Bread Loaf

La première fois que j'ai entendu parlé de Bread Loaf, c'est en tombant par hasard sur le site web de l'alma mater de mon pote JS, Middleburry College. Vraiment par hasard, car je me suis retrouvé là en faisant une recherche sur Boulgakov. Bref, ce matin MoorishGirl nous apprend qu'elle se dirige vers les vertes montagnes du Vermont. J'ai hâte de lire ses billets. Surtout après avoir lu l'article de Rebecca Mead. Je suis très curieux de voir une partie de footbal poètes-versus-écrivains-de-fiction. Et avouez que ces passages ne peuvent que titiller notre soif de savoir:

[...]The kind of things Bread Loafers do give thought to are: How can I find an agent? Where can I find a drink? My wife doesn't need to know, does she?

The triple compulsions of Bread Loaf have, traditionally, been getting published, getting drunk, and getting laid; and, though each is honored more in the breach than in the observance, the reputation lingers. The conference is informally known as Bed Loaf--it comes as something of a disappointment to discover that, in coining a nickname, the finest literary talents of the twentieth century couldn't come up with anything better than a low pun--and for many years it was as notorious for its debauchery as for its higher-minded pursuits.
[...]
Gardner, in particular, set the Bread Loaf tone by drinking heavily, holding forth brilliantly for hours to a circle of admirers at Treman, and bedding the odd enthusiast. Gardner's first wife once hired a plane to drop leaflets over the campus declaring that the author of "On Moral Fiction" was a neglectful father who was late with alimony payments, the kind of large gesture absent from today's conference.
[...]
Today's Bread Loafers seem less concerned with celebrating the debauches of the past than with transforming their own histories, debauched or otherwise, into literature. Among the members of one nonfiction workshop was a woman who was writing a memoir of her alcoholism and a man who was writing about his addiction to pornography. (The class also included a devout young woman whose memoir recounted her experience of almost becoming a nun. The alcohol memoirist and the porno memoirist agreed that it was beautifully written but needed more sex.)