One letter at a time

On the lie of nostalgia

2012-01-10T14:54:00.003-05:00

"...I try in vain to escape the obsessions that are certainly real, permanent, and true, and that weave the final chain of events, the evident destination of my journey through the world...

...To learn, above all, to distrust memory. What we believe we remember is completely alien to, completely different from what really happened. So many moments of irritating, wearisome disgust are returned to us years later by memory as splendidly happy episodes. Nostalgia is the lie that speeds our approach to death. To live without remembering may be the secret of the gods."

-- from Maqroll: Three Novellas by Alvaro Mutis, translated by Edith Grossman

Cain lives again

2011-09-20T16:09:00.002-04:00

A "lost novel" from noir giant James M. Cain will be published in 2012.

Maybe there's some more Jim Thompson out there too...

Telling of a beautiful young widow who takes a job in a cocktail bar after her husband dies under "suspicious circumstances", The Cocktail Waitress was the last book written by Cain before his death in 1977, but it was never published. Charles Ardai, the founder of American publisher Hard Case Crime, was alerted to its existence by the author Max Allan Collins, and has spent the last nine years tracking down the original manuscript and securing rights in the novel.

He called his discovery "like finding a lost manuscript by Hemingway or a lost score by Gershwin – that's how big a deal this is". The author of classic crime novels including Mildred Pierce – adapted into the acclaimed HBO miniseries starring Kate Winslet – and Double Indemnity, Cain, together with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, "is universally considered one of the three greatest writers of noir crime fiction who ever lived," said Ardai. The Cocktail Waitress is "the Holy Grail" for crime fans, he added.

He's at it again

2011-08-09T10:45:00.004-04:00

Nicholson Baker's latest revisits the bedroom.

Among other things.

Baker's OCD style is an acquired taste, but not many other writers out there have an iota of his exuberant linguistic playfulness.

So to speak.

One of the ways Baker surmounts this particular technical difficulty is by describing the innumerable, odd sexual encounters in a new language. He invents an ebullient, evolving slang that itself becomes the subject of the book: It is the play on words, the creation of a crazy, babbling new idiom that staves off any feeling of repetition or monotony. He is, at points, writing exclusively in made-up terms, an energetic, playful jargon that bears no resemblance to the words people actually use for sex: "I was bouncing up and down like a horse thief." "Ice my cake, dickboys! I want to feel like a breakfast pastry." "She twizzled her riddler." "She DJ'd herself," he "angled his Malcolm Gladwell." In a way, Nicholson Baker has more in common with the Lewis Carroll of " 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves" than conventional dirty book writers like Henry Miller or Philip Roth. The obscene subject matter is somehow subjugated to the sheer energy of expression: One suspects he could just as easily be riffing on plastic straws or shoelaces as blow jobs.

Coover deconstructed

2011-06-27T10:07:00.001-04:00

Hari Kunzru interviews Robert Coover in The Guardian.

But it was Pricksongs & Descants, Coover's 1969 short story collection, that cemented his reputation, standing today as one of the landmarks of postwar American fiction.

The title is a metaphor for a method that Coover has elaborated throughout his career. In manuscripts of medieval European music, the notes were physically "pricked" or marked with holes or dots. The melody (the cantus firmus) could be ornamented or counterpointed with an extemporised part, known as the descant. It's common enough for musical terms to be used to describe narrative (theme, leitmotif and so on) but Coover's usage is more precise. The collection contains his most anthologised story, "The Babysitter", which is told in a hundred or so paragraphs, each separated from its neighbours by white space. The cantus firmus is conventional. The babysitter arrives to look after two children. The parents go out. She spends the evening in their house. The parents come home. Coover's innovation is to produce descant-like variations on the possibilities of this scenario, possibilities that open up a grand guignol underworld of sex and violence beneath this suburban surface. The father fantasises about the girl. The girl's boyfriend and his buddy plan to come over and rape her. She plays with the little boy's penis as she gives him a bath. These events are not definitive. Contradictory possibilities exist simultaneously. The girl is raped and unraped. The father acts and does not act on his lascivious fantasies. The reader is expected to hold the story open, thereby exposing the mechanics of narrative for inspection. The effect is like the quantum-theoretical notion of "superposition", in which an unobserved particle exists in both of two possible states, before "collapsing" on to one or other possibility. The story ends with the mother exclaiming from the kitchen "Why, how nice! . . . The dishes are all done!" but also being told "your children are murdered, your husband gone, [there's] a corpse in your bathtub, and your house is wrecked".

Get in the ring

2011-06-20T17:09:00.002-04:00

Christopher Hitchens vs. David Mamet in the New York Times.

Fight!

Mamet began the book more promisingly, by undertaking to review political disagreements between conservatives and liberals in the light of his own craft: “This opposition appealed to me as a dramatist. For a good drama aspires to be and a tragedy must be a depiction of a human interaction in which both antagonists are, arguably, in the right.”

That was certainly Hegel’s definition of what constituted a tragedy. From a playwright, however, one might also have expected some discussion of what the Attic tragedians thought: namely, that tragedy arises from the fatal flaw in some noble person or enterprise. This would have allowed Mamet to make excursions into the fields of irony and unintended consequences, which is precisely where many of the best critiques of utopianism have originated. Unfortunately, though, he shows himself tone-deaf to irony and unable to render a fair picture of what his opponents (and, sometimes, his preferred authorities, like Hayek) really believe. Quoting Deepak Chopra, of all people, as saying, “Our thinking and our behavior are always in anticipation of a response. It [sic] is therefore fear-based,” he seizes the chance to ask, “Is it too much to suggest that this quote contains the most basic prescription of liberalism, ‘Stop Thinking’?” On that evidence, yes, it would be a bit much.

The ultimate truth, in ten words

2011-05-27T15:50:00.002-04:00

Real life can sometimes bear an unsettling resemblance to nightmares.

- from Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño, as translated by Chris Andrews.

Whose wing will we hide under now?

2011-05-19T17:15:00.001-04:00

Elaine's is closing.

Kaufman had a soft spot for writers who were trying to make it big, and she often let them eat for free. Among those who did make it big were Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton and Gay Talese. Eventually, they paid her back.

She was known as an exceptional listener, with patrons and friends typically sticking around until the early morning hours. Her regulars were fiercely loyal.

...There were complaints over the years that Kaufman banished less-interesting people to the worst tables, but she didn't consider herself a snob and argued that her restaurant simply attracted a sophisticated crowd.

Take a hike, Gideons

2011-04-19T17:16:00.002-04:00

Salman Rushdie is choosing the reading material at hotels in Manhattan.

Why has this taken so long to start happening? The whole Bible-in-the-hotel-room thing is kinda 19th century, don't you think?

Rushdie is the chairman of this year's PEN festival, which is being held at the hotel and other venues around the city and brings together more than 100 writers from 40 nations.

The British-Indian author's list includes mostly well-known literary classics, including Leaves of Grass, the 19th-century poetry collection by Walt Whitman, and The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness masterpiece. The most recent work is 2000's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, one of only four writers on the list who are still alive today.

Guests wanting to read one of Rushdie's novels, which include the Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children, will have to bring their own copies.

Coover notes

2011-04-01T10:46:00.002-04:00

Reading Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants, I am often made to feel as though I'm stuck in an elevator with someone who knows he's the smartest guy in the room - an elevator at a convention of smart guys.

Damn, he's good, though. Headsmackingly, depression-inducingly good. The writer he reminds me of most is Richard Powers -- another scribbler equally interested/obsessed with expanding the possibilities of narrative. The flipside of this talent, however, is a lot of the time you feel like you're watching a puppet show where the puppeteer hogs the spotlight.

Coover's stories read like game pieces and improv exercises; extraordinarily accomplished as far as technique, but lacking in a certain I-don't-know-what. Heart? Maybe, but Coover's stories don't feel completely untouched by human emotion. But even the stabs of pain and darkness in his fiction tend to feel like devices like everything else -- you can still feel the strings as they're pulled.

The NSS Awards #31

2011-03-07T09:55:00.001-05:00

From the New York Times: "Sheen is Surrounded by a Coterie of Enablers"

The question is the thing

2011-03-04T14:19:00.004-05:00

Jim Holt reviews Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember in The London Review of Books.

To ponder:

Moreover, as the cognitive psychologist Gary Marcus has pointed out, it’s possible to have the benefits of contextual memory without the costs. ‘The proof is Google,’ Marcus writes. ‘Search engines start with an underlying substrate of postcode memory (the well-mapped information they can tap into) and build contextual memory on top. The postcode foundation guarantees reliability, while the context on top hints at which memories are most likely needed at a given moment.’ It’s a pity, Marcus adds, that evolution didn’t start with a memory system more like the computer’s.

Considering these advantages, why not outsource as much of our memory as possible to Google? Carr responds with a bit of rhetorical bluster. ‘The web’s connections are not our connections,’ he writes. ‘When we outsource our memory to a machine, we also outsource a very important part of our intellect and even our identity.’ Then he quotes William James, who in 1892 in a lecture on memory declared: ‘The connecting is the thinking.’ And James was onto something: the role of memory in thinking, and in creativity. What do we really know about creativity? Very little. We know that creative genius is not the same thing as intelligence. In fact, beyond a certain minimum IQ threshold – about one standard deviation above average, or an IQ of 115 – there is no correlation at all between intelligence and creativity. We know that creativity is empirically correlated with mood-swing disorders. A couple of decades ago, Harvard researchers found that people showing ‘exceptional creativity’ – which they put at fewer than 1 per cent of the population – were more likely to suffer from manic-depression or to be near relatives of manic-depressives. As for the psychological mechanisms behind creative genius, those remain pretty much a mystery. About the only point generally agreed on is that, as Pinker put it, ‘Geniuses are wonks.’ They work hard; they immerse themselves in their genre.

My whole thing? The "exponential" growth of knowledge accessible by the Internet only expands our possibilities. Science and technology are not in perpetual motion; they move forward only when we start asking different questions.

In a moment, a multitude

2011-02-21T14:23:00.007-05:00

Owing to the ruthless, plangent economy of its brushstrokes, the best way to showcase Félix Fénéon's Novels in Three Lines is to simply quote it:

...M. Colombe, of Rouen, killed himself with a bullet yesterday. His wife had shot three of them at him in March, and their divorce was imminent.

...At census time, the mayor of Montirat, Tarn, nudged the figures upward. His eagerness to govern a multitude cost him his job.

