Strangers making the most of the dark

A lot of people lament how the publishing industry has changed over the years. Your career seems to very much bridge all that - from the small independent shops to the corporatization of it all.

I say to Bob Gottlieb, who's still a very close personal friend, "You couldn't stand to be in publishing today." And he says, "I know." It is very corporatized. We all began to think about that in those days. What was going to happen? These big conglomerates, synergy, all that. People began to worry about it.

Tell me about some more of the big characters.

We just don't have them anymore. Morgan [Entrekin] is as close as we have. And Sonny [Mehta]. There were so many: Henry Robbins, Ted Solotaroff, Joe Fox, Sam Lawrence, David Segal. Even Dick Synder is a lot more colorful than Jack Romanos, who is now gone. I mean, they had passion, they cared about literature. Even Dick, who's not an intellectual. He cared. He was a madman. I mean, we need a little bit more…. Who is a madman now in publishing? Peter Olson, but of a very strange type. I mean, Morgan's eccentric, Sonny's eccentric. Morgan's less eccentric than he used to be. He's getting very conventional now with the wife and the child. It was just different then.

So you miss the personalities.

Yes. I miss the fun. I tell Tina [Bennett] and Eric [Simonoff], "You missed the good days." When I worked for Sterling Lord, I had a loft, a sort of duplex loft apartment on Barrow Street. And Michael Sissons, who's now the head of Fraser & Dunlop, and Peter Matson, who's also an agent, used to give these parties at my house. They would make these drinks of half brandy and half champagne, and people got so drunk. One night Rosalyn Drexler, the lady wrestler and the novelist, picked up Walter Minton and just threw him against the wall. I'll never forget that. There was just more of a sense of fun.

So why was that lost?

It's the corporate thing. People are too scared.

Jofie Ferrari-Adler's 2008 interview with agent Lynn Nesbit.

There is a party, everyone is there

If you were physically incapacitated and could watch only one show for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Law & Order. I panic that there will be a time when it isn’t on TV. When I’m not in New York it makes me miss New York. I think about all the people angry that their streets are being closed off. And I feel like Jerry Orbach might be someone that I will get to meet in Heaven.

Amy Poehler's favourite TV shows. (Pic: Gothamist.)

Now playing

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.