The Promotional Train Chugs Along

I'll be reading from A Field Guide to the North American Family this Saturday, as part of New York's 20th annual Independent and Small Press Book Fair. The Indie Author Read-a-Thon runs from 10:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m., and I'll probably only be reading a couple of short chapters from the book; I can't recommend that anyone schlep to 44th Street just to see me. That said, I had a blast at this book fair last year, trolling the beautiful wares of such publishers as Akashic Books, New York Review Classics, and Gingko Press. You know... the kind of books that don't lend themselves to the Kindle. I emerged $40 poorer, but with half of my Christmas shopping done. My favorite find? An anthology of scam emails from Africa. So: Come for the books... stay for the reading!

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:13 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Churchill in Fiction: A Review of Never Surrender by Michael Dobbs

Yet another book about World War II may seem like a yawner. Because, seriously, what hasn't been written about the subject already? With the history side of things well-documented, most new books delve into personal accounts of the war years. In Never Surrender, British author Michael Dobbs does just that, but with a twist. The result is, according to the cover, "A novel of Winston Churchill."

Historical fiction can bring out the best or worst in a writer. Sometimes the author is an academic with nothing but names, dates and the question: What if? That approach often manifests itself in hundreds of pages consisting of too much history and not enough fiction. Other times the perfect balance is achieved, as with Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, a novel about the Civil War battle at Gettysburg.

After reading this 316-page novel, it's clear the historical fiction genre suits Dobbs well. Never Surrender strikes the right balance.

The book is set primarily in 1940, in the weeks leading up to and including Great Britain's desperate retreat from the European mainland and Adolf Hitler's advancing Nazi army. Churchill's leadership was still in its infancy, and he had few allies, both in England and beyond. The book serves as a vivid reminder of just how close the island nation came to striking a deal with Germany, and how reluctant the United States was to offer military aid to its weakened ally.

But Churchill is not the only character in this book engaged in battle. Across the channel in France, a young medic and conscientious objector named Don Chichester witnesses the horrors of war as the dead and wounded are brought before him.

They laid him on the kitchen floor – the table was occupied – and a doctor slowly unwrapped the sodden cloth. Two terrified eyes stared out, but of the rest of the face there was almost nothing. No lower jaw, no tongue, no cheek, only those two staring eyes which understood it all. Fingers clutched Don's sleeve with the force of a man under siege from pain he was incapable of resisting.

Such descriptions are used sparingly, making them all the more powerful, and realistic, for Don is soon separated from his unit and joined by a wounded French soldier in search of safety back in England.

By giving an equal amount of attention, and text, to the realities on the ground and to the decision-makers back in London, the novel deftly moves back and forth between the historical and the fictional. Churchill's survival is certain; Don's fate is less so.

Yet the two men share a similar handicap: Both are crippled by feelings of unfulfilled expectations set by their fathers. And it takes the unsolicited counsel of a foreigner for each to gain perspective.

Dobbs, who is a former advisor to prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major, is no armchair historian. His proximity to England's leaders has made him privy to the psychological burdens carried by those at the top. Furthermore, his experience as a newspaper reporter on both sides of the Atlantic is demonstrated by a fluid writing style full of English subtlety and wit.

While the 2003 book, rereleased in paperback this September, is the second in a series – Winston's War (2002), Churchill's Hour (2004) and Churchill's Triumph (2005) – about events before, during and after World War II, it is undoubtedly capable of standing alone. Some readers may desire to see what comes next, but reading what comes before will require a 704-page commitment.

Of course, any piece of historical fiction opens itself up to sins of omission. Certain events are left unmentioned, meaning readers who have studied the second World War in depth might feel like moviegoers who watch a film adaptation of their favorite book.

At the same time, the opposite can be true for those not steeped in the history of World War II. Questions may linger throughout about whether certain characters are historical or fictional. Fear not, all is explained in the epilogue. But it's safe to say that those who appear fictional are just that. So trust your literary instincts.

