April 28, 2006
The employees at Powell's might be hot, but please don't have sex with them in the Pearl Room.
Karla Starr interviews the remarkable Terri Jentz, author of the new Strange Piece of Paradise, which chronicles her investigation of her own near murder by a vicious psychopath in 1977.
I think my tenaciousness surprised me—I stuck with this thing, all these years, to do it really thoroughly. It took me a long time to do that. I come from this culture where everyone desires instant results, instant fame, instant fortune—and I was one of those. The biggest thing in my past that I'm most proud of is having developed my empathy to a great degree, to the extent that I can go to that place and feel another's pain, woes, and I can put it in my writing.
AM Homes and Jonathan Safran Foer are interviewed at The Portland Mercury.
The Morning News presents the “Sloppy Seconds With Opal Mehta” Contest!
The winner of the TMN “Sloppy Seconds With Opal Mehta” Contest will have his or her story published on The Morning News, and will also receive a TMN T-shirt and mug to remind them of this, the moment ethics in writing died.
On your marks...get set...internalize!
AM Homes' This Book Will Save Your Life, which is great, is reviewed at The Seattle Times and the Willamette Week.
Kaavya Viswanathan blames her "photographic memory" for her plagiarism, but bad news from Slate — it doesn't exist.
If the winners write the history books, what do the losers write?
The Independent profiles David Mitchell (Black Swan Green).
"There's no point being a miserablist," Mitchell explains, with a rather sweet smile. "You won't live as long and you won't enjoy it as much. I don't want to read 300 pages about someone who has hated their life and dies miserably. Cool, postured misery is easy. I want to write books that I love writing and, God willing, that readers will love reading."
Four Boston homophobes are suing the city of Lexington after a public school teacher read the children's book King & King, about two princes who fall in love with each other, to a second-grade class. Hey, it takes a village to raise an intolerant little bigot, and Lexington isn't playing ball. That's bad news for the religious right, and good news for America.
Without any doubt, my two favorite graphic novels of the year have been Renee French's The Ticking and Julie Doucet's My Most Secret Desire (a reworking and update/reprint of a 1995 book). There hasn't been much press about Doucet's new book yet, but this older article from Village Voice is still a great introduction to Doucet's dark work.
Think of Doucet as a wide-eyed boho ingenue with rickety English, adrift in a dangerous world—Kathy Acker meets That Girl.
As for The Ticking, it's satisfying to see the book get a respectable amount of attention, at least within the comic book world. French is interviewed at Newsarama. She explains the initial inspiration for The Ticking.
So I was sitting in a dilapidated bathroom that was in the basement of some restaurant in a hotel, and there was wallpaper that was ripped a little bit. I always have had this fear of what’s underneath something else, and I like to scare myself, so I’ll do things like imagine what if I peeled back that wallpaper and there was, for example, skin underneath it on the wall. That led to me going back to the hotel room and making sketches of peeled back wallpaper with some sort of skin or some sort of things that would couldn’t identify underneath – maybe a fold in skin, and lots of little doors in the wall that you could open up and there would be something that would be both subtle and terrifying.
If you're going to argue that worthy women are being shut out of literary awards, can you come up with a better example than Zadie Smith? Because you're just killing your own credibility. (Smith more deserving of the Booker than Banville? You must be off your rocker.)
In a stunning about-face only predicted by everyone in the fucking world, the publishers of Kaatya Viswanathan's How Opal Mehta Blah Blah Blah have recalled all copies of the plagiarized book from bookstores. Viswanathan lifted several passages from two YA novels by Megan McCafferty, whose publishers issued this eye-rollingly exaggerated statement:
"We are pleased that this matter has been resolved in an appropriate and timely fashion," said Crown Publishers, which publishes Ms. McCafferty's books, in a statement. "We are extremely proud of our author, Megan McCafferty, and her grace under pressure throughout this ordeal."
Yes, she truly is a survivor. Makes the folks who lived through all those mine accidents look like a bunch of pussies.
Seriously: ordeal? Since when does getting plagiarized by a teenage kid consitute an ordeal? I didn't go all psycho when my car stereo got stolen. Where's my Medal of Valor? (In fairness, I later realized that my stereo hadn't been stolen, but unintentionally internalized. I felt better after that.)
It all comes back to Eat Pray Love. I was reading this interview with my friend (and Girly author) Elizabeth Merrick, chuckling to myself over the loopy way she talks and thinks (loopy as in circular, not crazy), and when she's asked which book of the last year has been the most important to her, Eat Pray Love is just the obvious answer.
I have witnessed firsthand the shocking reluctance of the literary establishment to let in the spiritual, the sensual, the sexual, and Elizabeth Gilbert is this genius at opening the door very politely and then writing the hell out of whatever she’s onto. I love her writing, the integrity and the humor to her. This book so intelligently, exquisitely brings this content of women’s lives into the realm of respectable adults, takes it out of the self help aisle.
Amen. I really need to get another copy so that I can force onto more people.
The Guardian podcast has Will Self reading his short story "The North London Book of the Dead."
April 27, 2006
Does blogging help you become a better writer? No.
Most blogging is sheer exhibitionism, either the self-absorbed ramblings of an individual blogger or the corporate site that exists for the sole purpose of making money. (If anyone sees a disturbing parallel between blogging and column writing, kindly keep it to yourself.)
This doesn't mean blogs have to be badly written. It just means that most are.
The judge who acquitted Dan Brown of plagiarism charges hid a secret code in his ruling.
The first clue that a puzzle exists lies in the typeface of the ruling. Most of the document is printed in regular roman letters, the way one would expect. But some letters in the first 13½ pages appear in boldface italics, jarringly, in the midst of all the normal words. Thus, in the first paragraph of the decision, which refers to Mr. Leigh and Mr. Baigent, the "s" in the word "claimants" is italicized and boldfaced.
If you pluck all the italicized letters out of the text, you find that the first 10 spell "Smithy Code," an apparent play on "Da Vinci Code." But the next series of letters, some 30 or so, are a jumble, and this is the mystery that needs to be solved to break the code.
This is how you start a positive review of Elliott Yamin?
Yo, baby, Elliott
So check it out, dawg
Elliott
So check it out, man
I hated
Check it out
Did not like the arrangement
120 Questions for George Saunders continues.
36. Quick: Favorite song of the nineties?
“Forsooth Though We Dally, World War I is Yet Twenty-Five Years In the Future.”
Did Kirkus anticipate the Kaatya Viswanathan story? Two months ago, they reviewed the young author's novel:
But the plot is far-fetched (Harvard is concerned about an applicant's love life?), predictable and often seems plucked from a teen movie.
Once Viswanathan, currently a Harvard sophomore, figures out how to integrate her lively voice into a more original story, she'll be on her way.
(Thanks to Colleen for the link.)
Christopher John Farley quit his job to finish the biography he was writing, Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley.
One of the toughest things about leaving a job and writing a book is that nobody quite takes the move seriously. . . .
People talk about doing such things when they’re kids. They boast that they will do them in college. But then everyone goes into pre-law or pre-med or pre-professional something. Nobody goes into pre-posterous. No one starts planning trips to Mars, housebreaking lions or casting hexes. And nobody writes books fulltime.
I’m not even certain guys like John Updike really write fulltime. I think if you followed him around one day, you’d find that, after hours, he’s secretly in some dive, earning meal money by dancing round a pole. I could be wrong, but that’s what I’m thinking.
Admit it. That image aroused you a little, didn't it?
Pro-gun economist John R. Lott Jr. is suing Steven D. Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics, for defamation. Lott accuses Levitt of "spread(ing) lies about the quality and integrity of his work." Also at The Chronicle of Higher Education: Jennifer Howard considers the resurgence of interest in Big Papa.
As a bit of shameless self-promotion, I thought I'd let you know I have an essay in this month's issue of Jane. (Liv Tyler on the cover.) I haven't seen it yet, but I've gotten e-mails about it, so I'm guessing some people have it now. I'll have to eventually get out of my pajamas today and track down a copy.
The CBC profiles David Mitchell:
Of his own favourites, Mitchell gives a nod to Pink Floyd (“Of course”) and Yes (“I’m afraid so”), but the band he gave his full adolescent allegiance to was Rush. “I only say this to you because you are Canadian, but the band was the first inkling I had that Canada might be a cool place. Rush spoke to bookish kids like myself. The music involved a whole lot of human organs — not just the testicles, but the mind, too. There were literary references to Kubla Khan and Cervantes. It was brilliant. I’m happy to cite Neil Peart as an early influence.”
(Via George Murray from Bookninja, who's a rebel and a runner, a signal turning green, a restless young romantic...)
Erica Jong, whose Seducing the Demon was harshly and hilariously panned by Ron Powers, discusses what writers can learn from bad reviews.
Nextbook has the latest installment of Shalom Auslander's First Person Ambivalent column.
God has 72 names, one of which is Shalom; in a crueler mood, they might have named me Rock Of Salvation Auslander, or He Who Was Is And Always Will Be Auslander. I have a difficult enough time at the DMV as it is: "No, not Sharon Alexander. Shalom Auslander." I had a difficult time in yeshiva as well. There it was the writing down of my regrettably sacred name, and not its pronunciation, that presented a problem. Studying and writing primarily in Hebrew and Yiddish as we did, everything I put my name on—quizzes, book reports, Highlights—became instantly holy. These once insignificant scraps of paper (and one time my brown paper lunch bag) could never again be mistreated, for now they contained upon them the very name of God Himself (and also, in the case of that brown paper lunch bag, a smiley face and a note from my mother reminding me to eat the fruit). It was forbidden to let them touch the floor, it was forbidden to throw them away, it was forbidden to place anything on top of them.
"Name of the Creator!" Rabbi Brier would shout in horror, pointing at the McGraw-Hill American History lying anti-Semitically on top of my Talmud test. "Name of the Creator!"
Philip Weiss makes a great point about the Kaavya Viswanathan story — the best and most thoughtful coverage of the scandal has come from The Harvard Crimson, the university's student newspaper. It's not a good sign for the mainstream non-student media that they're getting out-reported by David Zhou, the Crimson writer and Harvard student who broke the story, and continues to do the best job covering it. I'm shocked by how good the Crimson's coverage has been — I worked for my university newspaper, and the only stories we broke were on the order of "Local band releases album" and "Improv comedy group delights some, annoys most." I guess I thought all college papers were more about smoking pot in the darkroom than actual newsgathering and reportage. Apparently not.
Speaking of talented college kids: University of Wisconsin freshman Josh Cohen has some of the sharpest, most accurate commentary on the scandal so far:
The story line buries the questions. After Ms. Viswanathan appears on Oprah, will anyone be suspicious of that beaming smile newly gracing the pages of the New York Times? Do we really want “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life” to be our generation’s “The Sun Also Rises?”
Apparently, the author’s mother called her sudden literary star to ask whether she preferred white or pink rose petals at her book party. If Ms. Viswanathan is really a writer she will go into a Kafka-like reclusion and give this mother the Philip Roth treatment.
John Barlow explains the "book packager" aspect of the Kaavya Viswanathan fiasco.
Book packaging is not a new phenomenon. It involves getting a book concept together, thus saving the publisher the trouble of finding writers, illustrators, editors, etc. Then a finished concept is sold to a publisher as a fait accompli. 17th Street is currently the most successful packager in the world when it comes to teen literature and the targeting of "Generation Y."
Hey, if you've emailed me in the past week or so, I will respond soon! I promise. I apologize for the server crash, which I caused by signing Jessa up for the surprisingly active Tony Danza Superfans listserv. And then exacerbated by inadvertantly starting an Angels in the Outfield-related flame war. So welcome back, Jessa! And I'm sorry about the movie cameras in your apartment; I kind of promised Tony they could film She's Out of Control II there. I really owe you a solid.
Thanks very much to Jordan Davis for helping out the past week. I'd offer to buy him a drink the next time I'm in New York, but poets don't really drink, do they? Ha ha! I'm kidding. The whiskey and Dilaudin's on me next time, man. Thanks.
Claire Zulkey interviews Michelle Tea, author of Rent Girl and the new novel Rose of No Man's Land.
30 years ago I was 5 and didn't have much of a feminist consciousness. Or, rather, I had the same feminist consciousness: I liked to wear high heel shoes I couldn't walk in, with a face full of makeup I couldn't quite apply, making everyone in the neighborhood act out scenes from CHiPs with me and I always had to the be the kidnapped hitchhiker on rollerskates, and I got pissed if you took any of that away from me and I still do today.
Hello, hello, hello. I am, as predicted, back with a hangover and a sunburn, but with the added bonus of so many mosquito bites that I look like I have some sort of pox. And I am full of new information, like don't read Shirley Jackson on your vacation. She fucks with your world view. Also! If you take your books to a rainforest, they will probably need to be weighted down with bricks for a week after your return to save the covers. (Although my Graham Greene with the fancy French Flaps was fine. Oh, how I love a good French Flap.) Also! Tequila smoothies will reduce you to reading your friend's New York magazine, as you can't follow anything else. (We found a place on the beach that made "margaritas" with equal parts strawberry ooze mixed with ice and tequila. I had three.)
So a mighty thanks to Jordan for taking over while I was gone. And an apology to anyone who tried to get ahold of anyone at Bookslut over the past week, as the day I left town the e-mail system stopped working. God does not like it when I go on vacations, or at least my server doesn't. I'll try to remain focused on Literary News today and not retreat to my living room couch to read my Entertainment Weekly. We'll see how long I can resist.
April 26, 2006
It's been a great week -- thanks to Jessa and Michael for having me. National Poetry Month is basically over, thank God, and we poets can get back to squabbling amongst ourselves over contest deadlines and fees, which aging authority figures to emulate and which deceased luminaries to overvalue, blah blah blah.
If you need me, I'll be busy trying to keep this from turning into a fake Million Dollar Homepage, and getting ready for the Rae Armantrout episode of The Million Poems Show, May 10, 6 p.m., at the Bowery Poetry Club, NYC. Talk to you later.
The Book Standard talks to Meg Cabot, author of the Princess Diaries series of YA novels, about her new mission: "To put the blowjob back in literature." (Seriously.)
But for this particular story, I really feel like the blowjob just hasn't had enough coverage in literature. I was like, "Damn it, I'm going to put that in, because we girls need to talk about it. I did that on purpose because I do feel like there has been a lot of talk lately about adolescent girls doing the whole blowjob-at-parties thing, and I feel like they're not getting the point. You've got to get something back, because it's great if you're going to do that for him, but what's he going to do for you? So I feel like that is something that older women think about, that I don't know necessarily if girls are. That's my calling—to put the blowjob back in literature. It just hasn't had enough exposure.
You've got to love the headline, too: "Heads Up: 'Princess Diaries' Author Has a New Calling—Not Suitable For Children!" This is why I love The Book Standard.
