Authors and editors in conversation

Janet Malcolm and Ileene Smith Authors and Editors in Conversation Ileene Smith: The title essay of your recently published volume -- Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers -- is an ingenious portrait of the artist David Salle that is taught in journalism schools. At what point did you decide to construct the piece as a series of "false starts"? Janet Malcolm: In most of what I write, it takes me a long time to find the opening that will propel the piece forward. False starts are openings that don't go anywhere. While struggling to find the right start for my piece about David Salle, it occurred to me that the record of the struggle might form a kind of parallel to Salle's paintings, which are a meld of images that don't seem to go together but in some mysterious way do. So I began writing false false starts and added them to the rather large number of true ones I had already written. Read on...   Festing with Bill Loehfelm Book Keeping Culture Diary Bill Loehfelm (author of, most recently, The Devil in Her Way) knows a thing or two about New Orleans. And music. Like his heroine, Maureen Coughlin, Loehfelm is a New York City transplant to New Orleans... and when he's not writing, he plays drums in the Ibervillains, a rock and soul cover band. It's a straight shot down Camp Street from my corner in the Garden District to the corner of Camp and Canal Street, where Camp becomes Chartres Street and leads into the Quarter. Riding down, I have the same thought I always have when I ride down to the Quarter -- why don't I do this more often? People travel a long way and spend a lot of money to hang in the French Quarter. I'm a twenty-minute bike ride away every day of my life. Since the storm, I do my best not to take my city for granted. Some days I do better than others [...] Read on... "Katherine was highly skilled at bringing arguments back to their original frame of reference, a tactic that had the double effect of making everything she'd said seem to lead back to some central point, meaning her entire argument was, in terms of interior logic, bulletproof, while at the same time implying that Daniel had forgotten what they were arguing about and so had unwittingly constructed an argument that was untenable and made no sense." (From Idiopathy, by Sam Byers)   No Instagram filter could do these Idiopathy posters justice...