What David Foster Wallace Taught Paul Thomas Anderson

The Paris Review transcribes a recent interview

Paul Thomas Anderson

From The Paris Review:

When I was at Emerson for that year, David Foster Wallace, who was a great writer who was not known then, was my teacher—he was my English teacher … It was the first teacher I fell in love with. I’d never found anybody else like that at any of the other schools I’d been to. Which makes me really reticent to talk shit about schools or anything else, because it’s just like anyplace—if you could find a good teacher, man, I’m sure school would be great.

[...]

I called him once. He was very generous with his phone number. He said “Call me if you got any questions,” and I called him a couple times ... I ran a few ideas by him about this paper that I was writing. I was writing a paper on Don DeLillo’s White Noise … I’d come up with a couple crazy ideas, and I don’t remember the conversation well, but I just remember him being real generous at like, you know, midnight the night before it was due … I’d love to go back and read [White Noise] again. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Port Magazine interviews Paul Thomas Anderson
• Writers: Don DeLillo
• Postcard: David Foster Wallace to Don DeLillo
• David Foster Wallace Symposium

Don DeLillo: BBC Documentary

A 1991 BBC Omnibus documentary, featuring the American writer

Find Don DeLillo on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Don DeLillo
• Don DeLillo reads Mao II
• Don DeLillo on researching Libra
• DeLillo on Mad Men and Writing
• Don DeLillo on Modern Death

50 Tough Books for Extreme Readers

Why read a 'difficult' book?

Alexander Deineka, 'Young Woman Reading' (1934)

Emily Temple (Flavorwire) has compiled a list of '50 Incredibly Tough Books for Extreme Readers'. Their toughness varies from the sheer bulk of the volume (eg. Tolstoy's War and Peace and Stein's The Making of Americans), to their stylistic virtuosity (Finnegans Wake, anyone?). But despite their daunting reputations, there can be something special about reading a 'difficult' book.

Such novels can prompt a unique kind of reader interaction, making us rethink the way we look at the world around us. These are often the sort of books that aim to elevate the everyday, or shed light on issues that society tends to overlook. What we find 'tough' or 'challenging' is often simply unfamiliar, or different to what we might usually expect. What turns our noses to the air in a modernist novel is often its attempt to capture life as it really is: a character speaking in a local dialect, or the disjointed structure of a daydream. In these and other cases, what is difficult is not the book itself, but our decision as readers to go with it.

There are books that we consume, and sometimes there are books that consume us - novels, poems and plays which perpetually pull us back to them. As the filmmaker David Cronenberg once said of Burroughs' Naked Lunch, 'You find your favorite parts, like the I Ching. You look in it when you need it, and you find something there.' Temple has charted a wonderful selection of just this kind of book. Here are just a few of them:

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes (Amazon: US | UK)
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy (Amazon: US | UK)
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville (Amazon: US | UK)
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (Amazon: US | UK)
J R, William Gaddis (Amazon: US | UK)
Finnegans Wake, James Joyce (Amazon: US | UK)
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (Amazon: US | UK)
In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust (Amazon: US | UK)
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs (Amazon: US | UK)
To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (Amazon: US | UK)
The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein (Amazon: US | UK)
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (Amazon: US | UK)
2666, Roberto Bolaño (Amazon: US | UK)
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (Amazon: US | UK)
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon (Amazon: US | UK)
Underworld, Don DeLillo (Amazon: US | UK)
The Unfortunates, B.S. Johnson (Amazon: US | UK)
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Lydia Davis (Amazon: US | UK)
The Tunnel, William Gass (Amazon: US | UK)
Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (Amazon: US | UK)
The Castle, Franz Kafka (Amazon: US | UK)
The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Amazon: US | UK)

[Read the Full List]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Is Modernism Boring?
• 'A House of Life': Anthony Burgess on James Joyce
• Man Ray: Photographs of Virginia Woolf
• Tolstoy: The Greatest Writer of all Time?
• Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'

Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo

A new title from Bloomsbury

James Gourley, Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo

From Bloomsbury:

Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo starts from a simple premise: that the events of the 11th of September 2001 must have had a major effect on two New York residents, and two of the seminal authors of American letters, Pynchon and DeLillo. By examining implicit and explicit allusion to these events in their work, it becomes apparent that both consider 9/11 a crucial event, and that it has profoundly impacted their work. From this important point, the volume focuses on the major change identifiable in both author's work; a change in the perception, and conception, of time. This is not, however, a simple change after 2001. It allows, at the same time, a re-examination of both authors work, and the acknowledgment of time as a crucial concept to both authors throughout their careers. Engaging with several theories of time, and their reiteration and examination in both authors work, this volume contributes both to the understanding of literary time, and to the work of Pynchon and DeLillo. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Don DeLillo
• On the Thomas Pynchon Trail
• Cover Art: Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
• Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice

On the Thomas Pynchon Trail

Boris Kachka on the life and work of an American writer

Pynchon, age 16 (left), and an artist's rendering of how he may look today (right)

From Boris Kachka (Vulture):

Let’s get a few things straight. First of all, it’s pronounced “Pynch-ON.” Second, the great and bewildering and, yes, very private novelist is not exactly a recluse. In select company, he’s intensely social and charismatic, and, in spite of those famously shaming Bugs Bunny teeth, he was rarely without a girlfriend for the 30 years he spent wandering and couch-surfing before getting married in 1990. Today, he’s a yuppie—self-confessed, if you read his new novel, Bleeding Edge, as a key to the present life of a man whose travels led one critic to reflect: “Salinger hides; Pynchon runs.” Now Pynchon hides in plain sight, on the Upper West Side, with a family and a history of contradictions: a child of the postwar Establishment determined to reject it; a postmodernist master who’s called himself a “classicist”; a workaholic stoner; a polymath who revels in dirty puns; a literary outsider who’s married to a literary agent; a scourge of capitalism who sent his son to private school and lives in a $1.7 million prewar classic six. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Cover Art: Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
• Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge
• Paul Thomas Anderson on Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Trailer for Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice
• Thomas Pynchon: Man of Mystery

David Cronenberg on his Life and Work

A 90-minute video interview

David Cronenberg

A 90-minute interview with Canadian director David Cronenberg, conducted on 15 March 2013, marking his 70th birthday with a reflection on his life and work (thanks to Espen Terjesen for drawing my attention to the video) [Watch]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Cronenberg on Cosmopolis, DeLillo and Robert Pattinson
• Mark Kermode's Top 5 Cronenberg films
• Gary Indiana on David Cronenberg's Videodrome
• David Cronenberg on J. G. Ballard
• David Cronenberg Interview: Violence, Gadaffi and A Dangerous Method
• David Cronenberg on A Dangerous Method
• Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'

Fan Letters: Famous Authors to Famous Authors

Letters from Joyce, Gaddis, Woolf, McCullers and others

A young James Joyce (1902)

Flavorwire has posted a fan letter written by James Joyce to the playwright Henrik Ibsen (link via Johann Gregory):

Honoured Sir,

I write to you to give you greeting on your seventy-third birthday and to join my voice to those of your well-wishers in all lands. You may remember that shortly after the publication of your latest play ‘When We Dead Awaken’, an appreciation of it appeared in one of the English reviews — The Fortnightly Review — over my name. I know that you have seen it because some short time afterwards Mr. William Archer wrote to me and told me that in a letter he had from you some days before, you had written, ‘I have read or rather spelled out a review in the Fortnightly Review by Mr. James Joyce which is very benevolent and for which I should greatly like to thank the author if only I had sufficient knowledge of the language.’ (My own knowledge of your language is not, as you see, great but I trust you will be able to decipher my meaning.) I can hardly tell you how moved I was by your message. I am a young, a very young man, and perhaps the telling of such tricks of the nerves will make you smile. But I am sure if you go back along your own life to the time when you were an undergraduate at the University as I am, and if you think what it would have meant to you to have earned a word from one who held so high a place in your esteem as you hold in mine, you will understand my feeling. One thing only I regret, namely, that an immature and hasty article should have met your eye, rather than something better and worthier of your praise. There may not have been any wilful stupidity in it, but truly I can say no more. It may annoy you to have your work at the mercy of striplings but I am sure you would prefer even hotheadedness to nerveless and ‘cultured’ paradoxes. [Read More]

