February 27, 2009
NPR is running my review of Rafael Reig's A Pretty Face.
Every woman knows what "a pretty face" means. It's right up there with "great personality" in the backhanded compliment department. "Great personality" means "ugly," and "pretty face" means the woman is, as Maria Dolores calls herself, "a fatty." Maria, the heroine of Spanish writer Rafael Reig's A Pretty Face, is also recently deceased. The story follows her ghost as she wanders around Madrid trying to solve her own murder.
Maria Dolores was fun, and I kind of miss her. More dead shenanigans, please, Rafael Reig. You can read for yourself, they're also running an excerpt.
Corey Robin noticed that Jacob Heilbrunn used parts of his London Review of Books essay in his book They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neo-Cons, without attribution. He started picking apart the book and found he wasn't the only person wronged. The Nation has more.
Europa Editions -- the dears responsible for Jane Gardam, Elena Ferrante, and other wonderful books -- are profiled in the New York Times.
February 26, 2009
What's important about the poet laureate in Britain isn't whether there should be one, it's who we can get the best odds on.
On Sunday in the NYT, David Orr worried that "for the first time since the early 19th century, American poetry may be about to run out of greatness." Amy King has argued in response that "poets are making their own ways, similarly and separately, differently and communally, as multitudes and as individuals, sans a set standard of formulas and rules." Reb Livingston echoes King, noting that "I don't like the word 'great' in this context. It's been sullied by what I consider a perversion, an immature fixation, an authoritative, negative patriarchal perspective (which is by no means limited or inclusive to all men, so many women share it too). It's a static, one-sided fantasy." Meredith Hight also muses on greatness, though not always in the context of poetry: "I decided to finally check out some of Charles Bukowski’s work, after coming across his poetry inscribed onto a public restroom in Venice Beach." Also see: The Vowel Movers.)
In an essay on Stephen Spender's Jewish roots, David Aberbach argues that "Spender did practically everything a Great Literary Man can do – except what his co-editor on Horizon, Cyril Connolly, described as the only function of a writer: to produce a masterpiece."
The Harry Ransom Center at Texas has launched a new exhibit devoted to "The Persian Sensation: 'The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám' in the West." It includes a *very* cool online version of five editions of Edward FitzGerald's version of the poem.
Nothing to do with poetry, but I love BookNinja's line that "Quotes are like condoms for stupid language."
Paul Muldoon on "The Physics of Poetry": "The word 'poem,' in fact, means nothing more than 'a construct,'" he explained, "a piece of structural engineering that is subject to the laws of physics." Relatedly, Sierra Nelson muses on spring, squids, and love.
Geof Huth unpacks the 8 parts of speech, and discovers two extra.
Susanna M. Smith reads Walter Benjamin's Archive.
When, in 1984, The Times asked Samuel Beckett for his New Year’s resolutions and hopes, he responded with a brief telegram: “resolutions colon zero stop period hopes colon zero stop beckett”.
The Telegraph's love for Samuel Beckett's collection of letters is contagious.
Jedediah Berry creates a soundtrack for his novel The Manual of Detection at Largehearted Boy.
I am very sorry to be linking to something even barely related to the octuplets story, but Liza Mundy wrote a very smart book about fertility technology, Everything Conceivable, and she does talk about other things in this interview that are not octuplet-related.
Richard Nash will step down as editorial director of Soft Skull Press and executive editor of parent company Counterpoint March 10. Nash joined Counterpoint approximately 18 months ago when he sold the financially struggling but highly regarded Soft Skull to Charlie Winton’s Counterpoint.
It's a question that gets asked a lot, and I'm not a quick enough thinker to come up with a lie: "What have you been reading?" Last week it was asked with a camera rolling, just hours after I turned in my latest Smart Set column, and the most pretentious answer came out of my mouth: "Dominique Janicaud, William James, Kierkegaard, and Simone Weil... Oh, and an issue of Entertainment Weekly." The list was only so long because the Janicaud book -- A Beginner's Guide to Philosophy -- was driving me mad. I had to remind myself that I actually do find philosophy interesting and immediate. The column is here:
When you’re 30 and your brain is preoccupied with mundane things like making money, cooking dinner, and doing the dishes, sitting down with Plato to contemplate the nature of love just for kicks feels a little absurd. I dropped out of college before I could get around to taking a philosophy course — abstract concepts never appealed to me very much. It’s easy to dismiss philosophy as this lofty, disconnected thing that has nothing to do with your daily life. But take a personal crisis — a shake-up of her rock solid atheist belief system, say — throw in a relationship that functioned like a particle accelerator, and watch the girl run into the comforting arms of Spinoza, James, Weil, and assorted others.
The Orwell Prize nominees are with us, and they are many: there's the Journalism prize, the Book prize, and the Blog prize. The latter is a bit new, and led to the creation of the Orwell Diaries blog, which is currently rocking some gardening and hen updates.
'When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page’, wrote George Orwell, in his 1939 essay on Charles Dickens. Seeing the faces in these very serious journo head shots makes me yearn for the whimsical facial hair as sported by Mr. Dickens and Mr. Orwell.
February 25, 2009
Tokyo Year Zero writer David Peace once thought his father might be the Yorkshire Ripper, and he manages to say it nonchalantly in this interview in the Guardian.
Then further back there was all the Ripper stuff. I remember saying in an interview once that I used to worry that my dad was the Yorkshire Ripper. That is true, but only in the way that everybody feared their father was.
Oh yes, of course, dear.
In conclusion I feel that my blog is one of the most powerful tools in my lifelong goal of achieving steady cash flow without a real job.
Tao Lin talks about the financial life of a writer, over at The Urban Elitist.
February 24, 2009
The Young Lions - and I am manfully avoiding making any 'pride' cracks here - are the five young writers fighting* it out for a $10,000 prize and the priceless opportunity to get felt up** by Ethan Hawke.
Jon Fasman for The Unpossessed City
Rivka Galchen for Atmospheric Disturbances
Sana Krasikov for One More Year
Zachary Mason for The Lost Books of the Odyssey
Salvatore Scibona for The End
*Bookslut does not condone violence, and any fighting will be done in a metaphorical manner by the fierce qualities of the lion's books in the judge's minds, and not with sharpened New York City Library pencils in a car park.
**Bookslut also wishes to clarify that by 'felt up' the writer indicates that Mr. Hawke will be 'feeling' the literary quality of the winning book 'up' in high regard.
The Atlantic Book Awards (nup, me neither) has split in twain following a barney between the organizers:
Details of the split are sketchy, but it appears to be due to a disagreement between the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, which organized the Atlantic Book Awards, and assorted members of the local publishing community. According to Writers’ Federation executive director Jane Buss, some of her industry colleagues wanted to mount a larger scale awards show than in the past. “And we weren’t that interested in it,” she says. “We wanted to carry on with the awards, but we didn’t want to have writers sit in an auditorium for two hours to learn that they’d won a prize. We aren’t into writing as a competitive sport.”
If Warwick Prize bots ever get around to updating their website to indicate that The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism has won, I hope that they upload a video of Naomi Klein doing the 'I told you so!' dance.
Preferably drunkenly filmed on a cellphone by China Mielville.
If you can stand another death of publishing article, the London Review of Books offers its version.
