Michael Greenberg’s happy intensity
October 12, 2009
Yesterday, I finished reading Michael Greenberg’s new book, Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life, published by Other Press. It’s a collection of his columns that have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement from 2003 to 2009.
Compilations like these — a gathering of career work — don’t tend to impress me. They can be dated in relevance and have the taste of leftovers, something that had more vitality in its original, fresh presentation. I also have had my fill of writers’ expositions about their trade.
Nevertheless, having read Greenberg’s excellent Hurry Down Sunshine, the memoir of his daughter’s “crack up” (as he refers to her psychotic episode), I knew he had the talent to be different with this kind of book. Greenberg’s got an edgy individualism that came through in the memoir. Indeed, as I learned in Beg, Borrow, Steal, when Greenberg was 15 years old, his father told him he had more guts than common sense.
My instinct proved correct: This is a delightful journey through a well-lived life in New York City. The 44 chapters-once-columns stand alone and yet, pulled together, flow like a river of many surprises. They are about a writer’s life — not the trade, as I mistakenly assumed – vivid anecdotes extracted from the jobs, friends and family, let alone the unexpected, in his native New York.
Speaking of jobs, from the moment he decided to be a writer (and not go into the family scrap metal business), Greenberg vowed to be his own boss. He’s worked as a street vendor, chauffeur, waiter, interpreter, ghost writer and cab driver, among other money-earning ventures that allowed him time to write.
The chapters are short, up to 5 pages each, and loud with wit, wisdom and irony. Many are simply perfect. All are rooted in his native New York. My favorite is #12, “Notes of an Anti-Traveler.” Greenberg chronicles his daily commute as a joke on himself, “an attempt to make a virtue of the fact that I hadn’t ventured more than fifty miles from New York City in almost a decade.” What he discovers is the happy intensity of being still. For that, Mr. Greenberg, I thank you.
On his website, Greenberg provides a clever interactive map of his New York, with original fine art and selected excerpts.
Preview: new poetry
October 10, 2009
Marie Ponsot’s newest poetry book, Easy, is due to be published by Knopf this month. Ponsot is in her late 80s, with five previous poetry books to her name. She’s won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and I have a feeling, from what I’m reading about this new work, it could be stunning.
I’m not familiar with Ponsot, so I found two of her earlier works in the online catalog of a nearby library. I stopped there on the way to my workout to pick them up. Evidently, I didn’t read the fine print on the catalog results page because the library’s Information Man said the books had been discarded.
What’s surprising is not the obliteration of the books, rather my standing like an immovable ape in front of the man’s desk, waiting for another answer.
I’m well aware libraries discard (please, deaccession) their books for reasons of bad condition or no readership. But I simply couldn’t digest what he was saying. I wanted to read Ponsot after my workout. I wanted another answer. Couldn’t he offer a banana and say, “Let me check in the back,” like a store clerk? Or, look up availability at another library? Or, even commiserate over the horror of getting rid of a book I wanted?
I said the word “discard” three times, stalling, and then announced, “She has a new book coming out this month,” as if that would highlight some shame on his part.
I later found one Ponsot book at an out-lying library that will transfer the book to my neighborhood library. By that time, though, I’ll have Easy in hand and, if it’s as good as I hope it will be, then I’ll be shopping for first editions of her other books.
TLC appears on Critical Mass
October 8, 2009
The National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) is in the midst of celebrating its 35th anniversary on the NBCC blog Critical Mass. Past and present NBCC board directors, members and award-winners are posting commentary, including authors and poets Katha Pollitt, David Lehman, E. L. Doctorow, John Ashbery and more. This week my post, “The Discerning Voice,” appeared with this esteemed group.
The National Book Critics Circle has been a gathering place for book critics since 1974. Here is a membership for what many believe is a dying breed, with the advent of casual commentary at bookseller websites and the pervasive layoff of newspaper book critics. Yet the NBCC and its members are more important now to book lovers, shoppers and readers than ever before, which is a topic in my post on Critical Mass.
Up next: the National Book Awards
October 6, 2009
The winner of the U.K.’s Man Booker Prize was announced today: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.
Next week, on this side of the pond, the National Book Foundation will announce the 20 finalists for its 2009 National Book Awards (NBA) in fiction, non-fiction, poetry and young people’s lit.
The winner will be announced November 18.
The NBA website says 193 publishers submitted 1,129 books for the 2009 awards and then breaks them down into the categories, as of August 13, 2009:
- 236 for fiction
- 481 for non-fiction
- 161 for poetry
- 251 for young people’s lit.
