 Red Room Writer Profile
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J.P. Smith's Blog
August 31, 2010
- ...and as mentioned in my previous blog, here's my review of Tom McCarthy's new novel: http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/jpsmith/2010/08/everything-dies-a-review-of-tom-mccarthys-novel-c/
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August 29, 2010
- Lately, while not writing draft after draft of a new screenplay, I’ve taken to writing reviews of some forthcoming books. I’ve only written one review in my career, a commissioned piece on Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (which, because the literary magazine which had paid me to do so never got around to bringing out their first issue, I published here at Red ...
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July 22, 2010
- Please check out my latest essay at The Millions, "Reading in Tongues": http://www.themillions.com/2010/07/reading-in-tongues.html
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July 17, 2010
- In a few months I’m going under the knife. Well, actually scalpel, followed by saw. It’s a kind of amputation, though what’s being excised won’t be visible to anyone but a radiologist and airport security personnel. And when the bone and dust is kicked up by the surgeon’s weapon of choice, I will, I sincerely hope, be in a state of blissful sleep. It’s a hip replacement. I thought I ...
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July 2, 2010
- I read this morning of the death not many hours ago of one of the most original voices in British literature, Dame Beryl Bainbridge. I’d first discovered Beryl’s works in the mid-70s after reading Graham Greene’s praise of her novel The Bottle Factory Outing. It was on a trip to London in the early 70s that I managed to find the title (unavailable then in the US), along with everything ...
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July 1, 2010
- A minor expansion of an earlier blog post, now appearing at The Nervous Breakdown: http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/jpsmith/2010/07/cheating-at-solitaire/
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June 26, 2010
- When I was first starting off as a writer, endings of novels were always a problem with me. For some odd reason, I tended to end all of my novels with the death of the protagonist, to the point where my agent at the time would laugh in despair over this peculiar habit (and spend five years trying to get one book after another of mine placed with a publisher), while the sound of his laughter ...
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June 26, 2010
- When I was first starting off as a writer, endings of novels were always a problem with me. For some odd reason, I tended to end all of my novels with the death of the protagonist, to the point where my agent at the time would laugh in despair over this peculiar habit (and spend five years trying to get one book after another of mine placed with a publisher), while the sound of his laughter ...
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June 9, 2010
- ...and my new essay at The Nervous Breakdown website: http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/jpsmith/2010/06/somewhere-else-in-the-universe/
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June 9, 2010
May 21, 2010
- Please check out my article, just published at Max Magee's themillions.com, on Nicolas Roeg's great film "Don't Look Now": http://www.themillions.com/2010/05/death-in-venice-don’t-look-now.html
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May 8, 2010
- The more I write—let’s be frank: the older I get—the more I find myself reaching back into my own life not so much for material to write about, but for the scenery of plot and narrative. For all of my years as a novelist I’ve really never used the materials of my own life, partly out of respect for others whom I certainly wouldn’t want to betray in any way, though mostly because I ...
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April 17, 2010
- In the summer of 1967 (and for part of the summer of ’68) I worked part-time at an East Village store on 10th Street called Paranoia. What had started out as a hangout (a college friend’s cousin owned the place) turned into employment. There were four rooms: the front room, which contained consignment pieces such as clothing, big paper flowers and the like; various underground newspapers ...
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March 17, 2010
- The time has come once again for a script of mine to go out to producers. This is a script I wrote in just under three weeks, then revised according to notes sent by my manager. But “going out” means it’s finished and ready to be seen by the eyes of Those Who Hold the Pursestrings. You have to be very careful at such times that you don’t 1) court failure (“No one, but no one is going to ...
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February 3, 2010
- It began as a river of electricity working its way up his legs, into the pit of his stomach, through his heart and finally settling to simmer in his head, where it would cook and bubble for the next eight hours, wreaking havoc with the primordial life that clung to the corners and corridors of a subconscious that had eluded parents, teachers, counselors and physicians for all of his eighteen ...
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