Forgotten But Not Lost

Scripted by Charlie Kaufman, ESSM is "about an
estranged couple who have each other erased from
their memories"— Wikipedia

"…I cannot recall forgetting another novel entirely—both the contents of the book and the act of reading it. Others may be out there, lurking, waiting to spring up and surprise and dishearten. But, looking at my bookshelves, I am aware of another kind of forgetting—the spines look familiar; the names and titles bring to mind perhaps a character name, a turn of plot, often just a mood or feeling—but for the most part, the assembled books, and the hundreds of others that I’ve read and discarded, given away, or returned to libraries, represent a vast catalogue of forgetting. [...]

     This embarrassing situation raises practical questions that also become ones about identity: Do I really like reading? Perhaps it is a failure of attention—there are times when I notice my own distraction while reading, and can, in a way, feel myself forgetting. There is a scarier question, one that might seem like asking if one is good at breathing, or walking. Am I actually quite bad at reading after all?"
— Ian Crouch, The New Yorker
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Here's the intro to Sam Taylor's list of ten books about forgetting…

"Sam Taylor was born in 1970 and is the former pop culture correspondent for the Observer. His first book, The Republic of Trees, was published to high acclaim in 2005. He lives in France with his young family.
     His second novel, The Amnesiac (Faber, £12.99), tells the story of James Purdew, a man obsessed with uncovering the events of three years of his life about which he remembers nothing."
— The Guardian
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Buy all the books mentioned in — or linked to — this post here...

Thank You

Festival committee member David Beynon receiving a blockbuster cheque
from the Centre Wellington Community Foundation.

Our thanks go out to the Centre Wellington Community Foundation for their generous donation to the Elora Writers' Festival through their Mini-Grant Funding Program.
     Our Festival was honoured by the CWCF at the mini-grant awards ceremony last evening (May 23, 2103) along with eleven other community projects.

"The Centre Wellington Community Foundation (CWCF) is a public, charitable foundation created by the people of Centre Wellington. Our mission is to strengthen the Centre Wellington community by helping donors to achieve their giving goals, and by helping local non-profits find resources to support their important work."— CWCF

For more information about the CWCF go here...

"Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." — Herman Melville

From: Reanimation Library

"… miniatures? Anecdotes? Essays? Jokes? Parables? Fables? Texts? Aphorisms, or even apophthegms?" — Man Booker Judge, Christopher Ricks

Lydia Davis (Photo: Luke MacGregor, Reuters [via The Star])

(For a definition of "apophthegm" go here...)

"The impossible-to-categorise Lydia Davis, known for the shortest of short stories, has won the Man Booker International prize ahead of fellow American Marilynne Robinson and eight other contenders from around the world.
     The £60,000 award is for a body of work, and is intended to celebrate 'achievement in fiction on the world stage.' Cited as 'innovative and influential,' Davis becomes the biennial prize's third successive winner from North America, after fellow American Philip Roth won in 2011 – prompting a controversial walk-out from the judge Carmen Callil, partly over her disappointment in the panel's failure to choose a writer in translation – and Canadian short story writer Alice Munro took the prize in 2009.
     Best known for her short stories, most of which are less than three pages long, and some of which run to just a paragraph or a sentence, Davis has been described as 'the master of a literary form largely of her own invention.' Idea for a Short Documentary Film runs as follows: ;Representatives of different food product manufacturers try to open their own packaging.' In A Double Negative, she writes merely that: 'At a certain point in her life, she realises it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.'

— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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"Davis said it was Proust’s monumental work and famously long sentences that helped inspire her succinct writing style.
     'Actually, when I was translating Proust was when I thought, "how short could a short story be?'’' she told Reuters after receiving the 60,000 pound ($90,800) award in London. 'I thought "how little could you say and still have it work?"'"
— Reuters (via The Star)
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Buy Lydia Davis' book here...

A Hierarchy of Snobberies

“'Among the duties of lady’s maids,' Lethbridge writes, 'was the nightly washing of their employer’s loose change, the coins having been handled by who knows how many undesirables before it made its way into her purse.'

