Category: creative-process

Dispatches from the Abyss I
Reading Infinite Jest Despite my admiration for David Foster Wallace as a writer, I figured I would never read Infinite Jest. I’d read collections of his stories and essays, and didn’t think I could take his intensity at such length (1079 pp. in my paperback). I’m a ploddingly slow reader, and figured a book like that ...
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Granny’s a Bitch
Grandma. A film by Paul Weitz Elle (Lily Tomlin), the title character of Grandma, is almost unbelievably grouchy. Within the first twenty minutes of the movie she has broken up with what seems to be a perfectly nice and quite lovely girlfriend (Judy Greer), made a spectacle of herself in a local coffee shop and purposely ...
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The Burning Building
The End of the Tour A film by James Ponsoldt I’ve always felt two ways about David Foster Wallace. Like Jonathan Lethem—whom I’ve been reading lately—he’s a major writer from a generation younger than mine. A few years ago I met a young writer who was wildly enthusiastic about Wallace, so I read a couple of ...
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The Real Fifty Shades of Gray
Loving Day by Mat Johnson. Spiegel & Grau. 287 pp $26.00 The issue of race is so fraught these days that I’m almost afraid to write about it. I am afraid to write about it. Anything I say will offend somebody. Of course, there’s something liberating about that. I know I can’t do it right, so ...
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In That Stillness is the Great Dynamic Activity
Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity by Edward Slingerland. Crown. 296 pp. $26.00. When he was a teenager, we all noticed that my nephew Charlie was surrounded by beautiful young women, though he seemed less accomplished than his older brothers (he wasn’t; he was just younger). You’d go over in the morning ...
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Was This the One with the High Voice?
Love & Mercy A film by Bill Pohland. “How did he die?” my wife said, as we were waiting for the opening of “Love & Mercy,” the new movie about Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. “I don’t know. I think he drowned. But I think everyone drowned.” I had previously told her Audrey Hepburn drowned. I was ...
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Beer Sodden Part II (Professional Class): The Mystery of Charles Bukowski
Run with the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader by Charles Bukowski. HarperPerennial. 512 pp. $16.99. In the midst of making my way through the novels of Marilynne Robinson, heavy with the taint of Midwestern Protestantism (I enjoyed those books, I really did. Sometimes I wanted to throw them on the floor and stomp on them, but ...
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Portrait of the Artist as a Bulldog
Mr. Turner. A film by Mike Leigh. There’s a lot not to like in Mr. Turner, Mike Leigh’s biopic of the British artist J.M. W. Turner (Timothy Spall). The man is often gruff and uncommunicative. He is especially so with his housekeeper, Hannah Danby (Dorothy Atkinson), who obviously worships him and would do anything for him, ...
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