Missing the New Yorker

Last week, my New Yorker didn't show up. This has happened a handful of times in the close to ten years I've been reading the magazine. Typically, wherever I've lived, my issue has landed in my mailbox between Tuesday and Thursday. If I haven't gotten my issue by Thursday, I tense up a bit and begin to plan, setting some time aside for a run to a bookstore or newsstand so that I don't fall behind and so that my gnawing yen for the New Yorker is satisfied.

But over the last decade, my New Yorker addiction has felt burdensome at times. I like to read - a lot - and yet with busy work schedules and other demands, I don't have as much time to read as I'd like. And though my Reading Queue occupies several linear feet of shelving, I still find myself devoting about four days a week to the New Yorker (which I read all the way through, skipping only reviews of theater, dance, and music). Being the best magazine in the world, the New Yorker is guaranteed to provide me with at least one transcendent reading experience per month, often more than that, and very few clunkers. It is exceedingly rare that I quit reading an article halfway through. Still, though I love it so, I sometimes grow resentful of the time I must devote to the New Yorker and I sometimes fantasize about the day I'll decide not to renew, though even formulating the reasons behind such a rash act is difficult.

And so this week, when Thursday rolled around and my mailbox was still empty, I again felt that nervous pang and began to set aside some time for the ten-block walk to the Barnes & Noble. But then, I thought about it some more, and decided to miss this week's New Yorker (though it may still arrive inexcusably late). So far, I feel pretty good, no withdrawal symptoms, and I think, if the day comes that I have to give up on the New Yorker entirely, I'll survive, bonobos be damned.

Update: That missing issue turned up after all.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:37 PM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

The Millions Hits Facebook

I've never been big on social networking sites. In fact, until Friday I'd never joined one at all, but the rising clamor of millions of Facebook fans convinced me to finally check it out. After a couple of days I can see the appeal. The site can offer hours of mindless entertainment, checking on updates from dozens of friends. And while it'll be interesting using the site to connect with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, I quickly saw that one of Facebook's features might offer some fun for us here at The Millions.

I've gotten to know quite a few Millions readers over the years via email and comments on the site. The very nature of the blog, however, does not provide much of a forum for Millions readers to interact. Those who aren't frequent commenters, meanwhile, rarely make themselves known at all. And so, to provide this sort of forum, I've created a group on Facebook called The Official Millions Fan Club. If you read The Millions and are a Facebook member, please join the group. I'll be sure to keep the group updated on Millions-related news, and members can use the discussion boards and "the wall" to shoot the breeze. See you there.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:33 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A Potter Post Mortem

What to say about Harry Potter that hasn't been said? One approach, I suppose, taking a page from the New York Times, would be to cover the coverage. I, for example, was delighted by the Times' hypocrisy in covering as news the New York Post's and New York Daily News' early publication of movie reviews of Harry Potter 5 (these tabloids sent their reviewers to the Japanese premier, which took place before the American and European premiers), and then publishing their own early review of an illicitly purchased copy of The Deathly Hallows. It was not a "spoiler" - no major plot details given away - but there was, in the very fact of a review published on July 19th, inevitably and implicitly, a nanny-nanny-boo-boo quality to the piece.

I have been rather under-whelmed by the reviews of the book (my own efforts included). One particularly aggravating feature is the gushing - and totally unexplained - lists of high literature to which Rowling alludes. I have seen Kafka and Milton on these lists. I would be beyond delighted to know where Rowling alludes to Kafka or Milton. Please post a comment if you know. The larger problem here is that the business (nay, the responsibility?) of a critic is to show and not tell - or, at the very least, to do both. That's the business of good writing in general. (Even an editorial has a responsibility to tether the opinions it offers to substantial, justifying fact or theory of some kind.) I have been frustrated at the love-fest quality of Potter reviews generally: substantial observation falls aside for adulatory effusion.

The following are a few (I hope) more substantial critical sallies at The Deathly Hallows and the series in general. I also forewarn those who have not finished the book that they read on at their own peril. Substantial details of the final book are discussed.

Rowling's gift as author is her masterful skill as an architect of plot. As she has said, she imagined Harry's story as a seven-book series from the beginning and each book has been carefully seeded with clues and pre-history that become newly significant in subsequent installments. The Deathly Hallows, more than any of the other books (because it has all of the other books to draw on) achieves a higher degree of plot complexity. It is in this (alone), I would say, that she resembles Dickens: the complex interweaving of individual personal stories into a larger, coherent plot. Though I think that in basic concept, the Penseive (the ability to experience other people's memories as an unseen observer), consciously or no on Rowling's part, owes something to Dickens' A Christmas Carol, wherein Ebeneizer Scrooge's moral and spiritual re-awakening is facilitated by ghosts who squire him, also unseen, through his own past and future and other people's presents.

The Penseive is also Dumbledore's means, particularly in The Half-Blood Prince, of teaching Harry to read meaning and significance in personal history, a task Harry must undertake alone in the seventh book, with Dumbledore gone. And Harry's task in the seventh does not just involve "reading" Voldemort to figure out where the Horcruxes are, but making sense of Dumbledore's own past, and his character and trustworthiness, in light of it. The question of whose version - whose reading - of events you take, and the troubling multiplicity of accounts about a single event, has been dramatized throughout the series by The Daily Prophet and particularly by the antics of the muck-raking Rita Skeeter (who pens a tell-all biography of Dumbledore in the Hallows). Rowling also dramatizes the difficulty and the importance of reading, and reading well, in Dumbledore's mysterious bequest to Hermione of a copy of the wizarding fairy-tales of Beedle the Bard. When Harry is (rather fantastically) reunited with Dumbledore, Dumbledore again emphasizes the importance of what and how you read: "And his knowledge remains woefully incomplete, Harry! That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing."

While Harry and Dumbledore have taken the time to read Voldemort's past - to "know thy enemy," He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named has failed to do his homework, which would have involved, very cleverly on Rowling's part, the reading and comprehension of not only Beedle's tale, but, in essence, Harry Potter - not the books themselves, perhaps, but some version of Harry's life history.

And one last observation on the limbo scene between Harry and Dumbledore: It reminded me of the final scene in Vanilla Sky, where a similar choice is made in a similarly surreal/psychic landscape. I also felt that the model for Harry's particular strain of self-sacrifice resembles, in certain structural aspects, the story of Abraham and Isaac, wherein the absolute willingness to make a sacrifice of life, is the thing that frees you from actually having to make it.

I applaud Rowling's clever double-ending. That you think it's over - are really and truly convinced that it's over - and then have an even greater joy in finding that it's not. But I also take issue with those who use the term "adult" too freely in their descriptions of The Deathly Hallows. In the best sense of the word, Harry Potter finishes as it began: as children's literature. Consider, for example, the dead. Rowling does not kill off a single central character (Harry, Ron, Hermione); nor any from the slightly lower tier including Hagrid, Neville, Ginny, and Luna. The only Weasley she kills off is the one with a identical twin - and we get Percy back, so in total the Weasley numbers remain constant. The deaths of Tonks and Lupin (who appear very infrequently in this volume - so there's less to miss) allow for the somewhat satisfying emergence of a Harry- and Neville-esque war orphan (their son, Teddy) for the next generation. And it also seems fitting that Lupin - and even Wormtail - join Sirius and James in the Great Beyond. Colin Creevy and Dobby - also possibly Hedwig - are innocents but they were never crucial players so far as character went (and, truth be told, Colin Creevy and Dobby had an irritating spaniel-esque quality that is often the mark of a dispensable minor character). My favorite Death Eater death was that of Bellatrix Lestrange: uber-anti-mother destroyed by ur-mother Molly Weasley. Snape dies, of course, but it's a kindness given the tragically loveless life he leaves behind. And Dumbledore, who actually is dead, is functionally revived in this final volume by the limbo scene, Snape's memories in the pensive, the crucial role of his pre-history, and the appearance of his doppelganger-ish brother. You lose no one you can't live without, is what I mean, and even get a few back through redemption and other means.

This is pure children's lit - though Rowling's Aeschylus epigraph may have led you to expect otherwise. Good triumphs over evil (if that's not the crux of a child's plot, what is?) and this triumph justifies and then eclipses the losses that made it possible. The world is made right and the survivors are not psychically broken by their efforts - they enjoy life again, they thrive. Especially for grown readers, one of the chief pleasures offered by Harry Potter and books like it, is their allowing us to experience - to believe in, however fleetingly or wistfully - the kind of idealism and heroism that most of us lose faith in, willingly or no, in adulthood.

