June 30, 2006
3:AM Magazine keeps up with Tom McCarthy, "the figure-cum-spearhead of the fabled Offbeat Generation," and author of Remainder and Tintin and the Secret of Literature. Also worth mentioning is Offbeat Generation novelist/poet Travis Jeppesen, whose book Victims I loved. His latest book, Poems I Wrote While Watching TV, is reviewed by Susan Tomaselli at 3:AM.
Jennifer Howard in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
James Miller, editor of Dædalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has been informed by the academy's executive officers that he will lose that job in August 2008.
Over 100 British libraries are being threatened with closure, reports The Christian Science Monitor.
Stealing maps is, perhaps, the nerdiest crime possible — even more so when the thief in question is named "E. Forbes Smiley III." Yeah, this guy's going to do well in prison.
The Japanese, always on the cutting edge of technology, are really into pencils now. It's all because of Basho.
Maggie: If you think Bryan would help us stage a Potter intervention, you're nuts. They'd be much more likely to overcome us, tie us to a sofa, and read aloud until our eyes glazed over.
Me: No no, by "group intervention" I meant you and I could get intervention for both of them at the same time. I figure we could get better rates that way.
Maggie: Bulk-rate Harry Potter intervention ... now there's a potential gold mine.
Me: Hey, yeah. We could stage a fake convention called MuggleCon or ConWeasley or somesuch, and people would urge their Potter-addled loved-ones to get all dressed up and go. And then, after everyone arrives, we would seal the doors and have a bunch of specialists would come in and intervene the shit out of everyone. PROFIT!
If the happiness experts are to be trusted, we should take time every day to count our blessings. What better way to spend a holiday, then, than wallowing in the misery of others? Weird though it sounds, perhaps it's time to chuck out the chick-lit and the Chardonnay and curl up with a piña colada and a nice copy of I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors.
(Via Largehearted Boy.)
Well, it's been a good six months, are you ready for your next Truman Capote biopic? Don't worry, it's much different than the Philip Seymour Hoffman version. Yes, it covers the exact same time period, but this one has Sandra Bullock! As Harper Lee! Aren't you so excited you feel you could start puking and never stop?!
Everyone is hating on Art Spiegelman these days. First Ted Rall, now the entire conservative movement. His essay for Harper's "Drawing Blood" is still provoking angry responses. I just love that this op-ed for the Conservative Voice basically accuses him of being too nice.
How our superheroes will age. (From Comics Reporter.)
Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) and Jason Furman ("scholar") have been discussing whether or not Wal-Mart is good for Americans. Ehrenreich worked there as an employee for her book, and Furman, uh, shopped there once. And thought about it. Or something. It's not really an even match.
What is with that Kevin Trudeau guy and inappropriate quotation marks? First it was Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You To Know About, and now it's More Natural "Cures" Revealed: Previously Censored Brand Name Products That Cure Disease. Oh, and also he's a convicted felon who "warns against deodorants, celibacy and farm-raised fish." But it's the quotation mark thing that pisses me off the most. They should send the guy back to prison for that.
June 29, 2006
It looks like Sienna Miller and Peter Sarsgaard will star in the film adaptation of Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, my favorite novel. (I know in my heart it's not as good as Kavalier & Clay, but whatever, it's been my sentimental favorite for over ten years, and I am a huge sap.) Chabon's wife, author Ayelet Waldman, is co-producing the movie, which will be directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber (Dodgeball).
The trouble with insolent breasts.
Nothing in a novel dates as quickly as the sex scenes. In 1960, 200,000 copies of Lady Chatterley's Lover were sold in Britain on the first day the ban was lifted -- in part because of the treasures therein implied by Mervyn Griffith-Jones, prosecuting counsel, in his famous question to the jury: "Is this a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?"
To which I say: yes. Make the missus and the footman and the scullery maid read it but spare me, please.
Calvin Trillin is rooting for Chris Dodd to win the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination because "his name has enormous rhyming potential." (Trillin writes the political poems for The Nation.) He's less excited about the prospect of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich getting the nod.
NPR talks to Gideon Defoe, author of The Pirates!: An Adventure with Scientists, which is very funny indeed.
Poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen is interviewed at PBS.
LEONARD COHEN: . . . I always thought of myself as a competent, minor poet. I know who I'm up against.
JEFFREY BROWN: You know who you're up against?
LEONARD COHEN: Yes, you're up against Dante, and Shakespeare, Isaiah, King David, Homer, you know. So I've always thought that I, you know, do my job OK.
The Lord of the Rings musical will close early in Canada. The show's producer blames the critics, and the mayor of Toronto blames the critics and, uh, September 11.
"The first act of The Lord of the Rings is the best theatre I have ever seen and I have seen a lot of theatre," [Toronto Mayor David] Miller said, suggesting the London critics should be heard.
But the mayor and other Toronto officials said that a general decline in U.S. tourism is also to blame.
"We know post-Sept. 11 it is very hard to get Americans to travel in huge numbers," Mr. Miller said. "That is affecting our ability on the big theatre productions and other tourism matters."
Uh, yeah. It's all bin Laden's fault. It has nothing to do with the fact that there are only 17 people in the world who think a Lord of the Rings musical is a good idea, and 13 of those people are currently confined in state-run hospitals.
My favorite moments in the Ted Rall interview Mike linked to:
When asked which Fantagraphics artists he likes, he replies, "Of those people, Adrian Tomine [Optic Nerve] speaks to me most."
"I love Richard Linklater, he’s one of my favorite directors... Do I like Richard Linklater because he likes me? Or do I like him because of the way I am?"
Well, now you know how to get a good review from Ted Rall.
Graham Greene's last interview.
Glenn W. LaFantasie, author of Gettysburg Requiem: The Life and Lost Causes of Confederate Colonel William C. Oates, has an interesting short essay about the Civil War generation at the Oxford University Press blog.
EconoCulture talks to Ted Rall about Art Spiegelman ("he has a terrible influence on cartooning"), Chris Ware ("he’s a miserable writer"), and Condoleeza Rice ("She wants to act white. She wants to help white people oppress black people"), among other things.
Slate loves bad novelizations.
E.T. the Extraterrestrial was written by William Kotzwinkle, who has twice won the National Magazine Award for Fiction, and it is irredeemably bad. A reviewer of novelizations, Justin Olivetti, offers this helpful summary: "It turns out that E.T., the 10,000 year-old alien, develops a disturbing crush on Elliot's mother and stalks her at every opportunity." Allow me to quote Page 134:
"[E.T.] crept down the hall to Mary's room and peeked in. The willow-creature was asleep, and he watched her for a long time. She was a goddess, the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. … Mary, said his old heart. Then upon paddle feet, he tiptoed over to her bed and gazed more closely."
This Salon piece about New England literature makes me so bored I nearly drifted into a coma. I mean, Ethan Frome? (I'm convinced that Edith Wharton never wrote Ethan Frome, instead it was created by a community of pissed off high school English teachers as a torture device.) The whole essay makes me feel like I'm back in high school. Too bad Tom Bissell couldn't write every essay.
