Copies don’t count anymore; copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won’t mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed, and copied again.  What counts are the ways in which these common copies of creative work can be linked, manipulated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media, and sewn together in the universal library. The only way for books to retain their waning authority in our culture is to write texts into this library… In the clash between the conventions of the book and the protocols of the screen, the screen will prevail.

Mr. Shields talking about his "book' Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. at The Millions.

Me on the couch, late 80s rom-com on the tube, salty-sweet snack at hand, mid-forties, and most damning of all, a thousand-yard stare.

Right.

But don’t let that stare fool ya. The work of Simpson-Bruckheimer, Feldman, Estevez, Hughes et al, really does deserve a closer reading but anyway, I veer off topic. I don’t dream of changing your judgment reader, tourist, manic-depressive, or pick- pocketing your pity, or even worse, eliciting your impassioned edification. Nothing from you would be nicest but just in case anyone gets any ideas, let the record show: It took me years of blood, sweat, and tears to reach this state of nirvana, to learn what Clint Eastwood really meant when he muttered that immortal line “a man’s got to know his limitations.”

I’ll make it quick. I got a decent public school education despite having little ability beyond reading comprehension. I put in the time on my dreams of becoming a film auteur- ramyen, 17-hour-days, terrible films; a traveler- dysentery, mind-crushing boredom, RSL (Retardish as a Second Language) affairs; a writer- bone-chilling loneliness, sling-bladed rejection, alcoholism; and last but not least, a real estate agent- staggering dental debt, affidavits, the devil’s own ill-timing.

Being part Irish bulldog, part American Indian aardvark, I held on to my dreams even tighter, going so far as to write “Genius is 99% Persistence” on a post-it note and super-gluing it to my bathroom mirror. I read books of philosophy, finding-your-way-in-life best-sellers (never knew there were so many) books that guided me to self-help groups where I meant some really cool, interesting people, you name it I tried it. Actually, let me quantify that: I drew the line at “Plant Fucking: Getting Off the Beaten Path and Finding Your Higher Calling.” Yet, the  truth be told, in the back of mind that 1% kept getting bigger, bigger, and bigger like a Mega-Lotto figure until one rainy day love came through my front door, sized up the situation remarkably fast, and said on the way out my door: “Wake up and smell the coffee! Get a job in customer service, reduce your expenses, and RELAX.”

And like a man drowning, burning and expanded lungs full of water, I let go, got an entry-level job at a Korean-owned wig-manufacturer, and finally relaxed for the first time in my life.

"I'm going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There's something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave." - from a letter to his mother Helen Pancake that Breece wrote in Charlottesville, where he was studying writing.

Amazing short stories. Do check them out.

where all that matters

is understanding the errors I have made and the errors

still to come, here is a list of what would be lost:

the gentle slope of sleep into vast terrors,

my cowardice at the scale of each undertaking,

my withering gift, the degenerative process

of any organism, down to a crouched old age,

my astonishment at the pettiness of envy,

of comradeships whose greed I could not gauge,

whose pretty poetry I ended up hating.

"I believe in the elaborate taking care of others. And we live in a culture where 'I'm not my brother's keeper,' 'That's your responsibility,' 'Get a life' have become bywords, code phrases, anthems for elaborate indifference, selfishness, greediness, and the failure of empathetic acceptance. In the same way that we need to repair the economy, we need to repair the effects of an economy of selfishness. And that isn't just the filling in of the big bucks that have fallen out of the system. The rescue that we need is emotional rescue, communicative, large-hearted. I've always dreamed that people listening to the show would hear that readers and writers are expanders of feeling centers, of the global ability to imagine other lives.  - Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW's Bookworm

“Why talk to the monkey when the organ grinder is in the room?”  Halpern wonders, quoting Churchill; the answer, he explains, is that in this case only the monkeys really matter.

As the tone of that last line suggests, alas, it’s hard to write a polemic premised on the assumption that your opponents are monkeys without sounding like a particularly high-vocabulary monkey yourself.

Helprin variously describes his foes as “wacked-out muppets,” “crapulous professors,” “regular users of hallucinogenic drugs,” “a My Little Pony version of the Khmer Rouge,” “a million geeks in airless basements,” “mouth-breathing morons in backwards baseball caps and pants that fall down” and so forth. The overall effect is like listening to an erudite gentleman employing $20 words while he screams at a bunch of punk kids to get off his front lawn.

