A Momentary Taste of Being

An interview with George Saunders Saunders is author of some amazingly funny short stories and a marvelous collection of essays titled The Brain Dead Megaphone.

Interview with Geoff Dyer via Books Inq.

An interview with Howard Bloom (via Books Inq.) I've always found the concept of "the anxiety of influence" interesting.  What is more interesting and perhaps less commented on is the anxiety of the canon, by with I mean that as time spins out and more an more new works come to notice, it becomes more and more difficult to stand out.  Certainly time does a fair share of weeding--but it is easier to stand out in a world where perhaps a thousand books a year are published as opposed to a thousand books a day/and hour/(with the internet) a minute.  Standing next to Shakespeare and Joyce, it takes a tremendous amount to hold your own, much less be pulled into the canon.  It suggests that we need to develop the literary equivalent of atavan.

Billy Collins on assembling poetry collections Link courtesy of a friend:  Thanks TSO

"An Interview with Jennifer Egan."

BH speaks of the rumor Gossip, and its close cousin, rumor, were both well addressed by George Harrison who referred to the one as "The Devil's Radio."

An interview with a researcher who has been looking at friendships among boys. Extremely interesting.

How is a novelist like a spelunker? Find out in this interview with Chang-rae Lee.

Beckett recalling Joyce through an interview And here, for my future edification and delight is the source of an anecdote that I had never truly trusted: He was very friendly. He dictated some pages of Finnegan's Wake to me at one stage. That was later on when he was living in that flat. And during the dictation, someone knocked at the door and I said something. I had to interrupt the dictation. But it had nothing to do with the text. And when I read it back with the phrase 'Come in' in it, he said, 'Let it stand.'

John Kenneth Galbraith interviewed by Bill Moyers

Mailer v. Vidal For those who thought incivility in public was a relatively new phenomenon.  

Wow, this MP3 is remarkable---Truffaut and Hitchcock together and talking cinema.

Just as I was a dissenter on The Road , seeing in it far more optimism that others did, so too with The Angels are the Reapers   in some ways it's a positively perky little zombie apocalyse: [Alden Bell responding] What I enjoyed most about writing the book – and what I hope readers will enjoy most about it – is the sense of unfailing optimism about the world, no matter how miserable and blighted it seems to be. The book is tragic in all the ways you might expect, of course, but there’s an underlying hope that feels like it triumphs by the end. I like that. I’m a sucker for the bittersweet ending.

Conversation with Alden Bell an interesting excerpt: But, yes, I think you hit the nail on the head with Cormac McCarthy. He was a huge influence on the narrative style of the book – along with other writers of the Southern Gothic genre: Tom Franklin, William Gay, Daniel Woodrell. Behind them all, of course, is William Faulkner. Faulkner is my cornerstone. Reapers is loaded with pretty overt references to him. And, yes, I really am quite susceptible to the styles of books I’m reading. That’s one of the reasons Hummingbirds is so different from Reapers. One day I’m reading Muriel Spark, the next I’m reading Cormac McCarthy. Especially when I’m at the beginning of a novel, I try not to read anything that will derail the style – at least until the book is sufficiently established. I once got on a Virginia Woolf kick in the middle of trying to write something – and the story wound itself into such knots of internal monologue that I had to abandon it entirely.

Three Questions for Ms. Krauss

"They're very prone to hypnosis. . . "

George Saunders speaks to the issue

Hitchcock's Angles Much of this strikes me as very worked up and not really good interpretive theory.  On the other hand, I am not a scholar nor even a good student of film, so I'll leave it to others who understand the medium better to draw conclusions. Ovaphobia

Joanthan Maberry considered Interviewed Another Interview   (I don't know if this link will work--it is a link into facebook)  If you try it and it doesn't work, please let me know and I'll reprint the interview from the site.  (My brother put it together and so I think I can re-use so long as there's no objection for Mr. Maberry.)

Michael Moorcock chats with Hari Kunzru