Oliver Sacks, David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max, Joyce Carol Oates, C.K. Williams: A morning spent reading

I had time, just now, that quiet time, of reading the magazines that came in last week.  Oh, the stolen deliciousness of it all.  In The New Yorker, I read of Oliver Sacks on his years dedicated, in large part, to experimenting with large doses of amphetamines, morning-glory seeds, LSD, morphine, and all other manner of neuro-shifters.  I thought of all the Sacks I have read these many years, of the seeming innocence of his beguiling childhood memoir, Uncle Tungsten:  Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, of his great empathy for patients and ferns and other earthly beings. His New Yorker essay delves, skips, and buries time before it rushes, headlong, toward its hard stop.  Sacks had discovered a book on migraines and it had become important to him.  He had a revelation about migraines.  He ...

... had a sense of resolution, too, that I was indeed equipped to write a Liveing-like book, that perhaps I could be the Liveing of our time.

The next day, before I returned Liveing's book to the library, I photocopied the whole thing, and then, bit by bit, I started to write my own book.  The joy I got from doing this was real—infinitely more substantial than the vapid mania of amphetamines—and I never took amphetamines again.

Writing books, Sacks suggests, saved him.  The next story I read, an excerpt from D.T. Max's much heralded biography of David Foster Wallace (in Newsweek), suggests how writing would and would not save this genius.  The excerpt, which focuses on Wallace's early correspondence with Jonathan Franzen as well as his infatuation with Mary Karr, suggests that this book is well worth reading as a whole.  I've always been a huge D.T. Max fan, and I'm certain I will learn from these pages.

In between the Sacks and the Wallace, I found two poems of interest.  Joyce Carol Oates has a chilling, compelling poem in The New Yorker called "Edward Hopper's '11 A.M.,' 1926"—worth reading from beginning to end.  Oates was one of several authors who contributed to one of my favorite poetry collections (a gift from my sister) called The Poetry of Solitude:  A Tribute to Edward Hopper (collected and introduced by Gail Levin). Clearly this project, all these years later, continues to inspire.

Finally, within the pages of this week's New Yorker is a poem by C.K. Williams, one of my favorite living poets.  I had the great pleasure and privilege, years ago, of interviewing C.K. in his Princeton home for a magazine story.  Later, I saw him read at the Writer's House at Penn.  He remains vital, interesting, experimental, and honest, and his new poem, "Haste," is a terrifying portrait of time.  From its later phrases:

No one says Not so fast now not Catherine when I hold her not our dog as I putter behind her
yet everything past present future rushes so quickly through me I've frayed like a flag

Unbuckle your spurs life don't you know up ahead where the road ends there's an abyss? ... 

My first corporate interview isn't until 1 this afternoon.  I'm sitting down to read Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.  I figure it's time.


(That above, by the way, is my cat Colors, who lived with me for many years.  She's climbing into my bedroom window.  I'm eleven or twelve years old.  And I'm reading on my bed as she pokes her pink nose in.)

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it's only one life: advancing the old IQ

If I did not want to spend most of the day discovering whether my son's very swollen ankle is broken (thank goodness; it does not appear to be), I did try to make the best of it.  Time together is, after all, time together, and lost days are not retrievable.

I had this week's Newsweek with me as the three of us traveled from waiting at the doctor's office to waiting at the hospital.  Its Sharon Begley cover story:  "31 Ways to Get Smarter—Faster."  Its premise?  IQ is elastic; it can be advanced.

I quote:  "According to a groundbreaking study published this fall in Nature, IQ can rise by a staggering 21 points over four years—or fall by 18."

Oh, yes.  I forgot to mention.  IQ can also fall.

While we waited for our son's name to be called, we reviewed the full list of IQ advancers:  Play word puzzles with friends.  Get news from Al Jazeera.  Go to a literary festival.  Build a "Memory Palace."  Learn a language.  Wipe the smile off your face (!).  Eat yogurt.  See a Shakespeare play.  Hydrate.  Visit MOMA.  Drink red wine (in moderation) and eat dark chocolate.

Sleep.  A lot.

Toss your Smartphone.

Write in long hand.

And did I mention dance? 

So much of this is common sense.  So many of these things I already do.  But convictions grow while sitting in a hospital surrounded by people whose circumstances are far worse than one's own.  The misplaced New Year's resolution comes into sharper focus.  And besides, I cannot afford to lose a single IQ point.  It would be nice to acquire a few.

