First of all this is not a particularly good photo, I KNOW, and if you want to see much better photos of the Seminar, head on over to Littoral, the Seminar blog. But it's my photo of D.T. Max talking about David Foster Wallace, shot on my phone from my perch in the balcony (that dark thing in the bottom right hand corner is the railing) and I'm going to use it, dammit. I'll confess I caught less of the second session, which I already regret, but I thoroughly enjoyed what I did see starting with Colm Toibin's masterful keynote on Thursday night that discussed the poets Thom Gunn and Elizabeth Bishop, both poets whose work shows "grief and reason battling it out," according to Toibin -- along with the work of Robert Frost and Joseph Brodsky.

Both Gunn and Bishop were stylistically and personally opposed to the trend of confessional poetry that swept through their chosen field in the 1960s, which certainly did not mean they had not suffered through traumatic times in their lives. Quite the opposite. And it doesn't mean those traumas didn't show up in their poetry. Bishop "buried what mattered to her most in her tone," Toibin said, most tellingly in the villanelle "One Art," about "the art of losing." Toibin calls it "a poem about what cannot be said."

I also didn't know, until Toibin told us, that Bishop wanted the line "awful but cheerful" inscribed on her tombstone. It's the closing line from her poem "The Bight," about Key West.

Other not-quite-random stuff from the seminar:

Ann Napolitano, who includes Flannery O'Connor as a character in her novel A Good Hard Look:

"You're supposed to be from the South if you write about Flannery O'Connor. I had barely been to the South."
"There is no way that I could imagine hanging out with Flannery O'Connor. I just think she would eviscerate me in about 30 seconds."
"Trying to get inside the skin of someone who is very prickly and you don't think would like you is a peculiar experience."

Brad Gooch, author of Flannery, a biography of the same writer:

"She was her own biographer in the sense she saw her life clearly and created it."
"As a biographer ... I have to stop where the facts stop. It's sort of annoying, but grounding as well."
"The thing about biography is that no matter how inspired you get, you sort of need a fact to get from one sentence to another."
Both Gooch and Napolitano were, in very different ways, inspired to write about O'Connor by "Habits of Being," a collection of her letters.

Brenda Wineapple on biography:

As a child, "Biography was a genre I didn't understand or really much care for."
On telling a professor at an academic conference that she was writing a biography: "'How did it feel,' he asked, 'to work on something so theoretically regressive?'" This while swirling sherry condescendingly in his plastic cup.
"What haunts the house? I think that's what the biographer has to discover."
"Biography matters because people matter. They matter to us because we want to know them and understand them."
"Biography is an invasion of privacy made palatable and jusifiable .. by the empathy that inspires it."

D.T. Max, author of "Every Love Story is a Ghost Story," a biography of David Foster Wallace:

On DFW's college-age ambition to go into politics: "The thought that David Foster Wallace wanted to be a Congressman from Illinois is so weird."
On writing a biography soon after a subject's death: "The laptop lid opens after the casket closes."
Biography is "the only nonfiction genre that's survived basically unchanged for the last 200 years."
On meeting readers with tattoos of lines from DFW's novel "Infinite Jest," or the dates they began and finished the book: "This is not what biographers are used to encountering."
Comparing the reaction to DFW's death to the reaction to the deaths of John Lennon and Kurt Cobain: "There was a way in which David was toucing people the way musicians usually do."
"If grief and sadness are what brought a lot of us to Wallace over the years, I certainly don't believe it's what kept us there."

I'll give the last word to Geoff Dyer, even though he speaks in long discursive sentences that are very difficult to get down accurately, especially if you're busy listening for his next witty comment:

I recognized his surprise, as an undergraduate, when he realized "how quickly doing English came to mean doing criticism."
I was surprised and delighted to hear him call F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Tender is the Night" "one of my two favorite novels of all time." I loved that book, too, even though, at least in this country, "The Great Gatsby" gets most of the critical love.
"Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice' is one of those books everyone has read. You've all read it, even if you've not done so personally."

If there's one image from this Seminar

Session 1 of this year's Key West Literary Seminar wrapped up yesterday. If you missed it, I suspect recordings will be showing up soonish on the Seminar's audio archive site. And we're getting particularly good coverage this year on Littoral, the Seminar blog and from WLRN, the public radio station in Miami. If you're Twitter-inclined, check out the hashtag #kwls -- you'll even see eminences like Judy Blume and James Gleick chiming in along with us lesser mortals in the audience. This year is not as Twitterific as last but we don't have William Gibson and Margaret Atwood with us (though Gibson is scheduled to return next year -- don't wait too long to sign up for 2014's Seminar, The Dark Side, because it's selling fast). As has quickly become tradition, Jason Rowan is back making custom-crafted cocktails, tailored to the year's theme. Keep an eye on his blog, Embury Cocktails, for recipes and more information in the near future.

