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January 25, 2012 · 10:44 pm

Old love and what’s in the box

What’s in the box?

A little old lady went to the grocery store to buy cat food. She picked up four cans and took them to the checkout counter.

The girl at the cash register said, “I’m sorry, but we cannot sell you cat food without proof that you have a cat. A lot of old people buy cat food to eat, and the management wants proof that you are buying the cat food for your cat.”

The little old lady went home, picked up her cat and brought it back to the store.

They sold her the cat food.

The next day, she tried to buy two cans of dog food.

Again the cashier said “I’m sorry, but we cannot sell you dog food without proof that you have a dog. A lot of old people buy dog food to eat, but the management wants proof that you are buying the dog food for your dog.”

So she went home and brought in her dog.

She then was able to buy the dog food.

The next day she brought in a box with a hole in the lid.

The little old lady asked the cashier to stick her finger in the hole.

The cashier said, “No, you might have a snake in there.”

The little old lady assured her that there was nothing in the box that would harm her.

So the cashier put her finger into the box and quickly pulled it out.

She said to the little old lady, “That smells like poop.”

The little old lady said, “It is. I want to buy three rolls of toilet paper.”

Don’t mess with old people.

A different type of box

4th Marriage at 80 years old

The local news station was interviewing an 80-year-old lady because she had just gotten married for the fourth time.

The interviewer asked her questions about her life, about what it felt like to be marrying again at 80, and then about her new husband’s occupation.

“He’s a funeral director,” she answered.

“Interesting,” the newsman said.

He then asked her if she wouldn’t mind telling him a little about her first three husbands and what they did for a living.

She paused for a few moments, needing time to reflect on all those years.

After a short time, a smile came to her face and she answered proudly, explaining that she had first married a banker when she was in her 20s, then a circus ringmaster when in her 40s, and a preacher when in her 60s, and now – in her 80′ – a funeral director.

The interviewer looked at her, quite astonished, and asked why she had married four men with such diverse careers.

(wait for it)

She smiled and explained, “I married

one for the money,

two for the show,

three to get ready,

and four to go.”

And that’s the box you leave in.

Or as the young grocery bagger who introduced the funeral director and the 80-year-old lady put it: “Will that be paper or plastic?”

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January 16, 2012 · 10:34 pm

Just a thought

Too many politicians, in an attempt to catch fire in the voters’ imagination, do nothing but stoke the fires of the voters’ fears. –from the blog editor

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January 14, 2012 · 12:44 pm

The Writing Life: The point of the long and winding sentence

Pico Iyer says writing longer phrases is a way to protest the speed of information bites people are subjected to each day.

By Pico Iyer, Special to the Los Angeles Times

January 8, 2012

“Your sentences are so long,” said a friend who teaches English at a local college, and I could tell she didn’t quite mean it as a compliment. The copy editor who painstakingly went through my most recent book often put yellow dashes on-screen around my multiplying clauses, to ask if I didn’t want to break up my sentences or put less material in every one. Both responses couldn’t have been kinder or more considered, but what my friend and my colleague may not have sensed was this: I’m using longer and longer sentences as a small protest against — and attempt to rescue any readers I might have from — the bombardment of the moment.

When I began writing for a living, my feeling was that my job was to give the reader something vivid, quick and concrete that she couldn’t get in any other form; a writer was an information-gathering machine, I thought, and especially as a journalist, my job was to go out into the world and gather details, moments, impressions as visual and immediate as TV. Facts were what we needed most. And if you watched the world closely enough, I believed (and still do), you could begin to see what it would do next, just as you can with a sibling or a friend; Don DeLillo or Salman Rushdie aren’t mystics, but they can tell us what the world is going to do tomorrow because they follow it so attentively.

Yet nowadays the planet is moving too fast for even a Rushdie or DeLillo to keep up, and many of us in the privileged world have access to more information than we know what to do with. What we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in a larger light. No writer can compete, for speed and urgency, with texts or CNN news flashes or RSS feeds, but any writer can try to give us the depth, the nuances — the “gaps,” as Annie Dillard calls them — that don’t show up on many screens. Not everyone wants to be reduced to a sound bite or a bumper sticker.

