1912’s Greatest Hits

February 5th, 2012

Here’s something interesting. Last year right around this time, one of the better online literary distractions involved looking up the bestselling books on the day of your birth. This week John Scalzi took a look at the top sellers from 1912, a hundred years ago (and anyone who thinks they might want to get a crack about my birthday in here, just skip it).

Off the top of my head, 1912 sounds like it might have been a good year for books. And, in fact, that year saw Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes, Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, and the original German edition of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. But popularity doesn’t necessarily speak to a work’s status as a classic, or any powers of endurance at all, as it turns out. The bestsellers of 1912 are as follows:

1. The Harvester by Gene Stratton-Porter
2. The Street Called Straight by Basil King
3. Their Yesterdays by Harold Bell Wright
4. The Melting of Molly by Maria Thompson Davies
5. A Hoosier Chronicle by Meredith Nicholson
6. The Winning of Barbara Worth by Harold Bell Wright
7. The Just and the Unjust by Vaughan Kester
8. The Net by Rex Beach
9. Tante by Anne Douglas Sedgwick
10. Fran by J. Breckenridge Ellis

As Scalzi points out, none of the ten titles or authors are exactly household words, even if you have a relatively geeky literary household. I recognize Stratton-Porter’s name—I’m pretty sure I had her A Girl of the Limberlost on my shelves when I was little, though I wasn’t very predisposed to reading anything with the word “girl” in the title. The rest of them, though, not so much. Which is definitely potentially depressing from a writer’s point of view. If best-seller status doesn’t confer any kind of relevance through the ages, then what does? Scalzi says,

I understand the temptation is to try to write something that will speak to the generations, but, look, in 1912 they hadn’t even yet invented pre-sliced bread. If you aim for being relevant to the future, you’re probably going to fail because you literally cannot imagine it, even if you write science fiction.

These books are all still in print in one form or another, many as public domain eBooks—now that would be a fun reading challenge for someone to take on—and a large number of them in large print, presumably for those readers who remember them fondly from days a little closer to their publication. But as he helpfully points out, we’ll all most likely be gone in another hundred years anyway. Although as readers and reviewers it’s always fun to second-guess the canon, as writers it’s our job to just… write.

If you must aim for relevance, try for being relevant now; it’s a context you understand. We can still read (and do read) Shakespeare and Cervantes and Dickinson, and I think it’s worth noting Shakespeare was busy trying to pack in the groundlings today, Cervantes was writing in no small part to criticize a then-currently popular form of fiction, and Dickinson was barely even publishing at all, i.e., not really caring about future readers. In other words, they were focused on their now. It’s not a bad focus for anyone.

What’s interesting, if you think about it, is that as often as not it’s genre that tends to hang in. You have the thinkers for the ages who’ve maintained, sure—your Thomas Manns, your Bertrand Russells—but also, if we’re looking at that same year, a heavy dose of Westerns, mysteries, and adventure stories. Not to mention, regarding pretty much any year you pick, YA and children’s literature. Endurance is a funny thing. You never know—another century from now, in whatever forum has replaced blogs, the same debate will probably be going on. “Oh sure, Freedom,” opinionmakers of the future will say. “It had its moment in the sun, but it was no Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.”

(Photo is Three Girls Reading, artist unknown, 1912.)

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Open Letters Monthly, February 2012

February 5th, 2012

I’m not sure what Punxsatawney Phil did this morning, but something tells me we have at least a few more weeks of winter left, no matter how mild it’s been this far. So to carry us through at least the next four, we have the February issue of Open Letters Monthly. February may be known as the F-month around here, but this issue holds a bounty beyond expletives:

Greg Waldmann gives us some political commentary on the post-Florida incarnation of Mitt Romney 3.0 and reviews Condoleezza Rice’s No Higher Honor.

There’s a little something for the middle of the month (you know what day I’m talking about): Jessica Miller on Everything I Know About Love I Learned from Romance Novels, by Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books fame.

And poets, and poetry! Stephen Akey takes a bittersweet look at Wallace Stevens; Austin Allen discusses Philip Larkin, who—yes—once wrote a poem about a unicorn (take that, mum and dad!); Maureen Thorson reads Kate Schapira’s two new books of poetry: How We Saved the City and The Bounty: Four Addresses; and Fani Papageorgiou gives us an original poem, The Drifter.

