Dudley Fitts Archives

Bolaño: Homicide Detective?, Vonnegut on Coming Home, Ebert on The Sounds of Words, Machado de Assis, Cormac McCarthy on Life, Eco on Lists, and Getting Advice on Writing… from Writers!

Stray Questions for: Roberto Bolaño?!
An excerpt from novelist Roberto Bolaño’s last interview, published in Playboy Mexico the month of his death and now appearing in English in Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations.
(Via papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com )
Letters of Note: Slaughterhouse Five
Letters of Note is a site that, according to its own description “gathers and sorts fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos. Scans/photos where possible. Fakes will be sneered at. Updated 2-3 times every weekday”.
This link to a letter from a young Kurt Vonnegut, in addition to living up to the “fascinating” label, should also give you an excellent feel for the other items that this site collects. Today’s post reprints a different Kurt: a letter to Beat legend William Burroughs from an admirer — Kurt Cobain.

If you’re like me, you’ll be there clicking away for hours before you realize it.
(Via www.lettersofnote.com )

Roger Ebert’s Journal: Perform a concert in words
It would be facile to suggest that Roger Ebert has found a deeper, more powerful voice since losing his ability to speak… but his paean to the beauty of the spoken word takes on additional depth for me because of it.
Reading some of his recent posts should be a kick in the ass to any writer who has one.
(Via blogs.suntimes.com )

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas – Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Reviewer M.A. Orthofer thinks that The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (Library of Latin America) “simply good, good fun”. Correct — and only the beginning of the superlatives you’ll want to lay at the feet of 19th Century Brazilian author Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis after reading any number of his works.
My favorite — Helen Caldwell’s translation of Dom Casmurro. Critic Dudley Fitts once wrote of Machado: “No satirist, not even Swift, is less merciful in his exposure of the pretentiousness and the hypocrisy that lurk in the average good man and woman. Machado, in his deceptively amiable way, is terrifying.”

Absolutely right.
(Via www.complete-review.com )

Cormac McCarthy on The Road – WSJ.com
In this already widely-linked-to piece, author Cormac McCarthy, 76, talks about love, religion, his 11-year-old son, the end of the world and the movie based on his novel ‘The Road.’ Included here just in case you missed it…
(Via online.wsj.com )

SPIEGEL Interview with Umberto Eco: ‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die’
“The list is the mark of a highly advanced, cultivated society because a list allows us to question the essential definitions. The essential definition is primitive compared with the list.”
(Via www.spiegel.de )

Writing About Writers: An article by Bob Thompson | The American Scholar
Bob Thompson on learning about writing….by asking writers. How…. novel? 😉
(Via www.theamericanscholar.org )