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February 16, 2012

Some books are tough sells. I was trying to get the people around me to read Little Boy Lost, because I think it's exquisite, but the conversation about it usually turned to the part where I had to reread the ending three times because I was crying so hard and the words were blurry and I missed a lot of it. (Sold!) No one wants to read that book now.

Same with Friedrich Christian Delius's Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, which turned me into a weepy mess. Then I found out the woman is based on Delius's actual mother and the crying started up again. It's the story of a woman, heavily pregnant, stranded in Italy where she has no language and no family, waiting to see if her husband comes back from the war. Without, somehow, being at all sentimental or mawkish. It is just lovely.

I talked with Delius for the Q&A series at Kirkus, about writing in James Joyce's shadow, using your own mother as a template for a character, and whether you can be considered brave if you're self-deluded.

February 15, 2012

“It is black-letter law in the United States that … publishers are protected from liability for non-defamatory false statements in books that they publish … by the First Amendment,” Penguin’s latest brief states. “A publisher owes no duty to verify the accuracy of non-defamatory statements in a nonfiction book it publishes.”

That is just one of many fun things in a massive Outside investigation into the Greg Mortenson Three Cups of Tea scandal. Because just when you thought you could read no more on the subject, Outside has the gall to write convincingly and interestingly on many thus far overlooked facets of the case. Including Penguin's denial that they should have to make sure their nonfiction is not fictional.

In case you needed to induce vomiting, there is this:

"Whitney Houston: 15 ebooks on singer published since her death"

For an antidote: Diamanda Galas's eulogy for Whitney Houston is smart and fierce. (via)

If parents stop reading fairy tales to their children because they are too violent or disturbing, or promote stealing (what the fuck), how are the kids supposed to know what to do when their parents turn on them? Isn't that the whole point of those stories? To let kids know their parents might one day try to kill them, or a step mother might try to set them on fire, or one day they might encounter a predator in the woods? I find this whole thing suspect.

Jacob Silverman has a smart piece on writers and money, focusing on Michael Chabon's decline on the literary side of things and increasing attention to the more lucrative HBO/children's books/Disney movie side of things.

And not at all predictable is Chabon's wife screeching on Twitter that she'd like to do harm to Silverman's penis. Really, who could have seen that coming?

February 15, 2012

It's kind of amazing, the number of people I talk to in the United States who have no idea that Hungary has gone wacko. Rewriting the constitution, the rise (again) of anti-Semitism, apparently there have been some book burning demonstrations, etc etc. And yet it is not quite considered news over here.

Well, you should put your Google Translate to work, because Imre Kertesz, Hungarian Nobel prize winning writer of Fatelessness and Fiasco, gives a moving interview to Le Monde. It's in French. He lives in Berlin, and explains the history and past of Hungary.

February 14, 2012

For those of you rolling out of bed, hoping you can get through today without throwing a bowling ball at a chocolate heart display, I have a small suggestion. Over at the Kind Reader, someone wrote in expressing dread for today's romantic hogwash, and I offer up the best antidote I know of: Mr. W. Somerset Maugham, the patron saint of relationship toxicity.

And if you need something to match how nasty you might be feeling, The Painted Veil, about a man who drags his cheating wife to the heart of a cholera epidemic in the hopes that one or both of them will die, is some strong medicine.

As always, if you have a question for the column, please send it to kindreaderbn@gmail.com.

February 13, 2012

And after much anticipation, we can finally say that The Chicagoan is here. J. C. Gabel, the man behind Stop Smiling magazine and a colleague from my Chicago days, is heading up a new, massive periodical that covers arts, culture, literature, long form journalism, opinion, personal essay...

I'm a bit of a latecomer, but I'll be editing and managing the literature supplement from issue two on. Mostly I'm just excited because it's the kind of publication I want to read.

Website and periodical will launch officially on February 20. You can also follow The Chicagoan on Twitter for more information.

Susan Matt, she of the pretty great Homesickness: An American History, recommends five books about nostalgia and homesickness for the Wall Street Journal.

Susie Linfield reviews Susan Hertog's biography of Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson , and finds one aspect particularly unconvincing.

