The Nail Polish Method

When the Virginia Quarterly Review recently posted the ten most common story titles submitted to the magazine in the last year, I was relieved that none of my own titles stared back at me from the list. Then again, if I were to name a story "Butterfly" or "Revelation," perhaps I shouldn't be writing it to begin with.

I've been thinking about titles a lot lately, probably because I can't seem to find a good one for my latest story. In my search for the perfect title, I've begun to look to nail polish for inspiration. That's right, nail polish. This summer I was into shades of red and pink, and at my local beauty salon, where they use the OPI brand, my two favorites were "Moscow Nights" and "I'm Not Really a Waitress," both of which bring to my mind the sex trade. In a good way. Now, there are also some less successful titles, from the poorly punned, "Quarter of a Cent-Cherry," to the mysteriously punned, "Chocolate Moose," to the downright enigmatic "Redipus Oedipus." (That last one, I must add, wasn't OPI's doing, and came in a scarily antiquated bottle.) But even these names caught my attention. What is the secret, I wondered?

Judy Stonefield, the Senior Marketing Manager at OPI Products, was kind enough to help out a hapless fiction writer like myself. She explained that their collections are geographically themed, and that the people on their "Naming Committee" are chosen for their "creative, witty minds." She goes on to say:

When the collection theme is determined, we each begin brainstorming privately to come up with a list of ideas. We think of cities, towns, or other geographical names that are in the region of the theme -- Midnight in Moscow, St. Petersburgundy. We also consider "icons" of the region or things that have to do with the culture as well -- food, clothing, language, industry -- and work them into a name that applies to color, nails, polish, etc.

When it's time to meet, we compile a master list and get together in a conference room. We decorate the room with images of the region, we serve food associated with region as well for inspiration -- like cranberry juice spritzers when we named the shades for our New England collection, and biscotti and cappuccino for the Italian Collection. We read through the entire list aloud (and the list could have literally hundreds of names). We mark the ones that we like and then we see which names work best for the colors of the collection. It takes a couple of hours to do this, and is one of the highlights of year.

I also asked Judy and her OPI Naming Committee to help me out with my current title conundrum. I told her the story include a dog kidnapped by a coyote, a dead boyfriend, and eyebrow waxing. Here were their suggestions:

• "A Doggone Tale"
• "Wax On, Wax Off"
• "If Not For Bad Luck..."
• "The Bad Coyote"
• "A Date With Fate"
• "Dogless, Loveless, Browless"
• "The Big Oww"

I like the last one the best, I think.

- Edan Lepucki @ 6:10 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

A Bygone Era: Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

I've read and enjoyed many of E.L. Doctorow's short stories, typically in the New Yorker, but I'd never had the occasion to read Ragtime, Doctorow's most famous work, one that has been made into a film and Broadway musical.

I don't know that I'm well read enough to insist that Doctorow invented this sort of quasi-historical book, a work of fiction that necessarily intersects with the notable political and cultural figures of the day, rather than using them as simply a backdrop, but it has certainly become more prevalent in recent years.

Back then, apparently, it was new and different. So new and different in fact that my 1976 Bantam paperback edition comes with this quote emblazoned on its back cover:

It is a novel so original, so full of imagination and subtle pleasure, that to describe it further would only dilute the pure joy of reading. Turn to the first page. Begin. You will never have read anything like Ragtime before. Nothing quite like it has ever been written before.

On the front cover the sentiment is the same, if less verbose. Ragtime is "the astonishing bestseller about America." 30-plus years later, Ragtime is still a remarkable book, but to today's reader it likely won't feel quite as fresh, as "astonishing," as it may have when it was first published, if only because it has, knowingly or not, been an inspiration for many novels that have followed.

Set at the turn of the 20th century, Ragtime traces a few intersecting threads, but the main one involves a family in New Rochelle, New York. Father is the owner of a fireworks and American flag business ("about America" remember) and also an amateur polar explorer; Mother runs the house and is the household's real source of strength; Mother's Younger Brother is a quiet dreamer with anarchist tendencies and skills with explosives; the boy, child and nephew of these three, is the window through whom the story is told. The family's relatively quiet existence is shifted when a baby is discovered buried in the back yard, miraculously still alive. A black baby. In not altogether enlightened New Rochelle this causes something of a stir and sets in motion the arrival of Sarah, the baby boy's mother, and Coalhouse Walker, his father. This in turn sets in motion further events that eventually, cascading, bring bustling New York City to a standstill. But this center thread is augmented by intimate fictionalized views of notables like Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, and Emma Goldman, all of whom peripherally interact with the central family at one point or another.

Perhaps because it shares with Ragtime a fascination with Houdini and a polar interlude, Michael Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, is the recent novel I most associated with Doctorow's. And indeed the two books seem to inhabit the same gritty New York City, though they are set decades apart. At the same time, however, Kavalier is a more evolved form, crisper and brighter like the comic books Chabon evokes. With Ragtime, Doctorow is more lyrical and wandering, willing to swaddle the central narrative with peripheral stories, willing to leave loose ends untied.

Not long ago, in the New York Times and elsewhere, there was much discussion of the "best" novels of the last 25 years. Ragtime, being too old, was ineligible to be bandied about by pundits and bloggers, but, having read it, I can see that it was essential in laying the groundwork for the tone that a certain influential strain of popular literary fiction has taken since then. The hype on the back of my paperback may be overwrought, but clearly Ragtime was something special.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:24 AM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

Garth Interviewed

Our own Garth was interviewed at the enotes Book Blog, where he talked about his new book A Field Guide to the North American Family, how it came together, and influences from Charles Dickens to Julio Cortazar. Check it out.

- C. Max Magee @ 6:22 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

More on Dybek: From the Archives

News that Stuart Dybek, a great and overlooked short-story writer, had been awarded a MacArthur grant sent me back to the archives of the now-defunct Fabulous World of Hot Face for this review of 2003's I Sailed With Magellan. As you can see below, I recommend that Dybek neophytes may want to skip around in this collection, or start with The Coast of Chicago.

I Sailed With Magellan

Like the Joyce of Dubliners, Stuart Dybek writes with an exquisite sense of place and an amazing sensitivity to the dreams and dislocations one encounters in the borderland between childhood and adulthood. His last work of fiction, The Coast of Chicago, is one of my favorite books, and I approached I Sailed With Magellan with high expectations. If The Coast of Chicago, with its unified setting, its young-to-old chronology, and its careful patterning (alternating short stories with lyrical "short shorts"), seemed more like a latter-day Winesburg, Ohio than a mere collection of stories, I Sailed With Magellan feels more like a group of very good stories than the "Novel-in-Verse" its title page insists it is. Here, Dybek preserves the setting and tone of his earlier work, but organizes his stories loosely around a central character: Perry Katzek. Like Kerouac's Jack Duluoz, Perry seems pretty clearly to be a stand-in for his author, and the richness of lived experience fills to bursting the strongest stories here - "Song," "Undertow," "Blue Boy," and "Je Reviens." All four offer glimpses of Perry's childhood in the Bronzeville section of Chicago. Another excellent quartet of stories - "Lunch at the Loyola Arms," "Orchids," "We Didn't," and "Que Quieres" - show Perry in various stages of a deferred maturity, and although they seem slightly less finished... well, so does adulthood; I'll call it "evocative disarray" and chalk it up to authorial intent. Throughout, images and characters recur in the background. We see again and again morning glories and the spray of fire hydrants in summer and Perry's uncle Lefty. These devices may justify the inclusion of "Breasts," a novella largely unrelated to Dybek's attempt at bildungsroman, but here, Dybek indulges his weaknesses - stagy dialogue, purple eroticism, and scenes and characters seemingly lifted from TV.

