TNCOM, #6

6. From everything that Toshi Yukawa could later determine, the original file was uploaded to one of those illegal Brigadoon sites that appeared, drew several thousand ecstatic hits, from six continents, then disappeared, traceless, twelve hours later, compressing the whole arc of human history into a single day: rough birth, fledgling colonies, prospering community, land grabs and hoarding, shooting wars, imperial decay, and finally, much gnashing of teeth after the inevitable collapse, which seemed to happen faster each time through the cycle. The kind of site that spelled music t-u-n-z. —Richard Powers, "Modulation," in The Best American Short Stories (2009)

Too many writers are dying

1. John Leonard archives at New York magazine and at The New York Review of Books and at Harper's.

2. My thoughts on an evening last year in which he helped Richard Powers perform a piece called "The Moving Finger," and then interviewed him onstage at the Morgan Library.

3. On Maureen Howard (Big as Life) in the NYTBR: "From sex and money as family secrets, to marriage and children as botched experiments, to art and history as magnetic compass points, to writing and teaching as the calisthenics of moral intelligence."

4. The eternal blurb (JL on One Hundred Years of Solitude): "You emerge from this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire. . . With a single bound, Gabriel Garcia Marquez leaps onto the stage with Gunter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov. Dazzling." (A blurb that's been as influential as any book to me—"the mind on fire"!)

5. I always loved this 1997 piece, from The Nation, which contains the line: "I review Atlantis books once a decade, whether they need it or not." (Shortly after reading this piece, I began not ignoring Atlantis books that entered my field of vision...now I have many and I have finished none.)

6. This doesn't mean anything: When he talked about The Believer on Sunday Morning, years ago, they did a close-up on a page from inside....it was my Portis piece. This doesn't mean anything but of course in my mind I pretended it did.

UPDATE: Renata Adler's Speedboat is another touchstone for me...or was I perhaps once again thinking of a JL blurb? Here's his review, plus the rest of his Harper's archive.

Powers to Powell

I. Dzyd Levi at Inside Higher Education, on the Nobel flap:

What writers might be on the verge of a Nobel-level career? I’m placing my bet on Richard Powers (as did the MacArthur Foundation several years ago): His oeuvre to this point has shown him to possess a restless, inquisitive mind that is unlikely to allow him to repeat himself or settle into a rut, while his ambitious attempts to marry the language and insights of science to psychological realism seems like a reasonable formula for the sort of sweeping masterpiece that could get the Nobel committee’s attention.

Ah, but who else does he like? Read on...

II. Levi also points me to this rather arcane (think Venn diagram) tidbit, a treat for Richard Stark fans who are also Anthony Powell fans, and vice-versa:

By the time he'd unpacked and desanitized everything, the air in the room had a bit of life in it. Sternberg stripped to his boxer shorts, turned down the bed, settled himself comfortably with the pillows behind his back, and opened the Anthony Powell novel he'd started on the plane. It was Magnus Donners he wanted to identify with, but he kept finding his sympathies going to Widmerpool.
—Richard Stark, Plunder Squad

Richard Powers and "The Moving Finger"

Quick post—last night at the Morgan Library, Richard Powers debuted his "talk-piece" The Moving Finger, with some help from the great critic John Leonard (who later interviewed him onstage). Powers nailed the sense of discovery, drift, and paranoia that the blogosphere engenders. He beautifully and lucidly evoked the competing drives for anonymity and fame, the Borgesian flavor of the blogging experience, the nuances of Technorati and YouTube and bookmarking. (There's a funny part at the beginning where he talks about searching for information about Hummel figurines, and emerging from the swamp of browsing six hours later.)

Powers read in the voice of a Powers-like character who chances upon a mysterious science-oriented, literature-drenched blog (significantly, an early post is about mirror neurons), written by an obscure professor in Montana (effectively played by Leonard). The Moving Finger is the best thing I've read (well, heard) to date on the nature of blogs—a playful, brilliant nightmare.

Leonard and Powers had never met before last night, and their mutual admiration for each other was palpable, indeed moving. The interview was as thought-provoking and inspiring as the prepared piece. (I was also thrilled when Leonard brought up the recent Powers interview from The Believer.) Touching on the subject of criticism versus evaluation (characterized by the "star" method of bite-sized reviewery), Powers made the point that a good piece of criticism makes you feel like there's another person in the room. You are not the same person at the end of the piece as you were at the beginning, he said. The same could be said about this event at the Morgan: I left the auditorium a different person than I was when I entered.

(Thanks to Galleycat for the link!)