The second issue of The Tiny... yes it's called The Tiny, what? I usually hate anything that even has a whiff of what could be called a knowing quality, except when said quality reminds me of The Larry Sanders Show, as it does in "On Location: South Beach" by Dan Hoy:
"And then so he said, 'If you can't distinguish
between a joke and a managerial command
make no mistake you will be fired.' And then
he said, 'I'm not joking.' Can you imagine?
My cousin's vaguely autistic. How's he
supposed to interpret the tone of that?"
Russell Baker considers Stephen Miller's Conversation: A History of a Declining Art in the NYRB:
The lifting of restraints on coarse speech, for example, is usually viewed as a gain for free expression, yet good as this may be for freedom, it may be crippling to expression. To illustrate, imagine that an eminent and powerful statesman—say Vice President Cheney —wishes to respond offensively when greeted by a senator who irritates him. Think of the glorious variety of cruelly stinging words the American language places at his disposal. Which shall he select? Poor Cheney, thrust suddenly into this very situation last year, experienced total language failure which left him powerless to say anything but "Go fuck yourself."
Not a point I ever expected to take from Russell Baker, but point taken.
The Entertainment Weekly review of Frank Portman's King Dork is now online.
It's easy to lampoon high school, but to set in motion an intricate and engrossing plot involving elaborate conspiracies, The Catcher in the Rye, "at least half a dozen mysteries, plus dead people, naked people, fake people, teen sex, weird sex, drugs, ESP, Satanism, books, blood, Bubblegum, guitars, monks, faith, love..." is a feat, and it's one Portman engineers with the gleeful flourish of a born storyteller.
Kirkus lists 35 fiction debuts (PDF) to watch for. I'm especially looking forward to Clifford Chase's Winkie, Scott Snyder's Voodoo Heart, Lisa Moore's Alligator and James Greer's Artificial Light.
Mary Ruefle's erased book A Little White Shadow gets a closer look from Vermont's Seven Days:
"The dead. / borrow so little from / the past," goes one of the book's more profound lines, "as if they were alive." A little later: "It / was my duty to keep / the . . . piano . . . filled with roses."
Who doesn't love a good modified book?
The Seattle Times looks at the changing face of high school reading lists. A new hero of mine is Tami Nesting, a former English teacher in Washington state:
In the past, advocates for teaching the great works of Western civilization insisted the classics were essential to develop citizens in a democracy. Nesting remembers hearing in college the argument that you must read "Hamlet" to be a completely realized person.
"You know, you don't," she said. "There's no one book you need to read to become a human being."
Allen Barra considers Edmund White. This is weird:
Straight novelists in America must, I'm convinced, secretly envy their gay counterparts. Gayness, in the hands of the right sensibility, provides a ready-made perspective from which to cast a wry eye at the world.
The Virginia Quarterly Review reprints an essay by the late Jane Jacobs.
The credential is not a passport to a job, as naive graduates sometimes suppose. It is more basic and necessary: a passport to consideration for a job. A degree can also be a passport out of an underclass, or a safety strap to prevent its holder from sinking into an underclass.
Tell it like it is.
Virginia Hamilton's YA mainstay The House of Dies Drear has survived an odd challenge in Virginia, where a parent "said the book lacked a moral foundation and endorsed lying, deceit, scaring other people and taking the law into one’s hands," reports the Daily News-Record. I can almost see parents getting upset about Gossipy Lipstick Blowjob Girls or whatever — almost — but The House of Dies Drear? Didn't we all read that in fifth grade and live to tell the tale? Or are there a bunch of Dies Drear vigilante gangs running around Virginia? I guess it's possible.
Scholars Discover 23 Blank Pages That May As Well Be Lost Samuel Beckett Play.
The New Yorker reprints a short 2004 piece about author Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities), who died yesterday at 89.
Two good reasons to at least check out the new New York Quarterly on the newsstand. One) a long, gorgeous, self-critical interview with Franz Wright, in which among other things he touches on his dust-up with William Logan:
You get these self-ordained parasites in every generation, and without fail they are crude and pedantic mediocrities. Lasting and reasable criticism is usually written in a spirit of reverence and love; and that does not mean blind to its subject's faults. The critics we go back to and read over time have usually been preoccupied with writing in an inviting and illuminating way about poetry they love. Anyway, it is difficult for me to imagine a sadder destiny than someone like Logan's. This is the only way he can get any notice in the literary world (whatever that is), and I recently contributed to that in a rather ridiculous way myself, and for that I am sorry. But I got a poem out of it. I'm calling it "Attack of the Blog People."
Wait, does William Logan have a blog? That would rule!
Two) a poem by Amber Tamblyn:
Not asking for eternity in the lunchboxes of future children but,
face me
when you're fucking me.
No more imagining.
I deserve to watch your lips stumble.
Well so much for that Netflix queue.
120 questions for George Saunders (Round 1).
8. What movie do you wish you could live in?
The film adaptation of "The Big Book of People Praising George, Seeing Only the Best In Him, and Overpaying Him, and Overpaying Him On Time For Once," the title of which Hollywood has changed to "Savage Desperate Lust Vendetta Handjob."
Remember to join the George Saunders Army! It's like the Salvation Army, only gays can join, and you won't have to harass people in front of Target with your annoying goddamn bell.
Also: I don't know how I missed this, but Saunders' website has an MP3 of Tony Danza — Tony fucking Danza — reading "The Barber's Unhappiness" live at The Mint in LA (go here and scroll to the bottom). I am obsessed with Tony Danza for reasons that I cannot quite explain, but for now, I'll just say this: The dude has a regular feature on his talk show called "Extravadanza" (formerly "Danza Prize Bonanza"). If that doesn't make you love him, I give up. I fucking give up.
(Thanks to The Morning News for the first link and That Girl Who Writes Stuff for the last one.)
Ali Smith, author of The Accidental and god among mortals, is the first author ever to be shortlisted for the UK's three most prestigious book awards — The Booker, The Whitbread and The Orange. The complete Orange shortlist:
-The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
-Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel
-On Beauty by Zadie Smith
-The Accidental by Ali Smith
-The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
-Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany
It's a strong, strong list, but only one of the finalists has won a (theoretical) rooster. I'm just saying. It's moments like this that make me proud to be Scottish. (And by "Scottish," I mean "German-Italian, but I own a Proclaimers CD.")
A Random House vice president rejected a sort-of-apology from How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life author Kaavya Viswanathan, who is accused of plagiarizing parts of her novel from two books by Megan McCafferty.
In her statement on Monday, Viswanathan said, “When I was in high school, I read and loved two wonderful novels by Megan McCafferty, ‘Sloppy Firsts’ and ‘Second Helpings,’ which spoke to me in a way few other books did.”
But when The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J. asked Viswanathan about the inspiration for her book last week—before the similar passages were reported—she responded, “Nothing I read gave me the inspiration.”
Lisa Daniels of the Today Show picks up the Kaavya Viswanathan story; Publishers Weekly's Charlotte Abbott gets the heel-grinding moment, says "It doesn't sound good to me."
So, what is this Drew Gardner poem "Chicks Dig War" of which I and many others have been speaking?
Women are excellent teachers
of the bitter lesson that being
anti-war does not get a man laid.
More video from the Flarf Festival coming throughout the day over at my blog. End of public service announcement.
Among rock musicians to publish poetry, David Berman enjoys more respect and (mainly) serious attention from poets than most. If that's something you can enjoy. (Sorry, Mr. Tweedy, Mr. Corgan. Dude's got an MFA.) Anyway, nice to see him up onstage and finishing his set.
Elsewhere in the Sun, Stuart Kelly's The Book of Lost Books (Maud Newton noticed the LA Times piece yesterday) is described as an account of "a bibliophile's worst nightmare." What'd Keats say? "Heard melodies are sweet, blah blah blah sweeter."
Eric Ormsby looks at the new Aliki Barnstone translation of The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy in The New York Sun. If you've read Coetzee, you know Cavafy -- his poem supplies the title Waiting for the Barbarians. For some reason Ormsby is more interested in the poems about the decay of nations than the sweet, self-punishing sensual ones; to each his own, I guess:
And the Alexandrians thronged to the celebration,
Enthusiastic and cheering
In Greek and Egyptian and some in Hebrew,
Charmed by the beautiful spectacle -
Though they knew, of course, what it all was worth,
What hollow words were these kingdoms.
Some new scraps of Sir John Betjeman's poetry have come to light, according to the Independent.
Sadly, they appear to be crotchets about felled elms. Nothing like his early masterpieces, such as "An Eighteenth-Century Calvinistic Hymn":
Thank God my Afflictions are such
That I cannot lie down on my Bed,
And if I but take to my Couch
I incessantly Vomit and Bleed.
I am not too sure of my Worth,
Indeed it is tall as a Palm;
But what Fruits can it ever bring forth
When Leprosy sits at the Helm?
Thought Torment's the Soul's Goal's Rewards
The contrary's Proof of my Guilt,
While Dancing, Backgammon and Cards,
Are among the worst Symptoms I've felt.
Oh! I bless the good Lord for my Boils
For my mental and bodily pains,
For without them my Faith all congeals
And I'm doomed to HELL'S NE'ER-ENDING FLAMES.
April 25, 2006
On April 15, Portland mayor Tom Potter committed a little concrete poetry, changing one letter in the city's name for the day.
Event organizer Dan Rapahel's Bop Grit Storm Cafe was one of my first bowls of word salad, lo I don't want to say how long ago. Some of it still sounds great -- "the meat of a car" -- "bedrooms too warm for breakfast / popping under the weight of parcel post." Some of it is still "peacock combat of genetic glossolalia / methedrine sign language" too. What can you do.
Could swear I pointed to Bat City Review, but it appears not: "Is that a muskrat or a wheelbarrow / pushing itself across Sixteenth?" asks Matthew Gavin Frank, and really that's the kind of question that a literary journal ought to pose.
Geraldine Brooks, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel March, is interviewed at PBS and Entertainment Weekly.
University of Texas professor David M. Oshinsky, who won the Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Polio: An American Story, is interviewed at PBS.
Frank Portman's great, great King Dork is reviewed at Aversion and at Entertainment Weekly (not online yet). Don't forget to check out the video trailer.
Scientific American reviews Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe.
Perhaps Field Notes can't make a movement where there's little concentrated activist juice. But something about this book feels as though it might. For a friend of mine, Kolbert's New Yorker series was an awakening--the first time, she said, she really understood what was happening and why we must act. Let's hope this powerful, clear and important book is not just lightly compared to Silent Spring. Let's hope it is this era's galvanizing text.
"A cartoon depicting a person engaged in a sex act with a giant hamster doesn't belong in a San Bernardino County library. And our tax dollars shouldn't be used to pay for it either, " he said.
Soft Skull, one of the country's great indie presses, is offering a 2006 fiction subscription — a hundred dollars gets you 12 books, including Nick Mamatas' Under My Roof, Delia Falconer's The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers and Lydia Millet's Oh Pure and Radiant Heart. They're also offering a similar poetry subscription program, featuring, among others, Bookslut contributor Daniel Nester's God Save My Queen.
After ten years, a book club in Boston is 251 pages through Finnegans Wake's 628:
Because of its density, Joyceans recommend reading it aloud and in a group with diverse backgrounds and knowledge, in order to get the most out of it. The sentence rhythms sometimes mimic songs, for one thing, and while a scholar might identify a Sanskrit word an avid fisherman would be the one to recognize the name of an obscure trout fly, an enthusiastic gardener an exotic plant.
Ah. So how diverse is the group?
There are usually four or five people at a meeting, says Jespersen, ''but we've had as many as 10." The group is currently all male, mostly in their 40s, but has included a few women.
Ah.
Poets & Writers has a rundown of literary magazines that are worth your attention, including two of my personal favorites, Backwards City Review and Bat City Review.
Elf Power singer Andrew Rieger submits a "Note Books" essay at Largehearted Boy, recommending both The Road to Los Angeles by John Fante and Crazy from the Heat by David Lee Roth.
The great AM Homes' This Book Will Save Your Life is reviewed at the San Francisco Chronicle and Newsday.
Preorder the Cat and Girl book! Dorothy Gambrill is my hero. Here are some reasons why. (And while you're at it, you can pick up a "My Other Car Is a Pynchon Novel" bumper sticker.)
Truman Capote's ball: You are there!
Wait. That doesn't sound good.
The return of Poetry Northwest is hailed for all the right reasons in the Portland Tribune:
You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of literary magazines that include a bit of what the poets call “T&A.”
Let's see: Fence...
Charles McGrath profiles Philip Roth (Everyman).
Another character, having already lost her husband to brain cancer, commits suicide after her back pain becomes too much to bear. "Old age isn't a battle," the protagonist thinks to himself after calling a former colleague who is dying in a hospice. "Old age is a massacre."
"This book came out of what was all around me, which was something I never expected — that my friends would die," Mr. Roth said.
The internet is filthy with poem-a-day sites, but how many poet-a-week sites do you know? Yesterday through Friday, James Grinwis is the featured poet at No Tell Motel.
“You want to bet on that hand, you want to?”
One hand said.
Pressing the escape button, Maury
found himself ensconced in the belly of a submersible.
Those who want to destabilize the health care system and those
who seek to preserve it appeared on the monitor
with a handful of martinis.
Kaavya Viswanathan, the 19-year-old author of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, acknowledged "there are similarities" between passages in her novel and two novels by YA author Megan McCafferty, but says it was unintentional. The Harvard Crimson, which broke the story, prints the text of Viswanathan's apology, and reports that McCafferty's publisher, Random House, is "certain that some literal copying actually occurred."
A show of Patti Smith's art opens at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow.
Say what you like about its airy grandeur, CBGB it is not. But if Smith seems an unlikely headliner for Glasgow International, the city's second festival of contemporary art, you need to look beyond the music of her Horses album of 1975, to the cover photo by Robert Mapplethorpe. That's a better indication of Smith's grounding in the New York art scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Her music was an extension of her poetry, which was, in turn, an extension of her art.
If there was ever anyone who wanted to be famous more than Patti Smith did, hide me from that person. Oh wait, there were a few people. Ah well, everybody's forgotten about them all, right?
According to Business Week, "blooks are blooming."
To translate -- books based on blogs are gonna be huge. Because there are a lot of blogs. And everybody with a blog wants to write a book. So a company selling bloggers back their words with a perfect binding could do pretty well.
I'm going to get right on that as soon as I forget how colonialism works.
On second thought, why not bring the ratio of writers to readers up over one. I mean, besides for the trees' sake.
USA Today:
Raytheon CEO William Swanson said Monday that he is not guilty of plagiarism because he has never claimed to be the original author of the 33 rules in his popular booklet Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management.
Many of Swanson's "rules" appear to be lifted from WJ King's 1944 textbook, The Unwritten Laws of Engineering — including, amusingly, this:
King: "Be extremely careful of the accuracy of your statements."
Swanson: "Be extremely careful in the accuracy of your statements."
