Kakutani on the Andrew Keen Bandwagon

Most reviews of Andrew Keen's anti-blogger screed The Cult of the Amateur have been pretty unflattering; take for example James Marcus' assessment in the LA Times. But apparently Kakutani is a fan, "calling it a shrewdly argued jeremiad against the digerati effort to dethrone cultural and political gatekeepers and replace experts with the 'wisdom of the crowd.'"

I haven't, and likely won't, read Keen's book, and I'm skeptical of the position that freely available tools allowing anyone anywhere to express themselves to the world are a bad thing. The intermet's (alleged) damage to highbrow culture is more than obviated by its contribution to democracy. For every 100 mindless bozos on YouTube, there's a whistle-blower revealing injustice somewhere or a witness to history offering up a first-hand account. To me, the trade-off is plenty worth it, and even if we are going to make the blanket claim that the internet is nothing but "superficial observations of the world around us rather than deep analysis, shrill opinion rather than considered judgment," there is value to be found in at least some of those superficial observations.

It's hard to say where Kakutani is coming from here, but I suspect she'd back any philosophy that might staunch the flow of all those "amateurish" books she's forced to read and then summarily dismiss in the pages of the Times. (This is in keeping with my image of Kakutani as the ultimate harried reviewer, who long ago lost the ability to enjoy books and loathes on sight every tome that crosses her desk.)

- C. Max Magee @ 6:46 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

The Most Anticipated Books of the Rest of 2007

With year nearly half over, it's time once again to look ahead at books that will be arriving in the coming months. 2007 was very much a front-loaded year in terms of big-name literary releases with heavyweights like Delillo, McEwan, Murakami, Lethem, and Chabon all dropping new titles early in the year. The second half of 2007, while it doesn't have as many headline grabbers (excluding Harry Potter, of course), does have a number of interesting books on offer.

September: I've already written about the Junot Diaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Here's what I said "The reason I'm so excited about this is that Diaz's story by the same title in the New Yorker's 2000 end-of-year fiction issue was one of the best stories that's appeared in the magazine in the ten years I've been reading it. It is a story so good that I still remember talking to various people about it in my then home city of Los Angeles, people with whom I never before or after talked fiction. It was a story that got around. And now, finally, it has blossomed into a book." Since then, the New Yorker has published another excerpt from the book, in the June 11 & 18 Summer Fiction issue, but the story isn't available online.

Suite Francaise, a posthumously published work by a Russian-born, French novelist who died in the Holocaust was a surprise bestseller in 2006. Though Irene Nemirovsky was a celebrated writer in the 1930s, she had been largely unknown to today's readers. Now, however, her work is returning to the spotlight. Like Suite Francaise, Fire in the Blood was written during the early years of the war, but only published decades later. Unlike Suite Francaise, Fire in the Blood does not center on the war, instead "it dwells on intense, often repressed emotional conflict set against bucolic country life," according to the International Herald Tribune where more about the book and Nemirovsky can be found.

Songs Without Words is Ann Packer's follow-up to her acclaimed debut, The Dive from Clausen's Pier. Based on some reports from BEA, the book has generated some buzz, but I haven't seen any early reviews. Publisher Knopf describes the book as a chronicle of a friendship between two women that is shaken when an "adolescent daughter enters dangerous waters" and "the fault lines in the women's friendship are revealed." An excerpt from the book is available, too.

Denis Johnson has a hefty new tome (600+ pgs) on the way. As Garth pointed out to me when he snagged a galley of the book at BEA, Tree of Smoke has garnered some serious praise from FSG head Jonathan Galassi. His letter from the front of the galley says: "The novel you're holding is Denis Johnson's finest work, I believe, and one of the very best books we have ever had the honor to publish. Tree of Smoke has haunted me in the sense that I've thought about it and dreamed about it since I finished reading it, and the impression it left has only deepened over time. I think it is a great book, and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I have." (via SoT)

Richard Russo is taking something of a departure from his usual terrain in upstate New York with his new novel Bridge of Sighs. The book's protagonist Louis Charles "Lucy" Lynch hales from upstate Thomaston, but the book's action takes place partly in Venice where Lucy goes with his wife to find a childhood friend. From the sound of it, Russo stays true to the themes and tone of his past books but broadens the geography a bit.

October: Ann Patchett, author of big seller Bel Canto has a new book coming out called Run. Patchett recently told Amazon the book is "about a man who is the former mayor of Boston, who has three sons and who has political ambitions for his sons that perhaps one of them would go on to be president, and he pushes them in that direction." Or if you want a snappier blurb: "Joe Kennedy meets The Brothers Karamazov," which sounds more than a little intriguing. Curious readers can listen to Patchett reading from the book courtesy WGBH Boston.

In my early days as a bookseller, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones was one of the first bestsellers I encountered from that side of the retail equation. I came to understand that this meant having a copy of the book within reach at all times since requests for it came unabated. At one point I even had the book's ISBN memorized from ringing it up so frequently. Sebold and her publisher will undoubtedly be hoping for similar success with her follow-up novel The Almost Moon. USA Today recently ratcheted up the hype by revealing the book's first sentence: "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily."

Tom Perotta's last book, Little Children got noticed both because of good reviews and because Pepperidge Farm made publisher St. Martin's take its goldfish crackers off the cover (they were replaced by chocolate chip cookies). Perrotta's new book, The Abstinence Teacher depicts no food whatsoever on the cover. The book treads Perrotta's usual turf: the raw underbelly of suburbia. Following in the footsteps of Election, another Perrotta novel, a film version of The Abstinence Teacher is said to be in the works.

Perhaps the "biggest" book yet to come out during the second half of this year, though, will be Philip Roth's Exit Ghost. Billed as the final Zuckerman novel, Exit Ghost follows Zuckerman back to New York where he is seeing a doctor but is waylaid when chance encounters stir things up in the way things get stirred up in Roth novels. An early look from PW is less than impressed - "the plot is contrived." A random blogger offers a different opinion. With the publication date several months away, the jury is still out.

The above are the forthcoming books that have caught my eye, but I'm sure I've missed some good ones. Tell us about them in the comments.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:17 PM ~ comments: 8 ~ Links to this post

 

Everybody Needs Moore Health Care

Overboard, sensational, witty, funny and not-so-objective Sicko is a Michael Moore classic. It is also a lesson in how to take a not-so-controversial issue (providing health care to all) and turn it into a provocative subject (by suggesting that Cuba, France and Canada's universal coverage works wonders).

But there is something inherently good about Sicko's provocative approach: it prompts debate about universal health care in the context of a government's duty to its citizens. Moore questions the humanity of denying care to patients on financial grounds, i.e., your insurance plan. Private insurance companies are in the health-care business to make a profit and can only do so at the expense of the sick, Moore contends. Then, he embarks on a tour of Canada, the UK, France and Cuba to debunk theories that government-based, free care is detrimental to the well-being of society and health professionals.

Along the way, Sicko visits families and individuals whose lives were deeply affected - emotionally, physically and financially - because of the for-profit system in the U.S. Moore asks why America, the world's wealthiest country, is incapable of providing a service that a range of other countries - from similarly minded Western allies to Caribbean foe Cuba - regard as a birth right.

Moore blissfully ignores certain aspects about other countries' national plans for a more favorable view of their virtues to amplify his message. Inevitably, this leaves Sicko vulnerable to attacks from the director's opponents and risks reducing an otherwise meaningful movie to preaching to the choir (e.g., Botched Operation, Crazy Moore Offers Wrong Prescription, says the New York Post).

But whether you like him or not, Moore definitely shines a light on an issue that needs and deserves public and political attention in the U.S. - dare I say, a la Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. No wonder Moore was at Capitol Hill flanked by more than 10 Democrats Wednesday, all screaming and kicking for universal health care. (Yes, I wrote about it here.)

As per usual, A.O. Scott of the New York Times nails it in his review. So, I'll stop my gibberish now. Before I depart: I expected the Post's criticism to stick, but after seeing Sicko I came to think that one has to be heartless and inhuman not to be moved by - or at least think about - the issues Moore raises.

Sicko opens in the U.S. Friday, June 29. See it for yourself and let me know what you think - don't worry, it'll be worth your 10 bucks, you'll get a laugh out of it as well as some food for thought.

- Emre Peker @ 8:42 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

New and Old from Woody Allen

Here at The Millions we've praised Woody Allen's writing over the years - Andrew discussed Without Feathers in 2005 and I did the same a year later. For fans like us, it's been a good month.

