Roy Miller's Blog, page 209
April 24, 2017
How Harvard Business School Has Reshaped American Capitalism
This content was originally published by JAMES B. STEWART on 24 April 2017 | 9:00 am.
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In virtually every instance, McDonald contends, Harvard has obsessively pursued money, sending a disproportionate number of its graduates to consulting firms beginning in the 1950s (it was all but synonymous with McKinsey), to Wall Street in the 1980s and to entrepreneurial start-ups once initial public offerings became the rage in the 1990s — and provided intellectual justifications for its actions. Much of that wealth found its way back to the school itself. Its professors earn enormous sums as consultants to businesses populated by their former students, who also give generously to their alma mater: Its endowment stood at $3.3 billion by 2015, a dedicated portion of the university’s enormous $32.7 billion.
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McDonald’s criticism of Michael Jensen, now an emeritus professor, is especially withering. As he sees it, Jensen bears major responsibility for the rapacious hostile takeovers and the obsession with stock prices and short-term results that led to the Enron and WorldCom scandals, as well as for the emergence of outlandishly high chief executive pay.
Jensen came to the business school in 1984, just as the junk-bond-fueled takeover boom was gaining steam, and he became a full-time faculty member in 1989. Undeniably one of the most influential business theorists of modern times, he advocated an “agency” theory of management in which management’s sole duty was to maximize shareholder value. This upended the long-held “stakeholder” model, in which management was seen as having broader obligations to a corporation’s workers, customers and communities.
Jensen’s theories had simplicity and consistency: If all that matters is shareholder value, then hostile takeovers, leveraged buyouts and other forms of financial engineering are fine as long as they boost share prices, no matter that battalions of workers have to be fired and community relations damaged. Jensen also championed share-based executive compensation on the grounds that no matter how much executives were paid, shareholders benefited. This was an idea that swept corporate America. McDonald notes that in 1992, the C.E.O.s of Fortune 500 firms made an average of $2.7 million a year. By 2000, the average was $14 million.
Just about every premise of the “agency” model, McDonald says, has now been punctured, but only long after the damage has been done. An obsession with stock prices and short-term results was the motive for many of the accounting scandals of the 2000s, which were designed to prop up share prices, and as a result, high executive pay. Even Jensen eventually had to concede that the liberal use of stock options as executive compensation had become “managerial heroin.”
Jensen is just one of many examples of the insidious relationship between Harvard Business School theory and real-world calamities in ”The Golden Passport,” but it seems worth asking: Is McDonald’s broadside fair? Apart from a few brief quotations from his published work, we don’t hear from Jensen himself, or any of the other still-living culprits McDonald identifies. It’s hard to fault McDonald, who reports that Harvard Business School “shut me out entirely” when he sought cooperation, and pretty much shut down everyone who works there. That seems a shame. McDonald insists he isn’t “anti-business-school” (he attended Wharton), nor is he “anti-wealth.” Nonetheless, he says he found the rejection “liberating.”
But I missed a greater sense of balance. It doesn’t seem fair, to take one major example, to blame Harvard for the recent financial crisis. While their actions remain a subject of spirited debate, the H.B.S. graduates assembled by McDonald — starting with former President George W. Bush, former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and former S.E.C. Chairman Christopher Cox — are credited by many with mitigating the damage and saving the country from an even worse catastrophe. To take just one counterexample, the young former Goldman Sachs investment banker Fabrice Tourre, one of the few Wall Street figures actually found guilty of civil fraud for his role in the kind of complex mortgage deals that contributed to the crisis, is a graduate of France’s École Centrale and Stanford University. (France’s prestigious “Grandes Écoles” — not H.B.S. — appear to have generated a disproportionate number of the financial engineers who unwittingly helped cause the crisis.) Given the large number of Harvard Business grads in high-ranking executive positions, it’s inevitable that many would be ensnared in what turned into a global catastrophe. It’s a shame that some of them didn’t see the looming disaster and sound an alarm. But hardly anyone did, including graduates of every other business school.
