One Close Call Too Many
The tragedy in Haiti has us thinking about close calls. We’ve been lucky. Hell, with our family’s history, we feel fortunate just to be alive. Our great-grandfather disembarked the Lusitania in New York in April of 1915. The Lusitania’s next voyage was its last, sunk by a German sub. Our grandfather was minutes from boarding a ship in Brooklyn. It was torpedoed days later. And just over five years ago we were steps away from visiting Ko Phi Phi, the island off of Thailand destroyed by the December 26, 2004 tsunami. It’s hard for us to think of these things and then move into Tuesday’s Literary Briefing. But we soldier on. Here’s a Wall Street Journal excerpt from Brian Dillon’s forthcoming book about tormented artists. The Guardian looks at Antonia Fraser’s memoir of her late husband, Harold Pinter. Polaroids have come and gone, writers adopt English as a second language, and an interview with Irish novelist Colum McCann. Finally, Stephen Elliot shares stories from his DIY book tour. Here’s to close calls and good luck. – Andrew Geer
– Doesn’t the hypochondriac—anxious, death- and age-obsessed, hypersensitive and self-absorbed—sound suspiciously familiar? Pumped into lumpy strangeness at the gym, filleted and stitched by the surgeon, embalmed in Botox, our contemporary celebrities look more like survivors than people who are going places. — Famous Hypochondriacs in The Wall Street Journal
The Pinter Tragedies
– Among the souvenirs found in Harold Pinter’s desk after his death was a placemat from a dinner party during which he’d been banging on about politics. “Darling – You are right,” Antonia Fraser had scribbled on it from across the table, “So SHUT UP.” The plea might seem to confirm the received media image of their marriage: he combative, cantankerous, a rougher-up; she genteel, discreet, a smoother-over. — Harold Pinter & Antonia Fraser in The Guardian
– Five years ago one of your deans at the journalism school, Elizabeth Fishman, asked me if I would be interested in tutoring international students who might need some extra help with their writing. She knew I had done a lot of traveling in Asia and Africa and other parts of the world where many of you come from. — English As a Second Language in American Scholar
– So, we’re here… to talk (as the bishop to the hooker). The next question is: why are we here? That, of course, is easy to answer. But, seriously, sometimes I wonder if we—I mean, we, us, as writers—have to increasingly justify ourselves, you know, like visual artists, whose primary mode of entry into their art seems to be the painstaking explanation of it. Forget the painting. There’s a whole business built up around it. The artists have to acquire a specific language. Have you read any of those “statements of purpose” (!) by some of the contemporary artists? It’s like stepping through acres of fresh tar. You pick one foot up only to find the other sinking further. — Colum McCann & Aleksandar Hemon in The Believer
Gone Black
– “Why can’t I see them now?” is the daughter’s question that’s said to have inspired Edwin Land to devise the instant camera eventually produced by his Polaroid Corporation. The camera was announced in 1947 and hit the market in 1948. Sixty years later the company stopped production of its film-based cameras and then of its self-developing film. The last Polaroid film expired on October 9. Today someone’s grandmother might be wondering, “Why can’t I see them anymore?” – Polaroids in The Nation
– Before my book came out, I had set up a lending library allowing anyone to receive a free review copy on the condition they forward it within a week to the next reader, at their own expense. (Now that a majority of reviews are appearing on blogs and in Facebook notes, everyone is a reviewer.) I asked if people wanted to hold an event in their homes. They had to promise 20 attendees. I would sleep on their couch. My publisher would pay for some of the airfare, and I would fund the rest by selling the books myself. — Stephen Elliot in the New York Times
Video: Stephen Elliot Reading
