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Kate Christensen has an essay in the latest Elle on writing “In a Man’s Voice.” (She’s an expert on the subject; three of her novels, including the upcoming The Astral, are narrated by a male character.)

I’m so determined to convince you — all of you, men not exempted — to read it that I sought, and got, permission to run an excerpt. Here’s the opening:

The phrase “dick for a day” used to be bandied about quite a bit by me and many other women I knew, mostly fellow writers, back in the 1980s, when we were young and ambitious but unsuccessful, our tone somewhere between wistful yearning and pugnacious wrath: “If I had a dick for a day, I’d show them” — “them” being overrated male writers, ex-lovers who’d treated us badly, and, frankly, men in general. They had all the luck. We were stuck being women.

I grew up in an all-female family — two sisters and a mostly single mother — and we often bonded, in part, by disparaging men and feeling superior to them. My charismatic, handsome, intelligent, crazy father, a Marxist lawyer, disappeared from our lives (led off by the cops in handcuffs for beating my mother; I was the one who called them) when my little sisters and I were young, three years after my mother had divorced him. After that, my mother struggled to raise us without child support or help, during a time when she was working toward a doctorate in psychology from Arizona State University.

As my family saw them, men were ­untrustworthy, weak, and selfish. Our mother taught us to get along without them, to get along without much of anything, and to live well and have fun anyway.

But even after he was gone, I still loved my father. I looked Norwegian, like him, with a long face, strong jaw, thin mouth, and flashing eyes. And, like him, I was ­verbal, easygoing, and low-key on the ­surface, and, deep down, proud, socially paranoid, full of self-loathing, and prone to rage at injustice. Until I was nine, I was my father’s “son,” the one he could talk to. And after he left, I still felt like the boy — the ­ambitious, hotheaded one. I never liked dolls or played house. I read and wrote, climbed trees, collected rocks, rode my bike, and befriended boys, platonically. ­Although part of me yearned for a husband, a house, and kids, most of my brain was ­single-mindedly determined to do whatever it took to be a successful published novelist, and that part of me felt male.

In spite of my family’s attitude toward men, I loved, admired, and identified with them. I envied them, too — their power and autonomy, their freedom to be selfish, to walk away, to start over, to get angry, to speak frankly without appearing to give a damn what anyone thinks. Men were assholes, women were victims; men were ­active, women passive. Given the choice, I would have preferred to be an active ­asshole. Instead, I kept writing.

After a lot of floundering around, post-MFA, with bad relationships and worse jobs, I published my first novel, In the Drink, when I was 36. Its first-person narrator was a woman, but I was writing in a consciously male genre I privately called Loser Lit. I wanted my female narrator, Claudia ­Steiner, to join the ranks of Lucky Jim, ­Gulley Jimson, and Peter Jernigan. Claudia is a hard-drinking ghostwriter who’s in love with her seemingly unattainable male best friend, in debt, hapless, and bleakly, comically gritty. As I wrote the book, I was sure I was breaking new literary ground. ­Reviewers (all of them female) felt otherwise: When it came out, In the Drink was lumped with two other recently published, superficially similar books by women; ours were collectively hailed as

A few months ago Amazon changed its policies to allow borrowing of Kindle books. A friend had been wanting to read Freedom, so I set things up to lend her my copy. Or so I thought. The little note next to the book indicated that it was on loan, but what actually showed up in my friend’s account was The New Oxford American Dictionary. (Eternal disclosure.)

“You’re just lucky,” she joked, “that it didn’t send your copy of Best Torture Clubs of the Northeast or How to Care for your Rubber Masks.”

I’m not actually into S&M, for the record, and maybe they’ve worked out the kinks (sorry) since January — everything went smoothly on the second try — but yeah, if you have the book equivalent of Etsy’s glass dildos and puppets in your electronic library, you might think twice about pressing that button.

(Incidentally, the bookmarks at the top of this post arrived in the mail yesterday from Google Books, to thank me for… buying an ebook.)

Lorin Stein’s first issue of The Paris Review is, like the beautifully redesigned website and the books he’s edited, elegant, edgy, and surprising, an unusual but cohesive mix of writing characterized by intelligence, precision and, frequently, humor.

As Stein observes in his Editor’s Note, by the time The Paris Review was founded in 1953, critics had already “been lamenting the Death of the Novel, and fiction in general, since the end of World War II.” The magazine sought to — and did — prove them wrong “not by argument, but by example,” finding and publishing “not things they considered competent, or merely worthy, but things they actually loved.” Because Stein has always done the same, he and the editorial team he’s assembled are a natural fit.

The issue includes an interview with the great Norman Rush, who discusses his early experimental efforts and the evolution of his writing process and invites his wife Elsa into the conversation as he reveals how deeply involved, on myriad levels, she is in his work. “[H]er patience with my arcane fiction was part of a greater patience, over a sort of battle we waged for years,” he says. “Some couples don’t ask much of one another after they’ve worked out the fundamentals of jobs and children. Some live separate intellectual and cultural lives, and survive, but the most intense, most fulfilling marriages need, I think, to struggle toward some kind of ideological convergence.”

Rush’s sentiments about the difficulty and sorrow of endings — “Dostoyevsky died still intending to write another volume of The Brothers Karamazov. It’s like a knife in my heart that he didn’t.” — find a partial echo in the Michel Houellebecq interview: “the last pages of The Brothers Karamazov: not only can I not read them without crying, I can’t even think of them without crying.”

