November 23, 2009
I’ll tell you what it is. It’s our new widget, “The Bookshelf.” It’s a new little area where 12th Street staff can post literary picks, comments on readings, and possibly add some additional media. It’s in its “beta” form right now, but check in for updates. Individual staffers may take over “The Bookshelf” for week-long periods. Come get engrossed by your favorite staffer’s picks and chide the ones you hate… which will probably be just mine.
-Tony
November 10, 2009
March 25, 2009
The Adriana Trigianni and David Baldacci event, Wine and Words, at the Virginia Festival of the Book last week, was held at a Charlottesville wine bar called Enoteca. It’s a knock off of the wonderful Bar Veloce in New York (2nd Ave, between 11th and 12th); they even have the slim menus, the high chairs, and the tea candles in small glasses.
My wife and I arrived twenty minutes early and the place was already full. We brought down the mean age by thirty years. We found two chairs across from each other, away from the crowds, but too far away from the wine. Miles Davis’ “Blue in Green” was playing overhead, and I smiled.
The two authors were easy to pick out, not just from their dust jacket photos but also by the group of people surrounding them and the name tags on their lapels. There was no organization to the crowd, just people mingling, the sound of many conversations.
I was disappointed with the fact that each person only received one drink ticket. After the first glass of Montepulciano I would have to start paying. One of the bartenders was overheard saying, “I should’ve known to order more white wine.” To eat, there were big green Cerignola olives, fresh crusty bread, Pecorino fresco, mild Manchego and Grana Padano. 
A white woman with flat hair and glasses, in her sixties, came back to the table near us with two signed copies of Very Valentine. She was beaming. An older gentleman who sat next to me asked her what she thought of Trigiani’s books.
“Well they’re not deep, but for women they are very enjoyable,” she said.
Baldacci was leaning against the bar, drinking the same Montepulciano, making smug mannerisms and laughing, surrounded by old men who were jealous of his perfect part.
A fat lady had to lean on my chair to get onto hers, and she kept her feet on my rungs the rest of the time. “It smells like pancake syrup,” she said to her equally overweight friend. A group of women were in the corner near the window, laughing loud enough for everyone to hear. “I guess, some people just came for the wine,” the lady with her feet on my chair said.
Finally, there were some introductions. Baldacci stood in front of the group, thanked everyone for coming, and spoke a little bit about an organization that he and Trigiani helped start, Feeding Body and Mind, where they take book donations and send them to a food bank to be handed out along with meals. He also spoke of how much he enjoyed the festival. He has participated in every one since its inception, fifteen years ago. “There’s smething for everyone at this festival,” he said, in a voice that was almost too soft to hear.
Trigiani came up after him and killed it. She’s a boisterous woman, with a big voice and an even louder laugh. She introduced everyone she had brought with her, including her mother, three sisters, her fifth-grade French teacher, and her in-laws. The crowd loved her, and she loved them back. “This is my home state. I love me some Virginia.”
March 24, 2009
On February 26, 2009, Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times of Philipp Meyer: “American Rust announces the arrival of a gifted new writer — a writer who understands how place and personality and circumstance can converge to create the perfect storm of tragedy.” The reviews for this first-time novelist have been rave, with comparisons to Richard Russo, Salinger and Steinbeck. This pressure on a writer brings excitement to readers.
It was the first day of spring and I was excited to attend the event, Fateful Acts: A Fiction Panel, with authors Valerie Laken (Dream House), Katharine Davis (East Hope), and Philipp Meyer (American Rust).
Katharine Davis discussed the difficulties in briefly describing her novels. “It’s the complexity that makes [novels] interesting.” Valerie Laken described how the idea for her novel came from a personal experience. She and her husband had bought a rundown house in an up-and-coming neighborhood in Ann Arbor. Soon after, they learned that a murder had occurred years before in their fix-it-up home. A young man had shot his mother’s boyfriend in the house, then walked down the street to the ice cream shop, set the gun on the counter and asked if someone would please call the police. “Stories come from mistakes,” she said, getting a laugh from the crowd.
American Rust, Mr. Meyer described, starts with a killing in a town where the steel industry went under. “It’s about how much people are willing to sacrifice for their friends.” He said he’s hesitant to call it a crime novel because throughout the book the reader always knows more than the characters.
“It’s set in southwest Pennsylvania, which is very beautiful, and very remote, with a lot of wildlife. It’s a place so depressed that a job at Walmart is coveted.” He described the place as having a “certain sense of loss, both human and material.”