(My patience is running thin on the total lack of imagination expressed these days. Yes, NYTBR, of course Philip Roth is the greatest living American writer. Yes, Salon, of course New England only produced Hawthorne and Robert Frost and Melville. Yes, John Banville, there has never been a female Irish writer ever. What's the point of these lists if all they do is list the same books as everyone else, just in a different order?)
June 28, 2006
Kirkus features 30 new graphic literature titles you should be reading.
Grady Hendrix wonders whether the movie novelization is done for.
Adding to their troubles, novelizations have been supplanted by big-selling tie-ins — original novels based on existing properties such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, CSI, or Halo — and the Internet. In a DVD world, the idea of using a book to relive the pleasures of a film is practically counterintuitive. And fans who want to participate more fully in the world of a movie can find guides, encyclopedias, and video games that allow them to wallow in the background details.
Look, if you can read the book versions of Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! or New York Minute or Home Alone 2 and not be moved to tears, then you're a soulless bastard who might as well just give up on being able to appreciate art. There. I said what we were all thinking. (Via Powell's, whose blogger Brockman is in justifiable mourning over the breakup of Portland's favorite daughters.)
Novelist Nick Brooks presents the top ten literary murderers in The Guardian. Making the list are Francie Brady (The Butcher Boy), Humbert Humbert (Lolita) and Patrick Bateman (American Psycho). (Via Backwards City.)
The Berkeley Daily Planet profiles Czeslaw Milosz, whose New and Collected Poems you should own.
Richmond's Style Weekly profiles Ted Genoways, editor of the great Virginia Quarterly Review (the new issue of which comes out on July 1). I always assume that literary editors are going to resemble me — doughy and pasty, like an undercooked croissant with glasses. But Genoways is a tough-looking dude who looks like he could kick your ass. It'd be funny if he picked fights with other literary journalists, just for the hell of it. "Hey, Louis Menand? It's go time, bitch."
That would be so cool. He seems like a really nice guy, though.
A Springdale, Arkansas, substitute teacher might be disciplined after playing a recording of a poem containing the word "fuck" to a class of eighth-graders.
The poem’s author, Eirik Ott — who goes by the stage name Big Poppa E — makes no excuses for the teacher. "The person who played the audio recording was an idiot, and [she] deserves to be chastised," said Ott, who has performed twice on HBO’s Def Poetry. "Whenever I perform in schools, I excise the curses and the sexual references."
Choriamb has extensive background on the story.
In for 2006: Library boards making incredibly stupid decisions, then reversing themselves after the inevitable public outcry. Remember the Porter County (Indiana) board banning homeless kids from borrowing books, then suddenly doing an about-face when they realized "Library board bastards hate homeless children" didn't make for the best headline? Yeah. That was pretty funny, in an "Even Satan himself could not be this evil" kind of way.
Add the Gwinnett County (Georgia) library board to the list. They decided to cut the $3,000 earmarked for Spanish language adult fiction from their budget, after some patrons complained that having the books constituted catering to undocumented immigrants. The board overturned the decision on Monday, after receiving "letters and e-mails from as far away as California and New Zealand from writers, professors and editors."
I guess you've got to give these people credit for eventually doing the right thing, but how the hell do they find these board members to begin with? "I couldn't help but notice you just stole that six-year-old girl's lollipop and stomped on that litter of cute kittens. Congratulations! You're our new board chairman! Here's a large check."
The latest edition of Book Notes at Largeheartedboy has Steve Lafler discussing his collaboration with Stephen Beaupre for the graphic memoir 40 Hour Man.
The Wall Street Journal profiles the MySpace for people who are over 16 and can spell — LibraryThing.com. (Richard, thanks for the link.)
Representatives from DC Comics, Fantagraphics, First Second Books, Powell's Books, and The Beguiling answered questions from Ian Brill of Publishers Weekly about the future of comic book publishing. Gerry Donaghy from Powell's sums it up nicely:
This also engenders another issue: the New York book publishing world is never, ever going to take the chances that the indie presses are. If you look at where all the legal challenges are happening to comics, it's happening to independent publishers and independent retailers. If a publisher is worried about being able to sell to Wal-Mart or Target, they're going to bypass anything that even smacks of risk. I've just seen one of the most beautiful works of art that I've ever laid eyes on (Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie) that Pantheon wouldn't touch with a 20-foot pole held by 20 lawyers. The people with the most to lose, in this case Top Shelf, are the ones taking the biggest risks.
The Miami-Dade County school district must keep a series of banned children's books until arguments in a legal challenge can be heard next month, a federal judge ruled Tuesday.
The AV Club interviews Amy Sedaris, actress and author of the forthcoming I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence.
AVC: Is there anything else you want to talk about?
AS: Hmm. I don't know. Paella?
AVC: Do you have a paella recipe?
AS: I don't.
The night before the reading series, I got a call from Ned Vizzini saying that he had a family emergency and would not be able to make the reading. But don't worry, Vizzini fans, he's rescheduled for the August 31st reading.
Last night was the first time our reading series was advertised in the Latvian community newsletter, and it was a whole other audience for us. They were there to see Pauls Toutonghi (maybe some of them were there to see Daniel Nester, I didn't actually take a poll) and hear him read from his fine debut novel Red Weather. It's a coming of age story about the son of Soviet Latvian immigrants, and Pauls apologized in advance for the accent he was going to read it in. It was a fine, Count Chocula-rific accent, Pauls.
Daniel Nester read the first poetry of our reading series. (There are approximately 28 poetry reading series in Chicago, I have no interest in trying to compete with them. In fact, Daniel read at the Myopic series while in town.) He read a few poems from his new collection The History of My World Tonight, a book I am currently smitten with. He also felt compelled to fit into our series format and read some prose, so he read his essay about footlicking and dating in New York.
We missed Ned, and hope everything works out for him soon, but we had a great evening. Thanks again to everyone who came. (Thanks to Chris for the brownies she brought!) Next month we're doing another nonfiction night with J.C. Hallman (The Devil is a Gentleman), Hillary Carlip (Queen of the Oddballs), and David A Karp (Is It Me or My Meds?). The reading will be Thursday, July 20. Hope to see you there.
Elgin, Illinois, police confiscated a cat and 23 birds from the home of children's author and librarian Charlotte Towner Graeber, saying the writer "failed to provide her pets with an acceptable living environment." Graeber's home "was red-tagged, making occupancy unlawful," reports The Courier News.
Colleen Mondor: Why Harry Potter must live.
Some of us still need happy endings, you see.
Good does win sometimes, it does beat the bad guys, it does come out on top. And I can't help but think that if Rowling kills off Harry it won't be because it's best for the story but because she has a message she wants to get across and she will use him to do it. In fact, I can't help but think that she will be taking the easy way out and letting down her fans in the process if all the dire predictions about Harry come to pass.