Even sans "Breasts," I Sailed With Magellan doesn't succeed as a novel. Broken into discrete chunks, Perry's journey seems stripped of causality. For example, his mother's madness - alluded to in several stories - can remain, in a story collection, undramatized. In a novel, however, such a powerful influence on the protagonist wouldn't remain merely implicit. Other experiences that seem to lie at the heart of Perry's (and perhaps Dybek's) character stay in the background, as well, and while Dybek gestures in a few stories toward focusing this book on the relationship between Perry and his Uncle Lefty, the uncle disappears for long stretches. It is always a pleasure to read Dybek, and some of his best work is here, but I Sailed With Magellan argues less for a reenvisioning of the novel's possibilities than the creation of some genre between collection and novel that might serve Dybek's intentions better than the "Novel in Stories" seems to.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:30 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

2007's Literary Geniuses

The annual MacArthur "Genius" Fellows have been named. This award gives people from diverse fields $500,000 with "no strings attached," for "exceptional creativity, as demonstrated through a track record of significant achievement, and manifest promise for important future advances." There are typically a handful of literary types among the scientists, artists, and musicians who become Fellows. This year, by my count, there are three.

• Stuart Dybek, as a highly regarded short story writer and novelist, is the best-known among them. When most people think of Dybek, they think of Chicago, where much of his writing is set. He's also the writer in residence at nearby Northwestern University. I haven't read any Dybek, but when I do, I'll likely start with The Coast of Chicago or I Sailed with Magellan.
• Peter Cole is co-founder and co-editor of Ibis Editions, "a small press and non-profit organization founded in Jerusalem in 1998 and dedicated to the publication of Levant-related books of poetry and belletristic prose. The press publishes translations from Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, French, and the other languages of the region. New writing is published, though special attention is paid to overlooked works from the recent and distant past." Among Cole's more recent efforts is The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492
• Lynn Nottage is a Brooklyn-based playwright. According to the Hartford Courant, "Nottage is developing a workshop production at Chicago's Goodman Theater of 'Ruined,' set in a mining town in the Congo rainforest. She recently workshopped another new play for the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York, an adaptation of slave narratives for the stage. She is also working on a children's musical 'Sweet Billy and the Zulus' for the Philadelphia-based touring company, Colored Girl Productions." Her most recently published plays are Intimate Apparel and Fabulation.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:56 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Confessions of a Non-Linear Reader (What's That Book About?)

I used to be a monogamist. I honored that voice in my head that intoned "Thou shalt read just one book at a time" (it was the voice of my high school English teacher, Ms. Denize.) But something happened to me this summer - some unnoticed change took place - and now here I am reading no less than six books at once. Like juggling multiple girlfriends, it's no easy task: I'm like a squirrel storing up nuts. I wonder if I might be preparing for a long winter of making love to War and Peace or something.

In any case, here is the list of the books that currently lie unfinished at my bedside, in no particular order, along with some thoughts on each.

Preston Falls by David Gates: My fellow Millionaire, Garth, introduced me to this book and its author. Who is this Gates? Apparently he's a culture writer for Newsweek, a writing professor at Bennington, and a Pulitzer nominee for his first novel, Jernigan, back in 1991. Never has midlife crisis been so funny, or so extreme, as it is in Preston Falls. Gates goes deep between the ears of his two main characters, Willis and Jean, mining their thoughts for the plentiful deposits of self-defeatism, marital angst, parenting missteps, etc., that reside there. Like Willis's '74 Dodge pickup, his "hillbilly shitheap par excellence," which he bought to show solidarity with the locals in their vacation town of Preston Falls (though they will always know he's a poser), the wheels are coming off this cozy suburban family. It's a car crash in slow motion but I can hardly turn away.

Old School by Tobias Wolff: What can we say about Tobias Wolff? He's like a wealthy benefactor, keeping us content with his avuncular offerings of solid prose. Set on the idyllic close of a New England prep school, Old School tracks the main character, an aspiring writer, through the evolution of his literary consciousness. In somewhat fantastic fashion, great writers visit the school in rapid succession. Robert Frost is followed, interestingly, by Ayn Rand, and the proclamations that issue from their mouths act as a sort of blueprint for writing, Frost in the affirmative, "'Form is everything. Without it you've got nothing but a stub-toe cry... You may have a grievance but you do not have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry,'" Rand in the negative, "'What you find in Hemingway is everything that is wrong with the so-called literature of this country. Weak premises. Weak defeated people.'" The narrator, formerly entranced by The Fountainhead, is shocked by the revelation of Rand's naked misanthropy. Supposedly Hemingway, the boy's hero, is on the way...

Nick's Trip by George P. Pelecanos: I had just moved and was lovingly establishing my modest library on its new shelves. I picked up this book, which I read years ago and which inspired me to consume the entire Pelecanos collection like a binging crime-noir junkie, and dove right in. With respect to Walter Mosely and Elmore Leonard, George P. is tops in my book. I'm from D.C., where his books take place, and thus biased. But for more evidence of Pelecanos's prowess, travel up I-95 a short ways to Baltimore, where the HBO series The Wire is set. Pelecanos acts as writer and producer for the show, which Salon.com recently pitted against The Sopranos for the title of greatest T.V. show of all time.

1776 by David McCullough: I thought a bit of non-fiction might go well with this smorgasbord. McCullough's work is considered one of the finest and most accessible accounts of the Revolutionary War (and it did garner the author a Pulitzer). Patriots are cool, Lobster Backs suck, and George Washington? Fuhgeddaboudit; he's the man. Currently I am reading about the Battle of Brooklyn, which constituted the first costly loss for the Continental Army, and is of particular interest to me because I live in Brooklyn and thus tread daily on the same ground as those soldiers. I wonder who wins in the end. Guess I'll have to keep reading.

Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson: Johnson's new novel, Tree of Smoke, is getting major play right now, and so it was fortuitous that a friend lent me this little book, which is a collection of short stories, because I had never read him. Johnson's approach is as subtle as a shotgun blast. The writing is spare, the language stark, the stories possessed of a simple, dark beauty. An admirer of Hubert Selby, Jr. and Leonard Michaels, I guess I'm predisposed to liking Denis Johnson too. The first story, "Car Crash," is exceptional.

Three Years by Anton Chekhov: I picked up The Complete Short Novels of Chekhov because I had never read him and often heard him described as the greatest writer of short fiction. Ever. I was drawn to this particular story, Three Years because of themes relating to love and happiness, or the lack thereof, but have so far found it to be less impressive than I expected. I appreciate Chekhov's writing, the facility with words, the pacing of phrase and meticulous form, but something about the writing seems a bit clinical (Chekhov was, after all, a physician). Not stilted, but perhaps a bit dear:

He again clutched the parasol to his breast and said softly, unexpectedly for himself, not recognizing his own voice: "If you would consent to be my wife, I'd give anything. I'd give anything... There's no price, no sacrifice I wouldn't go to."

She gave a start and looked at him in surprise and fear.

"What are you saying!" she said, turning pale. "It's impossible, I assure you. Forgive me."

Then quickly, with the same rustling of her dress, she went further up and disappeared through the door.

This should be an emotional scene, but it struck me as a little bit hollow, and I'm hoping that the work of this titan of modern literature grows on me.

So there you have it, quite a gathering of authors. It occurs to me that I need to round out this group with a female writer or two. Maybe Emily will lend me her copy of the new Harry Potter...

- Noah Deutsch @ 6:38 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

La Plus Ca Change...

I liked this essay better when it was less smug and less poorly reasoned. I think back then it was called "Hysterical Realism." (via Ed.)

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 8:06 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Toronto's fall festivals showcase authors and artists

Another weekend, another festival in Toronto.