Granting themselves a level of social and sexual freedom available to very few women of their time, Thompson and West led extremely tumultuous personal lives, which is the real focus of Dangerous Ambition. Yet I am not as convinced as Hertog that the two writers were necessarily less happy than women who adhered to more conventional domestic arrangements. (Lives of muffled desperation are not less painful than those that are full of sound and fury.)

(I wrote about Hertog's biography, and my own reaction to these biographical quirk, here.)

SB 1467, newly introduced in the Arizona State Senate, would force schools and universities to suspend, fine, and ultimately fire any teacher or professor who “engage[d] in speech or conduct that would violate the standards adopted by the federal communications commission concerning obscenity, indecency and profanity if that speech or conduct were broadcast on television or radio.”

My class would be so fucked.

Okay, so don't get too excited about the previously unpublished James Joyce children's story being released quite yet. We were all just waiting for the news that heir Stephen Joyce would block the publication somehow, and it turns out that material that was never published during the copyright might not fall into the public domain at the same time as previously published material.

(Am I the only one who saw the publication announcement as baiting? As the whole children's book was originally addressed to Stephen Joyce, the man who tightly controls the estate? Maybe we need a court case to settle who still has the rights to what once and for all, but it's going to be an unpleasant process.)

February 10, 2012

More goddamn proof that the major comic book companies are just kind of assholes.

Friedrich sued Marvel, Columbia Pictures, Hasbro and other companies in 2007, alleging the copyrights used in the first "Ghost Rider" movie and related products reverted to him in 2001 because, he alleged, the publisher failed to register the character's first appearance in 1972's "Marvel Spotlight" #5 with the U.S. Copyright Office. The case took a few turns, with Marvel countersuing in 2010, seeking damages for the writer's unauthorized sale of Ghost Rider posters, T-shirts and cards online and at comic conventions.

In brief, the agreement lay out that Marvel will drop its countersuit if Friedrich agrees to pay $17,000 in damages, and ceases not only selling Ghost Rider-related items of his own creation but also promoting himself as the creator of the character for financial gain. Marvel did note Friedrich's right to sell his autograph on Ghost Rider merchandise, but only that officially created or licensed by the company's subsidiaries.

Gary Friedrich is in need of financial assistance, to deal with the Marvel lawsuit. You can find out how to donate here.

He saw the terrible nature of his own predicament, and the work he had achieved rose up before him, not like a triumph of the will over circumstances, but as something which might fall and crush him. ‘Eight books to date, over 1,000 articles, ten hours’ work a day, every day for ten years, and today, losing my hair, my teeth, my potency, my most basic capacity for joy.’ Often rage overtakes him, almost certainly written in drunken abandon: Bernard von Brentano, a literary dilettante and descendant of the poet, is ‘one of those three or four people I would happily murder, with no more compunction than putting out a cigarette.’

Great article on Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters. (And, if after you read that you wonder what life might have been like with a man like him, you can read Irmgard Keun's Child of All Nations, which was based on being dragged from city to city from hotel to hotel from meager paycheck to meager paycheck with the man she loved.)

With all the various copyright and public domain laws around the world, James Firth looks at the problems with ebooks and online text when an author has hit the public domain in one country but not in another. (Probably in the US. We love copyright more than any other nation.)

If you're not following @wise_kaplan, then I kind of don't know what to do with you. The satirical/comedic/loving tribute to the eccentric former editor of the Observer Peter Kaplan is one of the better uses of the medium. (Yeah, yeah, taking down dictators is good, too.) The recent digression about Kaplan trying to be a bum on the contemporary Bowery, with nothing but a bottle of Wild Turkey and a $15 artisinal chocolate bar, was a particular gem. The authors were revealed and the Twitter account hailed in this profile at Slate, from a while back.

(Speaking of Berlin! A few months back I posted that my one bedroom in Prenzlauer Berg, all cozy and full of books and overlooking the loveliest green, magpie-filled courtyard, needed a subletter. There is one in there now, but the subletter for March had to cancel. If you are looking for a temporary place in the city, for March and maybe going into April, please get in touch.)

“My motherly heart yearns over homesick girls, waifs in a crowd of alien people, none of whom care for them.”

