The Big Winner

As expected, Cormac McCarthy's The Road took home the top prize in TMN's Tournament of Books. Oprah stole some of the award's thunder with her surprise announcement, but the excellent finale, with commentary from 17 judges, is a great read. In fact, I had a great time following the Tournament this year (for me it rivaled the NCAA's in terms of holding my interest). It was a treat to read reactions to books like The Road and One Good Turn day after day from a big group of people. I'm already looking forward to next year.

And incidentally, after reading all these reactions to The Road in the Tournament, along with all the Oprah-fueled media coverage, it's starting to sound like The Road is one of those important books that comes along from time to time. One that has real staying power.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:51 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Secret Histories: The Jamestown Colony in Postmodern Fiction

In this week's New Yorker, Jill Lepore offers a bemused consideration (not available online) of the Library of America's new edition of John Smith's works. Collected fact, or collected fiction? she asks. In True Travels alone,

Smith [claims] to have defeated armies, outwitted heathens, escaped pirates, hunted treasure, and wooed princesses - and all this on four continents, no less, if you count a little island in North America that this year celebrates its four-hundredth anniversary as the birthplace of the United States.

Putting aside, for the time being, questions of veracity (not to mention morality - "outwitted heathens?"), the quadricentennial seems like a good time to touch upon the wonderful (and growing) body of fiction inspired by Captain Smith's exploits.

John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor is surely a leading exemplar of the subgenre - as well as being one of the finest novels of the 1960s. Into the hilarious and strangely affecting story of one Ebenezer Cooke, Gentleman, Barth drops passages from Smith's "secret [read: invented] histories." Smith emerges as a liar and braggart of the first rank. But Cooke's intrepid tutor Henry Burlingame, undaunted, seems to model himself on the Captain. In the course of the novel, he "hunts treasure [and] wooes princesses," while bewildered Ebenezer blunders along in his wake. If you want a black comedy of high adventure (or if you want to see where Pynchon got the language for Mason & Dixon) look no further.

In the 1990s, William T. Vollmann revisited the Jamestown story with Argall. Here, we get Barth's pastiche of colonial Queen's English filtered through Vollmann's distinctive authorial temperament. Like Barth, Vollmann is fascinated by the violence of the early English colonists and the slaughter endured by the American Indians (a fascination he indulges throughout his unfinished Seven Dreams series). Unlike his metafictionist predecessor, however, Vollmann blurs the lines between fiction and journalism, between fact and legend... Sound familiar?

We'll pass over Disney's Pocahontas (IMDb) in silence, but Terence Malick's astonishing movie The New World (IMDb) certainly merits inclusion in the Jamestown canon. Malick takes a characteristically earnest approach to his subject. Even as his colonists descend into evil, Malick unabashedly evokes the romantic pull of the virgin land. He portrays the Powhatan tribe as innocents, much as the settlers did - but without the condescension that enabled so much slaughter. This movie is resolutely un-PC, and for that reason its condemnation of European conquest breaks through the familiar litany of post-colonial pieties. It is devastating, as any account of the origins of the U.S.A. should be.

Now Matthew Sharpe, author of The Sleeping Father, has come along to toss his buckler into the ring. His new novel, published by Soft Skull, is called, simply Jamestown. I have not read it, but I can say that I like Sharpe's writing a lot. Here he reimagines the Jamestown colony as a postmodern battleground, pitting settlers who travel by bus against indigenous people unskilled in the use of sunscreen. This appears to be an "ahistorical fantasia," along the lines of Mark Binelli's Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die! or Chris Bachelder's U.S.! It's notable that younger American writers are fleeing the good government of the historical novel in an era that has itself started to seem dystopic...that has, as Frederic Jameson puts it, forgotten how "to think the present historically." But Sharpe's choice of setting seems propitious. For as the Vollmann and Barth books show, there's nothing novel about these wild new novels. They're part of a grand tradition of American craziness that, Jill Lepore points out, stretches back to John Smith himself - "Who told his glorious deeds to many, / But never was believ'd of any."

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 10:21 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Oprah and the Recluse

You've got to hand it to Oprah. After a public snub from Jonathan Franzen, an abrupt switch to focusing on classic books, and a return to the contemporary with a confessional memoir that turns out to plagiarized - resulting in the very public humiliation of its author on her show - one would think that Oprah would have run out of opportunities to grab big headlines with her book club. And yet, by selecting Cormac McCarthy's The Road and convincing the famously reclusive author to appear on her show, she has done it yet again.

I had a couple of thoughts about this pick. In the early days of the club, Oprah selected quite a few emotionally challenging books, often with female protagonists in some sort of peril. With her selection of Franzen's The Corrections, however, the club broke out of its shell and then traversed the various ups and downs noted above. Still, it is fascinating to me that this unabashedly mass market phenomenon, the TV show book club, would pick a book that is by all accounts harrowing and devastatingly serious and not an easy read in any sense. It's not the first time Oprah has selected a formally "difficult" book. Recall the "Summer of Faulkner." Still, to take a book that is all of the above and also contemporary seems rather incredible. It will also be interesting, if The Road goes on to win a Pulitizer or National Book Award, to have had Oprah "anoint" a book before our more formal institutions have.

Secondly, I couldn't help but think about poor Franzen as I read the news that McCarthy would appear on Oprah's show. Franzen, of course, famously feuded with Oprah after she selected his book and he was publicly ambivalent about being an "Oprah author." This led to plenty of comments like this one from an independent bookstore owner at the time of the controversy, saying that she felt "that good literature cannot be an Oprah selection." With McCarthy appearing on the show for his "first television interview ever," it's hard to make that argument any more. We're talking about a legitimate Nobel Prize candidate here (and somehow this is different from Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez's classic One Hundred Years of Solitude being selected a while back). And poor Franzen, taking a public stand for his art and facing plenty of ridicule at the time, has had his legs cut out from under him by a literary giant - a famously reclusive one at that - eschewing the hand-wringing and taking the Oprah honor in stride.

Update: It's been pointed out to me that The Road missed its chance to win the National Book Award - it went to The Echo Maker, as you'll recall. The Road is still in the running for the Pulitzer, but as it is far from the typical Pulitzer candidate, I'd guess its chances there are slim. So McCarthy will have to be satisfied with the unlikely duo of an Oprah Pick and a TMN Tournament of Books win (which the book appears likely to snag).

- C. Max Magee @ 8:05 AM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

Thursday Links

• Alas, the Tournament of Books is over for my bracket as it was revealed that the "Zombie Round" brought Against the Day and Absurdistan back into the competition. With my finalists now officially out of the competition my bracket is dead, and it looks like I'll finish in the middle of the pack. Meanwhile, fresh off the Oprah selection shocker (more on that in my next post), I'm think The Road is a lock to win this thing.
• Book Chronicle has organized an award for litblogs. In my post about book blogs being snubbed by the major blog awards, I argued that book blogs didn't need to recognized in this way to legitimize them. Still, I do appreciate Book Chronicle nominating The Millions for their award.
• Harry Potter obsessives can now have a look at the cover for the final book in the series.
• The Paris Review has given its $10,000 Plimpton Prize for Fiction to Benjamin Percy, for his story "Refresh, Refresh," which is excerpted on magazine's Web site.
• Tom Bissell reviews Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close at Wet Asphalt.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:58 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Early Looks at Upcoming Books: Chabon, McEwan, DeLillo, Murakami

If I'm planning on seeing a movie, I don't typically look at reviews of it beforehand. I prefer to go into the experience with an open mind. And even though newspaper movie reviewers don't tend to "spoil" the key plot points, I'd just as well not know anything about the plot so that every twist and turn is unexpected. The same thing goes for book reviews. There have even been times when I've stopped reading a book review halfway in when I realized that I wanted to read the book being reviewed. Setting the review aside, I'll revisit it once the book is complete.