While Allen's movies have been coming along unabated for decades, there's been less on offer for fans of Allen's writing. But this month, for the first time in 25 years, Allen has a new humor collection out. Mere Anarchy collects many of Allen's recent New Yorker pieces as well as some new material. Supplementing that slim volume is The Insanity Defense, which puts Allen's three earlier collections under one cover - Without Feathers is joined by Getting Even and Side Effects. Both new books are must haves for Allen fans.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:30 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Quality Issue: Last Week's New Yorker

This week's New Yorker is already on newsstands, but before last week's issue is a distant memory, I wanted to praise it for being one of the best issues I've read in a while. Calvin Trillin's piece on an episode of vigilante justice in Canada was engaging and well reported and David Owen's profile of the Arup structural engineering firm was an interesting departure from the magazine's usual coverage of cultural luminaries in the architecture field (neither article is available online.)

The issue was anchored by Seymour Hersh's most important article since he helped break the Abu Ghraib story in 2004. In this follow up, Hersh delivers compelling evidence that responsibility for Abu Ghraib goes well beyond the handful of soldiers who were said to have acted on their own.

But what really capped off the issue for me was Helen Simpson's refreshing story "Homework," which had a startlingly different tone from the typical New Yorker short story. Instead of brooding and cereberal, the story is almost joyful from start to finish, augmented by a wry undercurrent of second meaning. Whereas many contemporary stories are played in a minor key, thriving on disfunction, "Homework" is built on a healthy relationship between mother and son as she helps him complete an assignment to describe a "life-changing event." Rolling her eyes at the silly assignment, the first person narrator mother dictates a made up life to her son, one that includes divorced parents and in particular a globe trotting, carefree mother. There are a few subtexts below the surface as she crafts the story for her son: her own difficult childhood, her desire for a more exciting, less domestic life. But the story is also about imagination and being a kid. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I hadn't read Simpson's work before, but I'll keep an eye out for it now. She's penned several short story collections over the years, including In the Driver's Seat, which came out last month.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:12 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 56th in a Series (A Remainder Reminder)

Neil writes in with this question:

I'm trying to remember the name of a new book I've recently read about and I can't quite put my finger on it. I think the general concept was that it was about a guy who was in an accident and when he wakes up, he has no memory of his life or who he is. Once the company that caused his accident pays him damages, he hires a bunch of actors to essentially play his family and friends. I think it's a British book. Does this sound familiar? Would love to remember the name.

As luck would have it, the book you describe was reviewed here at The Millions by Andrew back in February. It's Remainder by Tom McCarthy. Of the book's high concept hook, Andrew wrote:

You'd think all of this would be implausible, but the rendering is so painstakingly detailed that every time you think, "but what about...?", you find that McCarthy is one step ahead of you. He's already worked out the logical leaps. And once you wrap your mind around the notion that money can buy any service, somehow the improbable becomes possible.

For more on Remainder, check out its page at The Complete Review, chock full of links to commentary on the book.

Thanks for writing, Neil!

- C. Max Magee @ 10:02 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Cold and Ruminating: A Review of In the Wake by Per Petterson

Scott of Conversational Reading invited me to participate in his "Reading the World" series this month. My contribution was reading and posting about Per Petterson's In the Wake.

I don't read enough fiction in translation, maybe a couple of books per year. When I do the experience elicits one of two reactions. Either the book is so rooted in its place and culture that I can't imagine it being written in another language, or the book, despite its overseas origins, shows that there are universals in literature, no matter the language in which a book was conceived. Norwegian Per Petterson's In the Wake falls mostly into the latter camp, as it draws from the grand tradition of books about ruminating, somewhat pathetic male protagonists who appear to live their lives mostly in their heads.

Saul Bellow's Seize the Day comes to mind, and Richard Ford has made a career out of this type of book. But my favorite example from this crowded genre is Walker Percy's pitch perfect The Moviegoer.

Read the rest of the review at Conversational reading.

Also of Note: Petterson just won the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his book Out Stealing Horses. We took a look at the IMPAC shortlist in April.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:00 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Reading in Translation

Tomorrow, as part of Scott's month-long Reading the World series, I'll have a review of Per Petterson's In the Wake up at Conversational Reading. Reading the World is focused on "bringing international voices to the attention of readers," and reading In the Wake and considering it as a "work in translation" rather than simply a novel got me thinking about how much non-English language reading I actually do. As it turns out, I don't read many books that weren't written in English. I don't think this is necessarily a deficiency, but considering how much I've enjoyed the literature in translation that I've read, it seems I should seek these books out more often. Here are the books in translation I've read over the last few years (As you might expect, Ryszard Kapuscinski figures heavily.)

2003:

• Imperium by Ryszard Kapuscinski
• The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis
• The Lonely Hearts Club by Raul Nunez - my thoughts
• The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski

2004:

• Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes - my thoughts
• Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski my thoughts

2005:

• Generations of Winter by Vassily Aksyonov my thoughts
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas - my thoughts

2006:

• Television by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
• White Spirit by Paule Constant
• Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi Wa'Thiong'O - Garth's review

2007:

• In the Wake by Per Petterson

- C. Max Magee @ 9:45 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Learning Curve: A Review of Nell Freudenberger's The Dissident

Nell Freudenberger is unquestionably a gifted writer and will, if we're fortunate, become a major one. Her story collection Lucky Girls, published when she was 28, earned ink from Vogue and Elle and hardware from PEN, and if Marisha Pessl has since eclipsed her as lit-fic's "It Girl," well... so much the better. Slipping out of the prurient heat of emergence and into the relative tedium of an established reputation can only be good for the work, right?

In this case, yes and no. The Dissident shows off many of the traits that endeared Lucky Girls to reviewers: a clean prose line, a facility with dialogue, a Hogarthian ability to sketch a character, and, most substantively, an interest in the bad connections, missed connections, and disconnects that separate West and East and lover from beloved. And as a novel should, it broadens the writer's palette. Yet The Dissident sometimes feels beholden to Freudenberger's brilliant early notices, and overly eager to please.

The set-up is promising: Yuan Zhao, a Chinese conceptual artist once jailed for his art, gets invited to spend a year teaching at a private high school for girls in Los Angeles. His hosts are to be the Traverses, the kind of semi-functional affluent family much beloved of American independent cinema and M.F.A. workshops. A comedy-of-manners-cum-novel-of-ideas will ensue.

Or may ensue.

Unlike many of our younger writers, Freudenberger knows how to underplay a hand. She lays out the story of her protagonist's visit to Los Angeles with a touch so light it's almost Austenish. Every bench, tree, and closet at the St. Anselm's School for Girls has been named for a donor. Characters insist on referring to an outdoor space as "the Malmsted Courtyard." A Vice Principal approaches a conflict "like a racehorse, pawing the gate, eager to demonstrate the qualities for which she'd been bred." Thanks to such keen attention to surfaces, Cece, mother of the Travers clan (no relation to Pynchon's Traverses), instantly comes to life, and if the pretensions of The Dissident's Angelenos are familiar, it's still fun to see them lampooned in set-pieces: the awkward dinner party, the dance recital. But as many of the characters - especially the men - collapse into types, the comedy is defanged. That the protagonist must, of necessity, be a cipher puts even more pressure on the supporting cast. Still, motivations remain opaque, or perhaps underimagined, and we too rarely see ourselves in these characters. Mostly we laugh at them comfortably, from afar.

We look, then, to plot to draw us in, and here The Dissident underplays as well. The most exciting writing - the freest, it seemed to me, from the need to be "literary" - takes place in China, as we learn about Yuan's small circle of friends in Beijing's "East Village" underground, who have in common only their hunger for the radical, even frightening liberation of honest-to-God art. By contrast, the book's Romantic Subplot and its Big Twist feel dutiful, not to say inevitable.

As for the ideas... in the realist novel, ideas come to life when embedded in dramatic situations, and as The Dissident hurries blithely past opportunities for complication and confrontation, never dropping its tone of wry self-assurance, potentially interesting notions about the provenance of art and identity and the cultural construction thereof sit inert on the page, like notes toward an undergrad thesis.

But then suddenly, in the final pages, a brief and piercing ray of pain blazes up, like a Tolstoian candle: in the space of a single scene, Cece and Howard Travers become real. Their leave-taking has the characteristic heart-in-throat assault of a great short story, and remind us why Freudenberger's writing stirred such excitement in the first place.

In The Dissident, she aces the basic requirements of the novel - modulation of point-of-view, slowing and speeding of time, and gradual revelation of information - with the same seeming aplomb with which she approached the short-story form. But we want less of an "approach" and more of an "attack." Then again, perhaps Freudenberger is aware of the learning curve: in her first novel, she's given us a protagonist who also has to live with premature accolades, and compares himself unfavorably to a more passionate alter-ego. And she's placed him in a milieu where the pressure to succeed reaches absurd extremes."Young writers as... good as Nell Freudenberger give us reason to hope," the Times effused, of Lucky Girls. The Dissident will lead no one to abandon that hope - but in order to fulfill it, Nell Freudenberger will need to discover and seize those things that can't be taught. It is enjoyable this time around to watch the young woman at the head of the class pass the critical and commercial tests put to her, but in the future, we'll look to her to be an artist, not an art student. We encourage her to aim for the private ferocity of marks on paper, and to hell with anybody else's gold star.