Sam Lipsyte always makes me cackle, and his new story, “The Worm in Philly,” is my favorite so far (though I have yet to get to The Ask). If you’re unsure whether to read Lydia Davis’ new translation of Madame Bovary, the delightful “Ten Stories From Flaubert” will stoke your appetite. And April Ayers Lawson’s “Virgin,” a fascinating and nuanced portrait of frustrated male desire, is as frankly sexual in its way as any of Mary Gaitskill’s work, and somehow also — I know this sounds paradoxical — sort of old-fashioned in its restraint.

But it was John Jeremiah Sullivan’s affectionate reminiscence of the Southern writer Andrew Lytle that made me tear up on the subway and almost miss my stop. Born in Kentucky and raised in Indiana, Sullivan knows and masterfully, self-mockingly evokes the problem of the semi-Southerner, of growing up a Yankee and being “aware of a nowhereness to my life … a physical ache.” By the time he enrolled at the University of the South, he says, “Merely to hear the word Faulkner at night brought forth gusty emotions.”

What will happen to your email account, blog, or Twitter feed when you die?

New online lockboxes allow you to specify beforehand who’ll get your passwords, which private Flickr photos should be purged, and what final status should be posted at Facebook, but these services are no substitute for a will. And writers and other artists should be especially careful about relying on them.
 

In the current Wired, Scott Brown looks at “three companies — AssetLock.net, Legacy Locker, and the charmingly named Deathswitch.com — [that] have arisen to keep customers’ passwords, usernames, final messages, and so on in a virtual safe-deposit box.”

Here’s how it works: For around $10 to $30 per year, or $60 to $300 for a lifetime — prices depend on the services you want and how much you’re storing — these companies organize and store all Net-borne Protrusions of You… Once it’s determined that you’re fully and finally degaussed, your probate probes fan out across the Net, making your last epayments, Old Yellering your avatars, perhaps even euthanizing your FarmVille stock, and, ultimately, sending sign-off messages to friends, followers, frag-buddies, and hookups: “Status update: I’m dead. It’s been real!”

Under many circumstances, these lockboxes will work out fine. For instance, if you don’t have a will, but the person you’re handing the keys over to is the same person the law says should get them, no problem. And if you have a will, and it’s consistent with your online directions, okay.

But let’s pretend you’re a young, single writer who’s estranged from your parents (or you’re married, and in the process of getting divorced; you’re a storyteller — you can spin out the scenarios). You’ve kept a blog for years, and you die with no plan, except a digital lockbox, shortly after your first novel has been published to wild acclaim and unprecedented sales.
 

Under state intestacy law, your parents may very well be entitled to your blog and email account and the rest of your online accounts, even if you’ve directed a site to place them in the hands of your best friend, your lover, or your sister. As one site says:

AssetLock offers no legal expertise and therefore can not draft legal documents such as Wills or Trusts which dispose of property after your death…. If you die without making valid documents such as Wills or Trusts, the state government will disperse and tax your assets and belongings for you according to the law, no matter what you wrote down in AssetLock.

Of course there would also be the matter of the proceeds from your novel — your parents would probably get those too — but at least, once the book was published, it couldn’t be deleted. Unlike a blog. Or your personal email.
 

If you’re a writer, and you don’t have a will, you really should make one. And if you’re not sure how, Neil Gaiman’s tutorial is a good place to start.

Vladimir Nabokov famously instructed his wife Vera to destroy his final, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, if he didn’t live to complete it. At his death, the draft consisted of a stack of notecards which he’d shuffled through, added to and rewritten right up until the end.

Vera, having once saved an early version of Lolita from the incinerator, found herself unable to carry out his wishes. The task fell to their son, Dmitri, who waffled for years — publicly and dramatically but also somewhat understandably so, for not only had Nabokov reaped the benefits of the Lolita rescue, he’d approved of the decision to save Kafka’s drafts against the author’s express commands. While Nabokov may have claimed to believe that every artist should “ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication,” many of his own papers survived him.
 

All the post-death uncertainty over the fate of the book culminated, finally, in publication last fall. The Original of Laura is a facsimile series of the original index cards, with transcriptions below them, which can be detached along their perforated edges and held in the hand just like Nabokov’s.

The story being unfinished, character development is slight. The most remarkable aspects of the nubile love interest, a young woman with the “frail, docile frame” of a child, are the men who desire her: her mother’s lecherous charmeur, whose name, “no doubt assumed,” is Hubert H. Hubert (Lolita’s Humbert in a new incarnation?); her own novelist lover, who “destroys his mistress in the act of portraying her”; and her husband, Peter Wild, a stingy, obese and lovelorn neurologist with tiny feet. Despite all that’s missing in The Original of Laura, though, an intensity characteristic of Nabokov’s work (and missing in most of the self-consciously experimental fiction that purports to borrow from his) pervades it.

Wild strives to inflict upon himself the “sweetest death,” to will himself out of being, body part by body part, starting with his toes and working upward, in an act of “self-deletion.” For all their abstraction, these passages are fresh and surprising and sometimes moving. And as many have observed, the final card in the series presents a list of synonyms for annihilation — “efface, expunge, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate” — that, inevitably, casts us back to a consideration of its author’s fate.