And so with early reviews of books I'd like to read trickling in, I'm setting them aside to pour over once I've read the books. At the top of my list is The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon. I was able to get my hands on an early copy, and I'll be eagerly jumping in as soon as I finish this week's New Yorker. Bookforum, meanwhile, has already posted its review of the book. In the third paragraph, reviewer Benjamin Anastas writes "The Yiddish Policemen's Union is many things at once: a work of alternate history, a medium-boiled detective story, an exploration of the conundrum of Jewish identity, a meditation on the Zionist experiment, the apotheosis thus far of one writer's influential sensibility." I haven't read further than that, though, as I don't want anything to put a dent into my anticipation.

Elsewhere, hungry readers have cracked into some other hotly anticipated novels. Bookdwarf has a look at Ian McEwan's slim new tome On Chesil Beach. She initially calls it an "odd, intimate book," but ultimately gives it her seal of approval, calling it "superb."

Anne Fernald landed a copy of Don DeLillo's new novel, Falling Man and offers up her initial thoughts. The book is yet another entrant in the "9/11 novel" category, but Anne clearly didn't find it hackneyed or overwrought. Instead she calls it "wonderful... excellent but not the very, very best of his work." Later on she declares, "Oh, the marvel of watching DeLillo reveal the poisonous thoughts of an ordinary unhappy woman to us."

Finally, Haruki Murakami has a new book, After Dark, on its way. For those who seek them out, early looks at Murakami novels can nearly always be found since his books come out in Japan well in advance of the English translations. One need only find a bilingual reader to share his thoughts in English. An excerpt, however, is harder to come by, but that's what was recently offered up at Condalmo, where Matthew Tiffany recently shared the book's opening sentences.

Previously: The above books are just a few of the most anticipated books of 2007.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:48 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Top Tens: Their Silliness, Their Allure

Longtime Millions reader Laurie sent in her reaction to all these "top ten" book lists that have been floating around in recent months, while also, of course, sharing her own:

In the wake of the release of The Top Ten, [there is also a Web site] a collection of top ten books chosen by 125 British and American writers, the Washington Post is soliciting readers' top ten picks.

These exercises are fun, but I hope no one takes them seriously. The lists they receive (like mine) will lean toward American/British books, with a smattering of European titles, partly because American schools emphasize Western literature. Cao Xueqin's Dream of the Red Chamber should be as well known as War and Peace, but most Americans have never heard of it. Even when we have read the non-Western classics, we tend to favor the familiar -- my list included The Old Man & the Sea and To Kill A Mockingbird, but Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji and Abolqasem Ferdowsi's Shahnameh are probably greater works.

What do you want to bet, though, that like the Modern Library a few years ago, they get inundated with a lot of lists that include Battlefield Earth?!

My top ten (not set in stone, except for Heart of Darkness):

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
2. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
3. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
4. Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man - James Joyce
5. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. Don Quixote - Cervantes
7. The Iliad & The Odyssey - Homer
8. The Dream of the Red Chamber - Cao Xueqin
9. War & Peace - Leo Tolstoy
10. Oedipus the King - Sophocles

Thanks Laurie!

- C. Max Magee @ 7:53 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Four Years of The Millions

The Millions notched its fourth anniversary this weekend, and I'm very pleased that the site is still going strong and more popular than ever. As much as I'd like to take full credit for this, much of it should go to my contributors who really stepped it up last year and who since the redesign at the beginning of this year have, in a few short months, really taken the site to another level.

I should also thank the readers of The Millions whose participation in the comments and whose emails to me help make working on the site a tremendously fulfilling endeavor. In fact, just peeking at the site's stats and seeing how many regular readers we have makes me feel very grateful to know that so many readers appreciate what we're doing here.

And what is it that we're doing here? As ever, The Millions and its fellow book blogs continue to evolve. One of the most interesting developments over the last year is how several bloggers have become regular fixtures in newspaper book sections across the country. Some of these folks were critics before they were bloggers, but some, like Ed, began down that path with their blogs. Even as blogs have been increasingly accepted as legitimate voices contributing to the greater literary discourse, there are still those who question their value and accuse them of cliquishness and worse. Hopefully, though, book blogs will continue to matter enough to enough people that they will continue to be targeted by such attacks. I'd rather The Millions be criticized than irrelevant.

The Millions, of course, has never been particularly controversial. Fomenting arguments has never been a big part of the site's mission, as much fun as it to sometimes get involved in those battles. The mission of this blog is to act much like your favorite independent bookstore might. As I've written before, "one should be able to walk into [a good] bookstore and be able to grasp, based upon which books are on display and based upon conversations with staff and fellow customers, what matters at that moment both in the wider world and in the neighborhood." I hope that when people "walk into" The Millions they get that same feeling from those of us who write the posts and from their fellow readers who leave comments.

Deeper than that, at the very core of The Millions, is that we should seek out good books to read and pass them along to like-minded friends. As I wrote nearly four years ago when I decided that the site needed a manifesto to give the then bumbling proto-Millions some shape, "this isn't about compulsory reading; this is about making sure that whatever you read will serve a purpose for you and that, as often as possible, this purpose is to bring you the curious sort of joy that only a book can." There's more there too.

All of which is to say, I hope The Millions still feels relevant and worthwhile amid the millions of blogs that crowd the Internet. To me, our mission is still worth pursuing. Thanks again to all of you for another great year. Let's have another.

Previously: An Historic Day; The Millions Turns Two; Thanks for Three Years from The Millions.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:06 PM ~ comments: 8 ~ Links to this post

 

"Turgid Waters": Zodiac Unmasked

When I was a kid, I read People magazine. I mean read it. As in every week. A couple of years into my subscription, I could name the husbands of Elizabeth Taylor, the number of cars owned by Jay Leno, the blood-type of every member of the house of Windsor. Weirdly, People also taught me a lot about serial killers.

This was during the era of Jeffrey Dahmer and Hannibal Lecter, and in between its celebrity puff pieces and heartwarming tales of uplift, People lingered voyeuristically over every lurid detail of every serial killing, real or imaginary, from Florida to Alaska. Even now the names are coming back to me. Ted Bundy. Aileen Wuornos. You know: People. Especially compelling, for a ten-year-old (and, apparently, for everyone else who read People) was any whiff of weird sex. Of course, from a ten-year-old's point of view, all sex is weird sex. As all violence and loneliness and pathology seem obscurely familiar. But anyway, I gobbled this serial-killer stuff up like Halloween candy, though I knew I shouldn't. And, as with the candy I'd stashed throughout my room, my People binges would leave me feeling sick to my stomach and rotten inside.

I was doing a pretty good job repressing this, my brief and shameful fascination with serial killers, until last week, when I read Robert Graysmith's Zodiac Unmasked. I had just seen David Fincher's scrupulous movie about the Zodiac killer who terrorized Northern California in the early 70s. My engagement with this movie was (I thought) deep, thoughtful, moral... not at all voyeuristic or creepy or weird. Then on the way home I had to go and buy Graysmith's book, one of the sources for the movie. I read 450 pages in just over 24 hours.

I cannot with any confidence say that this is not the worst book I've ever read. Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, Robert Graysmith's sequel to his bestselling Zodiac is itself a crime-scene: missing transitions, felony-grade solecisms, metaphors even more overwrought than this one, interspersed with anxious self-congratulation. It is the anti-In Cold Blood. Which makes it all the more mysterious that I couldn't put it down.

