How to use this Page

Add a Comment

I encountered Antoine Wilson at the BEA, where I had gone to find out which adult titles had all the buzz, and why, on behalf of Publishing Perspectives.  Quick on his feet, witty, Antoine was, nonetheless, the author of a book about a "slow absorber"�a 28 year old named Oppen Porter who is recording every millimeter of minutiae about his life and thoughts for the benefit of his unborn son, whom Oppen doesn't expect to meet, stuck as Oppen is, in a hospital, and perhaps dying.  I would need to add a few more commas to that last sentence, a smattering of additional half-steps, not to mention some unexpected profundities, they would have to be funny profundities, but also true, in the way that funny is also true, except that I am personally incapable of conjuring either the profound or the funny, in order to foreshadow the nature of the novel itself, which I have just finished reading, in order to give you a sense for the whole. Or one small sentence of the whole.

I would have to be Antoine Wilson, but I am not.  I would have to be a literary ventriloquist with an obsession with the question, What is a man of the world?, but this is Wilson's terrain.  His Oppen is a Forrest Gump of sorts (minus the super-hero powers and the awesome historic coincidences)—optimistic, well-meaning, highly observant but also stuck in his observing, capable of seeing a lot of the picture, but perhaps not the same picture that so many of us see (because we are rushing, because we have conformed, because we have ceded something of the raw and unschooled in ourselves).  The novel is a monologue, a man talking into a tape recorder while his baby sits coiled within his gold- and white-toothed mom.  It is a circle, and while riding the circle, one meets fast-food workers, big thinkers, exasperated aunts (all right, just one single exasperated aunt), religious zealots, and a talking-cure shrink who cures nothing. 

I'm going to share here three sentences of Oppen's world.  Oppen is tall, you see, and his sleeping arrangements are unfortunate.  He's finding himself slightly fatigued:

I'm not a complainer, I wouldn't have said anything, except that I was concerned I wasn't going to be getting enough rest, that over the course of several nights the lack of rest would add up to a general fatigue, it had happened to me before, it had happened to me in Madera, when I had broken my arm, or rather my arm had gotten broken while playing Smear the Queer with the Alvarez brothers, I had fallen in an awkward way, and because of the cast and the way it was situated I could not roll over freely in my sleep, and as a result I suffered from what your grandfather called general fatigue, which he said was quite noticeable with me, what happened was that in addition to having less energy I was less interested in everything and less friendly, too, I wasn't myself.  At the time I did not know the root cause of the general fatigue but I have since come to realize that without sleep the head gets clogged with other people's words.  The head needs sleep to make everyone else's words into our own words again, it is a conversion process.

One final thing.  Panorama City is a Lauren Wein (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) book.  Lauren, whom I am proud to say is a friend, continues to produce some of the most interesting books around.  Read Shards, if

Display Comments Add a Comment

The iPad2 was my husband's gift to me—marketed weeks upon weeks in advance.  "I don't need that," I kept saying.  "It feels indulgent."  But we run a communications business here, we need to know what is up, what can be done, what hasn't been done yet, and besides, he had to talk me into a Blackberry, too, and you don't now find me going out too often without that.  Also besides, I've been saying for a long, miserable time that I need to spend less time in front of the computer and more time in a quiet place, a room or two away, reading and writing.

And so, the iPad2, which arrived a week ago, and which I have put to minimal, but interested use.  I am a New York Times subscriber, for example, and so, by downloading the New York Times app, I can now sit with this glass tablet on my lap in the dark making no disturbing rustling noises while I read the reviews of such great books as Francisco Goldman's Say Her Name.  I find it easier to read this way—my arms don't hurt, my eyes don't squint, and I can turn off the lamp beside my husband while he watches shows about fish, food, and war (sometimes he's lucky and all three things appear on one show at once).  I'm reading my hometown paper this way as well, and when my subscription to the paper version of The New Yorker runs out, I may go iPad with that as well, though I don't know.  I'm rather fond of my stacks of New Yorker stories, torn fresh from the bindings.  Vanity Fair?  Maybe.