The Original of Laura is not really a novel. It is a fascinating artifact, an almost-story that thwarts immersion by continually calling attention to its architect. As I made my way through the notes, I kept imagining the author of Pale Fire and Look at the Harlequins!, at his most mischievous and perverse, plotting not just this last book, but the whole publish-or-destroy drama it engendered, from his deathbed.

Other commentary: Aleksandar Hemon, Why The Original of Laura should never have become a book.; Stoppard, Burn It; Banville, Nabokov’s Laura is “little more than a blurred outline, a preliminary shiver of a novel. And yet“; David Lodge, Shored against his ruins; Jeanette Winterson, “a sane decision.”

Iris Murdoch’s novels were deeply informed — if not consciously shaped by — her readings in philosophy. Walker Percy found a theoretical framework for his fiction in Kierkegaard, who also influenced Kafka.

And Donald Barthelme urged his students to choose their “literary fathers” carefully, and to be well-versed in philosophy. Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty’s biography, suggests that reading Beckett and the existentialists gave Barthelme confidence that the kind of stories he wanted to write were possible.

Don dropped by Guy’s Newsstand…. and found a copy of Theatre Arts. In it was Waiting for Godot. He stood there and read the whole thing.

That evening, when he took Helen out to dinner, he brought the magazine with him. She had already read the play. “I found it exciting but did not see the implications for Don,” she says. “He was deeply moved and ecstatic about the language…. Each time we were in a bookstore after this, Don looked for work by Beckett and immediately read whatever he found. It seemed that from the day he discovered Godot, Don believed he could write the fiction he imagined.” It would be heavily ironic, and he could “use his wit and intellect in a way that would satisfy him.”

Of course, Don’s breakthrough wasn’t that easy. “The problem is … to do something that’s credible after Beckett, as Beckett had to do something that was credible after Joyce,” he said years later.

Initially, though, the excitement! Waiting for Godot showed Don that philosophy could become drama, almost directly, without the interference of plot, setting, and so on. By stripping away fiction’s stock devices, Beckett focused on consciousness. He could animate the intentionality at the heart of awareness….

[H]is discovery of Beckett and his philosophical studies were guiding him away from vague attempts at an “unlove” story. He was forming a firmer aesthetic. He grounded his magazine editing in philosophy, too, especially in existentialism as it evolved under John Paul Sartre.

I’m fascinated and inspired by this interconnectedness, but also a little wary of it. Whenever I feel philosophical or political axe-grinding creeping into my fiction, I think of Jimmy Chen’s succinct dismissal of novels whose didactic agendas overshadow their artistic ones (though I do love Brave New World — or did, the last time I read it). Your comments are welcome.
 

See also Murdoch’s Existentialists and Mystics, in which she imagines Socrates saying “In philosophy, if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace, you aren’t moving at all”; In defense of Big Ideas in fiction; and Wolcott on Barthelme.

“First, try to be something, anything, else.” That’s the famous first line of Lorrie Moore’s “How to Become a Writer,” and it’s funny because it’s true. Many writers do focus on another path initially.

Roberto Bolaño, for instance, wanted to be a spy, Kate Christensen a rock star, Joan Didion an actress. Chris Adrian went to medical school, and the seminary. Herman Melville was a sailor. Faulkner did guv’ment work.

And if he weren’t a fiction writer, Jonathan Lethem says he’d probably choose to be a film historian or curator.
 

Lately there’ve been layoffs at my day job. I seem to have escaped for now, but have been mulling over what to do if I get the axe. (I mean, apart from writing the things I want to write. I’ll always do that; I’ve always wanted to be a writer. But I also have to eat.)

Top of the list is is Grasso & Neutron, the private eye firm Dana and I are always talking about starting up. (Laugh while you can, monkey boy. We know what you did last night.)

Apparently this is a common writers’ fantasy. Also, espionage. (See, e.g., Edward Gorey’s Mr. Earbrass, above, and the writer as detective.)

I’d probably be reasonably happy doing genealogical research, which is sort of the same thing as detective work, except everyone is dead. I have a feeling there’s not a big demand for this sort of service in a recession, though.
 

How about you? If you write, did you go right into it? If not, what’d you do first, or want to do? And if writing what you love doesn’t pay the bills, what does (up to and including “layoff lit“)?

I’m genuinely curious and am opening up comments — or you can just @me at Twitter.
 

* Courtesy Ms. Carrie Frye.

The National Book Critics Circle has unveiled its new monthly recommended books list — which, as I understand it, is designed to provide alternatives to mainstream bestseller lists — by posting inaugural selections covering all of 2007. MaudNewton.com favorites Junot Díaz and Edwidge Danticat top the fiction and nonfiction lists, respectively. Head over to Critical Mass for the full selections, including poetry. (Perhaps Ron Silliman or Jordan Davis will comment on those choices.)

Voters included not just current members* but many of the NBCC’s former finalists and winners, and some of their outlying votes surface at the NBCC’s blog, Critical Mass. There President John Freeman arranged for writers like Julia Alvarez and Amy Bloom — and, at TEV, David Leavitt and Charles Solomon — to reveal their own choices.
 

* For the record, I haven’t joined.

While searching for something on YouTube last night, I discovered that Google invites authors to read and discuss their work — and then posts video of the events online. Does everyone else already know this?