June 27, 2006
Hey, all you Chicagoland folks: Tonight is a Bookslut Reading you will not want to miss. You will feel so bad if you miss it; your parents will disown you, and no one will ever want to have sex with you ever again. There is a study that confirms this, though I can't find it right now. Trust me.
Daniel Nester, author of God Save My Queen: A Tribute and God Save My Queen II: The Show Must Go On (both published by the great Soft Skull Press), will be there. You can read an interview with Daniel here; he talks about Freddie Mercury and Sharon Olds, which should be all the convincing you need to go to the damn reading. But you can also read his work for Bookslut, which is gold, all gold.
Also at the reading will be Pauls Toutonghi, author of the new, critically acclaimed Red Weather. Check out Pauls' story "They Rise, They Rise!" here, and read an excerpt from Red Weather here. (Thanks to Olena for that last link, by the way.) Pauls is interviewed at OnMilwaukee.com and profiled at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and his novel is reviewed at the Miami Herald and NPR. Pauls is also a Bookslut writer; you can read his work for us here.
So go. It's at the Hopleaf, which has more Belgian ales than Belgium, and besides, what else are you going to do? You can't buy foie gras. You can't take Ozzie Guillen to a gay bar. Actually, you can, but the Bookslut Reading is much more fun. Again: trust me.
So on one side, you have Caitlin Flanagan saying you're a horrible mother if you decide to get a job. On the other side, you have Linda Hirshman saying you're a traitor to your gender if you decide to stay home with your children (Hirshman's book is discussed at Slate and the LA Times). I am going to write a book saying that parents who want to work should work, and parents who want to stay home with their kids should stay home with their kids, and I will be hailed as a conquering hero of intellectual moderation. I'm going to call it Can We Please Talk About Something Else Besides People Who Have Kids Before I Sever Every Fucking Artery in My Body with This Butter Knife? Also Your Baby Isn't Cute, It Just Looks Like a Baby, They All Look Alike and Deep in Your Heart You Know This is True. Anyone interested? Random House? Anyone?
Harper Lee has written an article for Oprah Winfrey's magazine.
In a review of Douglas Brinkley's The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Salon's Allen Barra wonders why Brinkley goes easy on President Bush.
Brinkley's criticism of Bush -- "He should have showed he cared a bit more" -- is so compromised that the reader may be forgiven for wondering if he was afraid of coming to the obvious conclusion for fear of being accused of political bias by several of the TV hosts whose shows he has appeared on while plugging his book. It's hard to imagine that MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, for instance, would have welcomed Brinkley with such open arms had he come down on Bush with the same force as he did on Chertoff, who is virtually invisible to the American people.
Forthcoming Novels Titled With The White Hot Suffix “-ist”.
The Moving Violationist
By Lyle Brouse
An unrepentant illegal lane changer is handed the punishment of riding a slow-moving Rascal “scooter” to work every day. At first humiliated in his helmet and biking gloves, he soon discovers the discreet garage pleasures of scooter modding, and, spending weekends collecting trophies in geriatric race circuits, his old reckless driving habits threaten to undermine his budding talent…and his life.
The Morning News:
Sin is like air for you. You can’t and won’t stop sinning outright. But maybe, with apologies to Beckett, you can sin better? See, Dante believed Hell was divvied up very specifically. Certain sinners get certain punishments. You can tailor your sin so it goes down easier when they open the books on ol’ Jabba. Let’s face it, Purgatory is a long shot for you, let alone Heaven. Don’t abandon all hope. Just wait ‘til you hear the things you can get away with in the Inferno.
Two characters will die in the final Harry Potter book, but JK Rowling won't say whether one of them is Harry.
The New York Times profiles the writers behind Iron Balloons: Fiction from Jamaica's Calabash Writer's Workshop, published by one of my favorite indie presses, Akashic Books.
Patrick Ness wonders what the "new canon of wedding readings and poetry" for gay civil partnerships will look like.
Even if you were to concern yourself just with gay poets, the list is satisfyingly long. Langston Hughes, Frank O'Hara, Thom Gunn, Carol Ann Duffy, Gertrude Stein, Marilyn Hacker, May Swenson (whose weirdly wonderful "Symmetrical Companion" is just crying out to be used by a pair of intense lesbians). I leave out Sappho because, though among the greatest of all love poets, she tends to be a poet of yearning rather than of marriage. I also reluctantly leave out Catullus, but only because, try as I might, I can't seem to make "In truth, I am afraid of you and your penis" fit into a wedding vow.
(Via Choriamb.)
This is great: the fourth issue of NOÖ Journal is out, and features prose by Richard Grayson and poetry by Tao Lin and Raud Kennedy. Also: I wish I had a point-making prop closet.
The new issue of Professor Barnhardt's Journal features nine writers telling short stories in 20 words. My favorites are by Tod Goldberg and Duane Swierczynski, which, given the respective subject matters, probably says things about me that are not good.
June 26, 2006
Dear Anna Lappe and Bryant Terry:
I don't know if you heard, but organic produce has mainstreamed. There's a Whole Foods grocery store/amusement park in every major city, an organics section at the grocery store near my parents' house in rural Kansas, and free range eggs in convenience stores. People who eat organics no longer need to have white boy dreads and wear "crystal deodorant."
But you'd never guess that reading your book Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen. I like how it starts, warning people about the dangers of corn syrup (although Michael Pollan did it with more humor in The Omnivore's Dilemma) and your cost breakdown to prove that eating organic isn't that much more expensive if you do it right is interesting. But then you start with the recipes.
I mean, does there really need to be such a thing as an organic cookbook? You just replace "conventionally" grown potatoes with organic ones, maybe some heirloom varietals, and move on with your day. I'm just afraid that people will read your book, decide if they go organic they'll turn into an unwashed hippie and run away. You seriously not only suggest that people eat brown rice (there is no reason any human being should ever eat brown rice -- ever) but that they watch the depressing documentary Life and Debt while eating the brown rice. After the recipe comes the "food for thought" "Be mindful of the Mexican and other immigrant agricultural workers who cross the border and toil in our fields to provide the United States with a bountiful food supply." If you don't want your readership to fucking kill themselves over dinner, you should at least give them some good food to eat.
It's like a panel of meat lovers wrote this as a stereotype of what vegetarians would like. It's just so easy, like when you talk about authentic Latin American food and then offer a recipe for portobella mushroom quesadillas as an example and suggest the cook listen to something called "Love Songs of the Tropics" to set the mood. And I'm sorry, there's just no way in hell you can serve your friends something with "nut cheese" and expect them to ever come over for dinner again.
You look like hip people in your author photos. You have a foreword by Eric Schlosser. How about you pulp all of these books and try again?
Love, Jessa
World Hum has completed their countdown of the 30 best travel books, including Pico Iyer's Video Night in Kathmandu, Evelyn Waugh's When the Going Was Good, and my personal favorite on the list, The Soccer War by Ryszard Kapuscinski.
The Observer profiles Jeanette Winterson, author of the new children's book Tanglewreck.