McDonald bookends his long and impressively researched account with a portrait of Casey Gerald, an African-American who delivered a 2014 Class Day speech that’s been viewed online over 200,000 times, and is featured on the school’s “Making a Difference” website. Gerald turned his back on a lucrative career in private equity to co-found a public interest organization to connect M.B.A. graduates with mission-driven businesses. This may suggest to some that it is hard to generalize about Harvard’s students, though McDonald isn’t stopped: He sees Gerald as one of a handful of “outliers,” the exception that proves the rule that most graduates are morally detached, single-minded fortune seekers.
I suspect McDonald won’t be invited to campus anytime soon, but perhaps he should be: Agree with him or not, he deserves credit for raising questions that every business school needs to be asking. It’s hard to quarrel with his concluding plea: “H.B.S. should — and can — play a part in helping more people who think about business rediscover a purpose other than profit.” As he puts it: “It needs to graduate more people who are motivated to solve problems, and fewer people who create them.”
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Quarto Group Restructures Sales and Marketing
This content was originally published by on 1 January 1970 | 12:00 am.
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U.K.-based Quarto Group has made new appointments in its global sales and marketing operations following a restructuring of those functions in 2016 that created a global sales and marketing platform to service all Quarto imprints.
The global English language sales team now reports to Ken Fund, in his new role as chief operating officer, and is structured into three main channels: U.S. sales; U.K. and Europe sales, and international sales.
Tapped to head up U.K. and Europe sales is Andrew Stanley, who will join the company from Thames & Hudson July 10. Last week, Tim Loynes joined Quarto as director of children’s sales; Loynes was most recently at Abrams & Chronicle Books (the Abrams and Chronicle joint U.K. sales unit), where he was head of special sales.
In the U.S., Tara Catogge remains in her current role as v-p, sales director.
Looking after international sales, Mary Aarons has been named director sales, e-commerce for ANZ, Canada, Asia, Latin America. Monica Baggio becomes director of sales EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), Central Asia, Korea, Taiwan, India & Subcontinent.
On the marketing side, the title marketing and publicity unit now reports to David Breuer in his new role as chief creative officer for Quarto. The team is split between the U.S. and the U.K., and adult and children.
In the U.S., Kristine Anderson, who joined Quarto in March 2011, has been named adult marketing director. Anderson has over 20 years of experience in the publishing industry. She arrived at Quarto from LSC Communications Publishing (Dover Books) where she was v-p of marketing. Diane Naughton joined Quarto in January, as children’s marketing director.
In the U.K., Jessica Axe has been promoted to adult marketing director and Katherine Josselyn was elevated to children’s marketing director.
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New Literary Agent Alert: Sarah Bedingfield of the Levine, Greenberg, Rostan Literary Agency
This content was originally published by Cris Freese on 24 April 2017 | 10:00 am.
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Reminder: New literary agents (with this spotlight featuring Sarah Bedingfield of the Levine, Greenberg, Rostan Literary Agency) are golden opportunities for new writers because each one is a literary agent who is likely building his or her client list.
About Sarah: Prior to joining LGR in 2016, Sarah began her publishing career in trade fiction editorial at Crown and Hogarth. There, she worked with a range of bestselling and award-winning novels, including The Barrowfields by Phillip Lewis, Han Kang’s Human Acts and Man Booker International Prize winning debut The Vegetarian, as well as the New York Times bestselling novel The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George. Sarah hails from North Carolina, where she graduated from UNC Chapel Hill with a double major in Psychology and English. Her favorite authors include Sarah Waters, Shirley Jackson, Matthew Thomas, Maria Semple, Emily St. John Mandel, Erin Morgenstern, and Victor Hugo.
