Okay, is everyone going to be there? If you’ve never been, it’s a fabulous book festival with a ton of great panels for writers (and readers). Here’s the web site. If you’re around Young Hall at 2:30 p.m., say hi. My panel on publishing takes place then.

I’m going through a pile of New Yorkers that my librarian, Haidee, gave me, and right now I’m in the June 18, 2007, issue. I’m reading a long feature about literary archives by D.T. Max. I just wrote to him for permission to reprint the following long paragraph, which I love, about the literary life:

DeLillo’s letters are often about business—negotiations over contracts, responses to translators—but a few of them provide insight into his austere approach to the literary life. One, in particular, is the kind of note that biographers long to stumble across. In October, 1995, David Foster Wallace wrote to him, “Because I tend both to think I’m uniquely afflicted and to idealize people I admire, I tend to imagine you never having had to struggle with any of this narcissism or indulgence stuff. . . . Maybe I want a pep-talk, because I have to tell you I don’t enjoy this war one bit.” DeLillo responded in November. “I was a semiconscious writer in the beginning,” he writes. “Just sat and wrote something, or read the newspaper, or went to the movies. Over time I began to understand, one, that I was lucky to be doing this work, and, two, that the only way I’d get better at it was to be more serious, to understand the rigors of novel-writing and to make it central to my life, not a variation on some related career choice, like sportswriting or playwriting. The novel is different. . . . We die indoors, and alone, and I don’t mean to sound overdramatic but you know what I’m talking about. Anyway, all of this happened over time, until eventually discipline no longer seemed something outside me that urged the reluctant body into the room. At this point discipline is inseparable from what I do. It’s not even definable as discipline. It has no name. I never think about it. But there’s no trick of meditation or self-mastery that brought it about. I got older, that’s all. I was not a born novelist (if anyone is). I had to grow into novelhood.”

I’ve been in bed for days, sick with something or other, but I’m starting to see the light. Which is when I came across this dark page, a little treat, perhaps, for you…

And if you haven’t used up enough time playing, here’s another fun way to spend a few minutes, created by a fellow ASJA member who is indeed selling big jugs.

A fun interview at coolsville Readerville.

Scan down for the piece about Maira Kalman’s latest book, which I also love.

Did you read the piece on Baxter in Ploughshares that I posted yesterday? Oh, read it! This is from the piece. So outrageous.

Don Lee writes:

He [Charles] turned to fiction and churned out three novels, but they were disasters. “They were very abstract, these novels, very schematic, in some sense like bad postmodernism,” he says. “Nothing in them felt particularly real, although I didn’t realize that at the time. You rarely do when you’re working. I thought they were great. I was utterly baffled by the indifference or loathing with which people read them.”

One agent was particularly cruel. “I called her and said, ‘Julie, what do you think of my novel?’ And she said, ‘I hate it.’ And then she said, ‘Tell me why I hate it.’ And I said, ‘Julie, I don’t know why you hate my novel.’ She said, ‘Oh, you must, you wrote it. Tell me why I hate it. Is it the characters? Is it the setting? I just don’t understand any of it. Help me out here. Why do I hate your novel?’ It was an amazing phone call. And I kept having experiences like that. This person I knew on the West Coast read one of my novels and said, ‘Well, maybe your imagination’s poisoned right at the source.’ ”

He’s been called a “writer’s writer,” and he’s on the show today. (Podcast should be up soon if you miss the show.)

Here’s a profile of him that was published in Ploughshares. So much good stuff; I had to share it with you.