...Fearless boys of 13 and 11, Deligne and Julien were going off "to hunt in the desert." They were brought back to Paris from Le Havre.

[Translated by Luc Sante.]

Inside we are all monsters

2011-02-04T10:22:00.005-05:00

I didn't know this, but evidently I'm predisposed towards monstrous luxury and decadent excess, as the main character of Joris-Karl Huysman's Against Nature often seems like he's inside my own head:

Goya's savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Essientes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first idiot who saw them might be obliged to dishonour them with a few inanities and go into stereotyped ecstasies over them.

He felt the same about his Rembrandts, which he examined now and then on the quiet; and it is of course true that, just as the loveliest melody in the world becomes unbearably vulgar once the public start humming it and the barrel-organs playing it, so the work of art that appeals to charlatans, endears itself to fools, and is not content to arouse the enthusiasm of a few connoisseurs, is thereby polluted in the eyes of the initiate and becomes commonplace, almost repulsive.

This sort of promiscuous admiration was in fact one of the most painful thorns in his flesh, for unaccountable vogues had utterly spoilt certain books and pictures for him that he had once held dear; confronted with the approbation of the mob, he always ended up by discovering some hitherto imperceptible blemish, and promptly rejected them, at the same time wondering whether his flair was not deserting him, his his taste getting blunted.

Against Nature is more or less about a man's solipsistic retreat into his own ego. There's no real plot, but Des Essiente's fierce adherence to his own standards is a compelling enough engine for the narrative. There are slow spots -- discourses on endless writers, philosophers, theologians and the like, most of whom I've never even heard of, let alone read -- but it's still a great read, a worthy successor to the likes of Voltaire (despite Huysman's stated dislike of his fellow countryman).

And the bit about the turtle, that's great.

And I will believe the same about you

2011-01-27T09:29:00.004-05:00

Stephen Chbosky will adapt & direct The Perks of Being a Wallflower for the screen.

Great news; the novel is wonderful, and close to my heart.

Although no one has been cast yet for the lead role of Charlie, two book-based-movie stars have signed up: Harry Potter actress Emma Watson and Percy Jackson actor Logan Lerman.

In 2009, Chbosky’s book hit the #3 spot on the American Library Association’s top ten most frequently challenged books of 2009. The association listed these reasons for the challenges: “anti-family, drugs, homosexuality, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit, suicide, unsuited to age group.”

Preach it

2011-01-20T16:44:00.002-05:00

Farhad Manjoo spotlights one of my biggest pet peeves at Slate.

Finally, someone exposes this error for the foul offense it is:

What galls me about two-spacers isn't just their numbers. It's their certainty that they're right. Over Thanksgiving dinner last year, I asked people what they considered to be the "correct" number of spaces between sentences. The diners included doctors, computer programmers, and other highly accomplished professionals. Everyone—everyone!—said it was proper to use two spaces. Some people admitted to slipping sometimes and using a single space—but when writing something formal, they were always careful to use two. Others explained they mostly used a single space but felt guilty for violating the two-space "rule." Still others said they used two spaces all the time, and they were thrilled to be so proper. When I pointed out that they were doing it wrong—that, in fact, the correct way to end a sentence is with a period followed by a single, proud, beautiful space—the table balked. "Who says two spaces is wrong?" they wanted to know.

Tenacity, endurance, persistence

2010-12-17T11:36:00.003-05:00

Dark-horse NBA winner Jaimy Gordon is profiled by the New York Times.

For much of the ’70s Ms. Gordon was part of the experimental arts scene that flourished in Providence, attracting creative types from the Rhode Island School of Design and from the Brown writing program, then famously avant-garde. She wrote poetry, plays and a verse narrative, “The Bend, the Lip, the Kid, the Lip: Reallife Stories,” about a jailbird named McMagus who is convinced that the reason men become criminals is that their penises are unnaturally curved.

“I wasn’t writing about anything in the real world,” Ms. Gordon said. “I was just writing about the language that was thronging in my brain. I didn’t write realism until I was 35.”

To write a novel that was even remotely commercial, she went on, she had to get out of Providence, where even to think of such a thing was considered a sell out, and yet even after she moved, success did not immediately come her way.

“I had to confess that I do think about an audience, and I don’t think that’s so bad,” she said. “I’m a reader, and so I know what it’s like. That power — I wanted it so badly.”

My keyboard is broken

2010-11-19T10:13:00.001-05:00

When I try to spell "WRITE" it comes out on the screen as "PROCRASTINATE."

Weird.

Thoughts of a random nature while writing

2010-11-18T14:24:00.003-05:00

GalleyCat's National Novel Writing Month tips have been really cool so far. Some of the tools they point you to were already on my radar but most weren't. The OneLook Reverse Dictionary, spotlighted today, is a particularly helpful one.

And now, Mr. Waits:

You got to get behind the mule
In the morning and plow.

While I was out

2010-10-05T14:00:00.003-04:00

I wrote the liner notes for Film Score Monthly's limited-edition CD release of Ennio Morricone's score to the Samuel Fuller film White Dog.

I also wrote "13 Chills: Thirteen Memorable Moments in Horror Film Music," in collaboration with Howlin' Wolf Records.

Other projects included a couple of screenplays, and some short fiction. Blogging to resume soon.

On hiatus

2009-04-03T09:30:00.001-04:00

Other projects afoot. Stay tuned.

A public service announcement

2009-03-19T15:28:00.002-04:00

Now available free online: Dozens of issues of a trend-setting magazine, which throughout its history has published stories from a downright intimidating list of contemporary writers.

It does, however, feature a smidgen of adult content.

This is the future, I'm afraid

2009-03-19T13:39:00.001-04:00

The pleasurable act of imagining

2009-03-16T13:59:00.002-04:00

Christy Rodgers appreciates Terry Southern at Dissident Voice.

Another Southern collaboration, with Mason Hoffenberg, produced the novel Candy, in which Voltaire’s iconic innocent Candide is reconceived as a dim but preternaturally sexy small town girl who travels far (and wide) and finds her ultimate happiness in a very preverse manner. On his own, Terry Southern is perhaps best known for the novel The Magic Christian, a less transcendent but intermittently brilliant lampoon of human greed. Both of these stories became not-so-great movies, their wild imaginativeness stunted by a medium that Southern may have had too much confidence in, after experiencing it at its best with Kubrick. Later interviews with him indicate that he saw the medium to which he’d hitched his fortunes with a very jaded eye.

That’s why you need to read the stories. Southern’s short stories, both satirical and “serious,” are distinguished by prose mastery, subtlety and a truly mind-blowing range of genre and subject matter, possibly unique in U.S. fiction, from the magic realism avant la lettre of a Texas dirt farmer battling a mythical sea-monster in his melon patch, through the minutely examined lives of tragically hip expatriates in Paris, and insider views of the French working class, to the anomie and casual sadism of disaffected young boys. Whether the boys in these stories are in south Texas (where Southern grew up) or New York City, the dialogue is always pitch perfect and the milieu is coolly exact.

...Southern, somewhat like his contemporary Lenny Bruce, was fascinated with our night-selves, the unexpurgated utterers of all that language that narrow-minded ideologues of all stripes tend to fear and despise. This marks him as a spirit impossibly out of synch with our times, but quintessential in his own. The stuff he dredged up out of the mid-20th century psyche has all seen the light of day many times over now; concupiscence among the powerful and repressed no longer has the power to shock most of us. Incest, necrophilia, coprophagy, whatever: it’s a commonplace of 24-7 news feeds. And yet, in some way because the times demanded it, Terry Southern made his own uniquely delicious froth out of it all, that’s still tasty today. And still radical, even if it doesn’t shock. (The two qualities are often confused.) Why? Because he forces us to permit ourselves to imagine anything, and his wild and generous humor shows us what a pleasurable act such imagining can be.

Oprah excoriation imminent

2009-03-13T12:42:00.002-04:00

Kaye Gibbons has been a bad girl.

I don't mean to be flip -- this is a sad thing. I hope she can get it together. We need all the good writers we can get.

Kaye Gibbons posed as a Florida doctor so she could fill prescriptions for painkillers, which she said took the edge off as she finished a novel, a prosecutor said at the best-selling author's sentencing Tuesday.

Earlier in the day, Gibbons pleaded guilty to five misdemeanor counts of obtaining property by fraud. She received a 90-day suspended jail sentence, two years of probation and a $300 fine. District Court Judge Ned Mangum also ordered her to undergo a drug assessment and random drug testing during probation.

Her addiction and the pressure of finishing her book pushed her to submit fraudulent hydrocodone prescriptions online and try to pick them up at Raleigh pharmacies under the name of a Florida physician, said her attorney, Roger Smith Jr.

Unseen Bolaño

2009-03-11T13:29:00.003-04:00

There's more Bolaño out there.

...The previously unseen manuscripts were entitled "Diorama" and "The Troubles of the Real Police Officer," reported La Vanguardia.

The newspaper said the documents also included what is believed to be a sixth section of Bolaño's epic five-part novel "2666."

The Wylie Agency, the literary agency, which recently took over the Bolaño estate, declined to comment about the reports. The novels apparently came to light when piles of documents, notebooks and diaries left behind by Bolaño were being sifted through.

Simon beat me to this. Yay Simon.

Last look back

2009-03-02T16:05:00.001-05:00

The New Yorker has selections from David Foster Wallace's last work.

“The Pale King” had many ambitions. It would show people a way to insulate themselves from the toxic freneticism of American life. It had to be emotionally engaged and morally sound, and to narrate boredom while obeying the physics of reading. And it had to put over the point that the kind of personality that conferred grace was exactly the kind that Wallace did not have. In 2005, Wallace wrote in his notebook, “They’re rare, but they’re among us. People able to achieve and sustain a certain steady state of concentration, attention, despite what they’re doing.” It did not escape him that his failing to write the book was rising to a meta level—that he could not write it because he could not himself ignore the noise of modern life.

Wallace made a considerable start, though. He found a style that was amusing and engaging, that captured mindfulness without solemnity. Perhaps someone else reading the novel—Wallace would show it to no one—might have been satisfied. But his own past brilliance stalked him. In his “Author’s Foreword,” he assures the reader, “The very last thing this book is is some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher.” He also writes, “I find these sorts of cute, self-referential paradoxes irksome, too—at least now that I’m over 30 I do.” And yet there he was, writing about “David Wallace” in long, recursive sentences with footnotes.

The egg has to hatch first

2009-02-27T13:35:00.002-05:00

Conversational Reading brings good sense to the table on the question of potential arts funding.