Above is the clip of Junot Díaz’s appearance, but you can also see Aimee Bender, Tom Bissell, Neil Gaiman, Jonathan Lethem, Kelly Link & Karen Joy Fowler, Alex Ross, George Saunders, Jeffrey Toobin, and others.

This Thursday night at the Brooklyn Public Library, Akashic Books celebrates ten years of reverse-gentrifying the literary world.

“I think that literature should be consumed by more than just the well-educated,” founder and publisher Johnny Temple told the IHT earlier this year. “[W]e don’t need to just keep trying to sell books to the same people, these people for sure but also more of the population.”
 

In the past decade, Temple has published the likes of Chris Abani, Colin Channer, T. Cooper, and Marlon James. Some of Temple’s authors leave mainstream publishers for Akashic, some go on to larger publishers after acclaimed Akashic debuts, and still others, like Abani, straddle both worlds.

Recently I asked Temple how he feels when writers who start with Akashic publish elsewhere.

“I have an unconventional take for an indie publisher,” he told me. “I think it’s arrogant for publishers to think they know what’s best for a writer.”

Since Akashic only publishes authors Temple and his cohorts like and respect as people, he supports their decisions to publish books any place they feel good about. He was particularly glowing about (MaudNewton.com favorite) Marlon James, whom he called the “quintessential Akashic author.” James’ debut novel, John Crow’s Devil, came out from Akashic. His second book is forthcoming from Riverhead. And Temple couldn’t be more proud.
 

For those of you who can’t make it out on Thursday night, I’m giving away copies of Colin Channer’s The Girl with the Golden Shoes, Chris Abani’s Song for Night, Arthur Nersesian’s Swing Voter of Staten Island, and A Fictional History of the United States with Huge Chunks Missing, edited by T. Cooper and Adam Mansbach.

All four books will go to the 9th person to email me at maud [at] maudnewton.com with “Akashic” in the subject line.

Next month the Library of America publishes two collections of Edmund Wilson’s criticism.

While reading the first, Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 30s, I was struck by “Poe at Home and Abroad,” in which Wilson ponders Americans’ failure to embrace Poe as a serious writer despite his critical acclaim in Europe. (His influence permeated “a whole half-century of [French] literature,” but his work “so completely failed to impress itself upon the literature of Poe’s own country that it is still possible for Americans to talk about him as if his principal claim to distinction were his title to be described as the ‘father of the short story.’”)
 

As a critic Poe developed complex ideas about the aims of literature, and he sought to implement his theories in his writing. So he was not a typical romantic, but one who brought to romanticism “a new aesthetic discipline.” For Wilson, Poe’s poetry approaches “the indefiniteness of music — that supreme goal of the symbolists.” A narrator hears the approach of darkness; night falls with a dull, paralyzing weight; lamp flames emit an unbroken “strain of melodious monotone.”

His fiction also relies on confusion of the senses, and flies in the face of dogged realism. It is intended to instill in the reader very specific feelings — not just fear and horror, but also dread of evil impulses that appear suddenly, overtaking reason and the senses. Says Wilson:

Poe’s theory of short-story writing was similar to his theory of verse. “A skilful artist,” he writes, “has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thought to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents — he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect.” So the real significance of Poe’s short stories does not lie in what they purport to relate. Many are confessedly dreams; and, as with dreams, though they seem absurd, their effect on our emotions is serious. And even those that pretend to the logic and the exactitude of actual narratives are, nevertheless, also dreams. The happenings in them differ from the mere macabre surprises and the astonishing adventures and voyages of such imitators of Poe as Conan Doyle. The descent into the maelström is a metaphor for the horror of the moral whirlpool into which, with some justification, Poe had, as we know from more explicit stories, a giddy apprehension of going down; the precariously delayed dissolution of M. Valdemar stands for that horror of living death that figures also in Premature Burial, which, arising from whatever blight, haunted Poe all his later life. No one understands better than Poe that, in fiction and in poetry both, it is not what you say that counts, but what you make the reader feel (he always italicizes the word “effect”); no one understood better than Poe that the deepest psychological truth may be rendered through phantasmagoria. Even the realistic stories of Poe are, in fact, only phantasmagoria of a more circumstantial kind. Any realism of any age which does not convey some such truth is, of course, bound to be unsatisfactory. And today when a revolt is in progress against the literalness and superficiality of the naturalistic movement that has come between Poe’s time and ours, he ought to be of special interest.

Image of Ty Harvey’s Ghost of Bird 1 taken from his website.

Week before last, the vivacious and quick-witted Aura Estrada died very suddenly after a swimming accident while on vacation with her husband, the novelist Francisco Goldman.

I met her only once, the night of the Bolaño tribute, but her insights and stories and odd, lovely laugh have stayed with me since. Please read “Mi Aura,” a reminiscence Goldman wrote for Hunter College site; Estrada was pursuing an MFA in creative writing there.

