By now, you know that David Rakoff, a prizewinning humorist championed by David Sedaris, died Thursday night after two public battles with cancer. Rakoff cultivated a following among listeners of This American Life, the beloved radio show hosted by Ira Glass. In May, he made one of his last appearances on the show when TAL presented “The Invisible Made Visible,” a live stage performance beamed to movie theaters nationwide. Here, Rakoff reads the story, “Stiff as a Board, Light as a Feather,” about “the invisible processes that can happen inside our bodies…and the visible effects they eventually have.” You won’t want to his miss his poignant last dance. It’s yet another reminder of why he’ll be sorely missed. We’d also recommend spending time with his appearances on NPR’s Fresh Air.
Next to “celebrated” (or “celebrity”) the description I’ve most seen applied to the late Gore Vidal is “acerbic,” or some such synonym—“scathing,” “disdainful”… I’m sure he would relish the compliment. One of the most fitting adjectives, perhaps, is “Wilde-like” (as in Oscar Wilde), deployed by Hilton Als in the New Yorker. The adjective fits especially well considering one of Vidal’s most-tweeted quotes from his treasury of Wilde-like aphorisms: “Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.” It’s clever and morbid and naughty and devil-may-care, and almost entirely fatuous. Unlike several writers recently featured here—Margaret Atwood, Ray Bradbury, Henry Miller, George Orwell, et al.—who helpfully compiled numbered lists of writing advice, Vidal’s pronouncements on his craft were rather unsystematic. But, like many of those named above, what Vidal did leave in the form of advice was sometimes facetious, and sometimes profound. Despite his evident contempt for neat little lists, one writer in the UK has helpfully compiled one anyway. The “suicide note” quote above is number 4:
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.
Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!
I sometimes think it is because they are so bad at expressing themselves verbally that writers take to pen and paper in the first place.
Write something, even if it’s just a suicide note.
How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.
Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
You can’t really succeed with a novel anyway; they’re too big. It’s like city planning. You can’t plan a perfect city because there’s too much going on that you can’t take into account. You can, however, write a perfect sentence now and then. I have.
Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.
I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.
Writer’s Digest gives us ten additional quotes of Gore Vidal on writing (unnumbered this time):
“You can improve your talent, but your talent is a given, a mysterious constant. You must make it the best of its kind.”
“I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.”
“The reason my early books are so bad is because I never had the time or the money to afford constant revisions.”
“That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.”
“Constant work, constant writing and constant revision. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge. What he takes in he takes in normally the way any person takes in experience. But it is what is done with it in his mind, if he is a real writer, that makes his art.”
“I’ll tell you exactly what I would do if I were 20 and wanted to be a good writer. I would study maintenance, preferably plumbing. … So that I could command my own hours and make a good living on my own time.”
“If a writer has any sense of what journalism is all about he does not get into the minds of the characters he is writing about. That is something, shall we say, Capote-esque—who thought he had discovered a new art form but, as I pointed out, all he had discovered was lying.”
“A book exists on many different levels. Half the work of a book is done by the reader—the more he can bring to it the better the book will be for him, the better it will be in its own terms.”
[When asked which genre he enjoys the most, and which genre comes easiest:]
“Are you happier eating a potato than a bowl of rice? I don’t know. It’s all the same. … Writing is writing. Writing is order in sentences and order in sentences is always the same in that it is always different, which is why it is so interesting to do it. I never get bored with writing sentences, and you never master it and it is always a surprise—you never know what’s going to come next.”
[When asked how he would like to be remembered:]
“I suppose as the person who wrote the best sentences in his time.”
A series of snippets of Gore Vidal’s wit from Esquire provides the biting (for its non-sequitur jab at rival Norman Mailer): “For a writer, memory is everything. But then you have to test it; how good is it, really? Whether it’s wrong or not, I’m beyond caring. It is what it is. As Norman Mailer would say, “It’s existential.” He went to his grave without knowing what that word meant.”
Vidal returns to the theme of memory in a 1974 interview with The Paris Review, in which he admits to placing the ultimate faith in his memory: “I am not a camera… I don’t consciously watch anything and I don’t take notes, though I briefly kept a diary. What I remember I remember—by no means the same thing as remembering what you would like to.”
While Vidal is memorialized this week as a celebrity and Wilde-like provocateur, it’s also worth noting that he had quite a lot to say about the work of writing itself, some of it witty but useless, some of it well worth remembering.
Earlier this year, at the age of 70, John Irving published his 13th novel, In One Person. The title is from Shakespeare’s Richard II: “Thus play I in one person many people, and none contented.” “In One Person,” writes Charles Baxter in The New York Review of Books, “combines several genres. It is a novel about a bisexual man’s coming out grafted onto a coming-of-age story, grafted onto a portrait-of-the-artist, grafted onto a theater novel. The book is very entertaining and relies on verbal showmanship even when the events narrated are grim, a tonal incongruity characteristic of this author. The book’s theme, it’s fixed idea, is that actors and writers and bisexuals harbor many persons within one person.”
In this five-minute film from Time magazine we get just a glimpse of the person, or people, called John Irving. It’s an interesting glimpse. Director Shaul Schwarz and his crew filmed the writer at his sprawling house in East Dorset, Vermont. The sheer size of the place gives some sense of the popularity of Irving’s novels, which include The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany. The house has a wrestling gym where Irving works out and an office where he writes the old-fashioned way–with pen and paper–by windows looking out onto the forested hills of southern Vermont. “I can’t imagine being alive and not writing, not creating, not being the architect of a story,” says Irving near the end of the film. “I do suffer, I suppose, from the delusion that I will be able to write something until I die. That’s my intention, my hope.”
