No doubt you have already reacted to the announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature going to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, the French author whose books have been one our shelves for years. You heard the news and said, “Why should I care about that?” I know. We are alike in this way. The Literary Saloon has a good bit of reaction.
Category Archives: Authors
Rejecting Rejection
This is the centenary of the birth of novelist John Creasey, who received “743 rejections slips along the way – before his first crime thriller was accepted in 1932,” writes Margaret Murphey. “Creasey wrote 620 novels under more than 20 pseudonyms, selling 80 million books worldwide and writing across many genres, but he is best known for his crime fiction.”
I wonder how many of those rejections were styled as “Um, we don’t publish this sort of thing. Did you even read our publication before submitting?”
Dürer et al
World magazine has a few good arts and literature articles in the current issue (subscription required–sorry). The cover story is on Albrecht Dürer, “a true graphic entrepreneur during the first century of the printing press” and “interesting theologically, as he became a fan of Martin Luther during the last decade of his life.”
Also, there’s a feature on Dana Gioia, an article by artist Makoto Fujimura, and a review/interview with novelist Andrew Klavan and his latest book, Empire of Lies.
Frederick Douglass: Reading Fosters Freedom
This seems appropriate for this week. It’s an excerpt from Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom.
The frequent hearing of my mistress reading the Bible — for she often read aloud when her husband was absent — soon awakened my curiosity in respect to this mystery of reading, and roused in me the desire to learn. Having no fear of my kind mistress before my eyes, (she had then given me no reason to fear,) I frankly asked her to teach me to read; and, without hesitation, the dear woman began the task, and very soon, by her assistance, I was master of the alphabet, and could spell words of three or four letters.
My mistress seemed almost as proud of my progress, as if I had been her own child; and, supposing that her husband would be as well pleased, she made no secret of what she was doing for me. Indeed, she exultingly told him of the aptness of her pupil, of her intention to persevere in teaching me, and of the duty which she felt it to teach me, at least to read the Bible.
Here arose the first cloud over my Baltimore prospects, the precursor of drenching rains and chilling blasts. Master Hugh was amazed at the simplicity of his spouse, and, probably for the first time, he unfolded to her the true philosophy of slavery, and the peculiar rules necessary to be observed by masters and mistresses, in the management of their human chattels. Mr. Auld promptly forbade the continuance of her instruction; telling her, in the first place, that the thing itself was unlawful; that it was also unsafe, and could only lead to mischief.
To use his own words, further, he said, “if you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell;” “he should know nothing but the will of his master, and learn to obey it.” “Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world;” “if you teach that nigger — speaking of myself — how to read the bible, there will be no keeping him;” “it would forever unfit him for the duties of a slave;” and “as to himself, learning would do him no good, but probably, a great deal of harm — making him disconsolate and unhappy.” “If you learn him how to read, he’ll want to know how to write; and, this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself.” Such was the tenor of Master Hugh’s oracular exposition of the true philosophy of training a human chattel ; and it must be confessed that he very clearly comprehended the nature and the requirements of the relation of master and slave. His discourse was the first decidedly anti-slavery lecture to which it had been my lot to listen.
Mrs. Auld evidently felt the force of his remarks; and, like an obedient wife, began to shape her course in the direction indicated by her husband. The effect of his words, on me, was neither slight nor transitory. His iron sentences — cold and harsh — sunk deep into my heart, and stirred up not only my feelings into a sort of rebellion, but awakened within me a slumbering train of vital thought. It was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery, against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit : the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man. “Very well,” thought I ; “knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition . . .
Seized with a determination to learn to read, at any cost, I hit upon many expedients to accomplish the desired end. The plea which I mainly adopted, and the one by which I was most successful, was that of using my young white playmates, with whom I met in the street, as teachers. I used to carry, almost constantly, a copy of Webster’s spelling book in my pocket; and, when sent of errands, or when play time was allowed me, I would step, with my young friends, aside, and take a lesson in spelling. I generally paid my tuition fee to the boys, with bread, which I also carried in my pocket. For a single biscuit, any of my hungry little comrades would give me a lesson more valuable to me than bread. Not every one, however, demanded this consideration, for there were those who took pleasure in teaching me, whenever I had a chance to be taught by them. I am strongly tempted to give the names of two or three of those little boys, as a slight testimonial of the gratitude and affection I bear them, but prudence forbids ; not that it would injure me, but it might, possibly, embarrass them ; for it is almost an unpardonable offense to do any thing, directly or indirectly, to promote a slave’s freedom, in a slave state.
Of course–not to restate the obvious–reading the Bible is particularly beneficial to fostering freedom.
The Real Question
“No; we have been as usual asking the wrong question. It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing…. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?” – Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Who’s the Smug One?
Author Anne Lamott doesn’t like McCain-Palin. She even left church the other Sunday over it:
A man and a woman whose values we loathe and despise — lying, rageful and incompetent, so dangerous to children and old people, to innocent people in every part of the world — are being worshiped, exalted by the media, in a position to take a swing at all that is loveliest about this earth and what’s left of our precious freedoms.
When I got home from church, I drank a bunch of water to metabolize the Dove bar and called my Jesuit friend, who I know hates these people, too. I asked, “Don’t you think God finds these smug egomaniacs morally repellent? Recoils from their smugness as from hot flame?”
And he said, “Absolutely. They are everything He or She hates in a Christian.”
Later on, she devotes a paragraph to ridiculing the names of the Palin children. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto observes that she and her friend appear to be the very “stereotype people on the left typically hold of conservatives, and religious conservatives in particular: smug yet insecure, dogmatic and intolerant and filled with hate and rage. Even Lamott’s descriptions of Palin more aptly describe Lamott in the act of describing Palin!”
Ireland’s Eoin Colfer to Continue the Hitchhiker’s Guide
The publisher approached Eoin Colfer with the idea of carrying on with Douglas Adams’ series in a new book to be called, And Another Thing. To his credit, Colfer was initially shocked at the invitation.
More on David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) said, “Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function,” he once wrote. “It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony is singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.” This quoted in The Independent, which ran a final tribute today.
RIP: David Foster Wallace
The writer David Foster Wallace died tragically by his own hand this weekend. I had not read any of his work.
But Shawn Macomber posts a charming excerpt of an interview where he said some extremely sensible things.
If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls. Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you’re writing for other writers, so you don’t worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you’re communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way — essentially television on the page — that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.
I should probably look for one of his books.
Everything’s More Political Now
Nobel Prize Winner Orhan Pamuk on life after Nobel: “It made me more famous, it brought me so many new readers and it made it slightly difficult — it made everything I do more political than I’d expected.” Says something about the prize, doesn’t it?