Suppose, I say, we were to publish an errata column with this interview, what would she hope to see in it? 'There have been so many stories,' she says. The 'houseful of adoring handmaidens' (she wishes that were true). And the 'sex for saucepans' story. (In her impecunious twenties, she was reported to have regularly swapped sex for saucepans with married women from the home counties.) That made her laugh, but it upset her, too: 'It made it sound as though I was some sort of gay prostitute.' At least it gave 'sexpot' a new meaning, I suggest. 'These things are entertaining, but I have to block them out,' she replies.
Frank Portman (King Dork) is profiled at the San Mateo County Times.
Finally, some good news for independent bookstores. Fourteen patrons have joined together to save Houston's great Brazos Bookstore.
Karl Iagnemma, author of On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction, has a new short story in Nerve's future issue, "50 Ways to Leave Your Live-In Robot Lover."
The citizens of Aracataca, Colombia, failed to pass a proposition to change the town's name to Aracataca-Macondo in honor of native son Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Macondo is the name of the town in the author's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The Independent wonders whether Angela Carter's work is still relevant today (yes), and The Guardian takes a new look at Carter's classic The Bloody Chamber.
Woody Allen presents selections from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Diet Book.
As we know, for centuries Rome regarded the Open Hot Turkey Sandwich as the height of licentiousness; many sandwiches were forced to stay closed and only reopened after the Reformation. Fourteenth-century religious paintings first depicted scenes of damnation in which the overweight wandered Hell, condemned to salads and yogurt. The Spaniards were particularly cruel, and during the Inquisition a man could be put to death for stuffing an avocado with crabmeat.
Poet Laureate Donald Hall's cats are named Thelma and Louise.
The New York Times reviews Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which is starting to look like a cinch to win every nonfiction book award ever (in an alternate universe where graphic literature is respected by whoever the hell chooses the winners of book awards). In reality, it'll probably go to Orville Hickman Browning: A Very Long Biography of the Secretary of the Interior Who Changed the World or The Life of Pyotr Nikolaevich Lebedev: The Somewhat Obscure Physicist Who Changed the World or some other 1,200-page book that nobody will ever actually read.
NPR looks at Leo Allen's quest to read 100 books in one year. Allen recommends The Master and Margarita and The Baron in the Trees, but he wasn't impressed by Ben Bova's Colony ("horribly written") or Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife ("awful").
Will we see you in a year saying, "Oh, I had drinks with Rachael Ray, and actually, she's all right"?
Yeah, right. "After the hot-tub incident, I've changed my mind." You know, listen, like I said, I could be wrong. Unlikely. But maybe she's nice to puppies.
Sure, sure -- you haven't seen her kicking any old people lately.
Actually, that would be cool. If I ever saw her getting trashed on Old Crow, pistol-whipping a vegan after a bar crawl, I would think, "That's an interesting woman. I would like to know her.
I love Anthony Bourdain. (But my interview was better. Yes I'm petty.)
Laura Miller reviews Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors and has her DNA analyzed to determine if she has any dark family secrets hiding in her genes.
I started reading Baby Proof this weekend and got about 100 pages in. It's really hard to describe which part of the book was more annoying: the fact that she kept italicizing words for emphasis (so and so really wanted chocolate, but for the sake of the children or whatever), the fact that the whole first section read like she read one article about childfree women and used that instead of actually creating a character, or just the general unlikeability of everyone in the book. It did, however, accomplish exactly what I wanted and break my streak. I am now happily reading a book.
If I ever get stuck again, my options for really bad crap are plentiful. Take, for instance, this book about M. Night Shyamalan. The Man Who Heard Voices gets taken down by Defamer.
Speaking of libraries... remember that Chicago fire? No, not that one, the one that took out a chunk of the gay and lesbian section at the Boystown library? Turns out it wasn't a hate crime at all, just an unfortunately localized accidental fire.
The library system in this suburban Atlanta county says no mas — it won't buy any more thrillers, romance novels or other works of adult fiction in Spanish.
The decision has angered Latino leaders and thrust Gwinnett County — where one in six residents is Latino — into the nation's immigration debate.
Libraries! What the fuck is your problem lately? You're supposed to be fighting the dumbasses who want to censor books, not ban homeless kids from checking out books or deciding our national language for us. Stop freaking out, we need you.
Pitchfork has a summer reading list, which includes Frank Portman's King Dork, Andrew Beaujon's Body Piercing Saved My Life, and Jim Greer's Guided by Voices: A Brief History. This fall, Marc Woodworth's book about GBV's Bee Thousand will be released by Continuum, in case you're already drafting your autumn reading list. And you can probably add the seventeen books Joyce Carol Oates will probably release between now and September. (Via Largehearted Boy.)
June 23, 2006
Amazon opens an online grocery store. As of this morning, the "top sellers" list is dominated by diapers and condoms. Still, it's probably the least embarrassing way to purchase "Boy Butter Personal Lubricant."
The hospital — which was bequeathed the rights to the Peter Pan books by their author, J. M. Barrie — said that the creators of the comic book must obtain its permission before publication. The Lost Girls, which shows Wendy in erotic trysts and being observed by paedophiles, is the latest work by Alan Moore, the British graphic novelist behind V for Vendetta.
Mystery novelist and independent gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman (Bookslut interview here) has qualified for the ballot in Texas. A recent poll shows Friedman in second place in the governor's race, lagging behind incumbent (and moron) Rick Perry, a Republican, but leading independent Carole Keeton Strayhorn and Democratic nominee Chris Bell (campaign motto: "I've never heard of you either").
Also in that list of unlikely author bloggers we have Alasdair Gray. Bookmark now, motherfuckers.
Seriously? Tom Disch, god among men, has a LiveJournal?
One of my favorite young writers, Ned Vizzini (It's Kind of a Funny Story), answers readers' questions at The New York Times.
Q. 4. You are just 25 years old and this is your third book. What's it like to be an established author so young and are there other authors your age you think are exciting?
— Lisa Aldiss, New York, N.Y.
Putting out three books by the age of 25 has been a strange and surprisingly long trip. I am ten years into this, so for me it doesn't feel as if I'm young at all. I look at it as something to be proud of but not presumptuous about — there are many young authors out there. Some of the ones I respect and admire are Tao Lin and Nick Antosca, who are here in New York writing poetry and short stories respectively. I've always admired Marty Beckerman for his iconoclasm and attitude.
Check out Ned's books, and listen to his recommendations — Tao, Nick and Marty really are three of the best young writers around.
Two Comedy Central author moments you may have missed: personal hero Calvin Trillin on the Daily Show, and guy who made my friend's husband declare he could never eat again thanks to The Omnivore's Dilemma Michael Pollan on the Colbert Report.
Neil Gaiman already has a copy of Lost Girls. Lucky bastard.
As an exercise in the formal bounds of pure comics, Lost Girls is remarkable, as good as anything Moore has done in his career. (One of my favourite moments: a husband and wife trapped in a frozen, loveless, sexless relationship, conduct a stiff conversation, laced with unconscious puns and wordplay, moving into positions that cause their shadows appear to copulate wildly, finding the physical passion that the people are denied.)