The National Book Award can be fun for the surprises that often make the list of nominees and the controversy that can unfold.
Last year questions flew about Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country. (It won for fiction.) In 2004, the nominees were virtually unknown and many booed and hissed. One critic called them “narrow-minded nominations.”
Also in the archives of NBA surprises is the 1987 winner Paco’s Story by Larry Heinemann over the favored Beloved by Toni Morrison. The literary community was stunned.
I studied with Heineman in graduate school while he was writing the winning novel. I wrote congratulations, and Larry responded in a long letter that described the awards dinner, including this:
“…I went not expecting anything at all, just a bit of recognition as a nominee, a very good dinner sitting next to my editor who I get to see very rarely, and a business meeting with my agent the next morning. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t win the thing, much to the consternatoin [sic] of the NY Times.”
Two essays by Philip Connors
October 4, 2009
Two soul-stirring essays by Philip Connors: One in The Nation (March 2009) and the other Issue 8 of n+1 (Fall 2009). The Nation’s essay is about the life and work of Norman Maclean, author of the classic fly-fishing novella, “A River Runs Through It,” made into a movie directed by Robert Redford. The n+1 essay is about the suicide of Connors’ brother Dan, who shot himself with a semiautomatic rifle. He was 22-years-old.
Connors writes in a seductive tone, offering vulnerable information about himself while presenting engaging biographical information about his subjects. That’s especially true in the n+1 essay, “So Little to Remember,” capturing Connors’ struggle to understand why his brother killed himself. Connor writes, “He made a statement of thundering finality and left no means of answering it.”
These well-written essays evoke the complexity of the individual, a love of life and a deep need to understand it. The Nation essay, “A Tough Flower Girl: On Norman Maclean,” inspires me to re-read “A River Runs Through It,” as well as to check out McClean’s Young Men and Fire, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992. In The Nation, Connors writes:
“It’s not as if Maclean didn’t know his stories were strange. He often said he wrote them in part so the world would know of what artistry men and women were capable in the woods of his youth, before helicopters and chain saws rendered obsolete the ancient skills of packing with mules and felling trees with crosscut saws. Artistry, specifically artistry with one’s hands, was for him among life’s most refined achievements. As he says in the opening pages of “A River Runs Through It,” ‘all good things–trout as well as eternal salvation–come by grace and grace comes by art and art does not come easy.’”
n+1′s contributor bio for Connors says he’s at work on a book about his time as a fire lookout. I’ll be on the literary lookout for it.
This post was updated 4.10.11 with edits that tightened the copy, refreshed the hyperlinks and removed one photo. Philip Connors’ book Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout was published this month (April 2011) by HarperCollins.
Will Google kill used bookstores?
October 1, 2009
I made some purchases in a used bookstore recently. As I headed toward the door, the store owner quipped that it won’t be long before stores like his become extinct, thanks to the Google Book Project.
I sure hope that’s not true. One of my great escapes is getting lost in a shop filled with used, old and/or rare books. Time and worries vanish. His concern is real, though. The proposed Google settlement would allow Google to sell out-of-print books still under copyright in digital format on the Internet. Why would anyone need to go to a used bookstore? he asked.
Because many of us will still want the hardbound book and will pay the extra cost for it, I replied, but I don’t think it made the bookshop owner feel better. He asks everyone who enters his store if they want to buy it.
Here are three books I brought home with me:
Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York
by Gail Parent
This 1970s best-seller was on the syllabus of one of my college lit classes along with Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen and Mary McCarthy’s The Group. I wasn’t looking for it, but what a fun surprise to find it.
Parent’s story was made into a film in 1975 that wasn’t near the success of the book. The New York Times film critic wrote this great first line: “Something disastrous happened to the heroine of Gail Parent’s funny novel, Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York, on her way to the silver screen.”
The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich
This is Erdrich’s second novel published in 1986, after Love Medicine. It’s a family drama that takes place in North Dakota spanning 40 years.
Erdrich is scheduled to give the keynote address of the Kenyon Review Literary Festival on November 7 at 8 pm in Kenyon’s Rosse Hall. The lecture is free, but tickets are required to manage the limited space. Erdrich is the 2009 recipient of the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.
Slow Learner by Thomas Pynchon
This is a 1984 collection of early stories Pynchon wrote between 1958 and 1964. In the introduction, Pynchon speaks of middle-aged tranquility, “…in which I now pretend to have reached a level of clarity about the young writer I was back then.”
He adds, “It is only fair to warn even the most kindly disposed of readers that there are some mighty tiresome passages here, juvenile and delinquent, too.”
