Wednesday we ruminate. We nod to the past, with news concerning Arthur Miller and an infamous blond, we learn of a respected Irish writer’s ascent to the throne of Henry James, and gander, panoramic-like, at Jay McInerney’s career. And then we dust off the shelves and bring in the computers, as Benjamin Kunkel, and the People’s Daily discuss how literature’s scope is being redefined by online writing. Oh, and for good measure, we’ve tossed in a delightful tale of two writers making friends in a strip club. — Kevin Murphy
– Behind us, there was a group of guys drinking cheap beer. One of them said something about a strip club, and that sparked conversation at our table. People shared stories: straight strip clubs, gay strip clubs, friends who had worked at them, friends who were addicted to them. Someone made a joke about my friend’s bachelor party. His face fell a little. There was no party. “Hey,” someone said, “Ben should take you to one of Portland’s finest strip clubs tonight.” — Ben Greenman in Maud Newton
– The pages in Proust’s long novel describing a first-ever telephone call are often admired for their rare sensitivity to the experience of a new technology. The narrator is speaking, across the miles of cable, to his grandmother. More than speak, he listens. The telephone separates previously united aspects of his grandmother—her voice and physical presence—and through isolating the voice reveals something that the narrator had missed in the flesh: “having [her voice] alone beside me, seen without the mask of her face, I noticed in it for the first time the sorrows that had cracked it in the course of a lifetime.” — Benjamin Kunkel in N+1
– Many traditional literature writers have been touched by the Internet literature trend. A few days ago, noted writer Wang Meng was appointed as consultant for Shengda Internet Company. In addition, there were 10 writers including Haiyan, Yan Gelin , Zhou Meisen, Lan Xiaolong and so on, who signed contracts with “the starting point of Chinese Website”. Wang Shuo and Yu Hua also intended to try Internet writing this year. Hou Xiaoqiang, CEO of Shengda Literature confidently told reporters: “This is very helpful in enriching this type of online fiction.” — Online Literature in the People’s Daily
– Arthur Miller was 35 and at the top of his career when, in 1951, he first set eyes on Marilyn Monroe. He was the author of “All My Sons” and “Death of a Salesman,” the first play to win all three major drama prizes (the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award). He would soon begin work on “The Crucible.” She was 24 and, with minor film roles behind her, virtually unknown. — Arthur Miller in the NYTimes
– In his finest stories, McInerney’s characters try to, but ultimately cannot, take one another’s measure. Strangers suddenly become intimates. Intimates suddenly become strangers. In “The Queen and I,” a trannie prostitute almost picks up her own father. In “The March,” a protester almost gets billy-clubbed by a cop she once fed at a soup kitchen in the aftermath of 9/11. Visiting his ex-wife at a chichi rehab clinic, a well-known actor tries dialing his own dealer, only to discover he is checked in at the facility himself. “The problem with America,” says Cara, a product of “boarding school, country clubs, and European vacations,” is “there is no context.” — Jay McInerney in Slate
– I met Tóibín, 53, on May 18 while he was on book tour in Washington, D.C. He had taped an appearance on “The Diane Rehm Show” that morning and gave a particularly excitable performance at the Politics and Prose bookstore that evening. In between I took him to Kramerbooks, a Washington institution off Dupont Circle that occupies an important place in American history. (Monica Lewinsky may have bought a Nicholson Baker novel about phone sex there. The store refused to turn over its sales records to Kenneth Starr.) What follows is a shortened version of our 90-minute conversation. — Colm Tóibín in Bookslut
Video of Colm Tóibín at the New York Writers Institute
