Adam Reger | Freelance Writer

Philadelphia-based freelance writer

Category: Writing

September 3, 2010

M. Night

For reasons relating to my being unsure of how various parts of this blog work, for an early post I ended up creating a Category called “M. Night Shyamalan.” Thus giving the casual reader the impression that I blog about that dude, like, all the time. (I blogged about him once, in the context of planning to go see The Last Airbender, which my brother had been a production assistant on. Astute readers will note that I never again mentioned that movie, and if those readers are really astute they’ll be able to guess why.)

Also because of my lack of technical skill at this whole blog thing, I’ve decided it would be easier to write more about M. Night than deleting that category. Which I’m sure would only mean that that earlier post would belong to one fewer category, but in my mind WordPress itself would somehow be structurally damaged by the removal of this crucial category tag.

Anyway, the AV Club posted this item about Shyamalan possibly doing an Unbreakable sequel. It is an interesting possibility mainly because Unbreakable led all the way up to the exact point where you would typically be interested in a superhero movie, and then stopped; it makes sense as part of a multi-part narrative, but as a third or fourth installment, or, better yet, a straight-to-DVD prequel-type thing that completists would go nuts for. It’s a pretty silly movie that, in my opinion, “worked” only in the warm glow of goodwill from Shyamalan’s success with The Sixth Sense. So a sequel that picked up on the promise of a superhero showdown might actually be interesting.

It’s not to be, the AV Club item reports. But what made me think I ought to post this (other than having that annoying M. Night category to populate; seriously, I wish I could just get rid of it) was this transitional line from Sean O’Neal (whose writing on that site is kind of a surprise pleasure; I’m such a fan of Keith Phipps, Nathan Rabin, and Scott Tobias, it’s a bonus to enjoy stuff from other contributors, the moreso when it’s material like this item that would seem to be mere toss-offs): “Showing his usual acumen for giving the public exactly what he wants . . .”

Yes. Exactly. Thank you, Sean O’Neal.

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September 1, 2010

Franzen

Jonathan Franzen interviewed by the AV Club here. Two of my favorite things, finally joined. His new novel, Freedom, is receiving glowing reviews. I’m bending in my position of resigning myself to waiting a year ’til the paperback comes out . . . and have just added my name to the surely long waiting list at the Carnegie Library. From the interview alone, though, one gets a sense of the scope of the novel and its ambition. You can also get a clear sense of Franzen as a thoughtful writer, grappling with significant issues: freedom, clearly, and what it means in the current American context, but also slightly meta concerns such as hooking and keeping readers. His take on it is, as with most things, unimpeachable: that it’s the writer’s job to produce work so compelling the reader turns away from cable, YouTube, video games, etc., etc. in order to read the book. Period.

In what limited press and review materials I’ve read from this novel’s publicity push, Franzen has come off as a more likeable person. Having read both How to Be Alone and The Discomfort Zone, I got the clear sense that he’s a warm and funny person but that there’s a thin shell of reserve that can come off as chilly. Even reading this interview, the number of long pauses put me in mind of television appearances where his stoic face, those thick-framed glasses, that arrogant stubble(! I don’t know where that came from; I’m just going to go with it), made him come off as detached, a snob. Knowing he went to Swarthmore College, and possessing just enough knowledge of the place to form some key assumptions, probably doesn’t help. (I grew up one town over from Swarthmore.) Franzen seems, in general, the opposite side of the coin of his friend David Foster Wallace, who possessed a formidable intellect but seemed always to take pains to be self-deprecating and to connect to his audience. This is an observation, though, that suggests the folly of thinking you “really know” a public figure based on his/her writings and televised appearances.

Addendum: I forgot about this, or perhaps I never fully noticed, but I guess there was a small “feud” surrounding Franzen and Freedom when the writers Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner both complained about all the press. It was one of those annoying one-sided feuds that shouldn’t be called a “feud” because, well, you wouldn’t call mosquitoes buzzing around your ear a feud. But there’s a good rundown and, indeed, takedown by Lisa Solod at Open Salon (I guess a branch of Salon where people can post their own stuff? Don’t let that keep you away, though: the writing and reasoning are both Salon-quality.).

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August 31, 2010

Interviews in the Paris Review

They are, indisputably, excellent. They’re always good craft-centered pieces (which is no surprise given that the series is “The Art of Fiction,” “The Art of Poetry,” etc.), but I suspect that even if you never felt the urge to write anything yourself, if you were interested in that particular writer’s work you would get a lot out of each one.

No surprise, then, from reading this Lorin Stein guest post (at Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Atlantic blog) on the topic, that these interviews are the product of an involved and methodical process.

Here’s a link to the interview archives. Not many are available in full, but lots of the excerpts are meaty enough in and of themselves (and, you know, it’s fair enough that the Paris Review should want to sell issues, back or otherwise). This (excerpt from an) interview with James Ellroy is a beast, and prompted me to go to a bookstore and read the entire thing, which was equally beastly.

