William Landay

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Archives for 2013

A Little Facelift

Screen Shot 2013-03-27

Over the last few weeks this site has been updated. Nothing major — improved typography, simplified layout. But a few changes might affect visitors:

  • RSS Feed. The RSS feed has been shifted from the dying FeedBurner to this site’s own native WordPress RSS feed. If you subscribe to the blog via RSS, you will need to update that address to the new RSS feed.
  • Blog posts via email. I have removed the option of receiving blog posts via email. The trouble with having a blog-by-email service — which auto-generated an email to subscribers every time I added a post to the blog — was that it inhibited me from using the blog as I often like to: for short, occasional, unimportant posts that are more like scrapbook entries than essays. Those quick posts do not justify bothering hundreds of people with an email, which made me shy about posting anything at all to my own blog. Former blog-by-email subscribers will continue to receive the once- or twice-yearly email newsletter, and can of course subscribe to the blog via any RSS reader.
  • Comments. The moribund comment sections of the blog also have been eliminated. There just weren’t enough people commenting to justify the cost in space and clutter. Eliminating comments allowed for a cleaner, lighter design. Most visitors who wanted to comment about something just emailed me anyway, which I encourage readers to do.
  • Tumblr. I have abandoned my Tumblr blog and merged the contents back into this blog. For the last couple of years I used Tumblr as a scrapbook for things I found around the web — images, video clips, links — while the main blog was reserved for longer, essay-style blog posts. Alas, those long posts have become rare, especially in the tumult of publicizing Defending Jacob. Also, maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but I like having everything in one place, here on the main blog.

Writer-in-chief, cont’d

The White House has posted this photo of the president’s marked-up draft of the inaugural address, reinforcing Obama’s reputation as a gifted, meticulous, hands-on writer. I wonder: if we were to rank the greatest writer-presidents, surely Lincoln and Jefferson would take the top two places, but who would beat Obama for third place? Theodore Roosevelt and Kennedy would have their supporters, I guess, but I don’t think either beats Obama for the bronze medal. Any other contenders?

An enormous, legible version of this image is here. (Via James Fallows.) See also the similar image posted by the White House three years ago.

Malcolm Gladwell: Late Bloomers

Prodigies like Picasso … tend to be “conceptual,” [the economist David] Galenson says, in the sense that they start with a clear idea of where they want to go, and then they execute it. “I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research,” Picasso once said in an interview with the artist Marius de Zayas. “… I have never made trials or experiments.”

But late bloomers, Galenson says, tend to work the other way around. Their approach is experimental. “Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental,” Galenson writes…

Malcolm Gladwell, “Late Bloomers,” on precocious vs. late-blooming artists, and two very different types of creativity: conceptual and experimental. This article helped me understand myself and my own (experimental) creative method, and it is still a consolation to me. (More here.)

Henry James: The Art of Fiction

But the only condition that I can think of attaching to the composition of the novel is, as I have already said, that it be interesting. This freedom is a splendid privilege, and the first lesson of the young novelist is to learn to be worthy of it. “Enjoy it as it deserves,” I should say to him; “take possession of it, explore it to its utmost extent, reveal it, rejoice in it. All life belongs to you … There is no impression of life, no manner of seeing it and feeling it, to which the plan of the novelist may not offer a place; you have only to remember that talents so dissimilar as those of Alexandre Dumas and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert, have worked in this field with equal glory. Don’t think too much about optimism and pessimism; try and catch the colour of life itself…. Remember that your first duty is to be as complete as possible—to make as perfect a work.”

— Henry James

Read the complete essay here.

Quote of the Day

I write when I’m inspired, and I see to it that I’m inspired at nine o’clock every morning.

— Peter DeVries (though I’ve seen this quote or something similar attributed to several writers)

Paperback Pub Day

Defending Jacob is now available in paperback. The book hit the shelves yesterday (a couple of weeks ago in the UK). The hardcover keeps selling, too: on yesterday’s paperback publication date, Random House informed me the hardcover would go back to press for a surreal 15th printing. The larger format “trade” paperback will be released in the next few months, as well.

One of the nicer aspects of Defending Jacob’s long run is how the book has been taken up by book clubs. Book Movement, a web site for book clubs — because, as Book Movement nicely puts it, “not all great books are great book club books” — lists Jacob among its top picks for book clubs. I get emails every day from people who have read the novel in their book clubs, and they always tell me the discussion was lively. So the new paperback includes a reader’s guide, which I hope will help spur discussion for clubs as well as individual readers. (Book Movement has assembled a good readers’ guide for book clubs, too.)

In other news, Defending Jacob has been nominated for the Hammett Prize, awarded each year to “a work of literary excellence in the field of crime writing by a US or Canadian author.” A very nice honor indeed, for which I am grateful.