I had been thinking about ways to rearrange my life; we talked about that while we waited.  I have yearned for a quieter path—one less noisy with obligation.  I want fewer distractions, stiller waters.  It seems to me that spending less time on this computer and more time with pen and paper will help me get there.  It seems important to know who my friends are—my true friends—and to spend my time with them, on them.  It seems appropriate to leave my phone at home more often or, at least, to ignore the unessential messages until they become essential; some of them, amazingly, never actually do.  It seems about time for me to finally learn my husband's language—Spanish—so that I can speak to my mother-in-law after her own fashion.  It seems that I do just have to say no sometimes—and hope that others will understand.  And if they don't, if they need more than I can give—it seems appropriate to be okay with that.

It's a new year.  It's only one life.

I wasn't the only one who sat there thinking.

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"The Most Useless College Degrees"

I didn't make that title up. I borrowed it from this week's Newsweek, which I scanned while in the midst of numerous afternoon errands. It's a brief little blip, apparently provided by The Daily Beast. It doesn't make me happy. Indeed, it makes me wonder. For it is, apparently, equally useless to be a writer, to grow our food, to design our clothes, to take care of our children, to make sure we and others eat sensibly, and to sing.

I quote in full:

10 Majors That Don't Pay

(taking into account career salary levels and the numbers of jobs available):

1. Journalism
2. Horticulture
3. Agriculture
4. Advertising
5. Fashion design
6. Child and family studies
7. Music
8. Mechanical-engineering technology
9. Chemistry
10. Nutrition

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Unconscious thought (for the writers among us)

While waiting for the dentist, a different issue of Newsweek on my lap, I encounter something that I have long known to be true for me (but hey, I just thought I was weird).  I walk away from the computer to dream or write.  I check no emails, don't carry my phone.  I seek, and nurture, a deliberate fogginess, retreating to a far somewhere before I allow myself to think about the story or sentence at hand.  Some people think I am sleeping.  I understand that I'm not.  I can't write unless I enter this fog state first.  It's the most peaceful—and productive—place that I go.

But don't take it from me.  This from a Sharon Begley story titled "I Can't Think," in the March 7 issue of Newsweek:

Creative decisions are more likely to bubble up from a brain that applies unconscious thought to a problem, rather than going at it in a full-frontal analytical assault.  So while we're likely to think creative thoughts in the shower, it's much harder if we're under a virtual deluge of data.  "If you let things come at you all the time, you can't use additional information to make a creative leap or a wise judgment," says [Joanne] Cantor (author of Conquer Cyber Overload).  "You need to pull back from the constant influx and take a break."  That allows the brain to subconsciously integrate new information with existing knowledge and thereby make novel connections and see hidden patterns....

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What makes a woman brave? How does a woman shake the world?

Between meetings, I sat at a client's office with the March 14 issue of Newsweek on my lap, studying its remarkable center spread:  "150 Women Who Shake the World."  "They are heads of state and heads of household," the story begins.  "Angry protesters in the city square and sly iconoclasts in remote villages.  With a fiery new energy, women are building schools.  Starting businesses.  Fighting corruption...."

The pages that follow tell stories—feature heroines—we women can be proud of.  Chouchou Namegabe is here, honored for her radio documentation of an epidemic of rapes in Congo.  Sharon Cooper, for her studies of the brain development of trafficked girls.  Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, as Africa's first female head of state.  Salma Hayek, for her worldwide travels on behalf of maternal health.  Valerie Boyer, for her fight against eating disorders. Amy Gutmann, from my own University of Pennsylvania.  Shakira for her Barefoot Foundation, started when she was just 18 (it says here) to open schools in Colombia, Haiti, and South Africa.  Mia Farrow for not letting us forget Darfur.  Elizabeth Smart, the kidnapping survivor who has become an advocate for victims.  Rebecca Lolosoli of Kenya, who "persuaded women in her village to start a business selling their intricate traditional beadwork to tourists.  Then she encouraged them to form a separate village as both a tourist attraction and a refuge for victims of domestic violence and girls fleeing female genital mutilation or forced marriage."