One explanation is that Graysmith essentially turns the killings into a dime detective novel, gaming the material for suspense.

Another possible explanation lies in all the ways the Zodiac killings do not resemble detective novels. The clues do not line up to point in a single direction (despite Graysmith's best efforts). Every pattern is broken. The puzzle-solving part of the mind, frustrated, cannot let go of the crime, even if the moral sense longs to. Thus we run over the facts again and again, hoping that this time, they will yield some proof and we can relax again.

The brilliance of Fincher's movie is that it dramatizes this compulsion onscreen. Jake Gyllenhaal, as cartoonist-cum-gumshoe Graysmith, offers an objective portrait of our corrosive fascination with violence. In the grip of his obsession, he resembles a ten-year old (which may explain why Graysmith writes like one). In the book, by contrast, the real Graysmith effaces himself; we are left to feel the sickly fascination ourselves. Maybe this is the more honest approach. Still, I prefer the clinical lens to the pornographic one. Fincher himself, in a couple of early scenes (as in much of his earlier work), stoops to aestheticism. But if a distressingly well-crafted murder scene lowers a veil between the audience and the victim, what can we say about a sentence like "Only the most extreme adversity could prevent this prophet of death from gloating over the proliferation of his obscene word?"

Ultimately, the movie Zodiac felt more like an adaptation of Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song than of Graysmith's Zodiac writings. Like Mailer, Fincher is interested in murder as a window into human nature. And like Mailer, Fincher is as interested in the traumatized bystanders as he is in his killer. It may not be easy, watching Zodiac or reading The Executioner's Song, to get over the creepy feeling of being compelled by the suffering of others. But at least these made me think about that feeling. Zodiac Unmasked just let me feel it.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 5:15 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Quarterly Report: Book Industry Trends

Every three months I've been looking at Barnes & Noble's quarterly conference call to get some insight into recent book industry trends and to see which books the retailer expects to be "big" in the coming months. Here are the highlights from CEO Steve Riggio on the Q4 conference call (courtesy Seeking Alpha):

• One of the big stories for book retailers this year was a lack of blockbuster titles to get shoppers into stores. "It was a year that produced two titles that garnered significant media attention. But while the lack of traffic producing new releases didn't help our top line, what's important is that our core booklist was solid." I'm not sure which titles he's referring to there - which says something about last year's lack of blockbusters - but I'm guessing one of them was Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope.
• Riggio also noted how customer loyalty programs have made for "a vastly different environment than just three years ago," and he alluded specifically to Amazon Prime, the online retailer's popular shipping offer.
• Riggio said the chain has high expectations for new books by Lisa Scottoline (Daddy's Girl), Jonathan Kellerman (Obsession), Mary Higgins-Clark (I Heard That Song Before), David Baldacci (Simple Genius), Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen's Union), and Khaled Hosseini's follow-up to Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns.
• "The Oprah effect on books continues." Oprah helped make YOU: On A Diet, Bob Greene's Best Life Diet, and The Measure of a Man by Sidney Poitier. But the really big seller - much to the chagrin of many - was The Secret by Ronda Burn, which Riggio called "probably one of the fastest non-fiction selling books we've had in recent memory."
• B&N is also looking forward to some new non-fiction titles: Einstein by Walter Isaacson, Where Have All the Leaders Gone? by Lee Iococca, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, and Paula Dean's memoir, It Ain't All About the Cooking.
• Finally, "we are just beginning to see a wave of books about politics and those related to the 2008 Presidential election at this time and by far, Barak Obama's The Audacity of Hope leads the pack."

Previously: Barnes & Noble's third quarter.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:50 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Thursday Links

• An illustration of why Cliffs Notes are never a substitute for the real thing.
• The Britannica Blog looks at "fun facts" about the 1,000 most popularly held books in libraries around the world, including this item: "Which author has the most works on the OCLC Top 1000 list? William Shakespeare (with 37 works). He is followed by Charles Dickens (16 works) and John Grisham (13 works)." Here's the full list where The Bible comes in at #1, the Census at #2, and Mother Goose at #3 (in 2,036 different versions and editions.) (via)
• Powell's is making a series of short documentaries about writers that will supplement and stand in for book tours. From the New York Times: "The British author Ian McEwan is the star of the first film, which is planned to run 23 minutes and will feature snippets from an on-camera interview with Mr. McEwan, as well as commentary from peers, fans and critics." The film is being put out to coincide with the release of his new novel, On Chesil Beach. (via)

- C. Max Magee @ 7:21 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Job for Yaghdan

This morning, when I finished reading George Packer's long article in this week's New Yorker, I felt like crying. Not out of sadness so much as out of frustration. Reporting from Iraq, Packer discovers yet another in a seemingly interminable series of managerial and moral failures: the U.S. government's failure to support the Iraqis who have risked their lives serving the occupation as interpreters and administrators. I hope to have more to say on this article, and on Packer's book, The Assassin's Gate, sometime soon. In the meantime, I wanted to point out an area where similarly frustrated Americans might be of service.

Packer introduces us to a U.S.A.I.D. official named Yaghdan who has been exposed by extremists as an aameel - a collaborator - and threatened with beheading. His request to be moved to a post outside of Baghdad is ignored. And so he flees on his own. Having amassed years of U.S.A.I.D. work, he ends up working for a United Arab Emirates cleaning company. Yaghdad's U.A.E. visa expires; Qatar rebuffs his request for a visa; the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has no personnel in the Emirates. "Yaghdan had heard that the only way to get a U.S. visa was through a job offer - nearly impossible to obtain," Packer tells us,

or by marrying an American, so he didn't bother to try. He had reached the end of his legal options and would have to return to Iraq by April 1st. "It's like taking the decision to commit suicide," he said.

It occurred to me that there may be well-placed Americans at various firms who might be willing to tender job offers to Yaghdan or to other qualified Iraqis in Yaghdan's position. A young American U.S.A.I.D. named Kirk Johnson has, Packer reports, compiled a list of current and former occupation staffers who have put their lives on the line for us, and now that they face death at the hands of militias, would like to live here in safety. Packer argues convincingly that this is a growing crisis, and that American leadership lacks the political will to deal with these invisible refugees. I have no way of knowing if job offers do indeed lead to visas, but perhaps some enterprising person looking for an administrative assistant will, after reading Packer's article, want to get in touch with him or with Kirk Johnson. Perhaps the sense of helplessness might, however briefly, abate.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 2:10 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

R is for Ridiculous

In a List at McSweeney's, Chris Steck ponders what might happen when Sue Grafton runs out of letters for her series of novels (she's up to S is for Silence, so letters are running short). Steck posits that F1 Is for Help might be a good option. He's got some other ideas too.

James Patterson was much smarter to go with his number-based series. Infinite possibilities there, literally. Though I should note that as of this writing, Patterson's latest at Amazon is listed as The 6th Nanny even though the accompanying book cover shows the title as The 6th Target. That's a lot of nannies, sure, but it doesn't seem to point to quite gripping enough a premise for his fans.

(via)

Update: Fun's over. Amazon has fixed the title of Patterson's book.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:47 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Still Tied for the Lead, But for How Long

Very clever of The Morning News to do this whole bracket competition with their Tournament of Books, because here I am writing about it again. I can't help myself, especially with the palpable frisson of being tied for first. In all seriousness, though, I've greatly enjoyed both the write ups by the various judges and the attendant banter by Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner. Today's installment, pitting Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day against Pride of Baghdad, a graphic novel by Brian K. Vaughn and Niko Henrichon was, as judged by Anthony Doerr, particularly entertaining. The whole exercise has served as reminder, especially in light of recent controversies, that engaging with books in this fun and perhaps silly way can be just as worthwhile as "serious" criticism, especially if one counts among his goals getting more people to read more good books.

