Some stuff, some of which is varying degrees of awesome

Exhaustion is awesome. Exhaustion is all about falling asleep for two hours before going out to dinner. Exhaustion is all about realizing you've got 5-6 weeks to read five novels of your own choosing to meet a deadline of the utmost personal importance and thinking, "Meh!" Exhaustion is awesome.

Here's some stuff.

• An interesting question at Writes Like She Talks. I posted a comment that should in no way be confused with an actual helpful answer. But hey, helping meet a comment quota is akin to generating good bloggic karma, right?


• Flipping back through my del.icio.us postings, I come across this article about Jonathan Safran Foer. I haven't read JSF yet, because, just because. No idea what I think of his writing but I'll admit to face-stabbing levels of jealousy when I think of his level of fame and his age. Now, if I remember correctly, I think I wanted to call bullshit on something in the article...hmm...
  

  Even more than his first book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close experiments liberally with unusual literary devices. [...] Foer is unapologetic about these devices, though he acknowledges they may not suit every reader's taste. "The novel is far and away the most conservative art form of the last century," he says. Separated by a few thousand years, there really isn't all that much distance between, say, Homer's Iliad and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.

  
  Hmm, okay. I think I'm with him so far. I mean, more or less. I mean, there was that part in the Iliad where what's his face's dead body got dragged all around the city, and then there was that part in The Corrections where the dad decided to give himself enemas on his back on the basement floor. Okay, I can see the connection. I think--ah--er, hang on...
  

  But think of the artistic distance travelled from Leonardo Da Vinci to installation artists or from the music of Mozart to John Cage and Eminem.
  
  "If I were a painter and I painted words on the canvas, no one would mention it," he notes. But when writers incorporate visuals, people protest.

  
  A ha! COUGH COUGH BULLSHIT COUGH. See, if he were a painter, and he'd painted words on the canvas, nobody would mention it, because, nobody cares about painting. Oo! Diss!
  
  Okay, you got me, that's not true. What I really mean to say is: the difference is, when a visual art like painting incorporates words, the symbolic value of the words lies in their nature as word-as-image, whereas the symbolic value of incorporating visuals into written text is that it's stupid.
  
  Oh! Ow! Damn! There I go again. No, seriously, I mean, a word in an image becomes an image, the nature of the artform incorporating into itself what is put into it, whereas writing is about words, and words can't really incorporate image and make them into words. Nevermind the photo is worth a thousand words stuff; a photo is worth a photo and 1000 words are worth 1000 words. Comparing the two is like comparing a wallet full of cash to a gunshot in the night. Different value systems.
  
  Or in short, putting image into text is not like putting text into painting, but more like putting rank odor into image.
  
  Ah, fun. Anyways, if you're keeping score at home, that's Me, 1 point, Literary Wunderkind, 0 points, but a mansion full of money. Crud.


• Meanwhile, back where things make sense and I'm not lobbing softball arguments against brick walls, Jonathan Lethem gets interviewed real long-like. Snippet!
  

  RB: At the moment do you look at—where is the seam or break in your career trajectory?
  
  JL: ThereÂ’s a big one right now. A lot of people are led, understandably, to thinking of Fortress as a break with what proceeded it. In my view, though, itÂ’s the opposite. Fortress is the culmination of what IÂ’d been doing to that point. It recapitulates almost every interest and every concern of the early books, and utilizes all the tools IÂ’d accumulated, all the methods and motifs I had been exploring and gathering.

  
  You can look at it this way or you can look at it that way so long as you look at it my way: that The Fortress of Solitude was a kick-ass novel.


• While we're on the interview train...Kazuo Ishiguro gets interviewed, too. Snippet!
  

  SPIEGEL ONLINE: Most of your novels have been about an individual thinking back over a life. Do you ever want to write something quite different, like a poem or a play?
  
  Ishiguro: I have been doing some screenplay writing, and that for me is a completely different way to work, where I collaborate with other people. I think that comes from a different part of me, and that's quite refreshing. But I remain fascinated by memory. What I would like to tackle next is how a whole society or nation remembers or forgets. When is it healthy to remember, and when is it healthy to forget?
  
  [...]
  
  SPIEGEL ONLINE: Nietzsche once said, "To forget makes you free."
  
  Ishiguro: Well, it's such a big subject. I think my books have concentrated on countries going through big social changes on the one hand, or individual memories on the other hand, but I've never been able to put these two things together. It is quite a challenge.

  
  You know what won't be such a challenge? Me reading all his other books before he puts out his next one. Six books in 23 years. Which was all fine and dandy before I became a huge fanboy since reading Never Let Me Go (which is still an awesome novel, by the way, and you should read it), but now that Ishiguro's a huge silver permanent market spot on the screen of my green-line-blip-blip-blip lit-love radar screen, that kind of pace ain't going to cut it. Screenplays shmreenplays! Unless he's working with Jeff Noon on the screenplay version of Falling Out Of Cars, in which case I would totally have a complete and utter fanboy fit of glorious joy. Actually I don't even know what I'd do. Probably weep with nervous energy for the next five years. Yeah, that'd be awesome.


• I, for one, am greatly anticipating "a post on the meaninglessness of using the word 'important' when talking about literature".


• I wasn't a huge fan of Francine Prose's A Changed Man. As in, I sort of hemmed and hawed about it for a while, but in the end, the book just didn't work for me. But it didn't bomb for me so horribly as, say, Saturday by Ian McEwan did--a book I just really didn't enjoy much at all, what I read of it, at least--and so when I've seen her name pop up on Slate now and then, I've read her stuff, and, well, I like it. She writes a damned interesting book review, and I usually don't think book reviews are very interesting. But now I really want to read Veronica by Mary Gaitskill, like, a lot.
  

  And then there are novels that speak a language entirely their own. We recognize them as novels, though we would have a hard time saying why that should be so. They may have some, or none, of the elements I've listed above, but these features seem almost extraneous or inessential. [...] When we remember these untraditional novels, we tend to forget trivial and even relatively important details of story and character. What stays with us is an atmosphere, an emotion, the memory of how it felt to read the book and of what it was like to inhabit a particular sensibility--the mind of a character or of an author--for a certain period of time. Perhaps what we recall most vividly is how a writer's language rose to meet the challenge of maintaining our interest without the conventions (suspense, and so forth) that more commonly sustain it.
  
  Mary Gaitskill's new book, Veronica, is one of these unconventional fictions, though among its peculiar charms is the fact that it seems to think of itself as a much more ordinary sort of novel than it is.

  
  Well, okay, now, see...I'm sure I've come across these types of novels before, but this description makes me want to go find them all again, and re-read them all again, and understand why I'm reading them, this time. I'm sort of tempted to toss Snow by Orhan Pamuk halfway into this category but I think that might be mostly because you could say anything to me right now and in response I'd pull out my copy of Snow and wave it in your face while wildly gesticulating. Yeah, that doesn't make sense as something to do. But then, neither do a lot of things.


• I'm just sayin'.


• Get to it before the lawyers do: The Elegant Variation bootlegs an essay by John Banville about winning the Booker prize. On the one hand I read this, and, fromperspectivective of "random internet jerk", I kind of think, "Oh, POOR baby, wrote books, got attention, OH WAH." Then on the other hand he's just so bloody nice and proper and English about it that I mostly just want to beat up the first hand then go drink some tea with Mr. Banville. Plus then there's this right here and dammit, even though he beat my main man Ishiguro for the prize and all, I'm still glad I've got one of his books out from the library on my coffee table. I mean, look at that photo! That's just awesome.


• David Mitchell is awesome.