This LA Times piece on Obama and a possible resurgence in arts funding has been getting some play. It's hard to get too excited though, as the piece is whole bunch of speculation and very little substance...

...Sorry, but if these are the straws that arts funding is grasping at, then that is a commentary in and of itself. Not that I don't think Obama isn't an arts-friendly president, but I'll wait for something a little more solid than his Facebook page before I get my hopes up.

CR also links to a NYT piece about the humanities which I read earlier this week; the gist of it is that during times of greater penny-pinching, funding for the arts usually goes down, not up.

Pay respect to your elders

2009-02-27T11:38:00.001-05:00

Scientists have identified the world's oldest words.

Reading University researchers claim "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.

Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage.

The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct - citing "squeeze", "guts", "stick" and "bad" as probable first casualties.

Somehow I doubt that last one will happen...

The NSS Awards #30

2009-02-26T11:03:00.000-05:00

From the AP: "Audit: KY airport execs racked up lavish expenses"

He ain't dead yet

2009-02-25T15:08:00.002-05:00

Philip Roth has two more books on the way.

I have a bet going with a friend that Roth will be the next big-name writer to kick the bucket. Of course, I would love to be proven wrong about this.

Publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced Wednesday that the Pulitzer Prize-winning author will have a novel out this fall, titled "The Humbling," about an aging stage performer. Next year, he'll have another book, "Nemesis," set during a polio epidemic in 1944.

Roth, who turns 76 next month, has been averaging a book a year for the past few years.

Her trash, our treasure

2009-02-25T14:52:00.002-05:00

Michiko Kakutani pans Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones in The New York Times.

Why is it that a Kakutani slam makes me want to read the book in question even more?

The novel’s gushing fans, however, seem to have mistaken perversity for daring, pretension for ambition, an odious stunt for contrarian cleverness. Willfully sensationalistic and deliberately repellent, “The Kindly Ones” — the title is a reference to the Furies, otherwise known in Greek mythology as the Eumenides — is an overstuffed suitcase of a book, consisting of an endless succession of scenes in which Jews are tortured, mutilated, shot, gassed or stuffed in ovens, intercut with an equally endless succession of scenes chronicling the narrator’s incestuous and sadomasochistic fantasies.

Indeed, the nearly 1,000-page-long novel reads as if the memoirs of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss had been rewritten by a bad imitator of Genet and de Sade, or by the warped narrator of Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho,” after repeated viewings of “The Night Porter” and “The Damned.”

Off to the valley

2009-02-25T14:07:00.001-05:00

Philip Jose Farmer, 1918-2009.

...Farmer's career mixed acclaim, and daring that courted infamy. With stories like "The Lovers," which won him a Hugo for "most promising new writer in 1953, and novels such as Flesh, Farmer made great strides toward bringing sexual frankness into science fiction.

Farmer also found fertile grounds in the margins of other creators' works, revisiting and revising characters such as Doc Samson and Tarzan, both of whom became subjects of Farmer's fictional biographies. He also published a novel under the name of "Kilgore Trout," borrowing the name from Kurt Vonnegut's fictional writer, reportedly much to Vonnegut's chagrin. Farmer found his greatest following with a pair of ongoing series: The Riverworld and World Of Tiers cycles.

Quite the name he made for himself

2009-02-18T10:15:00.001-05:00

Alfred A. Knopf Jr., 1918-2009.

...When his father refused, blaming his mother’s resistance (she apparently didn’t like Mr. Bessie), Mr. Knopf said in an interview in 2005, Mr. Knopf (pronounced with a hard “k”) decided to join Mr. Bessie and Hiram Haydn, an editor at Bobbs-Merrill, in founding Atheneum. They lined up four backers, each willing to put up $250,000, and established their offices in a four-story brownstone on East 38th Street. Cornelia Schaeffer, who would later become Mr. Bessie’s wife, joined the house as an editor about a year after its founding.

Atheneum got lucky fast. Its first three lists produced three No. 1 best sellers: “The Last of the Just” (1960), a novel about the Holocaust by André Schwarz-Bart; “The Making of the President, 1960” (1961), the first in Theodore H. White’s series on presidential campaigns; and “The Rothschilds: A Family Portrait” (1962) by Frederic Morton. These books were acquired by Mr. Bessie, although by informal understanding each of the founders had to agree on every book the house published.

Other projects, if not best sellers, also did well for the house. The first list included Jan de Hartog’s crime novel “The Inspector,” Wright Morris’s “Ceremony in Lone Tree” and William Goldman’s “Soldier in the Rain.” Atheneum later published Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (1962), which sold more than 70,000 copies in hard- and softcover editions. On the other hand, having published Mario Puzo’s second novel, “The Fortunate Pilgrim” (1965), the house turned down “The Godfather” (published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1969). Mr. Haydn thought it “junk,” Mr. Knopf said.

Glad they cleared that up

2009-02-09T15:06:00.002-05:00

Over at Galleycat, Amazon's e-book sales numbers are examined.

Following up from an earlier post, the fine folks of Galleycat posted this clarification:

Following the advice of readers, GalleyCat asked an Amazon spokesperson for clarification. They reduced that early number: "Kindle sales make up more than 10 percent of sales of books that are available in both traditional and e-book form."

It's still not a number to quickly dismiss. I've never seen or used a Kindle but I keep hearing better and better things.

Leave it to Steve

2009-02-06T10:18:00.001-05:00

Stephen King speaks the truth about Stephanie Meyer in USA Weekend.

..."I think that has some kind of formative influence the same way reading Richard Matheson had an influence on me," King explains. "People always say to me, 'Well, what about H.P. Lovecraft?' And the thing was, you read Lovecraft when you were a kid but I never felt that he was speaking my language. It was chillier than my heart was, and when Matheson started to write about ordinary people and stuff, that was something that I wanted to do. I said, 'This is the way to do it. He’s showing the way.' I think that I serve that purpose for some writers, and that’s a good thing. Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re 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."

The NSS Awards #29

2009-02-04T09:30:00.001-05:00

From the AP: "Survey: College increasingly important but pricey"

Faith, belief, tenacity

2009-02-04T09:05:00.002-05:00

Charles McGrath on John Updike in The New York Times Magazine.

What other writers, young and old, prized most about Mr. Updike was his prose — that amazing instrument, like a jeweler’s loupe; so precise, exquisitely attentive and seemingly effortless. If there were a pill you could take to write like that, who wouldn’t swallow a handful? Equally inspiring was his faith in the writing itself. He toyed once or twice with magic realism, but the experiment never really worked and he gave it up. Though he loved Jorge Luis Borges, he didn’t in his own work go in for Borgesian mirror games, and he was free from the postmodern anxiety about the fictiveness of fiction, the unreliability of language. He was an old-fashioned realist, with an unswerving belief in the power of words to faithfully record experience and to enhance it. If other writers, younger ones especially, couldn’t quite subscribe to that belief, still it was reassuring to know that there was someone who did.

In earthiness is truth

2009-02-02T13:51:00.004-05:00

Mark Ravenhill on the salacious appeal of Emile Zola in The Guardian.

I read Germinal more than a decade ago, and I still vividly recall the mine sequences. It's been hovering around the top of the "needs to be reread" pile for too long.

In L'Assommoir, the French public were thrilled to find characters who were ruled by their bodies and by the most basic of human instincts; they swore, used the slang of the streets, and had no time for moralising or philosophy. Britain took a lot longer to come to Zola. Dickens had written about social problems with his trademark blend of the grotesque and the sentimental, but with nothing like Zola's uncompromising eye for realism. The frankness of the Frenchman's language and the physicality of his characters - who crap and copulate as frequently as any real person - meant that publishers here considered his work pornographic. Translations of the Rougon-Macquart series appeared slowly and haphazardly. It is one of the greatest achievements in world literature, yet still, remarkably, we do not have the complete series in English.

Zola has far more to offer than the "dirt" that first captured the French public's imagination. With Rougon-Macquart, he aimed to capture every aspect of life under the Second Empire, a period of unparalleled economic expansion and unashamed materialism. With our current sense that two decades of ugly, turbocharged capitalism has come to an end, Zola's portrait of a society that sheds its morality and humanity in the pursuit of profit would strike a massive chord. When Zola began planning the series, he had a distinctly determinist view of character and plotting. He would use the novels, he declared, to prove that man's fate was determined by his genetic inheritance. He also researched his fiction more thoroughly than any previous novelist. For each novel, Zola spent months filling notebooks with first-hand observations on farming, mining or events at the Stock Exchange. But in the actual writing of the novels, the instincts of the poet and the painter join those of the journalist and the scientist. The result is a series of huge, complex and very human books.

The latest casualty

2009-01-28T11:42:00.002-05:00

The Washington Post's Book World section will cease stand-alone publication.

You should know this song by now:

While the news has not been officially confirmed, the National Book Critics Circle reports that Book World, the Washington Post's stand-alone book supplement, will cease publication after February 15. Daily book reviews will still be published in the Style section.

According to the report, the section's essays will now be divided between the Outlook section and the Sunday Style & Arts section of the newspaper. Last week rumors flew (and were denied) that the Washington Post could close the section, and the National Book Critics Circle has created an online petition to support the publication.

Rabbit is gone

2009-01-27T14:47:00.001-05:00

John Updike, 1932-2008.

His settings ranged from the court of ''Hamlet'' to postcolonial Africa, but his literary home was the American suburb. Born in 1932, Updike spoke for millions of Depression-era readers raised by ''penny-pinching parents,'' united by ''the patriotic cohesion of World War II'' and blessed by a ''disproportionate share of the world's resources,'' the postwar, suburban boom of ''idealistic careers and early marriages.''

He captured, and sometimes embodied, a generation's confusion over the civil rights and women's movements, and opposition to the Vietnam War. Updike was called a misogynist, a racist and an apologist for the establishment. On purely literary grounds, he was attacked by Norman Mailer as the kind of author appreciated by readers who knew nothing about writing.

But more often he was praised for his flowing, poetic writing style. Describing a man's interrupted quest to make love, Updike likened it ''to a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached.'' Nothing was too great or too small for Updike to poeticize. He might rhapsodize over the film projector's ''chuckling whir'' or look to the stars and observe that ''the universe is perfectly transparent: we exist as flaws in ancient glass.''

Maybe it's the weather

2009-01-23T10:19:00.003-05:00

John Crace on the rising popularity of Scandinavian crime fiction in The Guardian.

