrote and deleted something clumsily, uncomfortably personal, here’s another striking quote from Harbach’s novel:

Baseball was an art, but to excel at it you had to become a machine. It didn’t matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren’t a painter or a writer—you didn’t work in private and discard your mistakes …


That last bit holds a healthy reminder for writers: Revising isn’t a burden; it’s a luxury.

So junk thousands of words. Start fresh. Be glad. And know that the shortstop whose game-deciding throw missed the first baseman’s glove by ten feet is deeply envious.

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Part of Affenlight felt peeved at Owen for interrupting or dismissing his bliss. Because it was bliss, he felt, to be here with Owen and to read to him, even when he was reading dry-as-dust sentences from a poorly xeroxed course packet. Of all the activities two people could do together in private, Affenlight had a special fondness for reading aloud. Maybe this was part of his instinct for solitude and self-enclosure; a way to reveal himself while hiding behind someone else’s words.

- from Chad Harbach’s novel, The Art of Fielding

I’m with Affenlight. Whether or not you’re hiding behind someone else’s words, reading to a loved one is bliss. So is being read to.

And when I say “a loved one,” I mean that broadly, to include everyone from your lover to your own infant, whose brain detects no story but only the song of your voice.

One of the most comforting deathbed scenes I’ve ever found myself imagining involves a late-middle-aged version of my daughter reading to an old-man version of me as I fade and fade and finally am no more.

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“You shouldn’t eat so much flour,” Owen said, taking a single pancake for himself. “Even when I’m stoned I don’t each much flour. The other reason, of course, is that I’m a staunch monogamist. In practice, if not in theory. I can’t help it. Do I acknowledge the oppressive, regressive nature of sexual exclusivity? Yes. Do I want that exclusivity very badly for myself? Also yes. There’s probably some sort of way in which that’s not a paradox. Maybe I believe in love. Maybe I just badly crave my mother’s approval. Hang on a sec.” Owen jogged back to the hot-food line, spatulaed up four more flapjacks, and slid them onto his plate. “Sorry to babble on like this, Henry. I think I’m immoderately stoned.”

After brunch they went to the union to play Ping-Pong. Owen, even immoderately stoned, proved to be a surprisingly good player.

- from Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding

A little like Owen, I have nothing but maybes to explain why I like this passage. Maybe it’s because I’ve stubbed my toe more than once on those “In practice, if not in theory” tree roots that lurk just below the tips of the grass blades when your spirit is more bold than your flesh. Or maybe I’ve just read “In theory, if not in practice” so very many times that I hallucinate a twisting backflip in Harbach’s “In practice, if not in theory.” 

Maybe the spelling of “spatulaed” looks so wrong that it’s just got to be right.

Maybe it’s as simple as being a sucker for a good Ping-Pong reference. Your serve, Mr. Nabokov.

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OKAY, BACK UP, WE CAN’T LET THIS PASS. YOU LIVED IN A TREE HOUSE?

The tree house is a structure on a friend’s property in North Carolina. When I left my very first job, I retreated to said tree house for several months. Then I went and worked for some friends of mine who are weavers in Italy for several months for the winter. When I came back in the Spring, the friend and I decided we wanted to make the tree house bigger. So I drafted plans for an additional part and we hired a carpenter. For about four months, I worked on building the second part of this tree house, which I then lived in for several years after.

YOU’RE DRAWN TO THE MAKING OF PHYSICAL THINGS.

I’m a builder.

OF BOOKS, OF TREE HOUSES, AND ALSO OF SHOES, RIGHT?

Oh gosh, shoes, yes! As I started getting more and more involved in bookmaking and my work began to be collected, I would see my books go into special collection libraries, put behind glass boxes in exhibitions, and stowed away deep inside buildings, never to be handled again. … Making shoes is a way to take the tools, materials, and processes I know and understand as a bookmaker, and using them in service of making a utilitarian object.

- from an interview with Jennifer Brook, who I nominate to succeed the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man In The World” guy.
I’ve been having trouble reading, trouble focusing, trouble thinking. But this is off to a dazzling start. Here, have a passage: As for The Defiant Ones, its suggestion that Negroes and whites can learn to love each other if they are only chained together long enough runs so madly counter to the facts that it must be dismissed as one of the latest, and sickest, of the liberal fantasies, even if one does not quarrel with the notion that love on such terms is desirable. These movies are designed not to trouble, but to reassure; they do not reflect reality, they merely rearrange its elements into something we can bear. They also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are.

I’ve been having trouble reading, trouble focusing, trouble thinking. But this is off to a dazzling start.

Here, have a passage:

As for The Defiant Ones, its suggestion that Negroes and whites can learn to love each other if they are only chained together long enough runs so madly counter to the facts that it must be dismissed as one of the latest, and sickest, of the liberal fantasies, even if one does not quarrel with the notion that love on such terms is desirable. These movies are designed not to trouble, but to reassure; they do not reflect reality, they merely rearrange its elements into something we can bear. They also weaken our ability to deal with the world as it is, ourselves as we are.

From People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks: I love the Tate. I really do. Despite the fact that its collection of Australian art is pretty sketchy. Not a single Arthur Boyd painting, for one thing, which has always bugged me quite a bit. There are times when my own ignorance yanks me out of the flow of a book so badly that it’s best to do a quick Google search. In this case, who’s this Arthur Boyd? The painting above is Boyd’s “Portrait of Alannah Coleman I.” I also found this landscape called “Shoalhaven River afternoon.” And then it was back to the novel.

From People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks:

I love the Tate. I really do. Despite the fact that its collection of Australian art is pretty sketchy. Not a single Arthur Boyd painting, for one thing, which has always bugged me quite a bit.

There are times when my own ignorance yanks me out of the flow of a book so badly that it’s best to do a quick Google search. In this case, who’s this Arthur Boyd? The painting above is Boyd’s “Portrait of Alannah Coleman I.” I also found this landscape called “Shoalhaven River afternoon.” And then it was back to the novel.

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The Passage of Power by Robert Caro: The much-anticipated fourth volume of Caro’s landmark five-volume life of Lyndon Johnson appears just in time for Father’s Day. This volume, covering LBJ’s life from late 1958 when he began campaigning for the presidency, to early 1964, after he was thrust into office following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, comes ten years after The Master of the Senate, which won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. The new volume, which focuses on the gossip-rich Kennedy White House years, will no doubt be another runaway bestseller.

- from themillions.com’s “Most Anticipated: The Great 2012 Book Preview” 

Both hands shot up to the sides of my head when I read this. Amazement. Joy.

Caro has shouldered such a monumental task. Sometimes I worry that no single human can complete it. Considering that I don’t know Caro, I think more often than is reasonable about his health and about the care he takes when crossing streets. 

Caro’s previous LBJ volume is one of my favorite books. I continue to believe that its tenth, eleventh, and twelfth chapters should be read by anyone who blogs, tweets, uses Facebook, or posts comments online.