She is Seeking: Sarah is seeking most types of literary and upmarket commercial fiction, especially novels that show powerful imagination, compulsive plotting, and unique voices. Epic family dramas, cross-genre narratives with notes of magical realism, darkly Gothic stories that may lead to nightmares, and twisty psychological suspense are among her favorite things to read. A southerner at heart, she can’t help but love books set in the south, but she’s a die-hard for any world immersive enough to make her miss her stop on the train, cry in public, or desperately seek help.
How to Submit: Please send queries to sbedingfield@lgrliterary.com. Query should include a brief synopsis and bio, as well as the first fifty pages of your novel.
The biggest literary agent database anywhere
is the Guide to Literary Agents. Pick up the
most recent updated edition online at a discount.
If you’re an agent looking to update your information or an author interested in contributing to the GLA blog or the next edition of the book, contact Writer’s Digest Books Managing Editor Cris Freese at cris.freese@fwmedia.com.
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April 23, 2017
9 Tips for Writers from The Outsiders Author S.E. Hinton
This content was originally published by Guest Column on 23 April 2017 | 9:00 pm.
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Fifty years ago, Viking Press published S.E. Hinton’s classic The Outsiders, a mainstay in schools and a worthy novel on any young adult’s bookshelf. Part of the reason the book has stood the test of time, Hinton believes, is because readers still can relate to the emotions in the book.
In flipping through our archives, I found an interview with Hinton in the 2000 edition of Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market, written by Anne Bowling. The interview covers Hinton’s writing life, and her switch from writing young adult to focusing more on children’s picture books, like The Puppy Sister and Big David, Little David.
Below, I pulled nine writing tips from Hinton’s interview that you can apply to your writing life:
Be patient with your release:
[The Outsiders] wasn’t an overnight success. It got some attention because I was so young, but the success of it built over the years. It was definitely a word-of-mouth book.
On writing for an audience:
I wasn’t thinking about the audience, which I try never to do. You start feeling them looking over your shoulder, and you start thinking you’re going to make a mistake. I’ve never thought, “Oh, kids would like this, I’ll stick this in.” I especially don’t make that mistake when I’m writing for young adults.
I have to write a story the way I see it and take the consequences. You never can completely get the audience out of your mind once you’ve been published, and after The Outsiders, I found that very difficult to deal with. But since then, I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it.
Overcoming writer’s block:
Click to order the 2017 CWIM!Get the right boyfriend. I was in college and I was reading good writers, but at that time, I couldn’t write. I was seeing everything that was wrong with The Outsiders; I was feeling the pressure of, “What is she going to do next?” and, “She wrote this well when she was 15, and she’s going to have a masterpiece.” And I knew I didn’t have no masterpiece.
My boyfriend, who is now my husband, was saying “I don’t care if you never get published again, but you’ve got to start writing again. Enough of this gloom and doom stuff.” He said, “Write two pages a day. Nobody’s every dropped dead of two pages.” And he’d come over to take me out, and if I hadn’t done my two pages we wouldn’t go out. So that was a great motivation for writing. And I was so careful with That Was Then, This is Now—I was thinking, “I’m not going to make the mistakes I did in The Outsiders.” I did two pages, but they were hard. I didn’t put down a word that I didn’t want, and when I had a stack about the size of a book, I sent it off.
Think of all writing as practice:
The Outsiders was the third book I had written; it was just the first one I had tried to publish. The first two ended up in drawers somewhere—I used characters from them in later books, but I certainly didn’t go back and rework them. Everybody’s got to practice.
Find your reason for writing:
One reason I wrote [The Outsiders] was I wanted to read it. I couldn’t find anything that dealt realistically with teenage life. I’ve always been a good reader, but I wasn’t ready for adult books, they didn’t interest me, and I was through with all the horse books. If you wanted to read about your peer group, there was nothing to read except “Mary Jane Goes to the Prom” or “Billy Joe Hits a Home Run”—just a lot of stuff I didn’t see any relevance in.”
The key to success:
The only way you’re going to be a writer is to read all the time and then do it.
