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September 05, 2008

The Telegraph has an excerpt about his school days from Roald Dahl's memoir, More About Boy.

The other thing that happened when Mr Pople's bell rang out on Saturday mornings was that the rest of the boys, all those of 10 and over (about 100 all told) would go immediately to the main Assembly Hall and sit down. A junior master called SK Jopp would then poke his head around the door and shout at us with such ferocity that specks of spit would fly from his mouth like bullets and splash against the window panes across the room.

"All right!" he shouted. "No talking! No moving! Eyes front and hands on desks!" Then out he would pop again.

We sat still and waited. We were waiting for the lovely time we knew would be coming soon. Outside in the driveway we heard the motor-cars being started up. All were ancient. All had to be cranked by hand. (The year, don't forget, was around 1927/28.) This was a Saturday morning ritual. There were five cars in all, and into them would pile the entire staff of 14 masters, including not only the Headmaster himself but also the purple-faced Mr Pople. Then off they would roar in a cloud of blue smoke and come to rest outside a pub called, if I remember rightly, The Bewhiskered Earl.

"How, how did you do this? Are you a magician?"
"I'm a bookseller, sir."

Thanks to Wes for the link.

Read this: Paula Fox's "The Tender Night," a story about a friendship.

As the historian Geoffrey Hughes has noted, "The days when the dandelion could be called the pissabed, a heron could be called a shitecrow and the windhover could be called the windfucker have passed away with the exuberant phallic advertisement of the codpiece."

September 04, 2008

Putin has been good for Russian literature, so says writers.

September 04, 2008

Books Un-Covered

There are too many books with dramatic clouds on the covers -- The Gathering, So Brave, Young, and Handsome, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, The Lace Reader...

They all have small silhouette people standing on a cliff or near water or in a sparse field, letters stamped across the sky, and decent sales. I suppose clouds lend an automatic poignancy to a cover, calling up the heavens and whatnot, but I wish they’d do something to distinguish one from the other.

Here’s a cloud depiction that’s a bit less drab, but, framed by the same border I used to have on my kindergarten talent show participation certificates, and with that unnecessary pale flesh-colored rectangle at the bottom. Drama-wise, it’s not dissimilar from the A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius cover, but that, at least, was enjoyably tongue-in-cheek.

I just realized the On Chesil Beach cover is exactly the same, except calmer, blue, and flipped. Falling Man is a relieving exception, featuring the same clouds but from a new angle.

And then there’s The Bible, and that McCain campaign poster.

Aboriginal leaders in Australia have called for a book teaching girls how to play the didgeridoo to be scrapped.

The Australian version of the Daring Book for Girls is due to be published next month.

Sherman Alexie showed up at Savage Love to help Dan answer a question about Native American porn.

"If the letter writer is an attractive blond female," says Alexie, "she can head to the next powwow in the region where she lives, pick out a handsome fancy-dancer, and hit on him. She'll either get laid in the back of a casino-money-financed SUV, or she'll get assaulted by a roving band of Indian women looking to protect our most precious and dwindling resource: Native American men."

September 03, 2008

I was prepared to duck my head a little when writing about the 2008 Kansas Notable Books list. Usually when I come across a book about Kansas, it's about prairie grass or the Civil War or rural poverty. But not this year -- Albert Goldbarth, Sara Paretsky, and Sea Monsters. We're a little greedy when it comes to claiming Kansans, but if you lived here once, we'll take credit, thanks. (Link from Largehearted Boy.)

Chronicle of Higher Education profiles Bernard-Henri Lévy and his new book Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against The New Barbarism.

Thus he decided to speak in Left in Dark Times, with its many incisive observations on what it should mean to be "Left" in the 21st century. For Lévy "nothing good can come for the Left" without breaking with much of its history, especially softness on totalitarianism. He takes the widespread abandonment of revolutionary aspirations by most leftists — in the American context, he's talking about "liberals" or "progressives" — as one happy example of that. As he painstakingly explains, remaining on the Left involves a combination of impulses.

Top Shelf Comix is having a $3 sale on its graphic novels.

I find it a strange decision for an opening radio segment, an interview about an interview. Philip Gourevitch talks to the RN Book Show about an interview with Umberto Eco that appears in the new issue of the Paris Review. That said, having heard Umberto Eco speak before, I think he should have a weekly podcast where he can tell his odd stories, sing songs, etc. I would pay for it even.

But the reason I bring this up is because after the Gourevitch segment is an interview with Emily Perkins about her fantastic novel Novel About My Wife. It's really hard to describe this book, about a man retelling the events that led up to his wife's death, without it sounding all depressing and mysterious. It is that, but it's also very darkly funny.