Our own Barbara J. King writes about the pressure for science writers to disclose their religious beliefs.
The key to achieving science literacy in this country, and to calming the ongoing hysteria of the religion-science debates, surely isn’t to dress science in faith and send our staunchest believers—and unbelievers—to the frontlines.
People! I know it's tough getting a little publicity for your book these days, but this whole pretending you're book has been banned, or pretending that your book gets you thrown in jail is just pathetic! Pull it together! Have a little dignity! Fuck.
George Szirtes translated my beloved Metropole (he also translated Sandor Marai's Esther's Inheritance, reviewed by Paul Morton in this month's issue), so I already liked him. I recently discovered he also has a fantastic blog, and in his latest post he talks about which podcasts are good to listen to when you have insomnia:
Maybe 1.23 am is not the best time to be have Helen Vendler in bed with you, but I listened, and listened hard, in that haunted half-awake state, and I kept thinking: Vendler, you are a fool. Vendler you are a pretentious ass. Vendler you are making this up. Vendler, you must know that is perfectly ridiculous.
Now I have a crush.
I am going to go ahead and blame my weekend "drink a bottle of wine at a friend's house, then go home and Google ex-boyfriends" incident on the novel I'm reading about a woman's obsession with her ex. (I tried to blame Venus in retrograde, but turns out Venus is not in retrograde.) The book is The Confessions of Noa Weber, and it's fucking fantastic, but I'm going to freeze my cable modem in a block of ice before I pick it up again to finish it.
February 23, 2009
Bookslut's Indie Heartthrob Interview Series
A weekly interview series where someone involved in the small press (be it writer, editor, slush slave, etc.) is thrown into the spotlight, grilled over the state of the independents and sundry other items, and quickly made to return from whence they came after having graced us all with their presence.
This week: Leah Schnelbach
They tend to filter into my spam box, but one day a few weeks ago I opened a PW Daily newsletter and learned that Karin Taylor (an Indie Heartthrob alum) had been let go in the restructuring of the NYCIP (New York Center for Independent Publishing, formerly the Small Press Center). Upon hearing this, I decided to get in touch with Leah Schnelbach, the NYCIP's new interim executive director, to discuss the situation. Small Press Month is only a week away, after all….
How has the NYCIP been affected by the economy?
The economy has certainly had an impact on NYCIP and on our parent company, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, as I think it has on all non-profits. We have undergone corporate restructuring to address these economic factors, to move forward with our programming, and to honor our commitment to the hundreds/thousands (?) of members we serve.
What does your new title entail?
As Interim Director I am working on our signature programs and special events, assuring our members continue to enjoy their full benefits, and serving as a liaison to the board, the General Society, our members and the community. Looking forward, I’d like to develop more educational programs, both for our members and for the general public, and institute more innovative events like Splat!, our graphic novel symposium. I want the CIP to continue to be an advocate for free speech and indie presses.
What is the current structure of the NYCIP? How is it being run now as opposed to two years ago?
Like many non-profits, we are evaluating how to function most efficiently and will combine job functions. We have eliminated the Assistant Director position and will consider hiring freelancers on an as-needed basis as support staff. As always, we will continue to offer internship positions and have been fortunate to have a wonderful team of passionate and committed volunteers that help provide support.
What does this mean for small and independent publishers in the long term?
Our goal is to continue to offer the same benefits that we always have, and to increase our educational programming to make sure that indie publishers are able to utilize new technology like ebooks and social media to promote their work. We will continue in our mission to serve small and independent publishers despite the current economic situation.
How are NYCIP programs being affected?
The programs are all going forward as scheduled. Small Press Month will be bigger than ever this year – we have a full month of events planned – at least one event per day! The full calendar is up at smallpressmonth.org. The Writers’ Conference programming is nearly finalized as well – and it looks fantastic. We are proud to have Wally Lamb and Alan Zweibel as keynote speakers, as well as professionals from all different aspects of the publishing world. The full schedule will be up soon at writersconferencenyc.org. While the economy remains a concern, we offer one of the highest quality writing conferences in existence, and we are extremely optimistic for its success.
Jacob Silverman talks about the creepiness of discussing an author's looks in reviews, going back to the cattiness over Marisha Pessl's author photo and gets into Janet Maislin's recent review of Miriam Gershow's The Local News.
When I first read this passage, I had to stop and reread it several times to see if Maslin really wrote what I thought she did. Shockingly, Maslin is saying that because college students’ online ratings of Gershow judge her unpopular and “not hot,” that information is somehow both relevant for a book review and credible. For her research, Maslin presumably turned to Miriam Gershow’s profile on RateMyProfessors.com, a service which allows students to rate professors in several categories, all based on standard academic metrics—difficulty, teaching ability, helpfulness, etc.—with the addition of one more: “appearance,” employing a simple “hot or not” rating that the site explains is done “just for fun.”
The Casual Optimist has a picture of "the most badass cover ever." Of course it's an old Penguin paperback.
Poets and Writers has a conversation with "four young editors," including Soft Skull's Richard Nash. It's very long! And it is mostly things you have read before, but it occasionally gets interesting.
Nash: One of the people in the article was quoted as saying that the twentieth century was a problem of supply, and the twenty-first century is a problem of demand. I think that describes a lot about the book publishing business right now. For a long time, racism, classism, and sexism prevented a whole array of talent from having access to a level of educational privilege that would allow them to write full-length books. That hasn't been completely solved, but it's been radically improved since the 1950s. Far more persons of color, women, and people below the upper class have access now. An entire agent community has arisen to represent them. But finding the audience is the big problem. I guess I'm imposing my own question on the question you asked—"Is it too hard to get published?"—and I think we all may have heard a slightly different version of that question. The version of it that I heard was, "Are there too many books?" I personally don't feel that way. And I get a lot of submissions at Soft Skull. I get about 150 a week. And it's hell having so much supply.
Coralie Bickford-Smith is interviewed at Caustic Cover Critic about her design work for Penguin. She's overseen some of the most interesting work to come out of there lately.
Dirty, dirty James Joyce is haunting Kate Beaton.
That book, The Gulf Between Us that was supposedly banned at the Dubai book festival for the gayness of it all? That caused Margaret Atwood to cancel her appearance in solidarity? Malarky. Atwood explains it wasn't the gayness, but the quality of the book that got it rejected, and not banned. It looks like it was mostly a publicity scam.
All that was last September. The little golden time bomb of a refusal-with-reasons was carefully guarded by someone - who? - until now, when it was hurled into the press to great publicity effect, easily stampeding people like me. Aren't we all too ready to believe that This Is Exactly What Those People Do? To arms, Anti-Censorship Woman!
February 20, 2009
The Believer Book Awards shortlist is out, and fresh flowers and kisses go to whoever wrote the copy for sounding so damn enthusiastic about these titles. Read it here.
The list in total:
Black Flies by Shannon Burke
Tampico by Toby Olson
Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins
Girl Factory by Jim Krusoe
Souls of Wind by John Olson
The Most of It by Mary Ruefle
All Shall Be Well; And All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well by Tod Wodicka
The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt
Who doesn't love a good Ford Madox Ford pun?
