The Nervous Breakdown: matchmaking writers and readers

Brad Listi started the website The Nervous Breakdown in 2006 as a place for writers to come together, to discuss and support -- and promote-- each others' work. The scope of the site has changed: It now reads more like a magazine than a message board, and the reading is good. It showcases editorially curated original fiction, nonfiction and poetry by writers such as Ron Currie Jr. and Tod Goldberg. But it's still sort of a collective effort -- a discussion with Neil Gaiman about his hair was a blog post -- although the collection of writers steering things is now nearly 200 contributors, with 19 volunteer editors. Founding editor Listi, an L.A.-based author, answered Carolyn Kellogg's questions about TNB via e-mail.

Jacket Copy: While The Nervous Breakdown appears to be a literary magazine, it grew out of a writing community. Could you explain the site's history?

Brad Listi: I started the site in 2006 as an outgrowth of the work I was doing to my promote my debut novel, "Attention. Deficit. Disorder." It wasn’t really all that long ago, but the tech landscape was markedly different even then. The concept of an author promoting his book on the Web was a relatively new one, and I was having some success writing online and building a bit of a community around my work. Along the way, it occurred to me that it would be fun -- and likely more interesting -- to be doing something similar in concert with other writers. It felt experimental then, and it feels experimental now. The goal is to offer something of value to online readers -- particularly those who are interested in literature and the arts. We’re trying to distinguish ourselves from the static, so to speak, and, with a nod to irony, we’re trying to use the Web to let readers know about books and writers worth reading.  

And it’s true: The Nervous Breakdown in its present iteration really is an outgrowth of a small writers' community that formed back in '06 and has been growing like a weed ever since.  A lot of lasting friendships have been forged via the site. A lot of writers have really bloomed and developed loyal followings, and many have gone on to have some amazing successes in publishing. Best of all, two of our contributors -- Greg Boose and Claire Bidwell Smith -- wound up falling in love and getting married, which led to the birth of a beautiful baby girl (whom we all now jokingly refer to as the “TNBaby”). As the site improves its design and becomes more sophisticated in its functionality, the challenge is to preserve this grass-roots, community aspect and to find ways to integrate it with a more robust publication.  

JC: Although there are many writing communities on the Web, few have a real constituency of working writers. Have any TNB contributors published books this year?

BL: We have dozens of contributors who published books this year, including Suzanne Burns ("Misfits and Other Heroes", Ron Currie, Jr. ("Everything Matters!"), Ronlyn Domingue ("The Mercy of Thin Air"), D.R. Haney  ("Banned for Life"), Tao Lin ("Shoplifting from American Apparel"), Greg Olear ("Totally Killer"), Lance Reynald ("Pop Salvation"), and Laura van den Berg ("What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us"), to name a few. 

JC: What's been the greatest surprise to you, in the evolution of TNB?

BL: The community that it fosters. The lasting friendships. The marriage. The child. The dating. The relationships. Writers sending food to one another. Exchanging recipes, books, music. Visiting one another in foreign countries. You name it. There has been way more of that kind of thing than I ever envisioned when we started out. And maybe it shouldn’t surprise me. The fact is that our writers are a good bunch of people, and very talented, very open and honest, and very interactive on the comment boards and so on. The site amounts to a daily conversation, in effect, and it fosters a genuine sense of intimacy and connection among people.  What better way to get to know someone, after all, than to read their deeper thoughts?   

As I like to joke: Match.com should hire me as a consultant. 

After the jump: Can new writers get involved? And how can a magazine be a community?

Cormac McCarthy's typewriter and its predecessors

On Friday, Christie's will auction Cormac McCarthy's battered blue Olivetti typewriter, with proceeds going to the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit the author supports. "I have typed on this typewriter every book I have written including three not yet published," McCarthy writes in his authentication letter. Of course, that includes "The Road," "All the Pretty Horses," "The Crossing," "Blood Meridian," "No Country for Old Men" and the rest. The typewriter has been tended as gently as if owned by one of his hardbitten Southwestern characters: "[I]t has never been cleaned other than blowing out the dust with a service station airhose."