While some of Scandinavia's literary elite looked down on Høeg and Mankell abandoning serious fiction in favour of something unashamedly mass market, there's little argument that they set the standard for what followed. Their books may have been populist but they were never pulp, and the quality of writing in Scandinavian crime fiction has remained, in general, a notch or two higher than elsewhere.

But no one buys a thriller for the writing alone: the Scandinavians have consistently come up with great plotlines that are as cold and bleak as the locations in which they are set. It's this sense of the other that sets them apart. Crime writers can come up with any number of serial killers and paedophiles with ever sicker twists, but as long as they are situated in LA, New York, London and Edinburgh there will inevitably be a sense of familiarity. The Scandinavian locations dislocate British readers and help take them beyond plot and genre to the human condition.

The 300-year death rattle

2009-01-21T10:12:00.000-05:00

Jill Leopore surveys the history of the dying newspaper in The New Yorker.

Some much-needed perspective here:

“The newspaper is dead, long live the newspaper!” has lately become the incantation of advocates of e-journalism, who argue that the twenty-first-century death of the newspaper hardly merits a moment’s mourning, since it is no death at all but, rather, a rebirth. Even if that turns out to be true—and you have to hope it is true—the digital newspaper could do with a better slogan. Invoking the hereditary succession of a divine line of kings to celebrate the zippy thrill of reading an RSS feed on your iPhone runs counter to the history of the newspaper. Our rulers do not rule over us for as long as they live and, when they die, their heirs do not inherit their titles. That, in short, is what the beginning of the American newspaper was about.

Everything depends upon the words

2009-01-15T10:31:00.003-05:00

Hortense Calisher, 1911-2008.

Tattoo for a Slave has been on my radar for a while. I'm out of excuses now.

Failure and isolation were themes that ran through her 23 novels and short-story collections: failure of love, marriage, communication, identity. She explored the isolation within families that cannot be avoided yet cannot be faced, isolation imposed by wounds inflicted even in the happiest of households, wounds that shape events for generations.

But her peers seemed most intrigued by her distinctive way of telling a story, her filigreed sentences and bold stylistic excursions. “Hortense Calisher has never been a writer who masked her thinking self or disappeared into her subject,” the critic Morris Dickstein wrote in The Times, commenting on her Jamesian fascination with the authorial intellect.

...“Going back over one’s own work, one can see from earliest times, certain paraforms emerging,” she wrote in “Herself.” “If one is crazy, these are idées fixes; if one is sane, these are systematic views. A mind is not given but makes itself, out of whatever is at hand and sticking tape — and is not a private possession but an offering. I had always had to write everything, no matter the subject, as if my life depended upon it. Of course — it does.”

It's too expensive to do anything else

2009-01-12T14:21:00.002-05:00

The NEA reports that the rate of adults' fiction reading is on the upswing.

Would that all such trends stuck around.

Among its chief findings is that for the first time since 1982, when the bureau began collecting such data, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen.

The news comes as the publishing industry struggles with declining sales amid a generally difficult economy.

The proportion of adults reading some kind of so-called literary work — just over half — is still not as high as it was in 1982 or 1992, and the proportion of adults reading poetry and drama continued to decline.

Finally, someone said it

2009-01-09T11:41:00.002-05:00

Chris Wilson looks into how to fix Word's spell-check limitations in Slate.

What's behind this disparity? Word processors and search engines have different goals. The latter has to field queries as broad and varied as the Internet itself, so it needs a very large vocabulary in order to differentiate spelling mistakes from legitimate search terms. Word processors are much more conservative, limiting their lexicon to words that are definitely legitimate. This way, a program like Word can catch virtually every typo, even if it means misidentifying some proper names and newer words. In other words, search engines put breadth first and spelling accuracy second while word processors are the other way around. If you type in Monkees, Google will assume you're searching for the band; Word will give you a red squiggly line, thinking you've screwed up the word monkeys.

Not surprisingly, search engines and word processors build their dictionaries differently. A search engine's lexicon is typically put together using words gathered from Web pages or old search queries—a huge corpus of real-world data that constitutes a list of valid words and their frequency in the language. Word-processing lexicons are more heavily chaperoned, and the pace at which new terms enter the dictionary is much slower.

The NSS Awards #28

2009-01-08T10:14:00.001-05:00

From the AP: "Ore. teens largely ignoring cell phone driving ban"

Department of "Why didn't I think of this?"

2009-01-07T16:54:00.003-05:00

Stephen King/Stanley Kubrick fan Phil Buehler has published Jack Torrance's work.

Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson in terrifying form in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film, is a frustrated writer who goes with his wife and son to spend the winter in the isolated Overlook Hotel in an attempt to get the novel he has always wanted to write started. But the hotel's grisly past and unquiet ghosts have their way with him, and his wife Wendy eventually finds that the manuscript he has been working on actually only contains the phrase "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", typed over and over again.

Now New York artist Phil Buehler, who describes himself as "a big fan of Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King", has self-published a book credited to Torrance, repeating the phrase throughout but formatting each page differently, using the words to create different shapes from zigzags to spirals.

"The idea has probably been marinating for years, because I loved the movie and the Stephen King book," said Buehler. "I'd just finished my own obsessive art project [and] it was an idea I had over the Christmas holidays."

The closest observers of suffering

2009-01-07T13:53:00.002-05:00

Andrea Crawford on the overlap between doctors and writers in Poets & Writers.

As the list of physicians writing fiction today grows longer, one can't help but wonder if it's just a coincidence or if there is a strong connection between the two professions. Canin, who stopped practicing as a doctor after his third book was published and is now on the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, says everyone has an expressive urge, but it's particularly pronounced in those who pursue medicine. "It's like being a soldier. You've seen great and terrible things."

Of the ten new students in his workshop last fall, Canin notes, two have medical backgrounds (and he adds that more and more physicians are contacting him for advice about pursuing writing). To Ratner, one of Canin's students, who graduated from med school ten years ago but never practiced, the two professions have always seemed connected. For as long as he can remember, he wanted to do both. "They're both what are sometimes described as callings," he says. "They were both ways of meaningfully addressing myself to human experience and suffering."

Shameless self-promotion

2009-01-07T13:51:00.001-05:00

Check out the new blog.

Terrifying headline of the day

2009-01-07T13:34:00.000-05:00

"Joe the Plumber to become war correspondent" [AP]

OMG yr story rox

2009-01-07T11:46:00.003-05:00

Dana Goodyear on the rise of cell-phone novels in Japan in The New Yorker.

Also a pretty good snapshot of the wonderful oxymoron that is Japanese feminism.

In a country whose low birth rate is a cause for national alarm, and where Tokyo women in their thirties who have yet to find a mate are known as “loser-dogs,” the fantasy of rural life offered by the cell-phone novels, with their tropes of teen pregnancy and young love, has proved irresistible. “Love Sky,” by Mika, which has been viewed twelve million times online, and has been adapted for manga, television, and film, is a paradigm of sexual mishap and tragedy lightly borne. Freshman year, the heroine—also Mika—falls in love with a rebel named Hiro, and is raped by a group of men incited by Hiro’s ex-girlfriend. Then Mika gets pregnant with Hiro’s child, and he breaks up with her. Later, she finds out why: he is terminally ill with lymphoma and had hoped to spare her. In the movie version, which came out last fall and earned thirty-five million dollars at the box office, Mika has tears streaming down her face for the better part of two hours. The moral of the story is not that sex leads to all kinds of pain, and so should be avoided, but that sex leads to all kinds of pain, and pain is at the center of a woman’s life.

A master passes

2009-01-02T10:01:00.001-05:00

Donald E. Westlake, 1933-2008.

Mr. Westlake wrote seven days a week, his friends said. His productiveness was honed in part by an era in which publishing houses churned out books at a relentless pace. During that time, he also wrote erotic literature, science fiction and westerns.

Mr. Westlake resisted computers and typed his manuscripts on manual typewriters. “They came in perfectly typed,” Mr. Kirshbaum said. “You felt like it was almost written by hand.”

Otto Penzler, a longtime friend of Mr. Westlake’s and the owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in TriBeCa, said, “He hated the idea of an electric typewriter because, he said, ‘I don’t want to sit there while I am thinking and have something hum at me.’ ”

Mr. Westlake kept four or five typewriters and cannibalized their parts when any one broke, as the typewriter model was no longer manufactured, his friends said.

Assessed verse Pinter's

2008-12-30T15:59:00.001-05:00

Christopher Hamilton-Emry examines the poetry of Harold Pinter in The Guardian's Books Blog.

However, Pinter's verse is also about process; it's Pinter acting out, as it were, the contrary facts of being inside the situation, the context of the poem, the context of the politics. It is in essence dramatic and vatic; read it out loud, and work your way through the fissures to get at the tissue of the man. Pinter is never about epiphany and revelation, and much more about concealment. Despite the surface of the language, the poems are essentially about withholding something. The language of the poems can be thin and etiolated, straightforward too; like Carver's it can be artless, and where Carver derided cheap tricks, one can feel that Pinter, too, was after something direct, intimate and oral. He wanted to get under our skin as quickly as possible. To get in, and do the job.

Another reason to feel bad about reading

2008-12-29T14:35:00.005-05:00

David Streitfield feels bad about buying cheap books in The New York Times.

Sorry, but with the economy in the tank, most of the books I get these days come from remainder stacks, used racks and thrift stores.

Don’t blame this carnage on the recession or any of the usual suspects, including increased competition for the reader’s time or diminished attention spans. What’s undermining the book industry is not the absence of casual readers but the changing habits of devoted readers.

In other words, it’s all the fault of people like myself, who increasingly use the Internet both to buy books and later, after their value to us is gone, sell them. This is not about Amazon peddling new books at discounted prices, which has been a factor in the book business for a decade, but about the rise of a worldwide network of amateurs who sell books from their homes or, if they’re lazy like me, in partnership with an Internet dealer who does all the work for a chunk of the proceeds.

Basically, this is another death-twitch-of-the-bookstore piece. The dollar is tanking so everyone in the publishing industry blames one another, resulting in sentiments like this:

Andy Ross, the former owner of Cody’s, told me that buying books online “was not morally dubious, but it is tragic. It has a lot of unintended consequences for communities.”

Umm... yeah. Buy a book online, and contribute to the decay of civilization. Got that, all you readers out there on a severely limited budget? Everything's your fault.

Rink rat tales

2008-12-19T14:01:00.001-05:00

Charles McGrath reviews Jack Falla's Open Ice in The New York Times.