Get this issue, if you can.  Look at what women can do—at what happens when they stand up on behalf of others and seek a greater, calming good.  And then, if you have a moment, check out page 79.  That's where my friend Caroline Leavitt's book, Pictures of You, is featured as a Jodi Picoult Pick.  

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Brain training through ballroom dance

I've been a big Sharon Begley fan for years now, and so when I saw that she had written a feature Newsweek story titled "Can You Build a Better Brain?" (January 10 and 17, 2011) I flipped the pages and settled in.

After reviewing all the things that don't have any proven tie to enhanced brain intelligence (those vitamins, the Mediterranean diet, statins, ibuprofen), Begley begins to center in on things that are known to help—exercise, meditation, and complex videogames.  You have to read the whole article to get the complete and utter gist, but I'm going to quote from the paragraph that made me happiest of all:

... taking up a new, cognitively demanding activity—ballroom dancing, a foreign language—is more likely to boost processing speed, strengthen synapses, and expand or create functioning networks.

Ballroom dancing—did you see that folks?  It ain't just about the glitter and the gloves.

Speaking, however, of glitter and gloves, that gorgeous woman in the photograph here is our own Cristina, of DanceSport Academy, whose little Eva is turning two this month.  If learning the rumba doesn't keep us young, this wondrous sprite of a child is bound to do the trick.

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Must writers be likable? Does it help if they are? And who the heck am I?

Ask anyone who knows me well:  I have my flaws.  Here I am, for example, with my impatient face on, waiting for a berry to ripen.  Not any old berry, mind you, but the berry I want, which is taking its time in the sun.  (I may indeed be insulting the berry for its stubbornness, quietly, beneath my snappish tongue.)

Would my handful of very kind readers read me less (to continue) if they knew that:

• I combine the impossible traits of seeking perfection, impatiently?
• I write long books that become short books because so many of my original sentences are preposterously bad?
• I want to be writing, I want to be finished writing, I want to be writing again?
• (to be clear:  I'm inconsistent)?
• I fall asleep during the runway portion of every single "Project Runway" show?
• I create bullet lists pummeled by non-sequiturs (but not when clients are watching)?
• I love animals and own no animals, which is to say:  I'm a neat freak who remains inconsistent?
• I am mindlessly and heedlessly improperly punctuating this bullet list of flaws, because I think — no, perhaps I presume — that since it's my blog I have a right to do so?

These are among the issues that Jennie Yabroff does not exactly hit on in her Newsweek essay, "The Man We Knew Too Much," her thought-provoking essay on Jonathan Frazen, a man, she writes, who has critics praising his new book, Freedom, "without letting their feelings about the seemingly insufferably self-important writer color their views."  Will readers, she wonders, be as kind?

... the Internet has exposed writers to a level of personal scrutiny formerly reserved for pop stars and teen idols, making it difficult to separate how you feel about an author's personal life from how you respond to his work, despite your best efforts to read the writing, not the writer.  Gawker opines on which writers are "book hot," while publishing blogs report not just on how much authors receive for their books but also how they spend the money.

Yabroff is right, of course—it is difficult not to see, or to try to parse, the cults of personality now growing up among big-name, big-ticket writers—not just Franzen, but Gaiman, Green, Foer, Collins, and Rowling, to name but a few.  I remain, of course, under the radar, my flaws not subject to widespread discussion, my life not the stuff of Time cover stories or Huffington newsflashes.  But this question is interesting, and I present it to you:  Does what you know about who authors are influence your reading of their books?

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The blogging wither

"Blogging has withered as a pastime, with the number of 18- to 24-year-olds who identify themselves as active bloggers dropping by half between 2006 and 2009," report Tony Dokoupil and Angela Wu in a Newsweek story (August 16, 2010) titled, "Take This Blog and Shove it!  When Utopian Ideals Crash into Human Nature—Sloth Triumphs."  Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr are alive and well, the authors tell us, because they "offer clear benefits to users, including the ability to easily stay in touch with friends, indulge in a game of Mob Wars, share baby pictures, or watch videos of fashion models falling down, in exchange for their time and efforts."  Twitter, meanwhile, with its 50 million tweets a day, seems possessed of many lurkers and is not, apparently, a place where many choose to stick around.  "Between 60 and 70 percent of people who sign up for the 140-character platform quit within a month, according to a recent Nielsen report."

