John Baker's Blog » proulx

A Book To Change Your Life

john baker — Sat, 10 May 2008 07:17:25 +0000

A panel at the PEN World Voices session came up with the following titles:

Antonio Muñoz Molina: Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner
Catherine Millet: The Lily of the Valley by Honoré de Balzac
Yousef al-Mohaimeed: first the Arabian Nights, then poetry (including haikus), and then, of all things Nikos Kazantzakis Zorba the Greek
Olivier Rolin: Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Annie Proulx: Before Adam by Jack London

The surrounding circumstances and reasons for the choices were, of course, as interesting as the selections: Proulx discovering the obscure London as a seven-year-old child, or Yousef al-Mohaimeed listening to his sister read from the Arabian Nights (which seems almost too clichéd—but when he follows that with Zorba the Greek it all sounds almost bizarrely believable again), or Millet drawn to Balzac after coming to recognize his style from readings on the radio.

Thanks to the Literary Saloon

Public Lives/Private Lives

john baker — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 12:18:35 +0000

The fourth annual PEN World Voices: The New York Festival of International Literature will take place 29th April to 4th May 2008. This year’s theme of Public Lives/Private Lives could hardly be more timely. How do we draw a line between our private and public selves? When must we tell private stories for the public good? How, as readers, writers, and citizens, do we confront threats to our privacy? What is still considered private in the Internet age? Do we need to redefine the meaning of public and private in the 21st century? The writers in this year’s Festival will mine this rich theme in a variety of literary conversations, panels, readings, and performances.

The complete list of participants, includes Peter Carey, Umberto Eco, Ian McEwan, Jo Nesbø, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, Annie Proulx, Bernhard Schlink, Mario Vargas Llosa and Salman Rushdie.

Five Questions: Self-Winding

john baker — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 07:16:26 +0000

1. Why do you blog?
I started because, for a time, I was caught fast at home and it brought me the outside world. Now I can’t seem to stop. Though sometimes tiresome, the exercise of regular writing brings discipline and creative pleasure. It is admittedly a quest for audience approval and its thread of journalism rather pleasantly alters perceptions of daily life. To blog validates one’s participation in the blogs of others.

2. Which author and/or book has most influenced you?
Shakespeare (though I did consider the twin polarities of St Paul and Frances Hodgson Burnett!). WS gave me my teenage breakthrough to the wonder of metaphor, of apposite language. His work puts the chance of miraculous performances in the hands of actors and I have seen my share. Listening to voices such as Gielgud’s explore the beauty of his verse has given me enormous pleasure. He is my complete package – read, act, study, sing, quote, watch.
I have read Eliot’s The Waste Land a thousand times and still go back to it. It took me deeper into poetry than I had been before and I regard it as a key piece in my reading. A challenging tissue of elaborate literary embroidery if ever there was one. I derive from it both delight in the imagery (‘bats with baby faces in the violet light’) and a librarianly challenge in chasing up its complex allusions (though now they seem a mite pretentious).

3. Which three blogs do you most visit?
Big n’juicy at: http://www.bignjuicy.co.uk/

Dick Jones’ Patteran Pages at: http://patteran.typepad.com/patteran_pages/

F*R*L at: http://fotoplas.blogspot.com/

4. Why do you read fiction?
For years novels were plankton that I trawled with open gills; odd weekly diets of Attwood, Allende, Rendell and Rankin. I found eventually that I was retaining very little nourishment, simply using them to go somewhere else for a while. I switched to biography, travel, social commentary, feeling that they gave more grist. Now I’m becoming a fiction recidivist, anxious to be told stories again. I have been stockpiling the recommendations of friends – Roth, Proulx and a list of many names unread. I suppose the central thing that one seeks is the mental snap that comes when a novelist’s style fits exactly to one’s literary taste. And escape, of course.

5. What makes you laugh?
Wit, puns, wry observations of life. But the pinnacle, amazingly, was a four-hour virtuoso performance by Ken Dodd, by which I was made quite ill with too much laughter.

Anna Scott blogs at Self-Winding, which can be found here: http://www.patriciascott.org/winding/

Five Questions: Full Blue Moon Dementia

john baker — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 09:19:04 +0000

1. Why do you blog?
I need a readily available outlet to express/expose my writing. Like my previous and current obsessions/passions (art/music) I have to write, I am driven to write – If I don’t then I am stifled, a depressed malcontent, well, more than I usually am anyway, and like music this is not something that you keep to yourself, it is for myself that I write, but the shared experience is crucial, the feedback essential, going through the motions part of the process; setting these self imposed deadlines, structure, piece lengths etc. and keeping to these parameters helps me be a better writer.

2. Which author and/or book has most influenced you?
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life – Anne Lamott, was the book that influenced me the most. Incarcerated, practically illiterate, with no hope I picked her book up and was so impressed that I started writing that night in my cell with a pencil on the back cover and haven’t stopped since.
Other authors who’ve influenced me:
James Ellroy – My Dark Places/American Tabloid
Herbert Shelby Jr. – Requiem for a Dream
Anne Proulx – Accordion Crimes
Chuck Palahniuk – Survivor

3. Which three blogs do you most visit?
Go Fug Yourself – http://gofugyourself.typepad.com/
All that Glitters
Bliss and the Color Pink – http://adrianabliss.blogspot.com/

4. Why do you read fiction?
I write creative nonfiction – reality gets a little too real sometimes and I need a break.

5. What makes you laugh?
Being called an American, living in America, the first morning glance in the bathroom mirror.

Patrick O’Neil blogs at Full Blue Moon Dementia, which can be found here: http://patrickseanoneil.blogspot.com/