Matt Dillon talks to the San Francisco Chronicle about his forthcoming adaptation of Charles Bukowski's 1975 novel, Factotum:
In a scene that had even the festival's blase audience agog, the character realizes he's caught crabs from his lover (Lili Taylor) just as he's supposed to leave for work. Ever resourceful, she applies ointment to his private parts and then systematically bandages them up.
"When I read the scene in the script, I thought, 'Interesting -- how are we going to shoot this?' " Dillon recalled. "I was really lucky to have Lili because I had to have trust in the other actor that we could play with it." After her handiwork, "I looked like I was wearing a diaper for a sumo wrestler."
I hear some people like that. Bukowski, that is.
The National Book Critics Circle has a blog.
Michael Burkard recommends Arielle Greenberg, James Wagner, and Malena Morling (among others) in the Syracuse Post-Standard.
April 24, 2006
The Academy of Arts and Sciences (the one that publishes Daedalus) has announced its 226th class of Fellows, which includes the following authors:
Alda, Alan: Actor, Writer, Director, Beverly Hills, California
Bernstein, Charles: Donald T. Regan Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania
Clinton, William Jefferson: Former President of the United States; Founder, William J. Clinton Foundation, New York
Dove, Rita: Commonwealth Professor of English, University of Virginia
Gupta, Anil K.: Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh
Lessig, Lawrence: Professor of Law, Stanford University
Lopate, Phillip: John Crawford Adams Professor of English, Hofstra University
Moretti, Franco: The Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Director, Center for the Study of the Novel, Stanford University
Remnick, David: Editor, The New Yorker
Taruskin, Richard: Class of 1955 Professor of Music, University of California, Berkeley
Vogel, Paula: Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Creative Writing, Brown University
Voigt, Ellen Bryant: Poet, Marshfield, Vermont
Waldrop, Rosmarie: Poet, Novelist, Translator, Providence, Rhode Island
A side note: I am having trouble with both my phone and email, so if you've tried to contact me in the past few days, I probably haven't actually gotten your message. Hopefully, I will eventually figure out what I did wrong, but in the meantime, you might want to resend any emails that I haven't responded to. Very sorry about this.
Louisiana State University Press was caught with next-to-no inventory when Claudia Emerson's poetry collection Late Wife won the Pulitzer last week.
The Columbia Spectator interviews George Saunders (In Persuasion Nation), who, like the golden calf statue I have named Li'l Ba'alie, I worship.
Spectator: Do you believe, like Orwell, that the misuse of language is a larger societal problem, or are you less caustic?
GS: I believe that’s true and believe that’s really evident right now. You know, you listen to Cheney or Rumsfeld talk, you can see that there’s something funny going on there. Or, for that matter, Michael Moore. I think that propaganda, even inadvertent propaganda, reveals itself in syntax instantly. I was traveling around and I hadn’t watched TV in four or five days and I turned it on and it was kind of unbelievable how fulla shit it was. Even if the grammar isn’t bad, the tone is just... “George Clooney coming undone!” Who the hell is saying that? What does that mean, you know? Language is the canary in the coal mine, it tells us a lot of subtext.
You can sign up for the George Saunders Army, which is kind of like the real Army except you actually get body armor and you don't have to take orders from Satan.
It seems like whole days have passed since I mentioned an impending poetry reading in New York City, so here goes:
Tonight 7:30 at Reading Between A&B (11th Street Bar), some guy named Sasha Frere-Jones reads with Max Winter and Amy Holman.
An old joke, repurposed:
What's the difference between Harold Bloom and God?
God doesn't think he's Harold Bloom.
The Guardian sighs, shakes its head sadly, and writes about "fratire."
In the book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, the author introduces himself bluntly. "My name is Tucker Max," he writes, "and I am an asshole. I get excessively drunk at inappropriate times, disregard social norms, indulge every whim, ignore the consequences of my actions, mock idiots and posers, sleep with more women than is safe or reasonable, and just generally act like a raging dickhead."
He includes a series of autobiographical tales to illustrate these character traits. One story, The Pee Blame, has him wetting the bed and blaming it on his drunken conquest. He suppresses his laughter as she loads the sheets into the washing machine and writes him out a cheque for a new mattress.
You've heard this before, but gangway -- here comes convergence:
For publishers confronting declining newspaper circulation in most parts of the world, the devices offer the tantalizing promise of reaching more readers while saving on printing and distribution costs. But after some highly publicized e-book machines failed to take off in the late 1990's, those long-held hopes have remained elusive.
The difference this time, developers and supporters say, is that the screens on the new hardware are made to reflect rather than transmit light, making them more like paper. The devices weigh about 13 ounces (light enough to be held in one hand while reading) and can be updated in Wi-Fi hot spots or through Internet connections (although they cannot be used to surf the Web yet). Their touch screens are also capable of doubling as notebooks to jot down information or to download books. Pages are turned with the touch of a button.
Book release parties "are decidedly not what they once were," and thank God.
"When you finish a book — not that I have a lot of experience finishing them — it's such a Herculean effort that you feel that you deserve everything," [author/socialite Fran] Lebowitz said. "It's like coal mining. The only people I feel sorrier for are coal miners. And they never have parties, they sometimes don't live through the day. But I'm sure if you ask them each day when they come out of the mine if they think they'd want people passing around canapés, they'd say yes."
And people say New Yorkers are out of touch. Imagine!
The great Lorrie Moore (Birds of America) on her William Shakespeare — "Washington, Dickens, Puccini and Tim Burton somehow merged into one."
Though many people have tried to insist that Shakespeare must have been a secret guild of theatricals, or the Earl of Oxford, or Sir Walter Raleigh, or some other person of education and rank ("How about the theory that Shakespeare is really Cliff Robertson?" joked a friend of mine), there is no doubt the man existed. Those who are still skeptical may be the same people who, generally pessimistic about human ability, insist that the pyramids were built by space aliens, or that Joyce Carol Oates is really a committee of middle-aged men. Or else they are the same elitists who think things like the roots of rock 'n' roll are actually white.
I believe that Joyce Carol Oates built the pyramids and invented rock 'n' roll, because she is an alien. You want proof? It's all on the backs of speed limit signs. Prove me wrong.
Philip Roth's Everyman is reviewed at The New Yorker, The Scotsman and The Sunday Times.
Black Swan Green: The digested read.
It's tough being 13 and having no real voice of my own. Sometimes I feel like I'm a 35-year-old man who's trying too hard to be knowing.
More me me me: A little squib of a thing I wrote about four lines of a Kenneth Koch poem was yesterday's news over at the Academy of American Poets' Life/Lines page for National Poetry Month.
A Writer's Life author Gay Talese is profiled at the Los Angeles Times.
"Did you know Lorena Bobbitt had an agent in Culver City?" he asked, with a look of wonder. "An agent! You cut off some guy's wangerino and then you go to Hollywood and think you have a motion picture deal. This is America at its most insane."
There are not a lot of writers who are cool enough to use the word "wangerino" and get away with it. Talese is one. I am not.
The Mel Gibson-produced documentary Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man is slated for theatrical release June 21, Pitchfork reports.
I'm Your Man was directed by Lian Lunson, whose previous claims to fame include a PBS documentary about Willie Nelson and work on the companion CD to The Passion of the Christ, Mel Gibson's other movie about a Jew with a fanatical cult following.
Sour grapes or real trouble at the Columbia School of the Arts?:
A short list of documentable facts—I’ll begin with the smaller issues and proceed to the larger ones—would include master’s theses that are routinely passed despite the fact that the level of writing exhibited in them is remedial at best and virtually illiterate at worst, tenure-track hires of close personal friends of the chair who have, quite literally, not a single publication credit to their names and who are hired over candidates with two and three books—resulting in a situation in which students often have more experience and more publications than their instructors, and an institutional culture in which those who have done nothing for 10 or 15 years hire others like themselves in order to make their own lack of accomplishment less visible and, for the same reason, discriminate against those who are active in their fields.
The author, U Chicago prof Mark Slouka (recently denied tenure at Columbia), mentions that the program has "let slip away the likes of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham and American Academy of Arts and Letters novelist Maureen Howard."
I hear Lenny Bruce not Bill Cosby while reading Bob Hershon's Calls from the Outside World:
We had dinner with them twice a week
for 23 years and now we've heard
(nobody called, we just heard) that she's living
with her aroma therapist and he has a thing for
teenage boys
Specifically, it's redheaded teenage
boys having sex with fox terriers in
restaurant basements while he, dressed in a sailor suit,
watches from a dark corner
This would make casual sex very hard to come by,
I would think, but maybe it's more of a scene
than I know
David Zhou of The Harvard Crimson reports that Kaavya Viswanathan's popular YA novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life "contains several passages that are strikingly similar" to the Megan McCafferty books Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. The suspect passages are detailed here.
When The Crimson reached Viswanathan on her cell phone Saturday night and informed her of the similarities between “Opal Mehta” and “Sloppy Firsts,” the sophomore said, “No comment. I have no idea what you are talking about.”
Check it, Camille Paglia is still flogging Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems. This time, she's charming her international anglophone audience:
There is one, perhaps surprising, Canadian selection. Not Leonard Cohen nor Irving Layton nor Al Purdy, but balladeer Joni Mitchell, for Woodstock, which most people regard as a song. Paglia says it's "an anthem for my conflicted generation . . . an important modern poem, possibly the most popular and influential poem composed in English since Sylvia Plath's Daddy."
There are no modern British poets included. "No one made the cut," she says. "The Brits were really offended."
Maybe you can help me. I'm trying to figure out what August Kleinzahler was thinking, opening his LRB review of Roy Fisher's new collection this way:
In a 1979 review of Roy Fisher’s collection of poems The Thing about Joe Sullivan, probably the most likeable collection by a not always likeable poet, John Ash wrote: ‘In a better world, he would be as widely known and highly praised as Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.’ This would be a very strange world, and not necessarily a better one. Fisher has never aspired to the sort of readership that Heaney and Hughes enjoy; it’s not clear he has aspired to much of a readership at all. Astringent in tone, the voice denuded of personality and with all the warmth of a lens, exploratory, restless, difficult: it is poetry almost entirely without charm. On first learning that his work was being read outside a small circle of poet friends, Fisher froze up for an extended period of time, as he would periodically throughout his writing life.
As I read this, I hear Bill Cosby saying, "Got to use the negative psychology on the kids."
April 21, 2006
So you may have noticed all the repeated words in the poems I've been quoting here. I'm not saying repetition is the only way to get poetry readers' attention, but maybe I am. It's probably all the flarfy Google-TM-sculpting... (100% increase in revenues? What the --)
Jeffrey McDaniel riffs on the word good in a poem in the new Spork:
The milk will be good until October 7th.
That guy nursing the hangover will be good starting tomorrow.
The little boy will be good from now until Christmas and then he will be bad again.
The little girl, lifting the dollhouse over her head and hurling it to the ground, will not be good no matter what.
Charlie says it's all good as he lights a joint the size of a telescope and charts his inner constellations.
UPDATE: The site's back: $12 for issue 4.3.
Bob Holman recalls his poetry Chicago:
Theory as to why Slam developed in Chicago: because bareknuckle Sandburgian poets refused to allow scene takeover by Performance Artists (yaccch! e’en the redundancy of those words makes me yaccch) as did NY/SF because: the poets were already doing it.
Literary history as she is spoke, f'reals.
Charles D'Ambrosio, whose The Dead Fish Museum is reviewed at The Seattle Times, learns to love his new pink house.
Next my wife told me that we had to find and buy a house within two months, because her brother would be moving in with us. She also informed me that the house had to have a good-size garage so that their band, Eux Autres, would have a practice space. Ever since high school I've wanted a girlfriend who sang, and my wife does, in fact, sing, but I guess I imagined that this girl would be a mellow and sensitive songstress like Emmylou Harris, strumming a guitar quietly. My wife plays the drums.
Why People Hate Self-Published Authors.
You remember Bobby? That weird kid in high school who went out of his way to wear plaid pants, day-glo sneakers, a green mohawk, maybe a little goth makeup, and sucked on a pacifier all day? Bobby spent more time planning his anti-conformity outfit (because, “you know, he just does his own thing, he’s such an individual“) every morning than Jenny the Cheerleader dedicated to her hair. But then he always bitched and moaned about how Pam the Prom Queen ignored him. Some self-published authors are the same way. They act like idiots and then wonder why they face such disdain.
Rake's Progress has a hilariously accurate list of stock characters from Annie Proulx's fiction. I can't decide which is my favorite: "Tall and plain housewife slowly dying of loneliness and Weltschmerz" or "He Who Alone Must Ride Fences, Endlessly, Silently."
Joshua Clover (reading Sunday 7:30 at the Spare Room in Portland OR) solves the blog war problem once and for all:
A: I won't play "Show your credentials." Here are my credentials!
B: Neither will I. Here are mine! Also, despite your credentials, you're an asshole!
A: That's ad hominem, you sellout bastard!
B: Everyone's a sellout in this world, so that's not worth mentioning. By the way, you're a sellout too! Radical chic! And you drink!
Lee Martin's novel The Bright Forever was a nominated finalist for the Pulitzer Prize this year — check out the Book Notes submission he did for Largehearted Boy last year, which includes songs from Lucinda Williams, Neko Case and the Drive By Truckers.
Protestors impede poetry reading:
"I've got poetry-reading tonight at Concordia University in Montreal," said Karen Mulhallen, a Ryerson University professor, fearing she wouldn't have time to prepare for the 7 p.m. reading.
"I've got poetry-reading." It's ok, it's curable.
Read an excerpt from Michael Gray's forthcoming The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia at the 33 1/3 blog. I feel like I have been subconsciously waiting for this book since I was 13 and heard John Wesley Harding for the first time. Rock.
Powell's interviews Joanna Yas, co-editor of Open City.
Q: What have been the biggest success stories from Open City, the magazine and the press?
A: For the books, a big one is David Berman, whose first book was also Open City's first book — Actual Air. It's sold somewhere around 15,000 copies, and we keep having to reprint. A lot of people identify us with that book — to the point that I've heard people call us "Open Air." And then there's Sam Lipstye, whose story collection Venus Drive has a similar kind of cultish fandom behind it. It also happens to be one of my favorite story collections of all time, which is a really nice thing to feel about a book I published.
The film adaptation of Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, maybe my favorite novel ever, might not be filmed in Pittsburgh.
As for the man who wrote "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh," he says good-naturedly, "Look, it's in the title, right? I really hope and pray and wish that it can be worked out."
Talking from his home in California yesterday, Mr. Chabon added, "Of course, I don't know anything about how these things are done and it's not my job to make those kinds of decisions, but I think it would be great for the movie and it would be great for the city, too," just as the film of "Wonder Boys" was.
(Via Largehearted Boy.)
In a story dated 4/20, The Book Standard reports that Snoop Dogg's debut novel will be published in October.
Double-threat Bob Hicok has worthy poems and a short story in the new Boulevard:
"God that's weird," Karen said.