Enter (I hope) the long sentence: the collection of clauses that is so many-chambered and lavish and abundant in tones and suggestions, that has so much room for near-contradiction and ambiguity and those places in memory or imagination that can’t be simplified, or put into easy words, that it allows the reader to keep many things in her head and heart at the same time, and to descend, as by a spiral staircase, deeper into herself and those things that won’t be squeezed into an either/or. With each clause, we’re taken further and further from trite conclusions — or that at least is the hope — and away from reductionism, as if the writer were a dentist, saying “Open wider” so that he can probe the tender, neglected spaces in the reader (though in this case it’s not the mouth that he’s attending to but the mind).

“There was a little stoop of humility,” Alan Hollinghurst writes in a sentence I’ve chosen almost at random from his recent novel “The Stranger’s Child,” “as she passed through the door, into the larger but darker library beyond, a hint of frailty, an affectation of bearing more than her fifty-nine years, a slight bewildered totter among the grandeur that her daughter now had to pretend to take for granted.” You may notice — though you don’t have to — that “humility” has rather quickly elided into “affectation,” and the point of view has shifted by the end of the sentence, and the physical movement through the rooms accompanies a gradual inner movement that progresses through four parallel clauses, each of which, though legato, suggests a slightly different take on things.

Many a reader will have no time for this; William Gass or Sir Thomas Browne may seem long-winded, the equivalent of driving from L.A. to San Francisco by way of Death Valley, Tijuana and the Sierras. And a highly skilled writer, a Hemingway or James Salter, can get plenty of shading and suggestion into even the shortest and straightest of sentences. But too often nowadays our writing is telegraphic as a way of keeping our thinking simplistic, our feeling slogan-crude. The short sentence is the domain of uninflected talk-radio rants and shouting heads on TV who feel that qualification or subtlety is an assault on their integrity (and not, as it truly is, integrity’s greatest adornment).

If we continue along this road, whole areas of feeling and cognition and experience will be lost to us. We will not be able to read one another very well if we can’t read Proust’s labyrinthine sentences, admitting us to those half-lighted realms where memory blurs into imagination, and we hide from the person we care for or punish the thing that we love. And how can we feel the layers, the sprawl, the many-sidedness of Istanbul in all its crowding amplitude without the 700-word sentence, transcribing its features, that Orhan Pamuk offered in tribute to his lifelong love?

To pick up a book is, ideally, to enter a world of intimacy and continuity; the best volumes usher us into a larger universe, a more spacious state of mind akin to the one I feel when hearing Bach (or Sigur Rós) or watching a Terrence Malick film. I cherish Thomas Pynchon’s prose (in “Mason & Dixon,” say), not just because it’s beautiful, but because his long, impeccable sentences take me, with each clause, further from the normal and the predictable, and deeper into dimensions I hadn’t dared to contemplate. I can’t get enough of Philip Roth because the energy and the complication of his sentences, at his best, pull me into a furious debate in which I see a mind alive, self-questioning, wildly controlled in its engagement with the world. His is a prose that banishes all simplicities while never letting go of passion.

Not every fashioner of many-comma’d sentences works for every one of us — I happen to find Henry James unreadable, his fussily unfolding clauses less a reflection of his noticing everything than of his inability to make up his mind or bring anything to closure: a kind of mental stutter. But the promise of the long sentence is that it will take you beyond the known, far from shore, into depths and mysteries you can’t get your mind, or most of your words, around.

When I read the great exemplar of this, Herman Melville — and when I feel the building tension as Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” swells with clause after biblical clause of all the things people of his skin color cannot do — I feel as if I’m stepping out of the crowded, overlighted fluorescent culture of my local convenience store and being taken up to a very high place from which I can see across time and space, in myself and in the world. It’s as if I’ve been rescued, for a moment, from the jostle and rush of the 405 Freeway and led back to something inside me that has room for certainty and doubt at once.