Regardless of the merits of TMN's endeavors, though, I am in it to win this thing, and I remain tied with the formidable Condalmo. I fear, however, that I may be peaking early in this contest. The "zombie round" may yet give me new life, but as it stands now, my two finalists, Apex Hides the Hurt and The Echo Maker, are out of the competition.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:31 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A New, Old Trend: 'Assistant Lit'

Skimming through the CS Monitor book section I came upon a capsule review describing Because She Can by Bridie Clark as the latest example of "assistant lit." I assume that this trend hit the big time with the success of The Devil Wears Prada, and the subsequent movie version. But just as some see Jane Austen as a precursor to so-called "chick lit," I wonder if "assistant lit" has some historical antecedents.

One fairly obvious example that comes to mind is Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, perhaps the ur-assitant lit, in which the sympathetic Bob Cratchit is put upon by his terrible boss Ebenezer Scrooge, who has become something of a model for penny-pinching bosses ever since. But in that case, the action focuses on the boss, and we don't get much of Cratchit being forced to do Scrooge's laundry.

Another, much more recent example - which actually came out after Prada - might be Rick Moody's ambitious novel The Diviners, which offers a bleak (and not altogether successful) take on the humiliating plight of the assistant, while also, more or less, attempting to chronicle the downfall of our vacuous, celebrity-obsessed civilization.

Then again, it might just be that the book that many consider to be the father of the novel, Don Quixote, also happens to be the very first example of "assistant lit." Sancho Panza fits the bill as he is endlessly put upon by a boss who manages to both domineering and moronic. For those who have been assistants, as I once was, Don Quixote and his maddening whims will likely call up memories of capricious bosses.

But certainly there must be other examples of assistant lit that long predate the current trend, or like The Diviners turn it on its head. Can anyone think of some other good examples? Share in the comments.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:15 AM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

Love: A Burning Thing

I guess I re-enter the ring of fire at my own peril, but I feel compelled to return to what has become (or so the publish first, ask questions later crowd would have it) "n+1 vs. lit-bloggers." At times, the whole kerfuffle has seemed to confirm some of the liabilities n+1's "Blog Reflex" sought to diagnose in lit-blogs: a tendency toward contempt or wet kisses, an emphasis on performance over analysis, a reduction of big questions into partisan orthodoxies. These are, in fact, the very same liabilities I thought I detected in the n+1 piece. On the other hand, without some very engaging performances, you probably wouldn't be reading this. Despite the extremely high temperature at which tempers seem to be running, or perhaps annealed by the flames, several noteworthy questions seem to have emerged. To wit:

Does instant communication encourage combat? If so, why? (Is the media the message?) When does anger work to enrich understanding, and when does it hinder it? Are those even the metrics anymore? How can a medium so bound up with the culture industry manage a critique of that industry? Is the blog-as-antidote-to-ideology itself part of the ideology? Is good writing good for writing? Does mass culture exert a leveling effect? Can highbrow and middlebrow coexist peacefully, and if so under what circumstances? What becomes of critique when words are control x-ed and control v-d and the very idea of context, the context of context, starts to evaporate?

I'd like to advance the proposition that we're all engaged in a test-case. To the extent that we can do something productive with these questions (which will likely involve listening as well as talking, reading as well as writing), we support the idea that the blog has some place at the table of cultural criticism. To the extent that we spend time finding ever more inventive ways to give one another the finger, we prove out the idea that, behind the hypnotic flickering on our shiny new screens, nothing of much worth is happening.

Here, I find myself rooting for the blog in the way I used to root for the Red Sox - passionately, but cautiously. Weirdly enough, this may be not too far removed from n+1's attitude. The original "Blog Reflex" piece - which I have read, and recommend others do, if only at the bookstore - proceeded from the tacit assumption that the blog isn't by its nature the enemy of "critique." Keith Gessen's and Marco Roth's thoughtful, if controversial, their comments here and at Long Sunday only confirm that they believe that the blog might, at least theoretically, offer some counterweight to an increasingly narcotic media environment... a point with which I think most literary bloggers agree.

I took issue with the n+1 polemic because I thought the rhetorical choices - use of the past tense, sweeping generalizations, accusatory tone - tended to prejudge unfairly, and at a very early date, the results of the blog experiment. And to make ad hominem attacks without naming names. Again, I think n+1 editors Gessen and Roth are, if not in agreement with me on this point, then at least open to the criticism. (And in this kind of volatile discussion, it takes courage to come out and offer even a partial recantation, as Mr. Roth did, rather than sticking to the mode of turf-defense.)

Moving forward, it might help to clarify what we mean by "lit-blog." (A contraction of a contraction of a contraction is bound to cause some confusion.) In responding to "The Blog Reflex," I took "lit-blog" to mean "blog about books," because I contribute to one. But I've come to see that n+1 meant something closer to "blog that filters contemporary culture through a literary sensibility." I'm happy to accept this more expansive definition. Thus, as Keith Gessen suggests, my very short catalogue of popular blogs that seemed to refute n+1's generalizations should be amended to include not only Maud Newton and Moorishgirl, but also Long Sunday and Crooked Timber and so on. In all candor, Gessen seems to read more blogs than I do... which only makes me wish that "The Blog Reflex" had been more specific in its targets, lest babies and bathwater both end up in the gutter. (To be fair, the "Intellectual Scene" section of n+1 has always been more about the generalities of culture; the specifics are usually covered in the longer essays.)

I stand by my plaudits for The Quarterly Conversation, the LBC, and the Pynchon roundtable, as I stand by my own reviews, but that's a matter of taste. What's noteworthy is that each of us seems to be able to come up with a list of exemplary literary blogs. I do resent the imputation that "Keepers of the Flame" name-checked only the blogs of friends or that I prefer blogs that make "noise." I'm not online enough to have known that there was "a little circle," and I mentioned Scott Esposito's blog specifically because I thought he didn't seem like a noisy writer. (I'm open to correction on this point, but check out his photo on the website... he looks so gentle!) I don't know Scott from Adam any more than I know Ed Champion from Bat Segundo. I literally just reached for a couple of examples, from among the 10 or 15 blogs I read.

I also think "phenomenally ignorant" is unfair, as are the unbanked assertions in some of Mark Sarvas' and Ed Champion's responses to Gessen and Roth's comments; we could debate the value of name-calling, but - again - we'd be debating taste. I'd prefer for the name-callers to spell out what they mean, or to admit that, hey, in the heat of battle, they lashed out... and move on.

But Mr. Gessen's momentary lapses in what's generally an intelligent post - like Mr. Roth's admission to getting angry; like Ed's "Je refuse," like my own flirtation in the original post with imputing the worst motives to "The Blog Reflex" - points to a phenomenon the subsequent comment thread bears out. And which bears analysis, should anyone wish to undertake it: there's something about instant communication that encourages high dudgeon. This is not always the enemy of thoughtful "critique," but it does not, in and of itself, constitute critique. "When it comes to hatred, most of us are cowards," as Marco Roth puts it. Hatred can be a cleansing fire, but to hate bravely requires discipline.

As I see it, the challenge for literary bloggers - at least those who would admit to the temptation to flame, and who would also admit to feeling like their most combustible writings are not their most intelligent - is to find a way to preserve the agonistic pleasures of the medium while doing important work for the culture. I'm not sure if I agree with Gessen's premise that "bad writing is bad for writing"... that it's an offense against writing (though Milan Kundera thinks so). But I know I don't want to waste time reading bad writing. There's a war on, for Pete's sake.

