March 11, 2010
Posted at 4:10 PM in Reading and Writing
So I'm reading Michael Slater's new biography of Charles Dickens. (It has very, very small print, but that's neither here nor there for the purposes of this post. It is a little trying on the eyes, though.) Slater focuses on Dickens as a working writer. The guy worked, then worked some more, then did some work. Nothing but work, work, work like the proverbial dog--from his youth until he worked himself to death in his 50s. As Simon Callow put it a tad more gracefully in his Guardian review of the book,
There are times in Michael Slater's indispensable new biography when one simply has to close the book from sheer exhaustion at its subject's expenditure of energy. It's like being sprayed by the ocean. Even Dickens was astonished at it: "How strange it is," he said, "to be never at rest!"
I have been thinking about what a working writer can learn from Dickens. In some ways, he exists outside the ring of people whom you can usefully emulate. First of all, he's Charles Dickens. Nobody else can be Charles Dickens, just like nobody else can be Shakespeare or Tolstoy.
How about Dickens as a cautionary tale, then? You could learn a thing or two from Mr. D. about the dangers of overwork (e.g., exhaustion, death) and about how not to treat wives and publishers. (Dickens was not always fair or kind to either.) Then there's story Slater tells of the artist who had the original idea for what became the Pickwick Papers, which helped launch Dickens into the literary stratosphere of Victorian England. The illustrator, whose name eludes me at the moment, struggled all night over an illustration that Dickens didn't like, then walked out into his garden in the morning and shot himself through the heart.
And yet, and still--Dickens knew how to sit down and write, and he must have loved it to do as much of it as he did. He was never content to have one project in hand; he needed two, or three, or seven. Journalism, sketches, novels, plays, operettas: He wrote them all and could rotate among genres as he liked or needed to. He always had room for another idea, and another, and another, and he made room in his schedule for a staggering number of them. Dickens's energy and his commitment to the act of writing, his ability and desire to do it over and over again, every way he could think of--these are things that a writer can take heart in. Why not love your ideas? Why not spin them into stories the best way you know how? Why not try to do more instead of less? Just be nice to your publishers and your loved ones in the process. And get some rest, for heaven's sake. No need to work yourself to death. But you do have to do the work. And that's part of the joy.
February 17, 2010
Posted at 4:39 PM in Q&A
Ever since my children brought home a copy of Oliver Jeffers's picture book The Incredible Book Eating Boy, it's been a family favorite. It's about a boy named Henry who devours book--really eats them, bindings and all. (The back cover has a big chomp taken out of it.) We sent Oliver a fan note, which he very kindly replied to. So I asked him if he'd mind answering a few questions, and he was kind enough to do that too. Look for his new picture book, The Heart in the Bottle, in March. Oliver does a lot of things besides picture books, all of them very cool. You can watch a neat video of Oliver at work in his studio here.
Q. From Lela, age 7: What was the first book you wrote?
A. My first book was How to Catch a Star.
Q. From Finn, age 5: How did you take that bite out of the back of The Incredible Book Eating Boy?
A. With a lot of difficulty. I went through lots of toothpaste and missed dinners.
Q. Do you first think of a story in pictures or in words?
A. Actually, I do the words and pictures at around the same time. I don't write something that is clear in the drawing, and I don't draw something that is clear in the writing.
Q. How different is writing and drawing picture books from the other kinds of art (paintings, objects) that you make?
A. Picture books are very different, because I have to think about each page and how it fits in with the whole book. With everything else, it's just a single image that stands on its own.
Q. In The Incredible Book Eating Boy, some of the illustrations feature pages or maps from old books. Where did you find them?
A. I collected all the old maps and books from library sales, second-hand book shops and my Granny's attic.
Q. What can you tell us about your next book, The Heart and the Bottle?
A. I can tell you the new book is about a girl who puts her heart in a safe place after loosing something important to her.
Q. What books/stories did you love as a kid?
A. I loved anything by Roald Dahl when I was a kid.
Q. You grew up in Belfast and now live in Brooklyn. What do you miss about Ireland? What do you like about living in the States?
A. I miss my family, friends, the greenery and much of the cooking in Northern Ireland, and I love a whole range of new and different foods in America, how big and busy everything is, and my new friends here.
Q. Do you have any advice for writers or illustrators who want to write/draw for kids?
A. My advice is to keep drawing and to not take no for an answer.
Q. Are you a dog person or a cat person? (Sorry, had to ask.)
A. I'm a dog person.
February 15, 2010
Posted at 10:37 AM in Net Life
My adventures in podcasting continue. First, I joined Dan Cohen, Mills Kelly, and Tom Scheinfeldt on their "Digital Campus" podcast (Episode 51, "The Inevitable iPad," Jan. 28, 2010). We recorded the podcast the day after Apple's big iPad announcement, so we talked a lot about what the iPad might or might not do for teaching and publishing. We also dug into Cornell's decision to ask other institutions to help pay for arXiv, the repository where physicists, computer scientists, and others in related disciplines share pre-print copies of articles about the latest research in their fields.