Watch Dillard light up and rise up and ease down as she finds, near the end of her 1974 book “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” “a maple key, a single winged seed from a pair. Hullo. I threw it into the wind and it flew off again, bristling with animate purpose, not like a thing dropped or windblown, pushed by the witless winds of convection currents hauling round the world’s rondure where they must, but like a creature muscled and vigorous, or a creature spread thin to that other wind, the wind of the spirit which bloweth where it listeth, lighting, and raising up, and easing down.”

I love books; I read and write them for the same reason I love to talk with a friend for 10 hours, not 10 minutes (let alone, as is the case with the average Web page, 10 seconds). The longer our talk goes, ideally, the less I feel pushed and bullied into the unbreathing boxes of black and white, Republican or Democrat, us or them. The long sentence is how we begin to free ourselves from the machine-like world of bullet points and the inhumanity of ballot-box yeas or nays.

There’ll always be a place for the short sentence, and no one could thrill more than I to the eerie incantations of DeLillo, building up menace with each reiterated note, or the compressed wisdom of a Wilde; it’s the elegant conciseness of their phrases that allow us to carry around the ideas of an Emerson (or Lao Tzu) as if they were commandments or proverbs of universal application.

But we’ve got shortness and speed up the wazoo these days; what I long for is something that will sustain me and stretch me till something snaps, take me so far beyond a simple clause or a single formulation that suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself in a place that feels as spacious and strange as life itself.

The long sentence opens the very doors that a short sentence simply slams shut. Though the sentence I sent my copy editor was as short as possible. No.

Iyer is the author, most recently, of “The Man Within My Head,” published this month.

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

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January 10, 2012 · 9:34 pm

Epic fight to put awesome in its place

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-holland-20120106,0,2183189.column

Trying to drive a stake through a conversational staple

British-born poet and journalist John Tottenham says that saying ‘awesome’ in his presence is like ‘waving a crucifix in a vampire’s face.’

Gale Holland, Los Angeles Times

January 6, 2012

“Awesome,” according to one dictionary of slang, is “something Americans use to describe everything.”

The linguistic overkill horrifies John Tottenham. So the British-born L.A. poet, painter and journalist has launched what he calls the Campaign to Stamp Out Awesome, or CPSOA.

“Saying the word in my presence is like waving a crucifix in a vampire’s face,” Tottenham says. “It’s boiled down to one catchall superlative that’s completely meaningless.”

I met with Tottenham last week at CSPOA headquarters inside Stories, the Echo Park bookstore he is trying to turn into the world’s first awesome-free zone. “Ground zero for a quiet revolution,” Tottenham calls the cafe and shop, where he has a day job. The group’s manifesto is posted at the counter, and no-awesome stickers with the usual diagonal slash are on sale, with T-shirts to follow, Tottenham said.

“It’s a matter of semantic satiation,” Tottenham told me. “Sometimes I’m sitting in a crowd and I hold my breath until someone says it. Seldom do I die of asphyxiation as a result.”

There’s no arguing with Tottenham’s premise that “awesome” is seen and heard everywhere, from the sign on the tchotchke aisle at the 99-cent store to the lips of supermarket cashiers. UC Santa Barbara linguist Mary Bucholtz says that from its dusky origins, perhaps in 1970s surfer slang, it’s spread to Australia and English-speaking India.

But Tottenham failed to convince me it’s a bad thing. What’s wrong with bathing everything in the sunny light of superlativity? I asked him.

I admire the “awesome” generation’s ability to talk at all with only a few words at its disposal.

The economy of expression is poetic, I argued. The conversations go like this:

Caller 1: Dude?

Caller 2: Dude.

Caller 1: Whadup?

Caller 2: Chillin.

Caller 1: Awesome. Want to kick it?

Caller 2: I’m down.

Caller 1: Now?