I want, I want, I want.
By the way, I had a really great time in St. Louis, so thanks to everyone for food recommendations and such. Next time I'd like to stay longer so that I can actually get to some of them. And blah blah blah, thanks to Washington University for bringing me down there. It was a very interesting thing, reading about evolution while sitting in front of the hippo tank at the St. Louis zoo.
Tom Bissell (God Lives in St. Petersburg, Chasing the Sea) adds his thoughts on literature for Central Asia at Salon's Literary Guide to the World. Now I love him even more because he lists some of my favorite books: Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward and Chingiz Aitmatov's The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years.
June 22, 2006
The Virginia Quarterly Review now has several articles from their upcoming summer issue online. There's an excellent web exclusive interview with Alice Munro, plus several appreciations and a literary history of the great Canadian author. Elsewhere in the magazine, Brock Clarke says that the critics who keep predicting the death of the novel are missing the point, and Floyd Skloot has an incredibly moving review of three recent memoirs. So, you know, subscribe already. There's not a better magazine in the world; there probably never has been.
NPR has a profile of Christopher Hitchens, probably the best living English-language essayist.
But he's best known for focusing his unforgiving pen on the likes of Henry Kissinger ("war criminal, liar without conscience, pseudo-scholar, pseudo-academic, pitiless sponsor of dictators abroad"); Mother Teresa ("friend of poverty, enemy of the poor, fundamentalist fanatic"); and Bill Clinton ("a man who was in politics for therapy who wasted eight years of America's time").
If you're on a sex offender registry, it's probably not a good idea to write, and publish, "an erotic short story about two 16-year-olds."
BooksFromScotland.com has a sweet deal going — buy one Canongate Classic and get another one for half price. Canongate is one of the best publishers in the world, and their Classics line features authors like Alasdair Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson and Lewis Grassic Gibbon. And Jessa will kill me if I don't point out that this is a good chance to pick up one of her favorite novels ever, Alasdair Gray's Lanark.
This year's Bumbershoot festival in Seattle will feature an impressive lineup of writers, including Chuck Palahniuk, Mary Gaitskill, Michelle Tea, Alison Bechdel, Charles D'Ambrosio, Gary Shteyngart, George Saunders and Sara Gruen.
Gothamist's Rachel Kramer Bussel interviews Kate Bornstein, author of Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws.
What one message would you like people to take away from the book?
Do anything you feel you need to do to stay alive, anything. Fuck legality, fuck morality. The only thing that makes that work is “Don’t be mean.” There are all kinds of ways to deal with people who don’t want you to do things, but if you’re not being mean to anybody, my god, do whatever you need to do to make life worth living. That’s the important thing.
Richard and Judy unveiled their summer reading list earlier this week, and it includes two books that Bookslut's own Colleen Mondor loved — Jim Lynch's The Highest Tide and Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian (Colleen's reviews are here and here).
Louis Menand has a fascinating review of Robert Greenfield's Timothy Leary: A Biography. (I didn't know Leary wrote articles for both National Review and Hustler, but there you go.)
LAist talks to Eileen Ybarra, a YA librarian at the city's central library.
I became a librarian to help people foster a sense of self-empowerment within them. I also was attracted to librarianship because of the sense of freedom, exploration and intellectual curiosity that is possible through using the library. With teens that process is a lot more fun and interesting. They tend to be enthusiastic about their interests and are still open to learning and knowledge.
Pete Doherty, the British musician who looks like Harry Potter as imagined by Irvine Welsh, will publish his first book next year.
LA Weekly talks to Monica Ali about her new book, Alentejo Blue, which is reviewed at The New York Observer, Seattle Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, and the Washington Post.
The AP reports on the Nampa, Idaho, controversy about The Joy of Gay Sex and other explicit books in the city's public library. The library's solution: Put the books on high shelves so kids can't reach them. Unless they have, you know, a chair or something.
Board Trustee Bruce Skaug offered a motion to remove "The Joy of Gay Sex" from the library but it was not seconded.
"I'd rather my 9-year-old take up smoking than see the pictures in this book," Skaug said.
Really, Bruce? Really?
"A very unlikely love story" involving a lesbian writer and a male mystery novelist.
Karla Starr talks to Chuck Klosterman, whose essay collection Chuck Klosterman IV comes out in August.
The ACLU is suing the Miami-Dade County school district in order to prevent them from censoring a children's book about Cuba.
The Porter County (Indiana) library system board of directors, apparently realizing that they'd rather not spend their afterlife roasting in hell, has lifted their ban on lending books to homeless children living in shelters. Here's my new candidate for library hero of the year:
Eleven-year-old Taylor Knoblock led the charge, taking his brother, Jacob, 9, and sister, Rachel, 6, and a wagon with him.
"I read in the paper that the public library wouldn’t let kids from the homeless shelter check out books anymore," Taylor said. "I didn’t like that idea, so I started to collect books for Spring Valley [homeless shelter] to have their own library." . . .
"I feel sad for people that don’t have the same stuff as I do," said Taylor, who by early afternoon had collected about 50 books and 20 videotapes.
Taylor, you rock.
June 21, 2006
The new documentary Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man is reviewed at Salon, The Village Voice, and Newsday. Cohen's Book of Longing was released last month by Ecco. (Thanks to Leela for the Salon link.)
Benedicte Page talks to Irvine Welsh about his forthcoming novel, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs. Also at The Book Standard: Anderson Cooper will be on The Daily Show tonight.
At the Virginia Quarterly Review — which really is, as Jessa has said, "the best fucking magazine on the planet" — Tom Bissell (God Lives in St. Petersburg) makes the case against Robert D. Kaplan.
Kaplan is worse than a bad writer or thinker. He is a dangerous writer made ever more dangerous by the fact that he is taken seriously. Even his most hostile reviews have treated him as though his arguments are still within the pale. His worldview is, in many ways, that of the current administration, and shared by many Americans. These are people for whom the wider world means only acrimony to be dismissed and obstacles to be knocked over. People who care not for “exquisite subtleties” when it comes to matters of force and occupation. People who do not think in human terms, except insofar as those terms reflect their own beliefs, which are supremely correct.
The summer issue of the VQR is coming out soon, and will feature a symposium on Alice Munro, which is yet another reason you need to subscribe yesterday. (Link via World Hum.)
The Gwinnett County (Georgia) library board won't spend any more money to buy Spanish language adult fiction, reports the AP.
Spending the $3,000 that had been earmarked for those Spanish reading materials next fiscal year, which starts July 1, would have only led to readers of other foreign languages to request the same treatment, the board’s chairman argued. However, one board member says the move came after some residents objected to using taxpayers’ dollars for patrons who might be illegal immigrants.
The $3,000 will instead be allocated to the county's "cross-burnin' fund."
A Penn State biologist has developed a new way to date books. Apparently the old method of taking them to dinner and a movie isn't cool anymore.
Edmund White (My Lives) wonders why nobody seems to be noticing the new renaissance in gay fiction.