Ross Douthat reviews Mark Halpern's "Digital Barbarism" A Writer's Manifesto" for the NYTS. 

For one reason or another, you might be feeling rather 'existential' lately. You are on a tram at the zoo and you can't get off. You are in a plane that has already hit 30,000 feet. You have kissed your bride. You have changed your 401K to retirement age settings. If these or any others apply to you then Belgian novelist JP Toussaint is for you.

His first novel, La salle de bain, was published in France by Editions de Minuit in 1985 and appeared in English as The Bathroom (E. P. Dutton, 1990; Dalkey Archive, 2008). His other titles translated into English are Monsieur (Marion Boyars, 1991; Dalkey Archive, 2008); Making Love (New Press, 2004); and Television (Dalkey Archive, 2007). The previously untranslated novel Camera will come out in November of this year, and his novel Fuir (”to run away”) is currently being translated. Among his untranslated works is a recent story about the French soccer player Zidane, who famously head-butted Italian defender Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup final.

Martin Riker has fourteen questions for Mr. Toussaint at The Quaterly

MR: Critics comment on your interest in the minutiae of daily experience. Do you feel that you have a particular interest in minutiae?

JPT: What really matters is to pay attention to what is both infinitely small (the most pathetic, trivial things, the most insignificant details of daily life) and infinitely large (the essential questions we have, the meaning of life, the place of human beings in the universe). A book must contain both darts and philosophy, bowling and metaphysics.

You can buy English translations of his work from Dalkey Press at Amazon, Powell, etc. Highly reccomended.

On Monday night I went to an AA workshop in Rancho Palos Verdes, CA at the insistence of my Thursday New Beginnings co-member, Rory. Rancho Palos Verdes is the Southbay equivalent of Topanga Canyon. The lights from the flatlands of Torrance (where I live) and Lomita shine just as bright from RPV and I suppose, Topanga, but folks who live in Palos Verdes and Malibu claim they are a bit brighter from their vantage point. In short, the residents of Topanga and RPV keep horses and smaller houses as opposed to Porshes and enormous compounds bolted to the hillsides of PV and Malibu. Six of one and a half-dozen of the other.

There were quiet a few folks there (a Catholic retreat center) and admittedly, a lot of the AA’ers looked like grizzled Catholics of one sort or the other. I suppose I did too. It seemed I had arrrived at the sixth meeting to date, but a kindly granddad informed me that was “not a problem, anyone could jump in anytime.” With that he pointed me in the direction of the coffee and I tried to smile genuine thanks.

The leader was a head-setted man named Herb. Mid-Fifties perhaps, red-faced, but neatly cut and presented. There were hand-outs explaining the paticular triangular/circular nature of addiction, arrows visualizing the mind, body and spirit. Underneath the diagram page was a form to be filled out specifically about your addictive behavior and how you dealt with it in the past. I try a stream-of conscieness approach when filling these forms out as a general rule. Scientology, New Ways, HR questionaires, etc.

Very work-shoppy so far.

He began the proceedings asking for announcements, housekeeping matters, and so on, and these things took up a large chunk of time. It appeared as if Herb had some competition for Life Coach and at times waved his hand like Moses with a low “yes, yes” breathed into the microphone to hurry things along. He paced like a seasoned pro, occasionally bringing his hand to his jaw and languidly rubbing it, signifying polite but real thought.

It seemed many folks were very concerned about the politics of AA, the isims and schisms and so forth but Herb, not without the right bit of humor here and there, seemed to take this as a matter of course and patiently explained what he knew about the why and wherefores.

This sort of thing never holds my attention for long and I began to check out some of my fellow attendees. There was a rotund man to my left who resembled Benjamin Franklin in the way he wore his hair, the pale skin, and small red lips that curled up at the ends. Handicapped, he seemed to rely on his wife or sister- hair in a tight bun festooned with a chopstick- for everything. "Hand me my coffee, lean my cane this way not that way, hand me my three-ring binder", and so on. I’m surprised he did not ask her to highlight passages in his Big Book that “meant a lot to him personally” As her back was to me, I could not see her expression as she went about these duties but I imagined her to be either a woman of great patience or recovering from the ravages of alcohol herself. “Courage to change the things I can” shot through my mind, and I uncrossed and crossed my legs for about the fifth time. I scanned the room for attractive women. Thinking it was not healthy to go down this road of thought, familiar mind ruts, I turned my attention back to Herb who was ready to crack the Big Book proper.