McCarthy's isn't the first typewriter to hit the bigtime: It's joining a posse of authors' typewriters that have become collectible. In fact, the Ransom Center in Texas has about a dozen in its collection, including an Olympia owned by "Perry Mason" author Erle Stanley Gardner, poet Edgar Lee Masters' Corona, a gold Royal belonging to Anne Sexton (below) and a few of Isaac Bashevis Singer's. Many of Singer's typewriters, including the one above right, were in Yiddish.

In a 2006 exhibit called “Technologies of Writing,” the Ransom Center displayed not only its typewriters, but works from its collection that related to typewriters (and other writing tools, but we're talking typewriters here). In 1945, while Norman Mailer was at work on "The Naked and the Dead," his first book, his parents offered to buy him a new machine. He wrote back asking for one with "ridged keys and a hard touch and a lot of noise. Somehow I don’t like most of the new models with their slippery keys and noiseless action. When my machine clacks and snaps I know it’s happy, but you can never tell about those quiet ones!" The Ransom Center displayed what it could of that typewriter -- all that was left was a beaten platen.

Another piece on display was a 1941 letter from playwright Tennessee Williams to his agent, Audrey Wood, which can be found in the book "The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, 1945-1957."

My operation occurred on the Via Aurelia between Rome and Genoa in my new Jaguar. I was driving it at 70 miles an hour, fortified by a couple or three stiff martinis, when a capricious truck came out of a side road and I decided to hit a large tree instead. One side of the car was demolished. My portable typewriter flew out of the backseat and crowned me just over the hairline. I have not had a bigger or more excited audience since the opening of "Menagerie." No one could believe the divine bird was still able to flutter! But here, I am, in Paris!

While many authors in the 20th century used portable typewriters, Williams may have had the only one that could fly.

How much the typewriters in the Ransom Center collection are worth is hard to say -- all were part of larger estates, not sold separately. McCarthy's Olivetti, which cost the author $50 in 1958, is expected to bring in $15,000 to $20,000.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos: Top left: Cormac McCarthy's Olivetti typewriter; credit, Christie's / Associated Press. Top right: Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yiddish typewriter; credit, Pete Smith / Harry Ransom Center. Bottom: Anne Sexton's gold Royal typewriter; credit, Pete Smith / Harry Ransom Center.

RELATED: George Bernard Shaw's typewriter up for sale

Author of 'The Ice Storm' tries storytelling on Twitter

Rick Moody, the author of "The Ice Storm," is publishing a short story on Twitter, 140 characters at a time. Moody took up the challenge when it was suggested by the innovative new magazine Electric Literature, which is publishing "Some Contemporary Characters" simultaneously with about 20 others, including L.A. bookstores Vroman's and Skylight and CalArts' literary magazine Black Clock.

The story is being tweeted in 10-minute intervals by @ElectricLit and the others between now and Wednesday, taking breaks at night. 

So far, it looks to be a story about a budding relationship between a forty- to fiftysomething man and a woman less than half his age -- hey, it works for Philip Roth -- Internet daters who meet cute. The story has been told, in its first installments, in what are nominally alternating tweets from the perspective of each character. 

It's interesting that a writer of Moody's caliber is willing to give Twitter a try. But at this early stage, the experiment shows where form and content aren't yet matched to their best advantage.

If Moody wrote the story from two individual points of view -- possibly more, as the story is called "Some Contemporary Characters" -- why tweet from a single feed? If the story had an omniscient voice, a godlike storyteller narrating the events, the single feed would make sense. But if these are supposed to be the tweets/thoughts of different people, why not fully exploit the form and bring them each into being on Twitter for the life of the story?

