NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

Had the pleasure of watching Ed Champion

and Sarah Weinman

eat breakfast in New York recently. As with other  lit blogger encounters, this was one fun,  easy, friendly affair. We spoke at the Skylight Diner nonstop for several hours mostly about how to monitize literary blogs (good bloody luck) and audio interviews (in ten years maybe), and the New York literary/media scene with its many essential-to-know-players, hardly any of whom I’d even heard of, let alone met. Highlights included description of a Craig Davison-Jonathan Ames “exhibition sparring event” last year at which Ed had played center ring announcer, and Sarah’s admiration of Grove Atlantic’s Morgan Entrekin after an impromptu evening of drinks, discos, and lit chat.

Then a leg stretcher around the block during which the two divulged (they spoke into my new, malfunctioning MP3 recorder) at my behest, a few favourite reads. Ed’s included John Barth’s The Sotweed Factor (which I can heartily second), and J.R. by William Gaddis. Sarah, flying the flag, went with Canadian, make that Ottawa, author Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I sat Down and Wept, citing the importance of powerful visceral reaction as a criteria for assignment merit and ranking books worthy of recommendation. 

After my claim that something of the ‘real’ must be present in a book if it is to produce a ‘viceral reaction’ in the reader, Ed countered with a short story he’d just read which involved an unhappy housewife having sex with a 1000 year-old woodpecker

(Some wood. Some pecker), and how this fancy had created in him a sadness, the depth of which, he asserted, might possibly have been unattainable had ‘realism’ been employed. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 at 11:29 AM and is filed under Authors and Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.