Ultimately, the most useful point of comparison for the blog seems to be the print periodical in all its variations. The blog as a medium seems capacious enough to contain short reviews, 5,000-word essays, war reporting, dumb lists, gossip, "ignorant railing." Anyone has a right to make whatever complaints they want, and - here's the blessing and the curse of the medium - to hear rebuttal or retraction or further discussion in fairly short order. Rather than spending my time telling other people to shut up, or trying to impose a reign of virtue, I'd prefer to try to step up my own game.

And anyone who doesn't like that can suck on it.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 9:55 AM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

Of Basketball, Betting, and Books

I think it is appropriate that a cartel of organizations, many of which you have heard of and one or two of which you may have even been a part of, self-sloganizes with the term 'Madness.' This cartel relies on the complicity of its member organizations to achieve a singular goal: making large amounts of money. Of course, as Pablo Escobar could have told you, trading in such a market, to the enrichment of a few, also involves the exploitation of many. However I speak not of Colombian cocaine, but of American college sports, headquartered far from Medellin, in Indianapolis. It is the National Collegiate Athletic Association, it is March, and business is very good.

March Madness means that the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament is upon us, along with its redheaded stepchild, institutionalized gambling. This is the real madness of the tournament: American businesses losing billions of man hours to the ubiquitous office pool (I should know, I ran the operation, back when I worked in an office), and dollars changing hands like so many dominoes and darts in the back rooms of bars. Devilish pursuits, and oh-so-American. As March Madness becomes more and more imprinted on the national calendar and the collective sports zeitgeist of millions of young men and women, most of whom can part with a ten or a twenty for the possibility of a big score, and the certainty of some televised excitement, as Vegas chews away on ever growing mouthfuls of greens, and as the cartel piles up larger and larger stacks of the same each year, the NCAA continues to be Teflon to the accusations that its practices are nothing short of exploitative toward the very individuals responsible for its undeniably superior product: the athletes. Don't the athletes want, sometimes need, and even deserve a cut of all that action? Have they ever decided to rise up and take what is rightfully theirs?

Yes, yes, yes, and, oh my, yes. And here we should get to the bookish side of things, because, if you're like me, you may be spending some time in front of the TV in coming days. College basketball was plagued by a number of scandals in the 50s and early 60s that threatened to undermine, indeed, destroy the integrity of the game. In 1951, Kentucky and CCNY (then one of the best teams around) were the main schools implicated in a point-shaving operation that involved seven teams, dozens of players, and the orchestrated outcome of as many as 86 games. As a result, CCNY, the only team to have ever won both the NCAA and NIT tourneys in the same year, all but abandoned their program. But only a few short years later, on the upper west side of Manhattan, the father of modern basketball point shaving would rise from those ashes. His name was Jack Molinas, and he played for my own dear alma mater, Columbia.

The Wizard Of Odds: How Jack Molinas Nearly Destroyed the Game of Basketball, by Charley Rosen, is a solid read, one of the best examinations of the machinations that went on in college gymnasiums all over the country in the years after the CCNY scandal (you didn't think the bookies just packed up and left town, did you?). It is also a fascinating character study of a man who pulled more strings than a master tailor, while managing to cut himself loose of every lifeline to salvation. A lean, tall Greek kid from the Bronx, Molinas would bet on raindrops dripping down a window pane. He was said to have a genius level IQ, but it was his incredible talent on the basketball court, combined with his intellect, that enabled him to single-handedly control the outcomes of the games in which he played. Molinas would know the point spread before stepping on the court, and often would lead his team to the win, while making sure that they failed to cover the spread, according to the pervading winds as judged by the bookies who would then give him his cut. This is simple point shaving, but Molinas elevated it to an art form.

There is plenty more to the story, such as his expulsion from the fledgling National Basketball Association, then desperate to free itself from the specter of gambling that was so plaguing the college game, after his rookie season, for gambling transgressions. After that, Molinas practiced law, while helping the mob orchestrate the next great college basketball betting scandal in 1961.

It doesn't take a genius IQ to recognize how the machinery of college athletics is vulnerable to sabotage in the form of gambling-fueled game orchestration. This is why the NCAA has such draconian rules involving student athletes and gambling. Would March Madness be March Madness if there was any question as to the competitive integrity of the contests? While this thought is frightening to some, it was the singular goal to which Jack Molinas devoted his life. Score one for the little guy.

- Noah Deutsch @ 1:19 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The n+1 Spillover

If you haven't seen the action in the comments of Garth's reply to n+1's column on litblogs, it's worth a look, as the discussion has, shall we say, flowed onward. Mark, meanwhile, has begun posting "an irregular featurette" called "The n+1 Letters" in which he revisits the correspondence he has had with the magazine in question. Here at The Millions we tend to take a more dispassionate view the literary scuffles that crop up from time to time, but being in the middle of this one hasn't been entirely unpleasant. It's entertaining at the very least.

Update: Scott has expressed his queasiness with the tack Mark is taking, and I'll admit to sharing that discomfort. (I would not republish private correspondence without permission.) Also, n+1 editor Keith Gessen has now left a comment at the original post.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:32 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Hot Book Tournament Action

The action at TMN's Tournament of books continues. Judge Marcus Sakey shocked the world by selecting The Emperor's Children over The Echo Maker, which was, to my mind, the presumptive favorite having taken down the National Book Award and all manner of praise from critics spanning the globe. But this, folks, is why we play the games. The Echo Maker going down early hurts our chances to win this thing as we had it going all the way (my pdf bracket). Luckily, a number of other folks had the book going far as well, so the damage is somewhat limited. In other news, the little rat that could, Firmin, made it through round one, selected by judge Sarah Hepola over Brookland, which she found to be "so boring."

And today we have The Road coming out ahead of The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo as judged by Maria Schneider. The result: Condalmo and I remain deadlocked at the top.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:06 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 51st in a Series (How Hagar Got Its Name)

Nancy wrote in with this question about All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones:

I am listening to this book on CD and in the past week I have driven over a 1000 miles just to keep listening. It is a wonderful book. I am wondering what the significance of the title is? Since I can't page back and see if I missed something, I ordered the book today. I have heard Aunt Hagar mentioned several times, but I need a little help.

The "Aunt Hagar" Jones is referring to is Hagar from the Bible, Genesis to be exact. As the story goes, Abraham's wife Sarah was unable to bear children and so she presented him with Hagar, her slave, and with Abraham Hagar had Ishmael.

I'll let Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley take it from here, as he went in depth on the title in his review of the book.

God then permits Sarah to bear a son, Isaac, but Sarah is angered when she sees the boys together and demands that Abraham "cast out this slave woman with her son." This he does, but he is distressed, so God tells him: "As for the son of the slave woman, I will make a nation of him also, because he is your offspring." The nation that ensued, many people believe, is Africa itself, hence blacks are "all Aunt Hagar's children."

The story of Hagar has long been told in black churches and is the stuff of music as well. In the early 1920s, W.C. Handy wrote "Aunt Hagar's Blues," which includes the lines: "Just hear Aunt Hagar's chilun harmonizin' to that old mournful tune!/ It's like choir from on high broke loose!/ If the devil brought it, the good Lord sent it right down to me,/ Let the congregation join while I sing those lovin' Aunt Hagar's Blues!" The song has been recorded many times, perhaps most notably by Louis Armstrong on his album devoted to Handy's music. It's easy to imagine that Jones listened to that performance more than once as he wrote these superb stories.

