I'm just back and settling in after a couple of weeks of travel out of the country. In my absence, I hope you all noticed the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go). For the record, in our short existence along with this Nobel, we have pre-selected winners for the Pulitzer Prize (Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son), the Man Booker (Paul Beatty - The Sellout), and a MacArthur Genius Grant Award (Ben Lerner - Leaving the Atocha Station.) In addition, our reading list is littered with books and authors we've read after they've received major awards. I hope you are all finding a way to let your reading background trickle out during various cocktail parties or when your are searching for a distraction during a Sox playoff disaster!
This email is also a reminder that our meeting for The Sportswriter is this Wednesday at 7pm where we will examine the prospects for Richard Ford on the awards circuit. I hope you can make it.
As always, if you plan to attend, please send me a note so that I can insure we are properly provisioned.
I have to share a great Philip Roth quote that reminds me of the advice my Dad would give me:
ReplyDelete"Let me tell you about the nap. It’s absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man. And he said – I was maybe nine – he said, Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off and put a blanket over you and you’re going to sleep better. Well, as with everything, he was right. And so I now do that and I come back from the swimming pool I go to and I have my lunch and I read the paper and I take this glorious thing called a nap. And then the best part of it is that when you wake up, for the first 15 seconds you have no idea where you are. You’re just alive. That’s all you know and it’s bliss. It’s absolute bliss."