These newcomers are unknown even to most gay men, who are too busy going to the gym and cruising on the Net to read. Whereas being cultured was once the entrance fee for being gay, now the gay community has dumbed down like the rest of the population.
Slate has a photo gallery of people reading to celebrate the summer solstice.
Salon has a podcast interview with Amy Sedaris, actress and author of the forthcoming I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence.
Today and tomorrow I'm doing this St. Louis thing (anyone know good restaurants in St. Louis? E-mail me.) but tomorrow evening at 7 you can see me doing my best Oompa Loompa impression on Chicago Tonight on PBS. Last time my face matched the orange bookshelves behind my head, but my neck was still whitewhitewhite. (I'm Scot-Irish, there's nothing I can do about that.) So once again, I am offering my humiliation for your pleasure as I talk about books on your television. Hooray.
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home is reviewed at The New York Times Book Review, The New York Observer and Kirkus Reviews, and the author is profiled at The Philadelphia Inquirer and Hour.
An employment agency's typo on a letter sent to hundreds of businesses ruined the reputation of a former newspaper editor seeking a public relations job, according to a defamation lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court.
Nerve talks to John Updike about, among other things, oral sex.
But the head getting close to the genitals is, in a way, more intimate than letting the genitals do it on their own. Our sensory organs, including the brain, are right down there, and if it happens less frequently in couples as the relationship ages and evolves, it's because it's an act of worship, really. You are worshipping the other person's genitals. That may be a kind of ardor that cannot be sustained forever.
Ange Mlinko says the film adaptation of A Prairie Home Companion feels like a "joke at the expense of poets, from beginning to end." (Via Choriamb.)
Area Woman Fulfills Dream Of Becoming Writer By Getting Job At Bookstore.
Edward Guthmann at the San Francisco Chronicle remembers Judith Moore, author of Fat Girl: A True Story (Bookslut review here).
June 20, 2006
Do a good thing today and donate some money or books to the Dewey Donation System, benefiting the Harrison County Library system in Mississippi.
There's something really irritating about discovering that books you love are out of print. Even though used bookstores, and sites like Abebooks, Alibris and Powell's have made it pretty easy to find them, it sucks that the publishing industry has given up on some great work from some great authors, while books like M is for Murder and N is for No, Seriously, Murder and O is for Oh My God Someone Just Got Murdered are readily available at every chain bookstore in the land. You might say that there's a good economic reason for this, to which I respond: I failed economics, bitches. So take that!
Anyway, the last two fiction books I read are now out of print, and it pains me, because they're both so unique and so beautiful. Both are by Mary Robison, a University of Florida professor whose stories have been appearing in The New Yorker for almost 30 years. I first heard of Robison a few years ago, when Why Did I Ever was first published, and newspapers and magazines, in one of their rare fits of good taste, paid attention. I read it then, and was pretty sure I loved it, though I remember being more confused than anything else. (This was 2002, when I was unemployed and depressed, so pretty much everything confused me. Syndicated reruns of 3rd Rock from the Sun confused me. I was drinking a lot then.)
I don't know why it took me so long to read more of her work, but it wasn't until this month that I picked up Oh!, a novel, and Believe Them, a collection of short stories. Both were originally published in the '80s, which I kept forgetting while reading them — there's something timely and urgent about both, though it's a relaxed, conversational kind of urgency. That sounds like a contradiction in terms, and maybe it is, but Robison is one of the few living authors who realizes that even at its most mundane and placid, everyday life is still pretty surreal and stressful. She is not capable of being boring.
Oh! was my favorite of the two; it's hilarious and touching without ever turning sappy, or anything close to sappy. The characters are, by most definitions of the word, unlikable — there's a misanthropic dad, a flighty son, and a bitter daughter who's a neglectful mother to her child. There are no real big events; the characters mostly trade barbs, watch TV and make periodic attempts at doing yard work. And yet it's impossible to stop reading; there's an emotional urgency behind every little thing they do. Oh! was adapted into a movie called Twister (not that one), which I kind of want to see, though I try to avoid any movie with Crispin Glover in it. (Sorry. Policy. Dude creeps me out.)
Believe Them is also incredible, though much sadder, and maybe a little more resigned. There's not a bad story in the collection, though there are some definite standouts — "Again, Again, Again," which deals with a high school football coach and his almost gleefully sad family; "Adore Her," the story of a young man in love with someone who's not in love with him; and my personal favorite, "For Real," which follows a local TV clown coming to terms with her serious-minded, somewhat humorless German boyfriend. There are quiet epiphanies, but no obvious light bulbs flickering on above the characters' heads. Robison's characters are subtle, even when they're trying hard not to be. It's the most real kind of realism there is, and I'm not sure there's any American writer alive who can do it better.
Check her out. You will thank me. Hopefully she'll get some more press when her new novel, One D.O.A., One on the Way, is published next month by Counterpoint Press. Good Lord, I cannot wait.
In what might well be the worst PR move in the history of the world, the Porter County (Indiana) library system has decided to prohibit homeless children living in shelters from borrowing books.
"Once I would have killed our dog to meet a writer."
An old favorite: Post your favorite author photos and portraits. Also, here.
Pauls Toutonghi's Red Weather is reviewed by Alan Cheuse at NPR. Pauls is also the subject of a nice profile/book review at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where Geeta Sharma-Jensen calls the novel "hilarious and touching, unpretentious yet incisive, instantly recognizable both geographically and emotionally." I really, really need to read this book. (Pauls, a Bookslut contributor, will be reading next week at the Bookslut Reading at the Hopleaf in Chicago, with Ned Vizzini and Daniel Nester, both of whom I love. Why don't I live in Chicago? Someone remind me.)
Alternet reviews two books about scavenging: Perishable, Dirk Jamison's memoir about growing up in a dumpster diving family and The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine by Steven Rinella, one man's ode to killing and eating anything that moves.
He shoots. He hooks. He snares. He nets. He hacks the heads off things. He guts. He flings fillets onto flames and freezes the rest to make elkburgers, pickled liver, snapping-turtle soup. He's a manly and literate man who happened upon a 1903 cookbook by Auguste Escoffier, the King of Chefs and Chef of Kings.
Okay, now I have to read Scavenger.
Devin McKinney at The Village Voice reviews Michael Gray's Bob Dylan Encyclopedia.
This is no mere catalog of facts, but a work of oceanic immersion. It has wit, opinion, style, and asks to be read, not just consulted. In addition to major essays on tough nuts like Masked and Anonymous, "Blind Willie McTell," and Renaldo and Clara are entries titled "frying an egg onstage, the prospect of"; "Molly Ringwald"; and "kelp."
Alice Munro's next book, The View from Castle Rock, will be her last, reports Richard Helm at The Edmonton Journal.
Debbie Woodell reflects on the importance of James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.
The Joy of Gay Sex will stay on the shelves of the Nampa, Idaho, city library. Well, maybe.
Randy Jackson complained to the board about the books, which he feels are pornographic in nature, and too easily accessible by children and teens, “I believe that the library board did not have the best interests of the community in mind when they made their decision today.” . . .