Millions readers in Toronto take note: Undaunted after a summer of festivals piled on top of festivals (Film, Fringe, Pride, Caribana, Jazz, NXNE, Luminato, and others that I'm sure I'm forgetting), Toronto grabs a few winks, splashes on some water, and bounces back with a few more festivals for the literary and art crowd.

First of all, I would be remiss if I didn't throw out a shameless plug for one of my favourite events in Toronto: Nuit Blanche. Beginning at 7pm Saturday September 29th, downtown Toronto turns into an art lover's paradise with an all-night, all-free, art extravaganza. Meet friends at the nearest outdoor art installation as the clock strikes midnight, stroll through tiny galleries at three in the morning, or just marvel until the sun comes up at the latest crazy thing to burst from an artist's imagination.

Then grab a nap and head over to Queen's Park for the Word on the Street festival. Sunday, September 30: Word on the Street is back, nestled in leafy Queen's Park, with readings and workshops spotlighting the best and most anticipated in Canadian literature.

Finally, beginning Wednesday, October 17, and continuing until Saturday, October 27th, Toronto's Harbourfront hosts the International Festival of Authors with ten days of readings and round tables by a few dozen of the best and biggest authors in the world. This year, you can hear the likes of Margaret Atwood, Ian Rankin, M.G. Vassanji, Michael Ondaatje, Tracy Chevalier, Jasper Fforde, Will Self, and J. K. Rowling. I went to a few readings and round-tables last year, and was lucky enough to hear Deborah Eisenberg, Edward P. Jones, Alberto Manguel and Ralph Steadman. I even met Wallace Shawn!

- Andrew Saikali @ 8:47 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Murder, Ink: Pelecanos, Price, and Lehane

Longtime readers of this blog may know that I'm an enthusiast of HBO's serial dramas... which these days is about as unique as being a Springsteen fan. (Which I also am, but nevermind). Still, I don't spend nearly as much time thinking about The Sopranos or Deadwood as I do thinking about books. And so it was only this week that I discovered that a "dream team" of crime novelists has taken over the writing of my new favorite show, The Wire.

My wife had popped in the second disc of Season Three, and I heard myself say, "Wow, this is really well-written." Plot, character, and setting have always been The Wire's strong suits, but in this particular episode, the dialogue and symbolism attained a nearly Milchean richness. I jogged back to see who was credited with the teleplay, and found that it was... Dennis Lehane, of Mystic River fame.

Turns out Richard Price, author of Blood Brothers and George Pelecanos, author of The Night Gardener are also sharing writing duties. I have a lot of respect for these three, for whom crime fiction is art, as well as entertainment. Price's Clockers may not be Faulkner, but the depth of its reportage on the drug trade elevate it far above the kind of by-the-numbers pulp that fills the airport racks. "I really admired that book," David Simon, creator of The Wire, told an interviewer. "It unearthed an entire world that had never been contemplated by the literary world. 'Clockers' paved the way for a lot of the split point of view that The Wire relies upon."

And given the solitary nature of the novelist's art, the idea of these three, bound by geography and class sympathies as well as by trade, trading ideas over pizza and beer... well, it's enough to make a fellow writer jealous. Simon joked with a co-producer, "I got Pelecanos, Price and Lehane. Who do you want next year, Philip Roth?"

Stranger things have happened. Quick - someone call Elmore Leonard's agent.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:45 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Lamenting 'Style'

If the Food Issue is the highlight of the New Yorker publishing year, then the Style Issue is certainly the nadir. Crammed full of glossy ads, the too-thick-to-not-be-a-double-issue magazine dwells endlessly on profiles of fashion industry bigshots, all of whom seem to have shared the same eccentric quasi-European upbringing. (They bring to mind Dr. Evil and his famous: "My childhood was typical - summer in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we would make meat helmets. When I was insolent, I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds. Pretty standard, really.") And don't get me started on those Patricia Marx shopping sprees. I do, however, note that Oliver Sacks has an article about amnesia in there, so perhaps it won't be all bad.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:07 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Nothing is Dead Yet: The Era of the Trusted Fellow Reader

What if right now is the golden age of the book, or even the golden age of literary fiction? What if we are living in the golden age of reading, writing, and criticism? But all around us, the dominant trope of the day is death.

Is it possible that a decade of poor management at newspaper companies amid shifting media paradigms has led people to think that literature is on its deathbed? Are books dead? Is literature dead? Is criticism dead? Are we facing, as a panel hosted by the Columbia Journalism Review asks tonight, "The Case of the Vanishing Book Review?"

Speaking on a Literary Writers Conference panel a year ago Morgan Entrekin, president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic, taking measure of the times, said,

Young people don't read newspapers... The big reviews don't have the impact that they used to, and I think that one of the things that I'm worried about and trying to figure out is what are we going to do, how're we going to get people in the conversation about literary fiction, and I don't know the answer... Barnes & Noble and Borders have wonderful selections of books, and they're in communities that never used to have bookstores, but they don't always have the same relationship with their customer that a local bookseller did, and what you used to be able to do with literary fiction was seed it within those local booksellers around the country, get them reading and talking about it.

He goes on to say, "The Internet is an obvious way to do it with community." While Entrekin, if you read the rest of his remarks, is actually fairly optimistic, the rhetoric from many (and particularly from some of the National Book Critics Circle's more vocal members) has centered on loss, even as the rush to fill the gap with not just blogs but with communities like LibraryThing and GoodReads has created a literary landscape that, while it may not serve the critical establishment, represents a net gain for anyone likes to read and to talk to other readers. In fact, some find being a reader right now to be genuinely exciting.

Back when I first started this blog, before it seemed possible to me that it could be anything more than a place to share some thoughts about books with some friends, I used to talk about something called "a trusted fellow reader." These are the people whose book recommendations are sought out and with whom discussing books is as rewarding as reading them. When this formulation first occurred to me, I happened to be working at an independent bookstore, surrounded by trusted fellow readers among my coworkers and the store's patrons. I left there in early 2004 and have spent my time since trying to recreate that dynamic here at The Millions. With much help from readers and contributors, I think we've succeeded. (In fact, our annual end of year series is an attempt to flood the zone, as it were, with trusted fellow readers.)

If anything is dead, it's the so called "print vs. online" debate and the interminable series of panels discussing our dying newspapers. Symposiums and editorials aside, the reality is fluid; writers and readers and critics consume and create in both media with regularity, and the focus on an empty debate and on column inches may be keeping us from recognizing that there are now many trusted fellow readers at our fingertips. We are in the midst of a shift, maybe now a revolution, in national (and international) literary discussion, which has migrated from book club meetings and bookstore aisles out into the open. Readers have fueled this shift, many critics and writers have joined in. We're excited to be a part of it.

Further Reading: If you think that the disappearance of book reviews and book sections in newspapers is a result of anything more than a broken business model, read this. And, from the manifesto, an explanation of why we all need trusted fellow readers: "Given that you and I will only be able to read a finite number of books in our lifetime, then we should try, as much as possible, to devote ourselves to reading only the ones that are worth reading, while bearing in mind that for every vapid, uninspiring book we read, we are bumping from our lifetime reading list a book that might give us a profound sort of joy"

- C. Max Magee @ 10:30 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Tuesday Links: Power, ReCaptcha, Junot Diaz

• Experience "THE POWER OF BOOKS"
• You know those annoying puzzles where you type in the letters so the computer knows you're not a computer creating a fake account or sending spam? A group from Carnegie Mellon is using these "Captchas" to help digitize books. ReCaptcha is a special type of Captcha that displays words that book digitization software is having trouble deciphering. So, by letting the computer know you're not a computer, you can help some other computers digitize our books.
• I missed Junot Diaz's appearance at the Free Library of Philadelphia where he read from his new novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, but Season Evans was there.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:36 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Notes on the Brooklyn Book Festival

Like the borough that hosted it, this year's Brooklyn Book Festival managed to unite seemingly disparate phenomena with a ragtag, homespun charm. Part reading series, part book fair, part publishing-industry confab, part literacy campaign, the second annual BBF had something for nearly everyone, and thus drew thousands to downtown Brooklyn. The literati may have looked askance at the radical pamphleteers; the publishers may have looked down on the self-published; the poets and the fiction writers may, for all I know, have faced off like Sharks and Jets behind the Starbucks... but on a mellow Sunday, under a crisp fall sky, no one came to blows.

