Jean-Philippe Toussaint, in the February 15, 2001, issue of the literary journal Bon-a-Tirer, describes the day he became a writer:

J’ai oublié l’heure exacte du jour précis où j’ai pris la décision de commencer à écrire, mais cette heure existe, et ce jour existe, cette décision, la décision de commencer à écrire, je l’ai prise brusquement, dans un bus, entre la place de la République et la place de la Bastille. Je n’ai plus la moindre idée de ce que j’avais fait auparavant ce jour-là, car, dans mon souvenir, à cette journée réelle de septembre ou d’octobre 1979 où j’ai commencé à écrire se mêle le souvenir du premier paragraphe du livre que j’ai écrit, qui racontait comment un homme qui se promenait dans une rue ensoleillée se souvenait du jour où il avait découvert le jeu d’échecs, livre qui commençait, je m’en souviens très bien, c’est la première phrase que j’ai jamais écrite, par : “C’est un peu par hasard que j’ai découvert le jeu d’échecs.” Ce que je sais avec plus de certitude, le souvenir se précise maintenant davantage, c’est que, rentré chez moi ce jour-là, ce lundi-là, je ne sais si c’était vraiment un lundi, mais il me plaît en tout cas de le croire (j’ai toujours éprouvé un petit penchant naturel pour le lundi), j’ai écrit la première phrase de mon premier livre dans ma chambre de la rue des Tournelles, dos à la porte, en face du mur. J’ai écrit la première version de ce livre en un mois, sur une vieille machine à écrire (et, comme je ne savais pas encore taper à la machine, je progressais avec deux doigts, maladroitement : en même temps que j’écrivais, j’apprenais à taper à la machine).

BBC Northern Ireland on local writing legend Brian Moore:

Moore had a difficult relationship with his father. He believed his father ‘died thinking I was a wimp.’ This perception of failure echoes through many of Moore’s novels. Failure interested him more than success because he believed that ’success alters people, while failure reveals them as they truly are.’ Perhaps this is what attracted him back to Northern Ireland during the Troubles - he took the chance to examine a society that had failed on so many levels, that was revealed for what it was.

Follow the link above for more about Moore, including some video of Moore visiting his old Belfast neighborhood. Here is another good essay about Moore, written by Tom Christie for LA Weekly in 1999.

J. R. Jones in the Chicago Reader, remembering Richard Yates:

“I guess I’m not very interested in successful people,” he told the Translatlantic Review. “I guess I’m more interested in failures.” But of course failure is the quotidian—most of us fail more than we succeed—which is why he dwelled on it and why his books are both depressing and endlessly rich in emotion. His own success was sweet indeed: Revolutionary Road was nominated for the National Book Award, and its critical acclaim won him jobs in Hollywood and Washington, not to mention more women than he’d ever imagined. But his name faded quickly from the public consciousness, and a long series of drunken outbursts on campuses and at writers’ gatherings, including one conference from which he was carried in a straitjacket, made him unemployable despite a general high regard for his work. He was the first to admit that, like his characters, he’d failed to live up to his potential.

Musing on McCarthy’s Remainder per my post below — and by the way, isn’t it interesting that, in a blog, the past is “below” while in real life the past is always “above” or “to the left”? — I remembered that I wanted to Google possible connections between said novel and the movie Synecdoche, New York.   And here it is, in an interview with Charlie Kaufman conducted by Scott Indrisek in Anthem magazine:

I found a lot of similarities between Synecdoche and this novel, Remainder, by Tom McCarthy…

This script, for the record, [was] written before that novel came out. I saw a review of that thing [Remainder]; I was freaked out. I intentionally did not read it. I have not read it. I hadn’t made the movie yet, and I didn’t want to have any kind of influence [from] it. But like I said, this script was written before that came out. I saw it online and I thought, A) oh fuck, and B) this is a book that I would read, normally. This sounds like a cool book. But I won’t. And I haven’t. And I probably at some point I will, but I don’t know…now it might be awful to read it. It might be like, Oh, he had this great idea that I didn’t have and I cant do anything about it.

It’s interesting to know that you haven’t read it.

It’s an idea that…that idea is not new to me, in my work. This particular version of it…What I’m saying is, it’s an attractive idea. I would look at that novel and think, Oh, cool. But I couldn’t in this case.

It’s got a similar kind of self-contained illogic.

He builds an apartment house and hires actors?

Yeah.

[Sarcastically] I wonder if McCarthy read the script…

Here’s a rather challenging meme I started, or attempted to start, five years ago. It is truly wonderful to reflect how stupid we were back then compared to how smart we are now. In only five years!

Anyhow, I just discovered a new example today, which I place last in the list below:

The narrator’s rich friend Ravelston in Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying AND the narrator’s rich friend Ravelstein in Bellow’s book.

The Annamite mistress appearing in Pynchon’s V. AND the Annamite mistress found in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

The defective trousers that figure in both A Confederacy of Dunces AND Robert Walser’s story “The Walk.”

The oddly fascinating plaster crack found in the bathroom in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and the same item found in the same room in Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s La salle de bain.

Incidentally, in the intervening half-decade I’ve been informed by an unimpeachable source that Toole could not have known Walser’s story. So put that one down as “chance.”

A few years ago I wrote about my visit to the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich.  Now James Woodall, in an article for More Intelligent Life, writes about his, at the end of an article recounting his “tussle with James Joyce’s censor”:

The foundation’s proudest possession is a suitcase-load of papers–well beyond the reach of Stephen–donated in 2006 by a stepson of Giorgio’s (he married twice). These include 50 letters and 34 postcards by Joyce, as well as manuscript material relating to “Finnegans Wake” and some of his poetry. The original documents are locked away in a Zurich bank vault, but laser copies are available for visitors to read. It is profoundly moving to gaze at Joyce’s handwriting from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as his substantial sketches for the “Wake”. This was the closest I had ever got to him.