Including ours.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:39 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Literary Archives From the Dusty Stacks to the Digital Future

I read with interest D.T. Max's article in the recent Summer Fiction Issue of the New Yorker covering the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which is, by the sound of it, one of the world's most important literary archives. The piece mostly covered the library's director Thomas Staley, and his impressive skill in locking down the papers of some of history's greatest writers, but it also delved into descriptions of the papers themselves.

I suppose I'd never really thought of it before reading this article, but I was surprised at the sheer mass that these collections represent. For example, Norman Mailer's "archive - weighing twenty thousand pounds in all - came to the center in a tractor trailer." And that's just one of many, many archives. In all, the collection "contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron's curly brown hair." The Texas is also old school in the way it approaches its collection.

Staley's conservatism extends beyond his literary taste. He does not want to place the Ransom's archives online. He believes, quoting Matthew Arnold, that "the object as in itself it really is" can never be replaced by a digital reproduction. "Smell this," he told me one time when I was in his office, as he picked up a manuscript box from the Edwardian British publisher Cecil Palmer. We inhaled the scent: tobacco, mold, dust. "See, there’s information in the smell, too," he said.

Be that as it may, the objects that Staley covets for the Texas collection may not be as plentiful in the coming years.

I was fascinated, for example, by Don Delillo's papers as described by D.T. Max in the New Yorker: Delillio's manuscripts "were eerily immaculate - embalmed in acid-free manila folders inside blue legal-sized boxes, each about the size of an accordion folder."

Compare this to a recent article in the New York Times discussing the increasing use of technology and software in crafting fiction. The article's centerpiece is Richard Powers, whose affinity for technology is well known. Instead of piles of paper, Powers

poured the background research into hyperlinked notebooks using Microsoft OneNote, a program more commonly used by businesses, which allows you to combine text documents, e-mail, images, spreadsheets and video and audio material into one searchable document. He then mapped out possible changing interactions between characters. "These notebook sections gradually grew into the kernels of individual dramatic scenes, which I could then work up in parallel," Powers said. "The combination of software programs (each of which links seamlessly into the other) allowed for simultaneous top-down and bottom-up composition."

I would guess that some archivists might find it upsetting that, increasingly, modern day authors won't leave dusty boxes of paper to sift through. Correspondence will be collected in email form, and background research will include hyperlinks and spreadsheets, images and video. This doesn't jibe with the classic notion of doing literary research, but it will also open dazzling opportunities, as notable writers' papers will exist in digital form from the outset, and won't be physically limited to certain institutions. In this way we may trace the links and paths set down by writers as they crafted their work. We will be able to sift through the "dusty boxes" from our desks, wherever we are.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:42 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Inter Alia #1: Notes Toward a Sporadic Column

I'm still working out my relationship with the blog as a critical organ... I guess, in a way, we all are. My thoughts, as visitors to this site may have noticed, tend equally toward the associative and the forensic. And yet, as a gift to you, the reader, I'd like to carve out a space in which I can share some of my less strenuously worked-out thoughts about the state of the art of fiction, and about culture more generally. (Lucky me, you're probably thinking.)

These "ideas," if I can call them that, may turn out on closer inspection to be completely bogus. And yet I'm feeling the need sporadically to turn the power of the blog as an instrument of feedback away from such epiphenomenal questions as, "Doesn't John Colapinto seem weirdly peevish and thin-skinned this week" and toward less sexy developments that may still have some bearing on American culture a year from now... or a decade from now. That is, I propose to engineer a column on literature here at The Millions that advances beyond "link-bait," even as it stays brief, casual, and interactive. I want to invite other writers working online, or stuck in the cubicle farm, to pick up on and respond to my less topical provocations, here or elsewhere, just as they might respond to a public gaffe by a former child star, or a book review in The New Republic.

I'd like to call this column "Inter Alia," which is Latin for "among other things." It will appear irregularly, like a meteor shower (or perhaps more likely, an unwanted guest). It will be about the length of what follows.

Inter Alia 1: Genre Madness

I'm going to raise a few questions, by way of experiment, about the continued relevance (or irrelevance) of notions of genre. It seems to me that the canonization of Philip K. Dick by the Library of America is a healthy development, and not just because it encourages snobs like me to consider speculative fiction alongside the main body of "realism" in our reading lives. It is also (I think) a manifestation of a long trend, with younger American writers gleefully sinking their teeth into the pop tropes of what was previously dismissed as "genre fiction," and "genre" writers like Dick being hailed for their literary merit. (Let's set aside for the sake of argument the high-low brinksmanship of Modernists like Joyce and Borges, similar in degree but different in kind). Kelly Link's Small Beer Press, e.g., has done a lot to remind us that the postmodern leveling of "high" and "low" culture distinctions is not just political - it can be fun. Simultaneously, "Literary Fiction," as Gerald Howard and others have argued, is moving from being a descriptor to being a genre in and of itself, with its own generic conventions. Call it lit-fic: a label no more a guarantor (or compromiser) of literary value than is "Western," or "Sci Fi."

Michael Chabon, it seems to me, is one of several 40-ish writers working toward a unified-field theory that harmonizes the best of lit-fic and its discontents. And yet, notwithstanding the wisdom of John Leonard, who suggested at a panel recently that getting too hung up on a book's genre is a form of stupidity, I find myself struggling with The Yiddish Policemen's Union. On one hand, it's a staggering feat of imagination, and often a great read. On the other, the stylized cliffhanger chapter endings (cribbed from gumshoe novels and children's books and Saturday matinees), the sometimes cartoony dogpile of figurative language, the comic book characterization, and the almost parodically rococo plot seem to me to obscure the promise of a brilliant premise: an alternative postwar history that turns Alaska into a Jewish homeland.

This may be nigglingly small-minded, and would be a mere footnote to a longer review. Chabon clearly invested years in The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and has taken significant risks, and I think he deserves a wide readership. But I want to be honest about my reading experience. If this were a children's book, like Summerland, or a melancholy lieder, like The Final Solution, I might swallow my resistance. But Chabon wants me to take to heart the adult sufferings of his hero, Meyer Landsman, and this particular book's generic patrimony interferes with my ability to do so. I keep feeling dismissed from the suspension of disbelief, like Adam and Eve booted from the garden. I keep feeling reminded of the book qua book. Am I just hung up in an old-fashioned need to classify, as I once accused Michiko Kakutani of being? Or are there certain compositional principles underlying the successful genre mash-up, the way a mash-up mp3 requires that two songs have affinities of key and tempo? And if so, how do writers put them into practice? How do readers evaluate a genre-straddling book by the standards of one genre without using the other as an alibi? Discuss.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 12:00 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

WTF: Classx 2 Yr Phone

A few weeks back, Reuters reported on a new website called Daily Lit, which blasts short clips of classic literature to subscribers' email addresses every day. Readers can take in Anna Karenina via Blackberry, in five-minute chunks disbursed over fourteen months. "Our audience includes people like us, who spend hours each day on e-mail but can't find the time to read a book," Albert Wenger, a founder of DailyLit, told the press.

Now, far be it from me to denigrate any effort to make literature more accessible. I used to be a regular reader of the Samuel Pepys blog, and probably made more of a dent in the digital Diary than I would have in the hard copy. But Daily Lit seems to represent the unexamined costs of the information age's promises of convenience. Is yet another daily email really the solution to too much email? What does it mean to click from Paris of Troy to Paris Hilton. (OMG, Achilles is sooo hot.) Does one find time, or does one make it?

Already 50,000 people have enrolled in Daily Lit, which currently offers 370 titles from the public domain, free of charge. Soon the site will expand to charge for daily excerpts of newer work. No doubt certain texts - Lydia Davis stories, poems by Basho - might lend themselves to the DailyLit treatment, providing a short liberation from the drudgeries of the day. But big novels aren't meant to be noshed on like an energy bar, wedged in between breakfast and dinner. At their best, they open up vistas of freedom beyond our daily habits and obligations. Opt for the bite-sized version if you like. But God forbid I come to look forward to Tolstoy with the same dread with which I approach my inbox.

And so, book in hand, to bed.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:49 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Ride the Shuffle: The Institute for the Future of the Book

This guest contribution comes from Buzz Poole, the managing editor of Mark Batty Publisher. He has written for the likes of The Believer, Village Voice and San Francisco Chronicle, and is the author of Madonna of the Toast, a look at the cultural ramifications of unexpected religious and secular icons. Keep up with his adventures in surprising iconography at his Madonna of the Toast blog.

