Shine On, Syd

Syd Barrett died a couple of weeks ago. Piper at the Gates of Dawn is one of my favorite albums, and definitely my favorite Pink Floyd album. While reading about this I came across the 33 1/3 series of books published by Continuum.

From the publisher, via Amazon: “Thirty Three and a Third” is a new series of short books about critically acclaimed and much-loved albums of the last 40 years. The authors provide fresh, original perspectives – often through their access to and relationships with the key figures involved in the recording of these albums. By turns obsessive, passionate, creative, and informed, the books in this series demonstrate many different ways of writing about music. What binds the series together, and what brings it to life, is that all of the authors – musicians, broadcasters, scholars, and writers – are huge fans of the album they have chosen.

Here’s an excerpt from John Cavanagh’s book about Piper at the Gates of Dawn. It looks like a cool book, but I wonder if reading such a thing would tarnish the dream that Piper creates. David Bowie (who I adore) gave a statement about Barrett’s death.

Shine on You crazy Diamond.

July 18, 2006 0

Beach Reads: Update

I didn’t get that much reading done at the beach. The only book I finished was Barry Hannah’s Airships. It wasn’t even on my beach reads list–ha. As I was walking out the door I saw it on the shelf, remembered I had indeed purchased it, and thought to myself that is what I need. I hadn’t read any of Hannah’s books before (hanging head in shame), and it was great. Each story was unique and haunting in it’s own way, with some absurdity thrown in for good measure. Funny stories, even if funny-sad, are hard to find. Two of my favorites from Airships are “Return to Return” and “Mother Rooney Unscrolls the Hurt.” Now I will have to get my hands on his first novel, Geronimo Rex.

Here you can listen to Don Swaim’s 1993 interview with Barry Hannah, Hannah reading stories at the 2001 Ohio University Literary Festival, and Hannah reading an essay titled “Why I Write.”

I read more of Winesburg, Ohio, but not all of it. And I have to say, that Anderson’s stories are great stories, but after Airships it felt slow. I still wanted to be swept away in the craziness that is Hannah. I started Invisible Cities and quickly decided it was not a beach book at all, and could not afford to be read while surrounded by large numbers of distractions: including but not limited to shuffleboard games, soccer games, swimming pool related galavanting, the ocean, bugs, sun, sweat, sand, children, passersby, and beer. It will have to wait for another day.

July 17, 2006 0

New Fiction

The 20th issue of McSweeney’s is finally out. My friend Sam has a story in issue #20, so you should buy a copy. Support the arts, people. I think the only place you can get a copy in Atlanta is Criminal Records. I suspect Borders and Barnes & Noble don’t want to deal with the occassional cigar box issue McSweeney’s puts out in all their glorious subversion–you know booksellers like their shelves to be just so. (You can also get McSweeney’s here, but you should opt to support the little guy.) Sam Miller also has a story online at AGNI, available for your immediate reading pleasure.

While not able to find McSweeney’s at Borders, I did pick up the recent issue of the Believer (a McSweeney’s publication). I thoroughly enjoyed the article ” ‘They Want Us to Look’: Finding meaning in the meaningless sex of eighties teen sex comedies.” And there’s also an amusing account of a modern day Repo Man scavenger hunt.

Lydia Williams has a story in issue #2 of Fresh Boiled Peanuts, an up and coming publication.

Chris Bundy’s story “Morning Prayers” has been anthologized in Where Love is Found: 24 Tales of Connection. You can read an excerpt here.

July 6, 2006 0

Beach Reads

I’m taking five books to the beach with me. I have no idea how much reading I might get done, and if I run out there will be plenty of people to borrow from, I know. Here they are:

*Everything Is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer (Um, a good friend gave this to me in January. It won The Guardian first book award. I’m expecting to be floored by it, from everything I’ve read. And the cover is completely awesome–mine is hot pink with a wacky yellow font. I love how the publishers had it produced with several different colored covers; White Teeth was like that too.)

*Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino (I’m really looking forward to it.)

*Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson (Recommended by a friend, and required reading.)

*Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson (No, I’m still not finished with it.)

*Pastwatch the Redemption of Christopher Columbus, by Orson Scott Card (An alternative history, supposed to be his best since Ender’s Game.)

July 2, 2006 0

Prolific Women

Alice Munro’s twelfth book is coming out in November: The View from Castle Rock. You can read an interview with her at the Virginia Quarterly Review. I love Alice Munro.

Joyce Carol Oates is ridiculously prolific. I can’t even go into it here, hence I send you to the great Wikipedia. I want to get a copy of her new book, High Lonesome: Stories 1966-2006. I’ve been meaning to read more of her work, and this looks like the perfect thing–four decades of work plus some new pieces.