What people are seeking, apparently, is rewards—rewards for building content, rewards for leaving comments, rewards for checking in.  It comes as no surprise, of course, and indeed I've noted, among my blogging friends, a true shift, over the past year, in terms of those who shiver on the doorstep of a blog, and those who come to stay.

Tenacious, stubborn, call me what you will—I'm still hanging out my blogging shingle.  Blogging is no experiment to me, no call for attention, no wanting of rewards.  It is a place where some of my thinking, my photographs, my living lives.  It is a place where I've met you.

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Seeing Past Z, Singapore, and what a difference time makes

Earlier today, while I was crawling my way back onto my feet, I was stopped by a letter originating in Singapore and come to me by way of W.W. Norton, New York City.  A handwritten, many-paged letter from a certain G, who was writing to tell me, among other things, that she had found my fourth book, Seeing Past Z:  Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World, "at the corner of the library where suggested readings and new arrivals are placed—a very prominent place where every visitor would or could see." G went on, then, to tell me her story, about finding faith in the imagination within a country intensely focused on banking and finance.  It is G's story, and I shall not repeat it.  But I kept returning to the impossibility of this little book having made its way across the seas. 

How?

When I published Z with Alane Mason in 2004, we were both swimming upstream, and we knew it.  I was writing about the importance of free time in an era when most children had anything but—when resumes were being finessed at five, and when intra-kid competition ruled (there is only ever number one).  I was writing about the aspiring writers who wrote poems with me or talked Jack London with me or dared each other to listen well to scene-inspiring music.  I was writing about "wisdom over winning," about "contentment over credentials, imagination over conquest, the idiosyncratic point of view over the standard-issue one."

I was writing, it must be said, unpopularly.  I was, among some, considered foolish.

Slow parenting has ebbed in since.  Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman have written, as recently as last week, a Newsweek cover story entitled "The Creativity Crisis."  Many parents have at last taken their kids off the fast track so that the kids could leave tracks of their own.

It is six years and eight books later.  It is me, perpetually ahead of or behind the times, not grabbing headlines, not riding the trend waves, watching books I have loved go remaindered.  It is also, today, G, in a blue-ink letter, on black-lined paper—G from Singapore saying this:  Your words have found their home.

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Bring your Imagination: Alice in Wonderland

I was reading "Rabbit Redux," the Ramin Setoodeh piece in this week's Newsweek.

He was talking about the imagination—those who use it splendidly well—and I was remembering my friend, Cuileann, who is one of the most imaginative people I know (we met in San Francisco, late last summer). Oh, what she does with words and photographs. What she does with heart.

So I was thinking about her, and then I kept reading, and I was thinking about my own book about the imagination (Seeing Past Z: Nurturing the Imagination in a Fast-Forward World) and then I thought, I wonder what my blogger friends would say about these thoughts Mr. Setoodeh is expressing? So I put them out there, for your comments:

"The only way to understand Alice is to use your imagination. Do you even remember how to do that? In our society of Web links, Wikipedia, Facebook, and reality TV, everything and everybody comes with a label and an exhaustive definition. There's scant room for ambiguity and interpretation. The genius of the 145-year-old Wonderland is that it forces you to bring your own creative juices to the tea party....

"Compare Wonderland with the great children's stories of our time: the Harry Potter series. As inventive as J.K. Rowling's seven books are, they're meticulously detailed (the intricate rules of Quidditch, the class rituals at Hogwarts, all the wizard paraphernalia) to the point of being encyclopedic, which is why the movies work as well as they do—they're road maps of the plot."

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Write What You Want, Open Your Own Doors

Lovers of books, buy the July 13th issue of Newsweek (a magazine that has lately been looking so smart, so right in its new designer threads). The editors have called this issue "What to Read Now," and there's no mere lip service to books paid here. This is the real thing, with articles titled "What to Read Now. And Why." (which lists The Elegance of the Hedgehog and Brooklyn among the top 50!!!), "The Write Stuff," "Best Books Ever," "Now, Read it Again," The Reluctant Poet Laureate," "My Favorite Covers," and "Homer & Langley: An exclusive (E.L. Doctorow) excerpt."

Readers of this blog know that I'm a huge fan of Olive Kitteridge, and that I had the privilege of seeing Elizabeth Strout read from this Pulitzer winner not long ago, and of speaking with her for a spell. She's one of the interviewees in this Newsweek issue, and what she has to say—not just about how hard writing is, but how essential— is worth the price of the magazine.

