Styron and the lost prize

So, with Christmas and with War and Peace over, I read Sophie's Choice in three weeks. I was Stingo, I had lived in a small apartment in New Orleans, exactly like the apartment described in the book- different city.. I had upstairs neighbors I was friends with. Sophie sat in my apartment and talked to me. The book is lovely, real and I couldn't put it down Styon is troubled always. I could not watch the movie for a good year and a half because that's not how Sophie looked. And the apartment wouldn't have looked like my apartment. The Confessions came shortly afterward. I can recall finishing the book at a little hotel on Geary Street where I moonlighted (actually daylighted- I was working graveyard full time at the St. Francis Hotel)) as a morning desk clerk and was brought to tears and got all choked up behind the desk in the empty lobby of this little hotel.

You should read all of Styron. I plan to. I think I have three left. There's still plenty of time

 The books let you know how troubled he was. The photo makes you realized what he overcame to live.

He shoulda won a Nobel. 

Been neglecting this blog again- sorry

Owe you guys Styron, but until then

Art is conversation. You can sit in your room and talk to yourself, but what's the point? Some people get paid for talking. Some even get prizes. If you don't start the conversation, who's gonna start it? I do it because I love to hear myself talk. But you have to listen too.

 

I wrote the above in response to a Facebook posting about art. I left out the part about how I started talking to prevent myself from being self-destructive and as a reaction to a crazy non-communicative father who abused all of those around him. Laughing is more fun than crying.

The Longest Novels -leaving out the asians

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_novels
The Longest Novels

I have read Atlas Shrugged, but to be honest I did skip quite a few pages of John Galt's speech at the end, as I did in Hugo's tome.

This is Balzac. It could be said that this might be the longest novel ever written.

Page from 1980

So this is the page of my reading record from around 1980. My arrows reflect the three books above as real big time keepers. I probably had been reading War & Peace for a while. I tend to read more than one book at a time. I was living in San Francisco and after my daughter was born in August of '79 we had settled into a small apartment just behind the St. Francis Hotel where I worked. I can recall reading it out in the rooftop patio area that some of the tenants had put together. It was windy up there most of the time but there could be good days.

I was working graveyard at the St. Francis and moonlighting as a Security Guard at a bookstore a couple of afternoons and later working at another hotel. Cynthia didn't go back to work after the baby was born. We had no money. I think that 1980 Christmas we found a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk and made that our Christmas fund. I got cardboard and wrapping paper and made us a Christmas tree. I can recall immediately after the baby was born, I'd walk the hill back home in the morning, and sit on the front stoop and smoke for a half hour before going up. It was overwhelming, but I got through it. We used to take long walks around the hills pushing the stroller. I'd make runs to Sears on my motortcycle for more diapers.

The book is very long and if you put it down for very long it's hard to remember who is who. It's mostly Pierre's story. (Henry Fonda in the early movie version) I had a hardback copy with a list of characters and their relationships. It was the Maude translation. I don't think I've read anything but the Maude translations of his books.

Tolstoy creates a world, populates it, makes it breathe, and will take you places you have never been and will make it visually part of your memory. This is a sweeping thing of a book. More of a history than a novel. Two or three months of devotion will take you there. Even the talk of ideas a bit later on didn't bog the progress. I took to skipping great sections of Hugo and Melville in their digressions of ideas, but not Tolstoy. As I am writing this, I'm thinking about Anna Karenina, Resurrection, Hadji Murad, Sevastopol, etc. All better novels. One should read it if one is doing Tolstoy. I have always considered him one of the top few. Flaubert belongs with him. I've finished all of Flaubert, still working on all of Tolstoy.

Working graveyard always gave me extra time to read. Having that luxury is great boon. Wikipedia says its really the 16th longest novel ever written. There no other ones of the long nature that I've completed. I only have managed the first two volumes of Proust's. Only the first book of The Tale of Genji, and only the first of the Story of the Stone.

A movie version to watch first might help with orientation.

This was our mayor then.