Is Lost still causing runs on the books in the show? I'm too lazy to see how Ulysses is tracking on Amazon pre- and post-Wednesday's episode. (Ulysses as airplane reading though? Sure, time travel, plane crashes brought on by a dead man's shoes, that's all fine. But there you lose me.) Doc Jensen provides some context, and pardon my geeky fan-ness:
Yes, Odysseus/Ulysses was a very crafty guy. But our old friend Dante — the Italian poet whose notion of Purgatory has spawned many a Lost theory — took a very dim view of this ''hero:'' He saw the guy's mad pursuit of adventure at the expense of his family and marriage as a gross perversion of human reason and therefore a bad influence on impressionable minds. As a result, Dante assigned cunning/ambitious Odysseus/Ulysses to the eighth circle of his Inferno, one reserved for — get this — ''false counselors.''
Baboon Metaphysics. Curbside Consultation of the Colon. The Large Sieve and Its Applications. The judges for the Diagram Prize for the oddest title of a book have a lot to discuss this year.
Read this today: Fanny Howe's "My Father Was White but Not Quite."
Disadvantages of being colonized by the British? Too long to go into here. Advantages? Drawers full of collectible tea towels, Coronation Street, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. It's worth £10,000, which used to be a substantial amount of dosh and now is just about enough to buy you a stale scone wrapped in a nylon Union Jack.
This year's Best Book shortlist is a bit of a stale scone itself, but the ace selection for the First Novel award makes up for it.
The Best Book shortlist is:
Chris Cleave - The Other Hand (known in the US as Little Bee)
Shashi Deshpande - The Country of Deceit
Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency
Jhumpa Lahiri - Unaccustomed Earth
David Lodge - Deaf Sentence
Salman Rushdie - The Enchantress of Florence
The shortlist for the £5,000 Best First Book Award is:
Sulaiman Addonia - The Consequences of Love
Daniel Clay - Broken
Joe Dunthorne - Submarine
Mohammed Hanif - A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Murzban F. Shroff - Breathless in Bombay
Prize-winning poet Ruth Padel is emerging as the frontrunner for the prestigious post of Oxford University professor of poetry, after poet laureate Andrew Motion ruled himself out of competition for a post he said was "in desperate need of an overhaul".
The position, established in 1708, is the most important in poetry after the laureateship, and sees the incumbent – who is elected by Oxford graduates – giving three lectures a year. The current holder is literary critic Christopher Ricks, who steps down in May, with such luminaries as Seamus Heaney, WH Auden and Matthew Arnold having filled the role in the past.
The Get Lit Players are a troupe of teenagers in LA that perform original, contemporary, and classical poems to promote literacy. There shows sound fun, though I'm not sure about this: Jafar compared a line from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Children's Hour" to a line from Talib Kweli in which the hip-hop artist dotes on his son. "It's the exact same thing," Jafar told the students. "Just in different language." What have the kids done to deserve Longfellow?
Mark Doty has posted his talk, more or less about Brenda Hillman from last week's AWP conference: We -- and here I mean myself and a dozen friends -- lived in a more Balkanized esthetic culture than would quite be possible today. My students have friends in and out of writing programs all over the country; they read blogs and poetry websites; they are very savvy as to the platforms and intentions and principles of all sorts of poetic projects. We were more bound by geography, and by the influence of strong teachers who had built poetry cultures at particular schools. As a result, our reading -- and our poetic practice -- was far less eclectic.
Everyone knows the sublime and the beautiful. But what about the cute? It's just a step further down the continuum that led us from the sublime to the beautiful: if the sublime is superior to us, and the beautiful our relative equal, the cute is in a meaningful sense inferior to us. It is no threat to us, like the sublime: in fact, it calls out for our protection. Not awe so much as "awwww!"
Katie Ford talks about her recent book of poems about Katrina, Colosseum (Via Marie Mutsuki Mockett).
Mike Chasar reads the Olympic Team poem in the wake of Michael Phelps: Kellogg's and Phelps share a predilection for, and particular expertise with, the preposition and prefix "in." Kellogg's is occupied with ingesting. Phelps—the swimmer and recreational user, natch—is in the business of inhaling.
Amiri Baraka reads Charles Olson's "The Hustings" on YouTube (via Dale Smith).
February 19, 2009
Reason #5897 why you should not date poets: the topics of conversation.
As far as dating went, I operated under a tit-for-tat divulgence basis: you talk ball cancer, I'll explain my thirty-day long period.
Sasha Watson talks to Marc-Antoine Mathieu about his comic about the Louvre, The Museum Vaults at Arthur Magazine.
There is humor in this approach. In looking, not at the works of art but at “what’s in the wings, and what surrounds them: the frames, the guards, the archives… the flip side of the painting,” Mathieu finds a lot to laugh at. There are the guards who learn in class the exact tone of the “Tsssk,” that they use when a patron gets too close to a work of art and there are the restorers who accidentally add too large a “schnoz” to a broken classical statue.
But there is also a deeper reflection at the heart of Vaults, in which art itself is seen as infinite. “A work of art is a world,” says Mathieu. “The museum, a world of worlds, a morsel of the infinite.”
I had dinner at Alinea last night (watch my interview with chef Grant Achatz here), and I lost the will to live around course #15. In the best possible way, of course. If I slip into a coma in the middle of a blog post today, I'm sorry.
February 18, 2009
If there is an author you find so reprehensible that you have to choke back vomit when his new book arrives on your doorstep, is it best to write about it, or ignore it entirely because obviously the douchebag feeds off the anger he inspires? Maybe I'll have a cleansing ritual, bury the book in salted earth and burn some sage in my apartment.
I have been grumbling and hating and kicking Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace lately, while also being unable to leave it on the shelf. (I also had a very inarticulate conversation about her yesterday -- at least my half of it was very inarticulate -- because my frustration with her takes over.) This article by Patrick Giles, "Looking for Simone: Saint of Estrangement," about his visit to her grave, is surpisingly helping me let some of it go.
I knelt again, my mind clear of nerves and embarrassment, surprised by the flat grave--no tall marker, no flights of angels in stone--and the silence. A few flowers lay withering by the headstone, near a damp envelope containing a note written in ink sent running by the rain. Apparently many make this pilgrimage. But why was I there? I have returned to Weil's work at crucial junctures in my life. I've tried to understand her words, her work with students and workers, her rejection of the modish radicalisms of her time, and her search for answers, as perhaps the modern example of a spiritual conscience refusing to be seduced by the common solutions of her day, or frightened from answering its crises.
Camellia Nieh is interviewed about translating Osamu Tezuka’s manga for Vertical at Advanced Media Network.
I go back and forth on whether I like Daphne Merkin, but after this from Best Sex Writing 2009 I'm back to "like":
Penises, it appears, deserve to be worshiped or envied (or, if need be, encouraged) but they don’t deserve to be nattered on about. This is still sacred male territory and women trespass at their own literary peril. The potholes are everywhere you look, waiting to trip you up into porn or parody, or perhaps the high gutter baby talk of D. H. Lawrence.
Murakami on his recent decision to go to Israel to accept the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society:
"I asked myself -- is visiting Israel the proper thing to do? Will I be supporting one side...
"If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg."