About six years ago, in a bar in Brooklyn, I met a pretty Mexican girl, with shining black eyes, the sweetest smile and an adorable gap in her front teeth. She was standing at the bar with an acquaintance of mine, declaiming from memory a long poem by the 17th century English poet, George Herbert. (”I struck the board and cried, No more, I will abroad. What? Shall I ever sigh and pine? My lines and life are free….”) As if finding a young mexicana reciting George Herbert in a New York bar was not unusual enough, I was struck by her unique, yet oddly familiar, pronunciation: most of the women from Mexico City I know speak English with a soft, almost British-sounding lilt, but Aura’s voice was exuberant, robust, with a slight thrumming raspiness – the voice of a spirited and wise old Mexican woman, or even of your smartest, most irreverent old Jewish aunt. I even asked her, “How come you speak English like a New York Jew?” And she laughed and said it was because as a young girl, left home alone in the afternoons while her mother worked, she’d taught herself English by watching the Seinfeld show on television.

Hilary Mantel reflects on the enduring relevance of Orpheus and Euridice, arguing that, in the era of modern rationalism, we banish the ancient gods at our peril.

For some years I lived in Africa, in Botswana, and people there used to say that to see ghosts you need to look out of the corners of your eyes. If you turn on them a direct gaze, then, like Eurydice, they vanish.

The whole process of creativity is like that. The writer often doesn’t know, consciously, what gods she invokes or what myths she’s retelling. Orpheus is a figure of all artists, and Eurydice is his inspiration. She is what he goes into the dark to seek. He is the conscious mind, with its mastery of skill and craft, its faculty of ordering, selecting, making rational and persuasive; she is the subconscious mind, driven by disorder, fuelled by obscure desires, brimming with promises that perhaps she won’t keep, with promises of revelation, fantasies of empowerment and knowledge. What she offers is fleeting, tenuous, hard to hold. She makes us stand on the brink of the unknown with our hand stretched out into the dark. Mostly, we just touch her fingertips and she vanishes. She is the dream that seems charged with meaning, that vanishes as soon as we try to describe it. She is the unsayable thing we are always trying to say. She is the memory that slips away as you try to grasp it. Just when you’ve got it, you haven’t got it. She won’t bear the light of day. She gets to the threshold and she falters. You want her too much, and by wanting her you destroy her. As a writer, as an artist, your effects constantly elude you. You have a glimpse, an inspiration, you write a paragraph and you think it’s there, but when you read back, it’s not there. Every picture painted, every opera composed, every book that is written, is the ghost of the possibilities that were in the artist’s head. Art brings back the dead, but it also makes perpetual mourners of us all. Nothing lasts: that’s what Apollo, the father of Orpheus, sings to him in Monteverdi’s opera. In Opera North’s staging, the god took a handkerchief from his pocket, licked it, and tenderly cleaned his child’s tear-stained face.

When I first met Dana in person five years ago, we bonded over everything from love of bourbon and Hollywood, Florida dive bars, to the travails of frizzy hair, but it was her reaction to my mention of Junot Díaz’s Drown that told me we were going to be really good friends.

“I know, it’s such a great book,” she said. “And Jesus, when is he going to finish the novel?”

We sighed. New rounds of whiskey were ordered. Cigarettes were lit. Fan letter disclosures were made.
 

For those of us who worship Díaz — and the others of you know who you are — it’s only natural to expect that all the host of heaven will finally descend to sing Hosannahs when The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao comes out in September.

Until then, I feel like we should all get tattoos so we can recognize each other.
 

Recently I was trying to explain to Sean McDonald, Díaz’s editor, that Riverhead might want to spring for security at major metropolitan bookstores the day the novel comes out, lest people come to blows over the last copy.

Sean laughed and studied his menu. He had succumbed to my threats of burglary and grievous bodily harm and met me for lunch at Do Hwa to give me a copy of the galley.

“Seriously, though,” I said, “This is a really big fucking deal for some people.”
 

Before he could respond — naturally he’s excited about the book, too — the server came over to take our order.

(Now, I’ve been to Do Hwa probably thirty times, and this woman has covered my table more than half of them, and while she has always been polite and attentive and impeccably coiffed, I’ve never seen her crack a smile or display interest in anything other than correct pronunciation of entrees and whether you might like dessert, or another drink.)

She flipped open her pad, readied her pen. “What would –?” she began, but the book next to me on the table caught her eye. “Oh!” she said. “Is that his novel? Have you read it yet? Where’d you get it? Drown is one of my favorites!”

So now you know where to go when you want to talk about Oscar Wao on September 7, after you’ve stayed up all night reading it.
 

The galley I read, by the way, exceeded my expectations in almost every particular. Here’s one delicious footnote:

For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history: Trujillo, one of the twentieth century’s most infamous dictators, ruled the Dominican Republic between 1930 and 1961 with an implacable ruthless brutality. A portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulatto who bleached his skin, wore platform shoes, and had a fondness for Napoleon-era haberdashery Trujillo (also known as El Jefe, the Failed Cattle Thief, and Fuckface) came to control nearly every aspect of the DR’s political, cultural, social, and economic life through a potent (and familiar) mixture of violence, intimidation, massacre, rape, cooption, and terror; treated the country like it was a plantation and he was the master. At first glance your typical Latin American caudillo, but his power was terminal in ways that few historians or writers have ever truly captured or, I would argue, imagined. He was our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a peronaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up. Famous for changing ALL THE NAMES of ALL THE LANDMARKS in the Dominican Republic to honor himself (Pico Duarte became PicoTrujillo, and Santo Domingo de Guzmán, the first and oldest city in the New World, became Ciudad Trujillo); for making ill monopolies out of every slice of the national patrimony (which quickly made him one of the wealthiest men on the planet); for building one of the largest militaries in the hemisphere (dude had bomber wings, for fuck’s sake); for fucking every hot girl in sight, even the wives of his subordinates, thousands upon thousands upon thousands of women; for expecting, no insisting on absolute veneration from his pueblo (tellingly, the national slogan was “Dios y Trujillo,” and if, at any public gathering, you forgot to toast Trujillo’s health you could find yourself in a world of hurt); for running the country like it was a Marine boot camp (trusted generals would get themselves kicked out of a job because Trujillo found dirt in one of their barracks); for stripping friends and allies of their positions and properties for no reason at all (just imagine what he did to his enemies) and for his almost supernatural abilities (dude was the original Witchking of Angmar).