This plurality of purposes and preferences is, in your correspondent's opinion, the great strength of the BBF (and, if I haven't made it clear, of Brooklyn itself). Events like this provide an important opportunity for readers to meet the producers of the books they read, and vice versa. Moreover, they encourage aesthetic cross-pollination and discovery. Whereas one walks away from BookExpo America wondering what the point of publishing all those books can possibly be, one strolls the crowded flagstones of Cadman Plaza surrounded by people who love to read. It's refreshing to see kids outnumbering the adults at the Children's Pavilion, to see bedraggled tourists lounging on the steps of Borough Hall to listen to poetry, and in particular to see presses that aim for an African-American audience treated as full members of the publishing community. (I'm no expert, as one reader of last year's BBF dispatch pointed out, but at BEA, too many presses publishing primarily black authors were cast into the nether regions of the Javits Center.) As Jason Shure of Housing Works said, in his introduction of George Saunders, Lynne Tillman, and Joshua Ferris, the Brooklyn literary boom offers a local counterweight to the various macroeconomic trends that threaten the culture of the book.

Again notable at the BBF this year was the emphasis on independent businesses. Local stalwarts BookCourt and Housing Works Used Book Cafe sold books by featured readers, and presses like Akashic (whose own Johnny Temple helped organize the fiction readings), Soft Skull, Ugly Ducking, and Calamari showcased the breadth and depth of American independent publishing. The friendly folks from A Public Space, Tin House, and the wonderful Nextbook showcased the best of both print and web periodicals. Minneapolis made a strong showing, with Milkweed, Coffee House, and Graywolf all operating booths. Works from across the world were offered in translation from Archipelago Books, Europa Editions, and Host Publications, to name a few. And at least a couple of literary magazines, Five Points and The Chattahoochee Review, made the trek up from the South... which points to the BBF's ambition to get on the national map.

Still, with its emphasis on the general reader, the BBF may not become a must-attend event for publishers. (Notable no-shows this year included NYRB and McSweeney's, though Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng gave a talk related to What is the What.) There's not much to do at the BBF besides buy or sell a few books, meet some cool people, and catch a reading or two in the too cozy confines of Borough Hall. None of which will make the morning papers. But there's a dignity in that. I'm happy to take the Brooklyn Book Festival just as it is.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:05 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

A MySpace for Books (and Nerds)

Goodreads is a vibrant and feisty place - if you can even call an online community a place. Its slogan boasts, "it's what your friends are reading!" and perhaps that's true: the site's more dedicated members are so busy posting the books they've read, and want to read, or are currently reading, that you might assume they no longer have time to actually read. But the opposite is true for me - since joining the site, and becoming obsessed with it, I've been reading quite voraciously. Chalk it up to a pure-hearted love of sharing my thoughts about literature; or to some illusory sense of accountability ("Everyone's breathlessly awaiting my opinion of Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao!"); or to my desire to read a novel as soon as it's lauded by a friend ("Wow, Katie gave 5 stars to The Dud Avocado, I must see what's so great about it!"). Or maybe it's just a primitive lust to build up my roster of books read, to assert myself as the most bookish.

Goodreads allows you to organize your books in self-created bookshelves (mine include "Theory" and "Tried but Failed to Read"), and to see if you and a friend have similar reading tastes (apparently, my taste is 100% similar to the aforementioned Katie's, which is just creepy). Most importantly, the site lets you rate books on a star system, one star signifying "I didn't like it," and five signifying, "It was amazing." The fact that there isn't an "I hated this piece of crap" option suggests that Goodreads is generally promoting a positive reaction to books. You can, however, say whatever you want in your reviews, and your friends can respond as they wish in the comments section. On my page, for instance, there's a 33-comment thread that covers Jonathan Lethem (the original subject of my review), Haruki Murakami, Miranda July, Michael Chabon, hipsters, blonde women, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Kelly Ripa and Faith Ford (that is, who's hotter), Rushmore, irony, Colson Whitehead, and more. Another friend's two-star rating (denoting "It was okay") of On The Road caused another friend to comment, "You also gave two stars to The Stranger, you tool. For that I should bypass this comment box and toss a flaming bag of shit at your house." This, unsurprisingly, led to a heated ping-ponging of comments. My, my, reading is more fun than I thought.

I'd say more, but I must get back to that Junot Diaz novel - which is definitely already 4 stars-good, if not 5.

- Edan Lepucki @ 8:51 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

The Welcome Wagon

The Millions just got a little bit bigger. Longtime readers will recall the occasional post from Edan Lepucki over the years. She worked with me at the bookstore in L.A., so we've been talking about books since way back. I've always enjoyed her thoughts on books and I think the unique sensibility she brings to teaching, writing and reading will make the site even better. Here's her bio (and her first official post will be up shortly.)

Edan Lepucki is a fiction writer and instructor living in Los Angeles. She has an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and her stories have been published in Meridian, the Los Angeles Times' West Magazine, and CutBank. She likes cheese, dogs, and sleeping in.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:11 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Google Books Reveals New Features

Google Books has just unveiled a set of new features that should appeal both to digital bibliophiles and the academically minded.

In my opinion, the coolest new feature is one called "popular passages." This feature does two very useful things. First, it cross-indexes and links books to relevant subject matter. So, when you run across a quote from Plato in the course of the reading, once click will take you straight to the relevant passage in The Republic. What may be even cooler, though, is that it tells readers how often and in what books a certain passage or quotation has occurred. Thus, one can, if so inclined, trace the intellectual heritage of an idea, or even a specific quote through the many books maintained in Google's library.

Other features include the ability to create and share personal libraries and to take direct quotes from public domain books and add them to web paged and blogs. All in all, good stuff that any avid reader (and commentator) should find handy.

- Ben Dooley @ 7:01 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Trivia: Musical Books

A very cursory beginning!

1. "Lillubulero," in Lawerence Sterne's Tristram Shandy
2. "La ci darem la mano," from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, in James Joyce's Ulysses
3. The "Hoffmann Barcarolle" of Jacques Offenbach "played" by Sherlock Holmes on the violin in Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Mazarin Stone" (the piece itself comes from Offenbach's "Tales of Hoffmann", a musical rendering of some of the German Romantic writer, painter, and musical composer E.T.A Hoffmann's tales)
4. Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch becomes "Venus in Furs," by the Velvet Underground
5. Beethoven's 5th Symphony features prominently in E.M. Forster's Howard's End (&, on a more scholarly note, Forster's use of "the rainbow bridge" imagery, in the furtherance of the "only connect" theme, is taken from Richard Wagner's Das Reingold, wherein the rainbow bridge appearing at the end conveys the gods to their paradisical new home Walhalla, see John Louis DiGaetani's Richard Wagner and the Modern British Novel)
6. The Beggars' Opera by John Gay becomes "Mac the Knife" by Bobby Darrin, et al.
7. "Norwegian Wood" by the Beatles becomes Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
8. E.T.A. Hoffman's The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr, the fantastical autobiography of a literate cat interspersed with the autobiography of his musician owner, Kapellmeister Kreisler (a fictionalized self-portrait of Hoffmann, himself a musical composer (as above); Tomcat Murr was the name of Hoffmann's own tabby cat - and performs some katzenmusik himself in the novel)
9. Alexandre Dumas (fils)'s novel La Dame aux Camelias becomes Giuseppi Verdi's opera La Traviata
10. And finally - though I come by this disingenuously because I haven't read it - Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho: I hear tell that it's got some very funny discussions of pop music, including the assertion that Genesis was the greatest British band of 80's...

