John Niven on Music from Big Pink

One of my favorite book series is Continuum’s 33 1/3, an ever-expanding collection of novella-length considerations of key albums in rock history by a motley assortment of writers and musicians. Until recently, each installment had been nonfiction—imaginative and highly personal, to be sure, but firmly rooted in “the real world.” That changed late last year, as John Niven’s Music from Big Pink became the first fictional segment in the series. In this essay, he explains how his literary ambitions coincided with Continuum’s cultural aims.

For a while I had been toying (and please forgive me that ‘toying,’ the author in his folio-lined study, disinterestedly ‘toying’ with any number of weighty subjects; the process was decidedly more fraught than that, but, nonetheless, toying I was) with the idea of a novel about a rock group right on the edge of success, but seen from the POV of a hanger-on, a drug dealer, a bagman. But something kept holding me back.

What was holding me back was what we might call ‘The Stillwater Problem’: the idea of hanging the story around a fictionalised group left me cold, cold, cold. (Grab a pencil and draw up a list of novels featuring an invented rock group that have really worked. Done? You should have a piece of paper with Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments written on it.)

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2 January 2006 | guest authors |

Set Your DVRs (or VCRs, for the Old-School)

Got a note from Beatrice guest author Meg Wolitzer this morning about next Sunday’s premiere of the CBS TV-movie based on her novel Surrender, Dorothy, which is not to be confused with the 1998 film Surrender Dorothy, especially since it’s doubtful that Diane Keaton and Peter Riegert would star in a film about transvestite submission. So if you’re all bowl-gamed out by 9 p.m. Eastern on January 1st, now you’ve got something else to watch.

Quite a day for Meg, as it turns out she’s also featured in Tuesday’s NYT arts section for her participation in Amazon Connect, the online retailer’s bid to help writers take advantage of blog technology and communicate more directly with readers.

26 December 2005 | watch this |