Over at the Smart Set, I have a column about Susan J. Matt's Homesickness: An American History. The above quote isn't from Matt herself, but a sentimental novelist she was quoting. There was a whole industry of newspaper columns and books and radio programs trying to convince young women not to stray too far from home: their homesickness might be fatal. And yes! Sometimes homesickness feels like it might be fatal. I've been battling homesickness for Berlin in a serious way.

So over in the column, I take a look at homesickness and nostalgia in an age of transitory workers and students and expats and migrants, an age where we are all just supposed to buck up and deal.

The coping mechanisms of the migratory only serve to prove there is something wrong with them, something sinister. They cluster together, sometimes creating their own little neighborhoods. They want to bring their own food. They are relieved to find others with whom they can converse in their native language. It is difficult to fit into another people’s structure. Every default decision you try to make is going to clash with the accepted standards of any given place. You will dress wrong, order the wrong food, say the wrong thing, greet a friend with a double-cheek kiss in a nation that only kisses once. In that moment, you are marked as improper. People see you stumble, and they recognize you for who you are: the outsider.

February 09, 2012

Two of my favorite music writers, Ann Powers and Daphne Carr (see Bookslut's interview with Carr), get together with Carl Wilson to discuss Simon Reynolds's Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past.

As it turns out, we have Shirley Temple to thank for the existence of one of Graham Greene's best works, The Power and the Glory.

Simon Schama talks to Cindy Sherman... it doesn't really matter what I say after this, does it? You've probably already left the site to go read it -- or, you did if you have any sense in that pretty little head of yours.

(For those of you still here, unsatisfied and cranky, you can always go watch the Dead Ringers spoof of Simon Schama and David Starkie, holding a battle of the battle re-enactments.)

A children's story by James Joyce has been published for the first time ever by a small press in Ireland.

Joyce's The Cats of Copenhagen is a "younger twin sister" to his published children's story The Cat and the Devil, which told of how the devil built a bridge over a French river in one night, said Ithys Press. Publisher Anastasia Herbert called it a "little gem" which she said "reflects Joyce's lighter side, his sense of humour – which can fairly be called odd or even somewhat absurdist".

Don't get too excited. The print run is 200, and the books cost up to €1,200.

February 08, 2012

The inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year prize for the best worst review has been presented to a master of the demolition job, Adam Mars-Jones. He won for this little number on Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall.

So it's not, but this video of Werner Herzog, discussing the stupidity of chickens, is better if you imagine it's in direct response to Alice Walker's book about her chickens, The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting with the Angels Who Have Returned with My Memories: Glorious, Rufus, Gertrude Stein, Splendor, Hortensia, Agnes of God, The Gladyses, & Babe: A Memoir.

Apex Magazine has Maureen McHugh's story "Useless Things" up on their website. It's one of my favorites from her new collection After the Apocalypse. It includes useful apocalypse-navigating tips, like, you could probably still make money by making dildos. End of the world or not, there will always be a demand for those.

February 07, 2012

As I'm trying to wade through all the Dickens material cluttering up the Internet today (including stories saying we are too stupid, or, our children are too stupid, to read Dickens anymore), this one seemed good enough to share: Simon Callow, in his lovely lovely voice, gives us a tour of Dickensian London.

Christopher Priest pays tribute to John Christopher, author of the YA SF series The Tripods, who recently died at the age of 89. (via)

Over at Kirkus, I talk to Norman Davies about his new book Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations.

Your book opens with something of a rallying cry, for historians to stop focusing only on the conquerors of the past. What are the consequences of a historical record that leaves so many peoples and events in the margins?

The effect is most damaging for the mentality of the conquerors themselves; it creates the illusion that they are invincible and eternal, even though as Vanished Kingdoms demonstrates, all political power rises and falls.

One has also to link the vanity of the powerful with their lack of empathy for less fortunate nations. Wisdom often lies in the minds of those who, despite their best efforts, have known defeat and failure. People who think of themselves only as winners are heading for disillusionment and a rude awakening. Pride precedes the fall.

The question I didn't ask: why does he keep writing such amazing books that I can't put down... despite the fact that they weigh about 6 pounds and make traveling with them so painful. I am pretty sure I can blame a specific crick in my neck to the two week period I was reading Europe: A History.