Aunt Hagar is present here both as the symbolic mother of all African Americans and as the embodiment of black womanhood. In the title story, a young black man is murdered, and a friend of his mother says: "One more colored boy outa their hair. It's a shame before God, the way they do all Aunt Hagar's children."

Thanks for the question, Nancy!

- C. Max Magee @ 6:18 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Keepers of the Flame: A Reply to n+1

It's not that I'm biased... or, rather, my biases pull me in two directions. On one hand, I greatly admire the new journal n+1 - its moral seriousness, its elegant writing, its stewardship of the Frankfurt School legacy. On the other hand, I regularly contribute reviews to the blog on which this post is appearing. And so, while part of me wants to sneer along with n+1's backhanded compliment to literary bloggers - that they represent "the avant-garde of 21st Century publicity" - another, better informed part of me rebels. The current issue of n+1 raises many legitimate questions about the transformation of consciousness and culture we are (proximally and for the most part unreflectively) undergoing. I am myself suspicious of the Infotainment Revolution, and it seems peevish to dismiss an entire critique in order to defend a scrap of turf. But when n+1 stoops to the kinds of gross generalizations and straw-man-thrashing we are accustomed to seeing on the covers of the newsweeklies, it threatens to undermine its own mission. A little background...

The Winter 2007 issue of n+1 - "The Decivilizing Process" - concerns itself with technology and the culture industry, and if its unsigned, front-of-the-book essays are polemical, they are generally justified in being so. The spirits of Marshall McLuhan and Theodor Adorno hover in the background like a beyond-the-grave odd couple, the former insisting that media are only as good or bad as the uses to which people put them, the latter asserting that those uses are likely to reinforce the worst tendencies of the capitalist world-order that birthed them. Thus one writer points out that silence, a hard-won legacy of literate civilization, has, in the age of "Whenever Minutes" begun to disappear. (No doubt some enterprising corporation will soon be marketing "silence spas" or "silence earmuffs" - selling back to us what we once had for free.)

In a short piece called "The Blog Reflex," n+1 extends its critique to the blogosphere, suggesting that reflexive antagonism and an imperative for speed have undercut the much-hyped democratic potential of the blog:

Yet criticism as an art didn't survive. People might have used their blogs to post the best they could think or say. They could have posted 5,000 word critiques of their favorite books and records. Some polymath might even have shown, online, how an acute and well-stocked sensibility responds to the streaming world in real time. But those things didn't happen, at least not often enough. [...] The language is supposed to mimic the way people speak on the street or the college quad, the phatic emotive growl and purr of exhibitionistic consumer satifsfaction - "The Divine Comedy is SOOO GOOOD!" - or displeasure - "I shit on Dante!" So man hands on information to man.

Not least among the problems with this premature obituary for the blog is that it is, in many small ways, accurate. Anyone looking for an Ebert-style thumbs-up or thumbs-down on Dante will no doubt find one on the internet. Google will even tell you how long the search took. Blogs both reiterate and catalyze the coarsening of the culture... the dumbing-down, the, uh...whatever. (Tocqueville knew that democracy tends to aim toward a B-minus.) And for reasons too complex to go into here (I'm intentionally trying to illustrate one of n+1's points) the blog as an instrument of kulturkritik may be as compromised as those other artifacts of industrial capitalism - film, the photograph, the short story, jazz, rock n' roll... even (gasp!) the magazine.

Yet, depending on one's degree of fatalism about world history, the medium may not doom the message. Some of us on the American left believe that Jean-Luc Godard, Walker Evans, Donald Barthelme, Archie Shepp, and The Clash managed to transcend the limitations of their respective media, to push some kind of shake-up in the system, to preserve a space for free movement in an increasingly die-cut, cast-iron (or, later, iPod-sleek, powered-by-Intel) landscape. If n+1 took Adorno's suspicions about mass culture more seriously, why would its editors seek to penetrate the citadels of Random House and Doubleday? Why would they run ads for HarperCollins? Why would they continue to publish? (Why would they demand 5,000 word critiques of favorite records? (Why, in Adorno's case, did bourgeois high-culture continue to matter?)) Obviously, some accommodation with the system has been reached, and more power to n+1 for continuing to fight the good fight. But to call out others for their own accommodations is to devolve to the level of intellectual pissing match. Or maybe King of the Hill is more apposite.

Lit-bloggers "represent a perfection of the outsourcing ethos of contemporary capitalism," we are told.

Why should publishers pay publicists and advertise in book supplements when a community of native agents exist [sic] who will perform the same service for nothing and with an aura of indie-cred? In addition to free advance copies, the blogger gets some recognition: from the big houses, and from fellow bloggers. Recognition is also measured in the number of hits - by their clicks you shall know them - and by the people who bother to respond to your posts with subposts of their own. The lit-bloggers become a self-sustaining community, minutemen ready to rise up in defense of their niches. So it is when people have only their precarious self-respect. But responses - fillips of contempt, wet kisses - aren't criticism.

Just for clarification, dear reader: this isn't a fillip of contempt. It's a fusillade. (Flame on!)

Here we must grapple with the anonymous writer's rhetoric: call it the Argument contra Fortiori. He or she proceeds from the premise that "I shit on Dante" is the alpha and omega of lit-blog discourse. But just as the lazy researcher can Google up coprophiliac reductions of il divino poeta, he can also easily find the sorts of long essays n+1 values - the kinds of essays (not incidentally) at which n+1 excels. For example, Scott Esposito's Quarterly Conversation, an extension of his excellent blog, recently ran the most considered critique I've yet read of William H. Gass' The Tunnel... and I've read many of them. The Lit-Blog Co-op, mixing old-fashioned boosterism with serious discussion, helps to bring overlooked novels, many of them progressive and anti-capitalist, to the public's attention. The LBC does it not for the publishers, little enterprises like Minneapolis' Coffee House Press, but for the authors, and for the readers. Ed Champion's recent round-table on Against the Day, meanwhile, offered readers much-needed context for that profoundly leftist novel.

Many of us engaged in this work feel that the institutions that might have done it in the past have vanished or sold out (the book club), refined themselves into impotence (the salon), or abdicated their critical instincts in favor of precisely the kind of PR-flackmanship n+1 lays at the feet of the literary blog. I won't make the case that my own writings for The Millions are anything other than superior versions of newspaper-supplement reviews, but I do know that serious literary bloggers see themselves as an antidote to a vertically integrated media sector and a closed-circuit publishing industry.

There is merit in n+1's attack on the hyperlink ethos of the blogs. In lieu of critical writing, a list of links can easily decay into an endorsement of an industry's buzz about itself. Does tracking down links count as journalism? An interesting question. But, given that many of the lit-blogs least vulnerable to charges of thoughtlessness link to one another, and given that these blogs are quite popular, it seems to me startling that n+1 didn't manage to stumble across them in its internet divagations.

Indeed, I seem to hear the call-note of territorialism sounded beneath n+1's write-off of the literary blog. (Note the way "their clicks" shades into "your posts.") The "aura of indie cred" paired with recognition "from the big houses"... once upon a time this intersection might have been the exclusive province of literary journals. But the best literary blogs, free from the economic vicissitudes of the print journal, have begun to encroach. What can editors who have "only their precarious self-respect" do but fire a warning shot? "So much typing, so little communication..." In this summary dismissal, I learn more about n+1's own anxieties than I do about the potential of the blog as a medium for "the free activity of the mind."

