Why did the novelist cross the road?

John Sutherland peeks into the lives of almost 300 novelists to map out a history of the novel. You get a sample like that, patterns are bound to emerge. Grant Snider tries to distill the "types" into a 9-panel block. You can play a tic-tac-toe of writing ticks with it. Or if lucky (or unlucky--depends on how you look at it) you can have a bingo blackout of, uh, writing fuel. Interestingly, there's nothing about happy people in those panels. Makes you wonder.

New books

New books
Originally uploaded by xkg

Lookie at the my new purchases! Haven't bought this many books since the start of the year, effectively repealing my self-imposed book ban. But it's not so bad, as almost all of them are from Booksale. The most expensive of the bunch, Brokeback Mountain: Story to Screenplay, came from Powerbooks, and that's already after 60% off.

A lot of the new acquisitions are scriptbooks (4/13): There is the aforementioned Brokeback Mountain, which contains the original Annie Proulx short story which first appeared in The New Yorker, with essays on the transition from page to screen by Proulx and the screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. All of them are united in the idea that (1) The film did not murder the original material and in fact added to it, (2) short stories, not novels, make for better adaptation materials.

Also got John Hodge's screenplay for The Beach, based on the novel by Alex Garland, Andrew Niccol's script for The Truman Show, and the script for I Heart Huckabees, which I haven't seen yet but will read anyway.

There seems to be a lot of script books floating in Booksale stores. I wasn't able to get the triptych by Mike Figgis. Of the three, only Leaving Las Vegas was familiar to me. But still, I have ended up with a lot of books to read.

Also got books about writing: Writing Past Dark by Bonnie Friedman, The Practical Writer by Therese Eiben and Mary Gannon of Poets & Writers Magazine, and The Elements of Fiction Writing: Plot from the Writer's Digest Books.

Trevor Corson's The Secret Life of Lobsters is the lone nonfiction book not related to the craft of writing. I was hoping to find a copy of David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster. But hey, this is still about lobsters.

And the last bunch of books are all fiction. Two issues of Story Magazine (Winter 1997 and Spring 1999) cost me Php25 combined. Also got Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding and Bharati Mukherjee's The Middleman and other stories. Then there's Murder on the Menu edited by Peter Haining. This last one contains crime stories by Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith, Agatha Christie, P.D. James and even Roald Dahl. Enlisted myself in the crime fiction writing class this term, so this will form part of my reading list.

All told, the thirteen books unloaded me of Php800. Not too bad. But then again, will probably impose the book ban again and not buy anything until I've read most of them.

Mostly Nothing Happens

"But mostly nothing happens, except in the sense that novelists and short-story writers understand. For them moving a character from not knowing that he’s unhappy to sort of acknowledging it qualifies as a pretty momentous event."

This comes from a New York Times article about the film "Smart People," which is about a depressed professor of literature who has an affair with a former student (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) and lives with his precocious daughter (played by Ellen Page of 'Juno' fame), a good for nothing brother. It was written by Mark Jude Poirier, a fiction writer who now has to reluctantly call himself a "professional screenwriter."

I haven't really seen the movie. Just found the review because I clicked the links related to the reviews of the Sex and the City movie. Apparently, the "depressed academic" is a character that has surfaced in American film in the last few years, with the bar set high by Michael Douglas' portrayal of Gordon Tripp in Wonder Boys and Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale. I saw both of these films and they both happen to feature frustrated academics-slash-writers. If these are the models, then maybe Smart People isn't too far off.

But what really got my attention is Poirier's shift from fiction writing to screenwriting, where generally, things have to happen. The article says that Hollywood had always wooed the big name literary writers--Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Truman Capote--but all these writers just go away puzzled. Hollywood asks them to write stories where a lot of things happen. But what about the epiphany? Epiphanies can be so subtle, if you wink you'll miss it. Poirier is from this school of writing: the only visible change is that the main character now recognizes that he *is* depressed, but acknowledging it doesn't make it any easier. No big transformations, no miracle happy endings.