Side note: If you care at all about the digital humanities--and why wouldn't you?--you should be following Dan and Tom on Twitter (@dancohen and @foundhistory). Mills doesn't do Twitter, but you can follow him at his blog, Edwired (linked above).
Second, The Collagist posted a podcast of me reading my short fictions "Twenty Questions," "It's Me," and "It's You" from the December issue. I love that the mag asks writers to do this. Not only do the recordings give readers another way to experience stories, they give the writer a chance to play with how the words fit together, where the emotional stresses and emphases are. I liked thinking about how much to act out the stories in how I read them, and how much to let the words alone carry. Hope you enjoy it. I had fun making it.
'
Another side note: Matt Bell, the amazingly energetic and talented editor of The Collagist, just had his story "Dredge" chosen for Best American Mystery Stories 2010. The collection will be out this fall, which is also when his next book, How They Were Found, will appear.
January 26, 2010
Posted at 12:18 PM in Mother Tongues
As I write in my latest feature for the Chronicle (UPDATE: the link is now free), translation is "having a moment, or a series of moments." It was the presidential theme of the Modern Language Association's most recent convention. Two university-affiliated publishing ventures, Dalkey Archive at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester, have been working overtime to get more translated literature into the hands of American readers.
One of Dalkey's recent titles, Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Aleksandar Hemon, has gotten some nice mainstream attention. The WSJ wrote about the book, and the NYT interviewed Hemon on its Paper Cuts blog.
If you pay attention to what's written about literature in translation, though, you'll notice that the people doing the translating are rarely named. (Props to Michael Schaub at Bookslut, whose review of Best European Fiction 2010 made sure to mention the stories' translators.) For my Chronicle story, I spent a lot of time talking to literary translators about what Lawrence Venuti has called the translator's invisibility. This is a particular problem for translators working in the academic world, where, as Esther Allen put it, being a translator "actively works against you."
In an attempt to broaden my horizons, I'm working my way through Best European Fiction 2010 now. So far it's a little heavy on Kafkaesque influences for my taste, and I don't know whether that truly reflects a lot of European writers' leanings--I'm willing to believe that but nervous about jumping to continent-wide generalizations--or whether it's a result of editorial taste. And maybe I'll change my mind by the time I get to the end of the book. In any case, it's fun to be taking "a whistle-stop tour of European fiction," as Tibor Fischer called the book in his Financial Times review. (He calls it "an appealing and applause-worthy project" but complains that it has "a slight bureaucratic stiffness about it" and hopes that future volumes will show "less deference to territories and more to talent.")
For more on how Americans deal with literature that isn't home-grown, read Jessa Crispin's astute take on the anthology, American insularity, and foreign influences at the Smart Set. To keep tabs on literature in translation and what's happening on literary fronts outside the United States, bookmark the excellent Literary Saloon blog, run by Michael Orthofer (@MAOrthofer on Twitter). Another great source for news and thoughts on literature and translation is Three Percent, a blog run by Open Letter's Chad Post.
Do you read literature in translation? Where do you go for good advice on what's available? Do you think U.S. publishers should get more translations into the market?
January 7, 2010
Posted at 9:36 AM in The Way We Live Now
Happy New Year, everyone. Like a lot of people I know, I was not sorry to see the back of 2009, a year in which some very unpleasant things--personal, financial, global--occurred. There were good moments, too, which I try to remember to be grateful for--catastrophes narrowly avoided, for instance, and some fiction published.
Even though a new year is supposed to be a clean slate, a fresh start, there's always some lingering business from the old year to wrap up. I finished the year, as I have for the last 5 years, at the Modern Language Association's annual conference. The 2007 conference nearly broke my spirit. The 2008 confab, held in San Francisco, was better, even if I did blow out my knee climbing up Nob Hill in the wrong pair of shoes.
And the 2009 gathering, held in Philadelphia? The humanities job market gets gloomier all the time, but the meeting was a good one. Happy, even, in its hyper-theorized way. The official theme this year was translation, but the digital humanities made a robust showing. The unlikely star of the conference was a visiting assistant professor who couldn't afford to attend in person but whose paper on contingent-faculty hell, read in absentia, rocked the academic Twittersphere and provoked a lively conversation that's still going on, mostly on blogs now, a week after the conference ended. And Twitter itself, and the way it and other social media added layers of conviviality and interaction to the proceedings, added another story line to the narrative arc of the conference.
All in all, a good MLA, maybe even a very good one, and one that marked a turning point in scholarly communication, at least from where I stand. There won't be an MLA meeting in 2010, because the conference is moving to January. Thank god. Something to look forward to next year.
Meanwhile, enjoy 2010, everybody. I hope it treats you and yours well.