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 6:58 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Squib Review: Twenty Grand And Other Tales of Love And Money by Rebecca Curtis

A few months ago I read a story called "The Near-Son" in n+1. It engrossed me completely, right through to the punch-in-the-gut Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"-esque ending. The plotting, the pacing, and the narrator's bizarre and fascinating affect (was she retarded - somehow not right in the head - or just distressingly honest?) were unlike anything I'd ever read.

"The Near-Son" is now among the inhabitants of Rebecca Curtis' first collection of short stories, Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money. It is a masterful first offering and very much a collection. All of the tales concern the want of love or money (often both) and all have in common narrators whose deadpan descriptions of the monstrous and disturbing are utterly transfixing. Curtis has a gift for the evocation of human cruelty, both a casual, thoughtless variety ("Summer, With Twins") and a more deliberate strain ("The Sno-Kone Cart" and "Monsters"). Although I found all of the Twenty Grand tales more or less excruciating for the material and emotional scenes they depicted, I could not stop myself from devouring all thirteen in a few sittings. There is a stark, bleak, amoral atmosphere to Curtis's tales that might, in lesser hands, have made them unreadable, but his is not the case. Ultimately, the lives and minds and souls she portrays - all narrowed or troublingly warped by friendlessness, exploitation, betrayal, and privation - make for an undeniable declaration of the horrific consequences of poverty, both emotional and material. These are beautifully constructed stories and they will stun you even as their content harrows.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 7:25 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

How I learned to Love the Bomb: A Review of William Langewiesche's The Atomic Bazaar

Gone are the days of mutually assured destruction, when - at the push of a red button - one of the nuclear giants could initiate a worldwide fallout, inevitably bringing about the widely feared doomsday. It is different now: the rogues are in the game.

The bomb scare is not what it used to be. Scaremongers nowadays point to the potential of a nuclear-armed North Korea or Iran, and not at the risk of MAD when things get a little tense between, say, the U.S. and Russia. True, guns at the hands of the "peerless leader" Kim Jong-il or mullah-led Iran with its fierce, controversial and rhetoric-driven president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, could be intimidating - but the real danger does not lie in so-called rogue states owning nukes; it lies in truly rougue groups' ability to get their hands on these weapons.

William Langewiesche's The Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor, an incredibly well-researched, 175 page firestorm that explores a nuke's power, moves from the laxly maintained Soviet-era nuclear facilities to Pakistan and its acquisition of the bomb and illustrates the who, when, where, what and why - not to mention the how - of developing the world's most coveted weapon. Parts of the periodically disturbing Atomic Bazaar were published in The Atlantic Monthly in 2006. Langewiesche has augmented the story with more details in the book, animating his breathtaking sources, and bolstering his claim that state-level proliferation is almost impossible to stop. The Atomic Bazaar is narrated in two parts and four sections. The first half is a how-to guide for a terrorist interested in developing a nuke and exploding it somewhere in the Western hemisphere. Now, some might find it outrageous to publicize this information, but the journalist's ability to collect all the facts by talking with locals and officials, and consulting with public documents should override that concern. After all, the instructions were probably already available to interested parties.

It is not so much the availability of the information - or the drunken Russian security guards, or the fact that radiation detectors in the Urals are turned off because they only catch fish from radioactive lakes - but the West's loss of street smarts that arms a seeker, according to Langewiesche. A terrorist can someday attack the U.S. with nukes, he writes, "because of Washington's discomfort with informal realms - because of a blindness to the street, amply demonstrated in recent times, which will have allowed some bomb-builder the maneuvering room necessary to get the job done."

But despite America and the West's arrogant ignorance regarding the work, life and authority of a wide range of people - from residents of Soviet-era "secret towns" with their corrupt and decrepit social structure to the local sheiks in eastern Turkey, who run the country's porous borders with Iran, Iraq, Syria, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia - stealing enough bomb-grade uranium, or developing bomb fuel, is still a long shot even for a sophisticated terrorist, Langewiesche writes, citing operational and cultural complexities.

The Atomic Bazaar does point to a recent lesson, however: the West's gross underestimation of Pakistan's nuclear ambitions. For a country that had next to nothing in terms of both financial and intellectual resources, Pakistan developed the "Muslim bomb" with relative expediency - about 20 years - right under the nose of American intelligence agencies and the United Nation's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and with technology from Holland and parts from all across Europe - particularly Germany and Switzerland.

Pakistan's nuclear genius, Abdul Qadeer Khan, was not only a firm nationalist who wanted to put his country on equal military footing with India, but also an egotist who sought fame and recognition - and who, to achieve that end, acted on the belief that the bomb was not exclusive to the original five (China, France, the UK, Russia and the US) and the "undeclared" few (India and Israel) but available to any sovereign who sought it.

The story of A.Q. Khan arming his nation is intriguing and disturbing. As Langewiesche repeatedly points out, Khan ran an operation much like the one Iran is running today: pompous and convinced that no one would or could do anything about it. Langewiesche also reports that that nuclear technology in Libya, Iraq, Iran and North Korea was provided by Khan; naturally, he charged a hefty premium.

It was easy for Khan to flout the West and enrich himself as long as the U.S. placed "greater importance on propping up the various Pakistani regimes than stopping the spread of nuclear weapons." Next he presents reporter Mark Hibbs, a "spy's spy" who shocked intelligence and nuclear agencies throughout the West with his step by step coverage of Pakistani and Iraqi efforts to build the bomb - as well as reporting on the methods by which technology and parts were flowing to these countries from the West.

Back then, as today, nuclear powers did not act. Yes, legislators and prosecutors eventually took action against exports and companies in the U.S., Germany and Switzerland - much like the IAEA actions against Iran today. But Western efforts to curb nuclear ambitions did not pay off in the past, and there is no indication they will now.

The Atomic Bazaar carefully acknowledges that during the last 60 years nukes may have spread to other countries, but they did not drop anywhere; i.e., as long as nation-states hold the bombs, they can be expected to remain in arsenals.

But, as Langewiesche points out, with likes of Khan running around the globe, and the West's self-imposed, politically driven complacency, it is becoming harder to trust governments and international organizations with stopping nuclear proliferation. So, I stopped worrying. Or, as one source told Langewiesche: "The best way to fight proliferation is to pursue global disarmament. Fine, great, sure - if you expect that to happen... It is simply not going to work."

- Emre Peker @ 3:48 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Wednesday Links: Honorary Awards; Scottish Flood; Book Sale

• Joan Didion and NPR uber-interviewer Terry Gross will be honored at the National Book Awards ceremony in November. Dideon won a National Book Award in 2005 for her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking.
• The National Library of Scotland flooded yesterday thanks to a faulty sprinkler system. It was a close call: "Some modern books and manuscripts suffered 'surface' water damage, but all of the 'important, iconic' books were saved."
• Oops! A church in England sold some rare tomes for modest though still substantial sum to a book dealer, only to find, too late, that they are worth much, much more.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:25 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

More Millions on the Air: Solid as a Rock

It was my pleasure to do a half-hour interview with Dorian on WFMU-FM's "The Speakeasy" last night. Our talk ranged from A Field Guide to the North American Family to Julio Cortazar to print vs. online to James Wood (natch). Check it out at www.wfmu.org/playlists/SE, where you'll also find interviews with Lawrence Wright and Charles D'Ambrosio, among others. (Segment starts at 27:00, following...that's right...Ashford & Simpson!)

