I’m at Bread Loaf. This place truly is the best summer camp ever. No posting for a while but gosh darnit will I have a lot to say when I leave on Sunday.
August 18, 2009
August 2, 2009
"Unlike young people these days, it took Jack and Alison quite a while to achieve the ultimate union. She had, I later learned, a hymen as tough as the plastic window on a convertible."
— Frank Conroy, Stop-Time. And one of the greatest hymen similes ever written.
July 31, 2009
"Is it the mindlessness of childhood that opens up the world? Today nothing happens in a gas station. But at thirteen, sitting with my back against the wall, it was a marvelous place to be. The delicious smell of gasoline, the cars coming and going, the free air hose, the half-heard voices buzzing in the background—these things hung musically in the air, filling me with a sense of well-being. In ten minutes my psyche would be topped up like the tanks of the automobiles."
—
Frank Conroy, Stop-Time
I tried to start this book maybe five times before it caught. Now it’s blowing me away. It’s quiet, lyrical, precise. Hombre could write.
July 30, 2009
"It’s really a book about nothing,” said Ms. Gideon, 45, in a telephone interview last week from the summer home in Maine."
—
The New York Times article on Melanie Gideon’s The Slippery Year.
So, like, all of those visiting agents in graduate school who asked me what my book was about and then glazed over and asked me if I’d ever thought of writing “an international novel” or “a book that really takes us somewhere”? This woman wrote a FUCKING BOOK ABOUT NOTHING. And it was published by Knopf. And it sounds pretty damn good. Just FYI.
"The Kindle edition of “Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems,” an e-book for people who design nuclear power plants, sells for more than eight thousand dollars. Figure 2 is an elaborate chart of a reaction scheme, with many call-outs and chemical equations. It’s totally illegible. “You Save: $1,607.80 (20%),” the Kindle page says. “I’m not going to buy this book until the price comes down,” one stern Amazoner wrote."
— Nicholson Baker on The Kindle in The New Yorker. I have to say I enjoyed this take-down of the device, even though I’ve never touched one, and also have unabashedly placed all of my hopes for someday making a decent living (and, say, buying that simple house in the Hudson Valley that my unborn children will one day call home) on the glorious future of the e-book. In other words, I may have some unfair expectations for the thing. And I get the sense maybe Nicholoson Baker did, too.
This is, I suppose, what a mouse thought of Revolutionary Road.
July 25, 2009
![The reading at KGB Bar went well, despite the ironic Stalinist decor. (Am I just too uptight? I mean the guy killed more people than Hitler. Just sayin.) People were quiet, seemed to be listening. There were some grunts from an older man near the front who seemed to be feeling it. Really, that’s all you can ask for. And SO MANY good people coming out to support/say hi/be kind. I miss New York at these moments and Iowa and the Adirondacks seem as isolated as they actually are.
Also, Meaghan, my internet celebrity friend, posted about this little blog—and about me—which not only made me blush and feel the frickin’ LOVE, it also outed my little blog experiment to the entire world. So for those of you who (rightfully) trust Meaghan, welcome! And to Meaghan, it should come through Paypal any day now.
Tomorrow, it’s back north to the Adirondacks and a final two-week push on the book.
[Gratuitous photo of myself taken in the bathroom at Please Don’t Tell, a speakeasy in the East Village that, despite its name, seemed to be incredibly well-told.]](http://tednotedward.tumblr.com/photo/1280/149227404/1/bXgTFQKIRqcqkzrwxLJjAXqW)
The reading at KGB Bar went well, despite the ironic Stalinist decor. (Am I just too uptight? I mean the guy killed more people than Hitler. Just sayin.) People were quiet, seemed to be listening. There were some grunts from an older man near the front who seemed to be feeling it. Really, that’s all you can ask for. And SO MANY good people coming out to support/say hi/be kind. I miss New York at these moments and Iowa and the Adirondacks seem as isolated as they actually are.
Also, Meaghan, my internet celebrity friend, posted about this little blog—and about me—which not only made me blush and feel the frickin’ LOVE, it also outed my little blog experiment to the entire world. So for those of you who (rightfully) trust Meaghan, welcome! And to Meaghan, it should come through Paypal any day now.
Tomorrow, it’s back north to the Adirondacks and a final two-week push on the book.
[Gratuitous photo of myself taken in the bathroom at Please Don’t Tell, a speakeasy in the East Village that, despite its name, seemed to be incredibly well-told.]
July 24, 2009
"The less you feel like a child, the more you’ll want a child."
— I think I heard this in a Casiotone For The Painfully Alone song, but I may have dreamt it.
July 21, 2009
I always say that the reason I write first drafts on a typewriter is because it makes a permanent record of my initial impulse, which somehow is more honest and surprising and leads me to deeper and darker places blah blah. But the reality is that it also leads to days like today: when I’m retyping until I can’t see straight and Microsoft Word suddenly seems like the greatest invention since, oh, fire.
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