"The eager grasping for experience that marked her twenties here gives way to fears about her place in the canon and the worry that her period of most gem-like burning is at an end. At the ripe age of thirty-two, she wonders, 'Have I done all the living I’m going to do?' This most authoritative of writers worries over her tendency to defer to the authority of others, and her habit of masking her aggression and competitiveness. (Either she was a very bad actor, or she was more competitive and aggressive than one can possibly imagine.) It seems that Sontag is the only person who did not buy into the myth that she was 'serious'; the notebooks are full of reminders to smile less, to be more serious."

"It’s time content people of all stripes recognized the WYSIWYG editor for what it really is: not a convenient shortcut, but a dangerous obstacle placed between you and the actual content. Because content on the web is going to be marked up one way or another: you either take control of it or you cede it to the software, but you can’t avoid it. WYSIWYG editors are fine for amateurs, but if you are an editor, or copywriter, or journalist, or any number of the kinds of people who work with content on the web, you cannot afford to be an amateur."

"Holiday is a testament to the fact that some things still manage to get lost in an age when almost everything is archived, or at least mentioned, online. As far as I can tell, no one seems to care much about the legacy of Holiday, and no archive exists. By now I own some forty copies of the magazine. I may be the archive."

"For instance, I’ve started to think that most books are too long, and I now hesitate before buying the next big one. When shopping for books, I’ve suddenly become acutely sensitive to the opportunity costs of reading any one of them. If your book is 600 pages long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60-page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?"

"... reading and thinking about the generations of women who had to suffer this kind of knee-jerk condescension from men, you begin to wonder how it was that any woman managed not to put her head in an oven before approximately 1968. Plath’s classmate in Robert Lowell’s poetry seminar, Anne Sexton, did eventually kill herself, too, but Plath’s sometime rival Adrienne Rich did not. Many millions did not. Why not? The situation was intolerable. How could anyone tolerate it?"

"My students tell me that this 300-word piece is unusually helpful. They seem to be taken by surprise by its economy -- that so much work can be accomplished just by tightening some screws. But the English language is endlessly supple. It will do anything you ask it to do, if you treat it well. Try it and see."

"This incredibly rare television documentary includes interviews with a number of Beckett's friends, colleagues and followers. Among those interviewed are: Raymond Federman, Hugh Kenner, Steve Martin, Edward Albee, Stanley Gontarski, John Calder, Barney Rosset and, in a round-a-bout way, Samuel Beckett himself."

"That’s what I wanted to do -- write a book about horse racing at its low end, in an era considerably before the present moment, and see if there wasn’t an open niche for that. By god, it seems to have happened."

"VIDA's study raises questions about how seriously women writers are taken and how viable it is for them to make a living at writing. As we all know, small rewards and affirmations have a concrete but unquantifiable effect on one's writing life. So does silence."

"It is what the internet lures out of us -- hubris, daydreams, avarice, obsessions -- that makes it so potent and so volatile. TV's power is serenely impervious; it does all the talking, and we can only listen or turn it off. But the internet is at least partly us; we write it as well as read it, perform for it as well as watch it, create it as well as consume it. Watching TV is a solitary activity that feels like a communal one, while the internet is a communal experience masquerading as solitude."

"In making an allusion, a writer (or a filmmaker, or a painter, or a composer) is not trying to "outwit" the reader (or viewer, or listener), as Kirsch suggests. Art is not a parlor game. Nor is the artist trying to create a secret elitist code that will alienate readers or viewers. An allusion, when well made, is a profound act of generosity through which an artist shares with the audience a deep emotional attachment with an earlier work or influence. If you see an allusion merely as something to be tracked down, to be googled, you miss its point and its power. You murder to dissect."

"Extraordinary young talents are all the more dependent on the most ordinary sustenance. But instead of a home and a college education, what Barbara Follett got was author copies and yellowing newspaper clippings. This girl—who should have been America’s next great literary woman—was abandoned by the two men she trusted, and her fame forgotten by a public that she never trusted in the first place. Her writings, out of print for many decades, only exist today in six archival boxes at Columbia University’s library. Taken together, they are the saddest reading in all of American literature." The story of Barbara Newhall Follett.

"... no longer needed to be shown the hollow hypocrisy of the bourgeois social order or whatever." <em>Or whatever</em>

"Ha, it's always awful. There is a restaurant in Petersburg called 1913. I ask, why 1913? 'The only good year in Russian history.' (Both laugh)"

Haruki Murakami: "To put it in different terms, we are living a world that has an even lower level of reality than the unreal world. What can we possibly call this if not 'chaos'? What kind of meaning can fiction have in an age like this? What kind of purpose can it serve? In an age when reality is insufficiently real, how much reality can a fictional story possess?"

