Live together in the City of Industry and spend their days watching TV.
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So long, dirty oughts…
The Interloper has been included in L Magazine’s Books of the Decade.
Which is awesome.
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As Told To
Lookie what I found in my inbox!
Veronique du Turenne was down Mexico way recently for the Guadalajara International Book Fair, where she snapped this significant shot of a massive electronic wall celebrating L.A. authors.
This year’s “Guest of Honor” was Los Angeles–the first time a city (as opposed to a country) has received that distinction.
I didn’t recognize the quotation at first. The sentiment, yes, the image, yes, but not the words.
Some Googling revealed that it came from an LAist interview I did when The Interloper came out.
Here’s the thing about interviews. Most of the ones I’ve done have been via e-mail, which means that I have control over my own responses, i.e., I can’t really misquote myself. This particular interview, though, was done old-school style, as a conversation over fish tacos, with a tape recorder on the table. Which means that Callie Miller had to take our wandering, digressive, spontaneous chat and make it look like a series of Qs and As.
I don’t know how much tweaking went on to render my everyday speech (rambling, stumbling, surfy) into the written word, but I suspect it wasn’t easy.
For the record, I was happy with the result.
Maybe the author wall should have said:
ANTOINE WILSON*
*as told to Callie Miller
See more of Veronique’s Guadalajara photos on her photostream.
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Post from iPhone
This novel isn’t going to write itself. (Turns out.)
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APS
A Public Space, issue 9
Yo, check the TOC for APS#9.
Now you can see what I’ve been up to. Hanging in the aether (or on a hard drive somewhere) with TCB, Richard Powers, David Shields, my old friend Sally Keith, Derek Walcott, and others.
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Holiday Reinhorn
My homegirl the brilliant writer Holiday Reinhorn has a new website, and it is totally worth checking out.
It’s visually awesome and has tons of stuff to explore.
So far my favorite is an interview with Ursula K. Leguin she wrote for career day at Chapman School, Portland, OR in 1978.
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Jimmy Slade on NPR
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New Books
Two books are coming out in September and October that are going to put a serious dent in my writing schedule.
Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist
The new fat OED Thesaurus of the English Language.
That is all.
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Startled Awake by Ernie’s Bugle
I’ve got friends who, at age 20 (or 30) could tell you right away what their favorite kids books were (and are), but for some reason I’ve never been that interested in kids’ books, at least not since I was a kid.
I have trouble remembering, too, what my favorite books were. Maybe it’s a symptom of moving around so much as a kid and changing languages to boot (from French with some English to English only). The Pooh books were my first chapter books, and later on I made my way through Encyclopedia Brown, Hardy Boys, all of Judy Blume, a bunch of Xanth books, and various Secret Seven adventures. But I don’t remember what the picture books were. Probably some Seuss. Richard Scarry. Don’t know if I ever got Goodnight Moon.
(When I moved into adult books, it was the Bourne Identity and the sci-fi oeuvre of Michael Crichton, especially Terminal Man and Andromeda Strain. The school library was stocked with this stuff. I have gone back and looked at these books, and frankly I find them hard to read. I can’t get past the bad prose. I can’t suspend my disbelief while also navigating those sentences. Occupational hazard.)
But now I’ve got a kid, a kid who’s really into his books, and so I’m visiting (and revisiting) all kinds of kids’ titles. We’re in the picture book stage still, though he does go in for a chapter of Pooh now and then, and it’s astonishing to me what’s out there.
Frank Conroy used to say that in good work, you could feel the soul of the writer behind the sentences. The same goes for kids’ books. Some are sublime and magical, many more are creaky and didactic. The brilliance of Seuss is his command of the language and his judicious use of the absurd. The weakness of so many other books is the insistence on delivering a message, however well-intentioned, to a captive and underestimated audience.
I’ve got more to say on the subject, but I’ll save it for a future post. I’ve got a novel to write. Meanwhile, have you got any favorite children’s books? Any that miss the mark but remain inexplicably popular? Can anyone explain to me what’s going on in “My World”?