There’s fiction: John Cotter on Eli Gottlieb’s dark “crackerjack thriller,” The Face Thief; Craig Dowd with Tom Piccirilli’s American noir Every Shallow Cut; Christopher Urban on Tom McCarthy’s reissued early novel Men in Space; and a review from Paul Griffin of Ayad Akhtar’s fine and serious debut novel, American Dervish.

And life stories: Steve Donoghue on W. Mark Ormrod’s excellent new biography of Edward III; and Victoria Olsen on the sad tale of Virginia Woolf’s secret sister (and William Makepeace Thackeray’s granddaughter) Laura Stephen.

Irma Heldman thrills to Chris Morgan Jones’ The Silent Oligarch and reassures us that “glasnost did not, as feared in some circles, spell the end of spy fiction.”

Andrew Ladd writes about the discomfiting fascination with writing about bullfighting.

In Open Letters Weekly, Steve Donoghue beams up Greg Cox’s Star Trek, The Rings of Time.

OLM talks to sculptor Megan Heeres, creator of this month’s cover piece, Home Alone, on, among other things, her passion for papermaking:

I love that paper can be 2D and 3D – that it is this super ubiquitous material but it also can be alarmingly elegant. It has religious (holy books, Joss paper) and socio-political (money, contracts), and quotidienne (butcher paper, toilet paper) connotations. I love that I can begin with this somewhat slimy, icky mass of paper pulp and create a considered composition.”

A Quiz for Black History Month, was enlightening (and I did well)—and thus fortified, shall slog through the rest of this short and not traditionally sweet month. I invite you all to do the same.

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Mario Vargas Llosa and the Sort of Book You’d Sacrifice a Sandal For

February 2nd, 2012

A few months ago my wife and I spent a day on Isla Colon—one of Panama’s Bocas del Toro islands in the Caribbean—where three different men asked if I wanted marijuana. When I told them no, they’d ask the obvious follow-up question: coke?

We decided to move to Isla Bastimentos, a smaller island usually described as “away from it all” or, worse, “tranquil.” What this means is that Isla Bastimentos would’ve been quite tranquil indeed if our hotel hadn’t fired up the bandsaw every morning at eight. It also means that there’s not much to do except walk around, swim, and read—which isn’t so bad at all, except that we were out of books, and our hotel’s book exchange specialized in titles containing the word “shopaholic,” James Patterson books, and German-language novels.

So we did some hiking. One morning about an hour into a hike, we saw a sign signifying that we would find a coffee shop just a fifteen minute walk down a small trail. The sign didn’t say anything about the trail just sort of disappearing in the grass, about the creek we had to ford, or about snakes. It also didn’t mention that it would take much more than fifteen minutes. I hadn’t planned for this sort of hike, and I was wearing sandals—good sandals though, Rainbow sandals. But at one point the trail was so steep and muddy that I tore through the strap of my right sandal and had to hobble the rest of the way in the mud and woodchips with one bare foot.

It’s still mystifying why someone would put a coffee shop on top of a hill in a jungle on an island. What’s even more mystifying is that here in the jungle was a coffee shop that wouldn’t be out of place in Seattle. They had organic chocolates, homemade pastries, and honey-mint lemonade—all at Seattle prices.

But the real treasure was the coffee shop’s book exchange. In the past few weeks of our trip I’d only been able to obtain books like Super Freakonomics (interesting enough but strangely forgettable), Jim Cramer’s Confessions of a Street Addict (fascinating in roughly the same way as Dante’s Inferno), and a collection of essays purportedly about Russian literature that actually turned out to be essays about a grad student’s life experiences studying Russian literature (not quite the same thing).

This book exchange on the hill had The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Bad Girl. But we hadn’t brought any old books with us, and it violates book-exchange rules—really, the only book-exchange rule—to take a book without replacing it. So we hiked down the hill to a small roadless village, where the one store in town sort of miraculously had a limited selection of sandals. I bought a nice pair of size-ten Aguila sandals for .50, which later turned out to be a women’s size ten with a subtle pink-and-green color scheme.

A few days later we gathered our mediocre books and again hiked up to the coffee shop on the hill. My Aguila women’s sandals held up quite nicely. I traded my book of grad-lit essays for Tom Sawyer and our no-longer-necessary Costa Rica travel guide for a paperback copy of The Bad Girl, complete with spots of black mold on the lower half of most pages. Since we were in Latin America, it seemed fitting to start with the Latin American book by one of Latin America’s most famous authors.

