Goon Squad Wins Pulitzer

Last week, Jennifer Egan won the 2011 fiction Pulitzer for A Visit from the Goon Squad. Does this mean I should quit bad-mouthing her second novel Look at Me? Seriously, I didn't like it. But she has received quite a lot of praise for her novel The Keep as well as Goon Squad. The Keep is in my reading queue currently (actually, the audiobook is my exercising MP3 player, but it isn't getting a lot of use these days). So, I'd better add another one to my list.

I will definitely have to read Goon Squad, but it got me thinking about what other Pulitzer winners I have yet to read. Below is the list of fiction winners since 1990--the ones in bold I have actually read:

2010 - The Tinkers by Paul Harding
2009 - Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
2008 - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
2007 - The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2006 - March by Geraldine Brooks
2005 - Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
2004 - The Known World by Edward P. Jones
2003 - Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
2002 - Empire Falls by Richard Russo
2001 - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
2000 - Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
1999 - The Hours by Michael Cunningham
1998 - American Pastoral by Philip Roth
1997 - Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
1996 - Independence Day by Richard Ford
1995 - The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
1994 - The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
1993 - A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
1992 - A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
1991 - Rabbit At Rest by John Updike
1990 - The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos

Just six in the last twenty years. I'd better get reading.

Poetry Is Good For Business

In Monday's Wall Street Journal, Baton Rouge Advocate columnist Danny Heitman makes the case for poetry in today's business world. He writes,

Although the brevity of Twitter and fleeting attention spans have been widely bemoaned by business professionals who are trying to get their points across, poets throughout the ages have routinely confronted the challenge of saying a lot—and saying it memorably—in small spaces. Read John Keats, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens, and learn how it's done.

I remember learning the biography of Stevens as a working undergraduate and taking heart that someone could be both a poet and a professional. That the two sides could not only coexist but complement. But poetry isn't only good for teaching people to write briefly and with purpose. People need the imagery and abstraction of poetry as well. They need new ways of seeing things, of understanding the impression the world makes on them, despite all of the noise of the day's activities. A little poetry is good for everyone.

Electronic Guilt

I feel so guilty. My poor neglected network. My month’s old Facebook status. Or my disturbingly irrelevant twitter update. And that aging blog, taunting me like a blank page. And then there’s the reading. Newsletters, blogs, my overloaded instapaper account. All of things I am missing. All of the things I am getting wrong. I know. Believe me, I’ve bookmarked or saved all of those articles on how to leverage a network, to build an online community. And I neglect it all.

It’s not as if not an expressive sort. I have plenty to say and think that most of it is worth being heard. It’s just that it all overwhelms. I am writing a novel, you know. While trying to get an agent for the last one and trying still to get a slew of short stories published. Oh, then there’s a career. And three children and a wife. Never mind the looming bookshelf of unread books towering behind me right now as I write this. The newspapers, the weekly and monthly magazine (Call that Print Guilt, I suppose). I might just have a few demands on my time. In all of this, it feels like there are little more than a few minutes available to dabble online.

I know I’m not alone in this. I am not the only one who fantasizes about it all going away. About being in some Montana cabin or seaside shack without the internet, out of cellphone range. Managing all of the demands on us, especially the electronic ones, will always be a challenge. Somewhere there is a way to manage all of it, or at least to feel more like it is all being managed. I see it done. I am always amazed by the people I know who are busy, kids and careers, but still manage keep up, to post the videos of their kids, to make me interested in reading their updates.

So, I ask your forgiveness. Forgive the missed birthday messages, the “likes” of the video you posted, the retweet of your link to the essay on James Salter. Forgive the silences, the disappearances. Forgive me and I will do my best to not let the guilt push me away. Though it overwhelms, I will try to be a better participant in our new electronic era.