James Frey tells the Wall Street Journal: “I’m done writing books. The only books I’ve written are the ones with my names on them, and I’m never writing another book.”

I don’t believe that, but if it’s true, this is a great day for letters.

He was caught at the launch party for Booktrack, which is a new company that “adds soundtracks to e-books . . . matches ’synchronized music, sound effects, and ambient sound’ to text.” Insert your own line about everything getting worse here.

I can’t make it because I’m heading upstate for an annual vacation, but tonight’s event at Melville House in Brooklyn looks compelling, and certainly timely: It’s a discussion about “the role of debt in the world economy” between Doug Henwood and David Graeber. Graeber’s new book is Debt: The First 5,000 Years.

(I will be posting around here while on vacation. I know it’s been quiet. I’m working on that, and hoping it changes more noticeably after Labor Day.)

This is only tangentially books-related, but I don’t care, because I’m a big fan of Richard Buckner. In a two-part interview — here and here — he talks about writing songs (and fiction), as well as his listening habits, which are sometimes innovative:

I used to have two stereos, and I would pick minimalist music from the early 60s like John Cale. Pallet-cleansing, droning, atonal music, something without a lot of drama or aggression. I’d put that on one stereo, and on the other I’d put a writer reading their own work. It was amazing to hear how the music affected the perception of the words. And if I did it again, with the same writer and the same music, the timing wouldn’t be the same, and even slight variations would change the tone of what I was hearing from the writer and how the music would manipulate it. It was a really fun experiment. And it’s also a sign that I wasn’t leaving the house as much as I should.

If you don’t know Buckner’s songs, I highly recommend them. His debut, Bloomed, is still among my favorites, though it’s a bit misleading, as he soon began writing much more condensed, highly impressionistic songs. Its two follow-ups, Devotion + Doubt and Since, are both excellent, and he’s released several strong records since. I was also heartened by this part of the interview, when he talks about the impact of recent day jobs, including driving a forklift in a warehouse:

I was touring and working a lot alone. I love being alone, and I can stay in the house for days at a time, just working, without leaving. But I realized after doing that for a while that my social skills had diminished. I ended up doing a film score, and I really didn’t leave the house. I wasn’t doing as much writing, since it was mostly instrumental. And I noticed that my live shows were changing dramatically, from standing onstage talking and playing and having a much more vibrant experience to being completely shut down. It got to the point where I was doing entire sets all as one piece and barely saying a word to the audience. No breaks or interaction.

When it came time to work the day jobs again after a few years of not doing them, I don’t know what [co-workers] thought of me. They probably thought I was some freak who didn’t speak to anyone except to say yes or no. After a while I opened up, because I was forced to interact with people. Slowly the stage shows are opening up for me, largely because of the interaction with people on those jobs.

I’ve seen a few of those “completely shut down” concerts. They were interesting — he would loop guitar parts so that songs bled into each other, and purposely sing and play in a way that disjointed the songs’ original melodies — but I’ve been wishing he would come back around and play a slightly more accessible show. Now he’s got my hopes up.

(via largehearted boy)

Frances Evangelista, who blogs at Nonsuch Book, is devoting August to reading (and blogging about) all 42 entries in Melville House’s Art of the Novella series. A little less than midway through the month, she’s a bit behind pace, having completed 15 of the books. But it still seems possible she will complete the goal, which would be impressive. Melville House joined in the fun by challenging other readers to join Evangelista and compete for prizes throughout the month. The interested are urged to join at nine levels, including Curious (one novella), Passionate (nine novellas), and Fanatical (27 novellas).

Between other reading plans and additional scheduling conflicts, I’m only safely in on the Curious level. Last week, I read Lucinella by Lore Segal. It was originally published in 1976, and is actually part of Melville House’s “contemporary” Art of the Novella series. Whether this qualifies to satisfy my Curious requirement, I don’t know. Life can be confusing.