Jack Falla, who died earlier this year at the age of 64, was one of the last of a breed — a very good hockey writer who never became burned out or cynical. He covered hockey for Sports Illustrated in the ’80s, the great Gretzky years, and then turned to teaching and writing books about hockey. He even wrote a hockey novel, “Saved,” which is easily the best goalie novel ever (in truth, there aren’t very many) and in the tiny pantheon of hockey novels stands not that far from “Amazons,” written by Don DeLillo under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell, and has the additional virtue of being actually obtainable. (After DeLillio disowned “Amazons,” it became so scarce that you can’t find a copy for love or money.)

Falla was not the prose equivalent of his idol Jean Béliveau; he was less a stylish, mesmerizing writer than a straightforward, unassuming one, and he hated flourishes and pretension. He used to tell his students: dependability beats talent if talent isn’t dependable.

Found Again #1

2008-12-18T09:37:00.004-05:00

This is a series of photographs of things I've found in books bought at thrift stores, garage sales, book sales, et cetera. I don't recall where each and every one came from, but I'll fill in the gaps as best as I can. Much more to come.

Sepia-toned photograph found inside a hardcover history book.

Shaping the message

2008-12-18T08:53:00.003-05:00

Eli Saslow profiles Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau in The Washington Post.

This is not, apparently, the same guy who directed Iron Man.

Favreau's job is "to be like a baseball umpire," one co-worker said, and perform his task so deftly that nobody notices him. He listens to Obama tell stories in his office and spins them into developed metaphors, rich in historical context. When Obama delivers a speech on the road, Favreau studies the recording and notes the points at which Obama departs from the text so he can refine the riffs and incorporate them next time.

In four years together, Obama and Favreau have perfected their writing process. Before most speeches, Obama meets with Favreau for an hour to explain what he wants to say. Favreau types notes on his laptop and takes a crack at the first draft. Obama edits and rewrites portions himself -- he is the better writer, Favreau insists -- and they usually work through final revisions together. If Favreau looks stressed, Obama sometimes reassures him: "Don't worry. I'm a writer, too, and I know that sometimes the muse hits you and sometimes it doesn't. We'll figure it out together."

Death is a requirement of membership

2008-12-17T11:52:00.005-05:00

Short fiction from Roberto Bolaño in the New Yorker.

For a guy five years dead, he's sure getting a lot of press. Funny how that works.

...Then I started corresponding with Enrique Lihn. Naturally, I was the one who initiated the correspondence. I didn’t have to wait long for his reply. A long, crotchety letter, as we might say in Chile: gloomy and irritable. In my reply I told him about my life, my house in the country, on one of the hills outside Gerona, the medieval city in front of it, the countryside or the void behind. I also told him about my dog, Laika, and said that in my opinion Chilean literature, with one or two exceptions, was shit. It was evident from his next letter that we were already friends. What followed was what typically happens when a famous poet befriends an unknown. He read my poems and included some of them in a kind of reading he organized to present the work of the younger generation at a Chilean-North American institute. In his letter he identified a group of hopefuls destined, so he thought, to be the six tigers of Chilean poetry in the year 2000. The six tigers were Bertoni, Maquieira, Gonzalo Muñoz, Martínez, Rodrigo Lira, and myself. I think. Maybe there were seven tigers. But I think there were only six. It would have been hard for the six of us to be anything much in 2000, because by then Rodrigo Lira, the best of the lot, had killed himself, and what was left of him had either been rotting for years in some cemetery or was ash, blowing around the streets and mingling with the filth of Santiago. Cats would have been more appropriate than tigers...

Welcome to the revolution

2008-12-16T14:02:00.005-05:00

This just in: Amazon is a bunch of meanies.

I've been saying for years that Amazon is the Wal-Mart of the Internet and that it would only be a matter of time before online culture turned against it in the same way that people flip-flopped on the Waltons.

An investigation by The Sunday Times at Amazon’s enormous warehouse in Bedfordshire has found that workers were:

– Warned that the company refuses to allow sick leave, even if the worker has a legitimate doctor’s note. Taking a day off sick, even with a note, results in a penalty point. A worker with six points faces dismissal.

– Made to work a compulsory 10½hour overnight shift at the end of a five-day week. The overnight shift, which runs from Saturday evening to 5am on Sunday, means they have to work every day of the week.

– Set quotas for the number of items to be picked or packed in an hour that even a manager described as “ridiculous”. Those packing heavy Xbox games consoles had to pack 140 an hour to reach their target.

– Set against each other with a bonus scheme that penalises staff if any other member of their group fails to hit the quota.

– Made to walk up to 14 miles a shift to collect items for packing.

Given only one break of 15 minutes and another of 20 minutes per eight-hour shift and told they had to get permission to go to the toilet.

Whenever I link to a book online, 99.9% of the time it's through Powell's. Just saying.

Hold for laughter

2008-12-16T11:20:00.001-05:00

James Frey's next book will have a Biblical slant.

Maybe I'm not giving him a fair shake... but...

James Frey is moving on from his drugs and booze-soaked memoirs to write the third book of the Bible, in which his version of Jesus will perform gay marriages.

Talking to online magazine The Rumpus.net, Frey said he had just finished an outline for the book, and was about to start writing it. "It's the third book of the Bible, called The Final Testament of the Holy Bible," he told interviewer and fellow author Stephen Elliott. "My idea of what the Messiah would be like if he were walking the streets of New York today. What would he believe? What would he preach? How would he live? With who?"

Massive fail

2008-12-16T10:36:00.003-05:00

Lawrence Osborne gives book publishers a piece of his mind in Forbes.

A bit of "why don't I get a $6.8 million advance?" whining, a dash of "the public is filled with idiots who don't read," and a smidgen of "things are going to hell" fatalism. Happy holidays.

But just as newspapers are dooming themselves by cutting the very thing they alone can provide--in-depth, on the spot reporting--so publishing houses are dooming themselves by trying to run in somebody's else's rat race and cutting the very thing we turn to them for: writing itself.

It's like American Airlines cutting the olives in Business Class salads. All that happens is 1) American becomes a tacky, risible airline and 2) people fly on Emirates.

Americans love bloviating about the "death" of this and the "emergence" of that. But a culture of multiplicity simply offers the inquiring mind different things for different moments. Books don't actually compete with the Internet or movies, and never did.

Oh, and a fact: most people I know around my age or younger don't know who Houllebecq and Bolano and Sebald and Coetzee are, so Osborne's nepotistic "the youth will save us" capper is not to be trusted either.

Writers have to be the underdogs. We need to be. Complacency is the death of relevance, especially in literature. Being way down on the list of Americans' favorite pastime -- judging by any given poll lately, we're hoving somewhere between macrame and toenail-clipping -- gives us something to fight that much harder for.

Oh, and by the way, looking at someone reading Stephanie Meyer and saying, "Well, at least they're reading" is like looking at overweight slobs pounding down Twinkies and saying, "Well, at least they're eating." That is all.

Pynchon alert

2008-12-15T10:08:00.004-05:00

Coming summer '09. The synopsis, from ThomasPynchon.com:

It's been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.

And it's less than half the length of Against the Day, too, which bodes well for it actually getting read.

The NSS Awards #27

2008-12-12T14:45:00.000-05:00

From the New York Times: "Drug Maker Said to Pay Ghostwriters for Journal Articles"

Quite the get-together

2008-12-12T11:36:00.004-05:00

Lawrence Weschler interviews Robert Irwin and David Hockney in The Believer.

Weschler, Irwin and Hockney in the same room. Can I apply for my fly-on-the-wall license now?

Even so, Hockney emphatically disagreed with Irwin’s characterization of the cubist challenge, already insisting to me just a few weeks later (for in the meantime he’d invited me to start visiting more regularly so that I might compose a text for a planned coffee-table book surveying the photocollage cameraworks series on which he’d only just launched out upon), “No! Cubism was precisely about saving the possibility of figuration, this ages-old need of human beings, going all the way back to Lascaux, to render the world in two dimensions, and saving that possibility at the moment of its greatest crisis, what with the onslaught of photography with all its false claims to being able to accomplish such figuration better and more objectively. It was about asserting all the things photography couldn’t capture: time, multiple vantages, and the sense of lived and living experience.” (For his part, critics often got Hockney all wrong as well, misinterpreting the intensity of the ways he would presently be engaging photography—taking literally hundreds of thousands of photos, coming to feel that the Old Masters themselves had been in thrall to a similar optical aesthetic—as a celebration of the photographic over the painterly, and specifically the post-optical painterly, when in fact all along he’d been engaged in a rigorous critique of photography and the optical as “all right,” in his words, “if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops, for a split second, but that’s not how the world really is.”)

Joyce even slurs his pauses

2008-12-11T15:01:00.001-05:00

Out now from the BBC is a three-disc set of radio interviews with writers of note.

For those of us who enjoy this kind of contact, Richard Fairman of the British Library has been rooting through his sound archives to make collections of authorial speech, most recently in a three-CD set, The Spoken Word: British Writers ( www.bl.uk/catalogues/sound.html),an assortment of utterances by 30 writers. Today, when every interesting author gets recorded often, it's surprising to learn from Fairman that there is exactly one known recording of Arthur Conan Doyle's voice extant, and also only one of Virginia Woolf's. They both lived well into the age of sound recording (Conan Doyle died in 1930, Woolf in 1941) but the idea of preserving voices hadn't yet taken hold among broadcasters and librarians.

People simply didn't keep radio broadcasts. As Fairman says, "They went out on the air and that was it. They were lost forever." Woolf spoke on the BBC several times, but on only one occasion did someone think it a good idea to save part of a talk she gave. The piece included in The Spoken Word: British Writers runs only eight minutes, but it's a revelation. Heard in 2008, she sounds like a vicious parody of an English intellectual. I had to listen three times before I could get past her mannerisms and absorb what she was saying.

Hitch on Yates

2008-12-09T10:32:00.002-05:00

Christopher Hitchens reviews Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road in The Atlantic Monthly (via Powell's).

Frank and April Wheeler are the reverse of the unhappy family in Chekhov's Cherry Orchard. They have already tasted the fruits and sweets of the big city, and qualified as urban -- perhaps better say urbane -- sophisticates. But you know how it is. Pregnancy comes to April a teeny bit earlier than had been anticipated (or desired), and the distressing need to earn some actual money is then imposed upon Frank, who must martyr his aestheticism to the brute requirements of "the firm." Soon enough the days become regulated by the commute and, of course, by the needs of the children.