Caller 2: Awesome. I’m out.

Caller 1: Peace.

Somewhere, DEA agents are holed up in a hotel room listening to this for hours on end and going out of their minds.

But there’s a subtle genius in language that has been wiped clean of almost all content. Nobody has to risk expressing a real thought or sentiment. Bland affirmation is an impenetrable defense. No one can object. As Syme, the language specialist in charge of shrinking the dictionary in George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” put it, “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

Tottenham was having none of it.

“The bogus sense of positivity has a demoralizing effect,” he said. “People resent it if you don’t say you’re doing great.”

Bucholtz, the linguist, pointed out that every generation thinks the next one is wrecking the English language. Tottenham, an old punk rocker who fled dreary old England for the Wild West, gave that point some consideration. But in the end, he rejected it.

“I hated it when I was young, ” Tottenham said. “It is the most irritating word.”

Tottenham said his linguistic cleansing movement has mostly been embraced, at least within “the two-block radius of Echo Park where I am a minor celebrity.” One Stories customer bristled when he tried to get her to honor the awesome ban, though.

“But I’m from California,” she said. “I can’t help it.”

As we chatted, a man in a cowboy shirt came up to congratulate Tottenham on his recent performance of an anti-awesome screed at a local gallery.

“That was awesome,” the man said, grinning widely.

Tottenham smiled back sourly.

“I know I’m setting myself up as a target to be churlishly bombarded by people who use the word to irritate me,” Tottenham said. “People who know about the campaign and want to further express their lack of verbal ingenuity….They do it because they think it’s witty, which it isn’t.”

“But I’m willing to take it on the nose in an honorable cause,” he said.

Tottenham already is looking toward other cliches to conquer.

“Other words will be addressed once we get rid of awesome,” Tottenham promises. “‘It’s all good.’ That’s definitely crying out to be done.”

But as with all social engineering movements, Tottenham has hit unexpected obstacles. As we chatted, we walked to a nearby cafe that had posted his no-awesome sticker in the window. The waitress stopped by to say the restaurant had been forced to take the sign down.

“The staff vetoed it,” she said. “They’re afraid people are going to think the restaurant is not awesome.”

gale.holland@latimes.com

Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

[Blog editor’s note: The title of this blog entry is mine, and is done a bit tongue-in-cheek. I approve this poet’s efforts, as all writers should. Poor and inadequate as they are at times, words are all we have to build our stories, poems, essays, novels, and other word constructs for examining life and who we are. Words are our tools and they deserve our respect.]

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January 2, 2012 · 3:12 pm

Writer’s Block

Writer’s Block, n.: The place where a writer lives with his/her imaginary friends. Something like the neighborhood of make believe.

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January 2, 2012 · 2:15 pm

Best writing advice you’ve received?

Below is some writing advice gathered by Chip MacGregor of MacGregor Literary. The listing below is from his blog. Website for the agency is http://macgregorliterary.com/.

http://chipmacgregor.typepad.com/main/2011/12/whats-the-best-writing-advice-you-ever-got-.html

December 30, 2011

What’s the best writing advice you ever got?

I’ve had several people write to share the best writing advice they’ve ever received.

Vince Zandri, who has done numerous novels and sold more than a quarter million books, wrote to me and said, “The best writing advice I ever got came from Ernest Hemingway in the form of his memoir, A Moveable Feast. If writers are worried about one thing, it’s the ability to keep a story moving from day to day. To avoid the ‘block,’ as some people call it. Papa wrote slowly and methodically in the early morning hours, and trained himself to stop at a point where he knew what was going to happen next. That way he could be sure of getting started the next day — and it left him the afternoons to play, exercise, fish, drink, or do whatever he wanted.”

Successful nonfiction writer Mel Lawrenz wrote to say, “The best advice? Take the long view. See the long process of publishing as an advantage — the stages of writing, editing, rewriting, and revising make for a more refined end product. Don’t miss the opportunity to rethink what you originally wrote.”

