Nearly every morning last year I went into my office with a single intent — to write. Something. Anything. Nothing. Instead, other than the few posts made here, I have managed to play 386,427 games of spider solitaire. Sadly, I don’t win often, but I do have an impressive twelve-win run in easy mode, which is totally pathetic.

I am discouraged.

Rest assured that there is an abundance of gross incompetence, general stupidity, and blatant disregard for truth and justice in the world that I would gladly comment on. At this very moment there are dozens of diatribes dancing around in my head fighting to find a direct pipeline to my keyboard.

This is not a case of writer’s block. There are big, big, big things going on that piss me off and I, like thousands of others in the blogosphere, have opinions and judgments that I think are unique, brilliant, and deserving of being blasted throughout the universe because, well, um, I am right and you are wrong.

No, this is not writer’s block. My deserving diatribes on the big issues are not absent. My truth is out there. But unlike everyone else in the blogosphere, I am the victim of a cruel conspiracy. My rage has been stolen and broadcast as a ‘special comment’ by Keith Olbermann. [Read more →]

Tags: black helicopter watch, books & writing
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No writer is quoted more reflexively than Shakespeare, which is too bad, because Will’s best lines not only repay close attention, but often demand it. Take the advice Polonius gives his son Laertes:

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Spoken like a true courtier, which is what Polonius is — a temporizing careerist whose summum bonum is survival. He is also a “wretched, rash, intruding fool,” as Hamlet — uncharitably, but accurately — calls him after impulsively running the old duffer through in Act III.

It seems safe to say that, for Polonius, being true to yourself means nothing more than giving top priority to your own self-interest. My guess is that, in Polonius’s view, everyone is out for himself, and that this defines the extent to which anyone can trust anybody else — which is to say, hardly at all. It is a supremely cynical outlook, and how exactly it ensures against being false to anyone else is far from clear.

There is another play in which the notion of being true to yourself figures: Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. When Peer visits the trolls, the troll king explains that the difference between humans and trolls is that while, among humans, the maxim is “to thine own self be true,” among trolls it is “to thine own self be — enough.”

But how do those differ, really? In both cases, the standard remains … yourself. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson
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I didn’t do as careful a job tracking the books I read this year as I did last year, but I think the below covers it (they’re listed more or less in the order I read them — I sometimes read more than one at a time). The list is about as long as last year’s; it seems that these days I read only 22 or so books a year. I used to read many more books each year, but I guess that was back when I didn’t have papers to grade or an online magazine to run or a child to play with. I hope next year the list will be a good deal shorter, since that would mean I’m spending more time writing my new novel in 2009 — I tend not to read fiction when I’m writing it.

Anyway, I hope your 2008 in books was a good one, and I’d be interested to hear what you thought about any of the below, if you read any of them (most of them are not new books). And do you keep track of what you read each year? I just started doing that the last couple of years. Since I’m asking questions, what was the best book you read in 2008? The worst? 

One of the below was really, really, bad; a few were not very good; a few were disappointing; a few were relatively painless and easy to get through, if unremarkable; a few were interesting enough even if not as good as they’d been hyped up to be or even if flawed in some major way; and a few were memorable and well worth reading. How’s that for specificity?

1. The Ladies of Grace Adieu, stories by Susanna Clarke

2. I, The Jury, a novel by Mickey Spillane (I wrote about it here)

3. Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner

4. Boomsday, a novel by Christopher Buckley

5. The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing
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OK. I admit it. For me, getting into the “Holiday spirit” this year has been more difficult than shoving a camel into a needle’s eye. Even though both my wife and I were raised in the Christian tradition, we do have Christmas lights, we do have an (artificial) tree, and we do have a bevy of berry-covered decorations, nothing is up yet. More, every trip to the grocery store and its continuous Holiday music gives me shivers. I’m actually tired of Bing Crosby and have begun, secretly, to hope for anything other than snow this season. So, go ahead if you want, call me “Scrooge.” I’ll just offer up another litany of humbugs.

But can you really blame me?

You see, this week, I packed up a box of personal belongings from my cell-like cubicle and made that confused walk to my car for the last drive home from work. I suspect, unless you’re really lucky, you’ve seen people clutching those small boxes packed with family photos and random mementos, and maybe you’ve even noticed that dazed look in their eyes. You know, the one that says, um, well, what now?