Anis Shivani compares creative writing programs to the medieval guild system. "The system is profoundly undemocratic when it comes to the quality of the product it engenders, and its relentless crushing of any incipient freelance competition. There is an undeclared boycott in place with the famous residencies, conferences, and awards, and non-guild members need not apply ..."

"I'm curious to see how this experiment pans out. I hope that this is a new niche for us writers. By pure coincidence, Amazon has just launched a new kind of product called 'Kindle Singles' that is exactly what I and other writers have been thinking about recently. I don't know how the experiment will evolve in the future, but there's one thing I do know: I for one won't be doing it alone. Books are still a communal effort, from creation to sharing."

A follow-up post from Craig Fehrman on his Boston Globe story. "... first I want to tell the full story behind Melville’s library. I didn’t have the space to do this in the Globe, but its fate is fascinating and complicated and even affecting. What’s true of Melville’s books is true of each author mentioned in my story, plus a whole lot more besides." Via: http://thesecondpass.com/?p=6602

”Monotonous. Tedious. Repetitious. One note, all the way through. Theme inordinately stale + old hat. Alas, Willie.”

"There is, I think, and we might call it not the problem with no name but the problem we can't define: the problem of unconscious gender bias and how it affects the ways we think about accomplishment and authority."

"Clearly, Google Scribe has been trained on the vast corpus of English language text that is also used for Google Translate to come up with plausible sentence fragments. Equally clearly, that means it is bound to be plucking phrases that have been written before out of the web for you, and favouring those that have been said most often. It won't come up with a crisp, resoundingly clear phrase for you, unless it has already been said many times before."

Alexander Chee's eight tips for author blogging.

Fiction is dead. Again. "The practice of fiction is no longer a vocation. It has become a profession, and professions are not characterized by creative mischief. Artistic vocations are about embracing more and more of the world with your will; professions are insular affairs that are all about the profession. The carefulness, the cautiousness, the professionalism that keeps contemporary fiction from being meaningful to the most intellectually engaged people is also what is stifling any kind of response to The New Yorker."

"Actually, let's be pedantic as hell." More: http://blog.theparisreview.org/2010/06/18/open-letter-to-the-awl/

"The space between the writer and the reader is evaporating."

"Reading that again, I thought that maybe art is, in the end, like so many letters to Cicero, notes addressed to the dead, to one’s ancestors and betters, or simply to those one had in mind while working."

"Lately, I’ve found the cathartic returns from blog-format writing to be diminishing." A problem with blogging unlike any other form.

"The thesis of the piece was that Ebert's work was suffering because he was on television all the time, but that's not really what it was about: It was me lashing out at Daddy, trying to make my own name, trying to feed off his. That's not what I thought I was doing at the time. But that's absolutely what it was."

"A little grave reflection shows us that our first duty is to establish a new and abusive school of criticism. There is now no criticism in England. There is merely a chorus of weak cheers, a piping note of appreciation that is not stilled unless a book is suppressed by the police, a mild kindliness that neither heats to enthusiasm nor reverses to anger. We reviewers combine the gentleness of early Christians with a promiscuous polytheism; we reject not even the most barbarous or most fatuous gods. So great is our amiability that it might proceed from the weakness of malnutrition, were it not that it is almost impossible not to make a living as a journalist."

"The Didion Rule: When in doubt, ask writers about writing."

"The capacity of being a great generalist -- which I hope to be -- is being lost a little bit. I think that’s tragic."

"I found myself drawn, this decade, in the gaps between blog reading, to a very particular kind of novel. Not to sound all techno-deterministic here, because the loops of influence are obviously complex, but many of my favorite aughts novels are those that mimic (or thematize, or rejigger, or one-up) the experience of reading online."

"When our own imaginations dry up – when, like Coetzee, we seem to have retreated, however spectacularly, to a cannibalisation of the autobiographical – it's easy to cease believing in the existence of another kind of writing. But it does exist. And there's no need to give up on the imaginative novel; we just need to hope for better examples."

"Sassy for the intellectual set." Not Double X.

".. all have that dizzying sense of otherness and surprise common to great books, an affluence of vitality."

"What I liked was the plain, Anglo-Saxon vocabulary; the intelligence; the challenge to my intelligence; the humor that undercut what might have been a heavy message; and the self-consciousness about language." ... "I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters."