And the simultaneous publishing by 20 different Twitterers is perhaps a miscalculation. In the past, having bookstores, bloggers and other magazines simultaneously pass out a short story would widen the circulation. Today, many of those people are in overlapping social networking circles, and the result is repetition rather than reach. Anyone following more than one of the outlets sees exactly the same tweet show up at exactly the same time from multiple sources. Twitter has a viral recirculation tool -- retweeting, or an RT in a post -- which is organic and feels like a shared secret. But this project isn't using retweeting, it's simply sending out the same broadcast from many places at once -- leaving the receiver to feel like he or she has been attacked by clones. No fun.

What role Twitter eventually will take in our culture -- other than short-attention-span distraction -- is hard to predict. But surely it is a possible venue for telling short stories, and Electric Literature is to be commended for splashing in with this one. But it shows that Twitter as a storytelling form hasn't been fully exploited -- yet.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Rick Moody in 2001. Credit: Jeff Geissler / Associated Press

Thanks, Jack Kerouac

On this day of thanks, I'd like to say thank you for an American writer I still treasure. Oh, you can complain about his romanticism, about his self-destructive alcoholism, about his inability to get beyond his initial massive success with "On the Road." But as much as the pilgrims and the codifiers of American holidays, Jack Kerouac showed us America in a way that would change our understanding of it forever.

Yes, "On the Road" isn't perfect. It is peppered with misogynist potholes, founders for long stretches, and is stuck in an adolescent mind-set.

But it also bursts with energy; it practically bounces off the page. It's a reminder that when Kerouac imagined something grand and unnameable and just out of reach, he could be electrifying. Imagine hanging out with him, back then, him and his friends like Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg, who could entice you into almost any adventure just with the draw of their enthusiasm.

Back then, they didn't have karaoke. But somehow in the late 1950s, Kerouac found himself in front of a microphone, and people nearby were taping. Some of those recordings were with Steve Allen, others recorded live with an unknown band, but all soon went missing. Then in 1999, rediscovered acetates were turned into the CD "Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road." Sure, he reads a chunk of his novel -- but more important, on a few tracks, Kerouac sings.

And today, for Thanksgiving, won't you celebrate an unusual feast of our nation's cultural heritage: author Jack Kerouac sings "Ain't We Got Fun" to a very jazzy musical accompaniment. And happy Thanksgiving -- hope you've got lots of fun, too.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

File photo of Jack Kerouac, right, with friend Neal Cassady.

Who walks in L.A.? Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.

It was Orhan Pamuk's first L.A. visit. The Turkish native, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006, has taught in New York without making it here -- until he appear at an L.A. Public Library ALOUD event earlier this month. Before things got started, he mosied around downtown with writer Lewis MacAdams, who chronicles the experience in today's books pages.

He asked about the history of Bunker Hill. It wasn't the sleek business towers that enchanted him, but the historic core. "All my friends say there is no downtown Los Angeles," Pamuk said, but clearly he was pleased to see that there was. "There is a downtown here," he noted approvingly. "And it looks very old-fashioned." ...

"I like it when there is history, when there is decay. I'm very much impressed that this city has a decaying face. I identify it with my own."

Pamuk, MacAdams writes, "was strolling down Hill Street, recognized by nobody." What a difference a continent makes. In March of 2007, Laura King reported on an increasing uneasiness among the literary world of Istanbul. This is her report of what those days were like for writers, including the outspoken Pamuk.

March 1, 2007: ISTANBUL, TURKEY -- At a recent dinner party on the shores of the Bosporus, the bookish chatter among the Turkish writers and academics present took a sudden grim turn: Are you under police protection yet?

"We were all comparing notes about which of us had only one bodyguard and which of us had two, and we joked a little about being in competition with each other over this," said journalist and novelist Perihan Magden, who was among those placed under police protection after threats by ultranationalists. "It was comical, but also very tragic."

In the wake of the January assassination in Istanbul of prominent ethnic Armenian editor Hrant Dink, Turkey's intellectual community is feeling under siege to a degree not experienced in decades.

A mass outpouring of dismay and revulsion when Dink was gunned down, illustrated by a funeral that drew tens of thousands of mourners, has given way to a powerful right-wing backlash. Shadowy nationalist groups have issued chilling threats against authors and thinkers who, like Dink, speak out against Turkey's official denial that the mass killings of Armenians beginning in 1915 constituted genocide, or on the power of the Turkish military, or the status of minority Kurds.