On thinking about specific writing elements:
Don’t think about what you’re doing, just keep your story going. Years later somebody’s going to write you a letter and tell you what you wrote about. So don’t worry about that part of it.
How to write believable characters:
With your characters, you have to know their astrological signs, you have to know what they eat for breakfast, and so on. That doesn’t have to come out in the book, you just have to know it anyway in defining your character. But on the other hand, no matter how well you think you’re imagining somebody, or even basing it on somebody you know, the writer is still the filter that the character goes through, so the character is still some aspect of yourself.
On writing for the young adult market:
I think the most common trap is the idea that the writer is going to take a problem and write about it: You’re going to take divorce, date rape, or drugs, and write about it, instead of thinking you’re going to take Travis, and write about him, or Rusty James, and write his story.
I think the problems are identical to the characters. One reason The Outsiders is still selling as well as it ever has, including the year the movie came out, is the kids identify with those emotions. The names of the group change, the uniforms change, but the emotions remain the same. If you’ve got ten kids in a school, they’re going to divide up into the “in” group and the “out” group.
The biggest literary agent database anywhere
is the Guide to Literary Agents. Pick up the
most recent updated edition online at a discount.
If you’re an agent looking to update your information or an author interested in contributing to the GLA blog or the next edition of the book, contact Writer’s Digest Books Managing Editor Cris Freese at cris.freese@fwmedia.com.
You might also like:
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Ariadne van de Ven obituary | Books
This content was originally published by Ann Sohn-Rethel on 23 April 2017 | 4:58 pm.
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Our friend Ariadne van de Ven, who has died aged 56 of cancer, was a book publicist and photographer of street life in Kolkata, which she wrote about in original ways.
Ariadne was born in Heerlen, in the Netherlands, the daughter of Jep, a solicitor, and Rose Marie (nee Van Grunsven). At the University of Utrecht, she was a brilliant student and gained a master’s in English language and literature. She moved to London in 1987 having met her future partner and eventual husband, the bookseller John Prescott.
Soon she was working for Yale University Press, then as WW Norton’s European publicity manager for six years, before turning freelance in 2000. A colleague who became a friend recalls her “combining insight, tact, sympathy and realism with a light touch”. After a lecture tour, the poet Adrienne Rich said that with Ariadne she knew at once she was in the best of hands.
In 1988 Ariadne had co-founded with Clare Baker the Women in Publishing International Committee, meetings of which are remembered for their wine and laughter as well as ardent feminism.
But that was work. “The hobby that became a project,” was how Ariadne characterised her trips to Kolkata, an annual fixture from 2002. Her friend, Krishna Dutta, described her “walking for miles along the crowded dusty streets … cutting a striking figure as a tall western woman draped in shalwar kamiz, with a camera dangling from her neck, a smiling face and welcoming eyes”. By 2008 she had used 167 rolls of film.
Ariadne mentions this fact in the first of two MA theses (Goldsmiths, 2008, and Royal Holloway, 2015). The course was Photography and Urban Cultures, and her title, The Eyes of the Street Look Back. Their looking back was the point: interact with your subjects, do not photograph them unawares. Nevertheless, Photographing People Is Wrong was a piece she wrote for the journal City, also in 2008. The title was an ironical dig at Susan Sontag’s ambivalent views on the value of photography, but Ariadne’s quarrel was with ignorant western stereotypes, cliched images of passive poverty. “I am not a camera and nor is my camera,” she wrote. There was nothing objective about a photographer’s choices.
Ariadne processed films in her darkroom, always black-and-white, and gave prints of her quirky, nuanced portraits to participants (if she could find them) on her next visit to Kolkata. She involved herself with London Independent Photography and Drik, the activist photo agency in Kolkata. A permanent home for her archive is being sought.
By British standards Ariadne could seem almost seriously intellectual. At variance with one of her tutors, she would email a draft of her counterblast: 13 pages of cultural anthropology, with references. But she would not mind if you found it heavy going. As a friend, she was as much a listener as a talker. She had recently volunteered with Women for Refugee Women.