Mario Vargas Llosa is probably most famous for winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. He’s also famous for running for president of Peru in 1990, and also for punching Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the face. Neither of them ever said what the punch was about, but it seems pretty clear why Latin America’s second-greatest novelist would punch Latin America’s greatest novelist in the face.

But the reason Mario Vargas Llosa is famous for any of this in the first place is that he writes great novels. I had read three of Mario Vargas Llosa’s books before—Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Conversation in the Cathedral, and Who Killed Palomino Molero?—and the main thing they had in common is that they were great books set in Peru. So that’s what I expected from The Bad Girl: a good book set in Peru.

The Bad Girl at first seems like a great writer blowing off steam by doing a bit of genre fiction. It’s a romance about a nice but boring guy who falls in love with a flighty girl, a girl who makes him feel alive but is also completely unhinged. Sounds familiar, right? This sort of female character has appeared in enough movies that it’s almost archetypal, and we even have a great name for it, courtesy of the A.V. Club’s Nathan Rabin: Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

Manic Pixie Dream Girls are terrifying. What’s terrifying about MPDGs is that you get the sense you’re supposed to like them, that if you’re a guy you’re supposed to think it’d be pleasant to date them or whatever. Can you imagine being in a long-term romantic relationship with Natalie Portman’s character from Garden State? Terrifying.

But Mario Vargas Llosa is a great writer, and great writers don’t pretend that you should like Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Mario Vargas Llosa doesn’t bully you into feeling a certain way about any of his characters, actually. I still don’t know how I was supposed to feel about the Bad Girl—Mario Vargas Llosa never really reveals his authorial feelings. He just gives a full portrait of the characters, makes them as human and understandable as possible, and then steps back and says: what do you think?

I thought the Bad Girl was an awful person. Just terrible. I didn’t particularly care for her pursuer either. But one of the brilliant things about the book is that the story works even if you despise the characters. Their romance is interesting, and what happens to them is rewarding and realistic, like what would’ve happened if Garden State had covered another forty years and shown what it’d be like if a guy actually tried to hash out a real existence with a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Spoiler alert: it wouldn’t be a lifetime of skinny-dipping and stuffed animals.

It turns out that it’s not really fair to classify the Bad Girl as a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. The key feature of a MPDG is that she isn’t real—she couldn’t exist outside of a fictional world where her only purpose is to buoy a depressed man. And the Bad Girl is real, as terrible as she is, and the romance she’s a part of ends up being much truer and more nuanced than a standard genre story. When a Nobel-caliber author takes a standard romance and gives it Nobel-caliber thought, you get something rare: actual wisdom about how to love another person.

Mario Vargas Llosa won his Nobel Prize “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” Though this seems to describe more political works like Conversation in the Cathedral, it applies just as much to The Bad Girl. Love is a structure of power, one of the oldest ones, and “resistance, revolt, and defeat” is the perfect description of the romance in The Bad Girl—actually, it’s probably the perfect description for a lot of romances. I imagine that The Bad Girl might be helpful to someone else, someone who might need some romantic guidance. So even though we pretty much destroyed the book carrying it across Panama, I’m still going to hand it off to another book exchange, even if they won’t give me anything in return.

Sean Carman: The Last Book I Loved, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

The Rumpus.net

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Bella Santorum

January 30th, 2012

Moral problems that do not fit tidily into preconceived ideas are fascinating and a good way to occupy oneself in the years of Mild Cognitive Impairment. Moral problems, when sufficiently complex, require complicated sentences, and I enjoy complicated sentences. So: I have been thinking recently about Bella Santorum.

Bella Santorum is the eighth child (one prior child died when just two hours old) of presidential candidate and Internet punch line Rick Santorum and his wife Karen Garver Santorum. Rick Santorum, though charming and Midwestern on the campaign trail, though given to a humbling fashion tendency—the sweater vest—that has gotten most men a beat down in the middle school years, is among the more doctrinaire and dangerous politicians of the moment, right up there with Sam Brownback or Jon Kyl or Mitch McConnell. He never met a social issue that didn’t require from him a knee-jerk one liner that would turn heads with its oversimplification and vacuity. He never met an earmark he wouldn’t try to bring home to Pittsburgh. Though he is not as preening and narcissistic as Newt Gingrich, he is just as willing to say anything. And Karen Garver Santorum once wrote a book on children’s manners, called Everyday Graces. Before that, though, before marrying Rick, the guy whose last name also refers to a frothy mixture of lube and fecal material etc., she was living out of wedlock with an obstetrician who provided abortions. I’m betting that in those days she was a different Karen.