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August 26, 2010

More Sports (Pan-Pennsylvanian Edition)

Two sports-related posts within a single (sports-related) post!

As a kind of follow-up to this post, on the woeful Pittsburgh Pirates, some recent stuff in the news about the team and, especially, the reasons for its awfulness:

–A Slate article asking the question, “Should the Pirates Spend Money to Win Ballgames?” and looking at the ins and outs of how they’d even go about doing that. Fascinating tidbit:

“Sabermetricians . . . have figured out ways to determine how much an individual player’s performance contributes to his team’s victories. Correlating those performance metrics to actual market prices for free agents shows that it costs management something like $5 million to purchase each additional win. (For example, by signing a $10-million-quality free agent, a team might improve its record by two games.)”

It does present more of an obvious dilemma for the Pirates’ ownership, as well as casting attention back on the greater disparities among large- and small-market teams within MLB.

Then again, if you’re feeling overly sympathetic, you might look back to the revelations that provided the impetus for the Slate article: leaked financial documents showing that the Pirates, among several other teams (most egregiously the Florida Marlins), made bank despite being among the worst-performing teams.

Moving over to football, I should say by way of preface that there’s only one professional team whose doings I give a fig about: the Philadelphia Eagles. The much-maligned, long-suffering, beleaguered Eagles.

Yet also the perennially in-contention Eagles. It’s true that, at this time of year, hope springs eternal for all 32 teams. Hope seems to be springing a bit too forcefully for the Eagles, by my estimation of their chances this year. Having dealt Donovan McNabb in favor of back-up and heir apparent Kevin Kolb, they’ve been tabbed by many to go through a rebuilding phase this year. I mostly agree with that: I have them finishing in the 8-8 or 9-7 range, and think it’s more likely they’ll finish a game or two below that than above it. And to that I say: That’s life. It’s rare that any team can rebuild on the fly, and still maintain—in spite of what I’ve just said—the chance to surprise people and remain a playoff contender.

That said, I’ve been cheered by reports like this ESPN profile and this Peter King column item that say Kevin Kolb is the real deal. I love that he’s getting this kind of praise, and that by all accounts it’s coming from inside the locker room. But I’ve periodically felt the need to throw cold water on myself, because buying into this sort of sports reportage feels like a shortcut to some kind of jinx: there’ve been so, so many big-money rookies and (as with Kolb, third-year) heirs apparent who’ve been similarly pumped up and anointed, only to fail dramatically or quietly, but in the end to fail, and to slump away into obscurity. Philadelphia, certainly, has had no shortage: Shawn Bradley and Mike Mamula are the first names that come to mind.

I don’t expect failure from Kolb. It’s just that, on the hype versus realistic-attainable-results spectrum, I don’t want to raise my hopes quite so high, at least not yet.

With that said . . .

E-A-G-L-E-S Eagles!!

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August 25, 2010

Book Beat

I’ve lapsed in writing about anything I’ve been reading recently. My bad!

I just picked up (from the fantastic and ever financially imperiled Carnegie Library system) a copy of David Winner’s Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer. I’m quite excited to start reading it, the more so because my interest in the topic—the Netherlands’ idiosyncratic “Total Football” soccer style—has survived the artificially inflated excitement of the World Cup. Yes, this still sounds like an awesome book. The jacket copy indicates that “[t]he cast stretches from anarchists and church painters to rabbis and skinheads to Holland’s beloved soccer players.” Wowza.

Meanwhile, I’m neck-deep in James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. Man, it is rad. Read it, if you haven’t. I was hesitant to pick it up, and then to get into it, because I thought, “I’ve seen the movie.” But, two things: 1) I do not even remember the movie, so whatever significant twists there may have been have no bearing on my reading; and 2) As has been mentioned by everyone, forever, the book is far superior to the movie as a general principle. It’s certainly true here. There’s a ton of stuff that never showed up in the movie, tawdry, disturbing stuff. Something I like about Ellroy’s work is that it supports this (not very sophisticated or surprising) theory of mine that the fifties are unfairly smeared for being dull. A Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, The Adventures of Augie March all came out in the fifties. It wasn’t all sock-hops and poodle skirts. Ellroy, a bad-ass even when one factors in his gifts for self-promotion, confirms this.

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August 19, 2010

“Assorted Fire Events” by David Means

I finished this collection yesterday. It was one of the best short story collections I’ve read in a while. I went in with an ever-so-slightly adversarial attitude, on the basis of never having read Means but making assumptions based on his pedigree (publications in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, etc.) and the general perceived blandness of his name and the titles of his books (The Spot made me want to take a nap; The Secret Goldfish made me roll my eyes).

