I’ve always been fascinated with writers’ rooms. The most important space a writer deals with is the distance from the mind to the blank page. But what surrounds that conduit, providing a physical platform for the connection, is the room the writer fixes around it. It cannot help but reflect the writer’s personality.
On the austere end, you’ve got E.B. White at his rustic desk in cabin, nothing in sight but a lake out the window. On the other end, there’s the cluttered desk of Stephen King, which welcomes the company of a dog, the writer’s feet, a Commodore computer, and stacks of crap. (For more examples, check out The Writer’s Desk by Jill Krementz.)
I recently had the opportunity to visit Kansas City novelist Whitney Terrell at his home, not far from his on-campus office at the English Dept at UMKC, where he’s the New Letters writer-in-residence.
I was on an errand of publicity, actually. A few weeks ago, I’d asked him if he’d sign a basketball to give away as a prize in the Library’s March Madness online tournament of books, called Booketology (which was a hit, by the way).
I’d asked him if he’d let me film him sign the ball, but when the day came to drop by his house, I thought, why not have a peek inside his office?
Whitney was game, and so he gave me a tour, highlighting things like the almighty desk, the typewriter he still uses for first drafts, the visual cues he tacks to the wall, and the guitars he jams on with his son when he’s not writing. And then he signed the ball. (And, shortly after that, KU lost, but that’s another story.)
You’re wrapped up in an amazing book, and you come across a reference to a song, a work of art, a place, or (perhaps most often) another book, and you think, “I gotta Google that later.”
Or maybe you’re the type who tweets that reference immediately. Or perhaps you make a note in your Kindle, or ask your Friend Who Knows Everything Cool*.
Anyway, you do look into it, and bang. Your life is a little bit richer.
This urge to click/tweet/ask FWKEC happened lately with me while reading Jennifer Egan’s magnificent A Visit from the Goon Squad. In one of the short-story-like chapters, an autistic boy who obsessively catalogs musical pauses in rock and roll raves about the song “Mighty Sword” by Irish band the Frames, a good band I’d totally forgotten about.
After some hunting, I found the song a couple of days later. The kid’s right. It rocks.
Whatever your method of researching the cultural references that pop up in books, it’s probably not very quick or likely to lead to other new discoveries. (Unless you’re the type that likes to browse Wikipedia, in which case, ew.) That’s why I’m excited that a new website is offering a sophisticated, searchable, interactive database for researching those hidden thought trinkets contained within books without going to Google or anywhere else.
Like an encyclopedic playground for book lovers, Small Demons collects and catalogs cultural references in books and displays them in a slick database that allows users to create profiles and interact with the site’s content.
It calls this content the Storyverse — the songs, artists, paintings, cities, authors, books, scientists, celebrities, poems, and even cocktails and bars that authors use to build the cultural architecture around their stories.
This video by Adam Lisagor explains the concept:
For every book in Small Demons’ database, there are about 250 people, places, and things referenced. These things, in turn are cross-referenced with other works uploaded to the database.
One of my favorite features is that each reference is accompanied by a generous quotation from the book for context.
For example, when one of the characters in Goon Squad mentions Lucian Freud, it’s in this lovely character thumbnail:
Her face was fragile and mischievous, pale enough to absorb hues from the world around her — purple, green, pink — like a face painted by Lucian Freud.
Small Demons indexes “Mighty Sword” too, along with a link to purchase the song from Amazon or iTunes.
You must create an account to even browse the site, but since jumping in, I’ve learned some pretty interesting and diverse marginalia: such as the fact that Texas writer Larry McMurtry has mentioned Michael Jordan in four different books. And that Don DeLillo drops a Longines clock in Underworld.
I’m interested to see what social features the site adds as it moves away from beta. Though the site draws a lot of reference content from Freebase, it might be interesting to let users post their own content, draw connections to books that aren’t in the database. There’s also been some talk of allowing authors to create verified accounts and curate their own content.
I’m definitely going to turn to Small Demons next time I encounter a song in a novel. Or just about any proper noun.
On May 22, 2011, a category EF-5 tornado devastated Joplin, Missouri. Thousands of residents lost their homes, hundreds were injured, and some 190 were killed. Kansas City sent money, food, and help in the ensuing weeks and months. Journalists were sent, too.