Even so, the lost Bohemia of their Greenwich Village period will not be denied, and before too long Frank and April are smilingly condescending to help out a local troupe called, with brilliant ominousness, the Laurel Players. They decide to build up the spirit of community theater with a production of "The Petrified Forest." I shall simply say that I don't remember ever feeling so sorry for a set of fictional characters. If Yates had one talent above all, it was for conveying the feeling of disappointment and anticlimax, heavily infused with the sort of embarrassment that amounts to humiliation. As the full horror of the first night, and the full catastrophe of April's own performance, become apparent, Yates catches the ghastly moment by writing, "The virus of calamity, dormant and threatening all these weeks, had erupted now."

An optimistic appraisal

2008-12-05T10:42:00.003-05:00

MediaBistro has what the others ain't got: courage!

If you're surprised that the publishing industry is crumbling... well, welcome back to Earth. A lot has happened since you've been gone.

...If that last sentence (which originally referred only to the departure of two CEOs) sounds somewhat callous after everything that's happened this week, we apologize—but we also encourage readers to remember that there is more to the publishing industry than the conglomerates in New York, and that even though independent publishers are themselves not immune to the economic pressures, many are prepared to press on and carve out a unique space for themselves because they don't want to live in a world where the books they love aren't available for others to read. They may press on cautiously, and slowly, and they may not gain huge ground most years, but they will persevere, as will their equally passionate counterparts at the larger houses, because they must. And we hope that, through such perseverance, opportunities emerge for those of our colleagues whose careers were disrupted this week.

When currents converge

2008-12-04T11:06:00.003-05:00

Adam Mansbach reviews Roberto Bolano's 2666 in The Boston Globe.

An excellent review which makes me want to read this thing even more.

To convey the emotional or topical polyphony of any of these sections would be impossible. I have said nothing, for instance, of Amalfitano's wife's adventures in Spain, which include several visits to a painter who has cut off his hand and attached it to a canvas, or of the speech Fate hears a Bobby Seale doppelganger deliver at a Chicago church on the topics of danger, money, food, stars, and usefulness. Everywhere in Bolaño's work, there is an unquantifiable precision to the absurdity; when a character insists that she believes in the existence of nothing except storms and Aztecs, the declaration makes sublime sense even before the explanation comes.

The NSS Awards #26

2008-12-04T10:10:00.000-05:00

From the AP: "Poll: Calif. gay marriage ban driven by religion"

The truth will out

2008-12-03T10:41:00.002-05:00

Excerpt from an actual man-on-the-street interview, referring to the calling plan of a major national wireless carrier:

"INTERVIEWER: ...So now with this plan?

MAN ON THE STREET: I'm trying to get as much cancer in my ear as I can by having it attached to the side of my head. "

The snake swallows its tail

2008-12-03T08:55:00.002-05:00

Now they're publishing rejection letters.

I got a coverage report by a reader at ICM on one of my screenplays that was actually quite a good piece of criticism. I kinda wish I still had it. But I decided to light it on fire instead.

Now, I suspect that the real aim of this compendium is to provide the rejected with a bit of cold comfort, an opportunity to offer some kind of riposte to the publishing professionals who have hurt their feelings by saying that their space operas or Jane Austen adaptations just aren't good enough. What I suspect the book won't do, however, is acknowledge that writing rejection letters is a delicate skill, one that must be fine-tuned over time (weeks, even) as one digs out from under the slush pile. For it is not easy to achieve and balance the two central goals of a truly accomplished rejection letter: trying not to make the writer feel distraught whilst also discouraging him or her from ever contacting you ever again.

Hopefully this will add up to more than a collection of elegant insults.

A question worth asking

2008-12-02T14:00:00.003-05:00

Alison Flood wonders how much effect Word would have had on Kerouac at the Guardian Book Blog.

Kerouac wrote the novel fast because the "road is fast". He'd delete unwanted phrases by crossing them out with a pencil or typing over them.

These days, the computer is the writing implement of choice. It allows us to delete, shift sections around and continually edit, in the way that Kerouac, writing on his lengthy scrolls, could not.

The typewriter/computer/notebook are, of course, just the instruments of the trade, but it's possible they have more influence on the eventual product than we think. Paul Auster, for example, writes by hand in notebooks, revising each paragraph until he feels it works – and I think his polished, elegant prose reflects this.

It would be different, that's for sure. There's a quality to handwritten stories that's unique. But whatever the mechanism you choose, you have to make your story work, and moving the words around until they do is what matters.

Only what you know

2008-12-01T11:21:00.002-05:00

Amitava Kumar examines the South Asian political novel in The Boston Review.

For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the nonresident Indian. If you were dealing in invented details, it hardly mattered when you mixed up names and dates. But now, more than magical realism, it is the painstaking attempt at verisimilitude that clearly betrays the anxiety about authenticity. This condition is more subtle. It has limited fiction’s reach, keeping writers to what they know. Look at Jhumpa Lahiri, who has assiduously mined the experience of Bengali immigrants of a fixed class. She is one of the better ones, writing about what she knows; lesser writers have been content to churn out what we all know: arranged marriage, dowry, saris, and spices.

Quite apart from this whole slew of stay-at-home writers, home being in most cases somewhere outside India, are the ones who, like Adiga, have taken the bus, or at least a hired taxi, to the hinterland. They might have traveled on a boat and risked being eaten by a Royal Bengal tiger. Or they might have walked in the tight, smelly alleys in the slums and, if they are enterprising, met a hired killer or two. This brings a different frisson to the body of Indian writing in English, which, given its roots in the middle class, has often been insular and dull. And these works seem direct responses to the numbing social violence in nearly every stratum of Indian society. But reportage is only an inoculation against the charge of inauthenticity. It hides larger untruths. Authenticity does matter, but only as it serves the novel’s more traditional literary demands: that the fault lines be drawn where the internal life and the larger world meet.

Ur doin it wrong

2008-11-26T09:10:00.002-05:00

John Updike is the latest winner of the Bad Sex in Fiction award.

The first Updike I ever read was Brazil, back in '94. I don't remember the novel very well -- just that there was a sex scene in the first 20 pages which included a comparison between an erection and a banana.

So what took the Literary Review editors so long?

The judges, editors of Literary Review magazine, said Updike had been shortlisted for the prize four times in its 16-year history. "Good sex or bad sex, he has kept us entertained for many years," they said in a statement.

The magazine said it was attempting to contact Updike to tell him the good news.

The 76-year-old American novelist was a finalist for this year's Bad Sex prize for his description of an explosive oral encounter in his latest book, "The Widows of Eastwick," but lost out to British writer Rachel Johnson.

Johnson won for a passage in her satirical novel "Shire Hell" that describes a woman in the midst of a "mounting, Wagnerian crescendo" wondering whether "the Spodders are, as requested, attending the meeting about slug clearance." Cats and moths also make metaphorical appearances.

Nice legacy to leave behind

2008-11-25T15:21:00.001-05:00

John Michael Hayes, 1919-2008.

Mr. Hayes adapted four films for Hitchcock: “Rear Window” (1954), from a story by Cornell Woolrich; “To Catch a Thief” (1955), from a novel by David Dodge; “The Trouble With Harry” (1955), from a novel by Jack Trevor Story; and the 1956 remake of “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

...Besides his work for Hitchcock, he was known for writing the screenplay for “Peyton Place” (1957) — no enviable task given the challenges of turning Grace Metalious’s novel of small-town scandals into Hollywood fare. His screenplays for “Peyton Place” and “Rear Window” were nominated for Academy Awards.

...Mr. Hayes’s later screenplays include adaptations of “Butterfield 8” (1960), in which Elizabeth Taylor won an Oscar for best actress and “The Children’s Hour” (1961). He also wrote television movies and in the 1980s and ’90s taught film at Dartmouth College.

The value of absolute clarity

2008-11-25T09:25:00.001-05:00

Michael Dirda on Paul Auster in The New York Review of Books.

Till recently, few innovative, literary novelists could rival Auster in his gusto for reframing tales of mystery, fantasy, and adventure. Auster repeatedly uses these genres to illuminate, often with great poignancy, life's fundamental relationships: parents and children (especially fathers and sons), married couples, mentors and disciples, artists and their work, even owners and their pets. All these affiliations are generally placed under severe strain—there are secrets between friends, suspected or actual infidelities, eruptions of street violence into ordinary life, distressing revelations. In Moon Palace the likable young hero inadvertently causes the deaths of his grandfather, father, and child. More recently, Auster's books—certainly the last half-dozen—have focused regularly on elderly, debilitated men with literary or intellectual vocations, as though their author were preemptively working through his own later years (Auster is now in his early sixties).

Some of Auster's tics or techniques—the incestuous literary connections, the skewed autobiography, the ambiguous blurring of fact and fiction, the pervasive fatefulness—might sink any ordinary novel from sheer portentousness. And portentousness, as well as sentimentality, has been a criticism regularly leveled at his work. At its best, his tone is unruffled, meditative, intelligent, yet sometimes it does grow gravely august, both orotund and oracular. His characters are all too often the playthings of invisible forces; and the most trivial action—answering a telephone, buying a blue notebook—can bring about the most improbable and dire consequences. What may look like chance is usually kismet, and to Auster New York really is Baghdad on the Hudson, an Arabian Nights world of omens, shifting identities, unexpected windfalls, improbable meetings, wildly good and bad luck, and all those sudden peripeteias that seem more the stuff of melodrama than of modern fiction.

I sometimes think of Paul Auster as the godchild of the legendary New Yorker journalist Joseph Mitchell: introspective and wistful by nature, both are drawn to society's more charismatic pariahs, bohemians, and misfits, and feel at home in the odd corners of metropolitan life. And both suggest that Americans are as lonely as the men and women glimpsed in the paintings of Edward Hopper.

A critic on a critic

2008-11-24T09:56:00.001-05:00

William Deresiewicz on James Wood in The Nation.

Wood's unwillingness to confront the contradictions in his thinking about these matters--to distinguish between realism and reality, artifice and experiment, character and person--points to a larger problem. Wood is a daring thinker, but he is not a particularly rigorous one. His powerfully associative mind tends to run him into logical cul-de-sacs that his supreme self-assurance prevents him from noticing. He often wanders from topic to topic, always too willing to be seduced from his path by the dappled description, the blooming detail. The general question tends to make him especially approximate; reading his critique of the gaseous George Steiner, I sometimes feel like I am watching two men beat each other with balloons. As at the larger scale, so at the smaller. Wood asserts that Mann's fiction is childlike because, among other things, it contains a lot of children. He says that human free will is not necessarily important to God, since God could have made us less free. While we might grant him enough room to argue that Morrison loves her characters too indulgently and then, four pages later, that she loves them less than she loves her language, we must draw the line when he tells us that Hamsun's characters "lie both to themselves and to us" and then, later in the same paragraph, that in his work "a character can lie neither to us nor to himself."