The site has also posted letters by William Gaddis (to Don DeLillo), Norman Mailer (to William Styron), Ray Bradbury (to Robert Heinlein), Charles Dickens (to George Eliot), Virginia Woolf (to Olaf Stapledon), W. H. Auden (to James Agee), Carson McCullers (to Henry Miller), George R. R. Martin (to Stan Lee), and William S. Burroughs (to Truman Capote). [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• James Joyce, The Cats of Copenhagen
• James Joyce Centre: New Acquisitions
• James Joyce Manuscripts Online
• James Joyce and Walter Benjamin
• Literary Mentorships: James Joyce and Samuel Beckett
• Christopher Hitchens on James Joyce's Ulysses

Outside Literature: Lars Iyer on Exodus

Tim Smyth talks to Iyer about his latest novel

Lars Iyer, Exodus

From The Quarterly Conversation:

Since the appearance of his novel, Spurious, in 2011, Lars Iyer has made a challenging and vigorous contribution to our sense of the importance of literature and thought in our vexed cultural moment. The intellectual anguish and inventive bickering of his two UK philosophy professors sees him steer a middle course between Mercier and Camier and Withnail and I. His combination of almost-total bleakness and bracing humour enables him to dip perilously close to despair, only to escape at the last minute.

With the sequel to Spurious, Dogma, Iyer confirmed his importance as part of an “enclave outside literature,” whose work extends the territory outside the contemporary canon to new and challenging distances. This novel extended W.’s and Lars’s itinerary across America, with little more than Plymouth Gin and the word omoi for company. As the humour deepens, so too does the despair, recalling both the Thomas Bernhard of Frost and Mark and Jeremy from Peep Show.

The final instalment of Iyer’s trilogy, Exodus, is the funniest, most hopeful, most despairing, and most gin-soaked episode of the three. Despite the impossibility of true endings, it is a final instalment—and a satisfying one at that. I talked to Lars, via email, over the course of nearly two months, during which we talked about hot tubs, the Bible, endings, and the collapsing borders of literature. [Read the Interview]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Lars Iyer on Max Brod and Franz Kafka
• Writers: Franz Kafka
• Lars Iyer on Blanchot's Vigilance
• Lars Iyer on Literature's Antagonistic Couples
• Extracts from Lars Iyer's Dogma available online
• Lars Iyer talks to Biblioklept
• Lars Iyer on Writing, Reading and Thinking
• Literary Influences on Lars Iyer's Spurious
• Lars Iyer, Spurious

Mark C. Taylor, Rewiring the Real

In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo

Columbia University Press:

Digital and electronic technologies that act as extensions of our bodies and minds are changing how we live, think, act, and write. Some welcome these developments as bringing humans closer to unified consciousness and eternal life. Others worry that invasive globalized technologies threaten to destroy the self and the world. Whether feared or desired, these innovations provoke emotions that have long fueled the religious imagination, suggesting the presence of a latent spirituality in an era mistakenly deemed secular and posthuman.

William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo are American authors who explore this phenomenon thoroughly in their work. Engaging the works of each in conversation, Mark C. Taylor discusses their sophisticated representations of new media, communications, information, and virtual technologies and their transformative effects on the self and society. He focuses on Gaddis’s The Recognitions, Powers’s Plowing the Dark, Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and DeLillo’s Underworld, following the interplay of technology and religion in their narratives and their imagining of the transition from human to posthuman states. Their challenging ideas and inventive styles reveal the fascinating ways religious interests affect emerging technologies and how, in turn, these technologies guide spiritual aspirations. To read these novels from this perspective is to see them and the world anew. [Read More]

Praise for the Book

This book exemplifies what an entire area within religious studies—‘religion and literature’—should be yet has never quite become: a genuinely interdisciplinary, existentially attuned, and constructively ambitious enterprise engaged with our most timely social and cultural questions.

— Thomas Carlson, University of California, Santa Barbara

Mark C. Taylor is, in my view, without peer as the most important postmodern secular theologian thinking and writing today. In Rewiring the Real, he leads the reader through difficult, even treacherous, contemporary literature in a teacherly and illuminating fashion, in the process sharing scores of philosophical and a/theological insights in the realms of economics, architecture, network theory, complexity theory, critical literary theory, politics, pedagogy, and aesthetics.

