Draft No. 4

Finding a font for our words

January 13, 2010 | 6 Comments

The New Yorker online recently excerpted a passage from Jonathan Lethem’s new novel Chronic City concerning a man who believes his mind to be controlled by the magazine’s font. This mention allowed The New Yorker to reveal: “Fiction editor Deborah Treisman expounded a bit on the font (it’s ACaslon Regular), and how it factors into the story selection process: Often when we’re reading stories, and thinking about them and editing them, we’ll say, ‘Let’s go ahead and put it in …

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‘Nat Turner’s’ narrative structure

January 8, 2010 | 2 Comments

William Styron creates dreamy world in his slave rebellion novel. The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. Vintage. 480 pages. Eventually I realized that William Styron’s poetic descriptions of weather and landscapes in The Confessions of Nat Turner aren’t supposed to represent the world as we know it—or even as the characters know it, save perhaps for the narrator, Nat Turner—but to create a feeling in the reader of tragic grandeur, of a doomed place saturated with significance and …

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The poetic prose of ‘Nat Turner’

January 3, 2010 | 2 Comments

William Styron’s great novel showcases the strengths of lavish, incantatory words and sentences. The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. Vintage. 480 pages. William Styron told interviewers he worked slowly, writing his thick books by hand, in No. 2 pencil, on yellow legal pads. In Sophie’s Choice his alter ego reads his sentences aloud, testing them, as he goes. Styron had an ear for rhythm and a fearsome vocabulary that he wasn’t afraid to unleash. The lovely word motes …

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The blockbuster in America

December 28, 2009 | 2 Comments

I attended two holiday  movies, Avatar and Up In the Air, both of which delivered the promised shock and awe but which on balance provoked in me a quiet despair. And this felt bad. So, I’m out of step. But there’s a great article, “A World of Hits,” in The Economist that chases my blues with the insight that, hey, such a reaction may be a small downside of living in a blessed wealthy mass-consuming Democracy—tyranny of the majority and …

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Christmas at the coffee shop

December 23, 2009 | 6 Comments

I eavesdrop on two groups, one male and one female, as they talk. Middle-aged men, two to four in the group, one talking loudly at a time: “You need to read more books!” “How are we going to solve the health care problem if . . .” “What gets me is these Republicans who say—” “This isn’t partisan—the Democrats . . . Obama . . . ” “We go to Wal-Mart and we buy this crap, and we don’t care …

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A few more words

December 21, 2009 | No Comments

I own a few sacred words, words of such beauty I desire to be worthy of them. I adore these watery two: lacustrine, of or pertaining to a lake, and pelagic, of or pertaining to the open seas or oceans. The oceans are mighty places, you know, and pelagic fishes must swim faster than their lacustrine kin. We try to capture our feelings with words, and we think more precisely and deeply with them. Therefore knowing the meaning of bumptious …

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A writer’s words

December 16, 2009 | 4 Comments

The more I consider words, the more beautiful and useful and strange they seem individually and in combination: What does “hopelessly endearing,” used in a recent New Yorker review to describe an actor’s smile, literally mean? Yet the phrase captures a doofus charm, and I can picture George Clooney pulling it off. I got frustrated with my own writing vocabulary when I felt I’d strung together about a dozen words to build a book-length manuscript. And it came to perplex …

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