He’s held many unique jobs, including working in a trauma center, driving an ambulance, and doing years of construction work. When Mr. Meyer was 16 he dropped out of high school and got his G.E.D. “I didn’t understand at the time how it would change me. It’s a social handicap. The decision was more significant than I first expected.”
While working in construction he knew several people who had been to jail, and what he learned from them made its way into the novel. “Most had some awareness that people are interested in them as ex-prisoners. When they realize that you’re not afraid of them, they’re willing to tell you anything.”
Researching the novel he “did a lot of walking in the town, and so in the book there is a lot of walking. Sometimes I would go to a bar and buy someone a beer. You’d be surprised, everyone wants to talk about themselves.”
Mr. Meyer admitted that American Rust is the third novel he’s written, but only the first one published. He was writing for eight years before he had a single story published, but now he’s had stories in McSweeney’s and on Salon.com. “I’ve always been a big reader,” he said. “I don’t remember learning to read, I just remember always reading.”
March 20, 2009
I climbed up the creaking stairs, 10 minutes late, as Jeffrey Renard Allen read from his
story “The Green Apocalypse” from his collection Holding Pattern. I was immediately reminded of how much I enjoy the way he pronounces the word “particularly”: it comes from his mouth like a rubber ball in slow motion, that then bounces gently down the stairs. Jeffrey Renard Allen, who is a professor in the Riggio program, was one of the most intelligent and kind writing teachers I’ve had.
Mr. Allen was one of three men reading from their short story collections. Following Allen was James Matthews who read from Last Known Position. He is a veteran of the Iraq war, having done two tours. Following him was David A. Taylor, author of the collection Success: Stories. After reading, each of the three authors took questions from the small audience of 20 people.
On how he starts writing stories, Jeffrey R. Allen said, “Every story is different.” He went on to describe how when he was once in Chicago, riding the El, he saw an older lady playing a guitar on which there was a picture of a younger boy, assumedly her grandson. The image stayed with him and found its way into the end the story “Bread and the Land.”
“Characters take you to place you didn’t expect,” Allen responded to an additional question on planning stories in advance to actually writing them. “Every story dictates its own terms.”
Someone asked Allen about his poetry, and how he came to it. He said that in school, he had always considered himself a fiction writer until a professor told him that his writing used mostly plain words, which he did not take as the compliment that it was intended. So, he started reading and writing poetry “as a way to better understand how to use the language.”
Up Next: Wine & Words with David Baldacci and Adriana Trigiani
March 16, 2009
This week in Charlottesville is the 15th annual Virginia Festival of The 
Book—five days of literary events to honor book culture and promote reading and literacy. This year 12th Street will be in attendance, so look forward to several postings from events. Jeffery Renard Allen will be reading from his new collection of short stories, Holding Pattern. David Baldacci, author of 16 novels, including Divine Justice, will discuss Italian wines. And if we’re lucky, we’ll get to discuss the novel American Rust with author Phillip Meyer.
March 6, 2009
Amy Berkowitz reads a poem from Ish Klein’s new book UNION!
March 5, 2009
“They might wax about the versatility of a deck bucket or of romance in rubber boots, but they also describe a livelihood that can kill those who pursue it.” —From an article in the New York Times about fisherman poets.
March 4, 2009
For 21 months I’ve been working on the same piece and it’s driving me crazy. Most every day I turn on my computer, open the same Word document, and
start the process all over again. I first “completed” the manuscript in June of 2007 and ever since then I have been editing it. No one ever told me just how never-ending this process would be. I won’t stop, can’t stop, but still I am exhausted. I’m exhausted with having to explain myself to other people. Yes, I’m still working on the same novel. No, it has not been published yet. No, I don’t know when or if it ever will be. I find that I regularly have to defend my own sanity, that I have to explain to other people that I am not being obsessive. I am not just correcting spelling and grammar errors. I am still working on things like plot and story line.
Why don’t I give up on my novel? What drives me to wake up every morning and stare at my computer for hours on end, scrolling past words that I have read countless times? What drives writers to work and work and work on the same sentences over and over again? Can writing ever be perfected? Or are we just told one day to put the pen down and walk away?
March 3, 2009
I can’t stop checking out this blog … daily!
A poem is posted each and every day, for the first 100 days, President Barack Obama is in office.On this blog you can read poems by: Mark Bibbins, Cate Marvin, Major Jackson, Matthew Zapruder, and so many more very talented and inspiring writers.
