Old Friends Help New York Review Celebrate 50 Years

Joan Didion reading at a celebration of the 50th anniversary of The New York Review of Books at Town Hall on Tuesday night.

By JOHN WILLIAMS

The eager crowd milling in the lobby of Town Hall on Tuesday night looked ready for the opening of an A-list movie. For one thing, Daniel Craig was present. “James Bond is standing over there,” a man said. A stranger next to him, a woman in a large furry hat, peered over. “Is he really? How exciting!”

The occasion was brainier, if less glamorous, than a 007 premiere: the 50th anniversary of The New York Review of Books, the literary institution that began during a citywide newspaper strike in 1963. Robert Silvers, the publication’s 83-year-old editor and co-founder, was M.C. for a night of readings and reflections by some of his longtime and more recent contributors.

Though charming and literate, a less visually dynamic public event is hard to imagine. Still, ticket holders were kept waiting outside for about 30 minutes after the scheduled start time while a handful of high-powered cameras were set up inside the auditorium. (Martin Scorsese and a crew have been filming the journal’s celebrations this week to help it commemorate the anniversary.)

Even knowing that Joan Didion was among the readers scheduled to appear, the crowd still let out a few audible gasps when Mr. Silvers announced that the writer would be the first to take the stage. Ms. Didion did so daintily, the rock-star essayist now visibly a lioness in winter at the age of 78.

 

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Atwood in the Twittersphere

Margaret Atwood

By Margaret Atwood

Reading the acclaimed novelist 140 characters at a time.

A long time ago—less than a year ago in fact, but time goes all stretchy in the Twittersphere, just as it does in those folksongs in which the hero spends a night with the Queen of Faerie and then returns to find that a hundred years have passed and all his friends are dead…. Where was I?

Oh yes. A long time ago, back in June of 2009, when we were planning the launch of The Year of the Flood and I was building a Web site for it. Why was I doing this building, rather than the publishers? Well, they had their own sites, and I wanted to do some non-publishing things on mine, such as raise awareness of rare-bird vulnerability and heighten Virtuous Coffee Consumption (Arabica, shade-grown, doesn’t kill birds) and blog the seven-country dramatic-and-musical book tour we were about to do. Anyway, the publishers were at that time hiding under rocks, as it was still the Great Financial Meltdown, not to mention the Horrid Tsunami of Electronic Book Transmission. “That sounds wonderful, Margaret,” they said, with the queasy encouragement shown by those on the shore waving goodbye to someone who’s about to shoot Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Oops! I shouldn’t have said that. Which is typical of “social media”: you’re always saying things you shouldn’t have said. But it’s like the days of Hammurabi, and those of the patriarch Isaac in the book of Genesis, come to think of it: once decrees and blessings have made it out of the mouth—or, now, in the 21st century, out of the ends of the fingers and past the Send button—you can’t take them back.

Anyway, there I was, back in 2009, building the site, with the aid of the jolly retainers over at Scott Thornley + Company. They were plying me with oatmeal cookies, showing me wonderful pictures, and telling me what to do. “You have to have a Twitter feed on your Web site,” they said. “A what?” I said, innocent as an egg unboiled. To paraphrase Wordsworth: What should I know of Twitter? I’d barely even heard of it. I thought it was for kiddies.

But nothing ventured, no brain drained. I plunged in, and set up a Twitter account.

 

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Poetry anthology sparks race row

Rita Dove (left) and Helen Vendler Photograph: Garry Weaser/PR

Poet Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry attacked by renowned critic Helen Vendler for valuing ‘inclusiveness’ over quality.

By Alison Flood

A furious row has broken out in the rarefied confines of American poetry circles, after grande dame of poetry criticism Helen Vendler attacked former poet laureate Rita Dove’s anthology of 20th-century American poetry for its focus on “multicultural inclusiveness” rather than quality.

Dove’s collection, The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, is the Pulitzer prize-winning poet and professor of English’s pick of the best US poetry of the last 100 years. Vendler, a critic and Harvard professor, laid into the book in an excoriating write-up in the New York Review of Books, criticising Dove for deciding “to shift the balance, introducing more black poets and giving them significant amounts of space, in some cases more space than is given to better-known authors”.

Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg and Sterling Brown are left out of the anthology – although Dove explains in her introduction that this was down to a rights issue: Penguin’s budget was not enough to secure rights to include their poems in the book.

Vendler lambasts Dove for her inclusion of “some 175″ poets and for her choice of poems: “mostly short” and “of rather restricted vocabulary”, she says.

“Multicultural inclusiveness prevails,” she writes. “No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading, so why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value? Anthologists may now be extending a too general welcome. Selectivity has been condemned as ‘elitism’, and a hundred flowers are invited to bloom.”

Later, Vendler enumerates that “of the 20 poets born between 1954 and 1971 (closing the anthology), fifteen are from minority communities (Hispanic, black, Native American, or Asian American), and five are white (two men, three women)”, saying that “Dove’s tipping of the balance obeys a populist aesthetic voiced in the introduction”. And Dove feels obliged to defend the black poets she includes “with hyperbole”, says Vendler.

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Why creative writing is better with a pen

A man's hand writing. Photograph: Acestock/Alamy

Not only is longhand a much more portable way to write, it’s also much more individual.

By Lee Rourke

In a wonderful article published on the New York Review of Books blog the poet Charles Simic proclaimed “writing with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper is becoming an infrequent activity”. Simic was praising the use of notebooks of course, and, stationery fetishism aside, it got me thinking about authors who write their novels and poems longhand into notebooks rather than directly onto the screen. There must be some. I mean, I can’t be the only one? Actually, it turns out there are quite a few. A while back I was having a Twitter conversation with the novelists Jon McGregor and Alex Preston about this very topic. Alex had decided to write his next novel with pen and notebook and Jon McGregor and myself couldn’t urge him to do it enough.

Everything I’ve ever written was composed in notebooks first. I have hundreds of them filled with my scribbles tucked away in boxes. I also buy them obsessively, so I probably have just as many empty notebooks lying around the house ready and waiting to be filled. I find that writing longhand I can enter a zone of comfort I find hard to achieve when sitting in front of a screen – I find typing annoying, if I’m honest, not the mechanics of it, but the sound. The constant tap-tap-tap-tap on the keyboard reminds me of all the offices I’ve worked in. The sound bores into me, it fills me with an anxiety I could do without. I feel like I’m signing off invoices rather than writing my next novel. Writing longhand is a whole different feeling. For a start, I can take my notepads and pens everywhere I go; which means I can write anywhere I want, when I want. This is good for me as my writing comes to me in fits rather than prolonged spells. Only when my work is finished in longhand do I transfer it to a computer, editing as I type up. I find this part of my writing process the least enjoyable.

“Pen and paper is always to hand,” agrees Jon McGregor. “An idea or phrase can be grabbed and worked at while it’s fresh. Writing on the page stays on the page, with its scribbles and rewrites and long arrows suggesting a sentence or paragraph be moved, and can be looked over and reconsidered. Writing on the screen is far more ephemeral – a sentence deleted can’t be reconsidered.

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