She and John married in 2000; he died in 2014. She is survived by Rose Marie, and her sister, Esther.
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‘I Dreamed of Africa’ Author and Conservationist Is Shot in Kenya
This content was originally published by JEFFREY GETTLEMAN on 23 April 2017 | 11:15 am.
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The author and environmentalist Kuki Gallmann in 2006." data-mediaviewer-credit="Jacob Wire/European Pressphoto Agency" itemprop="url" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/... author and environmentalist Kuki Gallmann in 2006.
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Jacob Wire/European Pressphoto Agency
NAIROBI, Kenya — Kuki Gallmann, one of Kenya’s most renowned conservationists and the author of the best-selling book “I Dreamed of Africa,” was shot and wounded in an ambush by raiders on Sunday morning.
Mrs. Gallmann, 73, who was hit in the hip and stomach area, was being airlifted to Nairobi for treatment, her family said. She had been riding in a vehicle on her ranch with Kenyan wildlife rangers when she was attacked, and the bullet flew through the door, hitting her.
“This is horrendous for Kenya and horrendous for her,” said Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a close friend and a well-known expert on elephant behavior.
For the past several weeks, waves of armed pastoralists have invaded her ranch in northern Kenya, part of a wider problem in which many farmers in the area have been terrorized.
Thousands of pastoralists from other parts of the country have swept into farms, burning down houses and chasing away residents, despite the Kenyan military and police services deploying forces to push the invaders out.
Mrs. Gallmann, a passionate, Italian-born conservationist who has been living in Kenya for decades, has been attacked several times before. This month, raiders burned down one of her most beloved retreats on her property, which had been a favorite place of her now-dead son.
In the past several days, the violence seemed to be drawing a tighter ring around her.
“Pokot militia openly carrying firearms,” she wrote in a text message to me on April 15. (The Pokot are an ethnic group in northern Kenya.) “Not just herders. Group of armed men without livestock. 13 firearm spotted.”
On April 17, she sent another message: “2 Arsons by herders and shooting reported.” She added, “Fire ongoing.”
After the shooting on Sunday, she was still conscious and speaking, her family said. The attack happened around 9 a.m., and by 1 p.m., she was undergoing surgery at a Nairobi hospital. Mrs. Gallmann’s friends said that a combat-trained field medic from a nearby British military base in Nanyuki had helped stabilize her and that she was flown to the Nairobi hospital by helicopter.
Mrs. Gallmann’s vast ranch is in Laikipia, a highland plateau north of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Herders from pastoralist communities, including the Pokot, have harassed Laikipia farmers for years, saying they need more land to graze their animals.
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This year, the violence has reached unprecedented levels. Invading herdsmen shot and killed a British rancher in March and have continued to burn down houses and shoot at farmers and police officers.
The Kenyan security services have deployed hundreds of officers, including some based on Mrs. Gallmann’s ranch, with a Humvee parked in her front yard.
But Kenya’s government is increasingly distracted by national elections scheduled for August. Just this past week, violence broke out across the country during primaries, a worrying sign for many Kenyans who already dread the elections because they often stir up ethnic tensions and lead to bloodshed in the country.
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2017 April PAD Challenge: Day 23
This content was originally published by Robert Lee Brewer on 23 April 2017 | 6:00 am.
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For today’s prompt, take the phrase “Last (blank),” replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then, write your poem. Possible titles include: “Last Starfighter,” “Last Unicorn,” “Last Day of Summer,” “Last Cookie in the Cookie Jar,” and so on.
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Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!
In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.
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Here’s my attempt at a Last Blank Poem:
“last one”
& i grabbed it without worrying
about whether i’d want another
because of course i’d want another
as soon as i finished eating that final
black jelly bean
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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). People tend to either love or hate black jelly beans, Robert falls into the former category along with his stepson Reese.
Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
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About Robert Lee Brewer
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John Waters: By the Book
This content was originally published by on 20 April 2017 | 9:00 am.
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What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
“The Joint,” by James Blake. A sexy, funny gayly-incorrect prison memoir that Genet might have liked.
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What’s the last book that made you laugh?
The book itself didn’t make me laugh, but the title sure did: “Queer Bergman.” He wasn’t.
The last book to make you cry?
“The Visiting Privilege,” by Joy Williams. “The dead just forget you,” a character reasons, and boy, that is a sobering, ego-crushing thing to tell someone.
The last book that made you furious?
“Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga,” by Pamela Newkirk. The true story of a Congolese man who is held captive and exhibited next to an orangutan in the Bronx Zoo in the early 1900s. Yes, I said true.
What do you read for solace? For escape? For sheer pleasure?
Solace? “Pol Pot,” by Philip Short. I feel so lucky I didn’t have to live under his rule. I don’t want to “escape” when I read a book; I want to enter a new world that disturbs me. Sheer pleasure? Michel Houellebecq’s novels always put me in a good mood.
What are your favorite books about film? About art?
I like film books at the bottom of the barrel and art books at the top. “The Ghastly One,” by Jimmy McDonough, is a hilarious biography of one of the most hideous directors who ever picked up a movie camera, Andy Milligan. Even worse is “A Thousand and One Night Stands,” by H. A. Carson, the alarming story of porno star, drug addict and alcoholic Jon Vincent, who complains he didn’t get enough credit for inventing onscreen sexual “verbal abuse.” On the other end of the spectrum is “Daybook,” by Anne Truitt, an intelligent, simple and moving record of what an artist’s day-to-day life is really like.
Please recommend books about Baltimore or by Baltimore writers.
Anne Tyler is now a friend (and we never agree on books we like), but I started reading her way before I met her. “Ladder of Years” is my favorite of hers, and it perfectly describes what it is like to be a Baltimorean; unpretentious, impervious to the outside world and layered in eccentric family traditions. Laura Lippman also writes about our fair city with a plot-driven, knowing, gritty and smart realism.
Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?
When her English publisher asked me for a blurb for “Transit,” I sent back, “Rachel Cusk is too smart for her own good,” and I meant this as the ultimate compliment. She doesn’t suffer fools, and I like that in a writer. I gave Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel “Eileen” to everybody as a Christmas present last year, and her new collection of short stories, “Homesick for Another World,” will scorch you like a blowtorch.
What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?
I used to like true crime, despite having to browse in that obscure section of the bookstore way back near the restrooms, but lately there’s been nothing published in that field that sends me over the moon. Science fiction is something I never understood. I would have no idea what is good or bad in that genre.
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How do you like to read? Paper or electronic?
Paper. I like the weight of the book, the cover, the text on the printed page. Especially if I paid full price for it at an independent bookstore I love.
What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
That Bob Hope biography by Richard Zoglin. It’s really, really good.
What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?
I collect weird sex pulp paperbacks, especially with the outdated slang word “chicken” in the title. I have 52 of them. Last year Kayo Books, my favorite used-book store in the world, sent me one I didn’t have as a gift: “Chain Gang Chicken.”
Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? How about your favorite fictional villain?
Ignatius J. Reilly in “A Confederacy of Dunces” is pretty hard to beat. Villains? Every character in Bruce Wagner’s “Dead Stars,” the cruelest book ever written.
What kind of reader were you as a child?
Grade school ruined reading for me by demanding book reports for such snore-a-thons as Benjamin Franklin’s biography written for children. I wanted to read “Hot Rod” and “Street Rod,” by Henry Gregor Felsen, but my teachers hadn’t heard of them. It wasn’t until I was a teenager and Grove Press came along and introduced me to Burroughs, Marguerite Duras and the Marquis de Sade that I became a real bookworm.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
“Surgery of the Anus, Rectum and Colon,” by J. C. Goligher.