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, easy go
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I wrote “The Stacker” when I was 23. It’s the first real story I ever wrote. (It’s also the first story I had accepted for publication, though not the first to be published, but I’ll talk about that later.) I’d written other stuff as an undergraduate at the University of Miami, where I majored in creative writing, but nothing I would call a story. As an undergrad fiction writer, mainly I flopped around, like a fish on a boat.

After I graduated I took a job with a small advertising agency in New York City. I answered phones when I started there, but pretty soon was writing copy for ads and brochures for toys and dog toys and wine — including Louis Jadot and Taittinger champagne.

I was going to New York University at night, after writing the dog toy copy all day. In my final term at NYU, I was working on my master’s thesis on Kafka’s short stories. For a couple of months I think I thought I was Kafka.

That same semester I decided to apply for MFA programs. I hadn’t written a word of fiction since getting my BA, nearly two years earlier. But MFA applications required creative writing samples. Besides, if I was going to be a fiction writer, at some point it figured that I’d have to write some fiction.

I wrote “The Stacker” over a couple of nights. With some distance now from its creation, I see three influences on this story. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, creative writing
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Shawn Macomber refers to The Age of Abundance in his latest post. I reviewed that book for the Philadelphia Inquirer on July 8, 2007. I wanted to send a link to the review to Shawn, but the Inquirer only keeps its online content posted for a limited time. I don’t know why. CNN.com does the same thing. Since When Falls the Coliseum’s host provides us with infinite storage space for, like, a nickel, surely major news outfits could afford to keep archives posted indefinitely. Anyway, I am posting the review here so it will exist online. The book and my review were published well before the current financial crisis and we might not all take the material security I mention in the review for granted quite as much as we did just a year and a half ago. Still, I don’t think the discussion of American wealth is any less relevant today.

Review of Brink Lindsey’s The Age of Abundance

The Age of Abundance begins by claiming that America’s mass affluence has created a “post-scarcity” society. We can’t have it all, of course; Brink Lindsey, vice president for research at the libertarian Cato Institute, understands that, as economists use the term, “scarcity” is still with us. But the everyday scarcity, that even our recent ancestors knew, is not. In building his case, Lindsey takes the reader on a tour of American history, with particular attention to the six decades since World War II. What a tour it is. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, rulers & ruled
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I find it disconcerting to realize that it has been more than half a century since I first read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” At least I know I’ve had plenty of time to think it over. I’ve read it a number of times since then, of course, but that first encounter has stayed in my mind with extraordinary vividness. It took place in February 1957. I was 15, a sophomore in high school. But I had stayed home from school that day because of a bad cold — for some reason colds affected me worse when I was young than later on.

The day was very clear and very cold. The bedroom where I sat reading was filled with dazzling winter sunlight. I don’t remember why I decided to read “Self-Reliance.” It was in an anthology of classic American literature that we had lying around the house. I knew that Emerson was supposed to be an important writer, so maybe I just decided to see if he lived up to his reputation.

He sure did for me. “Self-Reliance” hit me like a personal declaration of independence. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds….” “To be great is to be misunderstood.” What bookish adolescent wouldn’t thrill to such words?

Conformism was much talked about at the time. Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit — which had to do with conformity as exemplified by corporate yes men — had come out two years earlier and its screen adaptation hit theaters the year before. Maybe that’s what made Emerson’s essay seem so up-to-date.

At any rate, it was not those famous quotes from “Self-Reliance” that grabbed me so much as this one: [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson
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My writing partners and I just finished a series of children’s books. Seven, to be exact. It is a brilliant series that chronicles the week of a wonderfully charismatic little girl that just so happens to have two moms. Close your mouths people, you heard me correctly. Two moms. It’s crazy, I know. What’s crazier is the gaping hole that exists in the children’s book market when it comes to books that represent a child with same sex parents. There are a few out there. But most of them are about the fact that the parents are gay. Few are about anything else.

Here’s my personal side of the story. When my daughter was born, within a week I received Heather Has Two Mommies from my mother. She told me that she was surprised that at such a large bookstore (I don’t want to name names, but it rhymes with Shmarnes and Shmobles) she was only able to find the one book. I immediately felt my stomach sink. [Read more →]

Tags: blood, books & writing
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Michel de Montaigne invented the essay, and could well be the only person to have ever written one. Plenty of things called essays have been written, of course, and many — Lamb’s, Hazlitt’s, Emerson’s — are justly celebrated. But none are exactly like the ones Montaigne wrote.

In a way, they are just the opposite. Montaigne invented the name, too. It comes from the French word essayer, meaning to try or attempt. You could say that to write an essay about something means just to take a stab at it. Montaigne’s began as brief commentaries on favorite classical quotations, but soon expanded into wide-ranging meditations — the quotations became simply a means of triggering a train of thought, which Montaigne would then follow wherever it led.

