you can do it on just three hours a day

"... three hours a day is all that's needed to write successfully. Writing is turning time into language, and all good writers have an elaborate, fetishistic relationship to their working hours. Writers talking about time are like painters talking about unprimed canvas and pigments. (Nor is there anything philistine about writers talking money. Inside the ballroom at the PEN banquet, it's all freedom and dignity; outside, it's all advances.)"

Adam Gopnik, "Trollope Trending," New Yorker, May 4, 2015

Read more...

reflections on smart, attractive people

When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; that they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up.

Adam Gopnik, "Facing History: Why we Love Camus," New Yorker, April 9, 2012

(For the record: In my travels, I have met many people who are both gorgeous and smart. Some of them are even my friends. But I did find this assertion by Gopnik in a truly fine essay about Camus to be, well, I think the term is bold.)

Read more...

new additions to my library

When my American Express bill came in this past month, something odd and spectacularly unprecedented occurred: I owed a mere ninety-nine cents.  True, I have been so holed up here, so focused on work, that I've been operating as a blinkered horse, my eyes on the finish line (s), my mind shutting out all purchase-able distractions.  Also true: Except when it comes to buying gifts (I buy many, many gifts) I have never been exactly profligate.  Malls drive me batty.  Excess crowds me in.  My decorating aesthetic is whatever lies between homey and uncluttered, warm and just enough.  My wardrobe features three pairs of jeans, some turtlenecks, some sweaters/coats, an occasional skirt, and some dresses, for when I have to wear dresses.  My mother used to buy me my most interesting, most meaningful clothes.  She passed away several years ago, and I never rose to the challenge.

(I do like shoes.  By my count, I have too many shoes.)

Still, what I do buy is books—I buy a lot of books—in support of an industry, in specific support of specific authors.  Thus, I rectified my no-buying spree yesterday by adding a number of titles to my personal library, all of them, I realize, falling into the nonfiction camp.  That's nonfiction the way I define it, and not the way John D'Agata wishes I would.  (For more on the D'Agata controversy, I suggest you read the Gideon Lewis-Kraus RIFF in the New York Times.) 

Among the titles that will (at one point) be reported on here are the following:

Rough Likeness: Essays (Lia Purpura)
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Edwidge Danticat)
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity (Katherine Boo)
Winter: Five Windows on the Season (Adam Gopnik)
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Anthony Shadid)
Istanbul: Memories and the City (Orhan Pamuk)
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist (Orhan Pamuk)

Read more...

prison talk, continued

Last week I commented on Adam Gopnik's compelling New Yorker piece on prison life and silence.  In the wake of that post I received several notes, many off-line, regarding the state of justice or injustice in our country.  

Christopher Glazek, senior editor of n+1 magazine, was among those whose notes entered my e-bin.  He had just posted his own story on prison life—or, I should say, prison terror—and wanted to share it with me—a different perspective, he said in his e-mail, but one I might find intriguing.  Well-researched and deeply tragic, "Raise the Crime Rate" makes a radical suggestion, one that I can't imagine this country ever ultimately adopting.  But it often takes an extreme suggestion for us to reconsider the known facts, and Glazek's piece isolates some very real stories and statistics that should make us think harder about how we care for those behind bars.

Before I posted a link to Glazek's piece, I wanted to watch "Mario's Story," an artistically hailed documentary that turns the lens on Mario Rocha, a young man imprisoned for ten years for a crime all evidence suggests he did not commit.  He was sixteen when he attended a party at which another was shot.  He was a man—stabbed multiple times while he waited for justice—by the time he was released.  This cannot be the United States, I kept thinking, as I watched the film.  This is utter outrage.  And yet.  For ten years Rocha remained in jail and at great personal risk until someone in the judicial system actually listened.

Rocha's story is rare.  His release was predicated on the ceaseless dedication of a nun, on a team of pro bono workers, on a large family of supporters, on a church, and on all the people who knew he was innocent and spoke out on his behalf to investigators who sought to bend their words.  It was also predicated on his own character and talents; while incarcerated Rocha became and is a very capable writer. 

There are no easy solutions when it comes to crime and punishment.  My mother's life was radically redefined by a cruel and senseless violence.  As a young person in a far-away place, I was a victim myself.  Just yesterday a gang of kids broke into both our cars and stole what they could take—quarters, dollar bills, nothing much.  Still, it left me shaken.


I don't have answers.  But I am grateful to those who do not forget those made invisible in a system now gone awry.  A system that often hurts the prisoners more than they ever hurt another in the first place.  Watch "Mario's Story" or read Glazek.  You'll see what I mean.

Read more...

Adam Gopnik on prison silence

My tremendous respect for Adam Gopnik, a New Yorker staff writer, is well known by readers of this blog.  Gopnik seems preternaturally equipped to take on any topic and make it both new and compelling.  He astonishes me with his breadth and depth—writing gloriously, absolutely, but never sacrificing idea to style.