"Excuse me?" replied the man two stools over, the only other person in the diner. He looked at the Leprechaun tattoo on the inside of her wrist.
She hadn't been talking to him but answered, "A fungus," and pointed at the paper. "In Oregon. They say it's eighteen hundred football fields big, whatever that means. That it's been growing since 6,000 B.C. and no one knew it." She swung around to face him, grinned and added, "That's like a horror movie, this thing getting bigger, spreading out, taking over. Wouldn't you like to touch it?"
It took her a second to realize why he turned away and made a cave of his body over his breakfast. Fuck, she thought, I did it again.
Salman Rushdie opposes a unilateral withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.
Lawrenceville, Georgia, residents debate whether Harry Potter should be banned from Gwinnett County public school libraries. Next on the agenda: Should the local radio station be allowed to play the Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together"?
At Thursday’s hearing, [Laura] Mallory spoke against the books along with four other parents and students. One of them was Stacy Thomas, a mother of five, who said reading the “Harry Potter” series made her daughter turn to witchcraft, ultimately causing their Christian family to lose friends, finances and their reputation.
Her daughter, Jordan Fusch, 15, testified that she began experimenting with tarot cards, curses and seances after reading the books.
“As a former witch, I can tell you that witchcraft is not fantasy. ... I felt I could not escape the clutches of witchcraft,” Fusch said. “It has taken several years of counseling to get to where I was before witchcraft and reading ‘Harry Potter’ books.”
Wow. That is...something. John Sugg, a Christian fan of the Harry Potter books, calls Laura Mallory, who initiated the challenge, "the fault line running through the spiritual foundation of America."
Replace Potter with “Christian” books, Mallory says. One suggestion is Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” series. . . .
I wouldn’t stop my children from reading LaHaye’s science fiction novels, although the violence in them borders on pornography. Definitely, put them on the school library shelves. But I’d show my children the passage in Matthew where Jesus warns that no man knows when he’ll return, and that includes LaHaye. I’d counsel that the Jesus I know would not, as LaHaye depicts, return to become the greatest and most sadistic mass murderer in the world’s history.
Let's see, what recent books have I forgotten to press into your hands?
Daisy Fried's? Tony Millionaire's -- mainly poo free! Joanna Fuhrman's...
Two grains of sand in my hand: not in some
woman's pale hand first; they are nothing like these words I use to
order coffee or to attempt to pray. They are these geese, dividing
the sky into a kind of non-abstract grid, or even like the blessed
wallpaper designer growing inappropriately blissed-out, giddy
from drawing over and over again so many of the same same bird.
The NYC book party for Joanna's publisher is 6 pm tonight at Teachers & Writers, 5 Union Square West. If you've never been to an event at T&W's Center for Imaginative Writing (my old workplace) this is your next to last chance -- they're moving up to the Penn Station neighborhood.
Aphorisms. What is it about aphorisms?
Everything gets clearer and clearer -- then you realize you don't have to understand.
Speaking of jumping up and down with excitement, there are four new works by Ange Mlinko in the new issue of Magazine Cypress:
Maine in 1845 did not have limes as a possibility.
But everything was green. The beam industry,
the pew industry, all these did well.
The NYC launch for the magazine is Sunday, 5:30 pm at the Bowery Poetry Club, $6 admission includes the zine. And maybe Drew Gardner will read his poem from the issue, "Chicks Dig War."
David Mitchell's Black Swan Green is reviewed at The Christian Science Monitor, Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
John Freeman interviews Don DeLillo.
Sina Queyras's new collection Lemon Hound... I want to say something about the Virginia Woolf/Gertrude Stein-obsession but every time I go back to the book to pull a quote I jump up and down with excitement. Not easy on the A train:
Yes in the pantry while the poker game peaked. Yes in stilettos. Yes in flats. Yes in pink plastic. Yes you do. Yes I will. Yes while there's still time. Yes while I can. Yes whenever possible. Yes I'll be a top. Yes I'll be your bottom. Yes I'll whomp your ass. Yes after shopping. Yes with chocolate. Yes now. Yes here. Yes even alone.
The Minnesota Daily talks to the authors of Sweet Jesus, I Hate Bill O'Reilly about anger, psychosis and why you shouldn't use Latin phrases during phone sex.
Q: What about this sex tape scandal that just blew over?
Amann: It’s not so much that he had phone sex with an underling, which is unfortunate. It’s that he had bad phone sex. When we looked at his actual technique, it was horrible. It shows how out of touch he is with reality, to think that using words like modus operandi is a good phone sex technique. So we dedicate an entire part of the book to giving him pointers.
Flarf flarf flarf flarf Flarf flarf, flarf flarf flarf flarf flarf flarf flarf flarf flarf.
April 20, 2006
Poet, lyricist, novelist, publisher, singer, and inventor of the torn-t-shirt, Richard Hell speaks to Minnesota Public Radio.
Here's a project for another time when I have time: Figure out why Poets & Writers magazine makes me nervous. I'm guessing it's the magazine-magazine teaser words: coveted, spark, industry. Or maybe it's the magazine-magazine constructions: "But more than the story of one man's life, this memoir is the story of a nation." Yikes. No, I've got it -- it's the subliminal encouragement to remain insecure in perpetuity: final, prizes, how to, deadlines, challenge, classic.
The anxiety comes straight through the screen, right? Ah, what's so stressful about a little hypercompetitiveness.
Musician and novelist Nick Cave, author of And the Ass Saw the Angel, is interviewed at SuicideGirls.
I think that once you've written a couple of film scripts you can never write a novel again. Also I just never had any desire to write another one. It's just not something that I've wanted to do. Writing one in the first place was just this perverse idea at the time. Someone said I should write a novel and I went, “Oh, okay.” It was that type of thing and I wrote one and I don't have any ambitions to be an author really. For me I just really want to be a songwriter. That's what I'm primarily interested in.
The conservative magazine National Review reprints Frank S. Meyer's 1958 review of Lolita.
Mr. Nabokov is not saying that what happens to Lolita is excusable because it is no worse than the general mores of our society. So insensitive a judgment would be impossible for a man who can write with his intense sensitivity. He is saying the opposite — and saying it clearly to all who have ears to hear. He is saying that Lolita's fate is indeed fearful and horrible; and that the world ravaged by relativism which he describes is just as horrible. He is not excusing outrage; he is painting a specific outrage as the symbol of an outrageous society.
A couple days late to remember the centennial of the San Francisco fire, but good to keep in mind always ne'ertheless:
What Rescuers Learned
- Right after an earthquake, nobody's in charge. You self-start, or nothing happens.
- Collect tools!
- If you can smell gas, turn it off.
- After an earthquake, further building collapse is not the main danger. Fire is.
- When you see a fire starting, do ANYTHING to stop it, right now.
They're not Catullus, never mind Aram Saroyan, but they're not bad either. (Via Boing Boing.)
At the New Statesman, AS Byatt reviews Philip Roth's forthcoming novel Everyman, which is released next month.
Roth's writing looks uncompromisingly straightforward but is subtle and clever. Consider the sentence describing Every-man's idea of the suicide of a member of his class, in unbearable arthritic pain. He imagines her swallowing the pills, "slowly swallowing them with her last glass of water, with the last glass of water ever". Her last glass, and then the last glass. The end of a person, the end of the world.
I am pretty desperate to read this book, to the point where I am considering sneaking into the Houghton Mifflin offices, dressed like a Fuller Brush man or something. But then they'll probably say "What? This is an office, not a house. And do they even have Fuller Brush men anymore, anyway?" And I'll have to throw down one of those ninja smoke bombs and disappear in the ensuing confusion.
Or I could just buy it. But two and a half weeks seems long to wait for this. Oh man, I love Philip Roth.
Elsewhere in The Economist (what, I only read it for the articles):
Not everything in the “blogosphere” is poetry, not every audio “podcast” is a symphony, not every video “vlog” would do well at Sundance, and not every entry on Wikipedia, the free and collaborative online encyclopedia, is 100% correct, concedes Mr Michalski. But exactly the same could be said about newspapers, radio, television and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
So there. Uh, where is there, exactly.
Of man's first disobedience (and spec screenplay)...: Paradise Lost is in development.
The Economist on Muriel Spark:
Fate had taken Ms Spark to Africa in 1937, to a miserable marriage from which she escaped six years later. But Africa also gave her the material for a short story, “The Seraph and the Zambesi”, with which she won the Observer's Christmas short story competition in 1951. After this, gradually, she became famous.
Ladies and gentlemen, The Economist, where even the obituaries will provoke snort-laughs.
Reacting to Geraldine Brooks' Pulitzer victory for her novel March, Australian reporter Russell Wenholz wonders: What's the big deal about the American Civil War?
I have never been able to see how a conflict - which in this case resulted in the eloquent northerners making the slave-owning southerners the most beautiful losers of all-time - can have forged a nation. So many books and movies have come out of America that seek to foist this opinion upon us. . . .
What is it about this war? The high number of deaths per soldier? The needless slaughter? Perhaps it was the "civil" bit. It was American against American. Perhaps that is what appeals to them. It was exclusively theirs. No one else was involved. Is this something to be proud of?
The Stranger says David Mitchell's Black Swan Green is "clearly his worst . . . his next book had better fucking well knock it out of the park."
If I hadn't already written about his other books and just about everybody in his family business of balancing elegy and comedy, I'd be pitching a review of Anselm Berrigan's Some Notes on My Programming.
Here's the thumbnail: He gets all the shitty crazy real vocabulary of unidealized life into one place, and then he tickles it.
contracts are meant to be signed then read wake up and check birdy's collarAlternate take: He's the fusion of New York School and Beat poetry William Logan warned you about.
has he chewed through it? opened up his back? give vet hundreds for anotherchew toy blood test rapid cycling on the window sill wracked by construction
but he still loves he doesn't know the syringe full of nasty-ass medsis for his calamity he just knows I'm gonna jam it into his beak
One more try: His accounts of what the heart does when someone dies will get to you, ready or not.Hop ride on back of 18-wheel Evergreen
giant truck heading west near Canal
hold on tight as you can
when it zooms through Holland Tunnel
Wear holy shit poker face
while staring at driver
of car behind you
Hope glasses don't fall off
I'd be walking down the street interviewing myself—questions felt, unspoken answers articulated with measure lifted from interviews I'd read—& I'd read the tonalities into my voices in my head. This was, and is, how I communicate with myself much of the time. Uninterrupted consciousness began at four, when I started reading. I was prepared for Ted's death, without a word to its possibility having ever been plainly spoken in my direction. I don't care to explain that, other than to say it wasn't special, and that I was probably so prepared because he himself was, and I received that through his general calm, being what I mainly felt in his presence other than the times he'd get mad if the fifth sandwich or the right kind of pastry wasn't coming. When Kate was killed I went blank for about a year-and-a-half, a state I couldn't recognize until three or four years after having moved out of it.
Plus, you can hold the cover over your face and use it as a Halloween mask. Highly recommended.
Boston's Weekly Dig talks to Jonathan Safran Foer.
My life has really changed in the last year or two. Once I got married, my creative output cut way back. And having a kid, it cut back even more. It’s very satisfying in so many ways. I have diarrhea under my fingernails. It’s all I do.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard wants the nation's schools to stop teaching postmodern approaches to literature.
Here we go again. A Lexington, Massachusetts, parent is upset that a second-grade teacher read the children's book King & King to her son's class. The book is about two princes who fall in love with each other. Also there's a kitty. Real hardcore, immoral, adults-only stuff.
LA Weekly profiles "Muslim hipster" Reza Aslan (No god but God).
Speaking of Failbetter (haven't read the new issue yet), that poem "The Blue Terrance" by Terrance Hayes on poets.org yesterday isn't the same poem as the one with the same name in last spring's Failbetter -- I like the Failbetter one better:
I believe all the stories
of who I was: a hardback book, a tent behind the house
of a grandmother who was not my grandmother, the smell of beer,
which is a smell like sweat. They say I climbed to the roof
with a box of light bulbs beneath my arm.
Poets. Always faking you out. The NYC book party for Terrance's new collection from Penguin is Saturday evening at 6 at the Bowery Poetry Club, 1st and Bowery.
Random House says they're confident that Thirteen Moons, Charles Frazier's follow-up to the insanely popular Cold Mountain, will be a success. Frazier's advance for the novel was over $8 million.
The publishing industry is likely to watch the progress of Mr. Frazier's new book closely because at the time he signed the deal four years ago, his advance was considered extraordinary for a literary writer who had only written one previous book, although it was a huge best seller. With just a one-page outline of the planned work, he sold the second novel in an auction, and in so doing left behind the editor, Elisabeth Schmitz of Grove/Atlantic, who had discovered and nurtured him to success.
Me me me, not really: Pleasantly befuddled notice of my old boss Kenneth Koch's collected fiction at New Pages:
However, it is necessarily true, that after even a limited experience with poetry, postcards, one begins to know in advance, at least with a part of one's consciousness, that the results will not be satisfying, even though many other benefits may indeed arrive ("accidental aspects")—positions, appointments, the love of beautiful women, all things falling off the shoulder like a shawl made of ice.
It's not just me and New Pages -- Jonathan Lethem said that "As a teenager and aspiring writer I always told myself I wanted to be to novel-writing what Kenneth Koch was to poetry," and the perpetually-in-our-prayers Village Voice named it one of the top 25 of 2005. Just sayin'.
Humorist Richard Grayson's new short story collection, And to Think That He Kissed Him on Lorimer Street, is reviewed by Kirkus.
Nick Antosca, author of the forthcoming novel Fires, has a new short story at Yankee Pot Roast.
The new issue of failbetter is online, and includes an interview with Anne Tyler, and — this is the exciting part — a short story/novel excerpt from Bookslut contributor and Chasing Ray founder Colleen Mondor.
Getting ready to host the opening event of the Flarf Festival 8 pm tonight at the Medicine Show Theater, 52nd between 10 & 11, NYC:
Burgeoning hostility between participants: check.
Near-universal denigration, vilification and misprision: check ("One anonymous reader ... suggested that I be thrown into a wire cage at Bagram.")
Huge zit on the left side of the emcee's nose: check.
Except when it's about the annual New Year's Day reading at the Poetry Project, I get tremors when the already intimidating words marathon and poetry reading appear next to each other: Six actors in Columbus, Ohio intend to read Shakespeare aloud for at least 100 hours to set a world record for the marathon poetry reading.
The winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize in history, David Oshinsky's Polio: An American Story, was the second straight history Pulitzer for Oxford University Press. (Last year's winner was David Hackett Fischer's Washington's Crossing.) The Houston Chronicle profiles Oshinksy, and the Austin American-Statesman reports that the University of Texas Tower was lit Monday night in honor of the professor's victory.