In the wake of what was the weltering sea of publishing professionals awash in New York City's Javits Center for Book Expo America 2007, The New York Times ran the piece "Waxing Philosophical, Booksellers Face the Digital." The writer invoked John Updike's speech from a year ago during which he beseeched booksellers to "'defend [their] lonely forts' against a digital future of free book downloads and snippets of text." In the constant digital flutter of information that courses at us through screens - the one you read from this moment, PDAs and cell phones - it stands to reason that technologists would aim to bring reading, writing and the notion of books into the fray of this constantly shifting landscape. While the conversations of how books will endure our digital age have gone on for years, often at rates that far exceed the available technology, this Times piece evidenced the inevitable changes to publishing in the presence of companies like Google and MySpace at places like BEA

While the dissemination of books has certainly changed over the years, downloaded or bought at highly reduced prices from Amazon, the product is still very much a book that meets the conventional standards of writing and reading, in the sense that an author has written something for readers, and agree or disagree, like it or hate it, nothing will change about the actual text. Wired editor Chris Anderson was apparently touting his forthcoming book at BEA, something called Free, which will indeed be free to readers willing to download a version interspersed with ads. Print-on-demand books allow more writers the satisfaction of seeing and holding their words on bound pages held together by glue and a case, but they are still, "just books."

In the realm of publishing, however, especially mainstream publishing, the concerns and campaigns are geared to getting better at selling books, not to how the very nature of books is, and has been, changing for years.

The Institute for the Future of the Book is on the bleeding edge of this evolution. Headquartered in Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, the Institute is redefining the act of reading, with the ultimate goal of democratizing how information is created, conveyed, maintained and understood. The Institute is not the first on the block to try to make the best of technology for such a purpose, but it is making its ideas reality. The Institute is a project of the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. But it is much more than money, technology and profile that put the Institute at the forefront of this evolution; the Institute's founder Bob Stein is why the Institute will change how we understand the acts of writing and reading, or not.

With the look of a mischievous urban Zen monk, replete with the tonsured pate, Stein has long advocated for the optimal uses of the newest technologies to reinvent the conventions of media. Stein founded the Criterion Collection, today a carefully curated series of films transferred to DVD and supplemented with all the extras, outtakes and commentary we have become accustomed to. But pre-DVD, Criterion took classic films and put them on laser discs. (For those of you who don't remember, there was a time, albeit brief, during the nascent stage of the digital revolution, when both audiophiles and cinephiles thought the future of film was on a record-sized CD that had to be flipped in the middle of the movie.)

The second Stein project to fuse various technologies with the hope of creating a multi-media experience to go beyond just "watching" a movie or "reading" a book was Voyager CD-ROM. In 1988, Voyager produced the first consumer CD-ROM, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The release is also considered the first interactive electronic publication. The recording of the symphony by the Vienna Philharmonic, with the help of Apple's HyperCard, blended the aural with the visual, altering how users could link and interact with time-based events, in this case music accompanied by a cursor, controlled by the user, that moved across each and every note, elucidating aspects of the music like Beethoven's sense of rhythm.

Voyager released over 500 titles, like Art Spiegleman's Maus, an examination of Marshall McLuhan's ideas and a compilation of Mumia Abu Jamal's writings and interviews, all in the name of creating books that were about much more than ink on paper. Regardless of the subject matter, all of it complex one way or another, Voyager put readers inside the book as active participants. A book was no longer something readers acted on, but acted with.

The zeal with which Stein approached these projects, however, has been ramped up tenfold through the Institute for the Future of the Book because now technology can keep up with ambition. The enthusiasm fires out in the office as Stein, Jesse Wilbur, Ben Vershbow and Dan Visel spend their days blogging, writing treatises and hosting a revolving door of programmers, artists, writers and academics chasing and dreaming up ideas with the hope that their programmers, scattered all over the world, can hang with the whimsical but relevant musings of what Vershbow refers to as a group of "wayward humanists" and Wilbur calls "technical evangelism."

At any given moment, the Institute juggles many projects at once, though they all relate to free, accessible networks of information. The cornerstone of these projects, however, is Sophie, an open source digital infrastructure that synthesizes the best aspects of applications like Final Cut Pro, Word and the entire Adobe Creative Suite. (The alpha version of Sophie is available for download, free of charge.) Stein and friends coined the name based on its Greek etymology, meaning "knowledge," or "wisdom." They also appreciated the happy coincidence that three of the eleven Sophie programmers live in Sofia, Bulgaria (the other eight live in the United States, Canada and Germany).

The potential for Sophie is totally untapped, and if one is to believe the Institute, the potential is limitless, kept in check by nothing other than the bounds of one's imagination. "When you make a tool," Stein states matter of factly, "you want people to use it. How they use it has nothing to do with us."

And it is here that things really get interesting. The most influential people behind the Institute are not so much about the technology; rather they are about intellectual economies where theory and practice are equally valued. The Institute wants to do more than democratize information; it wants to reappraise the exchange of information and how it is valued.

Reading has always been a transformative activity; look at the Bible or the Qu'ran. Whether for the purpose of educating, manipulating, entertaining or escaping, readers throughout time have read for the purpose of being taken to places outside of their respective physical environments. Both reading and writing have been associated with the ever elusive post-modern "Other," that state of being or understanding totally apart from the confines of convention. If the powers that be define meaning, like what is "good" and what is "bad," with nothing but their own interests in mind, once you step outside of that box, the new perspective reveals the subjectivity of those definitions. This is the perspective of the Other, a vantage point from which you can see the entirety of the construct rather than just the walls of the construct in which you are contained.

The genteel protagonist of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's Way is often associated with this notion of stepping outside of the tradition of meaning and understanding. He loathes outside activities; what he relishes, however, are inside activities, especially reading. He greatly appreciates the power of books: "I myself seemed actually to have become the subject of my book... Then it would begin to seem unintelligible, as thoughts of a former existence must be to a reincarnate spirit; the subject of my book would separate itself from me, leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no." A century removed from Proust's days, the Institute strives for the same kind of total immersion into the act of reading, where reader and author act as partners, in a process that can conceivably go on forever, never ending just evolving.

So What Does the Institute Actually Do?

Before this question is answered, first it should be established how the Institute defines a "book," because it has nothing to do with ink or the tactile turning of pages. No one at the Institute wants to defame the traditional codex book, for they are the primary sources of inspiration that have fed these hungry minds. However, the rapid availability of information has reshaped culture at large; the Institute wants the act of reading, and publishing, to directly respond to the nature of social interaction. We live in a networked world, so there is no reason why books shouldn't be fully networked landscapes of social interaction, according to the Institute. Cast in this light, a book becomes anything that contains information, whether it is text based around music or images, or images based around text and music, or any permutation of media you can imagine. A book is anything that serves as a vessel for information, really no different from the dead trees you have on shelves and stacked up on the floor, with the exception that traditional books can't be networked.

Sophie is the ultimate example of such new books, a 21st century Voyager in many ways. Though, unlike Voyager products, Sophie, in Stein's words, "is a very flexible tool. You will be able to make open-ended projects like Gamer Theory or 'pickled' objects that resemble printed books." Sophie is rigged for laypeople; you don't need to be a programmer to make these books. The spec for Sophie, written by Dan Visel, and found on the Institute's website, avers: "Sophie is media-agnostic: all media is the same inside of Sophie." No matter the media employed while using Sophie, the end product is a book, as cut from the fabric of the Institute.

"Because Sophie is open source," says Stein, "it continually evolves itself." The author will evolve into more of a moderator, the readers will become like panelists or members of a live audience, free to add their thoughts, contest, agree, diverge, all in the pursuit of unfettered knowledge the source of which can always be identified.

Though it is a prototype, a mere shadow of what Sophie will permit in terms of media synthesis, McKenzie Wark's GAM3R 7H3ORY, one title in the "Thinking Out Loud" series, is the best example of what the Institute is getting at in terms of how information can be made transparent and foster new ways of intellectual discourse. The basic premise of Wark's "electronic monograph" is that life looks and acts like a game. It's not surprising that the Institute champions GAM3R 7H3ORY, since they are all of the age, with the exception of Stein, in which the video game is ubiquitous, not some novelty that you fed quarters to at the mall if you were lucky enough to catch a ride. Wark contends: "The whole of life appears as a vast accumulation of commodities and spectacles, of things wrapped in images and images sold as things."

In the case of GAM3R 7H3ORY, and as is the essence of this notion of transparent information, readers can respond instantly to Wark's words, or the words of other readers, and often times Wark responds to them. The text develops with every comment and any subsequent responses. When the whole process is made available for scrutiny, you can be sure certain readers will address the flaws, something the guys at the Institute get excited about. They study the differences in the rhythms of print versus networks, striving to reconcile where analog meets digital. These books permit "the ability to see the layers, the documentation of time." Ben Vershbow, the guy responsible for bringing Wark on board for this experiment, not without an understandable tone of pride says, "With this kind of model, it's no longer the author speaking, it's the book speaking."