As a result, novelists are canceling book tours, once-outspoken professors are maintaining a low profile, and crusading columnists like Magden wonder whether their words will wind up costing them their lives.

Shakespeare and Company's new literary mural

The English-language bookstore on Paris' left bank, Shakespeare and Company, has been a draw for generations of expatriate writers. That goes for both its first iteration, owned by Sylvia Beach, who was the original publisher of James Joyce's "Ulysses," and the more recent version, opened in 1951 by George Whitman. And those writers are rendered in portraits in a new mural in the shop, on the stairwell between the ground floor and the upstairs browsing/reading room.

On its website, Bomb Magazine has a slideshow of the mural's creation, and an interview with the artist, Badaude (a.k.a. Joanna Walsh). 

I’m somewhere between being a writer [and] an illustrator. I look with envy at other artists’ sketchbooks which are full of pictures and are beautiful objects. Mine tend to be pages of scribbled notes with the odd sketch thrown in....

In drawing the Shakespeare & Company writers -- looking at the way they presented themselves in the reference photos I used -- I became interested in how the image of being, and the story of becoming, a published writer in Paris was so central to the myth [of] their lives; a myth so hugely attractive it frequently became their subject matter ("Quartet," " A Moveable Feast," "Tropic of Cancer"). This is why I chose the quote from "Ulysses" ...  hidden in the wallpaper design of the mural, in which Stephen Dedalus remembers his “Latin Quarter hat,” “puce gloves,” and other “Paris fads” with which he -- and no doubt his hipster-goatee’d creator -- furnished his Paris persona.

Today, the shop is run by George's daughter Sylvia Whitman -- George, now in his 90s, is mostly retired. It continues to offer events with French and American writers, like Jhumpa Lahiri and Mavis Gallant in June and Charles D'Ambrosio later this month.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo credit: Paul Morris / Bomb Magazine

Oprah pick Uwem Akpan in the Southland tonight

Oprah Book Club fans in the Southland can see Uwem Akpan this evening at Loyola Marymount University’s William H. Hannon Library. The author is set to appear at 5:30 p.m.

Akpan, a native of Nigeria, is the author of Oprah's latest book pick, "Say You're One of Them." The book marked two firsts for Oprah's Book Club: It was the first set in Africa and the first short story collection.

"He is the author of the most powerful collection of short stories that I believe I've ever read," Oprah said on her book club broadcast.

Akpan is a Jesuit priest who received a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Michigan. After earning his degree, he has returned to Nigeria, where he serves at Christ the King Church, Ilasamaja-Lagos, Nigeria.

"I started off going into the priesthood," Akpan said on the "Oprah" broadcast, "and the writing came later. For me, the two are very intertwined, right now, connected."

It is not Akpan's first visit to Southern California. Last year he appeared at the L.A. Times Festival of Books.  "Say You're One of Them" was a finalist for the L.A. Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Uwem Akpan. Credit: Comfort Ukpong / Little, Brown & Co.

Studs Terkel and the FBI

In the 1930s, Studs Terkel applied to the FBI to be a fingerprint guy -- maybe if he'd gotten the job, we would have had "CSI: Studs Terkel." But the FBI turned him away and in 1945 began surveillance that would last for more than four decades. Our report has the details:

Terkel's paper trail started in 1945. It references Terkel speaking at a Paul Robeson rally in Chicago and quotes a source who questioned Terkel's "loyalty to the United States" because he worked with the BBC on a piece about the "sordid side of life in Chicago."

Terkel was an energetic journalist who lost his broadcasting job during the McCarthy blacklist era. He went on to write landmark oral histories of working-class America, including "Division Street," "Hard Times" and "Working," which made him either a patriot or suspect, depending on your point of view. After he died in 2008 at age 96, New York's City News service filed a Freedom of Information Act request, leading to this week's release.