You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
A three-martini lunch with Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys and Grace Metalious.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t?
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Well, I participated in my friend Philip Hoare’s “Moby-Dick Big Read” because I knew how much he loves this novel, but even reading parts of it aloud didn’t bring me an ounce of pleasure.
Whom would you want to write your life story?
A biographer I could control from beyond the grave.
What do you plan to read next?
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle: Book 6.” Hurry up, you lazy English translators. It seems like I finished Volume 5 ages ago!
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Work-Life Balance Suffers (Even) in Victorian England
This content was originally published by MIN JIN LEE on 21 April 2017 | 10:00 am.
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Sarah Moss
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Europa Editions
SIGNS FOR LOST CHILDREN
By Sarah Moss
420 pp. Europa Editions. Paper, $19.
In an era when Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, encourages young women to lean in to paid work and Damien Chazelle uses his film “La La Land” to portray the sacrifices lovers must make to pursue their artistic goals, the British writer Sarah Moss shows how little the concerns that rise from the intersection of work and love have changed over the last century. Her latest novel, “Signs for Lost Children,” offers a vivid psychological portrait of a woman doctor, Ally Moberly, whose efforts to help those struggling with mental illness in Victorian England are complicated by her own neuroses. In depicting Ally’s marriage to an architect and engineer named Tom Cavendish, Moss raises significant questions about our modern sensibilities, our attitudes toward the competing pulls of work and love among husbands and wives.
Moss’s novel returns readers to a character from an earlier book, “Bodies of Light.” There we came to know Ally Moberly, whose father is a successful painter and whose mother is a religious zealot devoted to the poor of Manchester yet haunted by the death of Ally’s sister May. As this new novel opens, it is the late 1870s and Ally, a pioneer in the male-dominated medical profession, has just met ginger-haired Tom, who has risen from a working-class background to work for a company building lighthouses throughout the world. After she graduates and becomes a doctor, they are married, but six weeks later his employer sends him to far-off Japan.
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In chapters that move back and forth between them, we follow Tom on his Asian travels and Ally in Cornwall, where she works in an insane asylum whose female patients are treated with horrifyingly primitive methods. Tom’s experiences in an alien culture and Ally’s travails in England are juxtaposed, allowing the reader to join them on their separate quests even as their nascent marriage is shaped by their separate concerns.
As a stylist, Moss deploys an arresting third-person stream-of-consciousness perspective to great effect, affording the reader a better understanding of her characters, particularly the very private Ally. “You chose the asylum,” she tells herself, “because you indulge yourself in feeblemindedness. Because despite all your training and all your so-called qualifications, you are still crazed.” By employing brief chapters and a vibrant present tense — “Rain scrabbles on the roof and the fire hisses and shifts. In the kitchen, cups and bowls chime as water pours and the maids’ voices rise and fall” — Moss makes a novel rooted in the past feel contemporary.
Ally and Tom are highly educated people who are fortunate enough to follow their callings. Yet Moss shows how they must recognize that their work inevitably changes them. As Ally attempts to study the treatment of mental illness in an era when the allegedly insane are left to molder in abusive institutions, she begins to regress herself, recalling harsh memories of life with her relentlessly ascetic mother and neglectful father and the tragic loss of her sister. In contrast, Tom’s mission abroad — to bring Western engineering to a nation attempting to modernize while also fulfilling a lucrative commission to buy exotic wares for a buccaneering businessman — transforms him from a provincial Englishman who spurns “slimy” Japanese sweets to a wanderlust-afflicted vagabond obsessed with “fox possession” myths who “does not want to go home.”
In this fine exploration of marriage and the complex minds of “lost children” — that is, all of us — Moss mines and assesses a union of gifted individuals who follow their paths with great determination, unaware that their hearts will surely be changed in the process.
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April 22, 2017
The Extravagant Jane Bowles: Always on the Edge of Something
This content was originally published by NEGAR AZIMI on 21 April 2017 | 11:00 am.