My parting thought concerns what I consider one of the most fascinating aspects of the children's fantasy genre as Rowling practices it: Its striking correspondence to the ancient epic tradition, in all of its un-ironic hero- and nation-making high seriousness. I find it particularly suggestive that epic, a genre that emerged and defined early human civilization, is now relegated to literature for humans in the early stages of life (from infancy to infancy, one might say), though I have no substantial thoughts on what it means about us as a culture. Harry Potter borrows much from the ancient literary traditions of Homer and Virgil - visits to and from the dead, prophecies, fantastic beasts to be slain, enchantresses to be escaped, magical objects, tragic flaws, heroic friends lost in combat, battles, and choices of world-determining import. The difference is that heroism and glory in war are not ends in and of themselves in Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, as they are in the Illiad, Odyssey, and Aeneid. All of the sublime feats of daring and self-sacrifice that this last volume offers are done to keep the mundane yet magical manifestations of human love going: friendship, family, marriage, children, education. As the epilogue, with its glimpse of a new generation of Hogwarts students, parents, and teachers, demonstrates unquestionably, the purpose of heroism is not becoming a hero, but preserving the people, places, traditions, and values that gave you the strength to confront death and pain in the first place.

As to the lasting power of this literary phenomenon - whether it is one for the ages - I think that cultural studies, at the very least, will see to it that future generations look back at Harry Potter. How and why did it (somewhat like, though far-surpassing, best-sellers of yore Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, Sherlock Holmes, Uncle Tom's Cabin) become such a prodigy? As to literary merit, I think, as I said earlier, that Rowling's skill as a plotter is tremendous: She has a gift for pacing and suspense, for the deft orchestration of clues and of characters' plot-functions. She is not a stylist - the best that can be said about her literary style is that is transparent and unobtrusive. Of characterization, I would say that Rowling's characters have an archetypal appeal (the arch, wise, and serene mentor; the affable and fiercely loyal but intellectually diminished sidekick/best friend; the brainy, bossy, dorky-yet-attractive-in-her-braininess female), but that character development is a bit thin - nowhere near so well done as the plotting.

Ultimately, though, I think this will be enough to secure Rowling and Harry literary immortality. We shall see.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 11:27 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

A History of Magic: A Children's Librarian Reflects on Harry Potter, and Offers a Post-Hogwarts Syllabus

As the media phenomenon du jour, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has put pressure on the commentariat to provide Potter-related context or controversy - anything to get readers to spend a few minutes with us, rather than J.K. Rowling! And herein lies a danger: in our zeal to ride Harry's coattails (broomstick?) to glory, we Muggles are tempted to wave a wand over our own preconceptions and imagine them transfigured into news. In that vein, an article in last week's Washington Post provoked our interest here at The Millions, while contradicting my own sense of how the Potter books function within the enchanted kingdom of childhood. I specifically remembered Cynthia Oakes, a middle-school librarian at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, telling me some years ago about a book her students had gone wild for, and recommending I check out Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Hoping to get some ground-level perspective on Pottermania, I got in touch with her (which wasn't hard; she's my mother-in-law) and asked if she'd mind revisiting the Potter books in a bit more depth. I had misplaced my Quick-Quotes Quills, but she graciously consented to be interviewed through the magic of email. [Editor's note: Scroll down to view Oakes' post-Hogwarts syllabus.]

Opening the Chamber of Secrets

"There is a wonderful bookstore in Hyde Park," Oakes told me, "57th Street Books, where my colleagues and I often go to buy the latest children's and young-adult titles. The children's buyer at the time, author Franny Billingsley (The Folk Keeper), told us that there was a new British fantasy novel out, and the word in England was that it was wildly popular. We bought a copy, read it, liked it, recommended it to a couple of kids, and put it on our summer reading list. By the end of the summer, the idea of our introducing anyone to Harry Potter was beyond laughable. That's how quickly it became a phenomenon. Kids told kids, who told other kids, who told still more kids - and that was that.

"Initially, adults were out of the loop - which was great! It was remarkable, from my point of view, to see any book capture these kids' imaginations and hearts so completely." Oakes offered some further context: "This was right around time that the term 'digital natives' was being coined. As school librarians we were being led to believe that the future, and especially our future, lay in the Internet - that students were no longer interested in print. Then the iPod came out; once again, we were told that the future lay in digital whatever... and suddenly our middle school library alone had to buy seven copies of Sorcerer's Stone. All copies were instantly checked out and the hold list was huge.

"Then kids learned that the sequel was out in England. It was unprecedented to have them beg their parents to plan summer vacations to the UK around the publication of a book. One family, who actually did vacation in the UK that summer, brought back a copy of Chamber of Secrets. We ended up buying four copies of the next two installments. After that, kids were buying the books for themselves so we didn't need to invest quite so heavily in order to provide access. We now have two shelves of the library devoted to six titles. I'm not sure if we'll need to buy more than one copy of the latest book, since the sales of this title have been astronomical. I can assure you that no other series even come close to it in popularity."

Apropos of families vacationing across the pond, Oakes said she couldn't generalize about any connections between the books' success and social class. But as Chicago's Lab School is a well-regarded private school, she could attest to the books' strong appeal to upper-middle class, affluent kids. That appeal, she noted, "doesn't seem to be contingent upon gender or race."

A Hogwarts of the Mind

"I think what makes these books so seductive," Oakes told me, "is that the world Rowling has created is a world kids really, really, really want to live in. Actually live in, not just imagine living in. They want to eat the candy, ride the train, wear the uniforms, own the brooms, play the games, study the magic, get mail from the owls, look at the maps, and spy from the folds of an invisible cape. Who wouldn't want to be a member of the Weasley family? And who wouldn't want Ron, Hermione, or Harry for a friend? Or Hagrid for a teacher? I am always amazed at how even a 14-year-old will still harbor the secret hope that Hogwarts is real." Oakes remembers "being quite surprised when a fifth-grader confided in me that he was not able to get the spells to work. He wondered what he was doing wrong and he looked so forlorn while furtively whispering all this to me.

"From a literary point of view, I'm not the first person to observe that these books are unique in combining the most popular of children's literary genres into one rollicking story: horror, sports, adventure, school story, fantasy, romance, animal fantasy, family problems, etc. That gives them appeal among a broad array of readers. In addition, they are page-turners for kids who love plot-driven books and have satisfying characters for kids who prefer character-driven novels. It doesn't hurt that the central character is a misfit without parents... a key ingredient to most successful children's lit. What child, tethered to family and home, wouldn't love to step through a magic portal where she instantly becomes the hero of the universe?

"One must also remark on their unusual length. A 900-page kids book? Unheard of. And equally rare is a sequel that doesn't have an 'our-story-so-far' component. Rowling rightly acknowledges the depth of her fans' understanding of all the previous books by jumping right into the thick of the story. It is very difficult to read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban without having read Sorcerer's Stone and Chamber of Secrets. And if you are starting with Book Seven, forget it!"

Dark Art

"My experience has taught me that kids will rarely choose to read a book that isn't entertaining and will avoid an instructive book as if it had spattergroit," Oakes continued. "This isn't to say that they avoid books with ideas. I harbor the belief that they prefer them. The Potter books are entertaining, but darkly so. They deal with real evil - Voldemort is crueler than the cruelest classmate. Harry has to wrestle with whatever part he may have played in his own parents' death. Thoughtless actions in these books have far-reaching and horrific consequences.

"This is also more psychologically nuanced fantasy world than many contemporary books offer, with every character suffering from his own particular character flaw. Yet a truly noble and ethical solution to every problem is always apparent. I believe that our kids long for that sort of clearly delineated ethical world.They are discovering that the adults around them, much like Dumbledore, are not perfect. They want their friends, just like Ron, always to return to them. And they want Harry to make the right choices (perhaps because if he does, then they will). The books instruct, then, in the way the best books do: by allowing the characters to fail. Whether or not the Potter books are helping to define anyone's moral universe, I can't tell. But contrary to the opinions of some commentators, they surely aren't destroying anyone's moral universe..."

She ventured a critique: "I know the books are flawed, and most of the books - certainly Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, could have used a seriously talented editor. Or just an editor." Still, she said, "They are remarkable. It's not popular to admit it, but when I read the first book I had to get up at three a.m. to finish it. As an unreconstructed bibliophile, of course I love these books... I am a fan."

Fresh out of veritaserum, I tested the truth of this last assertion by asking Oakes some targeted questions. Her favorite character? "As a woman and an educator, I have to love Professor McGonagall." Favorite villain(s)? "The dementors. I've certainly run across my share of soul-suckers and they scare me to death." Favorite setting? "I love Hogwarts and wish that I worked there. It has an amazing library and I would love to recommend books to Hermione. And have her recommend a few to me! Not to mention the fact that I'd get to hide from and/or fight trolls, death-eaters, and so on."

Ordinary Wizarding Levels (O.W.L.s)

"Most assuredly there is a social aspect to the Harry Potter phenomenon," Oakes said. "Kids sit around for HOURS discussing all the ins and outs of the books. They join online discussion groups, download podcasts, and know every website devoted to Harry. They create group Halloween costumes. In fact, fans were so enthralled by the books that they rushed into the library (en masse) the second, the very second, the cover art for Book Seven had been revealed. We had to display it at the circulation desk. (I mean, our credibility would have taken a serious nose dive if we hadn't.) Then, they congregated around the printout of the cover and discussed THAT for hours."