But there are also these pristine words from Lawrence Block. What Block expresses here is a notion in which I, too, have put my faith. My first book was rejected by the house that had stated, unequivocably, that it had plans to buy it, because, the house marketing team reported, it would never sell (and then it did). FLOW, my autobiography of a river, was considered unsalable; a university press took it on, and that book changed my life in Philadelphia. I write literary novels for young adult readers that are devoid of vampires and salacious details; somehow or other (that somehow being the blog community), those books still find their readers.

It can, in other words, be done. Lawrence Block:

"...I think the less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do. The enormous mistake a lot of young writers make is that they want to know what people want."

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Love Equals Money ?

No doubt this will make me unpopular. Certainly I've been unpopular before.

But.

I'm hearing a lot these days about folks out of work and about the impact of such losses on family, on love. I'm feeling the quiet out there and also the quiet within, where work at my own marketing communications firm has slowed considerably and projects that were once sure things have been thrown off of their tracks. I get worry. I get wondering what tomorrow will bring. I get sitting down at 4 AM with the finances and the taxes and the bills and jiggering things around to make the many pieces fit. Simpler meals, more carefully made. Shoes worn until the soles are left behind on the pave. A house that feels emptier as less comes in—but also roomier, perhaps, also more accommodating.

But what I don't get (and here's where you start to hate me) is the level of animosity I'm finding, in some places, toward those who have lost their jobs. Spouses furious with spouses. Disappointments stomped out in public. Quotes like this one, found today in a Newsweek story titled, "Men Will Be Men:" When money goes, love flies out the window. Spoken by an interviewed man clearly living a whole lot of char and hurt.

Does it have to be this way? Must love be contingent on funds? Can't love also be the time that is spent just being together, finding a way? We're not going to get these days back. Not ever. Can we really put love on hold until the coins start clattering in?

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Taking Control

"Stress Could Save Your Life," this week's issue of Newsweek heralds on its cover, and I sit down to read just how. I read the theories about how stress spikes adrenaline and after that comes cortisol and how in the presence of both muscles are flooded with energy, and not only that, but the brain grows sharper—more sensed up, more survival primed. Turn on that "stress-hormone switch" at the right time, and you might just go super hero when you need a dose of super hero. (Leave that switch on, however, and damage gets done.) Pregnant women who are stressed may be giving birth to babies with better-stimulated brains. Stress may help us solve more problems, faster.

It all comes down to control, apparently. "...if we feel we're in control, we cope," Mary Carmichael, the story's author, says. "If we don't, we collapse." The key to now, Carmichael says, is determining "what parts of our future we can control" and "engag(ing) with them thoughtfully."

I'm all for that. I have, in fact, been discovering, in these tricky times, the outright power of dreaming small dreams bigly (and of making up words, because it's my blog, and I can). Of recomposing my idea of the perfect day. Of taking the time to do things that I had to hurry past before. I can control how I watch the sky, how I fashion meals, how I arrange the day. I can count as an achievement a cleaned-out closet or a page of prose that perhaps no one but myself will read. I can say to my friends, Join me in this, and be happy when they do, and I can hold these things as central even as all that I can't control spins on—the fate of books I write, the status quo with clients, the headlines that keep blaring.

I can't fix most of what is wrong out there (or any of it, frankly). But I can make it a point not to add to the problem—to be lighter on my feet, to ask for little, to give more. I can use the stresses of now to my advantage, and I will try. I don't see that we have another choice.

(Oh, and for the record, I wasn't driving when I took this photo. Imagine the stress I'd have added to the world if I'd been.)

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Juarez: The Failed State?

The cover line of the current issue of Newsweek reads "How to Fix the World," and so I opened the magazine with hope. Desperate hope, of course, for aren't we all in need of true, good stories—proof that we have what it takes, somehow, to right our planetary wrongs, to be trustworthy caretakers of Country Earth.

But the first article I fell upon blared at me with this headline: "Bloodshed on the Border: Life in Juarez, where drug violence has created the equivalent of a failed state on our doorstep." The border between El Paso and Juarez is the most menacing spot along America's southern underbelly, I read. Juarez looks a lot like a failed state, with no government entity capable of imposing order and a profusion of powerful organizations that kill and plunder at will. Later: The absence of authority has opened the way for hordes of criminal gangs—some of them offshoots of the cartels; others, bands of opportunistic street thugs—to carve out specific rackets, like kidnapping, human trafficking, and car theft. Another burgeoning activity is extortion.