I find hypocrisy and mendacity among politicians somehow reassuring. It goes to show that anyone can be bought, and that in politics the price for which people can be bought is usually rather low. These things make the grim politics of the present less surprising.

However, when I think about how much contempt I have for Rick Santorum and how sure I am that somewhere in him lurks an anally-compulsive disco boy—why all the comments about how horrible it would be if people were allowed to do anything— I then start thinking about Bella. Bella is three years old and was born with Trisomy 18, which is a genetic condition not unlike Down Syndrome, but with more serious health complications. The list of potentially lethal effects of Trisomy 18, in fact, is rather terrifying. Half of children born with Trisomy 18 die upon birth, and 90% die within the first year. Santorum himself has indicated that while he was campaigning in Iowa at the end of 2011, Bella was having a lot of trouble breathing and had to be sent home to Virginia to be cared for by a nurse.

Now: when Bella was in utero Santorum and his wife presumably were able to have an amniotic fluid test to determine that Bella had a genetic abnormality, which Bella was more likely to have, because of Karen Santorum’s age at the time of the pregnancy, and they were able to decide to carry Bella to term because that is consistent with Santorum’s positions on abortion. More power to them. When my daughter was in utero, my wife and I decided not to get the amniotic fluid test because of the risk of miscarriage for “geriatric” moms, and because we agreed we would be content to have a child with Down’s Syndrome (Trisomy 21), if it came to that, which it did not. I commend the Santorums for carrying Bella to term and for caring for her now that she is here. Some people are not physically like the majority of us, and yet we can still love them deeply.

This is the sort of thing that bears repeating. Even when you are Pro Choice in all cases.

Still, Just as I found Sarah Palin’s use of Trig on the campaign trail in 2008 slightly sinister, so have I found Bella’s appearances in Iowa sinister, and I’m glad she is back in Virginia where her breathing problems can be monitored carefully. But as a parent myself I am afraid I am also thinking about how keen is the absence of a child especially during a professional year as demanding as what Santorum is going through now, assuming Santorum is capable of human emotions. Yes, he has six other children, one of whom, an older daughter, acts as a spokesman for her dad. This daughter recently indicated that the family carries around lapel buttons depicting Bella, so that she is uppermost in their thoughts no matter where they are. Publicity stunt? Or grief manifested?

And what does Bella think about exactly? And how often is she affixed to the breathing apparatus? Does she think about the discomfort of the mask? Does she miss her parents? Are there certain repetitive images, screensavers, let’s say, that are capable of keeping her mesmerized for hours? Will there ever be an age when Bella Santorum can understand party politics? Will she respond to love? Will she, like a friend of mine who has Trisomy 21, love Elvis? And when they say that those kids who survive a childhood with Trisomy 18 will “live into adulthood,” what does that mean? Will she live out a complete term? Or will she devastate her parents and her siblings down the road? Does she realize that there is something about her that is unlike other children? What will the Santorums do with her if her dad wins the nomination? (Unlikely, I know.) Does Bella feel the pressures of the campaign? Does she care what her dad does? Will she welcome him home when he loses? How did she feel in that one impressive publicity photo she did with her dad, where he seems to have John Boehner’s tan on? Was that love enough for her? And is she named after Queen Isabella? Or Isabella Adjani? Wouldn’t we all love Bella? If Bella were sitting in our lap?

Easy to loath Santorum. Easy to love that Internet buffoon that Dan Savage has made of him. But what about Bella? Have you thought about Bella?

No related posts…

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ALA, Publishers Go to the Table

January 26th, 2012

One bit of good news from ALA Midwinter is that big publishers will finally be sitting down to some serious discussion about eBook lending. At the end of this month Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin will be meeting in New York with ALA to broach the topic in—we hope—civilized fashion. At this point, none of the three publishers allow public libraries to freely circulate digital copies of their books, although at Penguin the restriction only involves new releases, and this particular impasse is getting old, to say the least. It’s very clear that ALA officials think so, and it’s hard to imagine that publishers don’t feel the same, no matter that they’re the ones holding the higher cards. Nobody’s going to be happy moving forward until some sort of working model is hashed out, and a meeting like this one will be a step forward.