I asked her if kids outgrow Harry. "Some students lose interest (or say they do), but a remarkable number do not. I overheard many conversations in the high school hallway prior to Book Seven that centered around horcruxes, Harry, and death. Our high-school librarians have all the Potter books on the shelves. The fifth grade to whom we recommended the first book graduated last year. So most of these kids grew up reading Harry Potter. I've watched high-school students sneak back into the middle school library to keep up on their favorite series books and their favorite authors. And I say, good for them!" No Argus Filch, my mother-in-law.

"As for the hoopla," she said, "the books have been very good for children and for young-adult publishing... Their sheer popularity forced The New York Times to create a children's literature bestseller list. (Ha!) These days our kids are reading just as much as - if not more than - they did before."As we'd discussed, "J.K. Rowling came at a crucial moment... However, I do wish the publishers would realize there isn't going to be another Harry Potter and ease up on all the fantasy that's coming down the pike. I worry that really good young-adult novels are getting overlooked. The hoopla has also turned off many new young readers. Whereas the initial impetus to read the books came from kids, there's now a huge media machine cramming those same books down our collective throat."

Flourish and Blotts

I asked Oakes if she could elaborate on "the good stuff" by furnishing Millions readers with some recommendations for post-Hogwarts reading. "Middle schoolers love serial storytelling," she said. "That is part of the success of the Harry Potter books. I can think of many recent series that have met with remarkable success: the Alex Rider series, the Warriors series, the Princess Diary series, the Eragon series, the Spiderwick Chronicles - to name a few off the top of my head. Students will request the next book in the series sometimes months in advance. Because of Amazon.com, they know approximately when the book will be published. We librarians are forced, more than ever, to stay on top of things. However, I can think of no other book or series that would compel students and parents to attend a midnight party in order to obtain the sequel. That is purely a Harry Potter thing. We've had kids counting down the days to publication since December.

"I would love for kids to love J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, because they are such elegant writers. Certainly there are kids who read Tolkien and Lewis, and often prefer it, but it doesn't follow that a Potter fan is automatically a Bilbo Baggins fan. Tolkien is much harder to read, for one thing, and the works of C.S. Lewis don't feel as contemporary as Rowling's do. The latest, coolest reading trend amongst my students is graphic novels."

When recommending a book to Potter enthusiasts, Oakes always asks, "What part of Harry Potter is your favorite part? The school, the family problems, the sports, horror, the magic...?" Then, she says, "I come up with some titles based on the answer. It's surprising to me how often students want to read about boarding schools and about all things English... and I can't resist recommending the great contemporary English author Hilary McKay. Read The Exiles and see if you can stop reading the rest of her work. It's not fantasy, but it is quintessentially English."

She went on to offer a post-Hogwarts syllabus of fantasy books:

Young Adult/Older Readers

• Ursula K.Leguin. The Earthsea Cycle. (A quest series with wizards and dragons.)
• Patricia McKillup. The Riddle-Master of Hed. (A quest series with wizards and mysteries.)
• Garth Nix. The Abhorsen Trilogy. (A dark fantasy that features necromancy and romance.)
• Philip Pullman. His Dark Materials. (Parallel worlds that collide in Oxford. As much science-fiction as fantasy.)

Middle Readers

• Lloyd Alexander. The Chronicles of Prydain. (A quest series with an oracular pig; highly recommended byThe Millions.)
• Eoin Colfer. Artemis Fowl. (Contemporary magic which relies on technology. Spies!)
• Diana Wynne Jones. The Chronicles of Chrestomanci. (Parallel worlds; magic; families in all their dysfunction and glory.)
• Jenny Nimmo. Children of the Red King. (Wizards go to a school quite different from Hogwarts!)

"Many kids don't want to be perceived as Potter groupies," Oakes noted. "It's interesting, though, how many will reluctantly pick one of the books up, then get sucked right in to the world Rowling has created. It is almost impossible to resist the spell of the Potter books. Having said that, I'll be very curious to see how they age."

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 12:18 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A modest proposal?

They eat babies in Guangzhou. This appalling side note appeared in this week's issue of Newsweek International in an article about problems with Chinese food safety. The article profiles Chinese journalist Zhou Qing who was nominated as a finalist for the Lettre Ulysses Award for his work covering food safety issues. According to Zhou, Chinese captains of industry blithely pickle vegetables with agricultural strength insecticides to keep flies away and sprinkle preserved fish with "sulphur salt," an industrial additive deadly in amounts as small as three grams.

None of this is very surprising, after a recent shipment of poisoned Chinese toothpaste and cough syrup caused a spate of deaths in Central and South America. What is surprising, however, is the inspiration for Zhou's book: an unusual dish he claims was served to him in a Guangdong restaurant. From the Newsweek article:

[The soup was] placenta soup... The placentas come from the aborted fetuses of migrant women workers who are unmarried or out of line with the government's one-child policy. During dinner, Zhou peeked into the back kitchen and saw the cooks scooping out fetuses.

While this tidbit doesn't seem to have earned even a blink from the jaded staff at Newsweek, I practically spit my morning coffee across the monitor.

Could this really be the one child policy in action? Or is it a hoax perpetuated by an overzealous reporter? Poisoning cough syrup is one thing, but eating babies? Although stories of women eating their own placentas abound, the issues raised by the potential commodification of the placenta are profoundly troubling. China's moral compass must be spinning like a dervish.

A cynicism well honed on long exposure to fabulist reportage on Asia, immediately took me to Snopes.com, the vaunted debunker of rumors and urban legend. The Snopes team decries a similar story as nothing more than racist claptrap. But a quick trip to Google uncovers a wealth of articles, including one from Bloomberg in the International Herald Tribune (which introduces a new wrinkle... the placentas are imported from Japan) and one from the Daiyuan Times... in Chinese. Who to believe?

The blood libel has been around for at least as long as the Jews, and probably well before. There are few crimes more transgressive and titillating than cannibalism, and people with an axe to grind are often quick to call their enemies out as baby eaters. A quick background check on the Daiyuan Times, for example, shows that it is owned by the Falun Gong, a Chinese religious organization that has experienced ruthless oppression at the hands of the Chinese government. If you can't trust the food from China, how can you trust the journalism?

Not that the United States is much better. Even putting aside purebred fictionalists like Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair, we're still left with a herd of reporters so eager for a good story, they're unwilling to get to the bottom of it. With old hands like Judith Miller selling entire wars based completely on rumor and innuendo, it's hard to find fault with an ambitious tyro for practicing his chops on a bowl of fetus soup.

So do they eat babies in China? Newsweek, at least, is sticking with Zhou's account. His book, What Kind of God?, is currently only available in Chinese, but the general hysteria building up around Chinese exports seems to be making room for a bestseller. Eat your heart out Upton Sinclair.

See Also: The Lettre Ulysses goes on hiatus

- Ben Dooley @ 6:32 AM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

Books: Life's Luggage

Apropos of a post earlier this month on limiting and culling overflowing book collections, Scott McLemee takes on the topic (via) in Inside Higher Ed. Leaving aside whether we are somehow seeing (in a trend that would fly in the face of publishing industry gloom-and-doomers) an explosion of ill advised impulse book buying around the world, lets have a look at the solutions recently proposed. Recall that the article mentioned in the above linked post suggested conducting "regular inspections of your library;" following "the 'one in, one out' rule;" spending "more to buy less by sticking with hardbacks;" using the library more, and "beginning to follow the 'Google Books' rule.

McLemee looks at a professor, overrun by books, who has reached a breaking point. A case study of sorts:

At the start, my correspondent estimated that he had 130 feet of books occupying his office. That works out to the equivalent, with ordinary bookshelves, of about 40 to 50 shelves' worth. He said the moment of decision came when he realized that reducing the collection to "the hard core of actually useful information [without] a lot of filler" would have a fringe benefit: "I could fit a comfortable reading chair in my office."

It sounded like the first thing to go was the dream of reducing his holdings to just two or three dozen titles necessary for preparing lectures. This extreme ambition was revised to trimming down to roughly 60 feet of books. The effort would take a few days, he thought; and he hoped to finish before leaving on a trip that would take him away from the office for a week or so.

Along the way the gamut of emotions are felt:

There is a kind of exhilaration to it. But it requires full acceptance of the reality that there will be pain later: the remorse over titles you never retrieved from the discard pile.