Gore Vidal wrote 25 novels and various memoirs, essays, plays, television dramas and screenplays. He invested himself in American politics and ran for office twice, losing both times. He tended openly toward homosexuality long before the country warmed up to the idea. And he never backed down from a good argument. Gore Vidal died Tuesday from complications of pneumonia at his home in Los Angeles.
During the 1960s and 70s, Vidal feuded publicly with literary and political foes alike. Sometimes it made for good TV. Other times it made for bad TV. It didn’t really matter. He was ready to go. Above, we have Gore Vidal’s verbal brawl with the mercurial (and seemingly sauced) novelist Norman Mailer. It happened on The Dick Cavett Show in December, 1971, and only the show’s host (and the bewildered Janet Flanner) emerge from the dustup looking okay. Slate has more on this memorable episode here.
The next clip brings us back to an ABC television program aired during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Suffice it to say, emotions were running high. In the months leading up to the Convention, Martin Luther King Jr. and RFK were both assassinated. Riots followed. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War splintered the nation in two. The Chicago police tried to shut down demonstrations by anti-war protestors, and eventually the two sides clashed in the parks and streets. Amidst all of this, Buckley and Vidal, both political analysts for ABC News, started discussing the protestors and their rights to free speech, when things came to a head. Vidal called Buckley a “pro-crypto-Nazi.” Buckley called Vidal a “queer” and threatened to “sock [him] in the goddamn face.” The threat was not easily forgotten. It became the fodder for jokes when Buckley interviewed Noam Chomsky the next year.
“We who use words enjoy a peculiar privilege over our fellows,” says Rudyard Kipling in this rare filmed speech. “We cannot tell a lie. However much we may wish to do so, we only of educated men and women cannot tell a lie–in our working hours. The more subtly we attempt it, the more certainly do we betray some aspect of truth concerning the life of our age.”
The speech was given on July 12, 1933 at Claridge’s Hotel in London, during a luncheon of the Royal Society of Literature for visiting members of the Canadian Authors’ Association. Kipling was 67 years old at the time. The text of the speech (which you can open and read in a new window) was published in a posthumous edition of A Book of Words.
Rudyard Kipling was one of the most celebrated English writers of the late Victorian era. Henry James once said, “Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.” In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a prolific author of short stories, poetry, and novels, Kipling was the foremost chronicler of the British colonial experience.
But as the British Empire faded in the 20th century, so too did Kipling’s literary standing. His works for children, including The Jungle Book and Just So Stories (see below), are still widely enjoyed, but much of his other writing–even the classic novel Kim–is viewed with ambivalence. The literary genius praised by James is often overshadowed by our contemporary views on the cruelty and exploitation of colonialism.
“Mercifully,” says Kipling later in his speech to the Canadian authors, “it is not permitted to any one to foresee his or her literary election or reprobation, any more than it was permitted to our ancestors to foresee the just stature of their contemporaries…”
How about this for a new publishing model? The Buenos Aires publisher Eterna Cadencia has started to publish books made with disappearing ink. Once you crack open the cover, you have two months to finish the book, or else you’ll be staring at a blank page. If books have an expiration date, readers won’t let them sit idly on their shelves. They’ll read books more often, and give more authors a try. That’s the logic of this new twist on publishing..
Books aren’t dead yet. They’re just intentionally fading away.…
When Ruth Finnegan published Oral Literature in Africa in 1970, she was awarded an Order of the British Empire for her exhaustive and pioneering research on the history of storytelling in Africa. Unfortunately, the book was so expensive that it was largely out of reach for African readers.
Now it’s out of print, but the book and many of the audio recordings Finnegan made in her research will soon be available through unglue.it, a kickstarter-style campaign to release out-of-print books.
Unglue.it raised $7,578 from 259 supporters—mostly in the library world—to make the book available “on any device, in any format, forever.” The money will help offset the costs of producing the e‑book and a digital archive of recordings and photographs taken during Finnegan’s fieldwork. In addition to the ebook, the publisher, Open Book Publishers, will produce free, downloadable pdf editions of the work.
Unglue.it has three other titles in fundraising mode: Love Like Gumbo by Nancy Rawles, a set of young reader books and the autobiography 6–321 by Michael Laser. Using the kickstarter-style model, Unglue.it is trying to raise an agreed-upon fair licensing fee to release the books under Creative Commons licensing, completely liberated from digital rights management technology.
By now, you’ve almost certainly heard that Nora Ephron, the screenwriter best known for “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally,” died yesterday in Manhattan. She was 71. Her bout with leukemia apparently wasn’t widely known, but discerning readers of her 2010 book, I Remember Nothing, could have sensed something was wrong. The book closes with two lists, each revealing on a couple of levels.
What I Will Miss
My kids · Nick · Spring · Fall · Waffles · The concept of waffles · Bacon · A walk in the park · The idea of a walk in the park · The park · Shakespeare in the Park · The bed · Reading in bed · Fireworks · Laughs · The view out the window · Twinkle lights · Butter · Dinner at home just the two of us · Dinner with friends · Dinner with friends in cities where none of us lives · Paris · Next year in Istanbul · Pride and Prejudice · The Christmas tree · Thanksgiving dinner · One for the table · The dogwood · Taking a bath · Coming over the bridge to Manhattan · Pie
What I Won’t Miss
Dry skin · Bad dinners like the one we went to last night · E‑mail · Technology in general · My closet · Washing my hair · Bras · Funerals · Illness everywhere · Polls that show that 32 percent of the American people believe in creationism · Polls · Fox · The collapse of the dollar · Joe Lieberman · Clarence Thomas · Bar mitzvahs · Mammograms · Dead flowers · The sound of the vacuum cleaner · Bills · E‑mail. I know I already said it, but I want to emphasize it. · Small print · Panels on Women in Film · Taking off makeup every night
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