I can recall Cynthia beginning to critique my writing style then and we did comparisons of those authors I loved and my own work and I began to realize that certain principles had to be learned and applied. That was the beginning of the pursuit of the perfect paragraph and seamless prose. She always felt as if she was smarter than I was because she had finished her bachelor's degree. We decided later to move to Arizona so I could go back to school to get a degree in writing.

All through this period I was writing regularly on a long book about a drunk printer in New Orleans that went on and on and had just a little plot and a lot of where nothing really happened. I think I ended up with a 60,000 word first draft. Then I was going to rewrite into a Joycean structure like Ulysses except base it on the 12 labors of Hercules. I never rewrote it. I didn't know it at the time, but I needed to learn about dramatic tension- which Tolstoy has plenty of.

Oh and we had a cat, Herbie (Herbert Gold) that would sit on my desk in the evening when I wrote in long hand.

I'll get to Styron next time.On the same page, there's Langer & Pound- worth reading for understanding it all.
 

Next endeavour

I've kept a log of the books I've read since 1975. It's been a sort of a journal, except no entries about the book itself other than to name the book, the author, the translator and the date I finished it. A couple of years ago I went back and drew arrows next to the books I thought were the ones I admired the most.

As you can see there are no arrows on these two pages. I'm hard to please. I figure from the log and the time before the log, that I read about 1000 books. That's way below what I wanted to read in my lifetime. I gave up on pulp fiction about the time I landed in New Orleans at 21. It was partially because I realized that I couldn't even recall the story or the characters a month after reading one. I had been a fan of John D. MacDonald and Travis Magee (detective) but couldn't remember which ones I had read. If you can't remember a book on some level why read it? Read poets because I thought that they could really teach me how to write. They have. Read famous novelists because I thought they would teach me how to write a great novel. They have taught me how to write also, but not how to write a great novel. Been reading more and more non-fiction the last several years, partially for a biography I plan to write after retirement, but also because I've fallen in love with naturalists and the notion of canoeing and there are thousands of personal narratives about river travel, so I've become a warped collector of the genre. I actually feel as if I'm getting that world history education that I wanted when I started reading the Will Durant history of civilization years ago. (I only got three volumes into it- pre-log record)  So here's the new project for the blog, I'm going back to those that I put arrows next too, and will try to describe why the book felt important, where I was when I was reading it and what it has meant years later. Maybe even post up the page, and you all can see then other books that were crowding that page. It would be cool to have a dialog. Maybe delve into the best songs, the best paintings,,, The best of whatever and whatever it does to your life. I need to re-balance my life a bit here. I need to finish this next draft of the new novel and I need to think about the other things that are important. Whatcha think?  

Self Publishing yourself and paying people hundreds of dollars to send spam emails to annoy people about your book

So I looked up their Web Site and they are just another self-publishing house. But their difference is that they go after other self-publishing company customers. As if I don't already get enough spam from the one I worked with. They will sell you anything you like. Back when I finished and published my first one, I called iUniverse and wanted to know how much it would cost me to to have them nominate me for the National Book Award. They said, "Huh?" Now you can buy it as a option of your package,

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Mc Nay [mailto:mcnay@usc.edu] 
Sent: Friday, November 22, 2013 3:31 AM
To: tsmith@bookwhirl.com
Subject: Re: RE: Book Marketing

Terry,

If you have not read the book, then you don't know if its any good, so you
are just trying to get me to pay you for services for marketing the product.
Like most people with a practical business sense, I realize if the product
is not making enough money to pay for marketing, then one should not pay for
marketing. 

You willing to work on a percentage commission of sales?

Don't respond if you are not.

Dan

Dan,

I understand where you're coming from, even large traditional publishing
company's marketing consultant does not read the books, they trust their
research team, and we do the same we receive 200-300 book a day, and we
don’t have the time in reading every book. The question here is not how
quality your book is, the question is How you can compete with a lot of
authors in the global market.

If you want to have something you never had, you need to do something you
never did.

Thanks,
All the Best,

Terry Smith
New Media and Film Department
Senior Marketing/Publishing Consultant

 
Marketing and Publishing Services - BookWhirl.com

Toll Free: 1 (877) 207-1679 ext. # 386
Fax       : 1 (800) 852-4249
Email   : tsmith@bookwhirl.com 
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