Not sure why I'm dwelling on this topic of late, but I suspect has to do with the fact that we're moving again soon, and with that comes inevitable book culling, though this time the damage should be limited. Best of all, we're finally (finally!) going to be moving somewhere where we'll be living for more than a year, so I can unbox all the books and put them on some sort Mrs. Millions-created shelving masterpiece. Brilliant.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:44 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Harry Potter's Big Numbers Attract a Wide Spectrum of Retailers

The numbers are huge, 8.2 million copies sold in 24 hours in the U.S., 2.65 million in the U.K., but Harry Potter isn't necessarily a boon for book stores. The big chains, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and the like, discount the book sharply in order to compete with one another, and then they hope that customers will pick up some other books where the profit margins are better. Independent bookstores are far less likely to discount at all. They don't get the books in large enough quantities to get a deal from the publisher, and, less efficient than the chains, they can't afford to trim profit margins much.

Generally, this is the case for most any bestseller, where the chains discount 20%, 30%, even 40% or more, and the indies sell books at full price, getting by on atmosphere, customer loyalty, and skillfully selling non-bestsellers that may not be on the front tables at chain stores. In the case of Harry Potter, however, a whole nother layer of retail establishments gets in on the action. The big box stores, like Wal-Mart, Costco, and Target, have already put the squeeze on the bookstore chains with bulk quantities of deeply discounted bestsellers, so a book like Harry Potter fits nicely into their business plan. But the net is cast even wider for Harry Potter. Grocery stores, usually not likely to have much in the way of books aside from the occasional rack of mass-market paperbacks by the register had stacks and stacks of the final boy wizard installment. Even Best Buy, whose products are probably more typically responsible for a decline in reading, had customers lined up at midnight so it could sell the book, placing Harry Potter alongside the Wii and the PlayStation3 in the pantheon of must have products hawked by the electronics giant.

And so, by selling the book at full price and getting by on charm, it's likely some of the indies got a bottom line boost from the Potter madness, but for the chain stores, squeezed by other giant corporations, profits may be tougher. On a much smaller scale, this challenge was evident in Malaysia, where book chains protested the price slashing of grocery giants, who sold Harry Potter at below cost, by boycotting the book (imagine Barnes & Noble trying that!) Eventually, the Malaysian booksellers worked out a deal with Penguin, Harry Potter's distributor in the country, but the episode highlights the high stakes competition that book retailers face when they are forced to go up against retail heavyweights.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:30 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Neal Stephenson, Polymath

I doubt that I could improve on John Derbyshire's review of the Baroque Cycle, Neal Stephenson's "octology" of historical fiction. The Baroque Cycle is actually three big volumes: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World, all published in 2003 and 2004. There are some well-respected American writers out there who have published bricks of comparable length and to whom Stephenson could conceivably be compared, if for nothing other than his ability to make readers turn pages, lots of pages. Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and Thomas Pynchon have all produced acclaimed doorstops. But despite some pretty robust sales of the Baroque Cycle, or perhaps because of them - and Stephenson is not shy about discussing his sci-fi roots - the author enjoys a much lower profile than all of the above.

I cannot review the Baroque Cycle until I've read it, and at this rate that could take years. I'm halfway through The Confusion and have begun to fall under that blessed curse of too many other titles and authors competing for my attention. And, as I said, I doubt that I could add much to Derbyshire's review. Derbyshire does a particularly good job of explaining the rather complex themes and scientific antecedents that run through these books, which follow the lives of three principal characters through late 17th-early 18th century Europe and beyond. The Protestant Reformation and England's Glorious Revolution, the contrasting subjugation of the French nobility by Louis XIV, the opening up of the Americas, the slave trade, advances in Europe's mercantile economy and monetary systems, the development of higher math, The Calculus, cryptography, and encryption (precursor to information technology); all figure prominently in the Baroque Cycle. Historical figures from Sir Isaac Newton to The Sun King wander in and out of the narrative. The principals wander far and wide: Boston, London, Amsterdam, Paris, Algiers, and Cairo are just a few of the cities they pass through, and Stephenson captures the essence of each place with skillful description that tends toward the fantastic. Reading these books is like diving into a massive landscape painting, what one might have seen adorning the walls of Versailles at its apogee. Suddenly the small figures toiling away in the foreground take form, their presence no longer merely giving scale to a world of unfathomable expanse, but instead demonstrating the interconnectedness of people and ideas. Whether concerned with noble folly, bourgeois intrigue, picaresque adventure, or scientific missive, Stephenson's touch is as light and easy as the torrential dialogue that flows between his characters.

Breezy as his fiction writing may be, Neal Stephenson has a penchant for deep thoughts. He is a polymath, someone who comes across as very learned in a number of areas, and his books present a sort of unified field theory of human systems (and also come complete with bibliographies). But at heart, Stephenson is a science fiction writer, two of his previous books, Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, fitting more obviously into that genre. The latter deals in part with cryptography and code breaking in WWII, and is a sort of primer for the Baroque Cycle despite being set hundreds of years later. That the Baroque Cycle is set in the past obscures what would otherwise be a fairly obvious connection to sci-fi. Call it historical science fiction. Indeed, before I did a bit of research into Stephenson, having read only Quicksilver, this connection was lost on me. But I find this aspect of Stephenson's writing appealing: ultimately metaphysics is more important than mere physics. Why is more important than how. Is it not impossible to answer the question why without moving from a discussion of hard science to a discussion of something more ineffable?

The last piece to the Neal Stephenson puzzle that I'm attempting to assemble here is his website. It's a good site because it's a place where someone can read cranky musings by the author on why in the world people wish to seek him out and the innumerable ways in which his work is misunderstood, and also purchase some pretty cool Baroque Cycle t-shirts. One can only smile at the introductory salvo: "The existence of this page: narcissism or necessity?" While Stephenson would have you believe that it's the latter only, the true answer would seem to be a bit of both. Yet, like his books, Stephenson's website is both interesting and informative (and, not surprisingly for a man with some geekish tendencies, rather well put together). And isn't some didactic crankiness refreshing in a world where so many of us are content to tiptoe through the tulips? My favorite portion of the site is where Stephenson equates his personal notoriety to that of the mayor of Des Moines. Hmm. One thing is certain: of the two, Stephenson has sold more books.

- Noah Deutsch @ 9:27 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Professor Trelawney Examines Her Tea Leaves

On the eve of the release of the final Harry Potter, I offer Millions readers a few brief intuitions - alas, grounded more in literary convention than in second sight - about the events to come in The Deathly Hallows.

My chief intuition, based largely on the over-determined association of Dumbledore with the phoenix throughout the series, is that everyone's favorite headmaster is not dead (X-Men, anyone?). Recall that Harry "thinks he sees" a phoenix emerge from the smoke of Dumbledore's funeral pyre. Based on this intuition, I also maintain that Snape is not, in fact, a Death Eater, and that he and Dumbledore staged a fake murder with Harry as witness. This will allow Snape to become more deeply embedded in Voldemort's ranks. Dumbledore's wisdom would be too seriously undermined if Snape really and truly betrayed him. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of this particular tea-leaf vision, more must emerge about how Snape gained Dumbledore's trust. This will be one of the central revelations of the new book.

Of lesser intuitions:

R.A.B., the initials on the note found in the locket that was supposed to be a horcrux, belong to Sirius' brother, Regulus Black, whom we have heard vaguely was a follower of Voldemort and then attempted to leave the ranks of the Death Eaters, only to be killed by them for his betrayal. This may mean that Slytherin's locket is concealed somewhere in the Black family house that Sirius left to Harry.

As to whether Hogwarts will remain open during this seventh year with Harry, I suspect that it will remain open in some capacity - if only as a larger and better fortified headquarters for the Order of the Phoenix and their allies.

I hope that, in the less than illustrious cooking-sherry-drinking tradition of Professor Trelawney, I am wrong about all of these things. I think The Deathly Hallows would be a better book for it.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 7:11 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Empire on the Wane: On J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

When Irving Howe reviewed J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians for the NY Times in 1982, he touched on the concern that Coetzee's "universalized" (which is to say unnamed and fictional) Empire would "be 'elevated' into sterile ruminations about the human condition." At the time of course, it was Coetzee's South Africa, that obvious villain of the last half of the last century, that Coetzee's crumbling Empire represented.

25 years later, Coetzee's choice to craft a novel about a nameless, malignant Empire seems prescient, as it turns out that other Empires can be viewed through the lens of the novel. Recent events have made the effect even more striking. As Howe goes on to add, "Waiting for the Barbarians renders a moment in our politics, a style of our injustice. Precisely this power of historical immediacy gives the novel its thrust, its larger and, if you wish, 'universal' value."

Some plot summary will be useful here: Barbarians is told in the first person by a character known as the Magistrate, a benign bureaucrat comfortably ensconced in a settlement in the outer frontiers of a sprawling Empire. As happens from time to time, the Empire has become exercised by an outside force, its usual nemesis, the Barbarians, roaming bands of nomads that live beyond the Empire's frontiers and always, it seems, present a threat to the heartland from the periphery. In the policies of the Empire and its bureaucrats and enforcers, this threat gives it license to throw its weight around. The Magistrate, meanwhile, is something of a softy, taken to indulging in women and rather aimless hobbies and more than satisfied to be positioned well beyond the notice of the officials in the capital. That is, until Colonel Joll and his men arrive on orders to take on the Barbarians that roam beyond the settlement walls. Ultimately, the Magistrate objects to the torture and ineptitude practiced by the soldiers in their dealings with the Barbarians and he is labeled if not a traitor, then someone of too weak a constitution to be trusted with the aims of the Empire. He too is subject to torture and humiliation.