Man, I was wrong. Halfway through the collection, given the opportunity to browse a big used bookstore, I looked first for Means books, and picked up The Secret Goldfish. The stories have a compactness that reminded me a tiny bit of Andre Dubus. Means frequently uses long, complexly punctuated sentences—he loves the semi-colon—that made me think of some close readings I did in grad school of Dubus stories. His method seems to be to present something, and then to complicate it or go deeper into that fact, that impression. At other times I thought of David Foster Wallace, the way Means seemed to pick his way through a fictional event—in the story “The Interruption,” a bum crashes a wedding reception and is badly beaten, but we never quite see the beating that (you’d assume) is the climax and centerpiece of the story—giving meaning to the whole constellation of details, characters, events, and relationships in the story without succumbing to the craving to (in the case of the Means story) give us the meat and potatoes of the fight itself. It reminded me of the way I felt during the last 50 or so pages of Infinite Jest, realizing there was to be no explicit action sequence resolving everything, that the really entertaining stuff was to take place off-screen, as it were. The implication in both books was that that’s not what’s important. Or, maybe more accurately, that these climactic fictional events are intensely important but one way of giving them their due is to omit them, to have the rest of the story swirl around them, a conspicuous absence.

I never felt unsatisfied by the stories or their conclusions, though; I still felt, in a way, that I did get my meat and potatoes from these stories. Each had a completeness, a feeling of exhaustively going through the possibilities, that made each story feel compact and self-contained. One example that’s online: “The Woodcutter,” one of the last stories in the book.

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August 17, 2010

Ron Carlson

. . . interviewed at Fiction Writers Review. Interesting stuff, very much about teaching as well as writing, and the writing questions are specific, process-oriented questions. I’ve lost track of his career over the last five to eight years but he used to be a favorite, beginning with his time as writer-in-residence at Beloit College. A few years ago I saw him read a selection from “Beanball” at the AWP conference and wondered why I’d stopped reading Ron Carlson. I wonder that now, too.

I’m heartened to hear that he’s not an everyday writer, that even for an established writer there are weeks when you muster only two days at the keyboard.  His goal of working more days per week than he doesn’t seems refreshingly sensible to me. I am floating into that zone myself, no longer having the available time to sit down for a dedicated, unbroken chunk of time each day. Partly it hurts, but partly it’s great, too: there are enough other things going on that I don’t have a daily string of hours from the time I get home to when I go to bed.

Also, this quote: “A lot of days I’d stop in the middle of a word. I’d know how to pick up, because I knew how to spell.”

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August 16, 2010

Literary slap fight & Juggalo rampage

I wanted to direct your attention to this enjoyable AV Club rumination on the alarming news that a bunch of overzealous Insane Clown Posse fans attacked inexplicably famous person Tila Tequila at the Gathering of the Juggaloes. The rampant uncouthness of these fans was eerily predicted by this Scharpling & Wurster bit (about an hour to 90 minutes in).

And I’m also using this opportunity to sneak in a few links that I couldn’t quite turn into the considered, thoughtful post I wanted to post.

I wrote about a thousand words trying to make some kind of meaningful response to this list of 15 overrated contemporary writers, written by Anis Shivani, an all-but-unknown writer, in The Huffington Post. And I also wanted to approvingly link to Anna North, at Jezebel, who responded elegantly here.

The problem I had was in taking this guy’s idiosyncratic opinions, which he’d like to elevate above the state of mere opinion by using lots of jargon and trashing these writers (mostly women, as Anna North points out (although the baffling thing, to me, was the high number of poets singled out for punishment; how many readers are these poets reaching, and thus how much damage could they be causing? Maybe lay off a bit, playboy.)), and discussing something more than the article, the specific whining, and the specific writers.

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August 10, 2010

New MFA Week

I just updated my “Non-Fiction” page to include a cache of newly discovered blog posts over at Hot Metal Bridge, the online lit mag of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA writing program.

In doing so, I re-discovered the fruit of one of my more inspired moments as an editor: “New MFA Week.” Being a mighty third-year at the end of the summer, I thought it would be cool to have various people contribute tips and advice to students who were at that moment finding apartments, registering for courses, and making travel arrangements to get to wherever they were starting their new lives as Masters students.

Some of the entries, like this dispatch on Pittsburgh’s vibrant food scene, are Pittsburgh-specific.

Other installments include how to go about locking down funding for your grad-school education; how to go about submitting your work to literary magazines; and some more general ruminations here and here (that one’s mine).

I feel most of the advice holds up, and should be of interest to non-Pitt soon-to-be-MFAs. (And the food stuff should certainly be of interest to non-MFA Pittsburgh people.) I wish we’d gotten to go a little more in depth, and there are people who I think could have contributed useful insights who I ended up not asking. But, you know: regrets, I’ve had a few / But then again, too few to mention, etc.

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August 10, 2010

Typo Hunt

These grammar-loving travelers are my kind of people. And here is their blog, chronicling their adventures correcting typos (or, less charitably, spelling and grammatical errors).

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