I also, as readers of this blog know, downloaded Tina Fey's Bossypants and iPad2'ed it—the perfect book for this medium.  As much as I loved Bossypants, I don't plan to ever teach it, do not need my scribbled marginalia as a guide to my first readerly reactions.  I know that some sort of marginalia can be achieved via the iPad2, don't get me wrong.  I'm just not interested in going there at this moment and rather suspect I'll never be.  There's an art to making notes in books, and I like pen to paper.  I also like, however, the extras the expanded iBook version of Bossypants afforded—more photos, an audio chapter, pretty cool flipping and bookmarking technology.  I've just downloaded Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad as well as a guide to Croatia for my next iPad2 readings.  I want to take Egan to Ithaca over Easter weekend and Croatia to Croatia, some time in June.  I think of these books as traveling companions.

Finally, I've downloaded the PDF app that will allow me to iPad2-read my own manuscripts-in-progress.  I've got two books I'm working on—a novel, nearly complete, and a memoir.  I've worked to give myself enormous distance on the novel and reading it again on a new technology, following a final set of revisions, will, I think (I hope), allow me to see this book as a stranger might.  That, at least, is what I'm going for.

My friend Karen, always so far ahead in matters of technology, does many things with her iPad that I don't know how to do—watch Netflix movies while exercising, say, or grading student papers.  She's the real expert on this (as she is on most things).  I'll become a smarter iPad2 user in time, I hope.  But for now, to answer your questions:

I really like my iPad2.

Display Comments Add a Comment

To visit an editor is to walk into a realm—into small offices made labyrinthine by the architecture of stacked books and scrambled manuscripts, posted notes to self, cardboard cutouts, events long gone but living on in the fade of aging posters.  I have been lucky in my travels, blessed to enter in, and time and again, I have been made grateful for those who spend their days leaning their imaginations and hearts against and into the work that they've acquired.  Editors, the best of them, make books better.  They allow books to live.

We hear from authors far more than we hear from editors.  We conjecture about editors' lives more than they know, more than they likely wish we would.  But in recent days, Lauren Wein, an editor at Grove/Atlantic who worked with her team to bring Francisco Goldman's remarkable Say Her Name to light, let us in on her relationship to this book and with this writer in a beautiful essay published in this special editors' forum at The Front Table. 

It's no ordinary retelling, Wein's essay.  It is a reflection that begins with the line "Francisco Goldman is an unlikely Hades" and that yields, over its quiet coursing, insights not just into the novel that Wein helped edit but into the transformative nature of editing itself.  We come to know the book and its author in Wein's essay; we also, magically, come to know Wein, who in August 2005 traveled to San Miguel de Allende (where the above photograph was taken two years later, when I journeyed there myself) to attend Goldman's wedding to Aura, the young woman, sadly no longer alive, who stands at the heart of Say Her Name.  "I traveled there with a colleague, Amy Hundley, and my six-month old daughter," Wein writes, continuing:

I sobbed through much of the nearly 12-hour journey. As a new mother, I was still finding my footing. I could not believe I’d been entrusted with this new life, and what was I doing taking her so far from our comfort zone?


But those days in San Miguel, that wedding, were among the best moments I’ve ever shared with my daughter. It proved to be an empowering journey in every sense—away from home, family, work, caregivers, she and I learned each other’s rhythms, learned to trust one another. We survived, we transcended, we fell in love. Frank and Aura were people who inspired others to leave their comfort zone—they led by example, they dared you to take risks that enabled you to become more than you were before.

Wein ends her essay with lines from a poem.  I won't share them here, for it is my hope that you'll go and read the entire essay itself—that you will, on this day, grow in your appreciation for the hearts and minds of the editors among us.

Display Comments Add a Comment