What the article also makes known is that there really aren't too many fiction writers who can hack the writing of screenplays. Oh there's Larry McMurtry (whose script to Brokeback Mountain I have yet to finish reading), but there's just so few of them. Playwrights have a better batting average. So if the fictionists are having a hard time transitioning to the big screen, what about the reverse: do screenwriters make for successful fiction writers?

Sedaris and Kureishi

The transport strike is ostensibly over--at least for today. There are people stranded in the streets.

But what I'm more concerned of is that classes have been suspended--and we lose one very crucial day in the tailend of the academic year. The last day of classes is Tuesday next week, after that is the mandatory break that comes with the remembrance of the Holy Week. Then students have to come back for exams and the submission of papers. Before we can do that, there's still a few things to discuss.

Today we were supposed to take up an essay by David Sedaris, "Remembering My Childhood in the Continent of Africa." Instead of doing it in class, we'll do an online discussion. To be supplemented by a live, in class one when we see each other later this week. I left my books in my office in the university, but that doesn't stop me from reading up on the author and the text. Time Magazine has ten questions for Sedaris. Sedaris writes a lot about his childhood and his family, and Time asks him whether his family opposes being written about. He says quite the contrary--they like appearing in his stories.

Tell that to Hanif Kureishi's sister, who told his brother through an interview with The Independent to "keep [her] out of his fiction."

Anthony Bourdain

The Onion's A.V. Club interviews Anthony Bourdain, 'bad boy' chef and host of No Reservations, which I follow on Discovery's Travel and Living channel.

Bourdain recently became a father for the first time, and he's trying to squeeze in family time by bringing his daughter to "low impact" shoots. He shot to fame after the publication of his autobiography Kitchen Confidential, which in a way contributed to the rise of the rockstar status of celebrity chefs.

He also says that he's wary of chefs (or writers) who have a band on the side. I instantly thought of Jamie Oliver, who has a band who can never escape his popularity and would forever be reduced to providing the theme music for his shows. Oh well.

Was also pleasantly surprised that he writes fiction, mostly detective novels. When asked which he prefers writing, he admits that writing nonfiction is way easier for him:

Fiction's hard. I do it because it's therapy. I spend a lot of time writing about myself, talking about myself and what happens to me. Me, me, me. Fiction is a nice escape from that. You can also be a lot more truthful about a lot of things. Things I can't say in non-fiction, I can say in fiction. But there's that damn plot thing. I really resent plot. I like creating characters and environments.

His next writing project is about "It's about a former '80s "it" boy writer, who wrote a Bright Lights, Big City type of book, and ends up washed up in the Caribbean. Murder and mayhem ensue." Hmm..must look for that.

How to Win a National Book Award

According to New York Magazine, this is how you can win the Oscars of the publishing world in five easy steps:

1. Don't be a young debut novelist
2. Do Aim for World-Historical Significance
3. Don't Write Short Stories
4. Do Be a Literary Insider
5. Do Expand Your Demo(graphic)

I haven't read it yet, but this year's front runner and eventual winner is Denis Johnson for Tree of Smoke, a Vietnam War novel. Everyone expected him to win anyway, as he got 3 of the 5 easy steps. I had read a couple of his short stories anthologized in Best of collections, and Jesus' Son sounds interesting.

Weddings and Beheadings

With a title like that, how can you be wrong? Apparently, very. The 1,000 word story was going to be read on the radio as part of a National Short Story writing competition. The story is set in Iraq and tells of a film-maker who is forced at gunpoint to film the beheading of terrorists’ victims. But then, it was found to be too violent, too visceral so it was left out.

Now Hanif Kureishi is crying out, "Censorship!" The organizers think he's just sour because he was shut out and denied a crack at the hefty prize money.

I say read "Weddings and Beheadings" (or as PDF) and decide if it really is "brutal, insensitive and not illuminating."

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