In love with Michael

I’m in love with Michael Dirda, damn him.

Michael is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a number of dauntingly erudite yet gorgeously readable books about books.  He writes equally stunning essays for the New York Times, the Barnes & Noble Review, and, well, pretty much any venue where the printed word is discussed.  I’ve met him a few times, he being a regular at the annual Baker Street Irregulars dinner.   And when I’m writing, he is rarely far from my mind, since I often dip into the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus to spark my interest in, and attention to, the words I’m using—and there stands MD, delivering pithy remarks about words from boring (“Just as sexy (q.v.) is the ultimate compliment, so boring is the most dreaded pejorative.”) to very (“among the few words that gains in effectiveness when repeated”) with stops at crapulous (“Writers ought to use these tricky words sometimes, not only to keep such useful terms current but also to lend a little panache to their prose.”) postmodern (“neatly suggests that its user is learned, widely read, up to date on the latest in literary theory, and, in general, really cool, not to say—ahem—edgy.”) and sexy (“be careful when using this revealing adjective: It allows others a peek into your unclothed psyche.”)

But this Dirda affaire is getting out of hand.  The most recent upsurge in our relationship (about which, I hasten to say, he is unaware—or…was.)  began with a reprinted article of his in Salon.com, a site to which I subscribe, for the pleasure of no ads.  I’m behind on my reading—both online and on the page—so when I spot something I like, I tend to scroll down a bit and discover things I missed when they first appeared.

Such as a review, of all things, of Pliny the Younger’s description of Pompeii, a review sparked by the eruption of our considerably less dramatic and more tedious Icelandic volcano that brought air traffic to a standstill.

The review was simply riveting: Pliny’s uncle (Pliny the Elder) died under Vesuvius, and the nephew describes the death, and his own experiences at Misenum, where—but no, I’m not going to repeat what the reviewer says so brilliantly, go and read it for yourself, and then come back:  Here’s the link.

I read the review, as I hope you just did, and having overlooked the name of the reviewer (a sin of which I am as guilty as anyone else, alas) looked back at the top and saw the name Dirda.  I should have known.  And so I followed the Barnes & Noble link over to that page, and found there a more recent Dirda review, of James Lees-Milne, The Life by Michael Bloch.   Which essay I greedily read, and then went hunting for others.  That took me sideways into a New York Review of Books piece on the Patricia Highsmith novels,

and into books about bar-crawling Roman emperors

and then a reminder of a delightfully eccentric memoir I’d read when writing The Game called Hindoo Holiday:

Ackerley’s holiday journal deserves an honored place in that literary subgenre of witty, opinionated travel books by sandy-haired young Englishmen. It belongs on the same shelf with such delicious armchair escapes as Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen, Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, and Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia.

But I had to stop when I came across an essay entitled “2009: A Year in the (Reading) Life”

because I knew that if I entered that particular essay, I would never come out again.

Thank you, Michael, for adding to my 23 linear feet of already purchased to-be-read by bringing to my attention, or nudging me to re-read:

Pliny the Younger: Complete Letters, P. G. Walsh

James Lees-Milne, The Life, Michael Bloch

Another Self, James Lees-Milne

The Road to Oxiana, Robert Byron

A Time of Gifts, Patrick Lee Fermor

Highsmith, a Romance of the 1950s, Marijane Meaker

The five Ripley novels, Patricia Highsmith

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, Patricia Highsmith

And lest I forget, if you haven’t read it, take a look at Michael’s memoir:

An Open Book, Michael Dirda.

Damn him.

(And his speaking manner is equally erudite and charming–which you can see at

watch?v=3MPSTMfAYVM

Start at the 3:30 point.)

A writer’s tools

Once upon a time, the mother of a couple of young children decided she wanted to write a book, or three. But because she was, well, the mother of a couple of young children, she spent a fair amount of her time doing parental things like sitting and watching her son at soccer practice, and sitting outside the house of the music teacher during lessons, and sitting…
And because this was the late 1980s, and computers were large clunky boxes firmly attached to desks (insert word processing disk; eject; insert blank disk; type; eject…) the choices for mobile writing were either a portable typewriter, or a pen:

My first pen (on the left) was a simple Waterman bought in Oxford on the high street pen shop (still there—it’s called Pens Plus.) With it I wrote The Beekeeper’s Apprentice and most of A Monstrous Regiment of Women. I used buff colored paper clipped to an oversized artist’s clipboard (as in the photo), comfortable whether I was at home, or sitting behind the wheel of the Volvo while the kids were kicking a soccer ball or tormenting the music teacher’s piano.
A pen is a personal, highly tactile way to write. A fountain pen has the definite advantage of being gentle on the hands and wrist, since unlike pencils or a ball point, there’s no pressure involved, just directing the ink’s flow. I could write for hours and hours, which is how I wrote then, and I never got cramps or carpal tunnel syndrome or even so much as a callus.
And that was the only way I wrote. Even letters, I would draft by hand first, then transfer onto the computer. For a while, I would buy myself a new pen for a new book—the wooden one (bought in France) is the one that wrote Folly. (Folly being about a woodworker…) But then I found the Namiki (which seems to have gone walkabout at the moment, so I didn’t add that one to the photo—no doubt it’s off attending some writing conference.)  The Namiki became my favorite, with its rare combination of a fine nib and an easy ink flow (Japanese characters, I imagine, requiring both) and I used that exclusively for a few years. All in all, I wrote nearly a dozen books in ink, until computers became small enough I could rest one on that same oversized clipboard and fool my brain into thinking it was still producing words with a pen.
I don’t tend to write first drafts with pens now, since the business of the rewrite and edit became just too cumbersome. I even cajoled my brain into writing letters on the machine, although I still need to see words on a page for any complex kind of edit. But I do use the pens still, when words are coming slowly, when I need to think things out in, well, a personal and tactile fashion.
When I need to think in pen and ink.

I set off from home with the best of intentions, daily blogs from the road in the UK. However…
A while back, I promised that I was going to start writing about “writers’ tools,” and the process I am going through at present is one of those: down time.
Being a writer involves holding a number of jobs, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes in series. There are weeks when I work on a new book, speak at an event, do an interview, finish up a short story or article, and fiddle with online things–in the same week. And there are other times when I cruise forward on one track alone, unconcerned with side issues, wrapped up in the matter at hand.
The matter at hand during the past three weeks has been the UK. My first week was given to events, widely scattered across southern England, but since the 23rd, with only a couple of exceptions, I have taken my brain off the track of novels, the writing of and the speaking about. I have done some work, on an academic book about Holmes scholarship Les Klinger asked me to help with, but for the past three weeks, my brain has been blissfully unconcerned with the craft of fiction. In the five weeks before I left, I produced 300 pages of first draft. After my time here, I feel as if a set of overused muscles has been allowed to rest, or as if an area of my brain showing red hot in a PET scan has cooled to blue.
A writer’s tools include rest. Thanks for waiting me out, I’ll be home at the end of the week.

Lunch (tea?) with Laurie!

Want to win Lunch with Laurie? (or tea, or brunch..?) The Carmel Bach Festival is holding a fund-raiser and auctioning off, among other things, a time with this author.

Here’s their link, the auction finishes August 1st, and the time and place (local to me) is to be worked out.

Communities

Cambridge is a town well experienced in repelling would-be boarders. I have never managed to drive directly to any goal in this town, even when I’ve had a GPS, or SatNav as they’re known here. This time I had only some scribbled notes from the map on my new iPad, and although on my second attempt I did spot the road I wanted, I was already past it. Oh well, thinks I, I’ll just turn around somewhere and come back.
An hour later, I found the road again.
Fortunately, once there, I could abandon the car and turn myself over to the insider tracking device of my friend Michelle Spring, who nonchalantly led an unerring way to the store I would have found only after forty minutes of casting about and begging bicycle-mounting students and scurrying shoppers for help.
But find this mythic mirage of a store she did, and we entered the welcoming doors of Heffer’s (now a part of the Blackwells chain, which sensibly kept the name) for their Bodies in the Bookshop event. Sixty three crime writers gathered to sell books and chat with readers and each other, comparing covers, talking about what’s next, catching up on the lives of colleagues we see a whole lot less often than people who work in offices see their colleagues. Just another typical example of the community of crime writers.
Then on Friday I took the tube into London, to drop in and sign books and to meet the writer whose book is the subject of discussion over at the Virtual Book Club this month, China Miėville. I adored The City and The City, and am having a great time with The Kraken, a whole different kind of book but equally stunning in its originality.
The afternoon I treated myself with a quick visit to the Museum of London, one of my very favorite museums, and then over to the Marylebone library, a stone’s throw from 221b Baker Street, which appropriately has a collection of Holmes material. I slanted my talk towards Holmes, although they seemed happy to talk about anything–and to my surprise, nearly half the audience were Americans, on holiday. The librarians were surprised, but pleased that I brought my own audience…
There followed drinks and dinner at the pub around the corner, the Allsop Arms, where the Sherlock Holmes society of London originally met, and remains a place for conviviality.
Another community

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