In my head, I collect faux-blurbs for myself. On my nonexistent book there are blurbs like, "Jessa Crispin is a foxy babe" -- so said a particular feminist writer in conversation. Also, "Jessa Crispin has fantastic handwriting," said by a Hot Young Writer when I had to leave him a note when we missed each other at a scheduled interview. That last one I'm particularly fond of. I love writing things by hand, and I often copy out by hand passages from books and magazines when completely stressed out.
Which is why I'm sad about Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting. No one writes anything by hand anymore, and people are less and less able to read cursive handwriting. Author Kitty Burns Florey was on NPR this weekend to discuss what in my mind is a tragedy.
February 17, 2009
First it was zombies. Now someone is adding Predator to Pride and Prejudice. Oh, where were you people ten years ago, when my book group was insisting Jane Austen is not the biggest bore ever and we must read her books over and over. I could have used a good alien invasion to keep me awake.
A thousand different designs for Fitzgerald's Benjamin Button, not a single one inspired.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science was here in Chicago over the weekend. (Also, I'm told, AWP.) Hoorah for that, because it meant I got to have brunch with Bookslut contributor, author of Evolving God, and friend Barbara J. King. She spoke on "Ape Emotion and the Evolution of Human Behavior."
(Okay, I knew about AWP. But not even an offer of a secret identity and personal tour by Daniel Nester could get me there.)
The novelist, whose book The Gulf Between Us is set in the Middle East, was initially welcomed to the event by the organisers.
But when they realised the novel featured a homosexual sheikh who had an English boyfriend and was set in the backdrop to the Iraq war, the book was withdrawn.
Are they very sure the book is not being rejected because of the horrible pun in the title?
Dick Cavett remembers the episode he had both John Cheever and John Updike as guests, and there's video from the episode as well.
Xu Lai, the writer behind Pro-State in Flames, was speaking at the One Way Street bookshop in Beijing on Saturday afternoon when he was attacked, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported. He had been speaking for a couple of hours and was answering questions when a fracas erupted.
His wife said that two men forced Xu Lai into the men’s toilet. She chased after them and found that one was holding a vegetable knife and the other a dagger. The men escaped, leaving Xu Lai on the ground with a cut to his stomach.
February 16, 2009
February 13, 2009
The Telegraph has the backstory for the first English translation of Stefan Zweig's The Post Office Girl.
I don't know what this video in French is saying -- something about how people leave flowers and gifts on Marguerite Duras's grave -- but I could watch that clip of Duras smoking over and over again.
Rachel Cooke interviews Iain Sinclair.
His publisher is marketing Hackney as "the book they tried to ban", a claim based on the fact that the local council does not want its author speaking in any of its libraries because he is "anti-Olympics". At this, Sinclair laughs gleefully. "So wonderful for me. So absurd and crazy, a metaphor for insanity, in fact, but the best piece of publicity. I was asked to go along to Stoke Newington library to speak to 20 people: old hippies and local history buffs, probably. But I'd written an anti-Olympics piece in the London Review of Books, and so the Hackney thought police decided: no, we can't have this person in our library. They lied about this all the way down the line, insisting it was nothing to do with the Olympics but that they can't have 'controversial' topics discussed in libraries. Eventually someone from the Hackney Citizen used the Freedom of Information Act to get the transcript [of what was said in a meeting] and, sure enough, it came directly from the Mayor, Jules Pipe, saying that this person is anti-Olympics, and he doesn't go into our libraries.
The London Review of Books piece, which is really very good, is available online.
(I forgot to say Happy Darwin Day yesterday. So, happy Friday the 13th instead, I suppose. Did you know Friday the 13th used to be celebrated by all day sex? Before it became a cursed, unlucky day? So truly, have a good Friday the 13th.)
Jesse Ball provides a soundtrack to his new book The Way Through Doors at Largehearted Boy's blog. Read Bookslut's interview with Ball here.
McGraw-Hill Cos., the owner of the Standard & Poor’s credit-rating service, won’t be publishing a book on the financial crisis that the author says addresses S&P’s role in the markets’ plunge.
Barry Ritholtz, chief executive officer of equity-research firm FusionIQ, said he withdrew the manuscript from the New York publisher and plans to return his advance after the company tried to edit passages critical of S&P. McGraw-Hill says it wasn’t initially able to verify some of the book’s claims.
February 12, 2009
The Telegraph has an excerpt from one of my favorite books of last year, Michael Greenberg's Hurry Down Sunshine.
Why are we so fascinated with US literature? I have begun to wonder why I have quite so many books by American authors
Dude, I can't help you. I'm an American and even I don't have this problem.
NZ on Screen has posted a 1975 documentary about Janet Frame, and it includes extensive interviews with her.
Will a school's decision to ban a book reach the Supreme Court?
Schools are supposed to introduce children to a variety of ideas and viewpoints, but the Miami-Dade School Board decided a few years ago to put one viewpoint off limits. It banned the children’s book “A Visit to Cuba” from its school libraries because it said the book offers too positive a portrait of life under the Castro regime. That was bad enough, but then last week, a federal appeals court upheld the ban.
Twice in the past year I was minding my own business, and a man starts talking to me about Jared Diamond. See, he just realized Diamond is right -- it's not that the man's life is shitty because he's in the wrong job or his wife hates him because he's sitting in a bar talking to some strange woman instead of at home, helping with the children. No, it's that mankind never should have evolved into an agriculture-supported civilization. We are meant to be hunters and gatherers. Twice. Luckily, I found the solution to this problem (it probably works for a variety of other problems as well). Lean in and say very calmly, "I am very close to punching you in the face right now." Conversation over.
But this "agriculture was a mistake!" thing showed up in Timothy Clack's Ancestral Roots, too. Also weird, he had a section that could be boiled down to "Hooray for Housewives!" Luckily, I had some Sarah Blaffer Hrdy to contradict him in my new Smart Set column.
In her 2000 book Mother Nature, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy examined the maternal instinct, fathering, and the evolutionary explanation for babies’ ridiculous cuteness and fatness. (In short, “Look, I’m adorable and healthy! Do not throw me in the fire or leave me in the forest!”) In her new book Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, she starts with the question, Why are humans able to sit in the coach section of an airplane for hours and hours without fatalities? No other primates would be so polite and considerate, especially when someone rolls carry-on luggage across their toes. “What if I were traveling with a planeload of chimpanzees? Any one of us would be lucky to disembark with all ten fingers and toes still attached… Even among the famously peaceful bonobos… veterinarians sometimes have to be called in following altercations to stitch back on a scrotum or penis,” Hrdy writes.
February 11, 2009
For some reason, NPR has a new review of Jonathan Coe's fantastic 1999 novel, House of Sleep.
Maud Newton found someone to translate an interview with Simone de Beauvoir.
Books are never enough. It can have echoes in revolts, in movements of public opinion, so it seems to be efficacious, but in itself The Second Sex didn’t change anything about the female condition. It only helped certain women to become aware of their condition.
Glen Duncan, in his press materials for A Day and a Night and a Day:
“For better or worse the world—my world, yours, right now in 2008, is loud. Guantánamo is loud, Abu Ghraib is loud, Iraq is loud, Islamism is loud, torture is loud. There may well be a time for another novel about a disintegrating marriage in suburbia, but it isn’t now.”
