But whether you read “Rip Van Winkle” as a statement on politics, marital relations, or as a tale that binds history to nature – Van Winkle’s bowling partners are determined to be Hendrick Hudson’s crew, and summer thunder in the Catskills is taken to be the sound of their pins crashing – the fact remains: Rip Van Winkle does nothing and gets away with it.
I wrote a little thing about Rip Van Winkle for the Hudson Valley magazine Green Door.
I’ll be reading at a night of Say Anything fan fiction a week from Saturday at BookCourt. It’s a Brooklyn Writers Space event that’s part of Brooklyn’s Lit Crawl. I talk all about it at The Huffington Post.
Feels good to be back on the masthead at a newsweekly after all these years.
Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live; and as you would if you knew you must die to-morrow.
Mother Ann, founder of the Shakers. Heard this in an old Ken Burns doc last night and liked the paradox of it.
”I detest my own past and that of others. I detest resignation, patience, professional heroism and all those nice, obligatory sentiments. I also detest the decorative arts, folklore, publicity, the voice of speakers, aerodynamics, boy scouts, the smell of gasoline, topical matters and drunkards. I love subversive humour, freckles, knees, the long hair of women, the laugh of young children at liberty, a young girl running in the street. I wish for real love, the impossible and the utopian. I fear knowledge of my exact limits.”
René Magritte
Just gave away 19 copies of A Prayer for Owen Meany (plus one of The History of Love) in 7 minutes and 36 seconds for World Book Night. So I guess that’s the time to beat, no?
“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”
— William S. Burroughs
Life is something that happens when you can’t get to sleep.
Fran Lebowitz (via iamblessed) (via quote-book) (via pinkeezy) (via libraryland)
At first blush, dialastar.com appears to be a crass scheme by a former porn star to leverage the shameless desperation of attention-starved D-listers and the lower impulses of celebrity-crazed American dimwits and/or ironic potheads. And it is all that. Users pay up to $25/minute to speak to future trivia questions like Michael Lohan, Chris Crocker, and Angie Everhart.
But might it also be more?
While credible literary lights like Emerson, Dickens, and Twain supported themselves — in their day — via public appearances, something has always struck me as not quite right about returning to that model. For one thing, it will mean we have arrived at a point where each pole of the marketing magnet — the book and the tour — is supposed to pay for the other, with the result that both are given away. Plus, the idea of supporting modern media with something so 19th-century as a speaking tour is just a little too steam-punky, if you know what I mean.
But this dialastar.com, this makes sense. What Emerson, Dickens, and Twain were really selling — after all — was access. Writing was their advertisement, but proximity was their product. And for many writers, who make livings as academics, it still is. The paid speaking tour hasn’t gone away. We’ve just jacked up the price, extended it to two years, and dratically limited enrollment (although probably still not by enough.) We sell maxi-access to writers, in the form of MFAs. But what about micro-access? Where’s the model for that? Maybe it’s dialastar.com.
Imagine dialanauthor.com, a site where you can talk to Jonathan Franzen or Jennifer Egan or, gulp, David Patterson for $5/minute or $5/minute or $500/minute (respectively). Do you think people would call? Do you even doubt for a minute that they would? Can you imagine if Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon were on there?
Discuss.
Going to revisit this one for his birthday: Drinking Like A Kingsley Amis Character.
What a crazy cover. Makes it look like an Elvis Presley vehicle.
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