The writing process keeps your brain sharp
August 24, 2010
You feel crazy when you write, fraught with doubt and remorse at not being able to do it well. More on that later.
So I felt pretty good when I found this Scientific American Podcast/article through Poet & Writers Daily News feed. It’s fascinating stuff.
Here is what scientists found: The number of ideas expressed in those autobiographies had a inverse association with the severity of dementia later in life. For instance in the sentence, “I was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, on May 24, 1913 and was baptized in a church,” has seven ideas according to the researchers. Phrases like “I was born” and “I was baptized in church” all count toward what they call a measurement of “idea density.”
So I suppose that bodes well for fiction writers, particularly, who write entire works from the ether of their imagination. I’d like to think these researchers would place the “idea density” of solid novels (and even well-written narrative creative nonfiction) damn high.
As for the insanity of writing, the amazing Richard Bausch once told me—and I’m paraphrasing—that the self-doubt you feel is your talent; bad writers don’t have that voice telling you “it’s not quite right yet.”
Stunningly stupid parental reactions
August 10, 2010
Chris Abani, who, besides being an amazing writer, is an all-around great guy, had his novel Graceland yanked from a 10th grade reading list in Jacksonville, Florida. Why? An anonymous parent complained about it.
You know, the novel that won the:
PEN/Hemingway Award and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award; it was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Oh, and is that the Today Show Book Club sticker on the cover? I think it is.
Frankly, Chris, I’d take this as a compliment. Keep doing what you’re doing.
The book as an art object
August 8, 2010
It’s been done before. Joe Meno did it with the gorgeous cloth-backed short story collection Demons in the Spring, which had each story illustrated by a different artist. I remember, a few years ago, when I worked at Borders, having a signed copy of David LaChapelle’s superfolio Artists and Prostitutes, and I thought they were nuts for leaving a copy of a $4,000 book out for people to touch. The damn thing weighed over 40 pounds, and there were just two of them, counting the fingerprinted copy, in the largest store in the country.
But the thing is, both of these books are stunningly beautiful, an object to behold, if only for the sake of holding it.
Now there’s this one, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, which, at $625 ($421–it’s on sale at Amazon!) is a six-volume desk set. I can’t help but feel that for foodies and chefs alike, it is as the LaChappelle book is to photographers.
But I’m heartened, in this age of iPads and Kindles and all of their various clones, that people like Meno and publishers are willing to go out on a limb and make beautiful books for the sake of making books. Nothing feels like something that you can hold in your hand and savor (pardon the food pun)—the smell of the paper and ink, the weight of it in your hand, the beauty of it sitting on your shelf.
Want. To. Go.
August 5, 2010
Gizmodo had a post this afternoon about an art installation in Bologna called Scanner by a Slovakian artist. And it’s made of thousands of books.
Oh, this is awesome.
Thoughts on The Shipping News
August 3, 2010
I just rewatched the film adaptation last night, which is absolutely one of the most successful translations from page to screen out there, and was reminded of the first time I read E. Annie Proulx’s novel. I was a sophomore at Miami University taking a contemporary literature class, though The Shipping News wasn’t on the reading list. (Jesus’s Son was, and that’s still one of my all-time favorites.) No, my professor mentioned Annie Proulx’s novel to us as something amazing, and I picked it up in one of uptown’s bookstores on the way home that afternoon.
It absolutely blew me away.
Leading each chapter with an entry from the Ashley Book of Knots. The way it starts with clipped phrases. Taking everything from Quoyle. The way the prose becomes more fluid and nuanced as Quoyle learns who he is and recovers his life. The stunningly human twists, and Newfoundland becoming a character of its own. The mysticism of the sensitive Newfies.
It started a young journalism student out slowly, with those clipped phrases. I remember thinking, “I can do this. I’ve read Hemingway,” but the more I read, the more I got sucked in, I said to myself, “I want to do this.”
It was the book that made me want to be a fiction writer and a journalist.