But perhaps I'm inferring too much. In any case, n+1 has little to worry about. Its editors are prodigiously gifted, respected, drowning in "indie cred," and despite (or because of) such stimulating missteps as "The Blog Reflex," the journal provides a much-needed antidote to the inanities of consumer culture. The biggest danger would be for n+1 to fall through the trap-door of elitism, around which Adorno himself danced. Communication requires both speakers and listeners, and by making common cause with like-minded bloggers, n+1 might swell the ranks of the enlightened, rather than going the genteel way of the salon. To that end, its introductory essaylets would do well in the future to forgo simplistic binary code - Literary Blogs: Thumbs Up Or Thumbs Down? - in favor of sustained, thoughtful analysis.

See more about n+1's "The Decivilizing Process" here. "The Blog Reflex" is, unsurprisingly, not currently available online.

Update: If you're not tired of this yet, see the follow-up post: Love: A Burning Thing.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 1:31 PM ~ comments: 21 ~ Links to this post

 

NBCC Winners - With Excerpts

The National Book Critics Circle winners have been announced. The big winner, of course, is Kiran Desai who follows up her Booker win with another big prize for her mantle. Here they are, with excerpts:

• Fiction: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai - excerpt
• Non-Fiction: Rough Crossings by Simon Schama - excerpt
• Autobiography: The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn - excerpt
• Biography: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips - excerpt
• Poetry: Tom Thomson In Purgatory by Troy Jollimore - poem
• Criticism: Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Weschler - excerpt

See also: More details at the NBCC blog.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:54 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Gabo Gets Back To Work

In late 2004, I received this question from a reader:

I'm wondering when the next volume of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's autobiography is coming out - anyone know?

At the time I didn't have an answer, but I instead managed to stumble upon the news, then ricocheting across the Spanish-speaking world, that he had finished a new novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores. (The Millions was, in fact, the first English-language publication to report the news, and that post gave us our first big shot of readers.)

Now, however, we have received word that Marquez may be starting in on volume two of his proposed three volume biography. The first volume covered his childhood, and Marquez has said that the second volume may carry us through to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1982. Reporting on the occasion of Marquez's 80th birthday, the LA Times said:

His longtime friend and collaborator Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza said by telephone last week from Portugal that "Gabo," as Garcia Marquez is known here, is picking up with his memoirs in Paris in the mid-1950s, where his first bestselling volume, Living to Tell the Tale, left off.

It's welcome news for fans, as Marquez "last year gave friends the disappointing news that he had 'run out of gas' and was quitting writing. The author was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1999, and after treatment at UCLA Medical Center, he recently was pronounced free of the disease."

As an aside, it was Marquez's trips to Los Angeles to be treated that gave me the opportunity to meet him in the very early (and slightly embarrassing) days of this blog. (You'll have to scroll down. I don't know what I was thinking - How could I not lead that post with Marquez!)

- C. Max Magee @ 8:09 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A New New Yorker Web Site

The New Yorker has unveiled a new version of its Web site, and while I applaud its clean look, the addition of much more content accessible from the front page, and RSS feeds, there is one major problem: links to much of the site's content from the years the magazine has been online are, as of this writing, broken. This means the many, many links to New Yorker articles and stories in The Millions archives no longer work, rendering posts like my roundup of the magazine's fiction in 2005 much less useful. On the other hand, perhaps they used the redesign as an opportunity to clear out the archives so that more folks would buy the Complete New Yorker.

See also: Kottke takes a more in depth look at the redesign.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:42 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A Plague of Sorts

After finding out the Harold Bloom has read pretty much everything there is to read, Sandra announced that she had contracted Bloom Syndrome: "a condition in which the sufferer is unable to read any work of literature unless it is deemed Significant by Harold Bloom." Luckily a number of readers provided various antidotes in the comments.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:41 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

So Far So Good

With one round done in TMN's Tournament of Books, things are looking good for The Millions bracket which, along with Condalmo, was the only one that had Brady Udall picking Chimanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun over Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart. How did I decide to pick it? It was a favorite of Dan Wickett's and I trust that guy's taste.

Also, if you've checked out the Book Bloggers' Office Pool page, you may have noticed that the reader that I'm playing for, who was randomly selected by TMN, shares a last name with me. He is, in fact, my dad. So this means one of two things. Either it's quite a coincidence, or my bracket was only selected by family members who decided to support me out of pity. Regardless, if my bracket wins and my dad gets all those books that should have me covered for quite a few Fathers Days and birthdays.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:40 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Capitalism Births a Chinese Kafka

As anyone who keeps up with world financial markets surely knows, the People's Republic of China is booming. After the quashing of the Chinese democracy movement in Tienanmen Square in 1989, Deng Xiaoping did an about-face and introduced capitalism as a panacea for the woes of his country. Echoing the call "to get rich is glorious," many old-guard communist institutions were abandoned in favor of quasi-free market ventures, and the result was a China on the make, full of hustlers and schemers, anxious to make a buck. Crooked politicians became crooked entrepreneurs, and the pursuit of wealth became not just the means to an end that Deng Xiaoping had envisioned, but an end in itself. The Chinese literary scene caught on quickly, selling out its ideological foundations for the cheap fix of fast money, and a national literature of the explicit was born, with even writers whose writing had once been pillars of the democracy movement turning their efforts to the salacious and titillating, whatever would sell. It was in this milieu that Zhu Wen, whose stories are collected in the recently released anthology I Love Dollars, made his literary debut.

Modern China, as captured by Wen, is a Kafkaesque horror. The parallels to Kafka's work are uncanny: the endless bureaucracy, arbitrary nature of decision making, the crushing closeness of others, ambivalence to - almost reflexive fear of - sex, all coming together to make even the smallest task a trial of epic difficulty. Kafka's preoccupations seem a perfect fit for China, and Wen manages to capture all of the loathing, and paradoxically - and much to my great relief - all of the bleak humor of Kafka's best work.

The title story, which follows the antics of a father and son as they scour a nameless factory town looking for the narrator's younger brother, is a send up/satire of the go-go China of the 1990s. Much like Kafka's The Castle, the story documents the endless circular pursuit of a goal, which, when finally attained, proves meaningless. The unnamed narrator possesses an almost Portnoy-like obsession with sex. (Philip Roth once when asked if he had been influenced by the stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce, replied, no, he had been influenced by a sit-down comedian, Franz Kafka.) He views every interaction from the perspective of getting laid, and his search for his brother is repeatedly waylaid by his sexual proclivities. The humor that arises from this obsession tempers Wen's insinuation that China has traded the good of the Democracy movement for something vulgar. When the narrator insists that his father abandon their search for the brother to find some girls, his father refuses, leading him to note, "In [my father's] day libido wasn't called libido, it was called idealism." Later, in a discussion of his second favorite topic, money, he declaims, "We've all got things we can learn from [Western money]... From its straight-up, honest-to-goodness, absolute value[s]."

As the stories unfold, Kafka's influence becomes increasingly pronounced. The second story, "A Hospital Night," and the third story "A Boat Crossing" both transform Kafka's familiar themes into exquisite commentaries on life in modern China. They're built on an atmosphere of gloom, paranoia and general malaise, so complete and effective it is at times literally chilling. And yet, the bleakness is so absolute, it inevitably becomes ridiculous, as in "A Hospital Night" when the narrator is dragooned into taking care of an elderly man he barely knows and whom despises him. The ensuing power struggle, waged over the elderly man's indignation at being tended to by a stranger and the narrator's need to empty his bed pan, could be taken directly from the pages of Amerika, and will surely elicit snorts and belly laughs from anyone with an appreciation for dark humor. "A Boat Crossing," while also amusing in its way draws a darker picture of life, where a man, escaping from a nameless fear, learns that sometimes the things that seem the least threatening can be the most dangerous.