So the question on everyone's mind (and by "everyone's," I mean "my") is whether OUP can threepeat, and whether using the word "threepeat" immediately sacrifices any bit of literary credibility you might have left. (Yes and yes.) OUP just published Raymond Arsenault's Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, which has been getting incredible reviews. If Arsenault wins, expect his publishers to celebrate Oxford-style (a keg of Natty Light and a blunt the size of Eugen Sandow's forearm).
Chicago blogger Don Baiocchi examines response books — like Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat and Mediterranean Women Stay Slim, Too, both responses to the book French Women Don't Get Fat. Don comments:
The point of all these books is basically: American women, you're all fatties. Apparently, every non-American woman is holding the key to eating healthy in her size 2 jeans. The answer seems pretty obvious, ladies: move...to another section of the bookstore before you cry or hit someone.
Katherine Rushton interviews, sort of, actor and musician David Hasselhoff, whose autobiography is released in September.
There our "interview" is in fact a monologue, as Hasselhoff recounts at break-neck speed his experiences as Michael Knight's real life alter-ego. By his own admission he's "not that good at structure" ("I'm kinda ADD"), and so one heroic tale veers off into another, abruptly interspersed with shouted impersonations of the characters he meets.
I am guessing that the book kind of reads like The Year of Magical Thinking combined with a light beer commercial from the mid-'80s, but hey, anything's possible! Except for this book being good. (Thanks to Jon for the link.)
Awwww yeah, Bettie Page tie-ins! Scott McLemee talks to Maria Elena Buszek, author of Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture, in his column this week in Inside Higher Ed:
And, yes, in retrospect what seems crazy is how “threatening” these images were to the American government — which subpoenaed both the Klaws and Bettie in the federal 1955 hearings on juvenile delinquency, regardless of the fact that the FBI ruled their bondage images weren’t obscene by any legal definition. Largely because of how chaste the images truly are, but also because of how silly Page’s performances are. But part of why they are still so sexy — and perhaps what was so threatening — is how unfazed she is by the supposedly transgressive behavior in which she’s participating; she’s clearly enjoying herself, and not taking it too seriously.
Acton, Mass. remembers its favorite son, the late poet Robert Creeley, with an annual poetry award. This year's winner is Carolyn Forché.
April 19, 2006
Last year I decided to read the poems in every literary journal I could find.
What I found: It's exceptional for a journal to get one poem out of three across to any given reader.
I'm going to be rereading more than half the poems in the first number of Brigid Hughes' post-Paris venture, A Public Space. Helps that they got work from such pros as Michael Palmer, Matthea Harvey, and Peter Gizzi. The piece that I would put in an anthology if I did that kind of thing is Katia Kapovich's "Tutor," a prosey account of teaching English to a "Russian kid with the Down syndrome."
He had zero English, and his RussianThe pleasures here are partly in what Big Republican Internet Bookseller calls "statistically improbable phrases" -- slurping tea Russian style, voluptuous cooing, colorless eyes without eyelashes, perpetual chocolate -- and partly in the timing and timbre of the punchline:
was not without problems either. Never mind
syntax, spelling, and punctuation, he wrote
in a telegraphic style. Now he set about learning English:
The sky is blue. the grass is green. The paper is white.
I felt bad that our studies never advanced much beyond
those simplistic statements. Blessed, on the other hand,
with a perfect ear, he learned to pronounce them
without a trace of Russian accent, much better than I ever could.
The next thing I knew, he was dating an American girl.
"Anton, my goodness, how did that happen?"
He looked at me seriously. "I told her, 'Look! The sky is blue!
The grass is green! The paper is white! What is your name?'"
If there's a new clichéd form in recent American poetry, it's the skinny-poem-several-lines-in-a-row-beginning-with-not then-suddenly-the-poet-lets-us-know-kablow! this-is-what-I-wanted-to-tell-you-about poem. Trust me, if you're at a reading and you hear the word not at the beginning of a poem, it's perfectly fine to shout "Not!" à la Wayne's World, in fact, it's considered impolite not to do so.
Todd Colby has some fun with the form in the new issue of Coconut:
Not the barren eagle
nor the salt fish kitten,
not the gash or the limp,
not the golden cake on the rim
of a gale, not hopeless and feverish,
not the strip of blue salted bing cherry
under her tongue (where I kissed it)...
I've mentioned that I fucking love Walter Kirn before, right? No? I fucking love Walter Kirn.
If unborn children really had rights, the infant daughter of the actress Katie Holmes and the temporarily-humanoid immortal starseed that styles itself 'Tom Cruise' would have been delivered by a lawyer. Breaking the absolute silence of the delivery room, the lawyer, on the infant's behalf, would have sued for spiritual guardianship and demanded that all profits earned from sale of the child's story and image-- including 'virtual' profits in the form of publicity for its parents -- be deposited in a trust account to fund its lifelong psychotherapy needs. It would also be stipulated that such therapy could not be interfered with or curtailed by 'Cruise' or his religious representatives.
(Via The Beiderbecke Affair.)
If you're in New York and you're free Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights (COFF loser!) come say hello at the first Flarf Festival: Inappropriate Exploration in 21st Century Art, at the Medicine Show Theater, 52nd between 10 & 11. (I'm the emcee.)
What's flarf, you ask? There's a long answer and a short one: people fucking around at work, using Google to make totally awful poems that (sometimes) turn out to be pretty good, actually.
Three nights. Three. Whole. Nights. Oh, you'll be hearing about it again.
Stay Free! talks to Leslie Savan, author of Slam Dunks and No-Brainers: Language in Your Life, the Media, Business, Politics, and, Like, Whatever, which I need to go buy soon. It looks fascinating.
Stay Free!: You write that street talk once rarely made it into print. And that it's only been relatively recently that the gap between written and spoken language has narrowed. Obviously, electronic media and marketing are a large part of that, but why do you think marketers were reluctant to use street talk in, say, the 1930s?
Leslie Savan: Because it was associated with lower classes and advertisers wanted to reach higher classes. Of course, now advertising plays to "the street" because that's where it's at. This goes back to the idea of covert prestige. When corporations use black street language it comes from the same desire to be cool, masculine, and tough. This is deliberate. Companies pay big money to look like outsiders.
(Via Number One Hit Song.)
Kimberly Maul interviews Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep, The Man of My Dreams).
Author Malachy McCourt (A Monk Swimming), the brother of Teacher Man author Frank McCourt, is running for governor of New York as a Green Party candidate. (Here's his campaign website, such as it is.) He joins fellow author Sander Hicks, the founder of Soft Skull Press, who's running as a Green for US Senate from New York.
David Mitchell's Black Swan Green is reviewed at the New York Observer and Seattle Weekly.
Speaking of readings, some fairly reliable poets are reading in New York tonight:
- Sarah Manguso is part of a group event the Poetry Society is throwing at Baruch at 7:30; a few other people on that bill have done good work too, but Sarah's the only one Dave "I Hate Poetry" Eggers has blurbed.
- Joe Elliott -- no not the Def Leppard guy -- reads tonight at the Poetry Project 8 p.m. at St. Mark's Church, 10th & 2nd.
Speaking of Wilbur, here's his take on the ritual of the reading:
At poetry readings, you have to be willing to let a few things go by you, to be puzzled and frustrated from time to time, and to tolerate that as part of the poetry-reading experience.
That's sane. A hard sell, but sane. The part I don't get is the compulsion even some of the best poets have to announce that they'll "just read two more." No wonder everybody thinks readings go on too long. (I mean, they do, but...)
More on the Harry Potter challenge in Gwinnett County, Georgia:
The mother of four said she was opposed to the messages of the books, which describe a young wizard’s adventures in a school of magic. She said she had done much of her research online, reading a variety of Christian message boards and Harry Potter fan sites.
“Their thinking has changed. They’re designed to think that witches and witchcraft and wizards and all this is just normal. And that it’s OK. And that it’s even good. I strongly disagree with that. I don’t think it’s OK, and I don’t think it’s good at all,” [Laura] Mallory said.
Mallory suggested that the public school libraries replace the Harry Potter books with either The Chronicles of Narnia or the Left Behind: The Kids series, I guess because it's hard to find copies of The Malleus Maleficarum and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion with good library binding.
(On a related note, The Guardian lists the top 10 books on witch persecutions. I don't really understand what people have against witches. The ones I've met have all been sweet, gentle people who just want to celebrate the solstice and listen to their Dar Williams CDs in peace. I think they're less about riding broomsticks and turning people into newts and more about selling patchouli oil at their herb stores. What the hell's wrong with that?)
The Guardian presents the 50 best film adaptations of all time. There's no Mysterious Skin or Wonder Boys, but happily, props are given to Kes and Goodfellas (the only film adapted from a work of nonfiction to make the cut). And once again, I'm reminded that I'm one of like 17 people in the world who really hated the movie Fight Club. Is it just me? (It is. I know.)
Richard Wilbur has won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation.
Publisher Judith Regan is finally moving her business to LA.
"New York is like a bad relationship that you can't get out of, because you still think the sex is good," the head of ReganMedia said. "Well, I think the sex is pretty good in L.A. too!"
God, what did LA do to deserve this? Oh yeah. Crash. Well...good luck! And don't make her angry. You wouldn't like her when she's angry.
Writing about Jason Shinder's anthology of essays about Allen Ginsberg's Howl in Slate, Stephen Burt asks:
Is there a Howl for our own time, a cultural creation that explains, excites, antagonizes, and polarizes a wide swath of America?
At least one critic sees a poem with that potential:
In a poetry-sphere flooded with wishy-washy antiquated responses to the political moment, Gardner’s "Chicks Dig War" should be notorious.
That was fast -- found one. This is part of a poem by Julie Lechevsky from her new book-with-a-staple:
Sometimes you meet a love quackA little harsh, maybe, but I hear some people like that.
stuck deep in adolescence,
who wants from girls some version of their past,
a middle-inning set-up man
who wants to be the closer,
a "nice guy" who can't even finish last.I cannot keep a denim butt from hoping,
commitment is a medical term,
and yet I can't be friends with everyone.
For me,
I love you, the sound bite of a loser.
Thanks, Jessa. I'll try not to scratch the car.
So, yes, it is National Poetry Month, thanks for asking. Most poets are counting the days until they can go back to resenting the lack of attention (twelve -- twelve days). I myself don't see it, the lack. I think poetry's the dark horse of American letters.
For starters, most poems are short. You don't like the poem your favorite magazine or literary journal printed to break up space on the page? Fine, here's your 42 seconds back. Which brings me to my second point: Most poems don't do anything, but the ones that do -- bananas. If I find any like that this week, I'll let you know.
Besides, most short stories give me hives.
April 18, 2006
That's it for me for a week. I'm leaving for "vacation," which usually means doing the exact same amount of work, just in another state or country. Also, drunk. I'm heading to an island with our usual guest blogger Elizabeth Merrick, but never fear. I met Jordan Davis -- poet, critic, editor, blogger, talk show host -- while I was drunk on tequila and he was eating ribs (I think I ate some of his ribs... sorry about that). He's a Friend of Friends of Bookslut like feature writer Daniel Nester and former poetry columnist Dale Smith. I decided to ask him to guest blog even though he chickened out of attending a party next to a meth lab. (Meth mouth guy only bothered us once at that party, asking my friend for his lighter so that he could light his joint.) It is poetry month after all. (Isn't it? I have no fucking idea.)
I'll let Jordan tell you all sorts of intimate details of his life when he starts blogging tomorrow. But you're in good hands. I'll be back next Thursday, sunburned and hungover. (Your reading assignment for while I'm gone: Renee French's The Ticking. I'm smitten with this book.)
More on Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, from the Albany Times Union:
The story of how little has been done is well known, as the U.S. government under President Bush has fled all international efforts to reign in carbon dioxide emissions. "If you parse through it all," Kolbert said. "This is the administration's line, 'We'll just sit here and wait for something to happen.'
Kolbert also notes that relatively little was accomplished under the Clinton-Gore administration, despite some strong rhetoric.
I live in Austin. It was over 100 degrees yesterday and will be again today. The utilities have timed the rolling blackouts to ensure that no traffic light I encounter, at any time of the day, will actually be working. Basically, being outside here is like hugging a very fat man for a long time, and also the fat man is on fire. To paraphrase Hank Hill: This is Texas. It's 110 degrees in the shade, and if it gets one degree hotter, I'm going to kick Michael Crichton's ass.
McDonald's is responding to the upcoming movie adaptation of Fast Food Nation with a "full scale media campaign."
I kill all plants. Every plant I have ever had under my care met a horrible end. I'm beginning to think the jade plant I bought for my living room is plastic, as it has not yet curled up and died. But I love books about gardening and farming. (Can you imagine if I had a farm? I would somehow manage to create the devastation of an entire state's crops, just by walking on the land.) William Alexander, however, is a good gardener, if obsessive. He talks to the New York Times about his book The $64 Tomato and how he managed to spend over $16,000 creating a garden in his yard.
A self-help bookstore in Chicago (yes, unfortunately those things really do exist) is in danger of closing. Let the funny headlines begin.
Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change is interviewed at AlterNet.
People don't like to confront problems they don't have a clear answer to. And the answers here -- to the extent there are answers -- are very, very complicated. They're very hard. We know what causes people to be overweight, and we can't even stop that! And with global warming it's not as simple as "eat less, lose weight." It's "do a million things." As the mayor of Burlington, Vt., said to me, there's not one thing we have to do; there are hundreds and hundreds of things we have to do. And we have to do them on a global scale.
At the Village Voice, Ed Park offers thirteen ways to look at David Mitchell's Black Swan Green.
Oh The Glory Of It All author Sean Wilsey goes to Amsterdam on his book tour.
After the interview with Susan, I met Jay McInerney. The novelist was on his Dutch tour. I introduced myself.
"I'm Sean Wilsey. We've actually met before, at a dinner."
"Oh, yeah ..." he said, noncommittally.
I said yeah.
He turned away and looked out the window.
The Herald Sun reports on The 9/11 Report, a Graphic Adaptation. Hill & Wang, an imprint of FSG, is publishing Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon's comic book adaptation of the 9/11 Commission's report in the hopes of widening the audience for it. The book will be published in September. (Link from Comics Reporter.)
Charles Webb, who based the characters played by Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross on himself and his partner, has told the Times that the couple are "two months in arrears on our rent and defaulting on our bank loans".
The LA Times talks to Walter Kirn, who is awesome, about The Unbinding, his serialized novel at Slate.
When colleges pick books for the incoming freshman class to read, some students get In the Shadow of No Towers, some get Mountains Beyond Mountains. Even others get The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom by David Kupelian, a book about those damn evil gays. Inside Higher Education has the story of the controversy over Ohio State University's nomination process for the freshman common book.
Playwright Adam Rapp (Red Light Winter) is annoyed that the Pulitzer board chose not to give an award for drama this year, although it did name three finalists.
"Now I can only say that I lost because all three of us sucked," Rapp said sardonically in a phone interview yesterday from a New York restaurant. "There is so little support for American theater and the American playwright. It's a shame they couldn't give an award to one of us."