February 26, 2009
February 25, 2009
The first line of a book always stays with me. I like to devour books, somehow imagining that I can climb into the book, become a part of the story as the ink on the page seeps into my skin. And no matter how fantastic the book was, or how terrible, I am always depressed when it comes to an end. Often I will go back and re-read the first line of the story when I am finished. As a kind of salve to the wound that finishing a story can leave. And so the first line of a book becomes magical, the beginning of a journey and with each opening line I never know where the story is going to take me.
Below are some of my favorite first lines. Hopefully they will inspire you to pick up the book if you haven’t already read it, or remind you of the journey you took when you did read it. What are some of your favorite first lines? Which ones inspired you? Made you want to go back and read the book again or recommend it to a friend?
–What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask. (Play it as it Lays, Joan Didion)
–In the end she went out to the yard, almost enveloped in flames, leaned against the tamarind tree that no longer flowered, and began to cry in such a way that the tears seemed never to have begun, but to have been there always, flooding her eyes, producing that creaking noise, like the noise of the house at the moment when the flames made the strongest pots totter and the flashing frame came down in an enormous crackling that pierced the night like a volley of fireworks. (Old Rosa, Reynaldo Arenas)
–Hazel Motes sat at a forward angle on the green plush train seat, looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it, and the next down the aisle at the other end of the car. (Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor)
–They say it came first from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz)
–The village of Holcolm stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.” (In Cold Blood, Truman Capote)
–The first time he saw heaven came exactly six hours and fifty seven minutes after the very moment an entire generation fell in love with him. (Heavier than Heaven, Charles R. Cross)
–The two men appeared out of nowhere, a few yards apart in the narrow, moonlit lane. (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, JK Rowling)
–In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper. (Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov)
–A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news. (Dreams of my Father, Barack Obama)
–First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. (The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien)
-It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. (The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath)
February 24, 2009
“Does being ‘great’ simply mean writing poems that are ‘great’? If so, how many? Or does ‘greatness’ mean having a sufficiently ‘great’ project? If you have such a project, can you be ‘great’ while writing poems that are only ‘good’ (and maybe even a little ‘boring’)? Is being a ‘great’ poet the same as being a ‘major’ poet? Are ‘great’ poets necessarily ’serious’ poets? These are all good questions to which nobody has had very convincing answers.” – The Great(ness) Game @ The Times
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“Stuck with men who couldn’t make ends meet, Rhys had a brief career in prostitution and also worked as a chorus girl. Evocative and empathetic, Pizzichini still offers no fully satisfactory explanation for the explosiveness of Rhys’s interior life: ‘She found life difficult because she found it hard to be herself.’” – The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys, reviewed @ PW
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“Little Red Riding Hood was my first love. I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.” –Charles Dickens
- Fairy Tale Review is looking for your Little Red Riding Hood submissions.
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The most beautiful map of St. Petersburg @ The Book Bench
February 20, 2009
I stole a book yesterday.
I know, I know, I know. It was stupid, and I really didn’t meant to do it. It just…happened. There’s a Barnes & Noble about a five-minute drive from my place, and I go there more often than I would like to admit. I stroll the literature aisle, take a peek at poetry, flip through magazines, and do other bookstore things. There’s even a decent café to sit in and get some work done.
Yesterday morning I was at home and feeling frustrated. Nothing I was doing came out right. So, I packed a bag with my MacBook, a notebook and three pens. I looked at the table with the “New Fiction,” and then I took a seat in the café. I didn’t really get any work done during the hour I sat there, but it felt good to be out and about, surrounded by other humans. One large coffee later, I came to the realization that I wasn’t going to find any answers sitting there. So, I packed my bag back and went to the bathroom. I looked to see if they had Jeffrey Renard Allen’s short story collection Holding Pattern, which they did, but I did not buy. They also had three copies of a novel by César Aira titled, Ghosts.
Somehow, without any thought, I slipped the Aira book into my bag and walked out. I didn’t realize I had done it until I was back in the car and saw it sitting in my bag. I thought about taking it back inside and admitting fault, but I really wanted to read it. I mean, Chris Andrews translated it.
I don’t know. I’m going to feel crappy about this for some time. What type of writer am I to steal books? Have I no morals? I’m still convinced that it wasn’t my intention to steal it, it just sort of happened. Writer and book thief. Awful.
February 14, 2009
Blake Butler and Daniel Bailey read “Catalogue Entry for Aging” from Someone Else’s Body by Claire Donato.
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Fiction Editor Mario Zambrano reviews non-fiction subject matter particularly dear to my heart. I hope his commentary will spark response and healthy debate, not only from 12th Street staff, but all those students and faculty who wish to weigh in.
~T
All the World's a Grave
That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness
Eeeee Eee Eeee