Gonzalo Barr

Various computer models are used by meteorologists to predict the path of a major storm.  The models are executed several times each day during the life of the storm. The last time anyone ran the models on Tropical Storm Hanna was three and a half hours ago. This is where the models predicted the storm would go over the next few days.

After seeing this, don’t you feel a lot more confident about weather forecasts?

Image:  Computer Model Hurricane Forecasts, weatherunderground.com

I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen. I think this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself.
–William Gaddis

The perfect world is for books to be famous and authors to be unknown.
– Salman Rushdie

Sources: Gaddis quote from The Gaddis Annotations website, Rushdie quote Shira J. Boss, “Under Cover No More,” Columbia College Today (Mar. 2003), at 12

For our latest installment in the category of “Familia é uma merda,” documenting how families and especially parents can abort or indirectly encourage a literary career, we turn to Orhan Pamuk and Paul Theroux. Here is Theroux, from his latest book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008) –

[Pamuk’s mother] loomed large in his life and in his Istanbul narrative. I asked him what she thought of the book.
“She didn’t like my Istanbul book. Then I got a divorce.” He smiled. “She wasn’t happy about that. But I put her in the book — My Name is Red. Then she was happy.”
“I put my mother in a book and she was very unhappy,” I said. “She saw it as a betrayal. When my first book was published, almost forty years ago, she wrote me a long letter. I was in Africa at the time. She said the book was a piece of trash. That was her exact word. Trash! ‘Thanks, Mom!’”
Pamuk became interested. “You must have been sad about that.”
“Strangely, no. I was energized. I think I would have been disturbed if she’d praised the book — I would have suspected her of lying. I thought: I’m not writing to please her. By the way, I kept the letter. I still have it. It was a goad to me.”

For other entries on writers and their families, see here, here, here, and here.

Picture: Orhan Pamuk; Source: Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008), at 49

Edward E. Ericson, Jr., a professor emeritus of English at Calvin College, recently wrote an essay on Solzhenitsyn for The Wall Street Journal. In the essay, Ericson rejected the notion that Solzhenitsyn was a “dour jeremiah figure hurling thunderous judgments at a wayward world.” Instead, the writer described himself as “an unshakable optimist,” convinced that the truth would prevail, so long as writers and artists set out to defeat it. Here is Ericson summarizing the writer’s views –

An “ordinary brave man” could decide “not to participate in lies, not to support false actions.” But “it is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie! For in the struggle with lies art has always triumphed and shall always trumph!”

The essay is here.  “A Solzhenitsyn Reader” accompanies the essay.  It is a list prepared by Ericson with the writer’s most important works.

Source: The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 9, 2008) at W12

Heidi Dalibor, a 20-year-old Wisconsin woman, was arrested earlier this month for keeping two library books two months past the date when she was supposed to return them. The two books were Janet Fitch’s White Oleander and Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons. On August 6, 2008, Grafton, Wisconsin police, acting on a warrant for “failure to return library materials,” arrested Dalibor. She was later released and the case closed after she paid about USD 30 for the overdue paperbacks and her mother paid USD 172 to get her out of custody. She was also allowed to keep the books.

The story is here.

Photo:  Heidi Dalibor, The Smoking Gun website; Source: The Smoking Gun website, sheboyganpress.com (the story is no longer available)

A recent issue of The Economist has a review of Haruki Murakami’s most recently translated book to English, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (translated by Philip Gabriel). The review is not favorable.  It calls the new book a “puzzling read,” a “slim new work” full of “banalities” that reads mostly “like a fitness magazine.”

One quote struck me, though. In the book, as Murakami is about to jump into the Sea of Japan during a triathlon, he thinks –

What a lame shabby being I am. I feel like everything I’ve done in life has been a total waste.

Dr. Faustus, in Christopher Marlowe’s eponymous play, asks Mephistopheles why Lucifer tempts souls to perdition.  Mephistopheles first answers, “Enlarge his kingdom.”  Unsatisfied, Faustus insists, ”Is that the reason why he tempts us thus?”  Mephistopheles then answers in Latin, a phrase that translates essentially as, “Because misery loves company.”

There is something about knowing that whatever ill you’re going through, you are not alone.  Whether devils and lost souls feel the same is unknown, pace Marlowe.  But we do know that humans get comfort from having company, even when it is in misery.

Writers work alone, from conception through revision. That makes them more susceptible to feeling like no one else experiences the kind of crises of purpose and being that strike writers. Murakami’s statement, coming from the hugely successful author of twelve books translated to English, as well as every language you can name, has to offer some comfort to any writer who has ever wondered what the hell he is doing and why.

The Times reviews the book here.

See also Ten Things You Need to Know About Haruki Murakami here.

Sources: The Economist (July 26-August 1, 2008), Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus II.i, murakami.ch

While Paul Theroux was in Turkmenistan to research his latest book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, someone in the audience asked him, “How do you write a novel?”

His answer — You need an idea, characters, setting, and about two years of solitude.

Source: Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008), at 121

We don’t expect much in the way of sustained winds from Fay. It will be too far from here and on the other side of the peninsula.  But we do expect some gusts and heavy rains, both of which have begun.

Here is a palm tree in our back yard. Watch how the fronds bend in the gust, before they straighten back.

The storm will probably be at its closest to Miami later tonight through early tomorrow morning. I live in a part of the city where the power goes out each time a squirrel sneezes, so we expect to be without power, even if there isn’t much going on outside. But that’s what candles are for, right?

Stay tuned.

Photos:  Gonzalo Barr

We are back early for several reasons, including Tropical Storm Fay.

“By the way, what’s the deal with Fay?” Sol asks.
Walt looks relieved. “Storm’s strengthening. Made landfall in western Cuba. Could be veering our way. We should be under a hurricane watch by now.”
“So what can we expect tomorrow?”
“Overcast skies with occasional wind gusts, precipitation, even some thunderstorm activity later in the day.”
“Some what?”
“Rain.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“A lot depends on whether the storm veers our way or heads north into the Gulf.”

from “Faith,” a short story in The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa

No one died in my story, even after the fictitious Fay became a hurricane.  I am keeping my fingers crossed that the real Fay is no more than an inconvenience when it becomes a hurricane, which it is expected to do in the next few hours.

Image: Satellite image taken August 18, 2008 1644Z, TS Fay, NASA, Weather Underground; Excerpt from “Faith,” in The Last Flight of José Luis Balboa (2006) by Gonzalo Barr

The Spanish newspaper El mundo reports that Franco-Vietnamese film director, Tran Anh Hung, plans to make a feature film based on Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.

Murakami has approved the project, which will be undertaken by Asmik Ace Entertainment and Fuji Television. Filming will start in two months and a release date is foreseen for 2010.

Image: UK Verso edition of Norwegian Wood, Wikipedia; Source: El mundo (Spain)