Ah, drama: The one form of writing less lucrative than poetry.
The FBI wants to go through the archive of late journalist Jack Anderson and "remove any item they deem confidential or top secret," reports The Chronicle of Higher Education.
April 17, 2006
The 2006 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced.
Fiction: March by Geraldine Brooks
General Nonfiction: Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Caroline Elkins
Biography: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
Poetry: Late Wife by Claudia Emerson
History: Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky
The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune and The (Gulfport, Miss.) Sun Herald won public service Pulitzer Prizes for their Katrina coverage.
Best wishes to everyone affected by the Iowa City tornados. Illiterati, EarthGoat and Circle Jerk at the Square Dance all have firsthand accounts, and Babies Are Fireproof has pictures of the devastation.
Jessa remembers Stanislaw Lem.
Carolyn Nizzi Warmbold read all 79 winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. (Number 80 will be announced today.)
At The Chronicle of Higher Education, Lawrence Douglas considers intentionalism, fiction writing, and learning to love — or at least tolerate — comparisons to Kingsley Amis.
The San Francisco Chronicle profiles Caitlin Flanagan.
She looks as if she couldn't bench-press 15 pounds, but there's a steely core in there. You can tell she's not budging on any of her stands, no matter how much they tick people off. As she puts it, "What interests me is that (my critics) seem really engaged about my articles. These people read them and react. In some respects this must be a good thing. I must have said it in a way that crystallizes their oppositional feelings."
Some of her detractors might be surprised to know that she's a died-in-the-wool Democrat, a pro-choice Catholic and a Berkeley baby who grew up on Bret Harte Road, ate ice cream at Edy's, hung out at Cragmont Park and attended Holy Names High School.
Flanagan's To Hell with All That is reviewed at The New York Times ("Flanagan writes with intelligence, wit and brio") and Newsday ("...her arguments twist into a Moebius strip of incoherence...").
A Gwinnett County, Georgia, parent wants to remove the Harry Potter books from the county's public school libraries. Why? I'm glad you asked:
On the forms, she wrote that she objected to the series’ “evil themes, witchcraft, demonic activity, murder, evil blood sacrifice, spells and teaching children all of this.”
She wrote she had not read the series because it is long, and she is a working mother of four.
I don't know which is my favorite part: the fact that she didn't read the series "because it is long," or the reference to "evil blood sacrifice." (Is there good blood sacrifice?) Atlanta Journal-Constitution readers react to the controversy, and thankfully bring some perspective to the issue:
"I am a Christian. I feel that Christian rights are being abolished in this country. Everyone talks about our views being pushed on them. But what about our beliefs? Don't we have any rights at all?"
— Posted by "red" on the message board
I have heard the Constitution has something to say about free expression and nonestablishment of religion, but I haven't read it, because it is long. (Thanks to Leila and Tim for the links.)
Muriel Spark is remembered at The Herald, The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Ali Smith is profiled at The Sunday Times and The Scotsman. Smith is apparently quite well known in the UK, which once again makes me feel bad about the books America chooses to send to the bestseller lists. The British are reading Ali Smith and we've got My Dying Professor Sure Taught Me a Great Deal and Although the Dog Did Not Behave, Still I Loved Him and thirty thousand books with "Templar" in the title.
On the other hand, Smith's The Accidental recently won The Morning News Tournament of Books, which is kind of like winning the Pulitzer, if the Pulitzer came with a rooster instead of a plaque and money. Which it should. Columbia University, are you listening? That's what the people want.
David Mitchell is interviewed at the Book Standard about Black Swan Green, a book I keep putting off reading. I'm about to go on vacation to Puerto Rico, and it doesn't seem like appropriate rum-drinking, beach-sitting, pigeon-pea-eating reading material. I'll probably just take a stack of Shirley Jackson paperbacks with me. But I did just finish number9dream this weekend. That's how far behind I am.
New York Magazine profiles one of my favorite authors, AM Homes. Her latest, This Book Will Save Your Life, comes out Thursday.
Critics may call her work fearless, but she doesn’t see herself that way at all. “The problem with having an active imagination is that you end up living in fear,” she says. “Basically, I’m terrified all the time. When I was a child, I thought when you were 9, you died. I’m very aware of the fragility of things now, as I watch my parents get older and I have this little girl who I just adore.”
Renee French is one of those comic book writers I would never recommend to anyone. It would be like asking my sister to sit down and watch Eraserhead. I love that movie, but I'm pretty sure she would puke. (Doesn't help that she recently had a baby.) Her books are... odd. But lovely. And then back to odd. The book that I don't feel weird about recommending, however, is her latest, The Ticking. It's beautiful and heartbreaking, and I think it's her best work. She is interviewed at the Comics Reporter about why she does her best thinking in the shower ("maybe it's the soap"), why she dislikes dialogue in comics, and how her mind is like astronomy.
If you're looking at some very faint object in the sky, in order to see it -- this is really corny -- in order to see it better it's best to look to the side. Right next to it. And then it comes in clear. It's something about the structure of the eye and how it works. It's really like that for me. I make notes in my notebook about, say, something that scares me. It will sit there a really long time, and then I'll have a dream or I'll be walking down the street and I'll see something that reminds me of it, and there will be a story that goes with it.
Charles D'Ambrosio's The Dead Fish Museum is reviewed at The San Francisco Chronicle and The Oregonian.
The Guardian has an excerpt from Haruki Murakami's short story "Hanalei Bay," which will appear in his new collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman in August.
This week's Guardian Digested Read: Alain de Botton's The Architecture of Happiness.
4. The Modernist tradition, inspired by Le Corbusier, flirted uneasily with science and functionalism. For instance, you might think that numbering my paragraphs was both scientific and functional: it isn't. It's just pretentious.
Author Peter Manseau (Killing the Buddha, Vows) comments on the new gospel of Judas on NPR. Christopher Hitchens does the same at Slate, but in a slightly more confrontational manner.
We're not likely to be getting rid of memoirs any time soon.
April 15, 2006
Author Muriel Spark has died at 88.
April 14, 2006
The Independent looks at Martin Amis' forthcoming book, House of Meetings.
Scarlett Thomas interviews Andrew Crumey, author of Mobius Dick and Mr. Mee, among others.
"To me, a novel is made up; it is a fiction. But it's the paradox of being unreal and real at the same time that interests me. F Scott Fitzgerald talked about the importance of being able to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time. It's a very child-like way to be as well. Even as grown-ups we go to a magic show and we can be impressed by the illusion and we don't want to know how the trick is done. That's what novels are like."
A federal judge smacked down a Reno high school for trying to prohibit one of its students from reading a "profane" poem at a statewide poetry recitation contest. The poem, WH Auden's "The More Loving One," contained the words — and listen, if you are sensitive about profanity, then stop reading right now — "hell" and "damn."
"Defendants (Coral Academy) apparently consider the poem inappropriate because it contains language that conflicts with the school's policies against students general use of profanity," [Judge Brian] Sandoval wrote. "However, when spoken in the context of a poem at a school-authorized, off-campus competition and written by a nationally recognized poet, the court finds that the language sought to be censured cannot even remotely cause a disruption of the educational mission."
To be fair, I can see where "hell" and "damn" would shock the people of Reno, Nevada. When you're driving down the street, minding your own business, looking out the window at a drunk businessman having oral sex with a transvestite heroin dealer, and Sophie B. Hawkins' "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover" comes on the radio, it's all you can do to not swerve off the road in abject shock.
Although swerving off the road when "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover" comes on the radio, which I guess is not too often anymore, is actually a totally appropriate reaction, now that I think about it, especially if it results in the radio breaking or your ears filling up with blood. Either way you win.
ANDY KAUFMAN MAY have been a wearer of masks - wrestler, busboy, comedian - but his essentially humanoid nature was never in doubt. This was not universally the case with Stanislaw Lem, the Polish writer who died on March 27 at age 84.
When in doubt, reporters, start with something that has no relevance to the article that follows whatsoever. Really, James Parker should get some sort of an award.
Alternet has an interview with Robert Atkins, one of the editors of Censoring Culture: Contemporary Threats to Free Expression.
I think the world, during the Gore-Bush election were so shocked to see that we really don't have this "one man, one vote" principle to which we pay lip service -- that someone could win and still receive a minority of the votes. This extends to so many areas of public life. We're trained on this idea that we have complete freedom of speech, freedom of press. Anyone who suggests that this isn't the case is looked upon traitorously. It's an ironic embodiment of the fact that we really haven't perfected those important goals.
Read an excerpt of the book here.
When 16-year-old Matt Jones checked out a book from the Victorville public library entitled, "Manga: Sixty years of Japanese comics," he got a real eyeful.
The book, which is shelved next to Charlie Brown and other comic books, contains some X-rated cartoons depicting graphic sexual acts, including sex with animals.
April 13, 2006
The latest entry in Largehearted Boy's great Book Notes series is Dan LeRoy, author of the 33 1/3 book The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique.
The King Dork blog tour stops at Brooklyn Vegan today, where author Frank Portman reports on trying to watch Rosemary's Baby while listening to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.
I'll say this: the laundry room scene is way more touching with "Fluff" playing over it. You'd almost think Rosemary and Terri Gionnoffrio are going to start to make out or something. They are looking at each other very tenderly. But no, now Rosemary is making out with Guy again.
Christ, how long is this song? OK, now it's over.
Minnesota Public Radio profiles author Julia Alvarez (How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Saving the World).
The Morning News Tournament of Books comes to a close, as the match between Home Land and The Accidental is decided. The winner, gracious in victory, offers to donate several flocks of chickens. Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner have commentary — not just about the books, but also about Kate & Allie and Luther Vandross' "One Shining Moment." You surely do not want to miss this.
The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and New York Press look at the new Samuel Beckett: Grove Centenary Edition, edited by Paul Auster. Beckett was born one hundred years ago today.
April 12, 2006
Frank Portman's King Dork is the best novel I've ever read about high school. (And it's not just about high school, of course, but that kind of thematic reductionism makes for a snappier open sentence, so.) Kurt Vonnegut said that "high school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of," which is true as far as it goes, but I prefer Portman's take, delivered at the beginning of his novel: "High school is the penalty for transgressions yet to be specified." Goddammit, you can say that again. The most shocking thing about King Dork is that it's Portman's debut novel; he writes with a natural grace and a charming, unique sense of humor that most authors never achieve, even after several books.
King Dork was officially released yesterday, and it's in the midst of a blog tour, organized by Andrew Krucoff. Portman and his novel have made stops at Gawker and Stereogum, and today he's at Largehearted Boy — later this week, he'll be at Brooklyn Vegan and the Jane Magazine Guest Blog. Also stay tuned for an interview with Portman in Bookslut, coming soon. In the meantime, check out this hilarious trailer for the book, and go buy everything you can find from Portman's legendary punk band, The Mr. T Experience.
It's got the best description of A Separate Peace ever written ("...about this irritating guy who keeps trying to make this other irritating guy fall and break his leg until he finally does and ends up dying.") It's got an (imaginary) album called Margaret? It's God. Please Shut Up. And it finally confirms the suspicion we've all had that there's something odd and sinister about high school teachers' collective obsession with The Catcher in the Rye. I love this book as much as I hated high school, and that's some of the highest praise I can possibly give.
Gina Piccalo profiles Caitlin Flanagan, author of To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife.
A profile in this month's Elle is a case in point of the impasse between Flanagan and her critics. In writer Laurie Abraham's telling of their interview, Abraham arrived at Flanagan's house flustered; back home, her daughter's pet gerbil had just died. Flanagan at first sympathized. Then after their chat turned heated over the question of what's lost when a mother works, she reminded Abraham: "The gerbil's dead and you're here."
"You could hear me gasp on the tape," Abraham said in an interview.
When reminded of the exchange, Flanagan gazed into the middle distance and mused, "Yeah, that was funny."
A California teenager checks out a manga book from a public library, and is shocked to find out it contains sexual content. How would you headline that story? Obviously, you'd have to go with: "Good grief, Charlie Brown! Family stunned by porn comics at library." I mean, that just writes itself, you know?
Look, it's not just me — Mary Park also loves Ali Smith's The Accidental.
There are two kinds of brilliant books: the kind you admire, and the kind you pull over your head like a quilt while the outside world slips away. Improbably, The Accidental manages to be both.
The book about the bad dog is cute and all, but where's the dark side of American nonfiction?
The Economist on Tom Wolfe and American literary realism:
“At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature,” Mr Wolfe wrote in one of his manifestos on behalf of literary realism, “we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property.”
Yet the trouble with turning yourself into an American Zola is that you immediately expose yourself to being trumped by reality. The better sort of critics are forever lambasting Mr Wolfe for going over the top—for using cartoon characters to exaggerate the evils of modern society—but the truth is the opposite. Mr Wolfe's satire pales into insignificance compared with the hog-stomping reality that he tries to capture.
I am excited about Catherine MacKinnon's Are Women Human? and Other International Dialogues. Even if I don't agree with a lot of her stands (anti-porn, for one thing, and her view that all men are potential rapists), it's rare to get such a chewy, dense book about feminism these days. In this profile in the Guardian, I do love this quotation:
Naomi Wolf branded her a "victim feminist". "Victim feminism," claims Wolf, "urges women to identify with powerlessness, even at the expense of taking responsibility for the power they do possess."
It's especially funny to me as I got in a book about dating yesterday, and the thing was blurbed by Naomi Wolf. Can we disregard everything she's ever said about feminism if she blurbs a dating book? I think we should look into it.
Rosecrans Baldwin judges the penultimate match in The Morning News Tournament of Books — tomorrow's championship fight will be between Sam Lipsyte's Home Land and Ali Smith's The Accidental. I will eventually stop telling all of you that The Accidental is a perfect novel you should read immediately. But not today. Go Ali.
Marcel Berlins wonders why so many English men selected Camus' L'Etranger as the most influential book they've read.
But the effect of having The Outsider as one's most helpful book at times of personal difficulty could not have lasted very long. Anyone seriously assuming Meursault's philosophy as a guide to adult existence would soon have ended up damaged and incapable of loving or living normally, though as far as I can judge, my admiration for Meursault did not leave me afflicted by any life disadvantages, even if my brief Outsider-inspired vow always to tell the truth and not care about the consequences spoiled my love life for a while. ("What do you think of my new dress?" "Awful. You've got terrible taste.")
For a week, people have been dropping by the palatial offices of The Magazine Reader to congratulate us for killing Cargo magazine. We'd love to take credit, but the death of Cargo is really a triumph for all the men of America -- except for the 373,727 wimps and weenies who actually subscribed to Cargo.
Happy 90th birthday to Beverly Cleary. The legendary children's author is profiled at The Boston Globe, Washington Post, Oregonian and Arizona Republic (which also offers a Ramona quiz).
An AP article on recycling book titles leads with this:
Choosing the title of a Harlequin release can be as challenging as actually writing the book . . .
