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My Essays

A Marine’s Vietnam Story & Other Writing

Operation Georgia - Marines blow up bunkers and tunnels used by the Viet Cong

This month I published a creative nonfiction story titled “The Consecration” in Booth, the literary journal of Butler University. The story is taken from my recently-completed memoir, and recounts my teenage friendship with a Marine Gunnery Sergeant who had fought in Vietnam as a combat engineer.

This week I also published a book review in Full Stop where I looked at recent works by novelist Marilynne Robinson and French philosopher Pascal Bruckner in light of today’s disheartening culture wars.

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My Essays

Writers & Day Jobs

picture-cubicles

For my January article in Full Stop I wrote about writers and day jobs with a little intro about T.S. Eliot and his years working as a clerk at Lloyd’s bank in London.

I couldn’t have imagined the interest that the article generated across the Internet over the last week and a half. There are clearly a lot of writers who work full-time and are conflicted about what this does to their creative work.

Here is a sampling of the sites that wrote about and linked to the essay:

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Literary

Kerouac’s ‘Big Sur’ Now a Movie

When asked about the novels of Jack Kerouac Truman Capote quipped: “That’s not writing, it’s typing.” His famed comment underscores Kerouac’s mixed reputation as a writer, both then and now. Kerouac’s output was certainly uneven, but his ambition for the novel and his vision for a new American prose was both genuine and compelling; Kerouac’s writing at times is full of fireworks and wonder.

In 2012 Walter Salles directed the long-awaited film of Jack Kerouac’s famous novel On the Road. And now, a year later, we have a film of his novel Big Sur, which recounts the efforts of Jack Duluoz (a fictionalized version of Kerouac) to get sober and regain his footing as a writer at a cablin in Big Sur, California. Jacket Copy has an interesting piece on the challenges of making a movie of Big Sur. Here is the trailer:

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Literary

The Legend of Gary Shteyngart’s Blurbs

A smart, amusing look at the strange publishing practice of blurbing new books and how Russian-born novelist Gary Shteyngart has emerged as a kind of blurbing king pin who will seemingly blurb just about anything, and do it with real flair.

The short 15-minute video has dozens of interviews with New York writers, critics and editors, as well as an interview with Shteyngart himself. The film was made by writer and editor Edward Champion.

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My Essays

Casting Sophia Coppola in ‘The Leopard’

My Twitter friend the writer Kim Askew invited me to guest post on her site Romancing the Tome last week as part of a celebration of the release of her new book Tempestuous (co-authored with Amy Helmes). I wrote about one of my favorite novels The Leopard by the Italian writer Giuseppe di Lampedusa and why director Francis Ford Coppola should use it as a vehicle to redeem Sophia Coppola’s notoriously poor acting performance in his 1990 film The Godfather III.

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Hoping Sophia Coppola one day stars in ‘The Leopard’

I was honored to guest post for Kim alongside such luminaries as famed literary networker Lauren Cerand, writer and editor Edward Champion and publisher Richard Nash.

This is not the first time I’ve written about Sophia Coppola. Last year in The Millions I imagined moving to Paris and bumping into Sophia and her singer husband Thomas Mars somewhere in the Latin Quarter.

Categories
My Essays

My ‘Full Stop’ Piece on David Foster Wallace

Recently I had the good fortune to be named a monthly contributor to Full-Stop Magazine. For my December piece, I wrote how I had been unknowingly “shadowing” the late-novelist David Foster Wallace across America for years. When I read the novel Infinite Jest back in 1996 or ’97,  I immediately recognized that Wallace and I shared connections to some very odd and specific American places.

Vol. 1 Brooklyn linked to the article today as part of their “Morning Bites” daily round-up. Morning Bites (and Afternoon Bites) features some of the best literary and cultural writing  online and is well-worth keeping tabs on.

I have blogged about David Foster Wallace before. Most recently I wrote about the mystery surrounding religion and David Foster Wallace. There is a lot of speculation that DFW had been something of a closet Christian–but the issue of his faith in not a clear one–and D.T. Max’s new biography seems to discredit the notion that Wallace was a believing Christian.