Rolf Potts writes about Kansan Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, the "Henry Ford of Literature," over at the Believer.

It was an odd ending for a man who, in just over thirty years, had become one of the most prolific publishers in U.S. history, putting an estimated 300 million copies of inexpensive “Little Blue Books” into the hands of working-class and middle-class Americans. Selling for as little as five cents and small enough to fit in a trouser pocket, these books were meant to bring culture and self-education to working people, and covered topics ranging from classic literature to home-finance to sexually pleasuring one’s spouse. Distributed discreetly by mail order, Little Blue Books disseminated birth-control information not available in small-town libraries, advocated racial justice at a time when the Ku Klux Klan influenced politics, and introduced Euripides, Shakespeare, and Emerson to people without the means for higher education.

September 02, 2008

Just go ahead and put all of these on your wishlist: Philip Pullman's 40 Favorite Books.

This week's Guardian Digested Read: Silks by Dick & Felix Francis.

"Hello," said Eleanor the vet.

"You must be my future girlfriend."

"Yes. But let's take things slow for a few chapters. Why don't you keep your regulars happy by getting in some riding action first? You could be brought down by another horse when you were winning and be an injured hero. Then we could shag."

You can now download a free copy of an English translation of Max Blecher's Adventures in Immediate Unreality online.

Ruth Rendell tells the Telegraph how her latest was inspired by the phrase "adventure sex."

'No, I don't think there is anything that would shock me,' Rendell says when I mention this. 'Regarding sexuality, at least. As long as consenting adults are involved, I would never censure. Not on moral grounds. There was a case a few years ago involving men doing violent sado-masochism to each other, nailing their scrotums to planks, and so on. You can't understand it, but you don't have to understand it. All that matters is that they like it.'

Deep Glamour has a sneak peek of the book Forgotten Fashion: An Illustrated Faux History Of Outrageous Trends And Their Untimely Demise.

Please excuse my prolonged absence, readers. I've been wallowing in the laziness of August, choosing to bake myself on my Brooklyn rooftop sans reading material just because I can. It seems appropriate, then, that I would reacquaint myself with my writerly duties by reading the 10th issue of The Drawbridge, which is based around the theme of opulence. For me, the more academic, theory-based articles fell flat simply it's more difficult to hear the tune of luxury when the language is dryer and more official; perhaps if the theme were risk or failure (Issues 7 and 8, respectively) I would have more tolerance for the authoritative.

That aside, the pieces that handed me soft, luscious details on a silver platter were thoroughly enjoyable. I relished in DBC Pierre's Mexican breakfasts, John Berger's myth of almond creation, Tracy Quan's salacious description of mink (and pubic hair), and Louisa Young's wistful and forgiving tale of the lecherous old man. In this day of obsessive conservation, it's good to know that there are some kindred spirits out there who see the value in "footmen on the stairs with candelabra. Also, if anyone knows how to score an invite to the Millionaire Fair in Moscow, shoot me an email. I'll don my fox fur and emerald earrings.

September 01, 2008

The Guardian is all over its own First Book Award, with interviews, book excerpts, reviews, and an awesome picture of a chimp. If only a tiny bit of that enthusiasm (whether we're talking website layout or this smile) could be passed on to judge Claire Armistead. In the inevitable blog entry she displays this season's colour for book award jury members: tepid.

As Waterstone's reading groups across the country start out on the shortlisting process, perhaps the best assurance I can give them is that, whatever quarrels they have with individual titles, if these 10 were the only books they read all year, they would get a pretty good idea of the energy, intelligence and wit of the best new writing today.

Claire, love, I'm concerned. Have you had your iron levels checked recently?

August 29, 2008

From Journalista: an online archive of Diana Dillpickles comics. I will never get work done again.

An American book prize has blacklisted Random House following its "cowardly self-censorship" of Sherry Jones's novel The Jewel of Medina. The Langum Charitable Trust, which awards two yearly $1,000 (£550) prizes, has said that until the novel is published, it "will not consider submissions of any books, for any of our prizes, from Random House or any of its affiliates".

Michael Kimmel talks to Inside Higher Ed about his new book Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men.

I find the notion that we should do nothing because, as you put it “guys will be guys” to be a case of premature resignation. As if guys are biologically programmed to be rapacious predatory beasts. I think that’s “male bashing” – and sets the bar far too low.

Comments about this book, particularly by people who have not read it, are kind of hilarious to read.