Wood's critical authority has become so daunting, it seems, that even he is afraid to challenge it. His argumentative method rests far too heavily on hand-waving, and while he is superb at turning a phrase, the fact that something sounds good doesn't guarantee that it makes any sense. Wood never stops to ask himself what his favorite formulas actually mean: characters who feel "real to themselves," who "forget" they're in a novel and so forth. These are obviously only metaphors, but metaphors for what? What, for that matter, does "lifeness" mean? And to what extent is Wood willing to take responsibility for his assertion, near the end of How Fiction Works, his new treatise on novelistic technique, that we should "replace the always problematic word 'realism' with the much more problematic word 'truth'"? Is something true (or beautiful, or good) just because James Wood says so?

Seeking compatibility

2008-11-18T13:39:00.002-05:00

The latest Paris Review "Art of Fiction" subject is Marilynne Robinson.

Characteristically fascinating interview with Robinson, with some interesting comments on science vs. religion, as well as the work of Richard Dawkins.

INTERVIEWER
Are religion and science simply two systems that don’t merge?

ROBINSON
The debate seems to be between a naive understanding of religion and a naive understanding of science. When people try to debunk religion, it seems to me they are referring to an eighteenth-century notion of what science is. I’m talking about Richard Dawkins here, who has a status that I can’t quite understand. He acts as if the physical world that is manifest to us describes reality exhaustively. On the other side, many of the people who articulate and form religious expression have not acted in good faith. The us-versus-them mentality is a terrible corruption of the whole culture.

INTERVIEWER
You’ve written critically about Dawkins and the other New Atheists. Is it their disdain for religion and championing of pure science that troubles you?

ROBINSON
No, I read as much pure science as I can take in. It’s a fact that their thinking does not feel scientific. The whole excitement of science is that it’s always pushing toward the discovery of something that it cannot account for or did not anticipate. The New Atheist types, like Dawkins, act as if science had revealed the world as a closed system. That simply is not what contemporary science is about. A lot of scientists are atheists, but they don’t talk about reality in the same way that Dawkins does. And they would not assume that there is a simple-as-that kind of response to everything in question. Certainly not on the grounds of anything that science has discovered in the last hundred years.
The science that I prefer tends toward cosmology, theories of quantum reality, things that are finer-textured than classical physics in terms of their powers of description. Science is amazing. On a mote of celestial dust, we have figured out how to look to the edge of our universe. I feel instructed by everything I have read. Science has a lot of the satisfactions for me that good theology has.

Condolences from the past

2008-11-17T11:25:00.001-05:00

An apparently authentic copy of Lincoln's "Bixby Letter" has surfaced in Dallas.

The famed Bixby Letter, which the Dallas Historical Society is getting appraised as it prays for a potential windfall, has a fascinating history.

The original has never been found. Historians debate whether Lincoln wrote it. Its recipient, Lydia Bixby, was no fan of the president. And not all her sons died in the war.

The letter, written with "the best of intentions" 144 years ago next week, is "considered one of the finest pieces of American presidential prose," said Alan Olson, curator for the Dallas group. "It's still a great piece of writing, regardless of the truth in the back story."

A long way to go yet

2008-11-17T11:01:00.002-05:00

Slavoj Zizek on Barack Obama in the London Review of Books.

A rather rambling and digressive essay, but worth a read.

As for Obama, I'm pleased that the Democrats are back in the majority, but he is a politician like any other; they're all the same, regardless of party affiliation. At the moment, lefties think he walks on water, and righties think he'll ruin everything. Neither side is thinking clearly. Let's see what he does, not what everyone imagines he might. Only then will we be one nation under a groove.

The reason Obama’s victory generated such enthusiasm is not only that, against all odds, it really happened: it demonstrated the possibility of such a thing happening. The same goes for all great historical ruptures – think of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although we all knew about the rotten inefficiency of the Communist regimes, we didn’t really believe that they would disintegrate – like Kissinger, we were all victims of cynical pragmatism. Obama’s victory was clearly predictable for at least two weeks before the election, but it was still experienced as a surprise.

...Nothing was decided with Obama’s victory, but it widens our freedom and thereby the scope of our decisions. No matter what happens, it will remain a sign of hope in our otherwise dark times, a sign that the last word does not belong to realistic cynics, from the left or the right.

First the madeleine, then the music

2008-11-14T14:06:00.005-05:00

Blair Sanderson undertakes a Proustian investigation at the Allmusic Blog.

Very interesting post, with musical examples, which attempts to determine exactly what piece of music served as the inspiration for the fictional "Vinteuil Sonata," rhapsodized over by Marcel Proust in an early section of Swann's Way.

Much as the flavor of the tea-soaked madeleine evoked powerful feelings of nostalgia for Marcel, another device is used by Proust to stir up the memories and emotions of the main character, Charles Swann. In the second part of the first book, Un amour de Swann (Swann in Love), a piece of chamber music is introduced to the story. It is a sonata for violin and piano composed by a Combray musician named Vinteuil, which haunts Swann throughout the novel as a leitmotif, reminding him again and again of his troubled, obsessive love for Odette de Crécy. They shared this music as their favorite sonata, and hearing it always brought Odette to Swann’s thoughts instantly, whether she was present or not. Its familiar “little phrase” recurs many times and its subtle changes in expression affect Swann profoundly. Effectively, Vinteuil’s evocative sonata is used by Proust as an analogue of Swann’s interior life, as well as a nearly synesthetic source of revelation.

My money is on Fauré, but who knows for sure?

Creating chaos

2008-11-13T11:13:00.002-05:00

John Rockwell reviews John Brackett's John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression in Bookforum.

A mixed review, but any serious attempt to give Zorn's enormous body of work some context is always welcome.

With all these ingredients, Zorn whips up a frenetic froth of sound, although every once in a while he calms down into lyricism. The effect is sometimes ebullient and amusing, though Zorn’s all-purpose anger insists on priority. It all sounds anarchic on a first listen, for good or ill, and Brackett labors mightily to impose some sort of order on this chaos. Although his musical discussions are more descriptive than deeply analytic—the nonmusical ones are better—Brackett shows us how Zorn uses numerological symbolism, as did Bach, Mahler, and the twelve-tonalists. (Music and mathematics lie close, and lots of composers have embedded number secrets in their scores.) Compressed chunks of others’ scores often act as jumping-off places for Zorn’s own compositions, providing historical reference points and skeins of unity, at least on paper. The sonic equivalent of film montage is another favored device.

The trouble is that Zorn himself has said, “My concern is not so much how things sound, as with how things work.” In other words, he loves the process of creating intricate scores that sound like maniacs improvising on the fly. In that limited sense, he’s like an abstruse academic modernist composer, as in the old distinction between “ear music” you can listen to and “eye music” best appreciated through a close reading of the notes. But by any reasonable criterion—and despite Brackett’s deliberate obfuscation of the fact—Zorn is a postmodernist, even the king of the New York postmodernist hill. People like or dislike his music for its jumpy flow, its wild clashes of style, its passion and humor, its hair-trigger virtuosity in conception and performance.

The takedown begins

2008-11-13T10:21:00.004-05:00

Jason Zengerle probes the cult of Malcolm Gladwell in New York Magazine.

Well, if you're selling books like crazy and pulling down eighty grand per speaking appearance, a little backlash should not surprise anyone.

The bigger criticism of Gladwell is not that he’s unoriginal but that he’s unserious—that he takes substantive academic work and applies it to frivolous things (epidemiology and Hush Puppies, anyone?). While such an approach may endear him to business elites, it often infuriates cultural and political ones. Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, has said, “What Gladwell is marketing is nothing but marketing—the marketer’s view of the world. But that view of the world is, I’m afraid, idiotic.” The judge and legal scholar Richard Posner, in a scathing review of Blink for TNR, complained that it was “written like a book intended for people who do not read books.” Meanwhile, Carlin Romano, the influential literary critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, used his review of Blink to give its author a hazing and an ultimatum: “Gladwell, one fears, has come to his own tipping point, or—to be fuddy-duddy—fork in the road. This way, guru. That way, serious writer.”

Gladwell tends to dismiss this line of attack. (“It was a sending a man to do a boy’s work,” he says of Posner’s review. “The guy’s like this legal Einstein, and he’s slumming it with Blink?”) But when he talks about his previous books, he sometimes sounds as if he agrees with his critics. “When I read Tipping Point now, it does seem more like a product of a lighter time,” he concedes. “I was really interested in marketing at the time, and that’s not that weighty an issue.” Blink, he says, “is very kind of distant. It’s, ‘This is a lot of cool stuff! Do with it as you will!'"

Yay for my friends

2008-11-13T10:07:00.003-05:00

Screen capture from "I Wanna Rock and Roll All Knight", episode #1.7 of Knight Rider, written by Rachel Mellon and Teresa Huang. (Watch the full episode here.)

Fight the right fight

2008-11-12T11:13:00.002-05:00

Cory Doctorow mounts a spirited defense of copyright at Locus Online.

The tragedy is that these para-copyrights have almost nothing in common with actual copyright law. No matter how hard you adhere to them, you're probably breaking the law — so if you're in making anime music videos (videos for pop music made by cleverly splicing together clips of anime movies — google for "amv" to see examples), you can abide by all the rules of your group about not showing them to outsiders and only using certain sources for music and video, but you're still committing millions of dollars' worth of infringement every time you sit down to your keyboard.

It's not surprising that para-copyright and copyright don't have much to say to one another. After all, copyright regulates what giant companies do with each other. Para-copyright regulates what individuals do with each other in a cultural settings. Why be surprised that these rulesets are so disjointed?

It's entirely possible that there's a detente to be reached between the copyists and the copyright holders: a set of rules that only try to encompass "culture" and not "industry." But the only way to bring copyists to the table is to stop insisting that all unauthorized copying is theft and a crime and wrong. People who know that copying is simple, good, and beneficial hear that and assume that you're either talking nonsense or that you're talking about someone else.