Any student of Marshall McLuhan would recognize the relevance of Wark's book. McLuhan long ago posited that we become the forms of media that we create. He hinges the point on the creation of the printing press, as a matter of fact. The mechanized process of publishing was the first major step toward full-throttle industrialization because objects could readily and regularly be produced, over and over again. "Typography, by producing the first uniformly repeatable commodity," says McLuhan in an interview in Playboy, "also created Henry Ford, the first assembly line and the first mass production. Movable type was archetype and prototype for all subsequent industrial development." If you place the emphasis, as McLuhan insists, on the medium rather than the content, then the Institute truly is on the pulse of the culture, even if the culture doesn't realize it yet. The Institute's experiments in book making are social experiments, taking place through screens, keyboard and fiber optic cables. For them, it is the means to an organic economy of information that gives voice to any voice that wants to be heard. That's why the Institute gives Sophie away for free; it is the vessel that transports the information that they are most concerned with. Giving Sophie to anyone that wants it is like throwing out handfuls of wild flower seeds and waiting to see what pops up, except in this case the result is an electronic ecology.

And so, where does this leave us? What do you think? We are left with many ideas, many new ideas that need time to breathe and suffer the vagaries of actual application. What the publishing industry needs to realize, however, is that books are primed to be more multifaceted than ever, in ways far more important and compelling than how to sell them. For better or worse, the digital age has made us media junkies in that we expect information delivered as text, imagery and sound, often as quickly as the event from which the information derives happens. These cultural developments do not threaten the traditional book, but they do necessitate writers, publishers and readers to explore and foment these developments, because if they don't, they will miss out, spending too much time figuring out how to put banner ads in books.

If this piece were a Sophie book, what would it look like? You'd have the text, the piece you just read. I will have scanned in various drafts, from which you could read scrawled notes to myself in the margins. There would be lists of what I have been reading, listening to and working on during the process of writing about the Institute. You would be able to read the 1969 interview with Marshall McLuhan from Playboy; River of Shadows by Rebecca Solnit, Proust and Steinbeck's often overlooked In Dubious Battle; an article about James Joyce's cantankerous grandson and the ethics of copyright abuse. And as you read, you'd listen to Jeremiah Lockwood, Broken Social Scene, Amalia Rodrigues, hell, I could dump my entire music library into this thing and you could ride the shuffle the same as me. And don't forget about Nathan Troi Anderson's Shadows of Time, a book of black and white photographs of ancient petroglyphs juxtaposed with contemporary advertising. All of these media have influenced this piece. And this is what is important, influence, the influence of the individual to have control of the information he or she is expected to swallow, often times like a dose of castor oil (and now watch a Looney Toons cartoon where Bugs Bunny foists castor oil on Yosemite Sam).

Lastly, you would be able to add your own voice to what I have written. You could call this a bunch of futurist hogwash; you could use a single sentence as the point of departure for your own piece about information economies, or McLuhan, or Bob Stein and the Institute for the Future of the Book, and it would all be welcomed as the essence of how information should be relayed and ricocheted today, in a space you can always step outside of and call your own, creating an inside that is always outside the box.

- Editor @ 7:05 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Jeff Hobbs in His Own Words

The Tourists, the debut offering from young novelist Jeff Hobbs, is a book about four college friends at Yale who, seven or so years removed from New Haven, find themselves reconnected in New York City. The tie that binds them is lust and longing, and also a certain "how did I get here?" melancholy. The permutation of sexual pairings among these four individuals is at the heart of the plot - an unlikely twist since the ratio is three-to-one in favor of the men. These relationships, including an ill-begotten marriage of college sweethearts, are governed by power and not love. It's a vision of fading youth, punctuated by the tastelessness of the characters' successes, the inevitability of their failures, and the rank indulgences with which they attempt to stave off their despair. But the book is not without humor, and it is full of observations about the interaction of personality, choice, and consequence. Though things do fall apart, the center, embodied in the unnamed narrator, does his best to hold, and is the one character largely unchanged at story's end (though we are left wondering if perhaps he himself is the most manipulative of the bunch). Recently, the Millions tracked down Jeff Hobbs for an interview.

The Millions: Greetings, Jeff Hobbs. Thank you for answering some questions from the Millions.

Jeff Hobbs: Thanks so much, Noah. I am completely, sincerely flattered to be included on your site.

TM: First of all, I couldn't not mention this: in the acknowledgments of your book you thank your dog, Noah, for the many hours he spent curled up at your feet as you wrote. My ears pricked up at this revelation: I have the same name as Jeff Hobbs' dog. I've always felt that we need more Noahs in the writing world...

JH: Thanks for the shout out to my dearest friend, but he would make an incredibly dull character in a book: ever loyal, ever loving, ever ready to lick your face in the morning to get your ass out of bed so he can poop.

TM: Now, The Tourists. On the back cover of your book there is a blurb in which someone uses the term "a generation at loose ends" to describe the group to which the characters belong. Is this a fair assessment? Talk a little if you would about these characters: why do their choices lead them away from self-satisfaction? What rolls do talent and privilege play in their "real world" difficulties?

JH: I would call them a "generation flailing" - flailing for success, for wealth, for some small measure of renown, and for - like everyone, always - happiness. About eighty percent of current college students list either "wealth" or "celebrity" as their number one goal going into the "real" world. Our particular generation was raised to believe that we can - we should - achieve everything we want in life, and now we find ourselves suddenly deposited in towns and cities without the basic infrastructure to know what we do in fact want (i.e. what will make us happy) or the nose-to-the-grind attitude that our parents and grandparents largely had. With this book, I tried to depict four young people flailing in their own distinct ways. David has wealth but is unhappy with where it's landed (or cornered) him. Samona has financial and domestic security but feels inconsequential in the world around her. Ethan has achieved wealth and fame, he can sleep with anyone he wants - but he's still melancholy and alone. The narrator has achieved exactly nothing that he was aiming for on his first idealistic train ride into the city, and so he lives vicariously through the others. Without giving up too much plot, their interplay is all about people trying to change each other - and in doing so, change themselves - in flailing attempts to angle themselves toward elusive fulfillment.

TM: Sex: in The Tourists the characters clack together like billiard balls, then drift away only to be thrown back in with each other when the next game is racked. The only romantic love depicted in the story is between the protagonist (or antagonist as the case may be), Ethan, and the narrator. They had a relationship in college before the narrator realized that he himself was not gay, and therefore could not return Ethan's love. Ethan's unrequited feelings for the narrator seem to be at the heart of his coercive sexual practices thereafter. What was your approach to the portrayal of such complex, and, for many readers I suppose, unfamiliar sexual relationships? (You artfully describe Ethan's seduction of another man, one who is not gay, in one of the books strongest - and arguably most implausible - passages.) What if any are the differences between homosexual and heterosexual relationships, beyond surface anatomy? In what ways does a character's sex life add specific depth to their personality on the page?

JH: Another notable difference between this generation and others (at least as far as I can tell, judging from how appalled my family was upon reading this!) is a rather casual approach to sexuality. Sexual fluidity is a firmly rooted part of the culture at this point, at least in urban centers, and I worked hard to approach sexual encounters and relations this way in the book. (Perhaps going a little overboard; a reader of an early draft once advised me that, unless these people are carrying around industrial size jars of baby oil, some of the scenes are physical impossibilities.) Setting off to write a story about whether or not one person can change another person in any relationship, sexuality felt like a solid metaphor.

TM: You have an understated writing style, straightforward, almost journalistic (indeed, the narrator portrays himself as simply reporting the events of the summer - with some details filled in, of course), and you are not prone to flights of fancy verbiage. But your observations can be acid, viz. descriptions of the world of high finance and those that populate it, or your sketch of the David Taylor character - how his dream of becoming a prep school teacher and coaching track yielded to spreadsheets and stop-loss orders. The ironies that you present are big ones, such as the narrator, who enjoys no financial security, possessing the largest account of self-awareness and principle of all the characters. I know you have a connection to Bret Easton Ellis; I hesitate to use the word protege without really knowing. Tell us a bit about the development of your writing. How has Mr. Ellis helped you along? What other authors have influenced your work? What are your core literary values when it comes to spinning a yarn?

JH: Bret is tremendously insightful, well-read, and he possesses the keenest intellect and (more importantly) instinct of any writer I know (admittedly few, but...). He treated the first draft of the book the way an editor treats it, slashing words and paragraphs that were imprecise or didn't belong, streamlining dialogue, and recommending books that could be useful. I will always feel indebted to his generous aid. I love Michael Chabon, Andre Dubus, Toni Morrison, Lethem, Faulkner. As far as development goes, you just sit alone in a room all day thinking, and you write under the knowledge that ninety percent of what comes out is garbage, and you keep piling up those ten percents until you have a book that feels right. "Spinning a yarn" begins with the structure, which is not to be confused with plot. If your structure doesn't work, then you could have the most majestic prose of anyone, ever, but the book as a whole won't stand. In The Tourists specifically, I felt the book called for a stark, sharp, journalistic voice because it is built as a mystery, and the story and characters are so isolated. So you start with scribbled thoughts and outlines and lots and lots of notes, and you create the structure - and everything else, the voice and style and POV, etc, stems from that first roadmap. So every book should have a different voice, I believe, depending on the fundamental structure the author decides to use for that book.