A (crazy) woman would rather go to jail than return a book to the library that she feels is hurting the children. While the possibilities are endless, the book she has selected to martyr herself for is It's Perfectly Normal. Included in the list of things the book thinks is perfectly normal are boys liking boys, masturbation, and having a body. Her argument:
"Children are not meant to be sexually active." Nor know what's going on in their bodies, evidently.

August 28, 2008

This can't possibly be true, right? David Gest and Michael Jackson have allegedly collaborated on a recording that sets Robert Burns's poems as . . . show tunes: Robert Burns's poetry might have been dismissed as "sentimental doggerel" by Jeremy Paxman but that hasn't stopped diminutive I'm A Celebrity contestant David Gest and pop legend Michael Jackson from recording an album of the much-loved Scottish poet's work. Mercifully, There are no current plans to release the recording as an album.

I'm sure this adaptation of Ted Kooser's The Blizzard Voices is better.

Talk about writers and fishing usually leads to Hemingway, but Chris Justice finds in James A. Emanuel's poems a vital connection: The “half-catch sometimes” that he alludes to recalls the imperfections inherent in fishing. Like writing, fishing is a celebration of missed opportunities, uncertainty, and failure. Casting a fly to an exact location is an exercise in imperfection, just as trying to describe a mental image or emotion with words can be. Every word a writer chooses, just as every cast a fisherman boasts, is simultaneously a reaching for something perfect while tacitly acknowledging it cannot exactly hit its target.

Poetry collections inspired by Katrina.

The UNLV student paper profiles Donald Revell. (I reviewed Revell's A Thief of Strings last year.)

Listening to W. S. Merwin read: "Prose has a specific subject," Merwin said. "Poetry, on the other hand, is about what cannot be said.

It's fitting to go into Labor Day weekend with Caitlin Kimball's "ten poems to read when you get stuffed in your locker."

There are moments when the books I am reading seem to act themselves out in my life. So while I was reading books about marriage for the Smart Set column, friends were announcing engagements, sisters were getting pregnant, and people were discussing grooms' cakes at dinner. Now that the column is up, hopefully all of that will calm down. But still, I found Susan Squire's I Don't: A Contrarian History of Marriage sadly disappointing. I was expecting marriage to take a serious ass kicking, and instead, the book was sorta, "Wives used to be kind of like slaves! DID YOU KNOW THAT?!" Someone just got out of Women's Studies 101.

We are at a point in society where each couple must define for itself what marriage is, what monogamy is, what “’til death do us part” is. Just as we no longer look to the church to define what our wedding ceremony will be, we are in the process of rejecting religion’s definition of marriage. No wonder we work ourselves into lathers over our wedding ceremonies. Writing your own vows and deciding which table linen best represents your inner spirit is a lot easier than laying out what a “wife” is these days.

Next topic? Insomnia. Expect a lot of 3 a.m. posts in the next two weeks.

New York Magazine has a preview of Raymond Briggs's graphic novel Gentleman Jim.

Once upon a time there was a princess who was living quite happily and not pining away for her prince or trying to avoid being killed by her evil stepmother.

This is not going to go anywhere good, is it?

Princess Bubble is a college graduate, a homeowner and works as a flight attendant to satisfy her desire to travel and meet people. Johnston and Webb once worked together at Delta Airlines and have college degrees.

A flight attendant? Way to make feminism look super exciting and rewarding.

Kramer's Ergot 7 is going to be enormous -- 16" x 21". (And very pricey.) Sammy Harkham, after being newly labeled as a "genius," explains why at the Comics Reporter.

Books Un-Covered

I wouldn’t say I’m exactly afraid of Shakespeare, but if I were, the No Fear Shakespeare series from the Editors of Sparknotes would probably quell my anxieties. They’ve simplified Shakespeare’s plays, with the original text accompanied by the easy version. Examples:

Original:
But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

Translation:
But wait, what's that light in the window over there?

Original:
If music be the food of love, play on.
Give me excess of it that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall.

Translation:
If it's true that music makes people more in love, keep playing. Give me too much of it, so I'll get sick of it and stop loving. Play that part again! It sounded sad.

I already feel like I have better grasp, not just on Shakespeare, but on literature as a whole.

Continue reading >>

Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai (uh, no, not that one), is selling e-books of Your Name Here co-written with Ilya Gridneff. She talks to Joey Comeau about why she's shying away from publishing these days.

I'd certainly consider publishing with a smaller press; I got a very brilliant letter from one editor who I think would be wonderful to work with. The problem is, though, that seeing a book into print takes up a lot of time and energy that could be spent writing other books. Normally an advance gives one something to live on while one writes the next book; if one doesn't have that, one is using up one's own money, that could otherwise be used to buy time to finish a new book, to see one already written into print. (Needless to say, I feel horribly guilty leaving Brilliant Editor to wait for an answer while I try to sort out my finances.) I think publishing with a smaller house often has a certain glamour (though it does depend on the house); if it means very small print runs, though, sales of the book will necessarily be limited, and that might affect the chances of other books. I don't know if that's the case; people in the industry tell one all kinds of chilling things and then say: 'But I don't want to make you paranoid.'

