YouTube might be stuffed full with videos of crazy cats and toddlers falling over, but it’s also an amazing archive like this opportunity to listen to David Foster Wallace express himself. This video was broadcast on March 27, 1997.
Archive for the ‘interview’ Category
A Very Young Dancer; all grown up
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011
In 1976 photographer Jill Krementz decided to chronicle the day to day life of a 10-year-old student named Stephanie. The story follows her attendance at the School of American Ballet in New York through to being chosen for the starring role of Marie in George Balanchine‘s presentation of The Nutcracker. The book was called A Very Young Dancer and while today it is out-of-print there was a time when it was a bestseller, for many years, and over the years has influenced a great many of today’s ballet professionals. But for all who read it there was always the question of “who was this Stephanie.” The young girls last name was never used in the book, and for 30 years fans have wondered what ever happened to the young prodigy. Did she become an adult ballet dancer; did she go on to teach? This past week we got to find out because The New York Times managed to find and interview Stephanie. The Very Young Dancer, it seems, was asked to withdraw from ballet at the age 13.
She wasn’t just a young dancer whose career was ending abruptly but the focus of a beloved, high-profile book. Her failure would be agonizingly public. And so she decided, with her mother’s backing, simply to tell people that she had quit.
“So many people would say, ‘Why’d you stop dancing?’ Just everybody,” Stephanie recalls. She told them that she wanted to go to college, and that a commitment at the school would rule that out. That was her story, and she stuck to it for three decades.
Even her father, who had divorced her mother when she was young, thought she had quit on her own. Following this blow Stephanie attended collage studying religion and returned to a family home in Wyoming each summer to nurture her other childhood love, horses. There was a fairly bumpy patch in the middle of her life where she explains that she felt completely lost, but she helped herself though it with an extended stay in a Connecticut monastery. Four years ago she moved back to Wyoming where she met her husband. They live a quiet life, he as a plumber and her working in a flower shop.
On a snowy day Stephanie flips through the book, telling John about the real people behind the pictures: the woman in wardrobe who pressed too hard with the bobby pins; Balanchine, who never talked down to the kids.
She looks at a picture of herself joyously dancing across a big, dark stage. “It was quite an experience,” she says. “It is hard to top it.” She gazes out the window at snowcapped Carter Mountain. “Out here kind of tops it, in a way.”
You can read the whole article in The New York Times
R. Crumb on His Rejected New Yorker Cover
Monday, November 14th, 2011
Love him or hate him, R. Crumb (Robert Crumb) always makes a statement with his art – he doesn’t leave a lot to be ambivalent about.
Vice has a brief interview with Crumb about a strange, back-and-forth, can’t-seem-to-make-up-our-minds episode involving a commissioned piece Crumb did for The New Yorker, which had been intended as a cover piece. The work depicted a couple of indeterminate gender applying for a marriage license while a dubious-faced employee looks on. There is a sign on the wall reading “Gender Inspection”, with an arrow. The drawing was going to be on the cover of an issue about gay marriage. Crumb got paid for his work, but the New Yorker apparently went back and forth and hemmed and hawed, before returning Crumb’s art to him, unused,
without explanation.
While his art is not always to my aesthetic tastes, I do like to read him in interviews. I find his blunt candor pretty refreshing.
Did the rejection offend you?
I’m in a privileged position because I don’t need the money. When you go to the cover editor’s office, you notice that the walls are covered with rejected New Yorker covers. Sometimes there are two rejected covers for each issue. I don’t know what the usual policy is, but I was given no explanation from David Remnick, the editor in chief, who makes the final decisions.Has the New Yorker attempted to commission work from you since this cover?
Yeah, Françoise [Mouly, the art editor] keeps mailing me these form letters, which they send to various artists they like to use. It says something like, “OK, so here are the topics for upcoming covers.” They send it out a couple of times a year or something. But it’s a form letter, not a personal letter.Did you receive an apology?
An apology? I don’t expect an apology. But if I’m going to work for them I need to know the criteria for why they accept or reject work. The art I made, it only really works as a New Yorker cover. There’s really no other place for it. But they did pay me beforehand—decent money. I have no complaint there. I asked Françoise what was going on with it and she said, “Oh, Remnick hasn’t decided yet…” and he changed his mind several times about it. I asked why and she didn’t know. Several months passed. Then one day, I got the art back in the mail, no letter, no nothing.