We are giving so much love to dead writer guys and gals in our new issue: Sinclair Lewis and Charles Dickens, Gertrude Stein ("American writers alive today are expected to work as if Gertrude Stein never existed. Gertrude Stein, in her time, had that same problem."), Stefan Zweig, William S. Burroughs, Robert Walser, Osa & Martin Johnson, Elaine de Kooning, Michel Houellebecq... Oh wait, they figured out he wasn't dead after all, right? One of those weird Twitter moments where everyone thinks Michel Houellebecq is dead and then it turns out he just decided to go to the beach instead of go to his scheduled book reading, right? So Houellebequian of him.

But there are also writers alive and lively that we show our affection for (or our displeasure, there is a little bit of that, too): Amelia Gray (there was a bit of a war to see who was going to get to review her book), William Gibson, John le Carré... but really, it's mostly the dead. You can make some connection between the dark of February to our morbid looks back, but that would probably be reading too much into it...

February 03, 2012

Commentary Magazine on why there was such an outpouring of grief and memorializing after Christopher Hitchens's death:

Mayer’s piece and the other tributes demonstrated that mawkish self-flattery is unavoidable among journalists when they compete to advertise their intimacy with the famous. I wish I kept a list of everyone who modestly admitted they “didn’t know Hitch well” but nonetheless recalled an encounter with him in which he recognized, with mystical discernment, their soul-deep connection. (“I had passed the only test that mattered to him,” wrote one editor…)

Yes: More opera writing like this, please. Sameer Rahim has started a column at the Telegraph called "The Opera Novice," following his learning process as he goes from having never seen an opera to becoming a little bit obsessed. (There is a disappointingly small amount of opera writing that isn't intimidating or too smartypants for its own good. It can be intimidating to someone who loves the music but doesn't know the language with which it's discussed.)

February 02, 2012

I don't know if you heard, but DC Comics decided to hire some people to write a Watchmen prequel. Without Alan Moore, of course. The only real question is, what is the worst way in which this is horrible? Is it the blatant money grab? The obvious fuck you to one of the most talented writers they have ever published? Is it the sign that they have simply given up all hope of ever re-establishing their credibility? What measure of scale does it take to figure something like that out?

Austin Grossman is at the Wall Street Journal blog, and he makes a stab at declaring the greatest of the many evils:

The truly frightening thing is that DC has lost faith that there are new stories to tell about superheroes. As Alan Moore put it, “I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago.” I find it hard to argue otherwise.

Catherine Flynn on the years in Paris wherein Walter Benjamin and James Joyce overlapped.

So for some goddamn reason we're totally doing an event tonight with Shalom Auslander and his book Hope: A Tragedy. It's in New York, at McNally Jackson. So, you know. Ready yourselves.

Polish poet and Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, whose beguilingly simple, playful poems spoke to the heart of everyday life, died yesterday aged 88.

Described by the Nobel committee as the "Mozart of poetry" but with "something of the fury of Beethoven" – and by an Italian newspaper as the "Greta Garbo of World Poetry" – Szymborska died in her sleep from lung cancer, said her personal secretary Michal Rusinek.

You can read her Nobel lecture here.

February 01, 2012

A new Kind Reader column is up, regarding those moments when your life changes and suddenly you don't recognize it anymore. (I was tempted to plagiarize the advice my mentor has snappishly given to me before: "It's like you're drowning yourself in a bird bath. Stand up, it's just a bird bath." But that is advice you can only really give to someone you love. Otherwise it sounds like you're not acknowledging their reality.)

At any rate, I prescribe Metropole, a novel of dislocation and spiritual crisis. (As we all remember, William James said that the "essence of the spiritual crisis is this: 'Help! Help!'" A scene that replays in my head frequently is the one where the protagonist, having been dumped in a city where he cannot speak the language, does not know anyone, is terrified all of the time, spots someone reading a newspaper printed in his own native language. It's in the subway station, and he calls out to the man. The man also must be stranded in this strange city, as he immediately calls back in joy and relief. But he's already on the escalator going up, as our protagonist is going down. The crush of the crowd prevents either one of them from turning around. By the time the protagonist gets to the bottom, is able to fight his way to the up escalator and get to the top, the other man has disappeared.