Lucinella is very funny. It opens at Yaddo, the artists’ colony, where the eponymous narrator describes her fellow guests, “five poets, four men, one woman, and an obese dog called Winifred.” (An early instance of Segal’s sense of humor: “Because Winifred is a real dog I have changed his sex to protect his privacy.”) The book follows the group at Yaddo, and then to New York City, as they fret about reviews, fight over poetic strategies, and fall into various cocktail parties and beds. It is, in short, a satire of the writing life.

It’s full of pithy descriptions (“She’s forty, five foot by four by four, and a genuine Russian.”), well-orchestrated group scenes, and modest, sometimes faintly dated experimentation. It builds to a conclusion that I found quite moving. And it contains the exchange below, which is now one of my all-time favorites. Lucinella has been haranguing her boyfriend William for his habits, which keep her from ever keeping the house in order (”William, how come you do everything wrong all the time?”). We pick it up from there:

“William? How come you never nag me?”

“What about?” asks William.

“Whatever you can’t stand about me.”

William is thinking. “When you keep nagging I sometimes want to murder you, but I can stand it.”

“Why don’t you tell me to straighten out my towel on the rack?”

“Because I don’t care if it’s scrumpled.”

“But, William, a scrumpled towel cannot dry!”

“Lucinella, sweetheart, love! A dry towel does not move my imagination!”

“Nag me. Go on,” I say.

William looks harried. “You’re a slob,” he says.

“No, I mean something true about me. Go on.”

“You are a true slob,” William says.

“A slob, William! I! Who can neither eat nor write nor love so long as my house is not in perfect order, how am I a slob?”

“Your towel is scrumpled in the bathroom. Lucinella, I don’t care—”

“Ah, but,” I say, “that’s different, don’t you see, that’s only because I haven’t got around yet to straightening it out. Nag me some more.”

“The kitchen,” says William, “is in such a shambles we have to eat out.”

“Only till I find the right Contact paper,” I explain, “which they no longer manufacture. Go on.”

September marks the centenary of William Golding’s birth. I’ve only read Lord of the Flies, and so long ago that it only survives in my memory as a punchline for chaotic situations. (And I wouldn’t even have to have read it to know that.) Golding’s British publisher has reissued Flies, which was his first novel, and The Inheritors, his second. John Self takes a look at the less famous novel, which is told from the perspective of a group of Neanderthals:

Evolution is the invisible character in the book, driving everything. The challenges facing the Neanderthals — finding food, returning home, getting across the river when the log they normally use goes missing — are amplified because they are not alone. Encroaching on their territory is a group of “new people,” Homo sapiens we presume. . . . There is great pathos here, as the mother of all dramatic ironies is upon us: the hopelessness of the Neanderthals’ struggles for survival in the face of the Homo sapiens, with their better tools, better communication and better planning; their habit of playing, a consequence of “leisure [and] incessant wakefulness.” Occasionally, one of the Neanderthals will strain toward an understanding of how to develop skills they don’t have — to gather more food than they need; to hold water in a shell — but it slips agonizingly away. In a sense, to review The Inheritors as a “normal” book does it a disservice. Its strength is in how it renders a world without thought as we understand it, and becomes a complete and convincing world.

I got an e-mail from Amazon today alerting me to the site’s favorite books of August, which led me to the page for Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, a novel about an immersive online game in the near future that sucks in the poverty-stricken protagonist and millions of others. That’s all I know at this point, but wanted to share this bit from an Amazon interview with Cline:

Q: Speaking of DeLoreans: biggest plot hole in the Back to The Future films?

A: The Back to The Future trilogy is perfect and contains no plot holes! Except for the plot hole inherent in nearly all time travel films: The planet Earth is moving through space at an immense speed at all times. So if you travel back in time, you are traveling to a time when the Earth was in a different location, and you and your time machine would appear somewhere out in deep space. For a time machine to be useful, it also needs to be able to teleport you to wherever the Earth was/is at your destination time.