— David Miller, Syracuse University

Lucid, erudite, and illuminating, Taylor’s converse with four provocative authors offers a guide to the digital galaxy. The fictions of William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo are astutely explicated and drawn into engaging accounts of philosophy, religion, economics, art, and technology. The result is a tempting elucidation of the expanding systems of commerce and conception that today constitute our uncanny existence.

— Houston A. Baker Jr., Vanderbilt University

Intellectually luminous and generically unplaceable, Rewiring the Real, in its investigations of the theory of poetry and life, embodies all the dreams of an artful philosophy, carving out new possibilities in literature and technology for the religious imagination.

— Jenny Davidson, Columbia University

Taylor's not only posing the question, he’s living it: Can art bring the salvation religion once promised? It has become clear, if it wasn’t before, that Taylor is undertaking nothing less than a comprehensive philosophy of culture.

— Paul Lieberman, cultural correspondent and author of Gangster Squad

A stunning capstone achievement. I judge that at the end of the twenty-first century, Taylor will be one of a handful of cultural critics still worth reading. This is a book to the claims of which every person aspiring to cultural literacy should subject him/herself.

— Ray L. Hart, Boston University

About the Author

Mark C. Taylor is professor of religion, chair of the Department of Religion, and codirector of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. He is the author of more than twenty-five books, including, most recently, After God; Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living; and Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Don DeLillo
• William Gaddis: J R and The Recognitions
• Representation and Reality in Don DeLillo
• Don DeLillo: 9/11 and Literature
• Don DeLillo on life, art and literature

Advertising and Consumer Culture: Postgraduate Symposium

University of York · 31 May 2013

Advertising and Consumer Culture
Third Annual Postgraduate Symposium
University of York
Centre for Modern Studies
Bowland Auditorium
Humanities Research Centre
Friday 31 May 2013

About the Symposium

Commercial speech – advertising – makes up most of what we share as a culture . . . As the language of commercialism has become louder, the language of high culture has become quieter.

– James B. Twitchell, Twenty Ads that Shook the World

Throughout the modern period, advertising and consumer culture have dominated everyday life; moreover, the trappings of commercialism permeate much of supposed ‘high culture’. Commodities clutter the pages of novels from Dickens and Zola to Bret Easton Ellis; works by Joyce and DeLillo are enlivened by advertising jingles and slogans; brands and trademarks pervade the practice of artists from Picasso to Warhol and the visualisation of consumer desire is appropriated and challenged in the work of Richard Hamilton and Martha Rosler.

Whether celebrating or critiquing advertising and consumer culture, art reflects our enduring fascination with them, despite research into the psychological effects of advertising, concerns over the evils of consumerism, and the often sinister nature of market research. The recent television show Mad Men, for instance, has revivified interest and scholarly debate surrounding the power of advertising and the consumer, as well as restaging debates around sexism, truth and the heteronormative ideal. Meanwhile, sociology in the wake of Erving Goffman continues to explore advertising’s uses and abuses of gender, identity and desire. Countervailing against consumerism and advertising’s many critics, theorists such as Michel de Certeau and the critical movement Thing Theory have endeavoured to examine advertising and consumer culture from a standpoint that goes beyond the model of the ‘passive consumer’ or Marx’s account of commodity fetishism.

We invite abstracts for 20 minute papers from postgraduate students and early-career researchers working in the modern period (1850-present day) across the humanities and social sciences. This conference aims to provoke interdisciplinary discussion about advertising and consumer culture. We therefore welcome papers that address these topics from historical, sociological, political or anthropological perspectives, as well as papers that analyse advertisements themselves and the representation of advertising and modern consumer culture in literature, film, television, theatre, and visual art.