Terkel was aware he was being tracked by the FBI, and several accounts of his life recall him joking that his file wasn’t as thick as the one compiled on his wife Ida Goldberg, a social worker and anti-war activist.

The FBI stopped following Terkel in 1990. More than 100 pages of Terkel's 296-page file remain undisclosed for "privacy and other reasons," City News reports. Exactly whose privacy is mysterious -- Terkel outlived most of his contemporaries.

The Chicago History Museum has a selection of his recordings online; his final book, released last year, was "P.S.: Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: What's that, an agent upstairs? Studs Terkel at home in Chicago 2003. Credit: Aynsley Floyd / Associated Press

Marcel Theroux on Siberia, disaster and the bafflement of technology

In Marcel Theroux's National Book Award-nominated novel "Far North," Makepeace has survived in a remote Siberian town, essentially alone, until coming across a desperate adolescent raiding an empty house. This disturbance changes Makepeace's path, so that staying alive means searching out what bits of civilization might remain in a shattered world. It's the fourth novel for Theroux, who has traveled to Russia and the Ukraine, and the first since he worked on a documentary for the BBC about climate change.

Jacket Copy: Right now we're surrounded by post-apocalypse fictions: The movie "2012" just topped the weekend box office, the movie version of "The Road" is coming out, there's your book and Margaret Atwood's. What do you think the appeal is of setting stories after an apocalypse?

Marcel Theroux: I didn't embark on it to be a post-apocalyptic novel -- I can see why people say that about it – but I started with the character of Makepeace. I suppose to answer your question, I think one of the attractions is it gives you another angle on the way we live now. It's a way of writing about the present without seeming to write about the present. That's one of the things I liked about it. It makes you realize that things we take for granted are contingent and could change, and things haven't always been this way. In a very huge way, it situates the time we live in a much bigger historical perspective. In the case of post-apocalyptic books, it makes you think about the present from the point of view of disaster.

When I was writing "Far North," I was thinking a little bit about how the achievements of ancient Rome would have appeared to a Medieval peasant. For such a long time in Western history, the greatest technological and scientific achievements appeared to be behind us. It's only now that we feel like we're living at a cutting edge, and we feel that life is naturally linked to progress. But there's nothing natural about that, if you look at history.

JC: Makepeace is someone who is both savage and civilized, because she has a moral code.

MT: Yes, she's got a moral code. She's also got a possibly misplaced respect for her predecessors on the planet. She looks back at us and thinks we knew all sorts of things and were impressive and civilized and smart. I often think she got the wrong end of the stick about us. But there's something kind of noble about her desire to preserve what she sees as best about human beings.

JC: In some ways, that's made tangible in the books that she saves, which is how your book begins.

MT: She saves them, but she doesn't actually read them herself. She feels like she ought to, but it gives her a headache when she reads them. She feels kind of inadequate when she considers these treasures of her civilization, but she's the only person there.

JC: There are some mysterious elements that are beyond her.

MT: I think it's true of all of us that we're surrounded by things we take for granted but we don't actually understand. I'm looking around the [hotel] room, I see my mobile phone and my computer and a plasma-screen TV. I couldn't take one of these apart and put it together – I have a very primitive understanding of the way these things work. I think there is a huge gap between the technological sophistication of things around us and our actual understanding of them. I was interested in that gap.

Makepeace is a very resourceful person who is hugely capable. Like a lot of people in traditional societies, she can fix anything that goes wrong. She's mastered all the technology that she needs to master, albeit on a more basic level than mobile telephones. She feels an awe and inadequate when she's confronted by these things that we take for granted, like planes and cars and internal combustion engines.

It's somehow compelling when you have a narrator who's doing their best but somehow knows slightly less than the reader feels they do. I think it's good to feel superior to the narrator in a way – I think it's a good device. My knowledge about the world is greater than hers – there's a lot of things she's ignorant about, and she's aware of it. I was kind of interested in the idea that it's possible for knowledge to disappear.

JC: When she sees an airplane, it inspires her.