In an interview with Publishers Weekly, ALA executive director Keith Fiels talks about how the issue finally got pushed to the forefront, and some of what he’d like to see come out of the proposed meeting:

To the vast majority of people in the middle, and certainly, to the rest of the 99%, libraries play a really important role in creating equitable access. And the decision not to offer equitable access, not to make something available to libraries, is to deny fundamental, basic access to information. So, you asked about the carrot and the stick. I think it is very important to realize that we are not too far from the point where the media is going to figure out that this is an issue. Now, we’re very much eager to do anything we can to facilitate publishers making works available to libraries.

Fiels’ tone is pretty hard to miss; he comes on strong all through the interview, which only serves to play up the picture of libraries at a disadvantage in this standoff. I’m sure the idea of making this a legal issue has come up many times in the past year, and I deeply appreciate ALA’s hard stance on freedom of information. But I don’t know that he’s doing the cause any favors when he tacks on statements assuring us that, never fear, ALA is on the offensive here—

Let me be clear, when we talk about having a dialogue, it is, “Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, you need to start making e-books available to libraries. Now, let’s have a dialogue.”

The us-and-them state of affairs is pretty well established by now, and I doubt dwelling on it accomplishes much—and that’s considerably ratcheted down from his statements to Library Journal, where he calls publisher noncooperation “potential criminal liability.” Then again, a passionate ALA is an effective ALA, so maybe this is just a case of everyone playing out their respective roles.

I’m also curious about the equitable access for the 99% he holds up as a gold standard—exactly what proportion of the 99% are they shutting out by not making eBooks available to borrow? Which is to say, how ubiquitous are eReaders at this point, and are the numbers generous enough to hinge an argument on? I probably should have those statistics at hand, and perhaps they’re ephemeral enough not to really matter—I can remember when video games were rich kids’ toys, and that changed quickly enough. Presumably a discussion about freedom of e-reader information will float all future boats.

Fiels commends Random House for their cooperation, alone among the Big Six publishers, as well as many independent and university presses. And he gets into concerns of formatting a bit, and licensing vs. ownership, which I think are going to come out as the really crucial issues. He has a good point about libraries serving publishers as the archivists of digital information, which is one of the stronger justifications I’ve heard of for ownership. Aside from the other one where it just makes more sense, period. And for that particular argument I defer to Jamie LaRue, Director of Colorado’s Douglas County Libraries, who recently partnered with the Colorado Independent Publishers Association to not only buy digital works outright and manage them in house, but to allow actual purchases of e-books via library catalogs. LaRue’s point on the stewardship of libraries needs to be the last word here, I think: “If you can’t trust a librarian, who can you trust?” I hope both sides of the table are listening next week.

(Illustration is Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s A Bold Bluff, c. 1909. Because at the end of the day I’d still rather look at dogs playing poker than librarians or publishing CEOs.)

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2011 NBCC Award Finalists Announced

January 23rd, 2012

The National Book Critic Circle has announced the 2011 contenders for the NBCC Awards. Nominees were announced by last year’s finalists at a star-studded event in downtown Manhattan, for which a good-sized crowd “braved a few inches of city slush”—never let it be said that literary types are wimps. It’s a good list, with no big blowout media darlings except for maybe The Marriage Plot, and damn—there’s that Edith Pearlman again. Finalists are slightly more representative of small presses than last year’s contenders, and two authors receive the honor posthumously: Manning Marable and Ellen Willis. No word as to whether the NBCC will be repeating last year’s feature wherein it blogged about a finalist each day in the month leading up to the award in March, but I hope they do. It was a fun month-long series and made it a lot easier to pretend in a casual conversation that you’d read all the books, if you were so inclined.

The nominees are as follows:

Fiction
Open City by Teju Cole
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst
Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman
Stone Arabia by Dana Spiotta

Nonfiction
A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman
The Information by James Gleick
To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild
Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War by Maya Jasanoff
Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Autobiography
One Hundred Names for Love: A Stroke, A Marriage, and the Language of Healing
by Diane Ackerman
The Memory Palace by Mira Bartók
Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing
by Luis J. Rodríguez
Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War by Deb Olin Unferth

Biography
Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of the Revolution by Mary Gabriel
George F. Kennan: An American Life by John Lewis Gaddis
Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961
by Paul Hendrickson
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra F. Vogel

Criticism
Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos
Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews by Geoff Dyer
The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem
Karaoke Culture by Dubravka Ugresic
Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music by Ellen Willis

Poetry
Core Samples from the World by Forrest Gander
Kingdom Animalia by Aracelis Girmay
Space, in Chains by Laura Kasischke
The Chameleon Couch by Yusef Komunyakaa
Devotions by Bruce Smith

The Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award went to New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers, and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing to Kathryn Schulz.

