I just noticed that Camille Paglia will be announcing the finalists for the National Book Award. I am rather fond of Paglia's Salon columns, even though a portion of many of them are just a bit over my head. But, otherwise, I find her to be a bit of a loose canon. I like loose canons.
I keep wondering if Paglia will read all the finalists. Will she read the finalists for young people's literature? Will she comment on them somewhere? What does she think of YA literature? I can just imagine her expounding on the evolving sexuality of the adolescent and how this is reflected in today's YA literature. Though when I imagine her expounding on it, she sounds a lot better than I just did in the preceding sentence.
Holy jump up and sit down! I just read at that National Book Award site that Fran Lebowitz has written a children's book! Had I heard this and repressed it for some reason? Or didn't believe it?
I own a copy of Lebowitz's Metropolitan Life that I bought when it--and she--were new and quite cutting edge, and I was first interested in reading essays. My recollection is that they were kind of slight and very urban for my taste. But maybe I'll give them another shot. Maybe now I'm slighter and suburban enough to not be so put off by accounts of city life. I think I remember her talking about sleeping a lot. But perhaps I'll find I was thinking of someone else.
It's time for those again? Wow.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I thought of that, too. Given that I just read this year's winner a couple of months ago, it does seem to me as if the last one's were just announced.
ReplyDeleteI heard Fran Lebowitz speak at a library conference once, and she talked a lot about sleeping too.
ReplyDeleteI read Metropolitan Life a very, very long time ago, and all the sleeping talk really made an impression on me. I remember thinking that she gave the impression she wasn't killing herself working. She seemed to sleep a lot and some of the pieces in her book weren't very substantial. And yet she appeared to be somebody in the literary world, her essays were published in magazines and her she was with a book.
ReplyDeleteWhile I wasn't sleeping anywhere near as much and couldn't publish a thing.
I'm feeling motivated to take another look at that book.
Her children's book was a rather arch little fable about pandas. Don't they sleep a lot, too?
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