August 27, 2008

I am on a strict diet of three bowls of oatmeal a day, with shots of olive oil between meals, trying to clean my blood after Bistros and Brasseries. (I shouldn't just blame this one cookbook. The foie gras bon bons -- and foie gras waffles -- I had about a month ago did my cholesterol levels no favors.) If you're feeling sturdy enough, I recommend the recipe for the stuffed onions that runs below my review. That is a quart of demi glace they're coated with. Consult your doctor first.

The Naturalist on the anniversary of Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America.

The New Yorker has the charmed story of Max Factor: The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World. It's worth it alone for the picture of the "beauty calibrator," Factor's device used to "detect subtle facial characteristics that needed to be disguised or enhanced." It looks like an Iron Maiden. The militant feminists who think "that we should neglect our looks entirely, just let ourselves go, and devote our energies to self-expression" are so not going to like this. (They also have a slide show of old Max Factor advertisements.)

Amazon is betting that you'll love the Kindle so much you'll be willing to meet with strangers from the Internet to show it off. (I just had a weird, parental-ish moment of "Oh my god, axe murderers will want to see your Kindle!")

August 26, 2008

Sticky Pages

Would someone please give Rachel Kramer Bussel her own imprint already? I was thinking it could be called “The Orgasm Factory” (if that’s not taken) or “Frost My” and there would be a small picture of a cupcake. Just give her an imprint and pay her a regular wage to publish erotica anthologies, please someone do this. (Random House, I’m looking at you.) I think I’ve reviewed eleven thousand of her books and all have been winners, whereas I’ve reviewed ten erotica anthologies by other editors and all have left me cold.

Bussel just put out a pair of oral sex anthologies, one for women (Tasting Her), one for men (Tasting Him -- yes, this will be next week’s Sticky Pages review) and so far, so delicious. 

I’m pretty sure Bussel read my mind as she was editing Tasting Her because as I was reading the story “The Goth Chick” by Lisette Ashton, I was thinking, why do all of these anthologies have one seriously hardcore SM story that never fails to make me uncomfortable? “The Goth Chick” is set at a swinger’s weekend and the eponymous chick has her vagina laced closed. As much as I wanted to enjoy the great oral scene between the chick and the female narrator, I just kept hearing a voice, which sounded an awful lot like my mother’s, saying, “that is very unhealthy and unsanitary.”

Continue reading >>

Anne Trubek on Catcher in the Rye:

Why is The Catcher in the Rye still a rite of high school English? Sure, J.D. Salinger’s novel was edgy and controversial when teachers first put it on their syllabi. But that was 50 years ago. Today, Salinger’s novel lacks the currency or shock value it once had, and has lost some of its critical cachet. But it is still ubiquitously taught even though many newer novels of adolescence are available.

If Mickey Mouse falls into public domain, we might finally see the end of the ridiculous extensions of copyright in the US.

Kathleen Parker has taken it upon herself to Save the Males.

In the process of fashioning a more female-friendly world, we have created a culture that is hostile towards males, contemptuous of masculinity and cynical about the delightful differences that make men irresistible, especially when something goes bump in the night.

She later compares her home life to Baghdad, so at least you know she understands proportion. Can I just repeat everything I said about The Broken American Male?

I'm wading through the fog (and dirty wine glasses) of last night's vegetarian dinner party, so here is where I'm at intellectually now: Monty Python's All-England Summarize Proust Competition. (Link from Artsjournal.)

August 25, 2008

Leona the Lizard Girl from Geek Love shows up in this gallery of comic book inspired tattoos.

A Grafton, Wis., woman said she never expected to be led away from her home in handcuffs simply for failing to return two overdue library books.

Heidi Dalibor admitted to ignoring four notices from the library in addition to two phone calls, two letters and a citation that included a court date, WISN-TV, Milwaukee, reported Friday.

"I said, what could they possibly do? They can't arrest me for this... I was wrong," Dalibor said.

The reason there are no more alcohol-fueled feuds in American letters anymore? No one can afford to drink anymore.

To all the writers out there who complain of being categorized incorrectly, or compared to Art Spiegelman if you're a comic book writer, at least you have not been labeled like Emily Perkins:

It wasn't long before Perkins was being hailed as one of the fresh young voices of her generation, which can be a mixed blessing when it comes with being labelled by one pundit as "the Natalie Imbruglia of Britlit."