Jackson checked out a copy of the book "The Joy of Gay Sex", and he says he has no plans to return it.
Jane Smiley on sellout writers.
But let's look at the text of "Cathy's Book," which is coming out in September. In the original manuscript, according to the Times' article, someone (no doubt Cathy) applies a "killer coat of Clinique #11 'Black Violet' lipstick." Now that the deal has been cut, Cathy prefers "a killer coat of Lipslicks in 'Daring.'" Of course, this is only my opinion, but I don't know what "Lipslicks in 'Daring'" is. "Lipslicks in 'Daring'" makes no sense as English prose. Score one for authorial integrity. . . .
. . . Novelists who sell their characters to financial sponsors are like teacher's pets. Instinctively we know that their allegiance is divided. They say they want only to please us, the readers, but really, what with "eyecolor" and "Lipslicks," it's pretty clear that we aren't first on the list at all.
Apostrophe Cast is examining the subtle art of the author photo, with this awesome photo of Faulkner serving as the gold standard. I have some personal favorites, from Anthony Bourdain with a sword to Neil Gaiman as hottest man on the planet, but nothing beats this shot of Somerset Maugham. I mean, lord almighty. Especially since he aged into this: craggy and delicious. (Should I mention I have a picture of Somerset Maugham as old and disapproving hanging in my living room? I have a thing for craggy: Maugham, Mike Wallace, John Hurt... I should really be in therapy, I think.)
The (painfully bad) reviews of John Updike's The Terrorist are not affecting sales.
I still can't find a novel to read. I'm still reading Balthus and now Goya, too. But I want a novel. Maybe there's a gas leak in my apartment that is keeping me just stupid enough not to get into a novel. I am thisclose to picking up Emily Griffin's Baby Proof, because maybe it's just bad enough that everything else will seem like James fucking Joyce after it. Lower my standards a bit. I'm only going to be in St. Louis for 24 hours this week, but I'm packing eight books, hoping something will catch on the plane. Bah.
In a move that maybe sounded like a good idea at the time, Slate is celebrating its 10th anniversary by asking people what they don't like about it, and then publishing the results. The problem is Michael Wolff is dead on.
Slate, like Fox News, is part of the opinion media where even a negative reaction is a positive reaction. To me, the Slate people are insufferable in ways that are quite similar to the ways the Fox people are insufferable—at Fox, they like to be the toughest guys in the barroom; at Slate, the most overachieving guys in the classroom—demonstrating, perhaps, that affect rather than ideology is the culture's most irritating force.
Remember their coverage of Watchmen's anniversary? Or their takedown of Kitchen Confidential by that adorable asshole Jeffrey Steingarten? Or even their review of the show House by How We Die author Sherwin Nuland?
Slate! We Kill Joy!
Jennifer Howard reports from the Association of American University Presses conference in New Orleans.
June 19, 2006
Jonathan Lethem (The Disappointment Artist, The Fortress of Solitude) writes an open letter to Frank Gehry.
The subject of my letter is the ill-conceived and out-of-scale flotilla of skyscrapers you propose to build on a series of sites between Atlantic Avenue and Dean Street in Brooklyn, in your partnership with a developer named Bruce Ratner and his firm, Forest City Ratner Companies. . . .
. . . It's a nightmare for Brooklyn, one that, if built, would cause irreparable damage to the quality of our lives and, I'd think, to your legacy. Your reputation, in this case, is the Trojan horse in a war to bring a commercially ambitious, but aesthetically — and socially — disastrous new development to Brooklyn.
Scottish authors collaborate with Scottish musicians for an album coming out this September on Chemikal Underground Records.
Among the highlights are collaborations between Teenage Fanclub's singer and guitarist Norman Blake and John Burnside, Sons and Daughters and writer-turned comedian AL Kennedy, Arab Strap's Aidan Moffatt and Ian Rankin, and Fife's own King Creosote and The Cutting Room author Louise Welsh.
Folk singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan and No Fireworks novelist Rodge Glass will also make an appearance. Elsewhere, The Trashcan Sinatras and Whitbread winner Ali Smith will join forces.
Will you marry me, Scotland?
"Summer reading" features are almost always incredibly lame, but here's a good one: Abraham Verghese (The Tennis Partner) recommends four books at NPR, including Charles D'Ambrosio's The Dead Fish Museum.
At The Boston Globe, Dushko Petrovich considers two recently released books from Yale University Press: The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art and Writings on Art, both by Mark Rothko. I've become obsessed with the artist after visiting the Rothko Chapel last month, which I recommend everybody do as soon as humanly possible. (Yeah, it's in Houston, but I swear it's totally worth it.) I need to read these books now. Dammit.
Gold stars for the robot boys at Continuum Publishing: The 33 1/3 blog has an excerpt from Marc Woodworth's forthcoming book about the Guided by Voices album Bee Thousand. (Although they rejected my manuscript for a book based on this mix tape I made once that was just Bread's "Baby I'm-A Want You" repeated twenty-four times, I still recommend the 33 1/3 books.) Continuum is also behind the new Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, which I'm looking forward to reading. Or at least using to settle arguments about who the Phantom of the Opera and Casanova are supposed to symbolize in "Desolation Row." (Correct answer: Paul Lynde and Sargent Shriver. Look it up.)
In truth, I had no idea what I wanted to study, so for the first few years I took everything that came my way. I enjoyed pillaging and astrology, but the thing that ultimately stuck was comparative literature. There wasn’t much of it to compare back then, no more than a handful of epic poems and one novel about a lady detective, but that’s part of what I liked about it. The field was new, and full of possibilities, but try telling that to my parents. . . .
Dad followed his “I’m so disappointed” speech with a lecture on career opportunities. “You’re going to study literature and get a job doing what?” he said. “Literaturizing?”
In a review of Noam Chomsky's new Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy, Peter Beaumont says the linguistics professor/hero to the far, far, far left might be overstating his case.
Thus on page 129, comparing a somewhat belated US conversion to the case for democracy in Iraq after the failure to find WMD, Chomsky claims: 'Professions of benign intent by leaders should be dismissed by any rational observer. They are near universal and predictable, and hence carry virtually no information. The worst monsters - Hitler, Stalin, Japanese fascists, Suharto, Saddam Hussein and many others - have produced moving flights of rhetoric about their nobility of purpose.'
Which leads to a question: is that really what you see, Mr Chomsky, from the window of your library at MIT? Is it the stench of the gulag wafting over the Charles River? Do you walk in fear of persecution and murder for expressing your dissident views? Or do you make a damn good living out of it? The faults of the Bush administration will not be changed by books such as Failed States. They will be swept away by ordinary, decent Americans in the world's greatest - if flawed and selfish - democracy going to the polls.
This pretty much captures my uneasiness about Chomsky. What's the old expression? "You catch more flies with honey than with a three hour long lecture about how the flies are stupid braindead drones who don't realize that they are worse than Nazis and should stop watching reality TV and start reading Anton Pannekoek in the original Dutch before it's too late you bastards." Or something like that.
