YATES

Word of the day : raiment : clothing, garments

Julia and I heard today that James Patterson will be the Keynote Speaker at the 2013 Savannah Book Festival.  Uggh.  I respect the career he's built for himself doing half-assed, below-par factory-writing, but as a writer, he's the pits.  You can't take him seriously at all.

- In the period from 2006 to the end of this year, he will have "written" 62 books.  Seriously!

- In 2011 alone, he "wrote" 12.

- He is "writing" 9 different series right now!  This is in addition to the stand-alone novels that he "writes."

- He has 13 "novels" on tap for this year.  

The man is God.  That is, if God sucked, couldn't write, was enviously rich, and fake.  

Oh, well, hopefully they get other, actual writers in the lineup.

Ralph Gibson (#27)

I couldn't find a whole lot out there about Gibson, but here are the basics:

He was born in Los Angeles in 1939, joined the Navy, and later graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute.  Early in his career he was an assistant to the great photographer Dorothea Lange.  He published one of modern photography's more well-known books, The Somnabulist, in 1970.  Influences included Edward Weston and Walker Evans.  Here is a description of his work from an exhibition at the Palm Beach (Florida) Photographic Centre in 2011

Ralph Gibson’s images often incorporate fragments with erotic and mysterious undertones, building narrative meaning through contextualization and surreal juxtaposition.

He had an exhibition at Atlanta's High Museum of Art this year.  He has used a Leica camera his entire year.  His work is a little Surrealist, a little Minimalist; nudes are common too.  He lives in New York City.  

from The Somnabulist

Richard Yates just may be - no, he is indisputably my favorite American writer.  His characters are more real than many of the people you actually meet in real life.  His dialogue and prose is so exacting, so carefully crafted yet natural, that it's almost breathtaking.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Yates spent the final years of his lonely, depressed, booze-heavy life in Tuscaloosa, Alabama:

http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20090126/NEWS/901250234?p=6&tc=pg

Interesting, huh?  I had no idea that Yates despised the work of John Updike, nor did I have any idea that comedian Larry David dated Yates' daughter Monica at one point.  And it would have been fascinating if Woody Allen, who bought the rights to Yates' great, splendid Easter Parade, had indeed made a version of it, rather than just keeping it and hording it because he admired Yates so much and (I guess) didn't want to see anyone else screw it up on screen.

I've said it before, but I do think Revolutionary Road, Yates' 1961 breakthrough, is the Great American Novel.  I still think that - and I think I will think that ten years from now, twenty, forty...

Even a late-period work like this, somewhat repeating some of the themes and moods of his earlier work, exemplifies what most writers at their peak are up to.  

He might not have been a nice, chummy, supportive teacher; maybe he was a bitter man, but he was definitely a great artist.

I would write more today, but I want to play with Gabriel outside some, work for an hour on my novel, and fume a little bit over our landlord.

Until tomorrow!