Harlequin author Dana Mentink sent this: “The best writing advice I got as a pre-pubbed author was that I should act like a professional. My mentor encouraged me to treat my writing like a business, not a hobby. Put in the hours, describe yourself to others as a writer, and really put yourself into the mindset of a professional. She explained to me that there’s a big difference between ‘I want to write a book’ and ‘I want to be an author.’ The latter requires professional dedication.”

Children’s author Kayleen Reusser noted, “Believe in yourself, even if no one else does. At my beginning I was the only one who believed I could write and get published. Even my mother told me I could not write — no money, no time, three small children to care for. But I swore I would die trying. (Thank goodness it has not come to that.)”

And novelist Dianne Price wrote to say, “Know your characters. LIve with them. Talk to them. Listen to their words and the cadence of their speech. Make them your constant companions. Argue with them. Commiserate with them. Ask them questions. You must know them to make them believable.”

What about you? What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever heard?

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December 31, 2011 · 7:59 pm

Parting shot: Mary Christmas

Mary Christmas

Mary Christmas, wherever you are.

Let us Harold in a New Year.

Commentary: in case you are wondering, this is an actual sign in the small city where I live. I could not win a spelling bee if thrown into one, but I do know that Merry can be Mary, and Mary Christmas could be the name of somebody, but usually it Merry before Christmas, and maybe after Christmas, too. I also know we all have our crosses to bare, and some of them can be more of a bear than others, but sometimes we bare our crosses in ways that might make Mary merry, especially with Harold around. Here’s hoping we can all find a dictionary in 2012 when we need one.

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December 31, 2011 · 10:33 am

Some things to do to celebrate the New Year

Bringing in the New Year

Some suggestions for bringing in the New Year

If you don’t already have plans, or looking for ways to try something new as the hour approaches midnight, consider these:

Japan: Omisko, New Year’s Eve, has been celebrated for several centuries, often with the ringing of a bell 108 times. This symbolizes repenting for each of the 108 bonno (moral desires) identified in Buddhism. (I didn’t know I had that many.)

Russia: In Moscow and probably other cities, many folks spend the final moments of the old year in silence. They write down wishes for the new year, burn them, pour the ashes into a wine glass, pour champagne in the glass, then drink the ash-infused wine, ensuring the wishes will come true. Bottoms up!

And if that is not enough of the grape for you, you can, as they do in Spain, eat twelve (12) grapes at midnight, one for each chime of the clock. This is supposed to bring good luck to each month of the coming year. There might still be time to go out and buy some grapes.

Then, when done with all your celebrating, be a mad Dane and take your plates to the homes of the people your love and break your dishes in their lawns. For full effect, you can recite some of Hamlet’s soliloquy: “To be a (broken dish) or not to be (a broken dish), that is the question….” Despite the apparent madness of this gesture, if you wake up and find a lot of broken dishes on your lawn, it is, in Denmark, a sign that you have many friends, or at least people who don’t want to do their dishes. This is, of course, hard to do with paper and plastic plates. But instead maybe you can set fire to them, after you write wishes on the bottoms, then drink to your friends’ health, and leave the empty plastic wine glass on their lawns. Toss in a dozen grapes for good measure, ring a bell 108 times outside their bedroom windows, and you might have all the bases covered for a wonder-filled 2012. After all, that’s the American Way.

Happy New Year!

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December 30, 2011 · 6:00 pm

Literary resolutions

I pass these along, found on line in an article at the LA Times web site. I don’t generally make resolutions. In fact, the last resolution I made was to not make any resolutions, and thus far I have managed to keep that one. But for those who do, you might find some inspiration here.

Happy New Year Couple

Counting down the minutes to a new year of resolutions


Pen up.

Keyboards clacking.

Steady as she goes.

Happy New Year.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/12/25-literary-resolutions-for-2012.html

When 2012 arrives this weekend, there will be resolutions aplenty. Diets! Exercise! Get organized! Figure out Google+! Quit smoking! Jacket Copy asked
writers, editors and publishers what their literary resolutions will be. Join them and tell us yours.