Bookslut contributor (and this month's Reading Series author) gets a nice write up in the New York Times this week for his novel It's Kind of a Funny Story: "This is an important book."
"Chick lit appears to be in its death throes," notes Janet Maslin in a review of the new — and yes, this is the real title — Literacy and Longing in L.A. And if you're wondering why...
The bookstore guy is named Fred. And he is perhaps less stimulating than the authors intend him to be. "At the moment I'm reading some postmodern, edgy first novels by a couple of guys who teach creative writing at N.Y.U.," Fred tells Dora. But she starts falling for him anyway. After all, he takes her dancing and whisks her around the floor while quoting a couple of lovely lines by Billy Collins. And Dora has always wanted to be whisked. . . .
. . . But this is an essentially good-natured novel about other novels, literary enough to have its heroine thinking of Maurice Sendak during a sex scene. ("Let the wild rumpus begin.") And living up to the aphorism from "Flaubert's Parrot" that scene invokes: "Books make sense of life."
So here's an experiment. Go up to someone you find attractive in a coffee house, bookstore or bar, and tell them that you're reading "some postmodern, edgy first novels by a couple of guys who teach creative writing at N.Y.U." and see what happens. I guarantee that you'll be going home alone and masturbating to a Maurice Sendak book.
It is time for us to sit down, as a culture, and have an honest talk about Garrison Keillor. It's no use trying to ignore him anymore: He is upon us.
As someone who has been trapped in my father's car, forced to listen to hours of Prairie Home Companion until I wanted to scream the word "FUCK" just to break the nicenice tone of the show, I really don't want to have this conversation about Keillor. I just want him to go away.
Keillor has, through three decades of canny self-marketing, turned himself into a kind of EveryMidwesterner. When he started as a writer and radio host in the early 1970s, America's major regions had all been thoroughly mythologized—there was Faulkner's Mississippi, Steinbeck's California, and everybody else's New York. But the Midwest was, relatively speaking, a blank slate. Like Faulkner, Keillor invented a fictional territory—a mythical Minnesota hamlet called Lake Wobegon, "the little town that time forgot and the decades cannot improve"—and dedicated his career to exploring it. (Wobegon is a little like Yoknapatawpha County, but Midwestern—i.e., with all the murder, rape, class warfare, and incest translated into gardening, ice fishing, and gentle boyish hijinks.)
Except for that if you live in the Midwest for more than five seconds, you know that is bullshit. It's like those fucking tv shows where the big city man moves to the small town and knows True Joy and Happiness... Okay, enough of that. Let's just relive that wonderful August Kleinzahler essay from Poetry magazine. Or Christopher Hitchens's more recent take down: "Every now and again you come across the real thing: a case of full-blown, corn-fed, white-bread American nativist bloviation." That's better.
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home gets reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. Also in the Globe & Mail, who decides to try to bring back that whole "not just for kids!" fad just as it was dying down.
This week's Guardian Digested Read: Unaccompanied Women by Jean Juska.
Just before I turned 67, I placed an advert in the New York Review of Books saying I was looking for a man I would like to have sex with and that Trollope worked for me. If this feels familiar, then it's because this was the start of my previous book, A Round-Heeled Woman, to which I will be making extensive reference, along with John Updike and Mark Twain, throughout this current volume.
June 16, 2006
Aw, thanks guys. We love you, too.
Irvine Welsh is interviewed at the Book Standard about his new book The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs. He also discusses his new lifestyle of horseback riding and green tea.
"Yoga's the one thing I've drawn the line at—I do my boxing and I don't know if yoga and boxing can go together."
Marilyn French is interviewed about the anniversary of her feminist novel (my skin just crawled a little typing that) The Women's Room at the Guardian. How does French feel about the state of publishing today?
"They have fired everyone over a certain age. I was told by one publisher - a woman whom I respect - that she adored my work. Then she told me to go off and write something more like Bridget Jones's Diary." My eyebrows hit the roof. "I am totally serious."
Shalom Auslander (Beware of God) has a new column up at Nextbook.
My mother has a son named Shalom whom she loves dearly, but he isn't me, or more accurately, I'm not him. He is married with many properly Day-Eight-With-A-Rabbi circumcised children, none of this Doctor-in-the-Delivery-Room narishkeit. He lives next door to her, in a proper Yiddishe community, and he keeps the Sabbath and he calls it Shabbos, and he phones her before Shabbos and wishes her a good Shabbos and he meets her in synagogue on Shabbos and they walk home together on Shabbos, and he phones her after Shabbos and wishes her a good week and he calls it a gut vuch, and all the myriad conditions of her love are blissfully met (he also wrote a book, this son, and it was also called Beware of God, but it wasn't short stories, it was mussar, chastisement, rebuke. "I loved it," his mother said). She has been the victim of some cosmic bait-and-switch, and she has spent most of my life looking for the receipt. "This," she says as she pats her pockets and looks through her coat, "is not what I purchased."
Love him.
June 15, 2006
No longer just for indie bands and tales of teen angst, the networking Web site MySpace.com is the latest outlet for authors to hook up with editors, sell books and seek solace when they're lonely. . . .
"MySpace is changing every day ... I do see far more people my age and even older," said 36-year-old Josh Kilmer-Purcell, one of four published authors who set up a collective page earlier this year.
The four launched a competition on the site this week, inviting budding writers to submit samples of their own memoirs, with the winner guaranteed a reading of their manuscript by editors at three major publishers.
Man, I have a MySpace page, and nobody's offered me a book deal. On the plus side, though, a heavy metal band from Pittsburgh just asked me to be their friend. Thanks, guys! That sounds really interesting, and I'll be sure to check out your DENY DENY DENY DENY OH MY GOD DENY
The Pitch profiles Gregg Motley, a recovering pornography addict who is now the spokesman for the pro-censorship group Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools (ClassKC).
Like the other parents in ClassKC, Motley is blunt when it comes to the books that ClassKC deems too vulgar, too sexual or too violent.
"Most of it's bad literature," he says. . . .
Motley wants ClassKC members in churches, rallying people in the pews. He talks about reaching the conservative Christian voting block and harnessing their political power. He's encouraging them to build partnerships with organizations such as the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families. ClassKC also networks with similar organizations in Virginia, Texas, Washington, Oregon, Arizona and Illinois. They have received the support of groups such as the conservative Christian nonprofit the Alliance Defense Fund, and Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum.
NPR talks to Donald Hall, the new US poet laureate, and Hall reads from three of his poems. He's also profiled by Arthur Allen at the Poetry Foundation. The Academy of American Poets has a biographical sketch and bibliography of Hall, and reprints one of Hall's most famous works, the 1989 essay "Death to the Death of Poetry."
The Associated Press:
A Stanford University professor on Monday sued James Joyce's estate for refusing to give her permission to use copyrighted material about the "Ulysses" author and his daughter on her Web site.
...[Professor Carol] Shloss accused Joyce's grandson