Writing a Book, One Blink at a Time ...

Yes, a very sobering way to write a book. Try blinking your eye for each letter of each word of each sentence you are thinking. And not just a paragraph to fill the blog cage but for an entire book. That's how Jean-Dominique Bauby, a former editor of Elle, dictated his redemptive memoir, Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). Letter by letter, blink by blink on hearing continual recitations of the alphabet. Julian Schnabel directed a screen adaptation of the book, oui, en Français, with Matthieu Almaric in the lead and a mostly French supporting cast and crew.

The film was screened at the NYFF yesterday. Whatever you might have thought of Schnabel's press conference showmanship--I was a bit taken aback-- his Best Director prize from Cannes and his cameraman's Janusz Kaminski's Prix de la Technique are well deserved. They successfully told the story from the point of view--both visual and psychological-- of a character who has "locked-in syndrome" ie almost complete paralysis, except for the movement of one eye, while remaining totally lucid (the result of a massive stroke). Kaminski's camera brilliantly rose to the challenge of recreating monoptic vision. The voice-over of Bauby's ironic interior monologue works well, and the decision to use the original northern French seaside hospital location and medical personnel who had treated Bauby add to the film's authenticity.

So no more kvetching about literary chores.

[I would post a clip from the pc here, except that I just shipped my camera back to the repair shop for a "redo" and can't upload.)

A film about a typeface

For some reason the publisher outsourced the copy-editing, design and production of the book to a conglomerate in Madison Wisconsin rather than doing it in-house. Author interaction is strictly rationed, but I made my suggestions anyway.

Correction: design decisions are made by publisher in Connecticut, to the extent that they are made at all.



To console myself, after fedexing the mss back to Madison
on time, I go to a screening of Helvetica, a fascinating documentary by Gary Hustwit about the origins and ascendancy of the famous typeface, and a good examination of graphic design in a social context. Watch for it at the IFC if you are in New York, or later on DVD.

Samira Makhmalbaf

Samira Makhmalbaf dropped out of high school at
15 and got her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, to teach
her filmmaking. Her first feature, The Apple,
which she made at 18, was shown in competition at
Cannes, as was her second film, Blackboards. I
originally interviewed her for Elle and later for
The Boston Globe.

Photo copyright Liza Bear 2000

Moscow Literary Lion

I saw Gleb Panfilov's hilarious film Tema [The Theme] at the NYFF after it was released post-Glasnost.

It's about a Moscow literary lion not too happy with having to toe the line. In the depths of the Russian winter he seeks out a country retreat to write only to find, to his chagrin, that everyone in the little town, from the traffic cop to the museum tour guide, is also a writer.

Immediately after seeing the film, I rang Betsy at Bomb from the payphone at Lincoln Center.

The interview with him is the first film interview that I did and the first in the book. The title is from a quote of Panfilov's,"beyond the frame of the permissible". My friend the great photographer Jimmy de Sana took the portrait of Panfilov, and it's not in the book. But de Sana's portrait of Inna Churikova, who stars in the film, is . . .

Photo copyright Jimmy de Sana.

laboring on labor day

My bedside reading right now happens to be Max Perkins: Editor of Genius.
The book fell open at the page where Hemingway takes off for the Ambos Mundos Hotel in Havana to read proofs at his leisure. I made it to Fire Island for four days but without the mss, so I'm back at the local café with the red pen to meet my deadline.





Photos: India Amos

Coming Home to Roost

Pub date is December 30 with

simultaneous paperback and hardback

editions. Hardback is destined for

library shelves, maybe even the shelves

of the brand new 271 Mulberry Street

library, which is on the ground floor,

cellar and sub-cellar of the Hawley

Hoops building next to the Puck building

in Little Italy.


That would be coming home to roost, so

to speak, since the sixth floor of the

Hawley Hoops building is where I wrote

most of the non-fiction stories in the

book, and all of the fiction stories

not in the book.


To write the early ones in the late

eighties I used a DEC pro 350 computer

with a clean white screen and a black

Courier font just like this and

absolutely no icons or other visual

claptrap of any kind on the desktop,

just a very simple menu.


The DEC was neither Mac nor IBM

compatible. When the editor at

the New York Times complained that

she personally had to retype

my stories to put into their

data base, that's when a kind

friend gave me a MAC SE and I

would take the floppy disk to

Unique Copy on East 4th Street

and pay for them to e-mail the

first draft to the NYT.

Book, What Book?

It's in the works.

Today I missed the Max Roach memorial

uptown and had lunch with my editor

downtown. It was our first meeting

after 15 months holed up in cyberspace,

if you count the nine months spent

tumbling the contract language.


We met by the Ghandi statue

in Union Square and walked

a couple of blocks in the sun.

It was hot and muggy.

We picked the corner table

in the front porch

of an Italian restaurant

frequented by Ed Koch, certainly

not out of deference to the former Mayor

but because it was the furthest from

the traffic.


Three ceiling fans kept us cool.


It was a working lunch. The editor

brought an Excel chart and I brought

some black and white 4 by 6 prints

of the photos in the book, because

I was quite sure that he knew the

photos only by their file names

and not as glorious images.