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 8:27 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Myth of the 9/11 Novel

On this sad anniversary, USA Today trots out the now tired question, asking for, as if we're all looking for it, the mythical novel that will explain and place into context the tragedy of six years ago. In this case, USA Today points out the uninspiring sales of "novels inspired by 9/11" as compared to their non-fiction counterparts, but the subtext of these articles, and there have been many in many venues over the years, is twofold.

First is that the serious novel's driving function is to make sense of our complicated world, to distill it to its essence so that years from now, when a young man asks how 9/11 felt, an old man can wordlessly slip a book into his hand. Second is this idea that every major event requires the culture to produce innumerable artifacts that are explicitly about that event. There are hundreds of films and TV shows that are primarily about 9/11, but where, the culture watchers ask, are all the novels?

I wrote about this several months ago, when the publication of Don Delillo's Falling Man led several to seek the "9/11 novel" (Falling Man deemed to have failed in this respect), and I still believe what I wrote then.

I would argue that nearly every serious novel written since 9/11 is a "9/11 novel." Writers, artists, and filmmakers, consciously or subconsciously, react to the world around them some way, and 9/11, from many angles, is incontrovertibly a part of our world. For example, even Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which is set in an alternate universe in which a temporary Jewish homeland has been set up in Alaska, is a "9/11 novel" in that it has internalized the post-9/11 sensibilities of shadowy government meddling in the Middle East and the feeling of an impending global and religiously motivated conflict. To expect a novel to explicitly place 9/11 into a context that offers us all some greater understanding of it is to misunderstand how fiction works.

There may never be a so-called "defining 9/11 novel," but there are already many 9/11 novels, some more explicitly about 9/11 than others but all internalizing that event to one degree or another. Still, since it seems likely that we will not satisfactorily settle on the one anointed 9/11 novel, writers will have a topic to dust off every year when this anniversary rolls around.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:13 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

I See a Darkness: The Looming Tower

1. Transparency, if not objectivity
In December of 2001, I took my mother to see the first Lord of the Rings movie. Though it was my idea to see the film, it was her cash that purchased the ticket, and so she was not only baffled, but also irritated, when I had to leave the theater in tears a couple of minutes before the end credits.

There was some precedent for this; I was the kid who cried at E.T. At Harry and the Hendersons. But I found it impossible to articulate to her, or even to myself, exactly what I found so upsetting about The Fellowship of the Ring's climactic Hobbit-hunt. Was it the surround-sound thunder of the hordes of orcs? The bloodlust on their faces? The flash of spears through chests, the thwack of axes on armor, the pornography of violence? Or was it the fact of having allowed myself to be transported, for a couple of hours, to Middle Earth, when I'd been trying so hard since September to stay rooted in this one?

In my mother's car, afterward, I tried to describe what it had been like that morning in Washington. How I'd lingered outside the Kennedy Center a few minutes after the start of business at the dot-com where I was working, drinking in the richness of my coffee and the blueness of the day. How, when the "What-the-f--k?" email from my editor hit my inbox, I felt sure there had been an accident or mistake. How we gathered in the clips room to watch CNN, and how even the atheists among us kept saying "Oh, my God" when the second plane hit. How, when a phoned-in voice reported an explosion at the Pentagon, maybe a quarter-mile from where we stood, it seemed inevitable: everything we'd grown up counting on had ended for good.

I tried to explain what it was like watching the debris cascade off the first flaming tower, telling myself it was helicopters pouring water, as on a forest fire. And then recognizing jumpers. Realizing I was seeing thousands of souls (twenty thousand I thought) being snuffed out. I tried to tell the woman who brought me into the world what it was like to walk home through streets silent save for the cell-phone calls that had made it through, and scanning the skies with a half-million others, convinced we were all about to die. But of course my mom had her own experience, and I couldn't really put mine into words.

Or maybe I didn't want to. I still don't like to talk about it, and I'm afraid as I type these sentences that writing about it, letting it out, will make me forget, or that my cadences will paper over the memories, replace what I felt then with what I know now. I'm terrified to let them go, all the people who died that day. And so I never say the date, or the numbers that have come to stand for it, and I never talk about it.

I guess the strategy is working, because even now sometimes my heart will stop when I hear a plane coming in low overhead, or look out my kitchen window here in Brooklyn and see the towers of light reaching up toward forever. And because when I finished The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 last month, I cried as though I was back there in the parking lot of that movie theater. Or back there on the streets of D.C.

2. Looking through the wreckage
Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer-Prize winning book, which originated in The New Yorker, unfolds as a series of profiles. Like several other accounts of Al-Qaeda, it locates the origins of Islamist terrorism in an Egyptian writer named Sayyid Qutb. Though far from sympathetic to Qutb, Wright meticulously maps the coordinates of his radicalization: postwar American materialism, Egyptian corruption and repression, and a stern theological literalism. Qutb's brand of Islamism is not treated as exceptional; rather, it is situated alongside Marxism and other religious fundamentalisms as a response to modernity.

He was opposed not to modern technology but to the worship of science, which he believed had alienated humanity from natural harmony with creation. Only a complete rejection of rationalism and Western values offered the slim hope of the redemption of Islam.

Wright extends the same imaginative inhabitation to each new figure he investigates. Qutb cedes the stage to fellow Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, one the most contemptible people I've ever had the misfortune to read about. And Al-Zawahiri gives way to Osama bin Laden (who, intriguingly, is the least interesting figure in the book), and to FBI agent John O'Neill, one of the first Americans to take him seriously.

This character-driven approach has its virtues. Through the figure of Bin Laden, Wright delivers a comprehensive account of the history of modern Saudi Arabia, a culture which went from stallions to F-15s almost literally overnight. The profile of FBI investigator Ali Soufan reminds us of all the values that Qutb missed in his account of liberal democracy. And O'Neill's story hints none too subtly at the extent of the CIA's responsibility for the attacks of Sept. 11; the agency appears, however passively, to have shielded Al-Qaeda operatives from the FBI, in hopes of "flipping" one of them. As the book darts back and forth from Tora Bora to Washington, it develops the sickening propulsion of a thriller.

And yet, as Wright's novelistic talents and exhaustive reportage drive the book forward, the sweeping claims of the title remain unfulfilled. The extent of Al-Qaeda's activities in post-USSR Afghanistan and Pakistan remain as obscure as its origins in Saudi Arabia and Egypt are clear. And despite bin Laden's stated agenda, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the history of terrorism associated with it, appear only as tangents to the story Wright wants to tell. Thus his portrayal of Al-Qaeda seems incomplete.

Which doesn't mean it's not damning. Al-Qaeda, as The Looming Tower presents it, is a far cry from Sayyid Qutb's Islamism. Al-Zawahiri and bin Laden have created neither an intellectual movement nor a political platform nor a set of theological propositions nor a proper ideology. Al-Qaeda is instead a form of nihilist scream therapy, a sexually dysfunctional death-cult. The President's frequent equation of Islamist terrorism and Nazism comes to seem narrowly accurate; a cloud of Freudian self-hatred envelops the leaders of each group. More broadly, though, the comparison begs the questions that matter. For example: What about all those followers?

3. "No justice, no peace"
In essence, Lawrence Wright has written the definitive Great-Man history of Al-Qaeda, and in so doing has provided a valuable service. We need faces for our evil, as we need them for our grief. But to say of The Looming Tower that there is no better book on Al-Qaeda may be a way of saying that we need more books on Al-Qaeda.