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Jane Bowles
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Constantin Joffe/Condé Nast, via Getty Images
In Tangier, amid the spiritual seekers and the French tourists, the men in long djellabas and the stoned glue-sniffing street kids, there’s a strip of concrete where the city’s faded colonial grandeur is violently interrupted by a modern high-rise. It was once home of the Parade Bar, a watering hole known for its velvety red interiors, its Orientalist paintings depicting half-nude Nubians and its illustrious clientele. Among its regulars was one Jane Auer Bowles, an extravagant woman of elfin physique who, by the end of her days, had taken to wearing a conspicuous wig. To many of the locals, she was magnouna, the crazy one. At the Parade, where she drank herself into a stupor most nights, she was said to have stripped naked on more than one occasion. Few knew she was a writer. She was rumored to have published one novel, in her 20s, and to have never produced much of anything again.
Jane Bowles died in 1973 at the age of 56. The outlandish biographical details are irresistible, and yet they cast a heavy shadow over the work. In the years since her death, Bowles, who was married to Paul Bowles, the author of “The Sheltering Sky,” has been reduced to an eccentric, dipsomaniacal sideshow — a footnote to histories of the Beats, a favorite ancestor for select lesbians and the discerning absurdist. The Library of America’s publication of her collected works stands to introduce the author’s crooked, sui generis prose to a new generation of readers.
“A fey sort of person who works just as hard at her lunacies as the rest of us do trying to keep on the mundane side.” This is how one of Jane Bowles’s cousins described her to Millicent Dillon, the editor of the Library of America collection. People who met Bowles inevitably came away with an indelible sense of her strangeness and charm.
Alice B. Toklas said Bowles was “not surprisingly like her novel.” The novel, of course, was “Two Serious Ladies,” a tale of two bourgeois women who go seriously off-piste, seeking spiritual salvation in the lowbrow and louche. While Miss Goering trades her stately home for a gloomy shack and is delighted to be taken for a lunatic, Mrs. Copperfield ditches her husband for a young Caribbean prostitute. The heroines were a composite of Jane herself, who had been born into a respectable Long Island family but chafed at her milieu’s prohibitions.
When “Two Serious Ladies” was published in 1943, readers were baffled. Bowles was heartbroken and didn’t produce all that much after; the Library of America collection includes a smattering of short stories, fragments and letters. But it does encapsulate a kooky universe featuring a cast of misfits and visionaries who are out of touch, out of style. (She once complained of Carson McCullers: “Her freaks aren’t real.”)
Above all, Bowles was a dizzyingly original stylist, and the texture of her writing and her dialogue in particular — staccato, self-confidently awkward — is unmistakably her own. “You have a very special type of beauty,” a fellow tells Miss Goering in “Two Serious Ladies”; “a bad nose, but beautiful eyes and hair. It would please me in the midst of all this horror to go to bed with you.” Bowles the letter-writer is also a pleasure, a leaky faucet whose correspondence reveals her famous equivocation and her demonic wit (“I find myself staring at my writing materials from the couch as though they were ‘Nazis,’” she once wrote to a friend).
In 1948, she moved to Tangier, drawn to the city’s odd-fangled customs, and in particular to Cherifa, a handsome peasant woman with “a laugh like a savage,” according to Paul Bowles. Gaining Cherifa’s affections became her central obsession — the Bowleses, though devoted, slept with others — and, not unlike one of her own questing characters, she wrote of feeling she was “on the edge of something.” She also wrote of her growing anguish over her inability to write. Tangier “was good for Paul, but not good for me,” she said. But she insisted it was where she had to be. In a short story called “East Side: North Africa,” the narrator runs her finger along a wall in an unnamed Arab town: “I remember that once I reached out to touch the beautiful and powdery face of a clown because his face had awakened some longing; it happened at a little circus but not when I was a child.”
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