December 2011
18 posts
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Good sentences, the ebullient critic and novelist Wilfrid Sheed wrote in 1990, are sent into the air like a series of jazz licks.“You noodle around with tempo and sound until you get the perfect fit for that particular song, and then, so long as you can sustain it, God is on your side and everything comes easily and even the waiters smile.”
—Dwight Garner, in The New York Times...
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Authorship as we know it
‘Authorship’ — in the sense we know it today, individual intellectual effort related to the book as an economic commodity — was practically unknown before the advent of print technology. Medieval scholars were indifferent to the precise identity of the ‘books’ they studied. In turn, they rarely signed even what was clearly their own. They were a humble service...
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Why America Needs Its Indies
“Culture, at a least a compelling one, develops when people are collectively engaged with a whole range of books, authors, artists, musicians, television shows, theater, magazines, etc. We would not consider an artistically robust culture to be one where everyone had been exposed to Matisse and Dali but no one else. The same is true of a literary culture: to have a good one, it is vital...
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“The books that matter to me—and they are books of all...”
– Sven Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies, Pg. 102
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“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something,...”
– Nora Ephron, in I Feel Bad About My Neck
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“People have to understand that their short-term decision to save a couple bucks...”
– Tom Perrotta as quoted today in Richard Russo’s NYT op-ed “Amazon’s Jungle Logic”
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Why Digital Naysayers are Real Grinches
“Music divorced from packaging is all about the songs, not the disk it comes on or the sleeve it comes in; novels and other works of literature will be all about their words.
“Critics who can’t believe this, that great novels will still be great novels when separated from their physical packages, are much like The Grinch in Dr. Seuss’s classic story The Grinch Who Stole...
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“Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.”
– Willa Cather (born today in 1873)
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"Why I Write"
“In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. Its an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasionswith the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming,...
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“I have never fallen in love with a book that I did not love all the more the...”
– Patti Smith, in this wknd’s NYTBR essay “Read it Again, Sam”
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