Those books would do well to resist the organization's skillful manipulations of mass media, which posit bin Laden and al-Zawahiri as world-historical figures. In reality - and I say this with all spleen intended - bin Laden and al-Zawahiri would be nothing more than an inept and morally bankrupt cable-access act, were it not for the legions of young men they and their henchmen have persuaded to die for them. Like Wright, I'm intrigued that these two privileged men would choose to live as outlaw demagogues. But I'm far more interested in the psychology of the converts who end up hijacking planes and blowing up women and children in Baghdad squares... if only because I want to believe they can be reached.

Students of history will remind us that Al-Qaeda has presided over fewer deaths, at this point, than have many heads of state. And were we to succeed in regarding human lives as digits on a printout, removed from context and connection, the events of September 11 might become commensurable with the other tragedies that surround us. But The Looming Tower does demand that we make a distinction...that we rationalists stop imagining that Al-Qaeda can be explained away. According to the book, Al-Qaeda's ascetics, rejecting Islam's intellectual and mystical legacies (and thus fully two-thirds of its theological content) have arrived at a hatred of life. I don't mean "our way of life." (However serious they may once have been, Al-Qaeda's political grievances have decayed into afterthoughts). I mean life in all its variety: pleasure, anxiety, grief, frivolity... For bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri, being-in-the-world is some kind of hoax being perpetrated on mankind by a (paradoxically) omniperfect God. It is the duty of the faithful not to be taken in by God's creation, but rather to reject the world and everything in it, and to kill anyone who gets in the way. This is the farthest mankind can fall.

And so for someone like me, committed to Wittgenstein's idea that the existence of anything at all is miraculous, The Looming Tower presents a bracing challenge. The malice and madness portrayed in this book aren't special effects. They're real, they're here, and if we value life, we're going to have to find smarter ways to fight them than conforming to caricatures of Western imperialism, or speechifying mistily about "hearts and minds." We're going to have to find a way to be their opposite.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:50 AM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

In Pictures

• A collection of striking photos of numerous well-known contemporary writers, in two galleries. Somehow these pictures exude the literary.
• Blogger lonelysandwich makes the only half toungue-in-cheek observation that the original cover of tennis fan David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest shares a color scheme with those Andre Agassi Nikes that were all the rage in the early '90s.
• George Saunders appeared on Letterman last week, as you may have heard. onegoodmove put the clip online.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:17 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

And Then There Were Six: The Booker Shortlist

The big news is that Ian McEwen's On Chesil Beach stays alive. I've heard pretty good things about the book, but I'd guess it's not winning. He's already won one for Amsterdam, and Atonement, considered by most to be his best, didn't win in 2001 (True History of the Kelly Gang took it home that year). For the slight On Chesil Beach to win the prize would seem odd. Clearly, I'm not alone in this thinking, as the bookies, who favored McEwen when the longlist was announced, now favor Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones. The longlist was offered here with some excerpts less than a month ago, but since you might not have gotten around to them then, we'll offer the same with the shortlist below.

• Darkmans by Nicola Barker
• The Gathering by Anne Enright (excerpt)
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (excerpt)
• Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (excerpt)
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (excerpt)
• Animal's People by Indra Sinha (excerpt)

- C. Max Magee @ 8:23 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Fighting Over Deck Chairs: Print Vs. Online

The sky is falling. The king is dead. And, oh, by the way, the barbarians are at the gates. Or at least, that's what a recent spate of opinion pieces bemoaning the increasing morbidity of literary criticism would have you believe. Although the whinging and general hand wringing has been going on for years now, the trend seems to have picked up steam in the last few weeks (perhaps as a result of blogs celebrating their ten year anniversary?), with a panoply of blustering critics and journalists thundering to decry the downfall of civilization as they know it.

Are the reports of literary criticism's death an exaggeration? There is no question that the space devoted to book coverage in traditional print media is in decline. With a number of papers, including such stalwarts as the Los Angeles Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, reducing or entirely eliminating their book sections, it's understandable that the old guard would set up a hue and cry about the fate of literary culture in the modern age. But the recent comments by critics Morris Dickstein at Critical Mass and Richard Schickel in the LA Times, rather than confront the real problems facing book reviews, amount to little more than a bitter rearguard action against the rise of literary culture on the Internet.

The problems faced by book reviews are not unique. Rather, they are a manifestation of a problem confronting all forms of traditional media: the Internet as Shiva, creator and destroyer of business and cultural paradigms. Is it any coincidence that the recent spate of articles bemoaning the loss of book reviews across the country is paralleled by articles bemoaning the death of the music industry? As uber-producer Rick Rubin points out in a piece in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, "...the world has changed. And the industry has not."

Of course, old guard naysayers will continue to say their nays, unwilling, or unable, to accept the fact that the world is moving on without them. And no doubt, manufacturers of the horse-drawn buggy had a hard time coping with the advent of the automobile. But their objections didn't serve to stay the tide of transformation, for better and worse, that cars brought with them.

What the book review Cassandras, with their predictions of the death of American literary culture, seem to forget is that it is the traditional newspaper itself, not just the book review, that is fighting for its very existence. When complaining about the diminishing coverage of books in print media, book critics and reviewers (and writers) are simply fighting over the deck chair with the best view of the iceberg. As Max pointed out in an earlier post, it's not what readers want that matters to today's newspapers, it's what shareholders want; and book reviews, for all of their merits, don't add much to the bottom line.

To the critics, however, this isn't a sign of a changing economic reality, but an omen of literary apocalypse. Book culture in freefall. But writing on books has not dried up or disappeared. It has simply pulled up its stakes and moved to greener, electronic pastures. And this, to the critics, is precisely the problem. The Internet, as a medium for written expression, is in their minds inferior to the printed word.

One would think that critics would welcome the advent of a medium where the cost of publication was not proportional to the amount of paper used. Yet many find it impossible to separate journalism, whether literary or otherwise, from the physical artifact of the newspaper or magazine. The success of popular online magazines like Slate and Salon (both of which publish frequent and useful book reviews) should prove that one can exist without the other, yet many critics see themselves locked in a Manichean struggle between "print journalism," and the "Web." On one hand, they concede the need for newspapers to find a new business model (and almost invariably insist this model must be electronic - although if not Web-based, then what, telegraph?), but on the other they see journalism as "mortally threatened by the Web." How can the average person brook such cognitive dissonance? One can almost see the smoke billowing out of their ears as they write.

Many old-guard critics, like Dickstein and Schickel and even writers (Richard Ford, with his dismissal of bloggers as "sitting in a basement in Terre Haute," comes immediately to mind) don't have much patience for new media. Shickel, for his part, declares blogs are not true writing, but mere "speech":

The act of writing for print, with its implication of permanence, concentrates the mind most wonderfully. It imposes on writer and reader a sense of responsibility that mere yammering does not. It is the difference between cocktail-party chat and logically reasoned discourse that sits still on a page, inviting serious engagement.

What, I wonder, does he make of US Weekly? Or the book reviews in Maxim? Surely even a mind as "superior" and possessed of "disciplined taste" (and those quotation marks aren't just for show) as Shickel's can conceive of an online world where, as in the print world, good writing exists alongside bad. And what claim to permanence, I wonder, do his movie reviews for Time - Does Time even publish legitimate criticism? - and other print venues really have? No more, I would hazard, than the immortality conferred on a blogger's writing by Google.