Much of the book takes place in the Magistrate's head, both because he leads an isolated life and because for a portion of the novel he is in prison, with not much else to do but think. While the machinations of the Empire are very easily compared to those of our government and others', the Magistrate's inner monologue is no less comparable to the inner struggles of citizens of these "Empires." Though the Magistrate's moral compass is intact, he has grown fat and weak on the largesse of the Empire. We are left to wonder, are the Magistrate's failings personality flaws or are they inescapable byproducts of our desire to live comfortably, even if it means that, as a result, others somewhere in the world are not?

Allegories aside, the book is a fairly stunning, brisk read, dystopian and thoughtful. Coetzee's Empire is finely wrought as are the people who dwell within it and without. Perhaps Coetzee had South Africa in mind when he created the Empire, but Barbarians will forever illuminate the price of power and hegemony.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:28 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Thursday Links

• The Rake is at it again, taking The Believer down a peg.
• Adventures in niche publishing: A new Paris Review?
• Simon at Bloggasm considers Harriet Klausner, the widely reviled #1 reviewer at Amazon.
• And, finally, some spot-on humor at the New Yorker this week.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:20 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Notebooks Elevated: On The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus (Cyril Connolly)

How to describe Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave: It is one of those books - like The Anatomy of Melancholy, The Compleat Angler, Minima Moralia, A Tale of a Tub, Urne Buriall - that defies all conventions of genre and, thereby, easy description. Though I have concerned myself much with the academic question of what it means to defy genre classification, I have no easy or convincing answer. By my reckoning, genreless literary works take into themselves aspects of various different disciplines (aesthetic criticism, philosophy, memoir and recollection, in the case of The Unquiet Grave) or genres (Moby-Dick is part "straight" narrative, part allegory, part encyclopedia (the Cetology chapter), part common-place book (the extended collection of quotations concerning whales at the beginning), part drama (the chapters that are laid out like acts in a play, complete with stage directions), part impressionistic quasi-philosophic meditation ("The Masthead" and "The Whiteness of the Whale" chapters)).

The difference between a book like Moby-Dick and a book like The Unquiet Grave, is that Melville's book has a master genre (it is still, at the end of the day, in spite of all of its formal experimentation, unquestionably a novel), whereas Connolly's book, along the lines of Burton's Anatomy, Adorno's Minima Moralia, Wittgenstein's Culture and Value, Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Buriall - is, as a reading experience, something more akin to being submerged in the psyche and/or intellect of its author. These books are odd mixes of opinion, quotation, recollection, personal philosophy, and meditation, and all have - some more than others - a fragmentary or aphoristic style of composition that can at times verge on the hallucinatory. And perhaps 'hallucinatory' is the wrong word - the sensation that the reading of Connolly's book induces is (and here I speculate) something more like being possessed for a while by the thoughts, the thought-patterns, rhythms, and favorite authors of someone else. The closest approximation of this sensation that I have found elsewhere is in the reading of private notebooks and unbound papers: Here, a fragmentary transcription of a conversation at a party; there, a formal letter to a parent; there, again, a diaristic meditation on the fear of marriage. All is produced of the same brain, in the same hand, and this common origin is the sole tie that binds the disparate sheaf.

And yet, however similar the sensation of rifling through an author's private papers may at times be to the reading of a book like The Unquiet Grave, a crucial difference remains: A book like Connolly's performs what manuscript papers actually do. Connolly and his ilk turn the casual essay-istic style of the notebook into art. They refine, polish, and uplift the fragmentary, meandering private style: They make it palatable, even beautiful. Private writing, when it is really and truly private, is not necessarily charmingly haphazard: Almost inevitably, it slips into the unendurably dull, the defeatingly self-obsessed, the clumsy, sloppy, and rough. It is hard going. There are occasional pleasures to be had, gems of wit and observation here and there, to be sure, but these are the exception and not the rule.

The beauty, the strange beauty, of The Unquiet Grave and its cousins lies in its elevation of notebook style - that quirky yet potentially enchanting melange of squib, meditation, quotation, anecdote, and philosophical monologue - to high art. The casual, associative meandering that stands in place of traditional chronology- and logic-driven narrative techniques creates the illusion that what we read was actually just dashed off casually in snatches of free time, while the quality of the thought, and the quality of the prose belies this informal, nonchalance of organization.

Below are a few choice excerpts from The Unquiet Grave, by Palinurus (Connolly's authorial pseudonym for this "experiment in self-dismantling"; the pilot of Aeneas' boat who fell asleep at the rudder, fell into the sea, and was drowned; Palinurus was a sacrifice taken by Neptune; he died - though he didn't know it - so the rest could arrive safely at Avernus).

In their variety and strangeness, these passages (I hope) will give something of an introduction to the book:

"Cowardice in living: without health and courage we cannot face the present or the germ of the future in the present, and we take refuge in evasion. Evasion through comfort, through society, through acquisitiveness, through the book-bed-bath defense system, above all through the past, the flight to the romantic womb of history, into primitive myth-making. The refusal to include the great mass-movements of the twentieth century in our art or our myth will drive us to take refuge in the past; in surrealism, magic, primitive religions, or eighteenth-century wonderlands. We fly to Mediterranean womb-pockets and dream-islands, into dead controversies and ancient hermetic bric-a-brac, like a child who sits hugging his toys and who screams with rage when told to put on his boots."

"The Vegetable Conspiracy: Man is now on his guard against insect parasites; against liver-flukes, termites, Colorado beetles, but has he given thought to the possibility that he has been selected as the target of vegetable attack, marked down by the vine, hop, juniper, and tobacco plant, tea-leaf and coffee-berry for destruction? What converts these Jesuits of the gastric juices make, - and how cleverly they retain them. Which smoker considers the menace of the weed spreading in his garden, which drunkard reads the warning of the ivy round the oak?"

From a brief set of descriptions of pets entitled "Graves of the Lemurs":

"Polyp. Most gifted of lemurs, who hated aeroplanes in the sky, on the screen, and even on the wireless. How he would have hated this war! He could play in the snow or swim in a river or conduct himself in a night-club; he judged human beings by their voices; biting some, purring over others, while for one or two well-seasoned old ladies he would brandish a black prickle-studded penis, shaped like a eucalyptus seed. Using his tail as an aerial, he would lollop through long grass to welcome his owners, embracing them with little cries and offering them a lustration from his purple tongue and currycomb teeth. His manners were of some spoiled young Maharajah, his intelligence not inferior, his heart all delicacy, - women, gin and muscats were his only weaknesses. Alas, he died of pneumonia while we scolded him for coughing, and with him vanished the sea-purple cicada kingdom of calanque and stone-pine and the concept of life as an arrogant private dream shared by two."

"When once we have discovered how pain and suffering diminish the personality, and how joy alone increases it, then the morbid attraction which is felt for evil, pain, and abnormality will have lost its power. Why do we reward our men of genius, our suicides, our madmen, and the generally maladjusted with the melancholy honours of a posthumous curiosity? Because we know that it is our society which has condemned these men to death, and which is guilty because out of its own ignorance and malformation it has persecuted those who were potential saviours; smiters of the rock who might have touched the spring of healing and brought us back into harmony with ourselves.

Somehow, then, and without going mad, we must learn from these madmen to reconcile fanaticism with serenity. Each one, taken alone, is disastrous, yet except through the integration of these two opposites there is no great art and no profound happiness - and what else is worth having? For nothing can be accomplished without fanaticism, and without serenity nothing can be enjoyed. Perfection of form or increase of knowledge, pursuit of fame or service to the community, love of God or god of Love, - we must select the Illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy. This is the farewell autumn precept with which Palinurus takes leave of his fast-fading nightmare."

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 7:03 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The McSweeney's Top 10: A Highly Subjective List

For no reason other than that it is July, we forthwith offer a highly subjective ranking of the best issues of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern.

(Editor's Note: Many of these issues no longer seem to be available at the McSweeney's Store. We remind you, however, that in the wake of the AMS/PGW fiasco, buying directly from independent publishers can be a great way to show your support. Hardcovers of Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown, for example, can be had for 40% off at www.softskull.com. We've provided links to the McSweeney's store below, when applicable, as well as our usual Amazon links.)