Topics for Discussion

Topics for discussion may include but are by no means limited to:

• The ways in which advertising and consumer culture intersect with issues of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity
• Psychological/psychoanalytic perspectives on advertising and consumer behaviour; how identity is created and reflected through participation in consumer culture; the legacy of Freud and Bernays
• How artists have appropriated the techniques of advertising, or have been co-opted by advertising and commodity culture (Koons, Rosler, Murakami, Kusama and Hirst) -Theorists who have engaged with advertising and consumer culture (Adorno, Barthes, Baudrillard, Certeau, Fukuyama, Goffman, Klein, Marx, McLuhan)
• The use of music in advertisements
• The formal innovations literature has adopted to create a poetics of advertising/consumer culture
• Shopping, the rise of the department store, brand names, and their representation in culture
• Histories of advertising agencies or ‘ad-men’
• How the importance of advertising in art may challenge the boundaries between high and low culture and/or modernism and postmodernism
• Anti-consumerist movements (the Situationist International, Adbusters) and strategies (détournement, culture jamming)
• The recent transformations advertising has undergone as a result of social media -The advert as spectacle or ‘event’ (celebrity endorsements, Christmas advertising, product placement, Pawel Althamer’s Real Time Movie)
• Figures who have worked in advertising, either before or during their artistic careers (Fitzgerald, Rushdie, DeLillo, Warhol, Lynch)
• Political advertising and the roles of politics in advertising

Submissions

Abstracts for papers should be no more than 300 words in length, and submitted by Monday 25th March 2013 to cmods-pgforum@york.ac.uk. We ask that applicants also include a short biography. For further information about the symposium or the CModS Postgraduate Forum, please contact us at this address, or visit http://www.york.ac.uk/modernstudies/postgraduate-forum/

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Don DeLillo on Mad Men and Writing
• Don DeLillo on Bookstores
• Don DeLillo, White Noise
• Bret Easton Ellis on Glamorama
• Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho

David Cronenberg on Cosmopolis, DeLillo and Robert Pattinson

An interview with IFC.com

Robert Pattinson stars as Eric Packer in David Cronenberg's Cosmopolis (2012)

IFC.com interviews David Cronenberg on his recent adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel, Cosmopolis:

IFC: You’ve made so many films over the years based on books, what was it about this particular story that jumped out at you?

David Cronenberg: I was immediately struck by the dialogue [in DeLillo's book]. It was familiar to me because Don’s dialogue is very distinctive. I think of him in the same terms as I think of David Mamet or Harold Pinter — that is to say, it’s the way people speak, but it’s also very stylized. That produces an interesting tension and rhythm. But those two guys are dramatists, and you hear their dialogue spoken often on stage and in movies, whereas Don is a novelist. You don’t hear his dialogue spoken ever, because he hasn’t had a movie made out of one of his books before.

IFC: Does that raise the level of difficulty in making a movie like this?

David Cronenberg: No, not at all. I’m really thinking of that in retrospect now. I wasn’t thinking so much about that at the time. What I was thinking was, I would love to hear that dialogue spoken by some really terrific actors. I think it would be really intriguing and interesting and compelling. That was the hook for me. It wasn’t the theme of the story or anything like that. I like the restriction of one street, one limo, one day, because I don’t shy away from that and rather like it, but I think it was the dialogue first and foremost that was the hook. And the dialogue in the movie is 100-percent from the book. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Don DeLillo
• Cronenberg's adaptation of DeLillo's Cosmopolis
• David Cronenberg to direct DeLillo's Cosmopolis
• Mark Kermode's Top 5 Cronenberg films
• Gary Indiana on David Cronenberg's Videodrome
• David Cronenberg on J. G. Ballard
• David Cronenberg Interview: Violence, Gadaffi and A Dangerous Method
• David Cronenberg on A Dangerous Method
• Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'

The Blue Velvet Project

A frame-by-frame analysis of David Lynch's unsettling masterpiece

A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)

A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)

A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)

A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)

A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)

A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)

A still from David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986)

There's a moment in David Lynch's 1986 film, Blue Velvet, where its protagonist, Jeffrey Beaumont, divulges: 'I'm in the middle of a mystery and it's all secret'. As the narrative unfolds, Jeffrey's obsession with clues leads him deeper into the dark and troubling heart of America's sunny suburbia.

In some strange way, I wonder whether Nicholas Rombes, author of The Blue Velvet Project, might have a thing or two in common with Lynch's curious hero. The project is a testament to both obsession and voyeurism, seizing a frame of Lynch's film every 47 seconds for description and analysis. Now completed, its website includes 149 shots from the film, all posted between 8 August 2011 and 10 August 2012. But in the same way that viewers of Lynch's film are implicated in Jeffrey's voyeurism, it's hard not to get sucked into Rombes' online archive of comments and associations.