Sadness in perpetual motion

2008-11-11T10:20:00.003-05:00

"I notice how it takes a lazy man, a man that hates moving, to get set on moving once he does get started off, the same as he was set on staying still, like it aint the moving he hates so much as the starting and the stopping. And like he would be kind of proud of whatever come up to make the moving or the setting still look hard. He set there on the wagon, hunched up, blinking, listening to us tell about how quick the bridge went and how high the water was, and I be durn if he didn't act like he was proud of it, like he had made the river rise himself."

- From As I Lay Dying

The NSS Awards #25

2008-11-11T10:17:00.001-05:00

From the AP: "Sheriff to ban deputies from mixing drinking, guns"

Some are useful, most are just old

2008-11-11T09:50:00.002-05:00

Oxford University has a special list of ten phrases they hate.

With about a billion more in the ensuing comments. I've used way too many of these, much too recently...

Mr Butterfield said: "We grow tired of anything that is repeated too often – an anecdote, a joke, a mannerism – and the same seems to happen with some language."

The top ten most irritating phrases:

1 - At the end of the day

2 - Fairly unique

3 - I personally

4 - At this moment in time

5 - With all due respect

6 - Absolutely

7 - It's a nightmare

8 - Shouldn't of

9 - 24/7

10 - It's not rocket science

A voice that is now an echo

2008-11-10T15:07:00.005-05:00

Miriam Makeba, 1932-2008.

Ms. Makeba wrote in 1987: “I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa, and the people, without even realizing.”

She was married several times and her husbands included the American black activist Stokely Carmichael, with whom she lived in Guinea, and the jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela, who also spent many years in exile.

In the United States she became a star, touring with Harry Belafonte in the 1960s and winning a Grammy award with him in 1965. Such was her following and fame that she sang in 1962 at the birthday party of President John F. Kennedy. She also performed with Paul Simon on his Graceland concert in Zimbabwe in 1987.

But she fell afoul of the U.S. music industry because of her marriage to Mr. Carmichael and her decision to live in Guinea.

Take a listen to her song "Liwa Wechi" sometime... it's unforgettable.

The shock of new beauty

2008-11-07T11:51:00.002-05:00

Adam Kirsch reviews Roberto Bolaño's 2666 at Slate.

And positions it as a major work, kicking off with a corollary to Proust. I've been looking forward to sinking my teeth into this sucker and this kind of review makes the wait even more difficult.

Time and again, Bolaño hints, without ever quite saying, that what is happening in Santa Teresa is a symptom of a universal derangement in which hidden dimensions of reality are coming horribly to light. That is why so much of the activity of 2666 takes place not along the ordinary novelistic axes of plot and character but on the poetic, even mystical planes of symbol and metaphor. It is in Bolaño's allusions and unexplained coincidences, in his character's frequent, vividly disturbing dreams, in the mad recitations of criminals and preachers and witches—above all, in the dark insights of Benno von Archimboldi, who finally takes center stage in the book's fifth section—that the real story of 2666 gets told. That is one reason why the book is so hard to summarize—and why Natasha Wimmer's lucid, versatile translation is so triumphant. 2666 is an epic of whispers and details, full of buried structures and intuitions that seem too evanescent, or too terrible, to put into words. It demands from the reader a kind of abject submission—to its willful strangeness, its insistent grimness, even its occasional tedium—that only the greatest books dare to ask for or deserve.

Conversational Reading has been beating the Bolaño drum for a while now, and I've been interested in him since sampling By Night in Chile. Come on -- a 900+-page final work by a largely unsung, but major writing talent? Bring it on.

Versus mortality, science loses

2008-11-05T13:39:00.003-05:00

Michael Crichton, 1942-2008.

Crichton died Tuesday at age 66. He had beenfront privately battling cancer, his family said.

"Through his books, Michael Crichton served as an inspiration to students of all ages, challenged scientists in many fields, and illuminated the mysteries of the world in a way we could all understand," his family said in a statement.

The pain had to end

2008-11-03T10:24:00.001-05:00

David Lipsky on the last days of David Foster Wallace in Rolling Stone.

Just read it.

Never too young to start angsting

2008-10-30T10:03:00.002-04:00

Diablo Cody on Judy Blume in Entertainment Weekly.

I grew up devouring the Blume canon at our woefully small public library. The covers were hazy illustrations that evoked Playtex bra ads from the '70s; the pages had been worn pulpy-soft by a thousand juvenile thumbs. But the first book I read of Blume's was not one of her infamous adolescent sagas. It was a kiddie story called Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, which nonetheless seemed so exotic to me it might as well have been a Macedonian travelogue. The story might have been about Peter Hatcher and his incorrigible baby brother, but I was more interested in the setting than the sibling rivalry. They lived in New York City! They played in Central Park! Their building had an elevator operator! Aside from those thrilling details, I related to Peter's youthful nihilism. At 9 years old, he already identified as the titular "nothing." He was Alvy Singer in saddle shoes. Every other book written for kids my age was sunny, upbeat, and about as subtle as a bullhorn-wielding camp counselor. Blume's stuff had an edge; it was grimly hilarious and worthy of my attention.

And it begins

2008-10-29T09:11:00.003-04:00

The Christian Science Monitor is ending its daily print edition and moving online.

Drumroll please.. who's next?

The Monitor's circulation is just 52,000 -- down from 160,000 two decades ago -- and its early deadlines are crippling. Since most copies are sent to subscribers by snail mail, all copy must be turned in by noon for the next day's edition.

"The cost of producing it, printing it and distributing it is pretty high," Yemma said.

But the Monitor, which concentrates on analysis, has a strong news team: 95 editorial staffers; eight foreign bureaus in an age when mid-size papers are shutting theirs; and eight domestic bureaus, including a nine-reporter Washington office.

Upload the Tolstoy program

2008-10-28T10:51:00.002-04:00

Scientists are trying to figure out how to insert text directly into the brain.

There's a long way to go yet, but they're still giving it a whirl:

Jacking text into the brain requires consideration of whether to insert electrodes directly into tissue, an impediment that might make neural implants impractical for anyone but the disabled. As has been known for nearly a century, the brain’s electrical activity can be detected without cracking bone. What looks like a swimming cap studded with electrodes can transmit signals from a paralyzed patient, thereby enabling typing of letters on a screen or actual surfing of the Web. Niels Birbaumer of the University of Tübingen in Germany, a leading developer of the technology, asserts that trial-and-error stimulation of the cortex using a magnetic signal from outside the skull, along with the electrode cap to record which neurons are activated, might be able to locate the words “see” or “run.” Once mapped, these areas could be fired up again to evoke those memories—at least in theory.

Some neurotechnologists think that if particular words reside in specific spots in the brain (which is debatable), finding those spots would probably require greater precision than is afforded by a wired swim cap. One of the ongoing experiments with invasive implants could possibly lead to the needed fine-level targeting. Philip R. Kennedy of Neural Signals and his colleagues designed a device that records the output of neurons. The hookup lets a stroke victim send a signal, through thought alone, to a computer that interprets it as, say, a vowel, which can then be vocalized by a speech synthesizer, a step toward forming whole words. This type of brain-machine interface might also eventually be used for activating individual neurons.

Pulling back the veil

2008-10-27T11:05:00.000-04:00

Tony Hillerman, 1925-2008.

Mr. Hillerman’s evocative novels, which describe people struggling to maintain ancient traditions in the modern world, touched millions of readers, who made them best sellers. But although the themes of his books were not overtly political, he wrote with a purpose, he often said, and that purpose was to instill in his readers a respect for Indian culture. The plots of his stories, while steeped in contemporary crime and its consequences, were invariably instructive about ancient tribal beliefs and customs, from purification rituals for a soldier returned from a foreign war to incest taboos for a proper clan marriage.

“It’s always troubled me that the American people are so ignorant of these rich Indian cultures,” Mr. Hillerman once told Publishers Weekly. “I think it’s important to show that aspects of ancient Indian ways are still very much alive and are highly germane even to our ways.”

My byline is

2008-10-23T10:59:00.002-04:00

Eminem, memoirist.

...“I do ride my bike, I don’t have a dog, I don’t mow my lawn,” Eminem, 36, admitted in a phone interview from a Detroit studio on Monday night. But otherwise he’s been living the life of a suburban father, taking care of three girls: Hailie, his daughter with Kim; Alaina, his niece; and Whitney, Kim’s daughter from another relationship.

And now Eminem, born Marshall Mathers, is tentatively re-entering public life with his book, published by Dutton this week. Part autobiography, part photo gallery, part ephemera collection, it’s a handsome midcareer (and midlife) roundup for an artist who has been notoriously reluctant to discuss his personal life anyplace but in his music.

...Originally intended to be “a scrapbook for my fans,” Eminem said, the book grew to include large chunks of first-person narratives culled from interviews with the journalist Sacha Jenkins, and presented in a conversational style. “Rap is one big Fantasy Island,” Eminem writes. “It’s the place I always retreat to when things get too hectic in real time.”

Today's coolest book picture

2008-10-22T13:54:00.003-04:00

From the Boston Globe's "Big Picture" photo blog (link):

Images of books on shelves are seen projected on the walls of the Tower of David in Jerusalem's Old City - part of a show called "Night Spectacular" on October 7, 2008. The Tower of David is a massive citadel that, over the centuries, has served as a fortress, military barracks and cannon position. These days, the Tower serves as a popular tourist site.

Their lot

2008-10-21T10:23:00.006-04:00

"It's a hard life on women, for a fact. Some women. I mind my mammy lived to be seventy and more. Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went and taken that lace-trimmed night gown she had had forty-five years and never wore out of the chest and put it on and laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes. 'You all will have to look out for your pa the best you can,' she said. 'I'm tired.'"

- From As I Lay Dying

Even witches mellow with age

2008-10-21T09:20:00.003-04:00

Michiko reviews Updike's new sequel to The Witches of Eastwick in The New York Times.

I had no idea that this was coming out. The second surprise is that she gives it a more or less positive review.

The passage of time seems to have mellowed the witches and their creator as well, and “The Widows of Eastwick,” while deeply flawed, is a less tendentious, more emotionally credible work than its predecessor. Mr. Updike is less interested here in scoring didactic points against feminism than he is in exploring the wages of time and age shared by men and women alike, and there is an elegiac tone to the novel not dissimilar to that in the last Rabbit novel, “Rabbit at Rest” (1990). The mood here reflects his characters’ realization that the past now weighs more than the future in the scale of their lives, and that the noisy imperatives of sex, which once got them in to so much trouble, have given way to whispered worries about bodily ailments and medical woes.