"Wheels" and "Pounds, Ounces, Meat" follow in the same vein. The first details an endless series of confrontations between a man and the pseudo-gangsters who are determined to make him pay their grandfather's hospital bills, and the latter follows a couple as their attempts to prove they've been cheated by a butcher cascade into a series of antic misadventures. "Ah, Xiao Xie" provides an interesting twist on the Kafka story, observing a Kafkaesque protagonist, a man struggling to quit his job at a power plant, from the viewpoint of a rational observer. As with so many of Kafka's characters, Xiao Xie's motives are completely inscrutable and defy all conventional logic, boggling the mind of the narrator, much as Kafka's endless variations on himself confound his readers. Eventually, Xiao Xie's struggle with the nearly indomitable will of his employers, who refuse to let him resign, undergoes a hilarious reversal. After Xiao Xie ruins his health with one of his schemes, his employers try to fire him, while he desperately clings to his job, terrified of losing his health insurance.

It's difficult to say whether Wen writes from a love of Kafka or a more organic identification with the themes of his work. Although Kafka's portrait hangs in Wen's office, many historical accounts of communist rule in China seem readymade for Kafka themselves. Many of Chairman Mao's initiatives summon forth images worthy of The Trial or The Castle, and the bizarre amalgamation of capitalist freedoms and communist tyranny seems a recipe for the confrontations between the self and the faceless bureaucracies that form the basis of so much of his work. The Chinese legalist tradition, harking back to the sixth century BC, also provides another point of similarity. The legalist's obsession with honoring the letter of the law over its spirit, reflected in the practice, if not necessarily the philosophy, of Chinese communism (not often noted, but to my mind indisputable), mirrors the unbending rules of the Talmud, with which Kafka expressed a deep fascination. Wen's work suggests that this combination of Jewish legalism and Germanic bureaucratic organization that Kafka experienced as an antagonistic force during his life in Bohemia has found itself reborn in a bizarro Chinese form. It might be hell to live through, but it makes for a fantastic read.

- Ben Dooley @ 7:19 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Oprah Going To The Dogs?

The latest in the burgeoning genre of book review-cum-anti-Oprah- screed, to which I made a humble contribution some weeks ago here, came courtesy of Peter Birkenhead writing for Salon.com. His excellent piece was featured on Monday, and has thus far garnered upwards of 300 reader responses, by far the most feedback I have seen to any single piece on Salon, which now posts all such commentary.

The thrust of Birkenhead's piece is that Oprah has completely sold out her once (halfway) respected Book Club to the forces of capitalism, in the form of her latest endorsement, ironically titled The Secret, an insipidly condescending visualize-it-and-it-shall-be-yours self-help contrivance, by Rhonda Byrne. Byrne is backed by an elite lineup of self-help heavy hitters, and Birkenhead trenchantly observes that "the enlisting of that dream team, in what is essentially a massive, cross-promotional pyramid scheme -- is brilliant." Brilliant when it comes to selling books, that is, not actually helping people. And, as Birkenhead points out, Oprah is, of course, at the top of the pyramid.

It got me thinking about the various self-help flowers out there and cross-pollination, and so I thought I would do a little research. I sought to enlist the help of a large pack of rehabilitated canines, a dream team, if you will, of (formerly) problem pooches. Cesar Millan, as anyone who has seen his TV show The Dog Whisperer or picked up his new book Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Correcting Common Dog Problems, is the leader of the pack. He is, in my opinion (and as someone who is considering becoming a dog owner), a pretty likable personality, and he certainly knows his dogs. But don't let the dog thing fool you: Cesar Millan is a self-help guru like the rest, believing that it is the owner, not so much the dog, who must change his or her habits in order for a dog to overcome its own behavioral problems. So, could it be that even the beatific Cesar Millan is part of the aforementioned pyramid scheme?

Acting on a hunch, and with some time to kill at Barnes and Noble, I picked Up Cesar's Way, and looked no further than the acknowledgments for my answer. Cesar makes a special effort to thank some of the personalities who have aided him on his spiritual journey. First and foremost, you guessed it, Oprah. After effusive praise of the den mother comes thanks to another dream team of self-help gurus: Anthony Robbins, Dr. Wayne Dyer, Dr. Deepak Chopra, and Dr. Phil, all of whom have upwards of 25 different books authored and for sale on Amazon. Cesar also thanks John Gray, of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus fame, for helping save his marriage. It seems that Cesar's guiding spiritual values are anything but pure-bred. Rather they are engendered by a whole host of self-helpers.

Using Cesar's Way as a litmus test, it would appear that Birkenhead is certainly on to something when it comes to the trend of self-help cross-marketing. Help yourself, sure, but it also helps to have some new-agey friends, all of whom have sold millions of books, on your side. Couldn't do it without 'em. If you scratch behind my ears, I'll scratch behind yours. Let's just hope, for Cesar's sake, that Dr. Phil is free of ticks and fleas.

- Noah Deutsch @ 8:30 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Canada Reads and Rocks and Rolls

Canada's national airwaves took on a decidedly literary tone last week with the latest installment of Canada Reads. This annual, week-long competition began in 2002 when five celebrity readers went to bat for the Canadian book of their choice. The panel would convince and cajole each other and at the end of each day, they would vote one of the contenders off the literary island. At the end of the week, one book survives.

The 2007 winner is Lullabies For Little Criminals, by Heather O'Neill, and championed by Winnipeg songwriter and poet John K. Samson.

In O'Neill's novel, the 12-year-old narrator, neglected by her junkie father, "collects and covets the small crumbs of happiness she finds as she navigates the streets of Montreal's red-light district."

Lullabies beat out Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis, (championed by Barenaked Ladies singer Steven Page), The Song of Kahunsha by Anosh Irani, (pitched by writer Donna Morrissey), Children of My Heart by Gabrielle Roy (defended by journalist Denise Bombardier), and Timothy Taylor's Stanley Park (whose praises were sung by Blue Rodeo's Jim Cuddy).

This year's contest was an all-star competition, as each of the panelists had successfully championed the previous five winners:

Page's pick in 2002, Michael Ondaatje's wonderful In The Skin of The Lion, set in the immigrant communities of Toronto between the two world wars, won that year's contest.

In 2003, Bombardier's pick Next Episode by Hubert Aquin, was victorious. Cuddy outsung the competition in 2004, giving victory to Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Last Crossing. In 2005, the crown went to Rockbound by Frank Parker Day, and pitched by Donna Morrissey. And John Samson's first taste of victory came last year with his winning defense of A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews.

Note that these books (and their contenders) include novels, short fiction and poetry, and are as likely to be drawn from Canada's rich literary tradition as from the latest offerings from publishers. I might quibble with some of the choices (that Leonard Cohen's second novel Beautiful Losers lost in 2005 still irks me, and I sided with Scott Thompson in his pitch for Mordecai Richler's Cocksure in 2006). Still, sour grapes aside, it's tremendously healthy for a country to be occasionally reminded of its often-overlooked literary past.

Those of you who have read my bio or my Millions contributions over the years know that I don't shy away from slipping a mention of my favorite songwriters and musicians - past and present - wherever I can possibly fit them in. So with that in mind, I would be remiss if I didn't point out that this year's and last year's championing defender, John K. Samson is himself, one hell of a songwriter, and three albums by his band, The Weakerthans, sit proudly in my record collection. Samson is also a founding publisher of Arbeiter Ring Publishing, specializing in social and political works.

- Andrew Saikali @ 7:09 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post