Ben Ehrenreich, author of the novel “Ether” and winner of a 2011 National Magazine Award for his article “The End”: That’s an easy one: write, write, write and write some more.

Richard Lange, author of the 2013 novel “Gather Darkness” (Mulholland): I’m going to reread “Moby-Dick,” “Crime & Punishment,” and “The Scarlet Letter.” Every time I go back to books that I loved as a kid, I learn more about myself as a writer now.

Dana Spiotta, author of the novel “Stone Arabia”: I have many books I want to read this year. For example, I have this inviting stack of Hollywood biographies and memoirs: “Rosebud” by David Thomson, “Frank: The Voice” by James Kaplan, “Run-through” by John Houseman, “Memo” by David O. Selznick, “A Girl Like I” by Anita Loos, and “Vanity Will Get You Somewhere: An Autobiography” by Joseph Cotten.

Antoine Wilson, author of the 2012 novel “Panorama City” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt): For 2012, I expect to be doing more interacting with strangers, thanks to the new book coming out, so my resolution is simple: To be able to clearly and concisely answer the following question: “What are you reading?” Jervey Tervalon, author of “Serving Monster” and founder of Literature for Life: Start working on a new novel that will amuse and consume me; and I will not allow myself, not even for a second, to dwell on the bleakness of the publishing industry.

Elizabeth Crane, author of the 2012 novel “We Only Know So Much” (HarperPerennial): I don’t know if this is exactly literary, but the only real resolution I’m considering, which I haven’t etched in stone yet, is to give up watching entertainment shows (ET, etc). This might or might not help my writing, if only insofar as it will free up an hour of my life every day, but the hope is that it will help my celebrities-and-celebrity-news-makes-me-want-to-pull-my-hair-out problem.

Rachel Kushner, author “Telex from Cuba,” a National Book Award finalist: This year I am inspired by my friend Marisa Silver’s resolution from last year, which was no internet (except e-mail and occasionally facebook). My resolution is exactly that. Perhaps that’s bookish, in that it might create more time in which actual books can be read. I feel better already, sensing the loss of this convenient form of self-sabotage–of time. Time is of a premium. I don’t want to waste any. I have a feeling I will miss out on very little without the internet. Whatever it is, if it’s important enough it will find me.

Marisa Silver, author of the short story collection “Alone With You”: Read more poetry. Use fewer commas.

Evan Ratliff, founding editor of the multimedia iPad magazine The Atavist: I’m not a big resolution maker, but I would say on the literary front mine is pretty simple and obvious. It’s building on something I started late this year, which is to carve out specific, disconnected, undistracted time to read every day. Sometimes it’s sitting outside with a paperback, having left the phone and all other devices back at the office. Sometimes it’s actually reading a book on the phone (as you might imagine, I’m a big fan of reading books on the phone!), but having turned off all the phone’s connections. It’s like exercise, for me: The whole day gets better if I set aside the time for it. And as much as I love reading digital texts, it’s not the same if I stop three times in the middle to deal with some seemingly-urgent-but-not-really email.

Elissa Schappell, author of the short story collection “Blueprints for Building Better Girls”: It’s the Russians. It’s always the Russians. Oh yes, I’ll read the Russians in the summer months. Two summers ago, I developed such a bad case of Tolstoy’s elbow from hauling around “War and Peace” I could barely flip through a magazine. The summer before “Crime and Punishment” doubled as a drinks tray at a lawn party, and when I got spooked staying alone at a friend’s summer house, I kept it by the door as a weapon. This year, however I’m more hopeful–I’m starting, more appropriately, in winter. Beginning tomorrow I’m going to make “Anna Karenina” my new BFF.

James Hannaham, author of the novel “God Says No”: This year I want to figure out why, when an author says the phrase “working on a story collection,” as in “I’m working on a story collection,” everyone in publishing reacts as if they have instead heard the phrase “molesting several children.” And I will continue to pray for the demise of e-books, or at least the demise of the stupid fear that they will replace printed books.