"Oh my God," says Perkins, bursting into laughter, "what does that even mean? What could it possibly mean?"

I read her newest this weekend, Novel About My Wife, and was late with deadlines, with cake baking, reading papers for a meeting, and everything else because I refused to put it down.

The Washington Post should know better. The "I don't know anything about comics, but here are all of my opinions, and by the way, I have heard of that Maus one" thing was out of date five years ago.

August 22, 2008

What your country's bestseller lists says about you.

August 21, 2008

If Time is writing about Haiku Nation, it must be late August: Short is in. Online Americans, fed up with e-mail overload and blogorrhea, are retreating into micro-writing. Six-word memoirs. Four-word film reviews. Twelve-word novels. Mini-lit is thriving. Like traditional Japanese poetry, the new pop-culture haiku says a lot with few words.

Of all the tributes to Mahmoud Darwish, one of my favorite's is Fady Joudah's startlingly intimate one at the Kenyon Review Online: Do you remember when you asked me what I intended to name the translated collection? The Butterfly’s Burden, I said. And laughing you said: "The heaviness of lightness." You were so delighted that I did not choose a title about history and elegy, loss and myth. It was the butterfly you chased as a boy. When you couldn’t catch it and you’d give up on it, it would come back and alight on your shoulder, and you’d leave it there.

The Chicago Reader has a feature on Regina Coll's Bathroom Poetry Project (a site which alarmingly includes podcasts), focusing on Sid Yiddish (a stage name for Charles Bernstein, though not that Charles Bernstein): "Sid Yiddish got a surprise in the ladies’ room at Cafe Express last fall. Someone had taken a knife and slashed a big X through his poem "For the Love of Man (For Jobie Hughes)." Yiddish took it remarkably well. "It’s quite a compliment," he says. "If they steal it or make something on it, it inspired the person enough to do something."

Quincy Lehr doesn't include the bathroom in his rant about selling your poetry book, but he might have: And you might even get a review in a prestigious journal. The journal has a subscription base of 2,500 people, of whom 200 subscribed because they’d heard the thing was highbrow but give it a desultory look-over. Five subscribed online while high. Another 250 are shipped out to university libraries. Some 600 are subscriptions from former and would-be contributors largely looking to see what work of theirs might be appropriate to send in, given what’s been running lately. Thirty subscribers graduated from the same creative writing program as the editor, while another ten are undergraduate chums. Then there are the thirty or so contributors of poems, fiction, and critical articles. The reviewer of your book won’t buy a copy; she has the review copy. The editor might, except that the magazine reviews sixteen or so books of poetry a year, and he knows five of those under review, who take priority.

Aimee Mann on language: I’m not somebody who sits around and reads stuff like Anne Sexton. Obviously, I’ve read her poems because I remembered that, where she talks about how [the word] stars is rats backwards. Which actually at the time I was like, “I wouldn’t be so excited about that if I was you” (laughs). That’s not really much of a discovery. But there is a fascination with words and letters and almost a feeling that certain things are encoded in a way- just taking pleasure in words.

Krissy Dunn Johnson of the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum introduces and reads from a Civil War-era "Dear John" poem.

Hmmm: Short Order Verse offers custom-crafted poems for all occasions: A custom poem adds a unique dimension to any occasion or communication. . . . Short-Order Verse is also happy to provide poems for events beyond the Hallmark spectrum. Have a presidential inauguration on the horizon? Need to address menopause, weight loss or divorce? Just say the word and we've got you covered! For your customized-poetry needs, though, I strongly recommend NOÖ Journal's Bad Poetry, which at least goes to support the journal.

Gestalten has sample pages from their pretty, pretty book Fully Booked: Cover Art and Design for Books. (Speaking of pretty, pretty books, I'm sleeping with The House of Viktor & Rolf under my pillow these days. I'm hoping it'll start invading my dreams.)

Lucy Mangan celebrates Enid Blyton, even if she isn't the type of writer you can revisit as an adult.

Blyton wrote more than 800 books in her 50-year career - 37 of them in 1951 alone, during which productive peak she was estimated to be churning out about 10,000 words a day. This is not a work rate that lends itself to the refining of prosaic ore into literary gold. Blyton was a one-woman mass production line, turning out workman-like units to serve a particular need at a particular time in a child's life, not finely wrought pieces of art destined to have their secrets delicately unpicked over the years by a gradually maturing sensibility.

Thomas Beller writes about the deaths of Ted Solotaroff and Rust Hills, "two of the more prominent editors of fiction in the '60s and '70s."