What is most interesting to me about The Blue Velvet Project is the sheer volume of references that have been pulled or inferred from virtually every shot. Blue Velvet is, famously, a film that peels away the layers of suburban life, and Rombes manages to find evidence of this almost everywhere he looks. Whether he's examining the film in the context of 1980s politics, American cinema, or critical and theoretical responses to Lynch's work, his observations are often sharp and insightful.

The real achievement of the project is to bring out many of the subtleties of Lynch's masterpiece, whilst retaining our sense of its mysterious and secretive nature. It's a strange world. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Filmmakers: David Lynch
• David Lynch talks to Mike Figgis
• David Lynch on BBC's The Culture Show
• David Lynch on Ideas, Cinema and Billy Wilder
• Mysteries of Love: Documentary on Lynch and Blue Velvet
• Inside David Lynch's Club Silencio, Paris
• Is David Lynch Retiring from Film?

Joyce Carol Oates on Blonde and Marilyn Monroe

A 2000 interview with the American writer

Marilyn Monroe

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe. Her iconic American status continues to fascinate. Blonde, an imaginative retelling of the Marilyn myth, if often hailed as Joyce Carol Oates' masterpiece. Celestial Timepiece, the Joyce Carol Oates homepage, is hosting a fascinating interview with the author by Greg Johnson, in which she discusses its inception. The interview was first published in Atlanta Journal-Constitution back in 2000:

What was the genesis of "Blonde"? What prompted you to choose Marilyn Monroe as the focus of a novel?

Some years ago I happened to see a photograph of the 17-year-old Norma Jeane Baker. With her longish dark curly hair, artificial flowers on her head, locket around her neck, she looked nothing like the iconic "Marilyn Monroe." I felt an immediate sense of something like recognition; this young, hopefully smiling girl, so very American, reminded me powerfully of girls of my childhood, some of them from broken homes. For days I felt an almost rapturous sense of excitement, that I might give life to this lost, lone girl, whom the iconic consumer-product "Marilyn Monroe" would soon overwhelm and obliterate. I saw her story as mythical, archetypal; it would end when she loses her baptismal name Norma Jeans, and takes on the studio name "Marilyn Monroe." She would also have to bleach her brown hair to platinum blond, endure some facial surgery, and dress provocatively. I'd planned a 175-page novella, and the last line would have been "Marilyn Monroe." The mode of storytelling would have been fairytalelike, as poetic as I could make appropriate.

Obviously, you've produced a long novel, not a novella. What happened?

In the writing, characteristically, the "novella" acquired a deeper, more urgent and epic life, and grew into a full-length novel. "What happened" is what usually happens in these cases. "Blonde" has several styles, but the predominant is that of psychological realism rather than the fairytale/surreal mode. The novel is a posthumous narration by the subject.

After I abandoned the novella form, I created an "epic" form to accommodate the complexities of the life. It was my intention to create a female portrait as emblematic of her time and place as Emma Bovary was of hers. (Of course, Norma Jeane is actually more complex, and certainly more admirable, than Emma Bovary.)

What led you to choose this unusual point of view, "a posthumous narration" by Norma Jeane herself?

This is a difficult question to answer. The voice, point of view, ironic perspective, mythic distance: this curious distancing effect is my approximation of how an individual might feel dreaming back over his or her own life at the very conclusion of that life, on the brink of extinction even as, as in a fairy tale, the individual life enters an abstract, communal "posterity." Norma Jeane dies, and "Marilyn Monroe," the role, the concoction, the artifice, would seem to endure.

At over 700 printed pages, this is your longest novel. But your original manuscript was even longer—1,400 pages. Why did you cut the novel so substantially?

At 1,400 pages, the novel had to be cut, and some sections, surgically removed from the manuscript, will be published independently. They are all part of Norma Jeane's living, organic life. To me, the language of Norma Jeane is somehow "real."

Still, a novel of such a length is a problem. Rights have been sold, according to my agent, to "nearly all languages" except Japanese where, if the novel were to be translated it would grow again by between one-third and one-half in length. In German, for instance, it will be massive enough!

