What to write next…

Here is a very snarky, but nonetheless very amusing essay by Colson Whitehead in the New York Times that purports to be a list with descriptions of the genres or types of novels that Colson has on a dartboard in his house for when he’s about to embark on a new novel. Some great parodies of dirty realism and postmodernism and possibly a shot at Toni Morrison.

The Color White

Here is a wonderful little essay by G.K. Chesterton called “A Piece of Chalk.” It espouses the moral and philosophical ramifications that result when one acknowledges that white is a color and not the absence of color. Believe me, it’s much more interesting than the summary I just provided.

Neurological

Marco Roth has written a wonderful essay in N+1 on “The Rise of the Neuronovel.” It is an insightful, necessary examination of the trend, in the last decade or so, of novelists using neurological disorders such as Capgras syndrome, schizophrenia, Tourette’s, et al. to justify and explain away any eccentricities in their characters’ thoughts and in their own prose. This approach severely limits the project, inherited from modernism, of exploring human consciousness. These novelists, by bowing to the prevailing wisdom, that science will eventually explain and codify every wrinkle of human consciousness, have abandoned the worthy literary task of observing the remaining mysteries of our inner selves.

Tao Lin

Get to know Tao Lin, author most recently of Shoplifting from American Apparel, through this wonderful interview he did with the Rumpus. He is an intriguing figure, in that he has cultivated a rabidly self-promoting online persona and in many interviews seems to dares you to write him off as vapid and nihilistic, but seems to be, in reality, a hard-working, earnest, shy writer with very interesting ideas. Not to mention this vapid nihilist has for literary influences the decidedly human and moral writers Lorrie Moore and Joy Williams, amongst others. The interview linked to above best shows his “serious” side, as he would scare-quote it. For a taste of his “comedic” side, or “snarky” side, check out The Levels of Greatness a Fiction Writer Can Achieve in America. Also see his blog here.

“Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.”

Speaking of Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, his 50,000-word open letter from jail to Lord Alfred Douglas, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship, is well worth a read. The above quote, which I love, is printed here as “Where there is sorrow there in holy ground,” which I presume is a typo, unless it’s supposed to be “therein.” At any rate, a very moving change of heart and mind is contained in the letter.

Beckett

“Bluer scarcely than white of egg the eyes stare into the space before them, namely the fulness of the great deep and its unchanging calm.”

—Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies

Burroughs

Paris Review Interview with William S. Burroughs

The Sounds of Silence

Here is Pico Iyer on the eloquent sounds of silence.

Wisdom from Cortazar

It would seem that the usual novel misses its mark because it limits the reader to its own ambit; the better defined it is, the better the novelist is thought to be. An unavoidable detention in the varying degrees of the dramatic, the psychological, the tragic, the satirical, or the political. To attempt on the other hand a text that would not clutch the reader but which would oblige him to become an accomplice as it whispers to him underneath the conventional exposition other more esoteric directions.
— Hopscotch, Julio Cortazar  (Translated by Gregory Rabassa)

Speaking in Tongues

Here is another engaging NY Review of Books essay by Zadie Smith, based on a lecture she gave in December 2008 at the New York Public Library.