Alan Cheuse's Blog, page 6
January 12, 2015
Robert Stone
A sorrowful thing, to learn of his death.
I will try to write about RS, but not today.
I will try to write about RS, but not today.
January 11, 2015
January 10, 2015
Taste
New story in the current issue of the Chicago Quarterly Review...
Taste
River. River.
I don’t know what could be Jewish about a river, but when I see that word I think about the Raritan, the broad and sluggish, sometimes salty, sometimes bitter Raritan, and those of us born Jewish to Jews clustered in this New Jersey neighborhood, mostly in small, attached houses that ran west to east from the factory and sewer plant for a number of blocks to where the Arthur Kill, flowing down from New York Bay, bled out into Raritan Bay. South to north streets climbed from the river to the main commercial street called Smith. North of Smith Street lay Catholic country where Hungarian and Polish kids ran in clusters, oblivious to our good qualities and wanting only to fight...
Taste
River. River.
I don’t know what could be Jewish about a river, but when I see that word I think about the Raritan, the broad and sluggish, sometimes salty, sometimes bitter Raritan, and those of us born Jewish to Jews clustered in this New Jersey neighborhood, mostly in small, attached houses that ran west to east from the factory and sewer plant for a number of blocks to where the Arthur Kill, flowing down from New York Bay, bled out into Raritan Bay. South to north streets climbed from the river to the main commercial street called Smith. North of Smith Street lay Catholic country where Hungarian and Polish kids ran in clusters, oblivious to our good qualities and wanting only to fight...
January 6, 2015
Back Again
After two weeks on the road--on trains,
airplanes, cars--and four different rooms, back home again at the keyboard. Difficult
to write anything more than notes while traveling. Home, with its familiar backdrop and background noise, allows a writer to conjure up new places within while sitting in one place.
So back again, and working. Or as Kenneth Fearing wrote in a poem, "Pause, and begin again..."
airplanes, cars--and four different rooms, back home again at the keyboard. Difficult
to write anything more than notes while traveling. Home, with its familiar backdrop and background noise, allows a writer to conjure up new places within while sitting in one place.
So back again, and working. Or as Kenneth Fearing wrote in a poem, "Pause, and begin again..."
Descent
Away goes Gone Girl...
Here comes Descent...
a thriller plus....
http://www.npr.org/2015/01/06/3740402...
Here comes Descent...
a thriller plus....
http://www.npr.org/2015/01/06/3740402...
December 20, 2014
New political junket thriller
Interesting combination of thriller and political expose in Case Walker's
"Last Days in Shanghai"
see
http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainme...
"Last Days in Shanghai"
see
http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainme...
December 15, 2014
A Writer's Notebook
I'll never forget standing in line at the passport counter at Rockefeller Center in the spring of 1960 with a man in front of me writing notes in his notebook--literal notes, the man, whom I recognized almost immediately was the then rising jazz giant John Coltrane...who spent the entire twenty minutes in the line composing...though try as I might I couldn't recognize a title, and I couldn't read the melodic line...
Keep a notebook, I always urge my writing students. Painters keep a sketchbook, you should keep a notebook.
In it you can jot down snatches of speech you hear, dialogue that comes to mind, images, titles of prospective stories or novels, you can add to your reading list--the writer reads and reads and reads--Walking across a dusty Spanish street the narrator of Don Quixote notices that the wind has blown a scrap of paper onto his boot, and, addicted to prose, he leans down and reads it...
Right now I've opened to the first page of an early notebook of my own, dated July, 1992, Squaw Valley, California,where I acquired the book in order to make notes for a talk I was scheduled to give at the beginning of the conference. Even on the title page I made a note that said "notes for novel--
"Biography of an Unknown Woman", a novel that I would write soon thereafter but put aside without publishing it--on the first page of the notebook I copied Shakespeare's sonnet "My Mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun..." and on the second page I began to compose in long-hand that talk I had to give, on what I called "The Elusive Question of Form"...The draft of this talk goes on for twenty hand-written pages...(with a copy of D.H.Lawrence's great lyric poem'
"Piano" copied opposite page three...