Sam Anderson reviews the loud novel at New York Magazine.
Collins, the confused stepchild of HarperCollins, grandson and last avatar of the venerable publisher William Collins, and relic of a more optimistic time in America — the year 2004 — died today at the age of 4. The causes were multiple: neglect, mixed messages, gluttony, and an epidemic of stagnation that has decimated American book publishing.
Tonight's reading series (7:30 PM, Hopleaf) with Idra Novey, Brandi Homan, and Hilda Raz is profiled at Chicago Centerstage, along with commentary by my lovely assistant Caroline. She's been running the series for a while now, and hosting them as well, which I am very grateful for. Everyone wave to Caroline, she works very hard.
A private bar will offer a selection of Belgium brews and wines to take the edge off, but reservation has never been much of a problem for the Bookslut crew.
Heh.
February 10, 2009
Lawrence Weschler is interviewed at the Rumpus.
I write books, but what really turns me on, what really captivates my thinking, is magazine culture. That’s a difficult thing, because magazine culture is in big trouble. If I write a book, it gets read by ten thousand people, if I write a magazine article it gets exposed to a hundred thousand people who are reading about something they didn’t know they had any interest in. The kind of writing I love comes at things from the side, and it relishes narrative itself. You find yourself reading, and about halfway along, you realize that what you’re reading is the most important thing in the world.
Exactly how long the prostitute, unbeknownst to my father, stayed at our house and slept in my bed is hard to gauge.
Maud Newton contributes to Granta's Fathers issue.
With the film adaptation of Bernard Schlink's The Reader nominated for an Oscar, and the Holocaust memoir hoaxes of late, it's worth re-reading this Cynthia Ozick essay, "The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination" from 1999.
Gizmodo on the new Kindle: Eh.
(Also: A new competitor for Kindle.)
Will Sheff of the band Okkervil River reads Tatyana Tolstaya's story of the same name (it's one of my favorite short stories, too). The audio is at the Daytrotter website.
February 09, 2009
Bookslut's Indie Heartthrob Interview Series
A weekly interview series where someone involved in the small press (be it writer, editor, slush slave, etc.) is thrown into the spotlight, grilled over the state of the independents and sundry other items, and quickly made to return from whence they came after having graced us all with their presence.
This week: Howard Cruse
A few years back I picked up a copy of Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby. I was immediately drawn in by Cruse's intricate narrative and visual mastery. As a pioneer in gay comics, Cruse edited the 1970s anthology Gay Comix before moving on to write Barefootz and Wendel, the latter having appeared in The Advocate in the 1980s. He wrapped up his work on Wendel when commissioned by a subsidiary of DC Comics to create his opus Stuck Rubber Baby, which received reviews from the likes of Booklist reading, "Maus, move over; as a great graphic novel, you've met your match."
I spoke to Cruse over the weekend, hoping to learn more about the history of underground gay comics (there's a dearth of information; perhaps something should be done about that). While you learn what I learned, you might want to check out his rendition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
When did you first start doing comics?
If you're talking about my first efforts as a kid with pencils and crayons, I can trace the impulse back to age six. My first comic strip to actually be published was a very Little Lulu-influenced series called Calvin that ran in our local weekly newspaper down in Alabama when I was thirteen. I was twenty-five when the first version of Barefootz began running in the University of Alabama Crimson-White and twenty-six when I launched my daily panel Tops & Button, which ran in the Birmingham Post-Herald for two years beginning in 1971. My first appearance in an underground comic book came in 1972, and six years after that marks the point when I was able to become a full-time professional cartoonist. So you see, there were all of these different benchmarks along the way, and I'm not sure which one of them your question would apply to.
What kinds of stories did you write towards the beginning?
I was drawn to satire from the first. It's that old MAD magazine influence, with additional input from strips like Li'l Abner, Pogo, and Barnaby. I drifted from comics into theatre for several years when superheroes took over, but satire came roaring back when underground comix arrived. My experiences with psychedelic drugs in the late-'60s and early-'70s led me to fold what I'd call "cosmic allegory" into my satire, which is what led to Barefootz, my first sustained comix series to get published nationally.
In the 70's you began editing Gay Comix. How did you become involved?
Denis Kitchen, who had published almost all of my early comic book work, felt that taboo-breaking was fast running its course by the late-'70s as a reason for undergrounds to exist and that social commentary would have more staying power at a time when the hippie counterculture was losing steam. By then the post-Stonewall Gay Liberation Movement was a decade old and it made sense for gay cartoonists to have a spot in the Kitchen Sink Comix lineup. Denis had known I was gay for a couple of years and he asked me if I would like to edit the series and, of course, contribute stories to it. It seemed a good way to help create something worthwhile while completing my own process of coming out professionally, which I had been preparing myself to do for several years.
What was the mission statement for the magazine?
To use the freedom that came with underground comix to get real about the gay and lesbian experience, basically.
Before Gay Comix there had been some substantial lesbian comix like Mary Wings' Dyke Shorts and Roberta Gregory's Dynamite Damsels, but the pickings were slim when it came to comix by gay males. Larry Fuller had already put out several issues of the anthology title Gay Heartthrobs by then, of course. These qualified as groundbreaking simply by broaching the subject at all, the counterculture being an arena that was heavy on machismo and homophobia. But Larry's taste ran to campiness and I knew that there was much more in the gay experience to explore than that.
So our goal with Gay Comix was to encourage both lesbians and gay male cartoonists to draw stories that reflected the kinds of lives that real-life gays were actually living. I knew we were getting off on a good footing when both Mary Wings and Roberta Gregory agreed to be contributors. Then Lee Marrs, whose Pudge, Girl Blimp series was included lesbian episodes in Pudge's adventures as a flower child, joined in. Then Rand Holmes, whose Harold Hedd comics had a huge following in the underground, offered to do cover art. The readiness of all of these diverse cartoonists to join in, augmented by newcomers who were brave enough to come out of the closet in print, told me that the time was right for Gay Comix. Whether they were already well known or just getting started, LGBT cartoonists were itching to make our presence felt in the medium we loved.
What do you remember most fondly about Gay Comix?
The friendships that grew out of giving a platform to a new generation of exciting cartoonists who cared about the same things I cared about.
What were the seeds of inspiration for Stuck Rubber Baby? Where did the story come from?
Creators who had put in a lot of years, as I had done by 1990, drawing comic strips or comic book stories that were only a few pages long, couldn't help wondering what they would do if the opportunity arose to write and draw something really long. It seemed economically impossible in my case, so I hadn’t given much thought to it, but when DC Comics encouraged me to submit a graphic novel proposal to the company’s experimental imprint, Piranha Press (which later became Paradox Press), I was forced to ask myself that question more seriously. And I thought about an incident far back in my past that I might be able to build a hefty story around.
When I was in college, still trying to convince myself that I could be heterosexual if I worked at it, my girlfriend and I inadvertently conceived a child. This crisis brought my conflicts about sexual orientation to a head. How things played out in the wake of that moral dilemma involved emotions that left a permanent mark on me. This seemed promising as an area of my life history that I could fictionalize in an interesting way.