My husband read me a paragraph about Danielle Steel from the Weekend section of the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Her 67th novel, Coming Out, is in stores next week. 67th! The secret? She writes 20 hours a day when working on a first draft. “I end up with swollen hands and bruised fingers from typing for that long.” Hearing this alone was enough for me to fall on the floor and fake death. And then my husband says, “58-year old mother of nine,” which was almost enough to prompt real cardiac arrest. Nine? We burst out laughing. We laughed at ourselves, at the enormity of it, in the numbers of books and children. Whether you would read Steel is beside the point–she is a successful and appreciated writer, and a mother of nine. She has sold over more than 550 million books, according to the Wall Street Journal, according to her publisher. Some people must just need less sleep, and have better coping mechanisms. We only have one child, and that’s tough enough. I’ve gotten a decent amount of writing done over the past two weeks, but I’ve been slacking elsewhere. My house looks like a tornado came through, I have mountains of filing piling up, and Friday I went out and came home to realize my shoes didn’t match. They were both black flip-flops, but still, one was Old Navy and one was Mossimo. And the only reason I realized this is because I stepped on an olive, because that is what we do around here, we don’t match our shoes and we harbor food on the floors.

June 25, 2006 1

Reading Habits

I used to read large chunks at a time–a novel in two days, that kind of thing. But now that I have a toddler in tow, my reading comes in bits and pieces, often interrupted, always expecting to be interrupted. I'll occasionally get some reading in before bed, or on the rare occasion that I get up before my son; more accurately, when my dogs wake me up before my son, and then only if I'm feeling ambitious. I reserve the big (big meaning 3 hours) chunks of alone time I get (glorious preschool!) to writing. And then there is the ever infamous basement I want to clean out this summer. I've given away 5 garbage bags of crap to charity and haven't made a dent. And, we've put many more things down there recently. Bleh.

I started thinking of my reading habits while compiling my 'Reading' list for this blog. The list is to share, but it's also for me to keep track of the books I've started, the ones I want to read next. Making this list is a bigger endeavor than I thought. I knew I was scattered, but while working on said list I realized I am literally in the middle of about 15 or 20 books, maybe more. Most of them are novels or books of short stories, a few are non-fiction. And I'm not even counting the literary magazines–we won't talk about that pile-up, like the copies of One Story that aren't even opened. Or how I'm behind on Tin House, which I do love dearly. To give you a preview since I haven't finished the static page yet: at the top of my in-progress list are On Beauty, Invisble Man, Winesburg, Ohio, Polysyllabic Spree, and Quicksilver. And just this morning I finished Other Electricities, which if I have time later I'll discuss further. It was really good, but kind of like being drop kicked, or held under water…a sort of immersion.

June 21, 2006 2

What’s New

Eva Longoria is going to publish an erotic novel.

Irvine Welsh has a new book coming out: The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chef. I haven’t read Trainspotting, but I recently read “Lorraine Goes to Livingston: A Rave and Regency Romance,” which is the first of three tales in Ecstasy. It was good, fresh. I flew through it. It’s 72 pages and 25 chapters. It’s a good length for the stippling effect the short chapters give the narrative. And the short length is also good for the subject matter–it’s like a short stroll (maybe during perilous weather?), a dive into cool water. You can’t easily get away with carrying on with things like necrophilia and bestiality for 300 pages.

Rae Meadows’ has a personal essay at Nerve: Sex in Zion: My job at an escort agency for Mormons. She was working on her MFA at the time.

June 16, 2006 0

Why, Oh Why?

Poor Kaavya Viswanathan. Plagiarism, plagiarism everywhere ~~and not a lawyer in sight~~.

If you haven't heard, Kaavya is the Harvard undergrad who signed a sweet two-book deal with Little, Brown and Company, and now she is caught in a legal / PR shitstorm after being accused of plagiarism in her first book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. You can look at sample passages from her book and two books by Megan McCafferty–there is definitely theft there. The Wikipedia article on Kaavya examines several other accusations of plagiariasm, from four additional books, including Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Megan Cabot's The Princess Diaries. That's a total of six books she would have plagiarised from.

That sounds like a lot of work. I can't imagine going through all the trouble to lift text from so many different sources. It all seems very weird to me. Did Saavya plagiarize? Yes. Are all of the alleged passages plagiarism? Probably not. In some instances language is obviously lifted, entire sentences. But at some point I start to wonder how prevalent the tropes in chick-lit and YA girls' books are, and at what point a snatch of pre-teen dialogue becomes a trope, a convention, and not someone's original creation.

June 13, 2006 4