MT: It's pretty amazing, isn't it? An airplane is pretty amazing. Actually, traveling in an airplane is horrible, and it doesn't feel anything like amazing, but the idea of it. When was the first powered flight, 1906? [1903]. It is a miraculous thing. It's a device for letting the reader know – it's hard now, because the book's been reviewed, but I was thinking that at the beginning you could be in the American West in the 19th century. It's only the plane that makes you know for sure.

Haunted: Michael Mewshaw on his 'Lying With the Dead'

Will Michael Mewshaw ever slow down? At age 66, Mewshaw continues to be productive as a novelist, book reviewer, travel writer, investigative journalist and tennis reporter. "Lying With the Dead," his 11th novel, has just appeared (his 19th book, "Between Terror and Tourism," will be published this winter). And yet, NPR's Alan Cheuse has called him “the best novelist in America that nobody knows.”  If that’s true, then it must be said that Mewshaw has been hiding in plain sight. In the course of a varied career, the experiences Mewshaw has had are quite unique, as he suggests: “I’ve played basketball with Julius ‘Dr. J’ Erving, played tennis against Roy Emerson and spent two weeks in Rome with Sharon Stone when she starred in the film of my novel, 'Year of the Gun' -- and I never scored with any of them.” Jacket Copy talked to Mewshaw on the occasion of his new novel and its relationship to his past.

"Lying With the Dead" has the feel of a novel with deep personal meaning.  You end with an afterword connecting it to incidents from your childhood.

All my novels have personal meaning for me. But while the Dresbach murders, which directly touched my family and which I wrote about in "Life for Death" in 1980, can be seen as the genesis of "Lying With the Dead," it would be wrong to read the book as autobiography. Rather than a factual account, it’s a meditation on possibilities, a reflection on the impact of similar events on different characters.

The mother in "Lying With the Dead" seems frighteningly real. Where did she come from?

A much different place than my biological mother. The fictional Mom came from my imagination. The character in the book isn’t my mother, any more than the character of Candy is my sister. In real life, I had polio as a kid. In the novel, Candy’s life is defined by the disease. That’s how fiction works, through a process of selection and rearrangement.

Still, there are the murders from your childhood. Why go back to them?

I’ve never really gone away from them. Murder, family turmoil, confusion about names and identities run through my books -- the nonfiction as well as the fiction. Call them themes, call them obsessions. I believe the Greeks had it right: Man hands on misery to man. But he hands on other things too: forgiveness, hope, redemption.

For all the references to Greek tragedy in "Lying With the Dead," there’s a lot to suggest you’re also a Catholic novelist.

Well, I’m Catholic and I write. But the category of "Catholic novelist" has never gained traction in the U.S.  In a 40-year career I’ve never been referred to as a Catholic writer. Maybe Catholicism has simply passed into midstream America, and its beliefs and rituals have lost any stigma -- which is a good thing -- yet have also lost any great resonance ... which is a shame if true.

Your work is divided between fiction and nonfiction, literature and journalism.  Did you plan it that way? Does one feed the other?

There was no plan. I published five novels and expected to continue teaching creative writing. But with "Life for Death," my first nonfiction book, I found a different way to make a living. In that sense, the nonfiction didn’t just “feed” my fiction. It fed my family. But I don’t want to leave the impression I did hackwork to pay the bills. I turned down some plum jobs that didn’t interest me. I refused to do a script for Goldcrest Films about Ali Agca, the Turk who shot Pope John Paul II, and backed out of a $150,000 deal as a ghostwriter for a top political advisor. But then, in 2008, for an advance barely big enough to cover expenses, I traveled overland across North Africa from Egypt to Morocco to do a book. What real writer wouldn’t want to do that when there’s supposed to be a clash of civilizations?

-- Desmond O'Grady

O'Grady's books include the novel "Dinny Going Down" and a travel book about Italy's Abruzzo region, "The Sybil, the Shepherd and the Saint."

Photo: Michael Mewshaw. Credit: Sharon Wohlmuth