The more I read, the sadder, more desperate I became. For this is Juarez of which Arian Campo-Flores and Monica Campbell write—the country where, just three years ago, I along with my husband, son, and about two dozen others, had the week we will never forget. A week living among the gracious people of Juarez. A week helping to build a community bathroom on the high, white sand plateau of a squatter's village called Anapra. A week where we felt as if our actions, our doing, our seeing, meant something.

Yes, at the time, Juarez had its share of problems—a history riddled with the unaccountable, unforgivable murder of women, an economy that was afflicted with drug trade. But every country, every city, has its underworld of menace, and in Juarez, we didn't just discover an entire community of gorgeous children and caring parents and construction workers who waved happily at us from their trucks or from rooftops. We discovered group after group of American citizens who were building houses, or providing care, or teaching children. Americans who had found an undeniable, irreplaceable happiness in Juarez.

There were thousands of us finding meaning in Juarez. And an uncountable number of Juarez citizens yielding goodness to us.

In The Heart is Not a Size, due out next winter, I write about this place that I came to love. I allude to the children I met and photographed, to the power of working in the hot sun on behalf of others. I refuse to believe that all is now lost in Juarez. I will pray that Juarez is webbed into the emerging plan to "fix" this world in which we live.

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The Grapes of Wrath and The Trouble with Prosperity

I have taken The Grapes of Wrath down from the shelf, and I am reading about that other great devastation that we as a country found ourselves in. Tom Joad and his woes. Dust like a dry, dirty cloud that has fallen and stayed. The pitch of power against the laboring masses. Uncertainty, heartache, panic.

Newsweek has a Robert J. Samuelson column this week called "Good Times Breed Bad Times." It begins by recalling the James Grant book The Trouble with Prosperity, summarizing it this way: "Grant's survey of financial history captured his crusty theory of economic predestination. If things seem splendid, they will get worse. Success inspires overconfidence and excess. If things seem dismal, they will get better. Crisis spawns opportunity and progress. Our triumphs and follies follow a rhythm that, though it can be influenced, cannot be repealed."

I never read The Trouble with Prosperity, but I have modulated my life according to its thesis—choosing that safe middle ground, buying a house with two bedrooms because, well, we only needed two, and putting nearly every dollar I made or had against the mortgage and my son's college fund. I live on the vaunted Main Line of Philadelphia (where gardens and farms still loll between trees, where the schools are good, where the communities are fine), and my decisions have frankly often set me apart. Smallified me, if you will. I lost a friend because of what I would not buy, because of what I did not have. She stopped inviting me to her parties.

I have, I realized, lived my literary life the same way. I have said no to TV and film adaptations of my nonfiction, shutting the door to some version of income and notoriety (but also, I thought and still think, opening the door to peace of mind). I have sought the right editor above the right advance in every case save for that of my second book, when I was enticed to go with a house that ultimately did not care about my future as a writer. Lesson learned. Mistake not to be repeated. All I've ever wanted as a writer is the chance to publish again, the chance to commune with other readers and writers, a reason to keep writing. I have wanted, desperately, sometimes consumingly, the editorial yes, we will publish this and you, and even now, 11 books in, it's not so easy.

Yesterday, reading the magnificent introduction to the Penguin Classics version of Steinbeck's book, I came upon these words from Steinbeck, which seem both timeless to me and extremely prescient. They are about writing, yes, but they are also about the way we live our lives, about the need, perhaps, not to want overly much. To be satisfied.

"I have always wondered why no author has survived a best-seller. Now I know. The publicity and fan-fare are just as bad as they would be for a boxer. One gets self-conscious and that's the end of one's writing."

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Anne of Green Gables: Reprise

Smart was always cool for Anne of GG. She liked big words and rapturous monologues. She dared to dream out loud. And now that she's turning 100 years old, she's precipitating all kinds of celebrations—and talk. She even scored herself a spread in this week's Newsweek, and there's a line or two inside that story that has a lot of bloggers blogging. That quote, for example, from AGG scholar Trinna Frever about the "literary smart girl" serving primarily as "sidekick" in today's YA books for girls. That sentence (also Frever) about a culture that treats "intelligence as a stigmatized quality." That pull-quote that blasts the headline right out there: "That Anne has survived so long is a miracle considering the state of young-adult literature."