Lucy Lethbridge is a reticent author who says nothing of the reasons that prompted her to take on the subject. But her book plainly owes something to television drama, with its emphasis on the authenticity of costumes and sets, and something to the preoccupation of academics with the abstractions of gender and class. In the end, however, she writes in a distinctive voice of her own. Servants is firmly grounded in oral testimony, novels, memoirs, academic monographs, manuals on the duties of servants and Mrs Alfred Praga’s poignantly titled Appearances: How to keep them up on a limited income (1899). Anecdotes flow freely and there is no schematic framework of the kind an academic would impose, but the evidence is deftly organized into a panorama of topics tracing the history of domestic service from its zenith in Edwardian England through two world wars to its decline and fall. Beautifully written, sparkling with insight, and a pleasure to read, Servants is social history at its most humane and perceptive."
— Paul Addison, The Times Literary Supplement
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'These days you can't go into a rural local studies library without seeing a corner dedicated to oral histories of life in the servants' hall at the Big House. On TV we have both sober documentary series (a recent excellent one by Dr Pamela Cox) and some pretty fantastical imaginative recreations (yes, Downton, I'm talking about you). Servants, then, continue to comprise a kind of psychic disturbance in our historical understanding, an intriguing puzzle to which we return in the hope that, one day, we will solve the riddle of our own curiosity.
     In this excellent addition to the history of domestic service in the 20th century, Lucy Lethbridge has swept the existing archive and added new sources of her own. The result is a richly textured account of what it felt like to spend the decades of high modernity on your knees with a dustpan and brush.'
—Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian
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Adapted for the Small Screen

Adapted from: "The Lost Weekend" movie poster

"Looking to transform Hollywood’s pile of unproduced scripts into publishable e-books, James West, a motion-picture industry entrepreneur, has launched Script Lit. The company licenses optioned, but never produced, scripts, to turn them into commercial fiction. At the end of April, Script Lit released its first e-book novella—Mom of the Year by screenwriter Denise Pischinger—and plans to offer three more titles later this year. It’s no secret that Hollywood studios option a lot of scripts that never become movies—scripts that may be quite good but are victimized by bad timing or arbitrary decisions of the studio, West said. West has been making his pitch to Hollywood studios since last fall, asking them to give him access to their scripts and hoping to sell the studios on the potential for finding bestsellers in an otherwise inert mound of content. “There are compelling stories in these scripts. The studios love the idea,” he said, though he acknowledged that some have been slow to act, adding, “there’s a lot of legal stuff to go through.”…

     West decided to launch Script Lit and publish the books himself as e-book original novellas, with POD [Print-On-Demand] paperbacks to come. West said he licenses the rights to each script directly from the writer’s agent or manager and hires a ghostwriter to create a narrative context for the story. He noted that screenwriters aren’t necessarily novelists, so he’s put together a staff with two in-house novelists who have experience writing in a variety of commercial genres.
      'We keep all the script’s original dialogue in the book—the dialogue is important—and take the setting and tone, and I have a staff of writers enrich the story and turn it into literary and narrative prose.' He emphasized that the original screenwriter is credited as the book’s author."
— Calvin Reid, Publishers Weekly
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"F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed there were no second acts in American life. Do posthumous ones count? If not, Fitzgerald himself would have been forgotten, his work being almost completely out of print by the time of his death in 1940. Charles Jackson has been forgotten, if contemporary readers ever knew him in the first place. Even his most famous work, the 1944 novel The Lost Weekend, is better known today for its film adaptation directed by Billy Wilder in 1945.

     I don't know that anything would have changed if Blake Bailey's new Jackson biography, Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, hadn't prompted Vintage Books to release a new edition of The Lost Weekend and a slightly reordered version of Jackson's 1950 collection The Sunnier Side and Other Stories."
— Charles Taylor, The Phoenix
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Buy all of Charles Jackson's books here...

Dactyls on the Grand

Illustration: Ian Turner

"Join the Fish Quill Poets on June 15, the day before they launch their canoes from the low-level bridge in the Gorge Park [Elora, ON] on their usual 10-day poetry trip down the Grand River.
     They will be performing with the Good Hearted Women Singers, who will dance, sing, and drum.
     We [the Elora Poetry Centre] are also bringing the New York School poet and art critic Bill Berkson to Elora Oct. 4 & 5... As you can see from these and our previous events, we are promoting international poetry [and] making the literary scene in Centre Wellington even more vibrant and diverse."

— Daniel Bratton, Elora Poetry Centre

Find out more about the Fish Quill Poets here and on their Facebook page.

See a profile of Daniel Bratton, and learn about "Beaver House," the future home of the Elora Poetry Centre here...

From: Blue Press Books

"Born in New York in 1939, Bill Berkson is a poet, critic, teacher and sometime curator, who has been active in the art and literary worlds since his early twenties….
     He is the author of some twenty books and pamphlets of poetry, including Gloria, a portfolio of poems with etchings by Alex Katz (Arion Press, 2005); Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently (The Owl Press, 2007); Goods and Services (Blue Press, 2008); Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2009); and Lady Air (Perdika, 2010).
     His poems have also appeared in many magazines and anthologies."
— The Poetry Foundation
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Buy all of Bill Berkson's books here...