This is what makes his essays different from those others, most of which have served as vehicles either for exposition or style or both. To be sure, Montaigne’s writing is stylish enough. He invented the plain style, clear and casual as the best talk. But for him style wasn’t an end itself; like a window, it was meant to be looked through, not at.

Montaigne also doesn’t seem to have arrived at any conclusion before he began to write. The point of his writing wasn’t to advance a position, but to record a process of thought. This is writing as an act, first and foremost, of self-examination, not self-expression (though it is that as well, of course). I have long thought a great opportunity has been missed in the failure to explore the essay as a method rather than a form.

But what about journals and diaries? Aren’t they examples of writing as a method of self-examination? Usually, though some, like Gide’s, are pretty clearly private performances meant for public consumption. The difference, however, between what a diarist does and what Montaigne did lies in the indirectness of his method: Montaigne explores himself strictly in relation to his chosen topic — such as one of those classical quotations. This enables him to get to know himself, not by recounting and pondering his quotidian round, but by seeing how his mind works.

Which brings me to the point of this column, in which I plan to try my hand at Montaigne’s opening gambit by riffing on a quotation every week. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson
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I am a book collector and have a weakness for modern first editions, although many of these are no longer in my price range (or that of anyone I know). And so, on a Saturday morning last April, I dropped by the Park Avenue Armory, site of the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, hoping to simply say hello to a few dealer friends, peruse the books quickly, and get back home in time to catch the Mets-Braves game. As it happened, I found a nice copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five. But what really interested me was a rather incongruous sideshow, also with a wartime theme.

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, terror & war
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After a break of about a year, I started reading the Wall Street Journal again just this week, and promptly encountered the following rather disturbing passage, in a page one feature article about the 300th and final bout of a British boxer, Peter Buckley, who’d lost 256 out of his 299 previous matches:

“With five seconds left Friday night, Mr. Buckley unleashed a wild swing for the last punch of his professional career.  It missed.

“The bell rang.  The crowd rose.  Peter Buckley’s name filled the air of a boxing arena for the first, and last, time.

“The judge’s decision came quickly.  The score was 40 to 38 points.  A tattooed arm was held up.  The perennial loser had won.”

I’ll explain why this particular passage bothered me so much in a moment, but first a word about a word:  “Crapitulation.” [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, trusted media
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I’m starting a blog. This thing. Here. My husband is terrified. I’ve told him I will be writing about him — but really — I’ll be writing about lots of things. Let me introduce myself…

I lived in the same house in Queens, New York from birth until college. I went to the University of Miami, largely because my brother went there, partly because I got a very small scholarship, gladly because I ended up in the communications school. I met my husband in November of my freshman year. We met through a mutual friend who wanted us to hang out but didn’t want us to “hang out.” That was 16 years ago. We have two kids under five who crack me up day-in and day-out. I may mention them from time-to-time.

My parents recently moved in with us. My husband suggested it. I agreed. My dad is a loud talker and my mom thinks she knows everything, literally. Annoyingly, eighty percent of the time she is right. And really, I am not sure how we’d do it without them. My days are hectic, like everyone else. I work full-time, try to spend as much time with my family as possible, and when I have a moment to myself I am usually so exhausted I go to bed. Well, not anymore. Now I will blog — because I have lots to say. Will you read me? Well, let’s hope it gets more interesting than this!

Tags: blood, books & writing
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Is this really necessary?

Children’s author Eoin Colfer is to write a sixth novel in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series, seven years after the death of its creator Douglas Adams, Penguin said Wednesday.

Adams’ widow approved, and Adams himself is hardly in a position to object.

Adams died from a heart attack in California in 2001 at the age of 49. He had hoped to finish the series with a sixth novel.

 ”Five seems to be a wrong kind of number; six is a better kind of number,” he once said.

Yeah, Adams wanted there to be another book in the series, but when he said the above, I’m pretty sure he was expecting to write it himself. Of course, Adams’ widow knows better than I do what Adams would want. And he wasn’t known for taking himself or his work too seriously, so maybe he’d have no problem with this. I know that I would want my wife to make some money off of my books for herself and my son if she could, and attract more readers to my work as well. I’m not really judging anyone on this. But this new book gets an asterisk, right? If you’re a fan of the original series, are you going to read this one? 