Outstanding accomplishments include: the 1937 genocide against the Haitian and Haitian-Dominican community; one of the longest, most damaging U.S.-backed dictatorships in the Western Hemisphere (and if we Latin types are skillfull at anything it’s tolerating U.S.-backed dictators, so you know this was a hard-earned victory, the chilenos and argentinos are still complaining); the creation of the first modern kleptocracy (Trujillo was Mobufu before Mobutu was Mobutu); the systematic bribing of American senators; and, last but not least, the forging of the Dominican peoples into a modern state (did what his Marine trainers, during the Occupation, were unable to do).

Speaking of Eudora Welty, not long ago I came upon a fascinating set of conversations that Virginia Ross and Sally Wolff had with Welty and her friend and former editor William Maxwell about each other in 1999. Maxwell died the following year.

The two writers discussed, among other things, their opposing perspectives on using people and events from their own experiences in fiction. Welty clearly disapproved of Maxwell’s reliance on autobiography. “I’m not used to people writing real things about their lives,” she said.

I can’t accept it. I try to protect people from it. Bill has written a lot of fiction that is autobiography. They’re very different forms. That’s the thing what would chain me back the most — if I had real life staring me in the face. I can only write fiction if I feel I’m not being tied down to reality. Bill is absolutely the opposite. It’s the method he uses to work from.

I understand the feeling he has when he reads The Folded Leaf now — trying to decide who is invented and who is remembered. Bill sticks closer to the facts than I do. He is scrupulous about facts. I never write about my life automatically, except when it was obvious that’s what I was doing, as in One Writer’s Beginnings. Otherwise, it would never occur to me to do so. His life was pretty sad, whereas mine was carefree — so we weren’t the same.

Maxwell, on the other hand, couldn’t imagine writing fiction that didn’t start with his own life.

I think Eudora may have had a moral disapproval of [my use of autobiography in fiction]. If I had had to write only about imaginary people, I would have had to close up my typewriter. I wrote about my life in less and less disguise as I grew older, and finally with no disguise — except the disguise we create for ourselves, which is self-deception.

I was a character in the sense that other people in the novel or story were characters, so there was a distance there. That made all the difference….

In my early drafts of The Folded Leaf I was of course recalling my own adolescence, and most adolescents are sullen and uncharitable — I certainly was. I described my father and stepmother pretty much as they actually were…. In revising the novel I thought about the fact that my father and stepmother had no sense of literature as something distinct from life and that it wasn’t decent to subject them to what would certainly have seemed to them an exposure. I made the father in that book a widower and a sporting character so that my father wouldn’t think I was writing about them. After the book was published a Lincoln friend of the family said “Why did you make your father like that?” There is no escaping the autobiographical assumption. My father never said anything, but later, when he read Time Will Darken It, he said he was glad the character that was based on him was a nice man. They had no sense of literature, and it isn’t fair to subject them to that.

Mark Helprin rendered me temporarily silent with apoplexy when “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” appeared in Sunday’s Times. But the paralysis has abated as the week has progressed, and today I answer questions from Gawker’s Alex Balk.

Balk admires Helprin’s fiction, but is “extremely wary of his political views, which can be found frequently on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, if that gives you any idea. Still, something about his argument seemed plausible, which deeply disturbed us.” Here’s an excerpt:

So is Helprin’s argument sound?
No, not really. Slippery, but not sound.

Not even from a legal standpoint?
The Constitution authorizes Congress to give authors and artists exclusive rights to their work “for limited Times.” Limited is by definition not perpetual. But then, as my high school government teacher was fond of observing, “The Constitution says whatever the Supreme Court says it says.” I wouldn’t put it past the current court to rule that “limited Times” means anything short of infinity…

But shouldn’t authors and their descendents have the right to royalties from their work?
Authors hold copyright for life plus 70 years, meaning that their heirs reap the benefits of exclusive rights for seven full decades after they die. But the purpose of exclusive rights like copyright and patent — both of which flow from the same twenty-seven words of the Constitution — is “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” not to fund vacations for John Grisham’s great-great-grandchildren.

If you’re interested in reading the major Supreme Court ruling on the subject, turn to Eldred v. Ashcroft. There the majority deferred to Congress’ 1998 extensions of existing copyright, finding that they were “a rational exercise of the legislative authority conferred by the Copyright Clause.”