TM: You used to live in New York, and your book is set here, but you now make your home in Los Angeles. A Brooklynite myself, I would like to know, what's up with that?

JH: NYers are so snarky about LA; it's really not so bad out there! My wife is a born and bred Brooklynite (Fort Greene), and our heart is and always will be on S. Portland Avenue, but we went west for her work. The people and atmosphere made me pretty miserable and whiny at first (for instance, Rebecca didn't know how to drive - a not-minor problem), and then I snapped out of it by thinking: why are you taking yourself so seriously? You live in a nice little cottage with a lemon tree in the back yard, and you can walk out your door and be on a mountaintop an hour later, and all you need to work is a pen and paper and the a corner of a room. We have very good friends who love to BBQ. And the Philadelphia Eagles can break your heart just as deeply watching them at the Rustic Tavern in Los Feliz as they can at the Dakota Roadhouse in Tribeca. Meanwhile, the dog is very, very happy to be inhabiting a place larger than 300 sq. feet.

TM: I'll stick with New York for a minute. DeLillo's Falling Man and a host of other recent works of fiction have sparked a dialogue about "the 9/11 novel." You touched on 9/11 in The Tourists, albeit very briefly. Do you have any thoughts about the implications of 9/11, and the course that America has navigated since then, for writers of fiction? Do you think a young writer like yourself necessarily considers the subject from a different perspective than a writer of an older generation?

JH: 9/11 is so tricky for fiction because of what feels like an obligation to address that event in any contemporary story, and especially one set in or around Manhattan. It is so much a part of the national consciousness because it is so visually apocalyptic and globally far reaching. The more successful novels dealing with 9/11 and its effects have been the strictly metaphorical ones, such as The Road - books that explore the primal fear and loss embodied by that day rather than the physical event itself - mainly because it is such a stretch for written words to depict the actions and sensations that we all saw and felt that day. I think this happened with the Holocaust as well: no prose, no matter how riveting, can precipitate the same gut reaction as seeing a photo of a mass grave or going to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. and standing over the room filled with abandoned shoes. Books can take a person away like no other medium can, but horror of this scale can quickly expose the limitations; the visceral impact does not compare. As far as being younger, I can only generalize, and I do not presume to speak for anyone other than myself. Those of us in our twenties are perhaps more removed from the political, economic, etc, implications of 9/11; we as a generation are much more inclined to live day to day, without excess forward thinking, and it is easier to shut out our basic, latent terror that way. Thinking ahead to what the world will be like in fifty, twenty, ten, even five years is enough to drive anyone crazy - and especially those of us in our twenties who are still largely unestablished and insecure. We are friends and siblings with soldiers, not teachers and parents, and it feels hard to conceive of doing anything heroic on the homefront, and so we occupy ourselves by simply getting by. So while we are perhaps well-suited at dealing with the short-term implications - and perhaps to write about them if driven to - we might be less suited down the road, when the long-term implications become more clear and we find ourselves lacking the foundation needed to deal with them. I can say for certain that my attitude and all my sensibilities have changed now that I have a little family of my own. Whereas before, when all I had to worry about was myself, food, and rent, it was so easy to maintain that layer of distance to people and news and, essentially, reality. Now, married and thinking of having children, the fundamental urge to hold loved ones close - to protect and endure in a precarious universe - underlies every single day.

TM: Okay, last question. You went to Yale, studied English and Literature, won some writing prizes, etc. And so, Jeff Hobbs, I ask you: who makes the better slice, Sally's or Pepe's?

JH: At risk of cutting my already modest readership in half, I'd take the train down to Philly for a Gino's cheesesteak over either, anytime.

Thank you.

- Noah Deutsch @ 7:22 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

After Tony: A Literary Speculation

I remember when I first started watching The Sopranos: early winter in the small town in Oklahoma where my then-girlfriend (now wife) had gone to work among the Cherokees. I was on a break from college, but my girlfriend got a grand total of something like four days off around Christmas (this notwithstanding the prominence of Christianity in the culture of Tahlequah). And so, from 7:30 in the morning until 6:00 at night, I was on my own. Believe me when I say: there is no winter like an Oklahoma winter. I'd write in the morning and then, in the afternoon, distract myself from the endless flat grayness of the country outside the living room window by reading books and watching movies.

This was back in the days of VHS, and one day at the Blockbuster I picked up a tape with the first three episodes of this premium-cable-channel show I'd been hearing so much about: The Sopranos. It was love at first sight. Aside from the searing performances of the leads and a memorable character turn from a minor hero of mine, "Miami" Steve Van Zandt of the E Street Band, the show offered all of the addictive pleasures of serial storytelling. This, I think, was what made The Sopranos feel so much like a novel. It was Dickens with gabbagul in place of figgy pudding. (And mightn't Copperfield's Barkis have recognized a kindred soul in Silvio Dante? Or Mr. Micawber tendered to Paulie Walnuts some prolix offer of friendship?)

Seven and a half years later, the titular Sopranos have reached the end of their long and erratic arc, and heat and humidity are on the rise in Brooklyn. (Believe me when I say: there is no summer like a New York summer.) And the question arises: how to fill the empty place Tony & Co. have left behind? How to pass the long summer afternoons?

The obvious quick fix for those suffering from Sopranos withdrawal is The Godfather, but Puzo's dialogue might feel a bit flat after David Chase's. So here's a suggestion: Robert Graves' I, Claudius and Claudius the God bear more than a passing resemblance to The Sopranos, and are similarly well-written and densely plotted. Given that the murderous matriarchs of these narratives are both named Livia, I wonder if Chase wasn't inspired by Graves. Beneath the disparate Italian settings - Rome at the time of Christ and Jersey in the time of American Idol (how far we've come) - The Sopranos and I, Claudius are both sagas of intrigue and betrayal, of men whose ability to trust their friends and loved ones wanes as their proximity to power increases.

If it's the psychodrama of The Sopranos that appeals to you, however, I can recommend an even less likely analogue: Joseph Heller's Something Happened. Here, trust is also at a premium. The setting is not a mob war-zone, however, but ranges from the WASPy corridors of a Fortune 500 company to the bucolic suburbs of Connecticut. Like Tony Soprano, Heller's Bob Slocum is an upwardly mobile executive suffering from moral rot. He is as unpleasant to spend time with as Tony has been this season, and yet his intertwined rage and loneliness seem to shed some kind of bleak light on the human condition.

Heller is, I think, a vastly underrated prose writer. His prefers a limited diction to the omnivorous vocabulary of fellow-travelers like John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, but his syntactic subtlety yields sentences of arresting power. Check out this outburst from Slocum, worthy of Dr. Melfi's office:

"Even fancy bakeries now use a substitute for whipped cream that looks more like whipped cream than whipped cream does, keeps its color and texture longer, doesn't spoil, and costs much less, yielding larger profits. [...] It tastes like s--t. Nobody cares but me. From sea to shining sea the country is filling with slag, shale, and used-up automobile tires. The fruited plain is coated with insecticide and chemical fertilizers. Even pure horses--t is hard to come by these days. They add preservatives. You don't find fish in lakes and rivers anymore. You have to catch them in cans. Towns die. Oil spills. Money talks. God listens. God is good, a real team player. 'America the Beautiful' isn't: it was all over the day the first white man set foot on the continent to live."

It's all here, in embryonic form: the rage, the narcissism, the depression, the nostalgia, the soured aspirations. (Not to mention the serial infidelity and a climax suspiciously reminiscent of the death of Christopher Moltisanti this season on The Sopranos.) I don't know whether David Chase has read Something Happened, but the section headings Heller uses to structure Slocum's 550-page monologue could just as easily describe the trajectory of seven seasons of The Sopranos: "I get the willies"; "My daughter's unhappy"; "My little boy is having difficulties"; "There's no getting around it"...

Perhaps most significantly, Chase and Heller are both willing to take literally the Freudian constructs that postmodern discourse has reduced to the level of metaphor, or bumper sticker. Slocum and Soprano are men haunted by a small handful of dreams and traumas (e.g., by their love for and resentment of their mothers). And every interaction out in the great world is in some way a Freudian replaying of a domestic trauma. As psychology, this might not be as nuanced as what you'd get in your local therapists' office, but it comes cheaper, and in deft hands attains the mythic resonance of art. In Something Happened, especially, we see the way that every conflict comes back to the primal fourfold of Slocum's household: man, woman, girl, boy. Every man is father, son, and brother, and every woman is mother, wife, and sister. And, returning to The Sopranos, we find that, however baroque the FBI's organizational charts get, it really is all about family, this thing of ours.