‘Publisher’ Jarvis Cocker interviewed
Friday, October 21st, 2011Jarvis Cocker, frontman of Pulp and the man who invaded the stage while Michael Jackson performed because Jackson was attempting to be some “kind of Christ-like figure with the power of healing”, is the latest celebrity to move into publishing. He is following Pete Townsend, Henry Rollins and Anthony Bourdain. The Guardian interviews him and you will soon understand why he’s moving into publishing.
Chuck Palahniuk on Ellery Queen
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011
Chuck Palahniuk’s new novel, Damned, is now out and he’s interviewed by Shelf Awareness today.
He was asked what was his favorite book was a child and he replied….
Anything involving Ellery Queen, I read it. Not so much for the murders, etc. I wanted to know why Ellery never got married. Why did he live at home with his father, Inspector Queen, all his adult life? In book after book, Ellery was thrown together with attractive vulnerable dames, but the sparks never flew…. Yes, Sherlock had opiates to account for his failure to form adult romantic attachments. And Hercule Poirot was simply a Belgian pig. But I wanted to see Ellery Queen find a real job and a lasting significant other. Sigh. I guess I want the same things for myself.
Belgian pig!
Incidentally, look at the cover for Damned. You will see the publisher still feels the necessity to mention that Chuck Palahniuk is the author of Fight Club as if anyone in the world was unfamiliar with this fact.
Terry Pratchett reads classic about poverty in Victorian London
Friday, October 14th, 2011
The Independent did a one-minute interview with Terry Pratchett as he sat in a hotel in Seattle. He revealed he was reading London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew. I’ll take a wild guess and say that most of you haven’t heard of this book.
Mayhew was a Victorian newspaper journalist who detailed the awful conditions endured by the city’s lower classes and went on to publish his learnings in a landmark book in 1862.
His writing was important as Mayhew went beyond anecdotes and attempted to use statistical data to back up his conclusions. This book is every bit as important as Dickens’ fictional work in depicting the poor of the Victorian era.
Neil Gaiman interviews Terry Pratchett
Tuesday, October 11th, 2011
Terry Pratchett’s newest Discworld novel, Snuff, is now out and who better to interview him than Mr. Neil Gaiman himself. I half expected a little more silliness out of the interview but in the end it’s just interesting to see that kinds of questions an author might ask a colleague. The two chat about whether science fiction has gone mainstream, Pratchett’s favourite books, and annoying your local elected official.
Jeffrey Eugenides returns with The Marriage Plot
Friday, October 7th, 2011
Nine years after Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides is back with a book called The Marriage Plot. The WSJ carried an interview with the author last week and he revealed how he had recently appeared in court. Apparently, Middlesex sold three million copies and The Virgin Suicides was hardly a flop. (PS – we have a few signed copies of The Marriage Plot.)
The Marriage Plot is a college love story that’s tightly focused on three characters: a beautiful, bookish brunette named Madeleine Hanna and her two suitors—brilliant, manic-depressive Leonard Bankhead and the spiritually inclined, erudite and slightly snooty Mitchell Grammaticus. It’s Mr. Eugenides’s most hyper-realistic, and autobiographical, book to date. Like Mitchell, he’s a Greek American from Detroit who attended Brown in the late 1970s and early ’80s, where he studied literature, religion and semiotics. Mr. Eugenides also drew on his own spiritual experimentation—he’s tried everything from Zen Buddhism to Catholicism—and his travels to Europe and India, where he volunteered with Mother Teresa. He revised the chapter about Mitchell’s experiences in Calcutta about 20 times, cutting some 50 pages.
Booker Prize Prediction: Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues
Wednesday, September 28th, 2011
Despite what the puppy says, when it comes to who will win the 2011 Man Booker Prize, here at AbeBooks headquarters we’re rooting for local author Esi Edugyan, whose nominated Half Blood Blues is her second novel and a heck of a good read.
Longlisted for the Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and with a new daughter born just over a month ago, Edugyan’s life must be a whirlwind of everything under the sun (except sleep) these days. Still, we managed to catch up with her to talk about her book and more.
Read our interview with Esi Edugyan, check out our review of Half Blood Blues, and if you haven’t had a chance to read it- it’s highly recommended.
