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Mr Wilson and, below, with Christine Perfect McVie not setting fire to a gazebo. Tineye can't source the snapshot which looks too good to be real, and probably was. California.

More talk

Philip Temple interviewed by Bob Cornwall:

How did you arrive at that very distinctive style? I've tried hard to find equivalents. Only James Ellroy comes close.

Parts of Ellroy I like, the jarring impact of the language. But there are times when I want to relax. I'd like to see a proper sentence, just one proper sentence.

But generally I've come to it because I want to say things as briefly as possible, and I want to somehow capture how the words feel in my head. So if I leave off pronouns and all sorts of things... As I said to one woman, I've taught English grammar and I know what I am doing. And my dialogue, I've always wanted to truncate my dialogue. Ever since I read George V. Higgins's Friends of Eddie Coyle, I've really wanted to write a book in dialogue. (Now that I am writing film scripts, I don't want to write a book in dialogue!). I've tried to create a distinctive voice, so it's fairly self-conscious. And I don't write like that normally. You won't get an e-mail from me like that.

But mostly I'm interested in the way we share, although we may come from opposite sides of the world, we're part of a linguistic community. And the way we speak to each other, we leave things out, we don't have to say full sentences, or point everything out. And when you find people that work together intimately, or who spend a lot of time together (women are like this sometimes, domestically, whatever), particularly colleagues who do the kind of work that doesn't lend itself to exposition, like, we know what we are doing here, they don't spell things out to each other.

So what I am trying to do is to say, inside this community, this linguistic community that we share, when we speak to each other, what don't we have to say. That's what I've tried to do. I've tried to take all of the bits out that people would not say to each other. I want to come close to some sort of naturalistic language. If you try too hard, it's art. And there's another line you can fall over, into transcript, and it goes clunky on you.

Full interview here.

A little knowledge

Green:

A few streets away in Hackney, the area Gartside credits with reviving him a second time after another few lost years, there are hundreds of new Scritti Politti songs in unfinished digital form. Gartside admits he suffers from completion anxiety. "But I'm convinced that I have to keep making music," he says, "and that I haven't come close to making the best music that I can. Though I've had a very low opinion of myself, the fact that the best work I've yet done is sitting unfinished on a hard drive back home must be good."

Full interview here.

Hard boiled

Fran Lebowitz on reading:

I like hard boiled detectives. I really don't like the English. If I see the word Don and it's not someone's name, I'm out of there. Nero Wolfe is one of my favorites because I love to read about food... John [D.] McDonald is another one of my great favorites. When my first book was published in paperback it was with Fawcett and I guess I told the publisher how much I liked him. I guess she told him because he wrote me a letter and told me how much he liked my book. I was thrilled. They made me an honorary member of the John McDonald fan club, with the badge, certificate, and everything. The Travis McGee's are the best.

I liked Robert Parker before he became a social worker. Elmore Leonard. I even like his bad ones. I think Joseph Hansen's the best living detective writer. The Dave Brandstetter series. The detective is a guy whose father owns something like Metropolitan Life Insurance, a zillionaire. The son is gay and he's the detective. He's a death claims investigator.

Hansen stopped writing them about five years ago but I still think he's far and away the best.

Full interview here. Public Speaking, the Martin Scorsese-directed HBO documentary on Lebowitz, is here.

Billion Dollar Brain

Robert Gottlieb on the art of editing:

For a while I was editing the two best writers of quality who were writing spy novels, John le Carré and Len Deighton, and you couldn’t find a more perfect pair of opposites in the editorial process. Le Carré is unbelievably sensitive to editorial suggestion because his ear is so good and because his imagination is so fertile—he’ll take the slightest hint and come back with thirty extraordinary new pages. Deighton, on the other hand—who is totally willing, couldn’t be more eager for suggestions—is one of those writers for whom, once a sentence is down on paper, it takes on a reality that no amount of good will or effort can change. So you can say to him, Len, this is a terrific story but there is a serious problem. He’ll say, What is it? What is it? And you say, Well, on page thirty-seven this character is killed, but on page a hundred and eighteen he appears at a party. Oh my God, Len says, this is terrible, but I’ll fix it, don’t worry. Then you get the manuscript back, and you turn to page thirty-seven, and he’ll have changed it to, He was almost killed.

Full interview here in The Paris Review.
Hat tip: Quote Unquote.

Coma

Claridge's Hotel in London is famous for catering to the idiosyncrasies of its guests. If you like mineral water at your bedside every night, the staff of Claridge's will notice this, and each night you'll find the bottle of mineral water by your bed. If you like it half empty, you will find it half empty. And since the staff is English, no eccentricity is too bizarre to indulge.

I lived at Claridge's for several weeks in 1978, rewriting a screenplay. I was typing and cutting and pasting the pages together. But I couldn't get an ordinary tape dispenser; I just had a plain roll of Scotch tape and a pair of scissors. Of course, every time I cut a piece of tape, the edge would fall back onto the roll, and I'd have a terrible time prying it free with my fingernails to cut another piece. Eventually I hit on the expedient of cutting long strips of tape, and running them lightly down the knobs of my desk drawers on both sides of the desk. This allowed me simply to cut between the knobs to get a piece of tape. I followed this procedure of taping the drawers for several weeks.

A year later I returned to Claridge's and checked into a room. It was a nice room, but it had a peculiarity: someone had stretched rows of Scotch tape down all the drawers of the desk in the corner.

-- Michael Crichton, Travels (2002)

Bedside reading

Liquidamber by Chris Bell, available in print and ebook.