I am pretty sure I cried when I read that the first time.

But at least the book ends happy(ish). At least, with a dose of optimism. Otherwise I would not have survived reading that book the first time.

Oh, and, B&N has asked me to make the next column relationship-y, as it will be printed on Valentine's Day. So send all relationship-y questions to my Kind Reader email. I'll find you a book that's romantic without making you want to vomit.

January 31, 2012

The photography website Emphas.is is starting a new publishing venture, starting with Trading to Extinction, an investigation into the black market for endangered species. It's set up a bit like Kickstarter, which projects funded by special pre-sales -- a $100 donation gets you a copy of the book and an archival print. The New York Times blog Lens has a slideshow of images from Patrick Brown's book.

I don't know about you, but the London Review of Books Kindle subscription has changed my life (a tiny, tiny bit). After realizing that spending $75 on an international subscription to the magazine was a pretty foolish thing to be doing (especially since so much of their fiction coverage is abyssmal), I didn't renew my subscription after a year. But now! It's on my Kindle. For a reasonable price. It is good to have you back, even if I miss my ritual of reading London Review of Books on a Sunday morning, the paper issues spread out on my daybed, eating crackers and drinking tea. It's not the same, but who cares when it's $40 cheaper?

(I know this sounds like an advertisement. I was just happy.)

From the handbags at ten paces department: Andrew Miller's sixth novel, Pure, has won the Costa Book of the Year Award after 'bitter dissent' between the judges.

Over at Kirkus, I have a short review of The Green Sofa by Natascha Würzbach. (Another lady! I cannot be stopped!) It's her memoir about her childhood spent between World War I and World War II. Her mother was a modern dancer who entertained German troops on the front line, and her father was an intellectual dissident who was forbidden from working, and who was hiding his Jewish heritage. I know, it sounds grim, but the book is a charmer.

Craig Ferguson tours Shakespeare and Company in Paris.

January 30, 2012

As the conversation about male bias in book criticism continues, I noticed my own peculiar statistics. I've been interviewing writers once a week or so over at Kirkus, and of the last 18 Q&As or features, 17 were women. (I just turned in another piece today: woman author.) Here I am, singlehandedly trying to even out the statistics for Kirkus Reviews. It's not really a political act, just a product of my mostly female reading habits. (That sounds like I'm reading the back of tampon boxes, doesn't it?)

But it seems the bias at NPR is far, far worse, as the Boston Phoenix does a little adding up of their literary coverage.

Does any of this really matter? (As in, aren't there bigger problems in the world?) Part of it goes back to the VIDA statistics, as in, who is being paid to write cultural coverage for these publications? Mostly men. In her review of Henry Miller and the Making of “Tropic of Cancer”, Jeanette Winterson reminds us of the result of any kind of homogeneity of voices in cultural criticism, whether that be gender or class or race or city or anything else for that matter.

George Orwell, writing in 1940 about Henry Miller, has very different preoccupations from Kate Millet writing about Miller in 1970. Orwell doesn’t notice that Miller-women are semi­human sex objects. In fact, his long essay “Inside the Whale” barely mentions women at all. Millet does notice that half the world has been billeted to the whorehouse, and wonders what this tells us about both Henry Miller and the psyche and sexuality of the American male.

On this day in 1933 Ezra Pound met with Benito Mussolini.

Ezra Pound! We were just talking about that asshole. Of course, now in our course Bad People Who Wrote Great Books or whatever I called that damn thing we've moved on to Koestler, but everyone loves a good Ezra Pound anecdote.

Also, if you're totally fucking bored and want to feel bad about the 20th century, you can read all of Pound's pro-fascist, anti-Semitic rants that he broadcast over the radio. They are gloriously all online for free.

In just a few days, I'll be heading up to New York for an event with Shalom Auslander at McNally Jackson on February 2. I'll be interviewing him live on stage about his new novel Hope: A Tragedy, at 7pm. I'm not familiar with this Auslander fellow, but I hear he's up to great things. Will try to at least flip through Hope before Thursday night...

January 27, 2012

Over at the Smart Set, I write about Erin Siegal's Finding Fernanda, a tale of corruption in the international adoption industry, and the "new" revelations about the working conditions at the Chinese factories that build all of our electronics. (New as in, the reports have certainly been around for a while, but only now do people seem to suddenly care.)

