This was 1985 — not the Anthony Burgess novel, the year (Anthony Burgess wrote so many books you might have to make that specification about a number of words or phrases — “On going to bed, I read ninety-nine novels — no, I mean I really did go to bed and read ninety-nine novels!”). I was dropping out of college and had begun a novel and returned to New York. A bookstore in Manhattan announced a rare reading and signing by Anthony Burgess, a primary hero of mine at the time, for his autodidact’s erudition and braggadocio, and for how he’d gentrified a number of outre genres just by picking them up and mingling them with his erudition and braggadocio.
Jonathan Lethem reflects on a a reading by Anthony Burgess.

“It’s an inevitably posed question, perhaps a fake-clever one, given Jonathan Lethem’s cheeky chapter titles in his new entry in Continuum’s 33 1/3 series about Talking Heads’ 1979 album Fear of Music. ‘Is Fear of Music A Talking Heads Record?’ he asks in one. ‘Is Fear of Music A Text?’ he poses in another.”

- Is ‘Fear of Music’ A Book? by Jesse Arnow

Recently I came upon instances of three very different writers drawing on three very different movies to produce three odd and wondrous little books. The writers are Geoff Dyer, Don DeLillo, and Jonathan Lethem, who, for all their differences, have one thing in common. Each became bewitched by a movie that spoke so forcefully to him that he watched it again and again until it revealed all of its secrets and meanings, until he grasped what might be called the movie’s deep tissues.
Blink vs. Think: When a Movie Bewitches A Writer by Bill Morris
Talk about post-modern moments. A critic writes a review of a writer. Then the writer responds to the critic. Then a blogger writes an article about the writer’s response to the critic. Then posters attack the writer for responding to the critic and other posters attack those posters for attacking the writer’s response. Then the critic responds to the posters, but no one believes he is the actual critic. The strangest/funniest part was perhaps when one poster pretending to be the critic also in response posted a link to a James Wood web site that is for James Wood the used car dealer and another asked that money be deposited in an offshore account for James Woods in the Cayman Islands, although those posts were unfortunately deleted.

Lewis.

(Pulled from the incredibly lively comment section on Sam Allingham’s “The Disappointment Author”, written in response to this piece from Jonathan Lethem in the LA Review of Books.)

Source: themillions.com