You wrote and extensively revised this huge novel in less than a year. It must have been an intense writing experience?

I think, looking back upon the experience, that it is one I would not wish to relive. In psychoanalytic terms—though we can't of course "analyze" ourselves—I believe I was trying to give life to Norma Jeane Baker, and to keep her living, in a very obsessive way, because she came to represent certain "life elements" in my own experience and, I hope, in the life of America. A young girl, born into poverty, cast off by her father and eventually by her mother, who, as in a fairy tale, becomes an iconic "Fair Princess" and is posthumously celebrated as "The Sex Symbol of the 20th Century," making millions of dollars for other people—it's just too sad, too ironic.

Could you describe your writing process as this novel evolved?

With a novel of such length, it was necessary to keep the narrative voice consistent and fluid. I was continually going back and rewriting, and when I entered the last phase of about 200 pages, I began simultaneously to rewrite the novel from the first page to about page 300, to assure this consistency of voice. (Though the voice changes, too, as Norma Jeans ages.) Actually, I recommend this technique for all novelists, even with shorter work. It's akin to aerating soil, if you're a gardener.

Since the 1960s, a number of well-known writers—Capote, Vidal, Mailer, DeLillo, and others—have focused ambitious novels on famous, and sometimes infamous, historical figures. Do you consider "Blonde" as falling into this tradition of the "nonfiction novel"?

The line of descent, so to speak, may derive from John Dos Passos's "U.S.A." with its lively, inventive portraits of "real people" mixed with fictional characters. Dos Passos's Henry Ford, for instance, is an obvious ancestor of E.L. Doctorow's emboldened portraits in "Ragtime." Some of these are rather more playful/caricatured than serious portrayals of "real people."

So much of "Blonde" is obviously fiction, to call it "nonfiction" would be misleading. (I explain in my preface: if you want historical veracity, you must go to the biographies. Even while perhaps not 100% accurate, they are at least predicated upon literal truth, while the novel aspires to a spiritual/poetic truth.) [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Joyce Carol Oates and Jane Yarborough Creech
• Joyce Carol Oates, Give Me Your Heart
• Joyce Carol Oates, Sourland
• Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country
• Joyce Carol Oates on Trauma and Adolescence
• Ten Rules for Writing Fiction
• Joyce Carol Oates on Bob Dylan

Mark Kermode's Top 5 Cronenberg films

A list from the Kermode Uncut Blog

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Mr. Movies: Mark Kermode talks to Mark Lawson
• Gary Indiana on David Cronenberg's Videodrome
• David Cronenberg on J. G. Ballard
• David Cronenberg Interview: Violence, Gadaffi and A Dangerous Method
• David Cronenberg on A Dangerous Method
• Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'

Hari Kunzru on Krasznahorkai's Hipster following

Hungarian novelist becomes fashionable among aspiring NY writers

Housing Works, New York

Writing for The Guardian, Hari Kunzru describes New York's literary hipsters at a Krasznahorkai reading in New York (link via Susan Tomaselli): 'The other day I attended a reading by the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai. The venue was Housing Works, a charity bookstore in New York's SoHo. The 58-year-old author is, it's fair to say, relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. His first novel, Sátántangó (the third of his works to be translated by the poet George Szirtes), written in the 80s, has just appeared in a handsome edition published by New Directions press. He deals in despair and metaphysical stasis, one part Kafka, one part Beckett, plus a dollop of earthy comedy. In the film world he has received acclaim for his collaborations with the director Béla Tarr, whose work (including a seven-hour adaptation of Sátántangó) often attracts the adjective "uncompromising". In short, this wasn't the sort of event where you'd expect to have to arrive an hour early to get a seat.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• The Mythology of László Krasznahorkai
• László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann, Animalinside

Don DeLillo, The Word for Snow

Unpublished DeLillo play to premiere in London

Don DeLillo. Photograph: Isaac Hernandez

Alison Flood (The Guardian): 'Originally commissioned by US theatre company Steppenwolf in 2007, the play is DeLillo's response to climate change and tells of an Earth where the physical world is disappearing, with only the words describing that world left in their place. The title is drawn from a question asked during the play: "Are you saying children will build a snowman with the word for snow?" The play, which will show at the London literature festival from 10-12 July, will be directed by Jack McNamara of new company Future Ruins, complete with music, video and projections.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Don DeLillo

