writers | proper manky

September 3, 2012 by proper manky

Happiest Moment

Speaking of Lydia Davis, here’s another of her short stories that I really like:

This is a beautifully constructed story with matryoshka-like nesting of several accounts: first, Davis writing this story; second, of the account written down by the English teacher; third, of the story told by his student; forth, of the experience by the student’s wife; which turns into Davis’ favorite story. And then there’s the nice parallelism of the word “hesitate.”

Turns out this story is based on a section (p.58) in Mark Salzman’s book “Iron and Silk” in which he writes about his experiences as an English teacher in China in the 1980s.

(Someone once compared Davis to the Velvet Underground, saying that, although their first LP sold only a few thousand copies, everybody who bought one went out and started a band. (e.g. Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, etc.))

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Unclubbable

Quotes from a writer remembering Gore Vidal in the WaPo:

Consider his lacerating self-assessment: “I’m exactly as I appear,” he once said. “Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.”

At restaurants, Vidal always picked up the bill, explaining that this was to remind him that he wasn’t wealthy: “Rich people never pay,” he said.

Having fallen out of favor with the Kennedys, having figured on Nixon’s enemies list and now having been declared persona non grata by the Reagans, Vidal said he had scored a hat trick. But clearly he was annoyed that he was always, as the British say, “unclubbable.”

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Gabo Has Senile Dementia

Source: Guardian

Nobel prizewinning author Gabriel García Márquez is suffering from senile dementia and can no longer write. […] Apparently he is no longer in a condition to write the second part of his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale. His last novel, Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores, published five years ago, received mixed reviews.

However, I very much liked it. In that book, he wrote: ”It is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things, though memory does not often fail with regard to things that are of real interest to us.” On the eve of the 90th birthday of the narrator, a journalist and columnist for a local newspaper, is feeling close to death. As a birthday present to himself, he pays for a night with a 14-year old virgin prostitute. The night does not quite turn out the way he expected, but he eventually reaches another unexpected type of bliss. The book is ~120 pages short; it made me laugh and sad. I am very sorry to read about his dementia that is now effectively ending his writing career.

Here’s a very personal account about dementia with references to Gabo.

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Julian Barnes: My Life As a Bibliophile

Source: Guardian

Barnes brings it home. Last paragraph is spot on. Like him, I’m in the habit of buying books at a rate that far exceeds any possible reading speed.

But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life.

True that.

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