On Literary Divadom

I had not encountered this Salon essay, “Didion as Diva”–It is from 1997! When the internet was written on cave walls with sticks and a paste of crushed berries and ash, or so I’ve been told!–until I came across it researching something else. But I think some of the points still have merit. (Perhaps I’m viewing it through the oversize, dark sunglasses of an Didion admirer?)

Though, if the idea of a literary diva still holds up, and since the word and its embodying attitude has not left the lexicon yet in relation to pop icons adored by the gays, however troubling (see: Gaga, Lady) then who might be our reigning divas of letters in a slight update of this premise?   Remember:   “The opera diva’s performance is immediate — and immediately gratifying — but the literary diva must create in solitude, then wait many agonizing months, sometimes years, for her voice to reach its audience through publication. This time lag places her at still greater remove from her followers, which only adds to her mystery.”

So then: Mary Gaitskill? Mary Karr? Lydia Davis? Or does it now fall on the likes of a Candace Bushnell or even an Amy Sohn?  Before you answer, maybe refer back to author Bill Hayes’ conclusion upon seeing Ms. Didion speak in the flesh:  “the literary diva exists only on the page. In person, this diva is unremarkable, forgetful of her lines, absent of herself. She is the antithesis of the legendary showbiz or opera divas, like Monroe or Callas or Garland, who had to be seen in the flesh or on-screen to be experienced, and who are reduced to ordinary humanity with the written word.”

People Who Died: Jim Carroll

Sad.  Punk poet Jim Carroll, author of “The Basketball Diaries,”  died of a heart attack in his Manhattan apartment on Friday.  He was 60.

I happened to see him read, or rather struggle and shuffle and digress in the attempt to read, at the Brooklyn Book Festival two years ago.  He looked aged beyond his years, but was still scrappy and engaging.

Jim Carroll, I salute you brother. Read the New York Times obit here.

Ephemera: Forgotten Bookmarks

If you are the kind of person who frequently acquires your reading material from libraries and used book stores, as I am, likely you find, stuck between the pages of your recent acquisition, random scraps that have served as the previous owner or checker outer’s placeholder –  a receipt, or a ticket stub, a sticky note with a hastily jotted grocery list, maybe.  These weird fragments, these little artifacts of another person’s existence.  These scraps.  They illuminate something and yet nothing at all. They are mostly mundane trash, but specific trash from a specific individual.  I’m kind of fascinated by it.  Windows into strangers’ lives, and all that.

Anyway!  How wonderful is the site Forgotten Boomarks, a blog started by an employee at a used and rare bookstore, who posts these left behind and “personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird things” that are found.  Do give it a look.

Forgotten Bookmarks [via Quiddity; Andrew Sullivan]

Pretty Things: Book Covers by Ruben Toledo

Renowned Cuban artist Ruben Toledo illustrated the covers to the Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions of The Scarlet Letter, Wuthering Heights, and Pride and Prejudice.  They are rather fantastic. [Nylon]

For When You Want to Share Your Dream Cast of a Mary Higgins Clark Book With the Internet

Paul Constant at the Slog does not think much of Storycasting, the site where you can play casting director with your favorite books.  “What a weird, unnecessary little website”  he says. Which is not untrue!  But then:  welcome to the internet! It’s already cluttered with forking roads and distractions and trifles, so what’s one more?  Cubicle monkeys cannot live by keyboard cat clips alone. I suppose there must needs be these time wastery websites.  And boy howdy do people want to cast some Janet Evanovich and Jodi Picoult, though not so much James Purdy or Mary Gaitskill. Still! Maybe you want to be the first.  If, you know, you see the “the movie in your mind.”