And then among other things, about fifteen pages of notes and interviews for a piece on Mexican Jews that I was writing for the San Diego Reader, which I eventually published in my collection of travel pieces "A Trance After Breakfast"...
and then a few scattered notes for that novel "Biography of an Unknown Woman"...and ten pages of hand written text of a talk I was invited to give at the ground-breaking of an assisted living facility in Gaithersburg, Maryland...
and some miscellaneous notes for stories
dated from around 1995-1997...
So, nothing really focussed, except for those two talks, but the rest, the titles of stories or brief notes for stories, serve as reminders of what I had been interested in doing at the time,
though the most interesting to me now on just looking over these old notes, is the
title "The Gihon, Flowing Out of Eden",
a little burst of possibility that came to me when I was visiting writer at the then quite new Vermont Studio Center" in Johnson, Vermont...where I stayed for a week, writing and giving talks...while living in the ground floor of the old barn that still stands as this art center's main building, in a bedroom that extended out over the Gihon River which in melting season flows with a great roar that became part of my night time meditation before sleep...though I don't recall any dreams that came of that proximity to such a noisy stream...
All this in one old notebook...
I have filled a few others since then...
Keep a notebook, I always urge my writing students. Painters keep a sketchbook, you should keep a notebook.
In it you can jot down snatches of speech you hear, dialogue that comes to mind, images, titles of prospective stories or novels, you can add to your reading list--the writer reads and reads and reads--Walking across a dusty Spanish street the narrator of Don Quixote notices that the wind has blown a scrap of paper onto his boot, and, addicted to prose, he leans down and reads it...
Right now I've opened to the first page of an early notebook of my own, dated July, 1992, Squaw Valley, California,where I acquired the book in order to make notes for a talk I was scheduled to give at the beginning of the conference. Even on the title page I made a note that said "notes for novel--
"Biography of an Unknown Woman", a novel that I would write soon thereafter but put aside without publishing it--on the first page of the notebook I copied Shakespeare's sonnet "My Mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun..." and on the second page I began to compose in long-hand that talk I had to give, on what I called "The Elusive Question of Form"...The draft of this talk goes on for twenty hand-written pages...(with a copy of D.H.Lawrence's great lyric poem'
"Piano" copied opposite page three...
And then among other things, about fifteen pages of notes and interviews for a piece on Mexican Jews that I was writing for the San Diego Reader, which I eventually published in my collection of travel pieces "A Trance After Breakfast"...
and then a few scattered notes for that novel "Biography of an Unknown Woman"...and ten pages of hand written text of a talk I was invited to give at the ground-breaking of an assisted living facility in Gaithersburg, Maryland...
and some miscellaneous notes for stories
dated from around 1995-1997...
So, nothing really focussed, except for those two talks, but the rest, the titles of stories or brief notes for stories, serve as reminders of what I had been interested in doing at the time,
though the most interesting to me now on just looking over these old notes, is the
title "The Gihon, Flowing Out of Eden",
a little burst of possibility that came to me when I was visiting writer at the then quite new Vermont Studio Center" in Johnson, Vermont...where I stayed for a week, writing and giving talks...while living in the ground floor of the old barn that still stands as this art center's main building, in a bedroom that extended out over the Gihon River which in melting season flows with a great roar that became part of my night time meditation before sleep...though I don't recall any dreams that came of that proximity to such a noisy stream...
All this in one old notebook...
I have filled a few others since then...
December 13, 2014
A new thriller
A thriller I recommend for holiday travel reading....
The Convert's Song by Sebastian Rotella
http://www.npr.org/2014/12/12/3703950...
The Convert's Song by Sebastian Rotella
http://www.npr.org/2014/12/12/3703950...
December 11, 2014
On Stage with Nicholson Baker
On stage at the Miami Book Fair with the gifted witty and experimental novelist Nicholson Baker...This tape just in....
http://video.pbs.org/video/2365384062/ …
http://video.pbs.org/video/2365384062/ …
December 10, 2014
Jose Saramago
http://www.npr.org/2014/12/10/3699024...
Skylight, an early work by the Portuguese Nobel winner, Jose Saramago, lost, then found but suppressed by the author, finally, now, out into the light.
Skylight, an early work by the Portuguese Nobel winner, Jose Saramago, lost, then found but suppressed by the author, finally, now, out into the light.
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