Of course, it was also the kind of story that could easily turn into a soap opera or become just another in the long list of gay "coming out novels" that were seeing print around then in the regular book-publishing world. To really get my juices flowing, any novel I wrote would need to be about more than just a couple of teenagers who got themselves in trouble. But once I began thinking about the times I was living through while that was going on in my personal life, it hit me that this would be a perfect opportunity to revisit the swirl of issues surrounding the Civil Rights Movement, which had Birmingham in turmoil during my late high school and early college years. This could be my chance to talk as honestly as I could about racism, a subject that had always seemed too complicated to tackle with any subtlety in the brief, two-page Wendel episodes I had spent the 1980's drawing. I was itching to register my anger about the cynicism that had become rampant in America while Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush were setting the national tone. I wanted to remind people that true heroism could be shown by ordinary people, and that not everything in life could be boiled down to getting rich and using wedge issues to amass power.
Like Stuck Rubber Baby’s Toland Polk, I spent a lot of my time with my head up my ass during the early ‘60s, at least when it came to political activism. I was seriously self-absorbed. My sympathies were on the right side during the fight against segregation, just as Toland Polk's are in the book, but my daily life was all about making art, not putting myself on the line for any cause. Still, even though I was not one of those who acted courageously when Birmingham was erupting in riots, I saw enough to have my perspective gradually expanded. My girlfriend and her family opened my eyes a lot, just as Ginger and Sammy and Harland and Anna Dellyne Pepper open Toland’s eyes. Watching Birmingham change in the wake of its civil rights traumas proved how potent street activism could be. In the long run this inspired me to make whatever contributions I could to the Gay Liberation Movement when it began gaining strength.
My biggest worry when I thought abstractly about spending years drawing a story two hundred pages long was that I would get bored somewhere in the middle of the process. But I had so many pent-up feelings about the life-changing events I've just described that I knew building a novel around them was unlikely to be a boring experience. Really, really challenging, yes—but never boring!
Booklist referred to the book as a match for Maus. What are your thoughts on the comparison?
My first thought when I saw that was, "Oh, God. Art Spiegelman is really gonna be pissed!" But Maus is a great achievement, for sure, and I'm totally complimented that Booklist felt like drawing a comparison. The complexity of characters and thematic ambition in Maus were definite inspirations to me.
Describe for me your writing process. How did your approach differ in Stuck Rubber Baby as opposed to, say, your strip Wendel?
Wendel reflected through a largely humorous prism the real-world lives that gay people like me were living during the 1980s, which is when I was drawing new episodes every two weeks for publication in The Advocate. In other words, the Wendel characters were living in the same world as The Advocate's readers, so I was making the series up as I went along based on what I saw happening in the culture. With Stuck Rubber Baby, on the other hand, I spent months mapping out the story arc from beginning to end before I drew the first panel. My goal was to create an honest-to-god novel, whereas Wendel was a serial in which storylines could and did shift drastically based on what was happening in the news.
What would you say were your greatest influences for getting involved in comics?
There were loads of good kids’ comic books around at the time I was just learning to read. You couldn't go to a drug store without running into spin-racks full of them. This was before the big Marvel wave when superheroes totally took over. Dell Comics were dominant, with DC Comics and Archie Comics close behind. E.C. was putting out its horror line, of course, but my parents did everything they could to keep those out of [my] hands—which didn’t stop me from poring over horror comics that got brought to summer camp.
I loved the variety of comics that were available. There were humor comics and cowboy comics and Disney comics and jungle comics and tie-ins to every movie, comedy, and TV sitcom you could name. There were superheroes, too, of course. I was always happy to find a new issue of Batman or Superman. But superheroes were just one genre among many, and since their stories began and ended in a single comic, you didn’t have to build your life around never missing an issue.
And there were the daily newspaper comics, too. I studied all of them constantly and practiced drawing all the characters. I was reading books and listening to radio dramas and imagining adventures starring my set of hand puppets. Making up stories came naturally to me, and the fact that I could draw some of them in comic book form added to the fun.
My original ambition, once it hit me that I wasn’t always going to be a kid, was to grow up and draw a newspaper strip. But as I got older I became aware of how hard it was to get syndicated and how many rules the newspapers made you follow. Later on, though, underground comix came along. In undergrounds there weren't any rules, and you had much more room for drawing than you did in a newspaper strip. That's when my interest in the comics form got reawakened.
Was there anything that specifically influenced you in each of your major works?
The period of time when I was a drama major in college and spent much more time writing and directing plays than I did cartooning left me with a real interest in exploring the psychologies of complex characters. So when comics returned after college as my main creative outlet, I brought much more of my interior emotional life to whatever I drew, and explored more grown-up themes. I did this in an allegorical way in Barefootz, letting Barefootz's apartment serve as a microcosm of the universe and the cockroaches as the chaotic masses of humanity. This worked well when the main things on my mind were questions about the nature of reality that tend to get raised when you're spending your weekends tripping on acid. But as I became more concerned about the mundane struggles of everyday life, not to mention real-world politics, I switched gears and started rooting my stuff in more realistic settings, even if I was getting my perspective across in a satirical way. Throughout it all, though, from Barefootz to Stuck Rubber Baby and things I've done since, you can see that theatre has been a major influence. When I've created characters, I've tried to explore them from the inside, not the outside, the way actors on a stage have to do if their performances are going to ring true.
What are you working on these days?
If all goes as planned after I complete my final semester of college teaching this May, I'll have more free time to experiment with new projects than I've had in a dozen years. What use I'll ultimately make of that time remains to be seen. I hope to do some short comic book pieces like the ones I used to draw for underground comix. I have some new characters milling around in my head who haven't decided yet whether they want to be in comics, a written novel, or a play. And I may collect all of the gay-related comics I've drawn since the mid-'70s into a single book collection—not counting Wendel and Stuck Rubber Baby, of course, who already have books of their own. But I could also end up doing something that hasn't even occurred to me yet. I've always been kind of restless and hard to please when it comes to deciding how to satisfy my creativity addiction.
He took with him, she wrote, "my real life, my only life, everything that is meant by my heart. I am in your keeping. And you are in mine."
Victoria Glendinning on her new book of love letters and diaries between Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, Love's Civil War.
The New York Times profiles Yu Hua and the reaction in China to his new (in English, at least) novel Brothers.
Last year an anthology of criticism titled “Pulling Yu Hua’s Teeth” charged the author of “Brothers” with several crimes: selling out to the very forces of commercialism and vulgarity anatomized in his novel; promoting a negative image of China and Chinese writers to the West; sinking into “a world of filth, chaos, stench and blackness, without the slightest scrap of dignity”; being a carpetbagging peasant who gives himself literary airs.
The Independent on the 20th anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
"It is crucial to distinguish between the effect of the fatwa on writers and on the publishing industry. The fatwa... was aimed both at Rushdie and his publishers, and therefore resulted in the death or injury of Rushdie's translators in Japan, Italy, Turkey and Norway". For Cheyette, "It is the sentencing to death of Rushdie's publishers and distributors, rather than Rushdie himself, that has had a narrowing effect".
February 06, 2009
Kansas City Pitch presents forgotten novel Killinger! as part of their "Studies in Crap" series.
The cover promises: Lord, where to start?
With "He's ruggedly virile, he's karate-quick"?
With the fact that he likes his ladies not just topless but nippleless, too?