In the thirty years since its publication,Something Happened has been obscured by the long shadow cast by Heller's first novel, Catch-22. But I have no doubt that, on the bookshelves of the future, nestled between the DVD boxed sets, there will be a place for it... as there will be for The Sopranos. This summer, before you move on to Deadwood, or to the BBC's miniseries version of I, Claudius, you might pick up Something Happened for your maintenance dose of literary misanthropy.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:19 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Books as Objects: Arty Goodness

• Artist Nina Katchadourian, in a take off on the sometimes serendipitous placement of books on bookshelves, has created micro-stories told only in the words on the spines of books.
• At the site of UK bookstore Any Amount of Books (which also runs the blog Bookride), one can view "The Incredible Bookman," a bookshelf that takes the form of a human, one who is perhaps charged with enticing you to read more books.
• The Guild of Book Workers is a 100 year old organization created to "establish and maintain a feeling of kinship and mutual interest among workers in the several hand book crafts."

- C. Max Magee @ 8:25 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Golden O: Dispatches from Oprah's Book Club

My wife, Edan Lepucki, is a newly-minted member of the Oprah Book Club. She also has an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and a story forthcoming from CutBank. So basically, she knows what she's talking about when it comes to the books and the reading business. Plus, she's totally hot. Here's her writeup of the most recent Oprah literary extravaganza:

I'd decided to read The Road after it emerged victorious from the Tournament of Books. The day I went to purchase it, the stack of paperbacks had already been blessed with a golden O, signifying that it had been inducted into Oprah's Book Club. I'd never before read an Oprah pick along with millions of other book club members, but I decided to give it a try. What would it be like? I was both excited to see the episode with McCarthy, and ashamed to be excited - I'll admit, I ripped the O sticker off my copy. I was superior to all those soccer moms, wasn't I? I didn't need Winfrey to tell me what to read.

On this blog and others, I've been unsettled by the slight tinge of sexism that colors some comments about Oprah's Book Club. So many people were surprised she'd chosen The Road, such a dark and literary novel. Some readers even threw around the phrase "chick lit" to describe her previous picks (except for Faulkner, of course!), and worried her viewers might not "get" McCarthy. But are the books of Toni Morrison, Isabelle Allende and Edwidge Danticat, just three of the many former club picks, "chick lit" simply because they are written by women? Even though I'd never participated in Oprah's club, I always thought it was a good thing - it sold books, lots and lots of them, and got people to read. So what if those people were mostly women? Does that make their enthusiasm and discussion of text less valid?

Of course, I'm asking myself these questions. I mean, I sometimes don't read a book my mom has recommended to me. The reason? It's too much of "a mom book" - meaning what, I'm not sure. I catch myself viewing such books (written by women, and read mostly by women) as somehow not important or challenging enough, even though when I've given in and read, say, Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, I'm met with something both ambitious and moving, and I need to check my attitude.

Okay, I'm getting off track, because everyone knows Cormac McCarthy is all man. What would he do in Oprah's Chicago studio, with all those women clutching their copies of The Road, wanting to know: What has happened to the world? Why didn't you name your characters?

Turns out, the real book club discussion is happening online - if you sign up as a club member, you can post on a message board, and get discussion questions, and so on. The episode of Oprah had none of that, only an interview with McCarthy at the Santa Fe Institute, couched between segments with Michael Moore and Bono's Vanity Fair gig.

I'm sure many of you have already heard about the interview, which was McCarthy's first (and probably his last, Oprah told us). She asked him, "Did you always know you wanted to write?" to which he answered, "I think." She asked, "Are you passionate about writing? Is it your passion?" to which he answered, "I don't know... passion seems like a pretty fancy word." She asked him about writing process; turns out, he types on a portable Olivetti typewriter, doesn't plan the story out too much, and doesn't tend to fraternize with other writers. They devoted much of the interview to McCarthy's previous era as a pauper.

To me, the most interesting question Oprah asked McCarthy was about the absence of women in his books. A good question, considering all the women who were now his biggest fans. He answered, "Women are tough," meaning, I suppose, that he doesn't know how to depict them on the page. Oprah didn't push this, and I wish she would have - How is a female consciousness different from a man's? Is McCarthy more interested in a world made and unmade by men? Is he simply afraid of getting it wrong with the ladies? Or is he just really into cowboys?

Oprah looked pretty nervous throughout the interview, and not wanting to upset a man who never talks about his work, she played it safe. That's fine, Oprah, that's fine - but you better make Jeffrey Eugenides jump through some hoops, or I'm defecting from your army.

Bonus Link: As you may have heard. Oprah's next pick is Eugenides' Middlesex.

- Patrick Brown @ 9:50 PM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

Confessions of a Cat Lady

The reviewer would like to confront, at the start of her first review, the occasionally embarrassing fact that at some point in the recent past she was considering - never mind with what degree of seriousness - a dissertation on eighteenth-century cats and their literary and cultural significance. Having been told by the advisor seemingly most inclined to support such a project (this advisor being an animal fancier herself: her dog, on occasion, had been permitted to attend office hours and sometimes lectures), that "That way madness lies," this reviewer abandoned her cat dissertation. The advisor's statement may have been a jest - serious and interesting scholarly work, as the advisor knew, had been done on animals in literature and culture. The suspicion, however, arose in the reviewer's mind (perhaps accompanied by a phantom waft of cat-box and spinsterhood) that whether you collect literal or literary felines, you are in some sense embarking down the path to the marginal and strange land of cat-lady-hood, and so she retreated by laying the project aside. And yet literary cats - in footnotes, illustrations, casual mentions in books long forgotten - continue to entrance her. They are, as Tristram Shandy would have said, her hobby-horse (or cat).

This is not to say that I (formerly known as "the reviewer") renounce the legitimacy of the eighteenth-century cats dissertation: By no means. Late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England was the birthplace of the fashionable lap-dog and the sentimentalization of animals generally. Who could forget the perpetual throng of spaniels at the feet of Charles II? Pepys complains in his diary of his wife's dog pissing on the floor and recounts with horrified amazement his first encounter with cock-fighting; Hogarth's best-known self-portrait includes his dog Trump, and his "First Stage of Cruelty" depicts boys and men doing hideous things to dogs and cats. The "Second Stage of Cruelty" depicts work-animals driven to death and a warning verse beneath:

The tender Lamb o're drove and faint,
Amidst expiring Throws;
Bleats forth it's innocent complaint
And dies beneath the Blows.

The final stanza pronounces the perpetrators of these cruelties "inhuman" and so suggests - long before there was anything like an animal rights movement - that there is a moral aspect to our relations with animals, integral to our humanity. Robinson Crusoe, once settled in isolation on his island refers to his dog, cat, goat and parrot as his "family." A recent show at the Huntington Library, entitled "Sensation and Sensibility," displayed several rustic scenes of cottage life by eighteenth-century artists, chiefly Gainsborough, in which animals seemed to be family members. One particularly sentimental inclusion depicted the sale of a poor cottage family's lamb: the buyer leads the lamb away as the family's many children cry or press their faces into their mother's skirts. Francis Coventry's 1751 book entitled, The History of Pompey the Little: Or, The Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog, gave voice to a living fashion accessory that is still with us. Eighteenth-century animals were memorialized in images, allowed to speak in memoirs, integral members of families, and extensions of human identity that still function today (as testified by the tiny dogs of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, as well as Queen Elizabeth II's troop of corgis).

And this is just the beginning: The prominent historian Robert Darnton's book The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History describes a massacre of cats in Paris in the late 1730s by several disgruntled apprentices as a symbolic revenge on their bourgeois master and mistress, who coddled and pampered their feline pets while treating their human apprentices "like animals." So cats become a means of expressing class tensions as well. And Darnton's essay goes on to offer a survey of the symbolic and ritual values assigned to cats in pre-modern and quasi-modern Europe, particularly France. Cats were associated (as they still are - if only in the linguistic sediment of the slang word 'pussy') with female sexuality, for example. From the 15th century the stroking of cats was supposed to increase a man's success with women, as manifested in such proverbs as "He who takes good care of cats will have a pretty wife." Darnton also details associations between cats and the occult: Caterwauling was considered an indicator of the casting of spells, or, if under a specific man's window, a sign of his wife's infidelity, his own cuckolding; and a cat on the bed of a dying person might be Satan waiting to carry his soul to hell. Stranger still are the magical folk-remedies and beliefs Darton inventories: a cat buried alive in field could clear it of weeds; blood from a cat's ear mixed with red wine could cure pneumonia; the brain of a freshly killed cat, if still hot, could make one invisible.