Black Clock 15: Public Reading

Black Clock 15 celebrates at the Mandrake Bar in Los Angeles

To celebrate the fifteenth issue of Black Clock, a journal published by the California Institute of the Arts’ (CalArts) MFA Writing Program, a public reading has been organised at the Mandrake Bar in Los Angeles. Contributors who will be reading include: Anthony Miller, Mark Z. Danielewski, Jonathan Lethem, Claire Phillips, Geoff Nicholson and Matthew Specktor and acclaimed novelist - and Black Clock Editor - Steve Erickson. The event will be held on 29 April from 2pm. [Read More]

About Black Clock

Edited by Steve Erickson, Black Clock has become one of America’s leading literary journals since its inception in 2004. Singular, idiosyncratic and a little mysterious, it has featured such established authors as Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, Miranda July, Joanna Scott, Samuel R. Delany, Aimee Bender, Susan Straight, William T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace along with a growing roster of striking literary debuts. Work appearing in Black Clock has been anthologized in best-of-the-year collections and nominated for O. Henry and Pushcart prizes, and two excerpted novels have gone on to win the National Book Award. [Read More]

Postcard: David Foster Wallace to Don DeLillo

David Foster Wallace shares news of his progress, and excitement about DeLillo's Valparaiso

Postcard from David Foster Wallace to Don DeLillo

Electric Literature has uploaded a postcard sent by David Foster Wallace to fellow writer Don DeLillo. Anna Knoebel offers the following transcript:

9-1 (CARDS WERE GIFTS–NO OFFENSE INTENDED)

DEAR D², I AM NOW A LICENSED CA DRIVER, WHICH FROM THE SENSE I GET IS OFFICIAL STATE-CITIZENSHIP IF ANYTHING HERE IS. THERE IS A PALM TREE IN MY BACK YARD THAT’S 11 1/2 FEET AROUND. A BRICK SHITHOUSE OF A PALM TREE. ¶ THANK YOU FOR YOUR NOTE. I HAVE NOT YET READ THE GADDIS, BUT I’M IN CONTACT WITH FRANZEN, WHO’S APPARENTLY BEEN CHARGED THE TASK OF A COMPREHENSIVE GADDIS PIECE BY THE NYer, AND IS ‘STRUGGLING’ WITH IT. ¶ THIS BLOODY MENGENLEHRE BOOK (IT INTIMIDATES ME THAT YOU KNOW THIS TERM) TURNS OUT NOT TO BE DONE — BOTH THE MATH-EDITOR AND THE GENERAL EDITOR WANT REPAIRS — OFTEN THEIR DEMANDS ARE MUTUALLY CONTRADICTORY. I WILL END UP HAVING SPENT 11 MONTHS FULL-TIME ON A PROJECT I’D PLANNED TO KNOCK OFF PART-TIME IN 4. I NEVER WANT TO SEE ANOTHER FOURIER SERIES AS LONG AS I LIVE. ¶ I’D LOVE A CHANCE TO EYEBALL YR. NEW NOVEL IF YOU DON’T OBJECT. AND I HOPE VALPARAISO IS IN GOOD HANDS WITH THE TROUPE.

Y.V.T.
DAVID WALLACE :-) [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Don DeLillo
• David Foster Wallace's Annotated Books
• Can Literature be Philosophical?
• David Foster Wallace: Fate, Time, and Language
• David Foster Wallace on Literature
• Interview with David Foster Wallace

David Cronenberg on A Dangerous Method

Steve Rose talks to the Canadian filmmaker

David Cronenberg

In an interview posted on The Guardian website, Steve Rose talks to David Cronenberg about Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis, and the filmmaker's often disturbing choice of subject matter. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• David Cronenberg on J. G. Ballard
• David Cronenberg Interview: Violence Gadaffi and A Dangerous Method

Charles Baxter reviews Don DeLillo's The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories

'If you have read several books by Don DeLillo, sooner or later you will have a Don DeLillo moment.'

In The New York Review of Books, Charles Baxter takes a look at a recent collected edition of Don DeLillo's short stories, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Don DeLillo