These objections, however, only serve to direct attention away from the critics' real complaint: the increasing democratization of criticism and the accompanying arrival of a new generation of literary gatekeepers. The problem for them is not that literary discourse has disappeared - if anything the Internet has served to deepen and expand it - but that anyone can participate. Certainly, as critics are quick to assert, all opinions are not equal (although one does wonder who has anointed their opinions superior), but it is unwise to mistake humble origins for lack of merit. Although not everyone has had the luxuries of upbringing and education that might have allowed them to become professional literary critics, humble origins do not necessarily denote a lack of discerning taste or cultivated knowledge. Content, as Steve Wasserman, former editor of the LA Times Book Review, very rightly points out in an excellent article about the mystery of the disappearing book reviews, is king. The beauty of the Internet, and the threat that it poses to the professional establishment, is that it allows readers access to that content regardless of whether it was written by a trained literary critic on paid assignment or by an auto mechanic who has developed an encyclopedic knowledge of Proust.

And who serves as the gatekeepers to this kingdom? Increasingly, the answer is bloggers, who have come to serve as the Internet's editors, directing readers to original content of note and, yes, importance. It would seem to go without saying that all blogs, as with newspapers, are not created equal, but many of the critics who are so quick to criticize them, seem to be under the mistaken impression that readers have no means of distinguishing one from the other and assign equal value to the ramblings of the proverbial subterranean Terra Hautean and a post by, oh, I don't know, Morris Dickstein.

Of course, critics will criticize. It is, as with Aesop's fabled scorpion, in their nature, if not their best interests. By insulting web savvy consumers, after all, they only risk driving away potential readers, hastening that which they fear most: the waning importance of their own contributions to a conversation that is rapidly leaving them behind.

- Ben Dooley @ 11:16 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Remembering Michael Jackson, 65, author, beer critic

In the early 1970s, when Michael Jackson first came on the scene, the idea of a professional beer critic must have seemed absurd. You didn't need a professional, after all, to help you choose between one pale, fizzy lager and another. They all got you equally drunk.

Since that time, beer culture in the United States has undergone a revolution. The 1980s saw the introduction of the first microbreweries and brewpubs and by the end of the 20th century, beer had become a full blown phenomenon, with thousands of varieties made in the U.S. alone, and thousands more being imported from countries, such as England, where once proud traditions - which had been momentarily subsumed in seas of tasteless, golden suds - were reinvigorated by the burgeoning movement.

Jackson, or "the Beer Hunter" as he was widely known, was the father of that movement. He devoted much of his life to the grand tradition of beer, traveling the world to chronicle beer culture, and arguing fiercely for beer's due as a great, and greatly underappreciated, cultural achievement.

Jackson was the sine qua non of beer writing. Borrowing heavily from the traditions of wine criticism, he developed a lexicon that was uniquely beer. His comparisons of the flavor of a Belgian lambic to "wet horse blankets," among other unorthodox descriptions, became the secret lingo by which beer lovers knew each other. He made it okay to take beer seriously, and his writing provided the critical framework for a generation of writers, making way for everything from glossy beer magazines to the New York Times' popular column "The Pour."

Jackson's books remain both a pleasure and a valuable guide. From his workman-like and essential Beer Companion: The World's Great Beer Styles, to his more colorful assessments of world beer culture in The New World Guide to Beer, and a variety of magazines and newspapers from the Guardian to Playboy, Jackson's writing was notable for its vivid, use of language and dry wit.

In his last, sadly prescient column, for the beer magazine, All About Beer, Jackson discussed his struggles with Parkinsons and took a moment to meditate on the death of the New Yorker's jazz critic Whitney Balliett

I am wondering how [Whitney] is coping with being offered a position Upstairs when all decent jazz clubs (not to mention drinking dens) are in the Other Place.

Hopefully, Jackson hasn't found the selection too bad.

Bonus Link: Jackson's blog

- Ben Dooley @ 7:39 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Tuesday Links: Saunders Blogs; Quarterly Conversation; New Yorker Festival

• George Saunders is taking up residence at the Powell's Blog this week as he embarks on a book tour promoting his latest (released today), The Braindead Megaphone. To my knowledge, it is Saunders' first foray into blogging, a format we discussed nearly two years ago (scroll down). His concern: "I worry about how much I would have to pay myself to keep my blog supplied with content. My fear is that, knowing I was working for myself, I would start cheating myself, only submitting my worst pieces, then get into a labor dispute with myself and never speak to me again." Hopefully, his fears aren't realized.
• A new issue of Scott Esposito's terrific Quarterly Conversation has arrived. It features, among several notable contributors, Garth, who "sorts out literary feuds, dissects James Wood's essay against Don DeLillo's 832-page opus Underworld, and argues that this book actually evolves the novel forward."
• Emdashes has the schedule for this year's New Yorker Festival. It looks fantastic as usual. I should really go sometime.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:37 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

The World's Longest Novel

9/24: Welcome Kottke.org readers. Thanks for stopping by. Once you're done reading about The World's Longest Novel, check out some of our more recent articles or have a look at our Notable Posts, listed in the right sidebar. If you like what you see, subscribe to our RSS feed. --The Millions

Over the years, there has been some controversy over what constitutes the world's longest novel. The Guinness Book of World Records gives the honor to Marcel Proust's elephantine Remembrance of Things Past, weighing in at 9,609,000 characters (including spaces). Other commentators cite Henry Darger's In the Realms of the Unreal, a 15,000 page, handwritten tome that has yet to see print. (Darger is said to have commented: "This is what you can do when you have no radio or television.") Why write something so long? Armen Shekoyan, an Armenian writer committed to producing the world's longest novel, says:

If you write a book according to the usual criteria, one person may like it, the other may dislike it, but when you write ten volumes, no one will say that the book is in eight.

Shekoyan, however, doesn't comprehend the magnitude of the task he has set for himself. After all, what's ten volumes compared to the 106 volumes of the Hakkenden, a Japanese epic running to 38 million words.

So, whose book is the biggest? The controversy will soon be put to rest, possibly for all time, when writer Richard Grossman installs his 3 million-page novel Breeze Avenue on a remote mountain in Kaha, Hawaii. Although it is unclear how many words Breeze Avenue comprises, an educated guess puts the count at over 1 billion.

Breeze Avenue is part of Grossman's American Letters Trilogy, the first two volumes of which, The Alphabet Man and The Book of Lazarus, were published by FC2. Grossman, and a cast of hundreds, have been working on the book for over thirty-five years, and it remains in a constant state of revision. Grossman tentatively plans to print just six copies of the book, each of which will comprise 4,000 volumes of 750 pages. One copy will be installed in a Hawaiian reading room, built for the project, and the other five will be sold in pieces online to approved buyers as objets d'art. There are also plans to make the entire work available online through a virtual reading room.

The book, much like Grossman's first two novels, is radically experimental. Thousands of pages of poetry are translated into other languages - among them, Hebrew, Chinese, American Sign Language and various programming languages - and then back translated to create interchangeable sub-elements of which Grossman claims there are 1,000,000. Pictures of buyers, who must apply to purchase the book, will be incorporated into the text itself. Much of the writing is, in Grossman's words, "differentiated and obfuscated. Like a labyrinth in which you can be lost to be found." Despite all of the post-modern shenanigans, however, Grossman insists the book, which is loosely modeled on Dante's Divine Comedy, has a definite narrative thread. The story involves a California retiree's struggle to deal with the aftermath of a young, autistic woman's death and prominently features Hasbro's popular board game Scrabble.

Accompanying the book's release, Grossman plans for a series of "performance readings." One of these projects, a symphony played on an instrument of Grossman's own design, has already taken place. The instrument, which Grossman refers to as the Car-iolon, is composed of thirteen cars (one of which he calls the harpsicar), which drive in tandem while playing music. The instrument plays a role in the book, and its first performance was held last Fall, with music specially composed for the event by Philip Glass. Other "readings" are planned to follow the book's (tentative) release in 2008-2009.

Did Grossman set out to write the world's longest book? "Not really," he said. "It just kept coming together."

- Ben Dooley @ 8:33 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post