Category Archives: Authors

Authors

Interview with Whit Stillman

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Whit Stillman on speaking French: “I wasn’t one of these people that love Paris and always talks about it. In fact all my friends were dropping out and taking a year off or semester off and going to France and I was the one who didn’t want to go to France. I went to Mexico because I was so intimidated by my experience in French class. I’d done so poorly in French class that I went to Mexico and learned Spanish first. To this day I’m mocked by French friends who say I speak French like Zorro.”

On American cliches: “One of the bad things America has done is that in trying to be popular it’s relied on certain formulas and gone back to the pump again and again and again and with the same formula. It’s flattering the lowest common denominator and it’s this underdog thing, and it’s very seductive, it’s in all the templates in our brain. But it’s a wrong view of the world.”

Authors

How Can You Say That?!

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When you leave 50 replies to a negative review of your interactive ebook, you’re doing it wrong.

Maybe you need more creativity. But then, “how did we come to care so much about creativity? The language surrounding it, of unleashing, unlocking, awakening, developing, flowing, and so on, makes it sound like an organic and primordial part of ourselves which we must set free—something with which it’s natural to be preoccupied. But it wasn’t always so . . .” (both via Prufrock)

Authors, Non-fiction

Podcast: C.S. Lewis vs. The New Atheists

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C.S. Lewis grew up among some well-known atheists and may have believed the same things argued today by speakers labeled “New Atheists.” Peter S. Williams has written a book on the subject, and this podcast introduces a series of discussions on that book, C S Lewis vs the New Atheists, with an overview. You can get a brief review and chapter list here.

Authors, Non-fiction

Andrew Klavan To Write Kermit Gosnell Movie Script

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The movie project about America’s worst serial killer is moving forward with the announcement that Andrew Klavan will write the script. He says the challenge will be writing a movie that people will want to see, because the base story is almost too repulsive. He tells NRO what’s most important about the Gosnell story:

I’m a crime writer. It’s a great crime story. But you know, I notice I’ve gone through this whole interview without saying the words “abortion” or “abortionist.” But that’s a part of it too, a central part. I’m in a sort of — I won’t say “unique” but certainly strange position on this. I’m a natural-born libertarian. With every fiber of my being, I want people to live the lives they want to live, whether it suits me or not. You want to be gay? Have a good time. You want to condemn gays? Knock yourself out. You want to dress up as Beyonce and get a tattoo of Louisiana on your forehead? I’m the guy who’ll buy you a drink and say, “Nice tat, Yonce.” I know a lot of women who’ve had abortions — people I like and love. I know a lot of people who are pro-abortion, likewise. But moral logic has convinced me that this is wrong — more than wrong – as wrong as a thing can be. It’s not about your feelings versus mine. It’s not about social conservatism. It’s not about libertarianism. And it’s not about feminism either or “women’s health care.” What nonsense that is. It’s an actual question of good versus evil. And listen, in the end, that’s what all great stories are about.

(via ISI)

Authors, Fiction

Reviewing ‘Herzog’ after 50 Years

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Jack Hanson writes about Saul Bellow and his 50-year-old novel, Herzog, a story about a professor who can’t handle his life after losing his wife to divorce. Bellow, who died in 2005, said the story is something of a joke about how education can ruin you, but many are not convinced that’s all there is to his National Book Award winner.

“It may be hard to imagine what the neurosis of a restless, mid-century academic have to do with Ferguson, militant jihad, or any of our other woes,” Hanson states. “But if the book has a single theme, it is that we are dominated more than anything else by ideas, and it is only when we confront ideas and our allegiance to them that we might be able to set our house back in order. Life will never be an easy affair, but it may become, at times, manageable. Herzog is not a morality tale, in the sense of being didactic, but it is highly moral, while being forward-looking.”

Authors, Poetry

The Joys of W. H. Auden

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“One of the joys of reading late Auden is the pleasure he takes in rare words used correctly,” Patrick Kurp reminds us. “Like his friend Dr. Oliver Sacks, he loved trolling the Oxford English Dictionary for good catches.” Catches like dapatical, for which you’ll have to read his post for context.

Alexander McCall Smith wrote a piece last year about the importance of Auden with a few personal anecdotes. “When I started to write novels set in Edinburgh, the characters in these books – unsurprisingly, perhaps – began to show an interest in Auden. In particular, Isabel Dalhousie, the central character in my Sunday Philosophy Club series, thought about Auden rather a lot – and quoted him, too. A couple of years after the first of these novels was published, I received a letter from his literary executor, Edward Mendelson, who is a professor of English at Columbia University in New York. . . . I then wrote Professor Mendelson into an Isabel Dalhousie novel, creating a scene in which he comes to Edinburgh to deliver a public lecture on the sense of neurotic guilt in Auden’s verse.”

Authors

Lauren Bacall on Writing Memoirs

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Lauren Bacall wrote three memoirs over the years. The last one was released in 2005. She said of loving Bogart, “I’d suddenly had this fairy-tale life, at such a young age, who would have thought something like that could happen?”

“Writing a book is the most complete experience I’ve ever had,” she said.

Authors

Whit Stillman’s ‘The Cosmopolitans’

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Whit Stillman’s next work will be on Amazon.com. A TV pilot episode for a potential series, “The Comopolitans,” will be available through Amazon Studios on August 28. See a cute preview here.

“This has elements of all three of the first films,” he tells Vanity Fair, referring to his 1990 debut, 1994’s Barcelona and 1998’s The Last Days of Disco. “It’s very much like the fourth film, of those three.” He says one has to earn a living, and TV is where one can do it.

He also says he doesn’t watch TV with violence and sex, “so it knocks out almost everything.” Others say he only watches TV on airplanes.

Authors

These Books Were Most Influential on Tolstoy

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“This summer on my way to work,” writes The Public Humanist at The Valley Advocate, “I found something just for me in a box of cast-off books on a sidewalk in downtown Northampton . . . a yellowed and fragile New York Times Book Review clipping, from April 2, 1978: a list of the books that Tolstoy was most impressed by, organized by the age at which he read them.”

The list was written in 1891 and includes selections such as Puskin’s poems: Napoleon, Gogol’s Overcoat, The Two Ivans, Nevsky Prospect, Rousseau’s Confessions, all of Trollope’s novels, and all of the Gospels in Greek. (via Open Culture)

Authors

WWI and Tolkien’s Fantasy

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John Rhys-Davies on how The Lord of the Rings may have been influenced by World War I.

“Tolkien’s experience of war left him with ‘a deep sympathy and feeling for the “tommy,” especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties.’ He based the character of Samwise Gamgee on common soldiers that he had known during the war, men who kept their courage and stayed cheerful when there was not much reason to hope.