This week Gopnik has a New Yorker essay entitled "The Caging of America:  Why do we lock up so many people?"  He's talking about process, procedure, and principles here.  He is raising the twin issues of common sense and compassion.  He is suggesting, among other things, that "the scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life."  He is reporting that, for example, more than four hundred teens are serving life sentences in Texas, and that "more than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives."  He continues: "Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850."

We have to think harder, after reading this story.  We have to investigate our personal prison politics.  We have to read again, and imagine: 

That's why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling.  Time stops.  A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded.

Read more...

My interview with Pamela Paul, the NYT children's book editor

We'd been in London until late last night, celebrating the christening of this enormously special little boy.  Among the packages we'd carried with us was this beguiling deluxe pop-up version of The Little Prince, the Antoine de Saint-Exupery story that has never lost its magical glean. (We also brought Felix The Man in the Moon, the gorgeous new book by William Joyce.)

Pamela Paul, who was named the fifth children's book editor at the The New York Times earlier this year, has an innate understanding of the importance of books made for children and has radically transformed their coverage since taking on the role.  I began to notice the changes some time around April.  The conversation was deepening.  The reportage was growing broader.  There was more children's book talk, not just on the weekend, but during the week.  Melissa Walker was having her New York Times Book Review moment.  We were being treated to behind-the-scenes conversations that I found frankly thrilling. There were more back-page essays exploring the influence of early books on readers.  Who, I wondered, was behind all this? What magic was she working behind the scenes?  What else could the rest of us expect to see as the weeks and months went on?

A few weeks ago, Pamela Paul graciously agreed to a conversation about this and more for Publishing Perspectives.  I'm honored today to share that conversation with you and to suggest that our future is in extraordinary hands.

To read my other pieces for Publishing Perspectives, please click on these links:

Success is when the world returns your faith:  My conversation with editor Lauren Wein

Between Shades of Gray:  The Making of an International Bestseller

Read more...

Learning is a world that we enter: The Phantom Tollbooth at 50

Here I make a plea:  Buy the October 17 issue of The New Yorker.  Turn to page 30, the piece titled "Broken Kingdom:  Fifty years of The Phantom Tollbooth," by Adam Gopnik. Find a nice chair. Sit. Read.

I love this story.  I love the idea of it, the execution of it, the knowing that one gains from it.  Who were these two men—Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer—who gave us this classic?  What was in their minds and hearts as they wrote and drew?  How did the book not end up on the remainder table?  What does it all mean?

You'll get answers to those questions.  You'll get Adam Gopnik himself, whom I love to read.  And in between you'll let lines like these, which should set you up in fine, fine style for this autumnal weekend:

What Milo discovers is that math and literature, Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, should assume their places not under the pentagon of Purpose and Power but under the presidency of Rhyme and Reason.  Learning isn't a set of things that we know but a world that we enter.

Read more...

Pamela Paul and Adam Gopnik talk about children's books and the people who review them

The New York Times Book Review has lately been doing an extraordinary job of celebrating books written for children and young adults.  There's more coverage.  There's a greater sense of context.  There's the feeling that all of this matters greatly.  

Take a look at the upcoming Pamela Paul essay on the back page—she's talking about Sendak, Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, and rule breaking.  Listen, then, if you have the time, to the podcast slipped in alongside the story.  In it Adam Gopnick and Pamela Paul discuss, among other things, the ideal reviewer of children's books; what qualifies anyone to have an opinion?  Sam Tannehaus asks good questions.  He elicits some really smart answers.

I just sat here in the dark listening to the recording all the way through.

I'm going to stand up now, feeling heartened.

Read more...

Plant TV

So there I was, waiting for a client call, when I again picked up the latest New Yorker to breeze through "The Talk of the Town."

Oh, I thought, here's Adam Gopnik in a piece called "Bright Ideas/Plant TV."

It begins like this:

"Jonathon Keats—a San Francisco-based experimental philosopher who has, over the years, sold real estate in the extra dimensions of space-time proposed by string theory (he sold a hundred and seventy-two extra-dimensional lots in the Bay Area in a single day); made an attempt to genetically engineer God (God turns out to be related to the cyanobacterium); and copyrighted his own mind (in order to get a seventy-year post-life extension) came to New York a couple of weeks ago to exhibit his latest thought experiment: television for plants."

Television for plants, as we readers who read on discover, is "an extension of an earlier project to make pornography for plants."

I could continue; I will not. I will say only this: Here I sit with a history and sociology of science degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and I have not a single clue what Mr. Keats and Mr. Gopnik are speaking of.

I want my father's money back.

Read more...

Heart Traces

Adam Gopnik's "Man of Fetters: Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale" (Dec. 8 issue of New Yorker) is a work of Gopnik-caliber art, jam-packed with the curious, the rending, and the infinitely quotable.

Take the following truism, for example. Every famous man gets reduced to a single word: Darwin is evolution, Wilde is wit, Mill is liberty, and Johnson is his dictionary. I read it several times. I stopped. I pondered. If I were famous what would I hope my reduction word would be? I came up with absolutely nothing while managing painfully to recall many one-word zingers that have in the past been tossed at me.

But what I really love, what will go inside my book of words and quotes, is Gopnik's final, singing line:

Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.

Read more...