10. Issue 14: At War for the Forseeable Future

Truly, a McSweeney's for all seasons. This is the one from right after the 2004 elections, and the mood is downright dour, from Chris Adrian's "A Child's Book of Sickness and Death" to Weschler's "Thumb in Eye" Convergence. But there is some damn good stuff in here, notably Jim Shephard's and Chris Bachelder's stories, and Claire Light's "Pigs in Space." Lindsay Carleton's creepy, angry "The People" perfectly distills the overall mood, and is probably our favorite McSweeney's debut story ever. In its stripped-down cover and moderate front-matter, this McSweeney's is, more than any other, a "typical issue" of the magazine. That it is of such high quality speaks to the enduring value of what editor Dave Eggers started. Every reader will have his or her own list of highlights and bloopers - aesthetic uniformity and frivolity seem to be the Scylla and Charibdis of the McSweeney's project - but it's been awfully good these last ten years to have a thick, prominent quarterly devoted to the notion that good writing both instructs and entertains. (McSweeney's Store)

9. Issue 11: It Can Be Free, a.k.a. "The DVD Issue"

This is another of McSweeney's stronger efforts, where fiction is concerned. Big names predominate - T.C. Boyle, Joyce Carol Oates, Denis Johnson - but the best work comes from the slightly less-prominent: David Means, Tom Bissell, and Samantha Hunt. As usual, there's a debut story of which to be jealous (by Benjamin Lytal), letters, a smattering of nonfiction, and a Lawrence Weschler convergence. The endpapers appraise us of another notable Eggers project, the "Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award." A handsome, quasi-biblical design diverts. And just when you think you've exhausted Issue 11, you remember the tongue-in-cheek bonus DVD. Indisputably the most essential item here is "The Editing of The Making of McSweeney's Issue #11 DVD" (with audio commentary by John Hodgman and Sarah Vowell). In theory: cloying. In practice: freaking brilliant. (McSweeney's store)

8. Issue 20, a.k.a. "Return to Form"

After a few issues in which whimsy trumped value, the magazine here buckles down and focuses on core competencies. First: fiction, notably Susan Steinberg's "To Sit, Unmoving" and J. Erin Sweeney's "Terminal." Second: Design. Among its stories, Issue 20 interlards beautiful color plates by contemporary artists. My favorites are by Jason Holley and Susan Logoreci. As a bonus, the editors throw in a bound excerpt of Chris Adrian's monumental novel, The Children's Hospital, subsequently published by McSweeney's Books. With the addition of a letters section and a kick-ass piece of journalism, this issue would easily have cracked the Top Five. (McSweeney's Store)

7. Issue 3: Windfall Republic

We could just as easily list Issue 1 here, on the principle of historical significance. But Issue 3, its beefy younger brother, is where McSweeney's really started to hit its stride. Having started out showcasing articles killed by other magazines and larky humor pieces, the Quarterly Concern quickly began luring the best work of talents young and old. Hence Saul Steinberg's wonderful diagram "Country Noises." Hence Paul Collins' "Banvard's Folly" (later reprinted in his book of the same title). Hence Judy Budnitz' O. Henry-award-winning "Flush," and Gary Greenberg's remarkable memoir "In The Kingdom of the Unabomber" - the bloody heart of the Windfall Republic.

6. Issue 12: Twelve New Stories from Twelve New Writers

Under the Managing Editorship of Eli Horowitz, McSweeney's has laudably (if intermittently) emphasized showcasing new talent. Given the pressure on literary magazines to draw readers with recognizable names, this issue was a pleasant surprise. Of course, the last 80 pages feature a Roddy Doyle story and short-shorts by, e.g., Judy Budnitz, Rhett Miller, and Jennifer Egan. But the real meat is in the titular twelve stories. At times, the profusion of present-tense threatens to overwhelm the reader. But in stories like James Boice's "Pregnant Girl Smoking," it works just beautifully. Two of these debut writers, Ben Ehrenreich and Salvador Plascencia, would go on to publish novels - one of them from McSweeney's Books. (McSweeney's Store)

5. Issue 13 a.k.a. "The Comics Issue"

To date, Chris Ware is the only guest-editor of McSweeney's to have written the majority of the text while also illustrating the dustjacket. Almost autistically intricate, Ware's design rewards repeated viewing. And between vignettes from his illustrated history of Western thought, Ware offers readers a four-color Who's Who of contemporary comic-book artists, including Daniel Clowes, Lynda Barry, Charles Burns, and Art Spiegelman. No less beautiful are the prose contributions from Ira Glass, John Updike, and Chip Kidd. Portfolios of Charles Schulz and George Herriman provide historical context. On the whole, the issue makes a compelling case for comics as literature. (McSweeney's Store)

4. Issue 10: Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

We've recently fantasized about a literary quarterly that would only have guest-editors. You'd have to bid for the budget and subscriber list: whoever had the best pitch would win the right to put out an issue. In this 2003 anthology, guest-editing again proved congenial for McSweeney's. In the most entertaining fashion imaginable, Michael Chabon made a case for the foolishness of genre distinctions. The results are a hung jury: it's telling that some lit-fic writers delving into pulp genres sound as uncomfortable as some pulp writers waxing literary. But when "Thrilling Tales" is on, it's on. Elmore Leonard is, as always, a great American Writer. Kelly Link is, as always, Kelly Link. Chabon's skylarking "The Martian Agent" would inspire at least one blogger to attempt serial narrative. And Rick Moody's "The Albertine Notes" (just republished in his book Right Livelihoods) reminds us of how good a writer he can be. It's interesting, having read What is the What, to return to Eggers' story "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly," and to rediscover the odd joylessness of his immediate post-September-11th output. Eggers' gifts as a writer depend, we think, upon his capacity for wonder, and when it goes, the work suffers. Perhaps this explains the streak of guest-editors, and the eventual hiring of Managing Editor Horowitz. Anyway, if you're going to buy this issue, try to find the original McSweeney's edition, rather than the Vintage paperback.

3. Issue 8 a.k.a. "Paul's Eye is on the Sparrow"

We've encountered a lack of consensus on this issue: people either love it or hate it. We love it. Guest-editor Paul Maliszewski devotes the entire issue to "hoaxes," presaging his own eventual exile from the McSweeney's kingdom. But expansion beyond the usual gang proves to be a good thing. Again, we get Ben Marcus, Paul LaFarge, Moody, Weschler, J. Robert Lennon, and some quality Gabe Hudson. But Maliszewski also brings on board Samantha Hunt, Lynne Tillman (in the letters section), Michael Martone, Darin Strauss, Curtis White, and Gilbert Sorrentino. On the whole, the mood is a bit drier, a bit more refined, though we do get some amusing faux-reference-work riffage on Borges and the letter "M" (a prelude to the Future Dictionary of America?) Highlights include a wonderful Alex Hemon story, Sean Wilsey doing fiction, Rachel Cohen on Fernando Pessoa, a Tina Barney gatefold, and Jonathan Ames' fascinating "The Nista Affair" - either memoir or story, we can't tell which.

2. Issue 5: Small Box Half-Full of Gems and Itching

Don't be fooled by the title. Issue 5 is not a box, and thus earns fewer style points than its immediate predecessor. (Nor does it contain gems or itching, in any literal sense.) It is, however, the strongest single issue of the magazine, where content is concerned. By the summer of 2000, whimsy, that sometime irritant, had given way to millennial exuberance. From the almost impossibly baroque "copyright page" to the pseudonymous letters by "Daniel O'Mara," editor Eggers left his fingerprints everywhere on this one. More importantly, he got top-flight work from Collins and LaFarge, Lydia Davis, and Ann Cummins. Other highlights include a "Convergences" pinup, a Ben Marcus short short, a long piece by Susan Minot on Uganda, and an enormous story by "Elizabeth Klemm" (David Foster Wallace, doing some of his best fictional work since "Church Not Made of Hands").

1. Issue 4: Trying, Trying, Trying, Trying, Trying, Trying (a.k.a. "The Box")

The perfect marriage of form and content, this issue crystallized, in paper, the grandest possibilities of the McSweeney's project. An unusual and elegant design concept - a box full of separately bound books - shows off this issue's stories and articles to wonderful effect. Slighter offerings by heavy hitters (Haruki Murakami, George Saunders, Moody) are enriched by their status as beautiful objects. Conversely, newcomer Sheila Heti dignifies the lavish presentation of her "Middle Stories" by making a hefty impact in a short amount of space. Lawrence Weschler contributes one of his most compelling "Convergences," and other nonfiction, like Malisewski's "Paperback Nabokov," help establish McSweeney's as a home for first-rate essays.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 9:33 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Potter, not so good for industry after all

In an article on Washington Post's Outlook Sunday, book critic Ron Charles explores the Harry Potter phenomenon, dissects - rather unfavorably - J.K. Rowling's writing and discusses issues that are larger than the teenage wizard. Yes, larger than Potter - if you can believe it.

With the seventh installment hitting the shelves July 21, Potter-mania is reaching new heights. Charles points out that millions of people will receive or buy Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows in a single day, a great marketing success that also bonds readers across the world. But, Charles also points out, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, half of all Americans will not buy a single novel in 2007.