Sounds about right.
A Reno high school has ordered a ninth-grade student not to recite WH Auden's "The More Loving One" at a statewide poetry recitation contest, because it contains "profane language," reports the Reno Gazette-Journal. The profane language in question: the words "hell" and "damn."
April 11, 2006
Irvine Welsh makes his debut as a music video director, but I'm personally more excited about Grainspotting.
The Global Language Monitor claims that the English language is about to add its millionth word, but OED editor-at-large Jesse Sheidlower is skeptical.
But there's no possible way to count the actual number of words in the language, and the idea of having a running counter, as is found on GLM's home page, is absurd. So, why have journalists fallen for the claim? I think it's the pseudo-scientific nature of GLM's "methodology": The company claims to use an "algorithm" called the "Predictive Quantities Indicator," so its figures must be right. . . . I recently got a call about GLM from a reporter, and when I explained why the million-word claim is bogus, he practically shouted, "But they have an algorithm!"
At USA Today, Roy Peter Clark explains "how to fix the memoir genre."
Be transparent. Invite readers into the process. . . . Perhaps memoirs should include endnotes. At the very least, each memoir needs a one-page author's declaration that precedes the narrative. So-called disclaimers hiding in small print with the copyright information are not enough. "About This Book" should describe in detail the standards and methods used to tell the story. Any author embarrassed to reveal his or her bag of tricks should check with Papa and get a brand new bag.
Jesus. So much for a little mystery, huh? I seriously have zero sympathy, though, for people who don't read the fine print and then bitch about it. What's keeping people from reading these disclaimers, anyway? The print's too small? Then get some fucking reading glasses or find a new hobby.
I love the "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" thing, though. Comically out-of-date pop culture references always charm me. "If these writers aren't 'In the Mood' to tell the truth, then maybe these bugle boys should boogie-woogie back to Company B and OH MY GOD I AM SO OLD." Pretty awesome.
Alternet talks to Kevin Phillips, author of American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. You can also listen to the interview with him on Fresh Air.
No link, just an observation: The Entertainment Weekly redesign not only means shorter reviews -- something I wasn't sure was possible -- they're also running pictures of authors as teenagers alongside the reviews. Huh? This week has David Mitchell and Daniel Handler as youngsters right there beside their reviews. Completely random and bizarre, especially since they're not running high school pictures of actors, musicians, or television stars. But I can't really stay mad, as the picture of 13-year-old David Mitchell is so heartbreakingly adorable, I just love him more now. Good lord, how cute.
It's the first match of the "zombie round" at The Morning News Tournament of Books, with Andrew Womack making the call between Sam Lipsyte's Home Land and reader favorite Zadie Smith's On Beauty. Kevin Guilfoile observes that the success of Home Land could change readers' attitudes towards trade paperback originals, "a format which, until very recently, was considered by many to be the publishing equivalent of a humorous Dorf on Golf instructional video."
When I get a large freelance check, I usually head to Marshall Field's and buy myself a nice pair of shoes, or a Betsey Johnson dress. (I'm lazy, though, so this doesn't happen very often.) Bloomsbury, when it got its check from Harry Potter, went on a similar shopping binge. Only someone maybe needs to have an intervention with them.
She'll read from her novels, and Cat will play his clarinet.
April 10, 2006
The Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning (yeah, me either) is selling an original piece of art by Seth to fund this year's awards. You can start your bidding on the piece next week.
Rachel Kramer Bussel interviews Shari Goldhagen, author of Family and Other Accidents.
Q: You bill yourself as a former "celebrity stalker," having worked for The National Enquirer, Life and Style and Celebrity Living. What's been your craziest adventure, and which was the most challenging?
A: Once Britney Spears gave me the finger. That’s kind of the highlight of my journalistic career right there.
Allan Gurganus, author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, considers the Duke lacrosse scandal.
Peter Wood, a history professor at Duke and himself a lacrosse player at Harvard, warned the administration two years ago that players were cutting class for morning practice — his course in Native American history, the culture that had given them their game. But what administrator is going to risk driving away a winning team from a winning university? How soon Boys Will Be Boys become Administrators Who Administrate in Defense of Such Boys. This lacrosse season, until rape accusations ended it, featured six wins and two losses. Code for "Leave them alone."
Dublin is celebrating the centennial of native son Samuel Beckett.
New York Magazine interviews talk show host/novelist Craig Ferguson (Between the Bridge and the River).
I’d written a couple of screenplays, and I wanted to be able to write something where I didn’t have to get anyone else’s permission or worry about demographics. For a lot of my life, I’ve been trying to figure out who is someone like me. Then I realized I don’t fucking care anymore.
The Morning News Tournament of Books continues, with Brigid Hughes advancing Sam Lipsyte's Home Land over Nicole Krauss' The History of Love. Today in the Tournament, author and critic Dale Peck, asked to judge between Ali Smith's The Accidental and Ian McEwan's Saturday, does pretty much exactly what you would expect Dale Peck to do in this situation:
Regardless, until writers realize the social compact is spiritual and species suicide, a pseudoethical pressure valve that allows Western society to pretend it’s examining its troubled conscience when all it’s doing is assuaging the guilt we feel for exploiting the rest of the world — and destroying it in the process — then the literary novel will remain little more than a series of embarrassing, irrelevant mea culpas. Speaking to the present context, this is my way of saying that I refuse to advance either of these books, even by the flip of a coin; as meaningless as the title “novel of the year” is, neither of these deserves it.
I kind of wonder what he's like on dates. When he's at the ice cream parlor, does he actually make a selection like a normal human being, or does he decline to choose between chocolate and vanilla because he refuses to reinforce America's dessert-based global hegemony?
Seriously, is Dale Peck for real? Is he?
NPR talks to Beverly Cleary, who turns 90 on Wednesday.
At The New Yorker, Daniel Zalewski reviews David Mitchell's new Black Swan Green.
Even Mitchell’s admirers may find “Black Swan Green” a welcome act of simplification. His previous novels have won him acclaim in Britain—he has twice been a finalist for the Booker Prize—but the characters were often lost amid the multilevel structures. By settling into a single narrative voice, and skipping the pyrotechnics, Mitchell has come by something that eluded him before: a sense of earned emotion.
Newsday's Tom Beer talks to Edmund White about his new My Lives, and the book's apparently infamous sex scene.
Let's get this out of the way: The dirty bit of Edmund White's recently published autobiography - the really filthy, scandalous bit that has readers fascinated and repelled and most definitely buzzing - is on Page 232. Flip directly to it, if you must.
There White describes, in a chapter about his S&M relationship with a much younger man, how he performed a certain sexual act on his "master" while the man sat on the toilet - stuff that would make an editor at Honcho magazine blush.
I don't find that particularly shocking. I think I read something similar in that "Life in These United States" column in Reader's Digest. "Imagine my husband's surprise when he was hit with jets of hot wh—" Wait, wait — that was actually in Toilet Blowjob Slave Weekly. I get so many magazines, you know? It's hard to keep them all straight.
My Lives is reviewed at The San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times Book Review, neither of which make quite as big a deal of the toilet sex thing.
Anyone in Leeds missing a book bound in human skin?
Deborah Solomon interviews George Saunders:
DS: It's true that "The Brady Bunch" creates its own imaginative universe, somewhat like fiction or any art form. You cannot say that about today's reality shows.
GS: I agree, "The Brady Bunch" can seem utopian compared to "American Idol" or "The Bachelor" or "Swapping Grandma" or "America's Bravest Hottie Midgets."
On MobyLives, Steve Almond talks about collaborating with another writer for his first novel, Which Brings Me to You. (Stephanie Merchant interviewed both Almond and his co-author Julianna Baggott in the last Bookslut issue.)
But the sour-grapes sniping from spurned authors should not obscure the fact that Kakutani is a profoundly uninteresting critic. Her main weakness is her evaluation fixation. This may seem an odd complaint—the job is called critic, after all—but in fact, whether a work is good or bad is just one of the many things to be said about it, and usually far from the most important or compelling. Great critics' bad calls are retrospectively forgiven or ignored: Pauline Kael is still read with pleasure even though no one still agrees (if anyone ever did) that Last Tango in Paris and Nashville are the cinematic equivalents of "The Rite of Spring" and Anna Karenina. Kakutani doesn't offer the stylistic flair, the wit, or the insight one gets from Kael and other first-rate critics; for her, the verdict is the only thing. One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home.
Slate thinks maybe you should consider reading at least part of that awful book clogging the bestseller lists, Marley and Me by John Grogan. I think they're crazy.
April 07, 2006
AlterNet talks to Louis Uchitelle, author of The Disposable American (excerpted here), about the psychological effect of mass layoffs. Uchitelle takes a well-deserved swipe at the godawful Who Moved My Cheese?:
That's a little bit like saying, "Don't moan about losing your job! Get yourself an education; do what you have to do. The cheese is out there; you just have to figure out how to do it. And if you don't figure out how to do it, it's your fault."
That message of "your fault" is devastating in this country. It's not that we shouldn't be responsible -- we should go to school. It's politically a lot easier to put the responsibility on the victims rather than the politicians or the unions taking on all the responsibility. We've acquiesced to layoffs and outsourcing, and we've made it easy, and that greases the way for more than is necessary.
The Reader of Absurdist Books interviews Kevin Brockmeier (The Brief History of the Dead) about white space.
On the other hand, a white space, perhaps because it is absent of information, presents itself as something to be understood. Many readers might fail to accept such an invitation, simply hurrying on to the next block of sentences, but I do think the request is implicit every time you encounter one.
(Via Maud.)
Tao Lin, the new poetry editor of 3:AM Magazine, talks to Noah Cicero, author of the forthcoming novel The Condemned.
me: yes
we are at the olive garden
we just got back from iraq
i am your literary agent
you are telling me about your book
ok
go
noah: It is about the war; A lot of quotes from mark twain. it mentions how much I like Beckett. There are terroists, over 1200 pages long.
me: i am your literary agent
please put in some inter-racial relationships
You can now watch the interview with Studs Terkel from the Daily Show online.
Jason Bitner, creator of Found and Dirty Found, explains his latest project, the book La Porte, Indiana.
I asked the waitress about the photos and she pointed toward a door leading to an unused dining area. The near side of the room was reserved for rolling silverware into paper napkins, while the back of the room housed two large metal shelving units holding 22 cardboard boxes. These boxes were stuffed with stacks and stacks of photos, all with remarkably similar characteristics. Initially, I guessed we were looking at 2000-3,000 photos, though I’d later hand count nearly 18,000 of these beauties.
“Find a family member! Photos $.50 each-or-$5.00 for a packet,” stated a small sign to the right of the shelves. Before us stood a nearly complete archive documenting the townspeople of mid-century LaPorte for sale-cheap!-in a quiet room of a local eatery. We rifled through an entire town’s population, as if it were a card catalog, a huge visual archive of Midwestern faces that were being unloaded two-for-a-dollar.
A high court judge today rejected claims that Dan Brown's bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code breached the copyright of an earlier book.
April 06, 2006
Another reason I should listen to everything Barbara J. King has to say: when her review of Pearl by Mary Gordon ran in Bookslut, I rushed out and bought a copy. But then it sat on my to-be-read pile while I wasted time with other books. I finally started reading it this week, needing some good sick reading. I am an idiot for waiting so long. Pearl should have been on more best of the year lists. It just came out in paperback, so get to it, folks. (Also, listen to this interview with Gordon on Fresh Air. Now I have to go track down her older books.)
The new issue of Bookslut is so hot, if you saw it walking down the street, you would hit on it, regardless of your gender and sexual orientation. Then when you found out it was a day old, you would feel really bad. You would think to yourself, "God, what does this say about me?" You would start drinking and become a shut-in. That is just how hot it is.
This month, we've got interviews with Steve Aylett (Lint), William Lavender (Aftershocks) and Jay Parini (Robert Frost: A Life). Elizabeth Kiem considers the television adaptations of Soviet-era Russian novels, and looks at three books on Eastern conquest. Melissa Fischer loves the cover art coming from Pavement Saw Press, and Barbara J. King digs Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love.
In columns, our Bookslut in Training tells us what happens when young adult novels go to war. The Specfic Floozy learns to (sort of) like steampunk, and our Small, But Perfectly Formed columnist looks at four novellas from the always amazing NYRB Classics. And we've got over a dozen reviews of new books from folks like Gail Godwin, Chip Kidd, Rich Cohen, Stephen King, Angela Davis-Gardner and Jennifer Vandever.
See how hot that is? You could spend a whole day reading this issue. And you should. Thanks, as always, for your support.
I am sick sick sick this week, so I'm catching up on things I should have posted last month. Like! Daniel Nester (Bookslut contributor and God Save My Queen author) being interviewed at the Million Poems Show. Also! Daniel Nester performing at the Million Poems Show. Just trying to get you excited for when he's here at the Bookslut Reading Series in June.
Edmund White's new memoir, My Lives, is reviewed at The Village Voice, and White is interviewed at Econo.
I admire many artists whose lives and temperaments are unlike my own. Maybe we are most attracted to alternative lives…. I like Bunin, who was proud, reserved and paranoid. I reread Flannery O’Connor all the time, but she was a hermit, as was Emily Dickinson, another favorite. If I share many qualities with the great poet James Merrill, I’m the first to recognize that he was more refined, more elegant, more joyful in his art than I ever will be. Alan Hollinghurst is a reserved, even shy man, but to me he is the greatest living gay author. I can’t bear the politics of Ezra Pound, Yeats, Nabokov — but I bow down before their writing.
Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love is becoming the word of mouth book of the year among my friends. I've already passed along my copy (judging by my friend's reaction to the book thus far, I'm not seeing the book ever again and will have to buy another copy) and forced another friend to buy her own. My friend Martha reviewed it for the Chicago Reader, and had the same reluctant "Oh crap, this is actually pretty fucking good" reaction that I did. Even Barbara J. King liked it, and at this point, I take everything she says as gospel.
But it never would have occurred to me to recommend the book to a male friend. Most of the women I've forced the book upon have been in the "Now what?" stage, either from break-ups, career bullshit, or just a feeling that everything is stagnant. I was feeling superior and cynical to another one of these "finding myself" memoirs, and the book completely admonished me. The basic premise is that Gilbert's marriage fell apart, her rebound love affair fell apart, and she had a spiritual crisis. She decided to solve the crisis by traveling the world for a year to Italy (eating), India (praying), and Indonesia (loving). As someone who has been going through similar things and decided to spend her time in places like Ireland, Puerto Rico, and Buenos Aires, the book got to me.
But it turns out men love Elizabeth Gilbert, too. The site also has two excerpts from the book. So you can find out, spiritual crisis or not, whether you are in desperate need of someone forcing this book upon you.
Jonathan Safran Foer narrates a new video exposing inhumane practices in the kosher meat industry, and urging Jews to adopt a vegetarian diet, reports The Book Standard.