It fascinated me that people were still dredging up the Salem girls from the past and diagnosing them. Amateur scholars, writers, producers, conspiracy theorists, descendents of Salem folk, and all the sophomore American History classes across America, including mine, once upon a time, have taken a crack at solving the riddle: What happened 320 years ago, and why?

Great piece about historians (amateur and those who write books) who believe they have solved great historical puzzles. Like why the Salem witch trials happened. Should be mandatory reading for everyone who has definitively diagnosed Mozart's cause of death, all 871 of you.

January 26, 2012

The National Book Critics Circle* Awards shortlists have been released, just a short time after the annoucement of the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year nominations for the most entertainingly vicious book review. Living legend Geoff Dyer shows up on both ballots. It's coincedences like that which serve to keep life worth living, isn't it?

*Specialist book blogger inside knowledge: It's just like the Magic Circle, only identical.

Sri Lankan writer/bass player Shehan Karunatilaka has won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature with his debut novel Chinaman (which I understand does cricket = Sri Lanka like The Art of Fielding does baseball = America).

Much of this week's class was about narcissism. I mean, we were talking about Ezra Pound. But if you are a dude who wants to distill thousands of years of philosophy, art, and poetry into a book called Guide to Kulchur, you kind of have to think of yourself as the most brilliant man alive. Simply in order to do the work. If Pound was thinking, I am just a small wee little mouse, lord knows he wouldn't have thought himself up to the task.

Not that defaults you into being a bad person. James Joyce also seems to have been a massive narcissist, at least where his work lives. And yet from most accounts he was not a dick. Pound: yes. Yes he was.

Alice Gregory writes about Raymond Roussel, a French poet who was also a massive narcissist, but he never became as important or as read as Pound or Joyce. He did believe, though, that he would “enjoy greater glory than Victor Hugo or Napoleon.” His narcissism tipped, though, a little into the crazy realm, as he believed his pen emanated a blinding white light as he was writing.

p.s. Ezra Pound was famously locked up for 12 years in an institution, and I found the following bit from Alec Marsh's short biography of Pound amusing:

The younger psychiatrists who had contact with Pound once he was hospitalized did not find him insane, which is not to say that they failed to notice his eccentricities, or to report on his strange swings of mood, which to Pound were terrifying and real: 'velocity after stupour tremendous,' Pound wrote to Cornell, and in the same letter: 'enormous work to be done and no driving force and everyone's inexactitude very fatiguing.' What does come across clearly in the transcript of the sanity hearing is that Pound was suffering from what we now call a 'personality disorder,' and not a full-blown mental illness. The doctors agreed that Pound was in a paranoid state, but was not a paranoid schizophrenic. He was 'schizoid' (a contested term that covers a wide spectrum of disorders), somewhat detached from himself and the 'real world.' He held certain 'fixed ideas' bordering on the delusional and a notable 'grandiosity' that goes along with that; his translation of Confucius holds the key to world peace, for example; or, that he 'has no peer in the intellectual field,' which is why he cannot make himself understood. 'He was grandiose and hard to talk to,' said one. All commented on his 'distractability' -- the way he jumped from topic to topic, leaving his interlocutors baffled, 'out on a limb.' The diagnosis was in effect a clinical judgment on who he was, not the discovery of an illness that like any other might pass away in time. Pound was being asked to recover from being himself.

Didn't the New York Times have a piece recently about a woman who was very happy living on her own until she fell and hurt herself and she realized this is how she is going to die unless she gets married really fast? I read it somewhere, but it was awful, so I'm not going to look for the link. Well, it turns out that living alone is pretty good for you. Eric Klinenberg, who also wrote that great book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, has published Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. He's interviewed at the Smithsonian.

We need to make a distinction between living alone and being alone, or being isolated, or feeling lonely. These are all different things. In fact, people who live alone tend to spend more time socializing with friends and neighbors than people who are married. So one thing I learned is that living alone is not an entirely solitary experience. It’s generally a quite social one.

In other words, if you live alone and fall, someone will probably notice you've gone missing. Eventually.