Though it’s not the law of the land, I enjoyed Justice Breyer’s dissent in that case, especially this part:

What copyright-related benefits might justify the statute’s extension of copyright protection? First, no one could reasonably conclude that copyright’s traditional economic rationale applies here. The extension will not act as an economic spur encouraging authors to create new works… No potential author can reasonably believe that he has more than a tiny chance of writing a classic that will survive commercially long enough for the copyright extension to matter. After all, if, after 55 to 75 years, only 2% of all copyrights retain commercial value, the percentage surviving after 75 years or more (a typical pre-extension copyright term) must be far smaller… [A report estimates] that, even after copyright renewal, about 3.8% of copyrighted books go out of print each year… And any remaining monetary incentive is diminished dramatically by the fact that the relevant royalties will not arrive until 75 years or more into the future, when, not the author, but distant heirs, or shareholders in a successor corporation, will receive them. Using assumptions about the time value of money provided us by a group of economists (including five Nobel prize winners) … it seems fair to say that, for example, a 1% likelihood of earning $100 annually for 20 years, starting 75 years into the future, is worth less than seven cents today…

What potential Shakespeare, Wharton, or Hemingway would be moved by such a sum? What monetarily motivated Melville would not realize that he could do better for his grandchildren by putting a few dollars into an interest-bearing bank account?

The Court itself finds no evidence to the contrary. It refers to testimony before Congress (1) that the copyright system’s incentives encourage creation, and (2) (referring to Noah Webster) that income earned from one work can help support an artist who “‘continue[s] to create.’”… But the first of these amounts to no more than a set of undeniably true propositions about the value of incentives in general. And the applicability of the second to this Act is mysterious. How will extension help today’s Noah Webster create new works 50 years after his death? Or is that hypothetical Webster supposed to support himself with the extension’s present discounted value, i.e., a few pennies? Or (to change the metaphor) is the argument that Dumas fils would have written more books had Dumas père’s Three Musketeers earned more royalties?

Regardless, even if this cited testimony were meant more specifically to tell Congress that somehow, somewhere, some potential author might be moved by the thought of great grandchildren receiving copyright royalties a century hence, so might some potential author also be moved by the thought of royalties being paid for two centuries, five centuries, 1,000 years, “’til the End of Time.”

Betty Hester, longtime correspondent, friend, and “adopted kin” to Flannery O’Connor, donated the Southern writer’s letters to Emory University in 1987, with the stipulation that they remain sealed for twenty years.

In 1998 she committed suicide with a hollow-nose bullet aimed at her skull, after spending the afternoon eating a day-late Christmas dinner and playfully mocking William Sessions “for taking the Church seriously.”
 

Hester (pictured at right) also exchanged letters with Iris Murdoch and wrote bundles of unpublished stories and novels, and a philosophical treatise. She was originally known to O’Connor scholars only as “A.” Her identity was disclosed after her death.

On Saturday O’Connor’s 300 letters to Hester — which reportedly reveal O’Connor’s attitudes about subjects from civil rights to homosexuality — were finally made public. According to Emory’s Steve Enniss, the early letters center on the two women’s “faith journeys” (his words?).

In the course of their correspondence, Hester converted to Catholicism, asking O’Connor to be her sponsor, but shocked the writer when she left the church in 1961.
 

Last week Enniss speculated that Hester ordered the letters sealed, and kept herself shut off from the world, because of her sexual orientation.

Betty was a lesbian, and probably for that reason was worried about public scrutiny of herself. She didn’t want any attention. She did not want scholars knocking at her door and did not want to answer meddlesome questions…

I believe Flannery will appear [to readers of the letters] in a very caring way in relation to Betty Hester’s disclosure about her personal life…

I’ve done my best to transcribe brief excerpts from the letters as read by Enniss on All Things Considered yesterday.

The first is a response to Hester’s revelation that she watched her own mother commit suicide at age 13. Hester also appears to have revealed some past sexual indiscretions, which happened during her stint in the military. O’Connor writes:

Compared to what you have experienced in the way of radical misery, I have never had anything to bear in my life by minor irritations, but there are times when the worst suffering is not to suffer, and the worst affliction, not to be afflicted. Job’s comforters were worse off than he was, though they did not know it. If in any sense my knowing your burden can make your burden lighter, then I am doubly glad I know it. You were right to tell me, but I’m glad you didn’t tell me until I knew you well. Where you are wrong is in saying that you are the history of horror. The meaning of the redemption is precisely that we do not have to be our history, and nothing is plainer to me than that you are not your history.

I’m not a mystic, and I repeat it. If I ever said it, you can discount it as my not having been in my right head. You are confusing the artist with the mystic in viewing me with your own mysticism. . . . All I have is the talent, and nothing else to do but cultivate it.

More O’Connor:

• A quote reprinted at If Flannery Had a Blog (and taken from letters in A Habit of Being): “I once had the feeling I would dig my mother’s grave with my writing too, but I later discovered this was vanity on my part. They are hardier than we think.”

• “But it is a Wooden Leg First,” on the accretion of detail in fiction.

• “And the Smug Shall Come Last: Pride, Purgatory and Perfection in Flannery O’Connor’s Short Story ‘Revelation.’”

Images of O’Connor’s inscription and of Hester taken from Access Atlanta.

Motoko Rich very kindly mentions this site — and a number of other blogs, including TEV, Bookslut, and Syntax of Things — in her New York Times article on the unfortunate disappearance of newspaper book reviews like the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s.