The widespread belief that the Potter series is to books what marijuana is to drugs does not hold, Charles argues. He also reflects on his tenure as an English teacher, saying that he should have structured his courses to enable kids to craft their own taste in literature - instead of having them read all the classics. An interesting approach which, as an aspiring journalist, intrigues me as I think of how the media is trying to adapt - quite unsuccessfully - to the post-baby boomer generations' habits in following news, or lack thereof.

Slightly condescending and very witty, Charles's funny reporting and commentary is worth your five minutes as you try to ease in to Monday. Check out "Harry Potter and the Death of Reading", it'll give you some good food for thought. Not to worry, if you are a Potter fan like me, you won't be terribly turned off.

See Also: The Grinch Who Hates Harry Potter

- Emre Peker @ 8:57 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

A Final Journey: A Review of Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels with Herodotus

Published posthumously, Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels with Herodotus is very self consciously a final book. In it Kapuscinski reflects on his life as a writer, rarely delving much into the details of his travels with which his readers have become familiar, but instead dwelling more upon writing itself. But more so, his focus is on Herodotus, the historian from ancient Greece, who Kapuscinski counts as a great historian and whose books were a near constant companion of Kapuscinski's on his travels.

Indeed Travels more than anything else reads like a companion text to Herodotus' book The Histories - a footnote early on refers readers to the Oxford University Press edition for those who want to follow along at home.

And that may be a good idea because, for the most part, Travels is Herodotus seen through Kapuscinski's lens. He tells us that the book was given to him by an editor before his first journey abroad and he took it with him on nearly all of his assignments during his long career. In looking at Herodotus, Kapuscinski suggests to the reader the origins of journalism as well as its purpose while also marveling at the fantastical stories and bizarre cultures described by the Greek. Kapuscinski is a true fan.

But this book is also a memoir of sorts, and Kapuscinski parcels out little nuggets of the Kapuscinski philosophy, a way of looking at the world that will be familiar to his readers.

Describing his very first trip, to India, Kapuscinski describes devouring books about the country and about the power of the written word to transport and teach:

With each new title I read, I felt as if I were taking a new journey to India, recalling places I had visited and discovering new depths and aspects, fresh meanings, of things which earlier I had assumed I knew. These journeys were much more multidimensional than my original one. I discovered also that these expeditions could be further prolonged, repeated, augmented by reading more books, studying maps, looking at paintings and photographs. What is more, they had a certain advantage over the actual trip - in an iconographic journey such as this one, one could stop at any point, calmly observe, rewind to the previous image, etc., something for which on a real journey there is neither the time nor the chance.

And of course, I'm sure there are many readers, like myself, for whom Kapuscinski's books have had "a certain advantage over the actual trip." With Kapuscinski as a guide, his books offer more of an escape and more excitement than most of us can hope for from our planned excursions to non-threatening locales.

In Herodotus, Kapuscinski undoubtedly sees his foundation, without whom Kapuscinski and many other journalists, historians, and travel writers wouldn't be possible. As Kapuscinski shows us, the world of the Greek nearly 2,500 years ago isn't all that far removed from what Kapuscinski has spent his career doing. At the same time, we wouldn't consider Herodotus a journalist in the modern sense, one who is beholden to proper sourcing, fact checking, and objectivity. Herodotus gathered up tales of mysterious faraway lands, relating even the ones that sound far-fetched, crafted narratives to suit his efforts, and passed judgment when it struck him to do so. Following his death, Kapuscinski was accused of just such things by Jack Shafer at Slate. Defending Kapuscinski, I wrote "To define [Kapuscinski's] books as journalism (or memoir, or "truth") exclusively does a disservice to journalism - offering a context within which this work fits, or even a disclaimer, is more appropriate - but to suggest that there isn't a place for writing and books like these does a disservice to readers." In speculating about Herodotus' way of life, Kapuscinski defends the writer's right to embellish in the service of both making a living and entertaining readers (two goals that often go hand in hand)

It is possible... that the rhythm of Herodotus's life and work was as follows: he made a long journey, and upon his return traveled to various Greek cities and organized something akin to literary evenings, in the course of which he recounted the experiences, impressions, and observations he had gathered during his peregrinations. It is entirely likely that he made his living from such gatherings, and that he also financed his subsequent trips in this way, and so it was important to him to have the largest auditorium possible, to draw a crowd. It would be to his advantage, therefore, to begin with something that would rivet attention, arouse curiosity - something a tad sensational. Story plots meant to move, amaze, astonish, pop up throughout his entire opus; without such stimuli, his audience would have dispersed early, bored, leaving him with an empty purse.

Perhaps it was a similar motivation that pushed Kapuscinski to not just send back terse wire service missives on the conflicts and battles he observed but also to keep a separate notebook of observations that he would craft into his books. But to suggest that Kapsucinski's motives were craven and profit-driven alone would be to ignore the profound empathy with which he treats his subjects and the care with which he observes the foreign lands he visits.

In Travels, Kapuscinski describes being lured to Algiers in 1965 by a vague tip from a source. Upon his arrival he discovers that indeed a coup has occurred, but he is dismayed to find that it has been bloodless and so there are no scenes of battle and mayhem to describe to hungry readers back home. Then Kapuscinski realizes how misguided this attitude is:

It was here in Algiers, several years after I had begun working as a reporter, that it slowly began to dawn on me that I had set myself on an erroneous path back then. Until that awakening, I had been searching for spectacular imagery, laboring under the illusion that it was compelling, observable tableaux that somehow justified my presence, absolving me of responsibility to understand the events at hand. It was the fallacy that one can interpret the world only by means of what it chooses to show us in the hours of its convulsions, when it is rocked by shots and explosions, engulfed in flames and smoke, choked in dust and the stench of burning, when everything collapses into rubble on which people sit despairing over the remains of their loved ones.

If there is a philosophy that encapsulates Kapuscinski, that is it. Body counts and "colorful" descriptions of chaos and violence offer us no insight into our world. Only with time and effort come empathy and understanding. This holds true of all of our best journalism (cf. George Packer).

But Kapuscinski does not romanticize this noble cause. He instead sees it as a symptom of his loneliness. He is not the swashbuckling hero journalist that some portray him as but a wandering lost soul imprisoned by his travels. Near the end of this odd little memoir, travelogue, and homage to Herodotus, Kapuscinski, as if knowing that this is his goodbye, lays himself bare to his readers:

Such people, while useful, even agreeable, to others, are, if truth be told, frequently unhappy - lonely in fact. Yes, they seek out others, and it may even seem to them that in a certain country or city they have managed to find true kinship and fellowship, having come to know and learn about a people; but they wake up one day and suddenly feel that nothing actually binds them to these people, that they can leave here at once. They realize that another country, some other people, have now beguiled them, and that yesterday's most riveting event now pales and loses all meaning and significance.

For all intents and purposes, they do not grow attached to anything, do not put down deep roots. Their empathy is sincere, but superficial.

Kapuscinski's admission is stark and sad, but one must think that it was his lack of joy, of hubris, of a sense of heroism that underpinned the singular tone of his work and made it such a revelation to read.

See Also: The Reporter: Ryszard Kapuscinski

- C. Max Magee @ 1:00 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Lettre Ulysses Goes on Hiatus

Longtime readers will recall my interest in a fairly obscure literary prize called the Lettre Ulysses Award, which recognizes works of book-length journalism from around the world. I wrote about the shortlist and winner in 2005 and the longlist and winner in 2006. Thinking it might be time for this year's installment of the Lettre Ulysses, I recently visited the award's website and was dismayed to discover that the award is on hiatus, perhaps permanently:

The Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage will not be presented in 2007. The only world prize for literary reportage was brought to life by the cultural quarterly Lettre International in 2003 with the financial support of the Aventis Foundation and was presented annually up until 2006. The Goethe-Institut has been a partner of the project from the very beginning. Since the contract with the Aventis Foundation expired the Foundation Lettre International Award has not succeeded so far in finding a new partner to finance the award. The organizers hope to be able to present the award again annually from 2008.

I'm hoping that Lettre Ulysses is successful in finding backing for next year. Though not a well-known prize, it highlighted the work of reporters around the world who shed light on conflicts and cultures that deserve global attention.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:42 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Meta-Critic Madness

The Rake put together a terrific column on lazy reviews, the prevalence of lists masquerading as criticism, and the army of meta-critics that has emerged online. I'm late in linking to it, but it's a very worthwhile read. A taste:

Yes, Virginia, your pal the Rake has been willing witness to countless hours of VH1's laziest programming. He's not made of stone. The professional listmakers' core insanity lies in the way in which they hold up sub-B list comedians and other cultural freaks as insightful, worthy commentators. Certainly there are subjects upon which Ron Jeremy is an expert, but the Top 100 Scorchtastic Movie Kisses is not one of them, not least of all because the very object of his commentary is chimerical.