(Come to think of it, I’ve quoted Woodall before as well.)

I’ll get my events list going again, one day.  Probably have to get fired from my current job first.

I noticed that no one blogged Zagajewski’s reading in Chicago last week.  Shame on you.  Yes, you there at the keyboard.

Oddly, my blog has become a clearinghouse for personal messages to Pedro Sorela.   Some people apparently don’t realize this is a private residence.  Man.

I read this unmistakeably Bellovian sentence in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland tonight:  “He found the ordinary run of dealings between people boring and insufficiently advantageous to him at the deep level of strategy at which he liked to operate.”  

Netherland’s quite good, I think.

I recently learned that I was a native of the pays d’en haut, otherwise known as “the lands beyond Huronia.”  How exotic. 

I loved Martin Riker’s interview with Jean-Philippe Toussaint in the Fall issue of the Quarterly Conversation.  Particularly his answer to the question, “What is the role of the artist in society?”

I’m back from my venture-funded hiatus, and I’m currently mulling over the impending “bankruptcy” of my events list — and also deciding which of the things I’ve read over the past few months are worth sharing here.

Here’s a start.  I bought the new New Directions edition of B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates a couple weeks ago and I’m slowly making my very enjoyable way through it.  (Caustic Cover Critic has some good photos here.)

As you may know, this is the famous 1969 novel that consists of 27 unbound chapters, sorted randomly and packaged in a box.  More precisely, as the author says in a note that accompanies the book:

This novel has twenty-seven sections, temporarily held together by a removable wrapper. 

Apart from the first and last sections (which are marked as such) the other twenty-five sections are intended to be read in random order. 

If readers prefer not to accept the random order in which they receive the novel, then they may re-arrange the sections into any other random order before reading.

One more thing to know - the chapters are each numbered uniquely starting with 1.

I decided to re-order the sections, but just a few moments before shuffling them I had a thought:  once I shuffle these chapters, I will no longer be able to restore the original random order of the sections as they were ordered by the author.  Why would I want do that?  Well, I don’t know - maybe I’d like to read that original order after I read my re-ordered version.  At any rate, I realized I was just moments away from losing that original order forever (short of buying a second copy). 

So I took a pencil and marked the chapters from 1 to 27 to reflect the original random order. 

Then I shuffled away and began to read.  

But as soon as I did, I had a second thought - if these chapters ever fall out of order, how would I recreate the book I am now reading?   So I realized that I needed to number the chapters a second time - to reflect my own random order.

Anyhow, just thought I’d let you know, so you don’t lose your original or personal versions of The Unfortunates. 

A final word:  in Jonathan Coe’s 1999 forward to the book, he notes that when the book was published in Hungary, the publisher couldn’t afford the added expense of creating an unbound volume.  And so Johnson added an extra element to his book, which he explained in an introduction:

Another device has occurred to me which goes some little way towards achieving an effect simular to that of the English edition.  Each of the twenty-five sections in between those labelled First and Last has a symbol printed at its head.  And on the last page, all the symbols so used are printed again, but together.  The really interested Hungarian reader is invited to remove the last page (or, of he has been brought up never to defile a book, to trace of copy it in some way) and to cut up and therefore separate the twenty-five symbols.  He or she should then place these symbols in a suitable recepticle, shake them vigorously to ensure they are thoroughly mixed, and then, with the eyes closed, draw them out one after another.  The symbols should then be numbered one to twenty-five in the order they came out.  The receptacle employed is a matter left to the reader: a hat is traditionally used for such drawing of lots in England, though please understand that I would hope that no headgear of a military character might be employed for so literary a purpose.  Many items commonly in domestic use and therefore conveniently to hand suggest themselves: bowls, saucepans, eggboxes, wastebins, cups even; and do not think I would be offended if you selected that old-fashioned, still-to-be-found piece known in English as a po, jerry, or pisspot.

But whatever receptacle the reader uses from which to draw his lots, he ends up with his very own random order corresponding to the twenty-five sections of the book between First and Last.  He now (or after an appropriate interval for refreshment if he is exhausted) proceeds to read the First section, and then refers to his cut-out symbols in order to identify the next section in his own order, and reads that.  And so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, until number twenty-five has been identified and read, whereupon the reader can sigh with relief and read the Last section.

The procedure does, of course, involve a certain amount of clerical and administrative work on the part of the reader.  But the amount is surely not excessive, and the lazy reader may of course proceed in his normal manner and accept the binder’s order.  if he does choose not to join in on the fun in this way that is of course, his inalienable right; but he will, however, be missing an experience not commonly (if at all) to be had; and perhaps the point, too.  Which is also his inalienable right. 

What all Hungarian readers cannot help but miss is the physical feel, disintegrative, frail, of this novel in its original format; the tangible metaphor for the random way the mind works, as I have said. 

I love the tone of this piece, which gives you a flavor of Johnson’s disarming directness and humor.

Now here’s the interesting part (you were looking for this, I know):  at the head of each section of the New Directions edition, you’ll find what I would guess are the symbols from the Hungarian edition.   Look for yourself: 

Symbol-free page from the original 1969 English edition (scroll down)

Same page from the new New Directions edition.

Each section has a unique symbol.  KInd of neat, huh?