Alas, its 9PM and Herb has began the wrapping-up ceremonies. Where did the time go?

It is not for nothing that in weird times, one might turn to French farce to make sense of it all. if you love the films of Tati, then the translation of The Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint's comic novel "Camera" is right up your alley

Not much happens in “Camera.” The hero takes driving lessons, falls in love, goes on a desultory journey. Who, then, is the opponent, the examiner, the rule-­setter? Why, reality itself. In the first of several almost perfectly paced passages in which he ­waxes philosophical, the hero muses that “in my struggle with reality, I could exhaust any opponent with whom I was grappling, like one can wear out an olive, for example, before successfully stabbing it with a fork.”

This will become a film, mark me words. Tom McCarthy reviews the novel for the NYTS.

There is something weird indeed about how we handle serious illnesses, our own and others. In the case of the former, we tend to blame ourselves. "If I had only not played with that yellowcake for so long!" or "I knew smoking and or drinking would finally catch up to me." Sometimes this is true but more often than not, our bodies turn against us for no reason except DNA or..mere chance.

Now when other folks get sick, a chill runs through us - "What about me??"- and then a kind of exciting, morbid fasination takes over as we watch our friends and family suffer. Here is an excerpt from the memoir A Journey Round My Skull by Frigyes Karinthy which in addition to being a life-affirming tale of trial and tribulation, is a damn fine piece of writing and often very funny.

Sympathy, which is the most sensational faculty of man, was holding an exhibition of its positive and negative manifestations. Orgies of sympathy were going on around my room, in the arm-chairs, on the divan and on the edge of my sick-bed. Two extremes were noticeable amongst these sympathetic friends. There was the noisy, exuberant, jocular type, who affected to treat the whole matter as a mere bagatelle, and, by making light of it, sought to hide the panic which steals over every one in presence of the great Enigma that awaits us all. Then there were the quiet, serious ones, braver than the first, who had examined their own hearts and knew that there can be no sympathy without egoism. It is the elder sister of sympathy, our own fear of death, which introduces us to it when the first danger threatens us in childhood. . . . There was also a third type—utterly frank, straightforward, and without false scruples. I received a letter from a relative of mine who said he had heard that I was about to “leave them.” In view of his serious situation, he hoped I would not forget him. I was to be sure and arrange for him to receive 300 dollars on the day I “went away.”

“One good, simple, modern story would go like this: ‘A lovely, talented personality fell victim to a severe chemical imbalance in his brain. There was the person of Dave, and then there was the disease, and the disease killed the man as surely as cancer might have.’ This story is at once sort of true and totally inadequate. If you’re satisfied with this story, you don’t need the stories that Dave wrote—particularly not those many, many stories in which the duality, the separateness, of person and disease is problematized or outright mocked. One obvious paradox, of course, is that Dave himself, at the end, did become, in a sense, satisfied with this simple story and stopped connecting with any of those more interesting stories he’d written in the past and might have written in the future. His suicidality got the upper hand and made everything in the world of the living irrelevant.

Jonathan Franzen remebering his friend Wallace at a memoriial at NYU along with other very famous authors.

“ all i know is that he left and for a long time i didn’t see him. it certainly wasn’t my intent. i try to hold onto my friends. i try to be pleasant and sociable. i try not to rush the passage from comedy to tragedy. life does a fine job on its own.

