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

Just the other day, I was complaining to a friend about how so many works of nonfiction are obese, topping the 500-page mark, when they would be so much more appealing at, say, 250 to 300 pages. Yet for the last couple weeks I have been happily ensconced in just such a work -- Robert K. Massie's new biography of Catherine the Great, which weighs in at 579 pages before the bibliography and end notes. I used to read these kinds of tomes all the time. This was a time when I lived in a city far from where I'd grown up where I had no friends outside of the workplace -- and I lived two blocks from an excellent independent bookstore and about five blocks from the library. I had a studio apartment that didn't require much upkeep. There was no Internet. So basically I'd do nothing all weekend but read. I'll even admit that this studio apartment and all this free time happened to be on South Beach circa 1989-1991 -- but hey, I'm a dork. I read lots and lots, current fiction and classics, and lots of giant biographical tomes like Carlos Baker on Hemingway and William Manchester on Churchill and whoever was writing about Virginia Woolf or Elizabeth I. I loved diving into a big nonfiction tome. This might be the fault of David Halberstam, whose doorstop about journalism dynasties, The Powers That Be, was one of my favorite books when I was a young and impressionable college journalist.

But in recent years, not so much. Over my journalism career, my nonfiction reading turned more toward works of current narrative nonfiction -- the New Yorker School, I guess you'd call it (Trillin, Frazier, Horwitz, Orlean). And in most recent years, I've been on a sustained run of fiction, mainly genre fiction -- historical for the most part, especially historical mysteries. I can only blame the Key West Literary Seminar's session on historical fiction for jumpstarting that.

But I was surprised and delighted when I saw that Massie, who is in his 80s, has produced another giant tome on a Russian monarch. A little guilty, too -- like almost everyone I know, I had a copy of his Peter the Great on my shelf for years; finally gave in and donated it to the library for the book sale. But I have read him and liked him a lot -- I first read his book The Romanovs: The Final Chapter, which used DNA findings and the post-Soviet Russian thaw to tell the story about what really happened to the royal family (hint: Anastasia did not make it out). From there, I read his Nicholas and Alexandra and found it to be well-written absorbing history, perfect for the lay reader who doesn't know much about the subjects, the place or the time. And the same, I'm happy to say, goes for Catherine. I've long had a thing for Elizabeth I and Catherine is a similar figure in being a woman ruling in her own right, despite all kinds of odds against her ever reaching, or keeping the throne.

The only problem with inhabiting these giant tomes is that post-book letdown is all the more severe for having lived with the characters for weeks. My mom, after finishing Bob Richardson's biography of William James, said she felt sad and that she'd miss James -- I knew just what she meant.

These are some titles of giant nonfiction tomes I highly recommend if you're looking to dive into the deep end:

Catherine The Great by Peter Massie -- For all the reasons described above. And no, there's nothing about horses at least not of an intimate nature. Turns out the Potemkin Village thing isn't true, either.

The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen -- You may think island biogeography would be a boring subject. In Quammen's hands, you would be very very wrong

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop -- Her letters, edited by her longtime publisher Robert Giroux. The closest thing we'll ever get to a memoir; they are heartbreaking in many ways but an amazing insight into the mind of a great poet

Up In the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell -- Early New Yorker writing at its finest. Yeah, I know, we can argue about the "nonfiction" qualifications of this one.

Annals of the Former World by John McPhee -- A compendium of the modern New Yorker master's books about geology. You know who was surprised to find herself reading 657 pages about geology ... and enjoying it? Me!

Titan by Ron Chernow -- Biography of John D. Rockefeller -- Great book on the influential mogul behind Standard Oil.

Other Powers by Barbara Goldsmith -- Biography of Victoria Woodhull, who was a medium, a suffragette, a financial adviser and all around force of nature -- fascinating look at the nation in the late 19th century, through the lens of a mostly forgotten figure

Key West Literary Seminar: Session 2 download

Falling in love again: the nonfiction tome