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Golden Doodles

January 18th, 2012

I do a lot of different writing these days: academic work for school, copywriting for a buck, essays and reviews for Like Fire and other venues, and plain old chatty newsy posts like this. One of the more important tools of my trade is the lined notebook sitting on my desk, not for flashes of inspiration or commonplace notes—I have other books for that—but what I call dowsing, mundane jottings and musings with no projected audience, a straight line from head to hand without interference or preconception. I keep it because I need to let loosenmy most personal voice unescorted on a regular basis, lest I lose touch with it in the course of all my other agendas. It’s verbal doodling, essentially. And, needless to say, it’s not for anyone’s eyes but mine. That’s the whole point.

I’m pretty sure that, unless I commit some kind of heinous crime or have one committed against me, I’ll never be interesting enough to the world at large to have my notebooks and sketchbooks poked through. It’s a reassuring thought. But at the same time, I’m perfectly happy to take advantage of all the archival digitization that’s available these days. Marginalia? Yes please. I love the voyeurism of seeing someone’s handwriting and doodles, even as I have to wonder—especially with posthumous archival collections—what the writers in question would have thought about having their stream-of-consciousness scribbles put up for such scrutiny. Still, given the choice between looking and turning away, I’ll always look. Who doesn’t feel a bit better knowing that David Foster Wallace graffitied vampire fangs on Cormac McCarthy? Then again, while I do love the strange Pilgrim-costumed centaur Samuel Beckett doodled in his original manuscript for Watt, I’m not sure I’m down with the Ransom Center’s description of it as something that

glows like a luminous secular relic. It is, at moments, magnificently ornate, a worthy scion of The Book of Kells, with the colors reduced to more somber hues.

It’s a great big rollicking collection of Beckett’s inner workings—“a wealth of doodles, sketches, mathematical calculations, rhyming schemes, and drawings,” according to the exhibition site—but I’m not sure the medium of ink and crayon exactly lends itself to luminosity or somberness. They’re scribbles, trifles, footbridges to his unconscious. They’re Beckett’s dowsings, and they don’t need to be elevated to high art to be appreciated.

But appreciate them I do, all in the spirit of fun. And even more than that, I appreciate the fact that the general public will never have reason to nose through my notebooks. I wonder, though, whether today’s up-and-coming writers think about where their marginalia is going to land. Archives are big business these days. Is that part of a young author’s fantasy of fame and fortune, which college or hometown library will digitize their notes and doodles for all the world to see? Because that would be a shame, the kind of self-censorship—or maybe more like self-curation—those projections would evoke. It’s easy to forget that people have private, interior lives beyond what they post on Facebook, Twitter, their blogs. It might even be easy to forget, in this age of disclosure, to have them in the first place. But for writers and artists especially, that kind of no-access stomping ground is the most important thing in the world.

Beckett—well, he’s dead, and he’s accomplished all the work he’s going to. I just hope everyone else has a diary with a lock on it.

(Image from Tim Green aka atoach’s Flickr photostream.)

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Rainbow Book Fair

January 17th, 2012

4th ANNUAL NEW YORK RAINBOW BOOK FAIR
Saturday, March 24, 2012 11am–5:30pm
The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
208 West 13th Street NYC

Welcome to the 4th ANNUAL NEW YORK RAINBOW BOOK FAIR On this website you can find out how you can become a Sponsor of the Rainbow Book Fair, how to become an Exhibitor, and keep abreast of Panels, Readings and the Poetry Salon for the 2012 Fair.

Plan to be a part of the most exciting LGBT book event in the U.S., the  4th Annual New York Rainbow Book Fair. More than 1OO publishers, writers, poets, editors, booksellers, and the 15OO+ readers who love and want to buy their books—from serious to wild, zany, and super hot. It’s totally free to the public with book discounts, giveaways, panels on writing and publishing, author readings, a non-stop Poetry Salon.