Bactine!

http://www.salon.com/2012/07/05/thank_you_for_killing_my_novel/

New Genre.

I'm reading another one of these, and I'm trying to come up with a definition:

Wealthy young people* slumming in European capitols in genteel poverty**, experiencing the local culture*** while pursuing artistic endeavors**** and engaging in earnest relationships***** that turn into tragic lifetime memories******. Also, somebody dies*******.

*They don't think they're wealthy. Often they think they had a middle class upbringing. Until they explain their boarding schools, vacations, and ponies. Mummy sitting in the drawing room smoking all afternoon, for example.

**Genteel poverty in that they have small apartments in bohemian parts of town, but never have to work and never run out of cigarettes and alcohol.

***These folks live in the "real" city, and some of their best friends are locals. Mockery of the clueless foreign tourists is a necessity.

****They are painters, photographers, novelists, poets, whatever. The writers only write longhand and the artists never need supplies. Whatever they do, it never interferes with their free time.

*****Lots of sex, and sex very soon after meeting the partner(s). Remember, these are young artists.

******Because we know these relationships can't last, right? Because then it's not literature. It's a romance. Nobody wants to explain this lost summer to the grandkids.

*******Might be one of the lovely young couple, but often as not is the friend who chases the art thing a little too hard. Alcohol, drugs, random behavior, suicide, something gets him. This is the death that tells our lovers that the dream cannot last. That they may have to go home and get a job. One of the two (usually, if one is a novelist, it's that one) will succeed with the art part, but love will never be the same.

Note that this genre does not seem to work with actual poor people, particularly Americans, because they have to start paying off their student loans and can't just biff off to Europe or wherever.

Home.

Twenty-four hours ago my plane was leaving LAX. Two empty seats beside me, got to watch a movie that interested me but wasn't good— about as good as air travel is going to get. Even all on time on a less-than-elderly 757. Thank you, American Eagle and American Airlines. One dodgy moment as I was getting up to go to the restroom as the flight attendant paged for the owner of a lost copy of Fifty Shades of Gray. So not mine. There were smirks, but I was reading Lorca!

The hundred-page-per-day resolution is back on, and was met easily this morning with Tawni O'Dell's very good and enjoyable Back Roads. I find her style to be in league with my own aspirations. If I really knew how to write...

More about the SBWC in coming days. In short, what surprised me was how much I enjoyed the experience of leading a workshop, and how incredibly impressed I was by the writers who participated. They not only stayed up late to work on their own material, they stuck around to help their fellow writers, often into the wee small hours. Good writers and good people.

The Book List - SBWC 2012

Here is the list of books I heard mentioned favorably at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. Below the list is a picture of what I found at the excellent Chaucer’s Books. Titles marked with an asterisk will be bought on audiobook. In some cases they didn’t have the exact title but I was able to buy another book by the same author. There are also a few books in the pile that I found while browsing. A few books will need to come from Amazon.

Flat-rate mailing, here I come.

James Agee - A Death in the Family

Conrad Aiken - Silent Snow, Secret Snow (poetry)

James Baldwin - Blues for Mister Charlie (play)

Richard Brautigan - So the Wind Won’t Blow it All Away

Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities

Miles Corwin - Midnight Alley

Douglas Coupland - Life After God

James Gould Cozzens - By Love Possessed

Joan Didion - Play It as It Lays

Joan Didion - Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream

Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking*

Ed Dorn - Gunslinger (poetry)

John Dos Passos - Midcentury

Frederick Exley - A Fan’s Notes

Matti Friedman - The Aleppo Code*

Christopher Isherwood - The World in the Evening

John Katzenbach - The Traveler

Roy Kesey - Pacazo

Federico Garcia Lorca - In Search of Duende

Henning Mankell - Kennedy’s Brain

Cormac McCarthy - Cities of the Plain*

Tim O’Brien - The Things They Carried

Autobiography of Red Cloud

John Sandford - Rules of Prey*

William Saroyan - The Human Comedy

Patrick Suskind - Perfume

Simon Van Booy - Everything Beautiful Began After*

Jeannette Walls - The Glass Castle*

Bailey White - Mama Makes Up Her Mind

Sloan Wilson - A Summer Place

Anything by:

Truman Capote

Raymond Carver

Lucas Hunt (poetry)

Nikki Giovanni (poetry)

Louis Ferlinghetti (poetry)

Sid Stebel

James Thurber

John Updike

Our Revels Now Are Ended.

So It Begins.

This afternoon the Santa Barbara Writers Conference begins, and for a week I shall suspend my hundred-page-a-day New Year's Reading Resolution. Five months and a week or so of solid reading, and I'm considering how to remake the resolution for next year. The two major changes will be allowing audiobooks into the mix, and reducing my reading requirement by half on any day that I'm actually working on my own book.

Oh, yeah, my own book... maybe that change will have to go into effect before the end of the year.

New Book New Book New Book!!!

China Miéville has a new book out!!! Frabjous joy! Bit of info here, with an interview:

http://boingboing.net/2012/05/31/an-interview-with-china-mievil.html#more-164086