Phyllis Rose opened with a wonderful keynote address Thursday night, examining John Hersey (for whom the Thursday event is named) as a lens through which to view the whole writer vs. person question. Is the man Key Westers saw riding his bike around the island the same person who wrote "Hiroshima" and "A Bell for Adano"? The answer is, of course, no and yes. Rose was also refreshingly dismissive about the overwhelming adoption of deconstruction and other French-influenced critical approaches toward literature, which tortured those of us who were English majors in the latter part of the 20th century and dared to think that writers' lives and times might influence their work. For literary scholars who didn't feel like sacrificing themselves on the altars of Derrida and Foucault, literary biography became "a welcome oasis during the desert years of deconstruction," Rose said. "Writers about writers were rescued by readers who wanted to know about writers' lives."

A sporadic sample from the rest of the weekend:

From Judith Thurman, biographer of Isak Dinesen and Colette and staff writer for The New Yorker:

"Fiction is high-minded betrayal and biography is dirty-minded fidelity."
One of Thurman's early jobs was translating pornographic movies. "It's freelance work that I heartily recommend because it's easy -- you just have to understand the words 'Yes.... yes!' and 'More!'"
Translation is "yoga for the mind and for the ear."
"One definition of the truth is that which is untranslatable."

From Brenda Wineapple, biographer of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Gertrude and Leo Stein, author of a book about Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

On her subjects: "I prefer them deader and deader."
Emily Dickinson is "the elusive subject par excellence."
Oscar Wilde quote: "Biography adds new terror to death."

Most amazing fact learned at this year's Seminar (so far):

Bram Stoker based the character of Dracula on Walt Whitman (amazing fact supplier: Mark Doty). Edmund White followed this with a comment on why vampire is so often code for gay in literature: "You meet someone, you kiss them and you turn them into you."

More from Edmund White, biographer of Genet and Proust, literary critic and author of a biographical novel on Stephen Crane:

"Politics and literature are opposites. Politics are all lying and literature is all truth-telling."
"Having come out when I was 12, I've always wondered what it would be like to be closeted."
On fiction vs. nonfiction: "The contract with the reader is entirely different." That's why he calls the books about his life autobiographical novels, not memoirs. "Once they're called novels, you're free to do whatever you want."

From Jay Parini, biographer of William Faulkner, Robert Frost and John Steinbeck and author of biographical novels on Melville and Tolstoy:

Leon Edel's five-volume biography of Henry James is "better than Xanax" as a treatment for insomnia. "He's the Xanax of all writers."
On the difference between writing biographies of Jesus (his most recent subject) and Gore Vidal (his next subject): "At least Jesus didn't think he was Gore Vidal."
"Biography is a form of fiction. .... I love to read biographies, even bad ones."
In writing biography, "you're not presenting a life. You've giving an illusion of a life."
To Edmund White: "I read your biography of Genet. I thought it was a great novel."

Literary subjects that KWLS panelists attempted as grade-schoolers:

Phyllis Rose: Eleanor Roosevelt, after her mother rejected her earlier choice of the Duchess of Windsor as a suitable subject for an assignment to write about "an admirable woman."
Edmund White: Peter the Great. "I was absolutely power-mad as a child."
Brenda Wineapple, at 10 years old, wrote the first chapter of a novel and gave it to her father, whose response was "But there's no plot here." Wineapple: "My career as a novelist was over."

Books I have purchased (so far):

The Master by Colm Toibin
Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America by Jay Parini
Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer by Richard Holmes, who isn't at the Seminar but the book was mentioned several times

If all of this makes you eager to sign up for Session 2, it's not too late. It all starts again Thursday night with a keynote I'm really looking forward to: Colm Toibin talking about Elizabeth Bishop. That's Toibin in the photo, by the way, speaking at the podium that Cayman Smith-Martin and his crew built from books they got from us here at the library -- they were otherwise destined for the recycling plant so it's great to see them serving literature one last time.

Key West Literary Seminar: Session 2 download

Key West Literary Seminar: Session 1 download