While I am recouperating from the scapel, I thought I would leave you with one of the last peoms Ted Berrigan ever wrote

Last Poem

by Ted Berrigan

Before I began life this time
I took a crash course in Counter-Intelligence
Once here I signed in, see name below, and added
Some words remembered from an earlier time,
“The intention of the organism is to survive.”
My earliest, & happiest, memories pre-date WW II
They involve a glass slipper & a helpless blue rose
In a slender blue single-rose vase: Mine
Was a story without a plot. The days of my years
Folded into one another, an easy fit, in which
I made money & spent it, learned to dance & forgot, gave
Blood, regained my poise, & verbalized myself a place
In Society. 101 St. Mark’s Place, apt. 12A, NYC 10009
New York. Friends appeared & disappeared, or wigged out,
Or stayed; inspiring strangers sadly died; everyone
I ever knew aged tremendously, except me. I remained
Somewhere between 2 and 9 years old. But frequent
Reification of my own experiences delivered to me
Several new vocabularies, I loved that almost most of all.
I once had the honor of meeting Beckett & I dug him.
The pills kept me going, until now. Love, & work,
Were my great happinesses, that other people die the source
Of my great, terrible, & inarticulate one grief. In my time
I grew tall & huge of frame, obviously possessed
Of a disconnected head, I had a perfect heart. The end
Came quickly & completely without pain, one quiet night as I
Was sitting, writing, next to you in bed, words chosen randomly
From a tired brain, it like them, suitable, & fitting.
Let none regret my end who called me friend.

Here are some choice quotes from English critic/novelist  Adam Mars-Jones'   new novel Pilcrow which James Woods reviews for the LRB.

‘The privilege of my situation, in which boredom lay so close to over-excitement that there was hardly any space between, was that snot qualified as a toy.’

'Hugs, for instance, ‘were emergency measures, not for every day. I wasn’t used to them. I’d hardly experienced them . . . Hugs might just as well have been kept in the medicine cupboard, so as not to lose their effectiveness by over-use.’

'Being suburban was much worse than being working-class, because suburban people had their roots in the working classes, and were denying their own people just as St Peter did to Jesus.’

The first thing I did was make a mistake. I thought I had understood capitalism, but what I had done was assume an attitude -- melancholy sadness -- toward it. This attitude is not correct. Fortunately your letter came, at that instant. "Dear Rupert, I love you every day. You are the world, which is life. I love you I adore you I am crazy about you. Love, Marta." Reading between the lines, I understood your critique of my attitude toward capitalism. Always mindful that the critic must "studiare da un punto di vista formalistico e semiologico il rapporto fra lingua di un testo e codificazione di un -- " But here a big thumb smudges the text -- the thumb of capitalism, which we are all under. Darkness falls. My neighbor continues to commit suicide, once a fortnight. I have this suicides geared into my schedule because my role is to save him; once I was late and he spent two days unconscious on the floor. But now that I have understood that I have not understood capitalism, perhaps a less equivocal position toward it can be "hammered out." My daughter demands more Mr. Bubble for her bath. The shrimp boats lower their nets. A book called Humorists of the 18th Century is published.

- from Donald Barthleme's The Rise of Capitalism.

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati …when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

- Ezra Pound

No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in. His inspiration is deflected at the source. If it is a world of truth, beauty and magic that he desires to create, why does he put millions of words between himself and the reality of the world? Why does he defer to action-unless it be that, like other men, what he really desires is power, fame, success.

The trully great writer does not want to write: he wants the world to be a place in which he can live the life of the imagination. The first quivering word he puts to paper is the word of the wounded angel: pain.

Henry Miller, Sexus.

Miranda July is a talented 'artist' no doubt, especially in her film and performance efforts but gee, how did she win the $35,000 Frank O'Connor award for short story writing Nobody Belongs Here More than You" her first time out..?? The Vancouver Voice drives home the old cliche "It's Who You Know"

One could be forgiven for thinking that Ms. July is a cunning self-marketer. But, then, it’s part of the family business. Her parents, Lindy Hough and Richard Grosinger, ran North Atlantic Book, a New Age publishing company. Now, as reported in the Guardian, Ms. July is the happy recipient of the 2007 Frank O’Connor award for achievement in short story writing. The prize comes with a cash award of $35, 000 dollars. Pat Cotter, the jury chairman, is described as having “defended” the shortlist (which also included Israeli writer Etgar Keret and New Zealand scribe Charlotte Grimshaw, reduced from a list that also originally included Alice Munro and David Malouf ) as a demonstration of the judges’ independence. The judges included American novelist Rick Moody, who happens to be her mentor and a family friend.

I am reminded of William Burrough's old adage "Wouldn't You?"