Ben Greenman, author of the short story collection “What He’s Poised to Do”: I want to reread all the Emily Dickinson poems, in order, at a slow enough rate that I understand them but a fast enough rate to keep it exciting. It’s not as easy at it sounds. And I also plan to think about why, in a time of reduced attention spans, short stories aren’t getting more traction.

Mark Haskell Smith, author of the 2012 nonfiction book “Heart of Dankness: Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race to the Cannibas Cup” (Broadway): For 2012 I owe my editor a novel, so I’ll be working on that.

Patrick deWitt, author of the novel “The Sisters Brothers,” a 2011 Booker Prize finalist: My resolution is to further distance myself from the internet, and to use the time I would have spent re-re-rewatching that “screwing/puking dogs” GIF reading and writing.

Rob Spillman, editor of the literary magazine Tin House: Since I read contemporary work constantly for work, my resolution is to continue my recent streak of reading great older work that I missed or glossed over in my youth. I’m about to finish “House of Mirth,” which I can’t believe I never read before. Next up is “Moby-Dick,” which I half-read when I was twenty. On the horizon Waugh and more Wharton.

Janelle Brown, author of the novel “This is Where We Live”: Write a rough draft of a new novel. No pressure.

Johnny Temple, publisher of Akashic Books: 2012 marks the 50-year anniversary of the independence of both Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago (both former British colonies), so my resolution for the coming year is to celebrate Caribbean-inspired independence.

Emma Straub, bookseller and author of the short-story collection “Other People We Married”: I think 2012 is going to be my year for one of the giant masterpieces: Anthony Powell’s “Dance to the Music of Time,” maybe, or Proust. Also, since no one answered my call for help and bought me all the NYRB classics in 2011, that resolution will have to shift onto the coming year.

Laila Lalami, author of the novel “Secret Son”: For the last couple of years, I’ve been working on my new novel and have been reading almost exclusively fiction and nonfiction that’s relevant to it in in some way. In 2012, I’d like to read some new fiction!

Chad Post, editor of Open Letter Books: In 2012, I’m going to read a ton of really long books. I’m going to start with Murakami’s “1Q84,” but also want to read Nadas’ “Parallel Lives,” the new translation of “War and Peace,” the whole Javier Marias “Your Face Tomorrow” trilogy, maybe “Bleak House” in honor of Dickens’ 200th birthday, and Pynchon’s “Against the Day” (the only book of his I have yet to finish). I feel like I’ve been putting off so many of these books for so long, because they’ll “take too long” to read. That’s ridiculous, and in a way, I think this little project will be a nice antidote to my normal state of being all ADD and jumping from one article or novella to the next.

Ned Vizzini, television writer and author of the young adult novel “It’s Kind of a Funny Story”: For 2012 I resolve to read 10 books for no other reason than because I want to — books (1) by people I don’t know (2) that I am not reviewing (3) that do not have any potential for film or TV.

Pamela Ribon, screenwriter and author of the 2012 novel “You Take It From Here” (Gallery Books): In 2012I resolve to get new curtains, because I believe my neighbors (and various passersby on the street) are watching me whenever I’m playing my XBox Kinect workout. The other day I’m pretty sure I saw one of them with a bowl of popcorn.

Tod Goldberg, director of the creative writing MFA program at UC Riverside, Palm Desert, and author of the short-story collection “Where You Lived,” resolved: My only real literary resolution for 2012 is to finish my new novel, which I then hope Salman Rushdie will read, on his Kindle.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of the memoir “When Skateboards Will Be Free”: Stop looking at so much porn.

Colin Robinson, co-publisher OR Books, which has just published “Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story of an Action That Changed America”: My resolution for 2012 is for OR Books to develop further direct relationships with those who want to read our titles so as to bypass corporate retailers whose only significant role in the publishing process is taking all the money. Oh, and also to publish some great books.

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