I sat on my deck last night reading Ramin Setoodeh's story and pondering again the teen girls I have known—their blazing, undaunted, unembarrassed intelligence. I was thinking, too, about K., that young man who is writing poems that break my heart (and letting me read them, now and again), and how I can't ever help but be inspired by these young souls. Every novel I have written and am writing for teens has a smart, language-loving center, a heroine who studies the world and weighs her words and can't stop herself from thinking. Every novel imagines as its reader the young people I have known.

Charlotte, thank you so very, very much for your exquisite, touching post.

http://charlotteslibrary.blogspot.com/

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Teen Readers

I was happy to read about the vitality and intelligence of this generation of teen readers in a recent Newsweek article (http://www.newsweek.com/id/136961), but I wasn't the least surprised. I workshopped with young readers for years; I saw their yearning. I heard their questions and stood nearby as they read well and wrote wisely. The teen readers I've come across are gloriously committed, smart, big-hearted. They're the type of people you want around when you've stumbled across some new lit passage you've got to love out loud.

Then there was this thing that happened the other day. I've had this high school student—I'll call him K—reading and writing with me this month, which is to say that he comes, we talk, I suggest some titles, xerox some poems, send him out into the world with a camera and pen, then wait to see what happens when he stops by again. A couple of weeks ago, I asked him to read Colum McCann's ZOLI. Next time we met, he said he hadn't. Well, yes, sure, I was disappointed. I'd wanted McCann for K, for K's sake, but I didn't bark, I just asked why. Why not ZOLI? Because, K said, he'd had Camus to read.

Camus?

For my book club.

Your book club?

Yeah. It's a bunch of us. We get together every week and talk.

So it was Camus last week. It'll be Orwell next week. Chances are they'll move on to Russian novels. It's classics, is what I'm saying, and no teachers, no parents are involved. These are high school seniors on the verge of the rest of their lives, getting together for books on Tuesdays, because it's fun, because it's good and right.

All hail the next generation.

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The Death of Photography? The Rise of Newsvine.

A recent Newsweek article asks the question, "Is photography dead?"—asks whether, in the words of writer Peter Plagens, "the entire medium hasn't fractured itself beyond all recognition." It is possible, Plagens goes on to say, that the medium (now so digitally ripe, so easily manipulated) has lost its soul, lost touch with truth. Says Plagens: "The next great photographers—if there are to be any—will have to find a way to reclaim photography's special link to reality. And they'll have to do it in a brand-new way."

I bought a new camera recently, and it's one incredible piece of equipment. I didn't read a novel last week because I was reading the manual instead, and every time I think that I've got one of the functions down, I trip up against another button and wonder what it does. In the end, however, I want the same thing from this camera that I have wanted from any camera, including the little pin-hole oatmeal carton version I made in elementary school. I want to preserve things. I want to be able to study—at length, later—something that I've only glimpsed at in real time. I only want the truth from my images, but I know that that does not mean that I have necessarily captured soul. No function button is going to give me that. Only my ability to bear witness. (I'm still working on that; I'll always be working on that.)

On another topic altogether (but one that feels related), I was interviewed by Scott Butki last week, about two recent books, UNDERCOVER and ZENOBIA. Over the course of the interview, I learned a little something about what Scott does with his Newsvine, and it's fascinating. "Newsvine is a place with more than 100 writers writing about everything from the best current music to suggesting drinking games for the election debates to talking sports," he explains about this site, which was bought three months ago by MSNBC. In addition to interviewing fascinating people such as Roger Ebert, Robert Parker, Mary Higgins Clark, and Stewart Copeland of the Police, Scott himself writes frequently about media ethics and (at this very moment) the writers' strike.

In any case, as one who can barely figure out how to embed links into her own blog (wait, that's right, I haven't figured that out yet, despite the best efforts of my friend Nettie Hartsock and the incredible blogger Toby Bloomberg), I'm very impressed with what Scott has created and grateful to him for including me in the process. You can visit Newsvine at http://sbutki.newsvine.com/.

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