There's more, too.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:13 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

In Praise of Wyatt Mason

It's been over a decade since James Wood came on the scene to reclaim literary criticism as its own kind of literature, and though all his enthusiasts have a top-ten list of the Wood essays with which they most strenuously disagree, he comes by his reputation as "our best critic" honestly. Indeed, disagreeing with Wood can be an education in and of itself; if I had to choose one critic to pan my own work, it would be Wood. But what if I could choose a critic to praise it?

For several years, Wyatt Mason of Harper's has quietly been reinvigorating an even more recondite form than the critical essay: the literary encomium. As with Wood's considered corrections, one can disagree with Mason's glowing appraisals of Mary Gaitskill or Charles Chadwick (I wasn't as enamored of It's All Right Now as Mason was), while still being provoked to think - and feel - more deeply about literature.

Congenially, Mason's tastes are closer to mine than are Wood's. (Witness his translation of Eric Chevillard's wonderfully weird Palafox.) I'm particularly in his debt for introducing me to the fiction of Leonard Michaels, and at the end of the month, harpers.org will be offering the essay in question to non-subscribers. For the time being, one can check out a brief, but interesting enough, interview about Michaels.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 8:55 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Canadians Paying Steep Prices for New Books

Book hoarder that I am, I tend to buy most things second-hand, occasionally remaindered, almost always paperback, ideally pocketbook. But never hot-off-the-shelf hardcover. Okay, occasionally. When Bob Dylan's Chronicles came out a couple of years ago, I bought it after work on the first day and actually refused to return home without a newly-minted copy in my backpack. (It's an obsession. I'm handling it.)

The portability of paperbacks and the affordability of second-hand makes for an appealing combination. But the odd time that I do dig into my wallet for something new, especially a new hardcover, I'm astounded by the cost. This might sound a bit trite. The high cost of newly published books is hardly news. But I look at the price on the jacket and I see a massive difference between the US dollar cost and the Canadian dollar cost. This difference bears no resemblance to the 2007 economy.

Less than five years ago, the Canadian dollar was sitting at around 65 cents US. In recent years, it's been inching its way up and now sits at around 95 cents US. So you'd think that a new hardcover sold here in Canada would be only slightly more expensive than the same book in a US store. How then do bookshops and the publishing industry justify the 30 per cent premium that Canadians are often paying?

A recent article from the Globe and Mail examines this phenomenon and explores the actions that Canadian booksellers are taking to bring book prices more in line with economic reality. And, in the process, corral more wayward book-buyers like myself, into their stores.

With any luck, this matter will be resolved by the time Dylan's Chronicles Volume Two comes out.

- Andrew Saikali @ 10:03 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

The Devil Inside: A Review of Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita

About a year ago, The Millions readers recommended that I read Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita after I wrote about Crime and Punishment - which was not so much a commentary on Dostoevsky's fantastic writing, but a plea for more excellent Russian literature. As happens with a lot of books I end up reading, I stumbled upon the novel per chance: a friend visiting me in DC had a copy he intended to read, but gave it to me as a travel companion.

Enter the devil - or Messire, as his servants respectfully call him. Set in Moscow, ostensibly sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, and in Yershalayim right before and after the Crucifixion, Bulgakov's eccentric satire brings the ruler of the shadows into the lives of unassuming citizens.

As a heavily censored author in communist Russia, Bulgakov mocks the bureaucracy, hints at literary and political persecution, and employs the tightly regulated social life under Stalin to create a colorful scene of chaos.

It all begins when Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz urges the poet Ivan Homeless to revise his latest piece in a way to demonstrate that religion is bogus - namely by explaining that Jesus never existed. A curious stranger joins the debate and, taken aback by the suggestion that the devil does not exist, begins prophesizing about Berlioz's fast-approaching death. When the chubby publisher succumbs to his fate as foretold, Ivan loses it. And soon, many people in Moscow do too.

Surrounded by an incredible retinue comprising an odd-looking fellow in a pince-nez suit; a talking, drinking and mischievous black tom; a beautiful and often naked red-haired woman; and a vicious, stocky, short man with a fang protruding from his mouth, Messire - or Woland as others call the devil - rules Moscow for a brief few days, amusing himself and his entourage and terrifying many others.

But the devil's show is not inherently evil, rather it is a collection of minor acts that play on the actors' vices: bribery, free-goods and personal favors go a long way for the citizens of a cash-strapped USSR. And while Bulgakov amuses his reader with Woland's deeds and his victims, he introduces the Master and his lover, Margarita. And, he solemnly tells the story of Jesus and Pontius Pilate.

The Master, who is banished to an insane asylum after his novel about the Crucifixion is deemed unfit for publishing and subjected to scathing reviews by literary authorities, might just symbolize the author. For The Master and Margarita shared the same fate as the Master's piece on Pilate - it was published in 1967, 27 years after Bulgakov died.

But the similarities do not stop there. Like the Master who burns his manuscripts, Bulgakov, in an effort to convince Soviet authorities to let him emigrate, destroyed his "book about the devil," and later rewrote the novel from memory. At the time of his death, the work was still not in its final form.

Bulgakov dictated revisions and additions to his third wife, Yelena Shilovskaya, even from his death bed, and it was she who brought the work to light. Much like Margarita in the novel, who relentlessly pursues her Master and his writings, aiming to both satisfy her desire to know how the story in Yershalayim unfolds and share the masterpiece with the world.

The Master is not the sole teller of this story, however. As time winds back and forth between certain parts of the book, the reader hears the story from Woland, the Master and a narrator from ancient times. One is, all of a sudden, observing the painful contemplations of Pilate, his disgust for the post in the Middle East and the brewing tensions in Yershalayim. I'm not much for Christian history, but from what I can tell Bulgakov sheds a different light on to the whole situation. This becomes manifest later on as the reader sees the symbiotic tie between the devil and Jesus as they decide certain characters' fate.

The Master and Margarita shows the folly of Soviet repression, but it does not stop at mere cynicism and irony. Bulgakov also illustrates that the devil might watch out for Jesus, and vice versa, i.e., there are more gray areas even in the scripture than one might ordinarily perceive.

The gripping plot surely helps with the read, but Bulgakov's genius is in the subtle theories and observations he advances throughout this page-turner, forcing a reader to think about what it all means as a grin maliciously spreads across his face.

PS: I was reading the book on the bus in DC one evening. A kid, probably about five, saw the cover and remarked, "The cat has a snake's tongue. That's stupid." Clearly the subtlety was lost on the child, but I still find the comment very amusing. This brings me to a stylistic note: The version I have has the black tom in a suit looking over his left shoulder and slithering his split tongue; similarly, The Heart of a Dog - also by the same author - features a dog in a suit, with his tongue out, and looking over his right shoulder. Just a random note...

- Emre Peker @ 7:12 AM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Life In A Broken City: A Review of Rawi Hage's DeNiro's Game

The first thing you'll notice is the urgency. Our hero's youthful voice flirting with maturity, ready to move and ready to take you with him, whether you're ready or not. Even when he's waiting, you sense the activity, the plans and schemes to move his life along, to leave for pastures greener, or in the meantime, to bear the ten thousand bombs falling all around him.

Ten thousand bombs. This is Beirut - 1982. The civil war has been raging in Lebanon since the mid 70s and would continue for many more years. For Bassam and his best friend George, this is the only life they've known. In DeNiro's Game, the first novel by Rawi Hage, that life explodes onto the page, as Bassam dreams of escaping the day-to-day horrors of a city under siege. A city at war with itself.

Fuelled by longing, by testosterone, Bassam does whatever desperation demands of him to acquire the money to leave. All the while we sense Beirut's past weighing heavily on Bassam's shoulders:

"I climbed onto George's motorbike and sat behind him and we drove down the main streets where bombs fell, where Saudi diplomats had once picked up French prostitutes, where ancient Greeks had danced, Romans had invaded, Persians had sharpened their swords, Mamluks had stolen the villagers' food, crusaders had eaten human flesh, and Turks had enslaved my grandfather."

Bassam's childhood friend George eventually joins the militia, plunging head-first into the hell that governs their lives. George lives life one step closer to the extreme, constantly tempting fate. This is where the title comes in: George is nicknamed DeNiro by many of his cohorts, who share his fascination for the Russian Roulette game played out in the film The Deer Hunter, literally a death-defying game which becomes almost a rite of passage for George and others in his group.

Meanwhile Bassam deals with life in a broken city. The horrific and the mundane become one:

"Ten thousand bombs had split the winds, and my mother was still in the kitchen smoking her long white cigarettes."

And an awareness of mortality mixes with youthful arrogance. Bassam tempts fate in his own way:

"Death does not come to you when you face it; death is full of treachery, a coward who only notices the feeble and strikes the blind. I was flying on the curved road... I was a bow with a silver arrow, a god's s