Same with music, though, right? I used to love music, back when it had melody and chords and lyrics. But now it has no melody and no chords, just thwack-thwacking, and they even seem to be cutting back on the thwack-thwacking, so now it’s sometimes just thwa, and, as far as lyrics, do you consider these lyrics?
Hump my hump,
My stumpy lumpy hump!
Hump my dump, you lumpy slumpy dump!
I’ll dump your hump, and then just hump your dump,
You lumpy frumply clump.
I’m sorry. To me? Those are not lyrics.
The Morning News Tournament of Books shocks the world with a surprise "zombie round."
Tomorrow and Monday, Brigid Hughes and Dale Peck will whittle the current Final Four down to two. But then, before those books can advance to the finals, they will need to get past the top two reader favorites. In other words, we are not really down to a Final Four, but rather a Sexy Six. There will be a second semi-final after this one, in which two books thought to be dead in this tournament will miraculously rise from the grave. Call it the Zombie Round.
Zadie and Jonathan aren't dead yet. It's time to update your brackets.
The Guardian asks men which books they read "to get them through life." Last year, women selected Jane Eyre as their favorite "watershed" novel; men selected Camus' L'Étranger in translation. (The Guardian calls it The Outsider; in the States, it's more commonly called The Stranger.)
From the face-to-face interviews as well as the raw data a real pattern emerges: men use fiction almost physically as a guide to negotiate a difficult journey (but would rarely admit to this downright being the case). They use fiction almost topographically, as a map. Many of our women respondents last year explained that they used novels metaphorically - the build-up to an emotional crisis and subsequent denouement in a novel such as Jane Eyre might have helped negotiate an emotional progress through a difficult divorce, or provided support during a difficult period at work, or provided solace when things seemed generally dull.
My personal watershed novel is The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, but I tell people it's Casca: Panzer Soldier so they'll think I'm all intellectual and shit.
April 05, 2006
Hey, Austinites: I'm giving you plenty of warning so you have no excuse to miss this. Next Wednesday, April 12, author Jaime Hernandez (co-creator of Love & Rockets) will be speaking at the University of Texas. The talk, which is part of the ¡A Viva Voz! celebration, is at 5:00 pm at The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection in Sid Richardson Hall, Unit 1. Last year, in a review of Locas: A Love & Rockets Book, Bookslut writer Karin Kross wrote that "the Love and Rockets series is one of the great milestones in comics history." Check this one out. I implore you. (Very special thanks to Pamela for the tip.)
I don't know how I missed this, but PopMatters is spending this week covering books and authors from the indisputably cool Continuum 33 1/3 series (blog here). So far, they've had interviews with Jim Fusilli, author of The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (which Bill Gibron reviews), and series editor David Barker. Steve Horowitz reviews Don McLeese's contribution to the series, The MC5's Kick out the Jams, and Rob Horning considers the series as a whole. And over at Largehearted Boy, Alex Green, author of The Stone Roses, contributes a "Book Notes" essay on the music that helps him get by. (Thanks to Leah for the first link.)
April is National Poetry Month, and it's good to see someone getting in the spirit.
(UPDATE: I just saw that George Murray from Bookninja made this exact same joke. Which just proves, unfortunately for George, that he and I are twins. I love my Canadian twin!)
Lovecraft and Tolkien are the authors of choice for metalheads.
Henry Farrell, the author of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, is dead at 85.
A Bible publisher has rejected a request by an anti-pornography Internet ministry to put its "Jesus Loves Porn Stars" brand on the covers of the New Testament.
In the final match of Round 2 at The Morning News Tournament of Books, Adrienne Brodeur makes the call between Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation and Ian McEwan's Saturday.
Malcolm Gladwell considers Charles Tilly's Why?, which tries "to make sense of our reasons for giving reasons."
Why is such storytelling, in the wake of a crime, so important? Because, Tilly would argue, some social situations don’t lend themselves to the easy reconciliation of reason and role. In Jonathan Franzen’s novel “The Corrections,” for example, one of the characters, Gary, is in the midst of a frosty conversation with his wife, Caroline. Gary had the sense, Franzen writes, “that Caroline was on the verge of accusing him of being ‘depressed,’ and he was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. . . . Every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never again win an argument.” Gary was afraid, in other words, that a technical account of his behavior—the explanation that he was clinically depressed—would trump his efforts to use the stories and conventions that permitted him to be human. But what was his wife to do? She wanted him to change.
The Onion's list of new religious fiction includes Job and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.
April 04, 2006
Stoic blogger Jessa Crispin looks at Midwestern literature (and mentions brilliant Kansas native Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin and personal hero of mine).
The New York publishing industry loves to publish books about New York, and on occasion it seems they forget that the Midwest exists at all. Even I tend to stay far, far away from books set in Kansas, as I've had enough of the stereotypes: the stoic farmer, the stoic pioneer, the stoic religious freak.
Salman Rushdie's new introduction to Midnight's Children. (Via Maud.)
Liberal authors? Get the fuck out of here! Author Stephen Elliott (Happy Baby) announces the formation of LitPAC, a progressive political action committee made up of literary authors. Members include Jane Smiley, Dave Eggers, Daniel Handler, Aimee Bender, Mary Gaitskill, Tobias Wolff and Rick Moody. The conservative equivalent is expected to open shortly, but it's just Tom Wolfe, Dean Koontz and Orson Scott Card watching Fox News and writing open letters to the teenagers of America, urging them to please have less sex.
I'm kind of hoping this leads to an Eggers for Governor or Moody for Senate campaign, because you know that would be the most entertaining race in American political history. ("I'm Dave Eggers, and I approved this message, although I did so ironically.") A few authors actually are seeking office this year: Kinky Friedman (Independent for Governor of Texas), Sander Hicks (Green for US Senate from New York) and Jim Webb (Democrat for US Senate from Virginia).
Angela Mercedes Becerra considers the new poetry collection Lost and Certain of It by Bryce Milligan, publisher of Wings Press, Texas' oldest small literary press, and, 17 years ago, my creative writing teacher.
Newsday finds a way to put "sex" and "teenage girl" in the same headline, increasing interest in literature a thousandfold, if only on Long Island, if only for just one day. The article itself deals with sexual content in YA literature — think Gossip Girl and Rainbow Party. Naomi Wolf comments:
And that, according to the detractors, is the exact direction where teenage values are heading. Wolf, the author, said she believes pornography is surreptitiously being slipped into the milieu of teens without their parents' knowledge.
As a result, "young girls are becoming numb to the sexual experience," said Wolf, who suggested putting rating labels on the books. "They do it with movies. I don't see why they can't do it with books."
Yeah! Rating labels worked so well on records in the late '80s. My generation was protected from 2 Live Crew and W.A.S.P., and as a result, we never, ever thought about sex. In fact, what's sex? I have never heard of it! Thank you, PMRC!
The Sunday Times profiles Flann O'Brien, author of At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman (Bookslut review here).
Author Michael Allen has posted two excerpts from his new book, How and Why Lisa's Dad Got to be Famous.
In a piece accompanied by the most unintentionally scary photograph I have ever seen, New York Magazine looks at the new, young editors of Harper's, The Atlantic, The Paris Review and The New Republic. Judging from the picture, they are evidently all zombies.
The very serious magazine is the antithesis of the blogosphere. Time-consuming to produce, obstinately unscalable in an era of multiple media platforms, often deeply reported, they’re self-consciously pedigreed heirs to a tradition that can seem, at the very least, quaint amid the kicky assertional blur of the Internet. . . .
“We’re all sort of the anti-blogs,” says Roger Hodge, the new editor of Harper’s. “And I think we will eventually triumph over the blogs!”
And then eat their brains. Their delicious braaaaaiiiiiins! (Via Bookninja.)
The Morning News Tournament of Books is close to picking its final four. Last week, Jessa Crispin very, very reluctantly moved The History of Love on to the next round, where it will face Sam Lipsyte's Home Land, which Mark Sarvas of The Elegant Variation selected in yesterday's round over Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Today, Maud Newton judges between Ali Smith's The Accidental and Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, and in a bizarre judicial mishap, convicts Robert Blake of murder.
Rachel Proctor May's rejected submission to NPR's This I Believe:
Which is why I believe the phrase "the writing life" should not exist. I don't know who came up with this treacly trope, so redolent of cats on the lap and tea steaming in the mug. So evocative of gazing out the window thinking writerly thoughts, such as "What is the meaning of life?" or "Now that Inspector Bunchybottoms has discovered the meat cleaver behind the potted palm, whatever shall she do next?" or "My butt is sore. I want a sandwich." Writing, however, is not life. It's not even very much fun.
Kimberly Maul reports that books based on blogs are selling like hotcakes, if hotcakes were a specialty niche item that only sold at a rate of like one-third of a hotcake per day.
Publishing types have continued toiling away in the industry’s underground laboratory, feverishly trying to alchemize blogging, hoping to prove that the common base metal of user-generated-content that the kids seem to enjoy so much (you know, those “web logs”) can be turned into the gold of bestsellerdom (you know, real books, sold in large numbers).
Basically, if you have a moderately uncrappy LiveJournal page, and are capable of writing a book proposal even slightly more elegant than "I am a blogger, and I want to write a book based on my blog, and blogs are great blog blog blog blog BLOGBLOGBLOG," you need to find a way to get on board this gravy train before it crashes with tragicomic results.
(NOTE TO OUR READERS: My memoir, Via: A Life in Hyperlinks, will be published by Harvard University Press in October 2007.)
(NOTE TO HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS: We'll talk.)
How is it that in this interview with Erica Jong she seems intelligent and focused, but when she showed up on the Bill Maher show on HBO last week she was ditzy, spouting conspiracy theories, and in general making me watch with my hands over my eyes? Was she high? Are there two Erica Jongs?
But her reasons for revealing she slept with Martha Stewart's husband in her new book Seducing the Demon seem false to me.
In the book I made a decision that I would write about all the terrible mistakes I made as a young writer. And all the self-deceptions. And all the times that I found myself in a compromising situation that I later regretted. But that in my vulnerability and naiveté -- and perhaps a desire for experience to write about -- I fell into these reckless and stupid things. And I thought that thematically that ... worked with the idea that I was trying to write a book about how I survived as a writer. And boy did I do some stupid things ... It's really about all the mistakes you make along the way as a writer. And I present it as a mistake. I'm sorry I did it. It's not presented as, Look at me, I'm so smart. It's sort of, I'm so stupid and I did so many idiotic things, but I think that readers can identify with that.
Read the excerpt here, and tell me that's not pure revenge. Funny that in the Salon interview she complains about the in-fighting between women and then has that in her book.
Bertolt Brecht might have seemed abrasive, but once you got to know him, he was actually kind of a dick.
According to a posting at the Rome News-Tribune, an indictment against comic retailer Gordon Lee has been dismissed when the prosecutors, according to the article, determined the book was actually given to the child’s younger brother.
According to the relatively vague report, the District Attorney of Floyd County will still pursue charges against Lee through a misdemeanor action. Such a charge will not have to go through a grand jury, as the previous felony charges did.
The New York Times profiles Craig Ferguson (Between the Bridge and the River), late-night talk show host and Bulgakov fan.
He grew up outside Glasgow in a large family that cherished reading: his father, a postal worker, favored "quasi-erotic, devil-worshipping spy novels," he said, and his mother preferred Lillian Beckwith, who wrote "folksy and beautiful tales about the Outer Hebrides." His own early reading ("Animal Farm," "Lord of the Rings") ground to a halt when he quit high school, at 16, "mainly to drink."
In an almost painfully touching profile, Steven Barrie-Anthony of the Los Angeles Times interviews Gore Vidal, author of the forthcoming memoir Point to Point Navigation, about growing old, life as a gay man, and the inspiration behind his amazing novel The City and the Pillar:
Vidal was just 23 when he published "The City and the Pillar," but it was his third novel and he was already a literary star. He dedicated the book "For the memory of J.T.," initials that remained mysterious for years. Today, Vidal speaks openly of Jimmie Trimble, a fellow pupil at St. Albans School in D.C., and Vidal's first love. "He was an athlete," Vidal says. "Now we think of athletes as just dumb-dumb boys, they're all muscle and no brain. But our athletes, at least of the class we came from, the political class, from Kentucky — he was from Kentucky — they were not only body boys, they were brain boys."
Trimble and Vidal were inseparable for a while, sexually and otherwise, and then fate intervened in the guise of Vidal's shrill and beautiful mother, Nina, who, concerned about her son's mediocre grades, transferred Vidal from St. Albans into yet another boarding school, Exeter, near Boston. Vidal saw Trimble one last time, at a dance in 1942, and they fled the hall together briefly, doing what teenagers in love are apt to do, leaving behind Vidal's fiancée, a young woman named Rosalind. Of course, Vidal never married Rosalind. And Trimble joined the Marines at the height of World War II and was killed in the Battle of Iwo Jima.
Thanks to Carl for the link.
April 03, 2006
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund court case of Gordon Lee begins today in Rome, Georgia.
If you haven't read Orhan Pamuk's The Black Book yet, you might want to hold off a few more months. A new translation will be published in July. Pamuk is interviewed at the Guardian about the aftermath of his trial and why he had thought the controversy would come in response to his book Snow, not an interview.
Largehearted Boy's latest edition of Book Notes is up. This time, Perishable author Dirk Jamison lists songs by the Cowboy Junkies, Willie Nelson, Sonic Youth and as the soundtrack to his memoir. (Read the Bookslut review of Perishable here.)
David Mitchell talks to the Scotsman about his new novel Black Swan Green.
If it is not already apparent, Mitchell has not decided to try and follow-up his 2003 blockbuster, Cloud Atlas, with another ambitious, globe-trotting novel. "Oh," he says at one point, discussing the intricacies of Black Swan Green, "it feels so good not to be talking about Cloud Atlas."
It's not hard to see why. Mitchell thinks of writing as "controlled personality disorder. It's controlled because in order to make it work you have to concentrate on the voices in your head and get them talking to each other".
The Americans can't return the three years that Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost lost, locked in a cell in Guantánamo Bay. But they could at least give back his poetry.
"Please help," said Dost, who says he penned 25,000 lines of verse during his long imprisonment. "Those words are very precious to me. My interrogators promised I would get them back. Still I have nothing."
Judith Warner, who has written about politics for magazines and published books about the progressive movement in America and Hillary Clinton, has been hired by the New York Times to write columns about... domestic issues.
Columbia Journalism Review thinks bloggers, reporters, and editorial writers should back off of Jill Carroll.
Bookslut is cancelling the April reading series due to scheduling problems. But we will return in May on our fourth anniversary with Michelle Tea (Rent Girl, Rose of No Man's Land), Elizabeth Merrick (Girly, This is Not Chick Lit), and Gary Amdahl (Visigoth). If you just need some serious lit activities before then, tonight Shalom Auslander and Ira Glass will be speaking at a Nextbook event, and you'd be a fool to miss it. Hopefully I'll see you there.
