MEMBER BLOG TAG: jian
| Friday, April 30, 2010 7:12AM | | | | PEN World Voices Adaptation | Tags: PEN World Voices, Adaptation, Film, Prose, Djian, Toussaint, Gifford, Price
| | | | When you write a book, says Francine Prose, and you get a review, there's always that second or third paragraph where they give the plot summary. And you read it and say, How did anyone ever think this is what the book was about? So when a movie is made from your novel, it's like seeing that paragraph blown up really big.
There are five novelists on the stage, all with experience of having books turned into films.
When I wrote the book that became "Betty Blue," says Philippe Djian, I wanted to write about a kid who scribbles away in his corner, who fills notebook after notebook wityh his writing, and who feels no need to take it any further. Writing is enough for him. But... | | | | | | | Wednesday, April 28, 2010 5:44PM | | | | Philippe Djian and A. M. Homes | Tags: PEN World Voices, Philippe Djian, A. M. Homes, interpreting, Maison Française
| | | | So it's in a little room at the Maison Française, off Washington Square, well-attended. well-lit, video-recorded, photographed, remembered perhaps, blogged about certainly.
Djian is the guy in the black leather jacket with the three-day beard. The woman on his arm, it develops, is his interpreter. With them is A.M. Homes who will moderate/interview/jolly things along.
Not much is happening. Clearly we have a provocateur at the dais, but the fur is refusing to fly. The mechanics of the session are interesting. First A. M. Homes asks a question, but invariably someone starts to talk before she has made her point. The interpreter. She's translating into Philippe Djian's ear. Then Djian answers, elaborates, wings off on a tangential tack, loops back around, falls silent. Now it's the interpreter's... | | | | | | | Friday, May 2, 2008 10:45AM | | | | Books That Make Us Write Books | Tags: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kafka, Ma Jian, Metamorphosis, Charles Simic, Antonio Munoz Molina, Fatou Diome, Ma Jian, Nabokov
| | | Resonances: Contemporary Writers on the Great Works
Thursday May 1
Gabriel Garcia Marquez never forgot the day he won permission to write. It happened long before he knew he was a writer, and it happened instantly, as soon as he finished Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
...Probably Kafka’s The Metamorphosis” was a revelation . . . It was in 1947 . . . I was nineteen . . . I was doing my first year of law school . . . I remember the opening sentences, it reads exactly thus: “As Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” . . . Holy shit! When I read that I said to myself, “This isn’t right!... | | | | | | | Monday, April 30, 2007 10:17AM | | | | The Art of Travel Writing | Tags: Voyage and Voyeur, de Botton, Trojanow, Jian
| | | | My final panel! But what a great way to end the festival. In a discussion titled Voyage and Voyeur: Travel and Travel Writing, authors Alain de Botton (England), Ma Jian (China), and Ilja Trojanow (Bulgaria/Germany/South Africa) brilliantly deconstructed the notion of travel.
Among the highlights:
From Trojanow: That the label “travel writer” is a troubled one with the rather specious connotation of a white male from the West traveling somewhere exotic for a week, looking out his hotel window, and then returning home to report on what he’s seen and thereby captured the Other. Two examples of this kind of work he brought up were Paul Thoreaux and Gunter Grass, whose travel book on India featured “shit” over six hundred times. ... | | | | | | | Friday, April 27, 2007 12:07PM | | | | Barnaby in Translation | Tags: baseball, Columbia, English, invasive, Ma Jian, Francesc
| | | Barnaby, if you’ll recall, himself attended Columbia College but was kicked out five hours before commencement; and though his better sense tells him that everyone who, in the course of his exuberant senior-year prank, was covered with chicken blood or otherwise molested, must by now have forgiven, or forgotten, or at least satisfied his vengeance by contemplating the state of Barnaby’s life; still, Barnaby took no chances—he walked into Columbia’s Faculty House in a false mustache, fedora, and trench coat, and in a thick coat of a cologne that he normally doesn’t wear. (To throw them off the scent, if you will.)
The name of the talk he attended was “English: An Invasive Species?” It was moderated by David Damrosch. After a series... | | | | | |
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