Two of those reporters were Laura Bauer and Eric Adler of the Kansas City Star. I recently had the pleasure of filming interviews with both to promote a new book on their and their colleagues’ experiences in Joplin in the storm’s aftermath. Not all writers are good at being interviewed, but Laura and Eric are articulate, interesting people. My coworker Steve (like me, an ex-journalist), conducted the interview off-camera.
Laura and Eric recently spoke at my library, so I made the video below first to promote that event. However, the Star‘s books team liked it enough to ask me for a version to solely promote the book, so I changed a few title screens at the beginning and end.
When I was a kid, I used to let my pet hamster Ginger have free but monitored run of the living room. One night, I wasn’t watching closely, and a slamming screen door on the back porch cut short Ginger’s little gemlike existence. I was responsible for the death of something I cherished; I was crushed.
A passage I recently encountered in the novel Couples by John Updike, describes with sensuous detail, empathy and humor the final night in the life of a family pet.
The adventure was easy to imagine. Ruth, feeling that her pet needed more room for running, suspecting cruelty in the endless strenuousness of the wheel, not believing with her growing mind that any creature might have wits too dim to resent such captivity, had improvised around his tiny cage a larger cage of window screens she had found stacked in the attic waiting for summer. She had tied the frames together with string and Piet had never kept his promise to make a stronger cage. Several times the hamster had nosed his way out and gone exploring in her room. Last night he had made it downstairs, discovering in the moon-soaked darkness undreamed-of continents, forests of furniture legs, vast rugs heaving with oceanic odors; toward morning an innocent giant in a nightgown had admitted a lion with a mildewed eye. The hamster had never been given cause for fear and must have felt none until claws sprang from a sudden heaven fragrant with the just-discovered odors of cat and cow and dew.
My mom asked me over the phone what I’d been reading. “To Have and Have Not,” I said. “It’s not very good.”
My dad sprang into range of the speakerphone, his English-professor gears kicking in, “But it’s an important novel in the development of the Hemingway hero. Hemingway, you see, believed that a man alone hasn’t got a chance.”
Dad was paraphrasing the main message of the book, which is delivered by the hero, Caribbean smuggler Harry Morgan, as he is being taken off a boat, wounded and delirious in the aftermath of a bank robbery and getaway attempt by some Cuban revolutionaries. After drifting for hours, some men find him.
“A man,” Harry Morgan said, looking at them both. “One man alone ain’t got. No man alone now.” He stopped. “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.”
If, like me, your first exposure to Hemingway’s fourth novel (pub. 1937) was the 1944 film by Howard Hawks starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, you’re in for some surprises.
1. There is no love interest. (“You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve?” — that bit never happened.) And 2. Harry Morgan is not Bogart’s cool and seductive Key West captain. The real Harry Morgan is a murderous, racist borderline criminal who gets his arm shot off and hates his kids (but is fairly good to his big mess of a wife). His mood ranges from gruff to brutal.
Faced with the ruthlessness of his surroundings — a Gulf Stream of dishonesty and crookedness — he attempts to thrive by carving out his own place. His relative stability is built on upholding certain law-of-the-trade principles, such as never smuggling people. But he abandons them when economic factors force him to compromise his rules in order to feed his family.
Though many readers will have little sympathy for someone who regards “Chinamen” and black people as subhuman, he is, by very loose standards, a good man faced with impossible odds. And, in his failing, he does learn that men who struggle only to save themselves for the sake of living don’t stand a chance.
Life, for Hemingway’s hero, is cruel, absurd, and meaningless. The only hope you have is to face that absurdity with dignity by living for a cause worth dying for. As the Hemingway character in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris puts it: “…there’s nothing fine and noble about dying in the mud unless you die gracefully. And then it’s not only noble but brave.”
I found myself rooting for Harry Morgan. He was a total bastard, sure, but he was brave.
This shorty by Schjeldahl gets in and gets out quickly, leaving you with a few masterful phrases and a real sense of the power of the work it’s about. Brilliant craftsmanship.
My work day was going so well... until I came across the shattering CBS news report "pics of blown out faces go viral." cbsnews.com/2300-504784_16…2 days ago