With the tiny frogman who services his metal manhood?
Rupert Thomson has an essay at the Guardian about reuniting with his half-brother after over 20 years. (Link from Maud.)
Oliver Sacks was diagnosed with ocular melanoma, causing a blind spot and the loss of stereo vision. In the blind spot he started to experience visual hallucinations, which he explains in an interview at Wired.
[F]or some reason there's often an odd, fanciful quality [to the hallucinations.] There's often an odd emphasis on headware. Sometimes they may have a box on their heads. Some times they may have a pigeon or a vulture on their heads. They're not usually threatening, and they're usually recognized as hallucinations, they're not mistaken for reality.
There was a fine poet called Virginia Adair. She published a lot as a young woman but then became a teacher of English. But then she lost her vision and started hallucinating in her 80s and this started up her poetic voice again. And she published her first book of poems when she was 83. So she was able to use her Charles Bonnet hallucinations very creatively.... Quite a lot of her poems are about the amazing cascade of images which would rush through her mind.
Charlotte Mandel, the translator of Proust's The Lemoine Affair and the upcoming The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, is interviewed at Maitresse.
Amy Reeves profiles Bennett Cerf, the founder of Random House and publisher of Dorothy Parker, James Joyce, and Eugene O'Neill. Maybe he should have been in Outliers!
"I've always been lucky," Cerf (1898-1971) wrote in his memoir, "At Random."
His luck started with his birth into a rich New York family.
Indeed.
There is a satisfying takedown of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers in the New Republic, even if it gets unnecessarily angry at a few points. (Although, considering how many people read Gladwell and think he's brilliant, the anger might be justified.)
Gladwell's overarching thesis in Outliers is so obviously correct that it hardly merits discussion. "The people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are." Also, tomorrow is the beginning of the rest of your life. Gladwell writes as if he is the only person in the world in possession of this platitudinous wisdom. The central irony of Outliers is that, Gladwell's discomfort with the self-help genre notwithstanding, he has written a book that conforms to it perfectly. This is a motivational manual. It is larded with inspirational stories, and with interactive games to capture the reader's attention--with handy charts and portentous graphs. Its language puts one in mind of, say, Tony Robbins. (On his blog Gladwell recently referred to two speaking engagements on his book tour as "shows.") We are in guru-land here.
Zach Baron interviews Michael Robbins about his New Yorker debut, "Alien vs. Predator". Sounds like they had fun: I'm a very slow poet. I might think of a couple of good lines and put them in a poem that I'm working on that takes me--I've been working on this poem right now which is loosely based on the video for Guns N Roses's "November Rain." And I've been working on it over a month, just writing things and deleting them and trying to think of a good way to rhyme with 'Axl.' It turns out 'Paxil' was staring me in the face the whole time and I didn't realize it.
Ben Myers waxes nostalgic for the days when poets were . . . farmers: There's a great distinction between these poets, who, because their survival depends on it, have a far more intimate relationship with the land, and those who describe it while looking at it from their firesides on the other side of the window.
Tim Martin discovers an important truth: The existence of Ubuweb, PennSound, and other archives means never again having to leave your blog post bereft of multimedia poetry links.
Portland, Maine, police sell fundraising calendar . . . of their poems: Poetry has given Poisson an emotional outlet while opening her eyes to the world around her. In "The Things I Carry," a poem on the January page, Poisson writes about her feelings as she equips herself for each shift with a .45-caliber Glock, a knife, pepper spray, handcuffs, a baton and two clips of bullets.
Gary Sullivan recounts the history of Flarf, proceeding from one proclamation of the end of irony to another: The Flarf e-mail listserv, launched by half-a-dozen poets in March of 2001, was a kind of joke, or anyway a space where people who liked to tell jokes—inside jokes, about the poetry world, mostly—could hang out and dish. And write awful poetry, often parodying the kind of earnest sludge we’d all had poured into our ears at our favorite venues while dutifully waiting for the poetry to happen.
Robert Archambeau unpacks Iggy's line about being "just a modern guy" in "Lust for Life: "Lust for Life" works as minor literature in the way it reworks the meaning of what it means to be "just a modern guy." It's worth lingering a bit over what the phrase "just a modern guy" means in the song. I think the "just" (as in "only" or "merely") is important, because it really does make "modern" seem less like it means "up to date" or "of our time" and more like it means "ordinary" or "regular" or "not unusual." I mean, it's a matter of nuance.
February 05, 2009
Also, any progress made yet on an accurate translation into English of The Second Sex? I mean, no rush or anything. It’s only 55 years old.
Brock Clarke revisits two Muriel Spark novels: The Comforters and Memento Mori.
In these two sly, spectacular novels, Spark shows us what should have been obvious all along: of course art is artificial, and of course writers must be self-conscious about it, but being self-conscious is not the end of a writer’s responsibility toward her book (as one often feels in, say, John Barth’s fiction, or Raymond Federman’s, or Ronald Sukenick’s), her characters, her readers, but is simply the most efficient, most honest, most rewarding, most self-critical, most moving, most beautiful way of doing so.
You are not obligated to read John Updike.
Stephen King apparently has stopped giving a fuck. Bless him.
King compared the Mormon author to JK Rowling, saying that both authors were "speaking directly to young people". "The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can't write worth a darn. She's not very good," he told an interviewer from USA Weekend.
King also drew a comparison between Meyer and Perry Mason mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner. "He was a terrible writer, too, but he was very successful," he said, going on to criticise prolific thriller author James Patterson - "a terrible writer but he's very successful" - and fellow horror author Dean Koontz, who although he "can write like hell", is sometimes "just awful".
He did not sink so low as to say, "And what the hell is growing on top of Dean Koontz's head? We remember what you looked like, dude. You're not fooling anyone!"
While Hysterical Men sounds like a bit of a bust -- it was supposed to explain how hysteria became gendered, you know, the wandering womb and all that -- at least there is still the fantastic Mad, Bad, and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors. Her interview on BBC4 (and the one we did here at Bookslut) give a better overview.
A Stanislaus County school board banned a celebrated but controversial piece of Chicano literature from its high school classrooms this week because trustees and the superintendent believe "Bless Me, Ultima" contains too much profanity.
The Newman Crows Landing Board of Education voted 4 to 1 Monday night to strip the coming-of-age novel by Rudolfo Anaya from the sophomore required reading list at Orestimba High School. The district review of the book was prompted by a parent's complaint last year that it was "anti-Catholic" and sexually explicit.
February 04, 2009
Kitty Burns Florey on the inspiration for her new book Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting at More Intelligent Life.
I began writing books back in the late 1970s, pen in hand, notebook on my knee, typewriter at the ready to receive my completed manuscript in its various incarnations. (Somewhere in a box I have 13 typed revisions of my first novel, which probably should have been called "The Death of the Forest".) But when the computer came along and made cutting and pasting virtual instead of messy, I saw it as the compulsive reviser’s dream machine. My last eight books are children of Microsoft Word, and virtually everything I write, from a long book to a short email, is done on the computer. The only person I know whose life doesn’t revolve around the infernal machine is my artist husband, and lately even he is showing signs of e-mail addiction.
Once again, a petition fails to save the world.
Andrea Camilleri is profiled at the LA Times.