"But for the moment, my brain is so cluttered with strange and conflicting ideas about what a blog should and shouldn’t be and what I’m trying to do, in general, with this kind of writing -- because, I do think that blog-writing is a different kind of writing than edited printed-matter writing -- that I’m having trouble figuring out what I even want to say."

"Pancake’s writing is devastating in its beauty. He evokes the landscape of West Virginia and the inhabitants of those small town mountain hollows with a sinewy and precise prose that comes as close to Hemingway as anything I’ve ever read. And the force of his prose is just the beginning." Still grateful to SF for introducing me to Pancake.

Marking the first anniversary of David Foster Wallace's death. "You don’t need a Ph.D. in literature to recognize the power of Wallace’s work. You just need a set of healthy nerve endings."

Makes a point key to any discussion about paywalls or the value of journalism: Write things people (particularly those outside your known audience) actually want to read. "Whatever you think of the actual piece, it's an almost startling reminder of the power of good writing. My takeaway from the piece had very little to do with Goldman Sachs and a lot to do with my job. Too much of journalism is about serving the existing audience ..."

"I went through a period of publishing for free, and then a period of being insulted that people wanted my work for free, and then back into a period of writing for free."

"I write for free because there seems to me to be no meaningful relationship between whether a publication pays me and whether it’s worthwhile for me to write for them." Etc.

Or, how to write 23 inches in 20 minutes. One reporter's simple method for organizing stories.

Are tweets protected by copyright? Short answer, "No." (But what about a body of tweets?)

'Do you know what her children call her?" a mutual friend asked me when I said I was going to see AS Byatt. "You'll never guess. Not in a million years." "Antonia? Mum?" "No," he said, laughing. "They call her 'AS Byatt'."

"It's a note-taking technology... It's a ball-point pen. Get over it." Spirited.

See Johnson WSJ article. Related.

"Among the jobs that Beckett contemplated were: office work (in his father's quantity surveying firm); language instruction (in a Berlitz school in Switzerland); school teaching (in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia); advertising copywriting (in London); piloting commercial aircraft (in the skies); interpreting (between French and English); and managing a country estate." Fortunately, he took up writing.

"There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?" I both fear Johnson's conclusions and suspect he is right.

Writing clearly and effectively online.

Talking about obsession, writing, and making money.

Sample entry: "E’LFLOCK. n.s. [elf and lock.] Knots of hair twisted by elves." See: Manes done up in Steve Asmussen barn style.

Max answers readers' questions on David Foster Wallace and the lengthy article he wrote about the late author.

On friendship and writing. That this thoughtful essay happens to feature turf writer William Nack seems cosmically right.

Quibbling with Max's sensitive, exhaustive New Yorker article on David Foster Wallace's work and life.

D.T. Max's exhaustive early review of DFW's life and work.

"The basic lucidity of this response, and its analytical ambition (this is the quality Obama critics, and some fans, call 'professorial'), may be clearer in the transcript." The pleasures of having a president familiar with the ways of words ...

"In Dream City everything is doubled, everything is various. You have no choice but to cross borders and speak in tongues." Zadie Smith on plural selves, plural voices.

"Long-form journalism is, ironically, one of the easiest things to sell display ads against. So, if you can change the cost structure enough, you can actually imagine building whole businesses around that."

"I mean, really, I’m just so impatient with the argument that the world should be slowed down to help people who aren’t smart enough to understand what’s going on."

"There’s no existential put-down to compare with a righteous Wikipedian’s. Now I know how information architects felt in 1995. Content strategy needs to get past its “dark continent” reputation, or live forevermore as the here-be-dragons squiggle on the edge of the user experience design map."

"The baby and I sit happily on the floor, side by side, tearing pages out of books, and sometimes, just for fun, we go out on the street and smash a windshield together."

"Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men."

"To the charges of inaccuracy and unprofessionalism, bloggers could point to the fierce, immediate scrutiny of their readers.... The form was more accountable, not less, because there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly humiliated for sloppiness. Of course, a blogger could ignore an error or simply refuse to acknowledge mistakes. But if he persisted, he would be razzed by competitors and assailed by commenters and abandoned by readers."

Writing, blogging, creating ... how everything contributes to an arc.

Clear and to the Point: Guidelines for Using Plain Language

"Where to go after Infinite Jest?" Where to go after DFW?

"David Foster Wallace's death looks, from where I'm sitting, like a failure of communication. But his life, and his work, are an affirmation of it."

A fair appraisal of DFW and his work from Kakutani

"There are some lives we read backwards, from bloody exit to obscure entrance, and Jane’s is one of them."

Invented, borrowed, and stolen ideas (new lit journal)