My favorite eighteenth-century cat (the cat who started it all), however, is not of the Satanic variety. Christopher Smart's Jeoffry, whom Smart immortalized in his strange and difficult poem (written sometime in the late 1750s or early 1760's) "Jubilate Agno" or "Rejoice The Lamb," was a divine cat. "For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry," Smart begins, "For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him." Smart's description of Jeoffry's particular habits has a striking intimacy of detail, and these mundane details of feline existence become emanations of divine order and a recognition of Jeoffry as an instrument of divinity:

For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neighbor.
For If he meets another cat her will kiss her in kindness.
For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.
For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying
For he purrs in thankfulness when God tells him he's a good Cat.
For he is an instrument for the children to learn gentleness upon.

The profound strangeness of this poem in the context of the rigorously metered rhyming couplets that form the bulk of eighteenth-century poetry is, I hope, hardly less than its trans-historical strangeness. Even now, in the days of feline and canine clothes, braces, birthday parties, and marriages, Smart's contemplation of the mundanely named Jeoffry as a being embodying, manifesting, and teaching the ways of God to men is still, I think, equally strange, arresting, and moving.

Much of the rest of "Jubilate Agno" is an odd mystical taxonomy that pairs people, (both biblical and historical persons as well as Smart's contemporaries) with specific animals and plants: "Let Mephibosheth with the Cricket praise the God of chearfulness, hospitality, and gratitude...Let Micah rejoice with the spotted Spider, who counterfeits death to effect his purposes...Let Anna rejoice with the Porpus, who is a joyus fish and of good omen...Let Ross, house of Ross rejoice with the Great Flabber Dabber Flat Clapping Fish with hands...Let Balsam, house of Balsam rejoice with Chenomycon an herb the sight of which terrifies a goose." The explanations for these pairings are cryptic, brief, and/or nonexistent (you can understand why the poem was initially thought to be the product of a stint in Bedlam), but the purpose seems to be to assign to specific people a beast or a mineral or botanical variety expressive of some essential quality of their beings - that one man's soul is expressive of blue daisie, juniper, jasper or onyx, while another's is of the hawk, Pegasus, porcupine, or crocodile.

Of course Smart was not the first or the last to imagine a correspondence between the variety of human natures and the rest of the natural world. The ancient Roman Aelian's (AD 170-230) multivolume On The Characteristics of Animals is not so explicit as Smart's poem in drawing correspondences between the souls of humans and the natures of animals, but the language of Aelian's descriptions blurs the distinction between human and animal, making his animal subjects seem human in their motivations and behaviors:

The Owl is a wily creature and resembles a witch. And when captured, it begins by capturing its hunters. And so they carry it about like a pet or (I declare) like a charm on their shoulders. By night it keeps watch for them and with its call that sounds like some incantation it diffuses a subtle, soothing enchantment, thereby attracting birds to settle near it. And even in the daytime it dangles before the birds another kind of lure to make fools of them, putting on a different expression at different times; and all the birds are spell-bound and remain stupefied and seized with terror, and a mighty terror too, at these transformations. (47)

A more literal fictional imagining of this notion is found in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), which presents human souls externalized and personified as animal "daemons." These creature-spirits can speak, and in their species are expressive of the particular nature of the human to whom they are attached. There are other examples of this species fusion and confusion - the Chinese animal calendar, Native American religions, the metamorphoses of Greek and Roman mythology, the animaguses of Harry Potter, for starters: But what does it all mean - if anything - and how does it relate to cat dissertations?

A facile assessment of the desire to find correspondences between human souls and animal species might end in something similar to an exclamation I heard in a lecture on "The Grand Armada" chapter of Moby-Dick. This chapter describes the birthing and nursing of baby sperm whales in a calm, sheltered underwater room created by the rest of the pod with their bodies. Ishmael tenderly compares the expressions and motions of the whale calves to newborn human babies and such descriptions inspired a professor I once knew to exclaim excitedly, "Whales are people too!" Everyone laughed. But he did mean it, in a way. Suddenly, there is a break from the contemplation of whale as prey, enemy, alien "other," and instead, a contemplation of these creatures in acts and attitudes of such mutual care and tenderness that the only way they can be described, even by their hunter, is "as human infants." The willingness to confuse human and animal categories might imply a willingness to take a more expansive view of "humanity" or "personhood" that might include non-humans. This view would contend that animals are capable of seemingly human responses (tenderness, affection, care, curiosity, urgency, terror, etc.) that force us, as they forced Ishmael, to see ourselves in them and so - to some extend and however briefly - to respond to them and their behaviors as human - to treat them or imagine them as one of our own.

But if animals, to whatever degree, gain humanity, humans gain something of the creaturely as well. The notion of particular animal species as expressive of human souls suggests that we are not all the same kind of human, and that no single theory of human nature quite gets the whole story: Fox-souled people are like this, cat-souled people, like that, giraffe- and marmot-souled people, other things entirely. Smart, Pullman, and Aelian recognize the totemic power of animals in slightly different ways, but all see in them sacred and mystical types that can help to illuminate aspects of the human - our varieties, vagaries, and eccentricities. In the case of Jeoffry, animals also offer models of holiness: Jeoffry's sacred "compleat"-ness as Smart describes it - his exuberant, joyful catness - seems a portrait of being-wholeness one could never attempt with a human as the object of contemplation. Jeoffry is a cat in a way that I, or you, or anyone else will never be human - and perhaps this is because we are capable of such variety that we need the whole rest of the animal, vegetable, and mineral world to help us signify the essences of our beings. And we are also too self-conscious, self-fashioning, proud and fond of progress to simply to be human and do human-ish things they way Jeoffry does cat-ish things (bathing himself, hunting mice, stretching, napping in the sun) - What would those things be, anyway - what activities are particularly expressive of the human (Playing video games? Farming? Starting wars? Knitting? Writing blog articles? Bobsledding? Vacuuming?)?

In the end, perhaps I should have stayed among the cats (and the canines, and the monkeys, and the pigs... there are so many more! Gulliver's Houhynyms, E.T.A Hoffmann's The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr, Pierre-Jules Hetzel's Scenes from the Public and Private Life of Animals...). Perhaps it is a better place - or perhaps, more simply, I am philosophically a misanthrope, of the school of John Wilmot, Lord Rochester (1647-1680). The best-known portrait of Rochester (Johnny Depp's The Libertine excepted) depicts him standing beside a monkey perched on a marble pedestal; the monkey is tearing pages from a book while Rochester crown him with a laurel wreath. I leave you in the earl's dangerously capable hands, with the first stanza of his "Satire Against Reason and Mankind":

Were I - who to my cost already am
One of those strange, prodigious creatures, man -
A spirit free to choose for my own share
What sort of flesh and blood I pleased to wear,
I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,
Or anything but that vain animal,
Who is so proud of being rational.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 10:04 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Welcome Emily

For too long The Millions has been an entirely male operation (occasional contributions from Mrs. Millions and a few other female regulars notwithstanding.) I've long want to rectify this deficiency of ours, so it is with great pleasure that I welcome Emily Wilkinson to the site as a new regular contributor.

Emily Wilkinson is a graduate student in English at Stanford University, where she is writing a dissertation on the genre and aesthetics of miscellany in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature.

I think you'll find that she brings a unique and interesting perspective to the site. Emily's first post as a regular contributor will be appearing shortly.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:16 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Corey Vilhauer Book of the Month Club: June 2007

The travelogue. Ah, the oft maligned travel novel, thrown onto the burn pile with other not-taken-seriously genres like mystery and thriller. Driven to the edges of respected literature, called unimaginative and easy, dropped first from a library's collection and left to rot on library sale tables.

Yet, it seems like everyone wants in the action. Where did this unfair assessment come from? Is it the easily dated subject matter - an ever-changing world that has a hard time looking constant from one year to the next, let alone for the years that pass while a travelogue sits on the shelf? Is it the fact that nearly every travel novel takes on the same subjects - a jaunty and funny brush with weird foreigners, a coming of age on a long-respected trail, etc. etc?

Yes. And yes. A lot of travel literature is dated. And even more is boring and redone. I started reading travel lit by hitting the ones that did it best, big names like Bryson, Theroux and Mayle. I latched on and let the genre take me for a ride. Through reading Bill Bryson, I discovered that I wanted to become a self-made writer. Through reading Paul Theroux, I discovered that I wanted to ride across countries and meet people, if only to document their individual intricacies. Through reading Peter Mayle, I wanted to move to France. That's all. Just move to France and live in his house.

Through all of this, I honed my tastes. I figured out the difference between good and bad travel literature. I stopped reading about one person's trip around England because, well, I'd already exhausted that location through both Bryson and Theroux. And eventually, I stopped reading it all together, feeli