Craggy features, a bald dome and a longish fringe of white hair give the author the look of an ancient eagle. His speech and movements are jovial and deliberate. He's a chain-smoker, a habit he describes as "imbecilic."
"On the other hand, I have made it to 83," he says. "Maybe if I quit cigarettes today, I would drop dead."
I have a difficult time hearing the words "positive psychology" without wanting to vomit. I just think of a woman crying on her therapist's couch being told, "You know what you need? A hug." I had enough trouble with The How of Happiness, but now there's also Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life.
These essays do not in themselves constitute an argument that we are born to be good. At most, they demonstrate that we have the potential to be good, to do good, a statement that no one, not even Thomas Hobbes or John Calvin, would have denied. Therefore, the larger part of Keltner's work is actually evidence for the more modest version of positive psychology, even though his title and his opening chapters promise the more grandiose version.
If you need me, I'll be curled up on my couch with Cynics.
February 03, 2009
Wetlands has inspired another tirade about those dirty, dirty whores. This time in the Daily Mail. While I agree a lot of those books are bad (and Wetlands is not a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination), it all seems a little hysterical. Most people are still able to distinguish between fact and fantasy, yes?
(I filled out a survey recently for a study on female sexuality, and while "Do you think sex is fun" was not asked, there was a long page of questions about whether I had ever been raped, molested, abandoned by my father, etc. As if that would be the only reason for a woman to have sex outside of a longterm relationship. There was not a space for me to write, "Ancestral Roots says I'm more likely to experience an orgasm outside of a monogamous relationship.")
A series of books in Japan tells you your personality based on your blood type. (Better, I think, than those books that tell you which foods you should or should not eat, based on blood type.) My type, "Os are curious, generous but stubborn." And here I thought that was just my Taurus Rising.
This week's Guardian Digested Read: The Last Supper by Rachel Cusk.
At night I would be woken by unearthly groans from outside my window, inchoate monologues imperceptible to less sensitive souls. We were living in Bristol at the time and I was increasingly feeling the pain of the city's history of slavery, a subject on which I would frequently digress to my Bulgarian cleaner. I needed to escape the disenchantment.
I was also stuck for anything to write about, so a prolonged summer holiday in Italy seemed an ideal prescription.
Does anyone else hate the Guardian Writers’ Rooms series? I mean really hate it, with a visceral rage that should be better saved for something more lasting.
Yes, damn it.
I have been happily reading Timothy Clack's Ancestral Roots: Modern Living and Human Evolution, although it covers so many areas I occasionally wish some things had been expanded. Like the monkeys who went on hunger strike until all monkeys were receiving grapes. Or the evolutionary explanation for "beer goggles." Although my favorite part was when he mentioned a study where women "politely" asked men for no strings attached sex and they counted how many agreed. (Less than you would think.) So many questions! Were the results different if they "belligerently demanded" casual sex? Did they go through with the sex, or did they just say, "Okay, just wanted to know if you were interested. I'm going home now." Because that seems mean. I need to find the original study.
February 02, 2009
Bookslut's Indie Heartthrob Interview Series
A weekly interview series where someone involved in the small press (be it writer, editor, slush slave, etc.) is thrown into the spotlight, grilled over the state of the independents and sundry other items, and quickly made to return from whence they came after having graced us all with their presence.
This week: Amanda Stern
Amanda Stern was one of our first Indie Heartthrobs, but this week she deserves a second term. The Happy Ending Reading & Music Series recently left its mainstay bar for a bigger, ritzier space. With such changes come fundamental changes to the series, leaving the question: is it still Happy Ending? This week, Amanda sheds light on the changeover.
You and the series spent so many great years at the Happy Ending Bar in NYC. Why the move to Joe's Pub? How did you pitch the idea to the venue, and what was the reaction?
It was a really hard decision to move but the timing was right. On the technical end, the series began to outgrow the bar. I wanted to accommodate the musicians in ways that I couldn’t (no drums were allowed, no keyboards etc) and because the bar is set up for Djing, not live music, there were inherent limitations. So that became an issue for me and one that was unsolvable at the bar. At the same time, the crowds were getting thicker and I was unable to accommodate everyone. People were being turned away, or stuck in the hallway or had to sit on the floor or stand through the whole event. I slowly began to realize, at the same time as the owner, that I was outgrowing the bar. He and I had a conversation and made a difficult decision, but it was the right one.
Joe’s came about because Asthmatic Kitty (Sufjan Stevens' label) approached me and asked if I’d like to team up for a special night. I did, of course under the condition that we do it somewhere else. I wanted a full band and I wanted to invite a larger crowd. We approached Joe’s Pub, they were very excited and we did a Music Night last April with My Brightest Diamond and the writers Daphne Carr, Alec Hanley Bemis and Rob Sheffield. The night was sold out and was an amazing success. That’s when I thought that Joe’s might be a good fit. I talked to Jennie Wasserman and Shanta Thake, and we all thought that the timing was right to make this next move. And…voila!
The last event at the original location just happened to have the exact same lineup (A.M. Homes, Mary Gaitskill, Nelly Reifler, and The Wingdale Community Singers) as the first reading years ago. How did you feel about this particular night?
I wanted everything to come full circle. Those readers and musicians helped me set the series in motion and it wouldn’t have felt right to end it any other way. That particular night was hard for me because I was saying goodbye to the bar, to the friends I’d made, to the routines I’d developed over the five years of going to Happy Ending and admittedly, it was very hard for me. But I wouldn’t have wanted it to end any other way or with a different group of people.
With the move to Joe's Pub, you also have a slight change in the way things work. What's different at Joe's Pub, and what gets to stay the same? More importantly, are readers still required to take a risk on stage?
Readers are still required to take risks and musicians still have to play a cover song. I’m going to open the door to more theme nights. I’m tentatively planning a “Science Night,” a contemporary “African Literary Night” and a “Graphic Novel” night. There will be some shows that are based more around ideas and themes and less on readings, but I’m not quite there, yet.
Do you find it easier to book particular readers and musicians now that the show's in a bigger space?
No. In fact it’s gotten harder. There is so much amazing talent out there. I have never EVER believed the sentences in rejection letters that read, “this was a very hard decision,” but now I do. It is very, very hard not being able to accommodate everyone. There is a massive pool of sick talent in this city and every one of them deserves a platform.
Now that you have the space, what do you have planned this season? Who do you have scheduled, and if not, who are you trying to schedule?
Upcoming: Julie Orringer, Andrew Sean Greer, Ryan Harty, John Wray, Wells Tower, and for the future, I’m talking with the theoretical physicist, Lisa Randall about doing a Science Night. Zadie Smith and I have been talking about doing something in the fall and I’m talking with some people over at Newline about a Movie Adaptation Night.
What's one word you would use for the last incarnation of the series? And one for the new incarnation?
Old: One
New: Two
"Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone crunching zombie action.
Oh, hooray! Maybe now I can make it all the way through that boring ass book. (Link from Andrew Sullivan.)
There were some unfortunate decisions made in the cover design for Paul Martin's Sex, Drugs & Chocolate: The Science of Pleasure. Any of those three items could be an interesting starting point, and instead they used this image, which, uh, does not look like chocolate. So thanks, whoever did that. I have to go scrub my brain now.