Maud Newton, who has been writing a literary blog since 2002, said she has the freedom to follow obsessions like, say, Mark Twain in a way that a newspaper book review could not, unless there was a current book on the subject. But she would never consider what she does a replacement for more traditional book reviews.

“I find it kind of naïve and misguided to be a triumphalist blogger,” Ms. Newton said. “But I also find it kind of silly when people in the print media bash blogs as a general category, because I think that people are doing very, very different things.”

Also, I participated last year in “Critical Edge,” a blog-versus-print discussion at Arts Journal. There Rolling Stone’s Anthony DeCurtis leapt in with the sneering enjoinder to blog on, little honeybees, blog on — we have, thanks! — and cast writers’ willingness “to work for nothing or next to it” as a quasi-unethical act.

My response: Thoughts from a “little honeybee.” And before that: Venue, or voice?
 

Image credit: Berenice Abbott’s News Stand, 32nd Street and 3rd Avenue, Manhattan, November 1935 was taken from the NYPL’s Changing New York collection.

Let us all pause and offer a moment of silence to Lauren, who parted with the new issue of Dirtypop so that I could bring you these excerpts from a fascinating 5-page interview with Junot Díaz.

On the logistics of balancing writing with teaching (at MIT), he tells interviewer Dulce Mateo:

I can barely write while I’m teaching but I can barely eat from just my writing so that’s the rub.

Luckily for me, I’m already a slow writer so it’s not like anybody notices the one-line-a-month pace. As for the process, I’m so terrified of writing that at least once every couple of months my writing anxiety triggers a spine-snapping muscle spasm (I shit you not) and it’s in the aftermath of that horrible agony that I often get a lot of my best work done.

“Shit,” says Díaz:

it’s sort of like living in a conservative, mostly white, wealthy country. I’ve already got lots of experience with one, so it was easy to survive in the other. But honestly, the Boston area can be like a white supremacist homeland; fucking scary a lot of the time… Fortunately for me, Mass. has a sizeable Dominican population…

He also riffs on capitalism, childhood reading, books he’d take to a desert island, his answer to Proust’s madeleine, and much more.

If you’re a fan, get your hands on a copy.

Doesn’t it seem like the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven should’ve joined together by now to proclaim that Junot Díaz’s first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, will be out this September?

But no. It is winter, and so we trudge along with Oprah scandals, Dawkins’ rantings, and editor doocings. Oh, and of course, we are only! just! learning! the fascinating details of Jenna Bush’s debut literary effort. Will someone wake me when March is over?
 

If you haven’t read Junot Díaz’s Drown, please do so now.

Seriously: stop clicking through to book news or random clips of Paris Hilton’s latest chocha flashing or whatever, and just listen to this. (Then acquire copy of book, then set aside evening to get lost in same.) You can also read a very brief, very old piece of “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” a short story published in The New Yorker in December 2000.

Those already acquainted with the brilliance of Díaz can hear him talking about his work on a recent Cornell interview. Here’s a choice excerpt:

[Your] narrators have at least superficial similarities to you personally — that is, race, age, gender, New Jersey — that make your readers often wonder if you are Yunior, if Yunior is you. What is your relationship to your narrator? And does your readers’ preoccupation with this bother you?

. . . . I never think of Yunior — sort of my alter ego in some ways — as metonymic for myself. You know, after you’ve worked with a character for a long time, they kind of get a certain amount of precedent, and they begin to exist in a way in your head that is often unrelated to the way that you think about yourself and how you pulled that character out of yourself. I think what’s interesting about a character like Yunior — and thinking about the first-person voice — is that, again, I feel in Yunior a lot of the traits which I find very difficult to reconcile in myself [are] easier for me to reconcile in him.

Some school librarians want to ban The Higher Power of Lucky, this year’s Newbery Award winner, because it contains the word “scrotum.” Justine Larbalestier responds.

The books coverage at The New Leader was often smart, and sometimes provocative, so I was sad to see the 82-year-old magazine cease publication last year. Now it’s been revived online — although someone really needs to learn html — and a correspondent points me to Brooke Allen’s dismissal of the latest Pynchon and Mailer as “late-period self-indulgence.” (Page 15.)

Allen’s patience sputtered out before the end of Against the Day. He challenges the idea that a critic must finish a book to review it.

Here I have a confession to make. In the 15 years or so I have spent reviewing books, I have often been asked whether I always read the whole book I am writing about. The answer is yes; always; every word. But with Against the Day I cried uncle, finally defeated by Pynchon’s relentless assault. Although I literally wept with boredom throughout Mason & Dixon, I read it all. In the case of Against the Day I simply gave up, with a sense of utter relief. Do I feel my confession disqualifies me from writing about the book? Not at all: I suffered through enough of it to see that further perusal would be unedifying. I am not tempted to work out its elliptical and elusive puzzles. I know any enlightenment achieved will not be of a general nature; it will simply be an insight into Pynchon’s mind, terra I am content to leave forever incognita.

Beyond that, I dunno. Of course I finish books I’m assigned to review, but as a reader I abandon or decide not to pick up novels all the time. And I won’t apologize for that. If I devoted all my energy to the books the Times and the publishing industry tell me to read, I might never discover other excellent, and neglected, ones. As for the Pynchon and Mailer, Coetzee has me wanting to read The Castle in the Forest, but even Mr. Maud’s most passionate testimonials have not yet ignited the desire to spend three weeks with Against the Day.