Tags: books & writing
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In a transient, mobile, pseudo-egalitarian society such as modern America, it makes sense that the population would self-segregate by interest and familiarity to some degree. It’s not wrong. It’s human nature.

[Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, rulers & ruled
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Robert: I’ve been thinking about the amazing number of online sites and magazines out there. Do you think people who write for these sites actually read the work of others on those sites? I’m sensing we’re in the “I write for it but don’t read it” era of writing and publishing. Perhaps it has always been thus. I don’t know if most contributors to academic publications read most of the work in the publications they write for … am I wrong? Yet now the proliferation of sites makes the imbalance between writing and reading more pronounced. And of course there is the question of whether there is anything wrong with this emphasis on production and writing as opposed to reading? As a teacher, I too am emphasizing writing more than reading, trying to get my students to write their way into engaging a subject. Any thoughts on this?

  Paula: You raise a point that does have application to myself. I write for lots of journals, both print and online, and I certainly don’t read everything in those journals. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, conversations with Paula and Robert
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We are pleased to announce that Mean Martin Manning, a novel by our very own Scott Stein, was reviewed yesterday by the American Spectator:

Crafting a breezily subversive, funny narrative out of a barely hyperbolized modern American zeitgeist, Stein spins perhaps a bit too-timely-for-comfort cautionary tale.

Read the whole thing.

Tags: announcements, books & writing
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Plenty has been written about humans bonding with dogs (Old Yeller, The Call of the Wild, The Voice of Bugle Ann) or with horses (National Velvet, The Black Stallion), but not much about humans bonding with birds. Which seems strange, since falconry certainly has an ancient pedigree (the earliest evidence of it dates to the eighth century B.C.).

Nowadays birds are pretty popular. According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, nearly 48 million Americans have taken up bird-watching as a hobby. Throughout the pleasanter months of the year a good many of those millions will take to field, forest and wetland to renew their acquaintance with the feathered flocks.

Most will engage in just looking at them, hoping to add another name to the list of those they’ve seen. But avian encounters can prove a good deal more profound than that, as two books in the outstanding NYRB Classics series conclusively demonstrate. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing, wild things
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George Carlin said, “If you were trying to clean up the world with a gun, you could sure do a lot worse than starting with a whole bunch of dead prosecutors.”

I’ve always thought that a whole bunch of dead criminals would be better — we could ask people living in North Philly if getting rid of prosecutors would improve their lives, but it might be hard to hear their answers over all of the gunfire. Maybe I’m unduly outraged by violent crime and its perpetrators, or I’ve seen too many episodes of Law & Order. Either way, my inclination is to want the prosecutor to win and the criminal to be locked away and decent people to be safe from brutality. This is the perspective that most people have, according to The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Law Enforcement Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice, the 2000 book by Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton, which I read last week.

Though I already shared some of the authors’ views (e.g., on the reprehensible War on Drugs and the accompanying injustices of asset forfeiture), I clearly wasn’t entirely predisposed to agree that prosecutors are causing the death of the republic. And while I’m still a law and order guy (certainly when it comes to violence and property crimes), I recommend The Tyranny of Good Intentions. Predictably, as with other books with political implications, reviews on amazon.com generally reflect the ideology of each reviewer — this book is alternately condemned as a right-wing screed (oddly, since it is highly critical of law enforcement) or praised as the most important book in print. I’ll make no such judgments but will say that whatever your political viewpoint, the perspective The Tyranny of Good Intentions offers on the danger plea bargaining poses to the entire justice system is alone worth your time. It’s also valuable for illuminating just how far we’ve strayed from the Constitution and the notion of the Rights of Englishmen in the pursuit of social agendas and bureaucratic careers.

Tags: books & writing, on the law
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“How do you find the time to write?” is a question that I, and surely other writers, am often asked.

My answer is, “You don’t find time — you make time.” [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing
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In graduate school I went through phases. I had my Cormac McCarthy phase, my Don DeLillo phase, my Tim O’Brien phase. Like a young athlete emulating his heroes, I paid homage to mine by copying their prosaic technique, voice, and style. McCarthy’s sweeping vision, and long, stark, near-Biblical sentences; DeLillo’s twisting language and genius sensibility; O’Brien’s subtle potency, the conveyance of confusion, tragedy, and strange beauty in war. Story after story I tried to incorporate these traits and elements into my own work, until my advisor told me, “You’re not Cormac McCarthy. Or DeLillo. Or Tim O’Brien. Just be you.”

The problem was that I didn’t know who I was. [Read more →]

Tags: books & writing
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