- Timothy R. Homan @ 7:41 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Is the End in Sight?

The siege may soon be over. That's right, the WGA strike may be over by Christmas. If this is indeed true, it's unclear who "wins" in this scenario, other than TV viewers, who won't have to sit through any more reruns, and all the non-writer people who make a living in TV. Rob Long thinks the strike (and the effects of emerging media, in general) might make Hollywood find a more efficient way of producing content. That remains to be seen.

In the meantime, the strike has produced some interesting sideshows, like the writers of "The Daily Show" taping a YouTube "webisode" outside Viacom headquarters, and the cast of "Saturday Night Live" performing an unaired episode of the show, complete with indie it-boy host Michael Cera and musical guest Yo La Tengo, to benefit the show's crew. The SNL performance used skits that couldn't make it onto the air, either because they were too raunchy or because they simply weren't that funny (Considering the quality of recent season of SNL, one has to wonder just how bad these skits really were). What does this mean for those of us living in Los Angeles? Well, on the plus side, the economy won't collapse. And there are likely to be more seats at the local coffee shop, as well. On the other hand, this might mean more episodes of "Cavemen."

Peace, but at what cost?

- Patrick Brown @ 5:45 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

A Man of Appetite Amongst the Waifs

Alone (I'd be willing to bet) among the Millions staff, I am a reader of Vogue. Not, I often think, a sensible choice: Much of what one finds to read between the covers of the average monthly issue is utter tripe, I willingly admit - at least if you're not an heiress. The ideal reader of Vogue is a lady who lunches (preferably in New York and on two lettuce leaves washed down with fine white wine) and many of the magazine's readings reflect this demographic: For example, Sally Singer's dead-earnest account of how hard it was for her to get back in shape for a gala at the Met after having a baby, or Tomasin Day-Lewis' equally un-self-aware recounting of how scary it was when her son almost, sort-of got hurt while skiing. Depending on one's mood, these pieces can be hysterical, infuriating, or fascinating (as anthropological bits of evidence in support of Fitzgerald's assertion that "the rich are different from you and me"). But these are not what keep me a reader.

No, I read Vogue for Jeffrey Steingarten - one of the finest food writers on the planet. The irony of finding The Man Who Ate Everything in the midst of pages and pages of photographs of 100 pound, six-foot-tall women is hardly one I am the first to note, but a man of Steingarten's superbly well-developed sense of humor, I imagine, relishes this irony anew every month. Steingarten's style of essay is a delightful mix of personal narrative and culinary reportage, and while he occasionally (not always) finds himself in rarified surroundings, he has the blessed sense not to pretend they're otherwise (as many of Vogue's contributors - to other, unintentionally comic ends - do). He is both dyed-in-the-wool food enthusiast, connoisseur, and self-deprecating comic hero, and his contribution to the November issue, "Temptation Island," is a fine example of his gifts, both comic and culinary. (Which is to say that if you find yourself in a hair salon or a doctor's office and see the issue with Jennifer Connolly in a dark blue dress on the cover, do yourself a favor and turn to page 379).

Since I cannot offer a link to the text of this article, I offer instead a few liberal quotes from Vogue as a Steingarten-ian aperitif. This month's article is an account of his trip to a resort in the Maldives with his wife, a trip he approaches with trepidation, fearing both resort group activities and (more grave) that there will be nothing good to eat. Reminiscing about resort group activities past, he writes:

I particularly remember a nightmarish diving excursion off the coast of Maui into the spectacular crater of an extinct volcano called Molokini, led by a guy who believed he was Don Ho, and his partner, who answered to the name of Snorkel Bill and had an unbreakably amiable demeanor, at least until an unexpected storm arose and we all tried to climb back on board up a ladder that gyrated so violently that some of us were thrown back into Molokini and one was knocked out, while a half-dozen sharks circled beneath the boat - but that's a story for another time.

And of his wife's spa treatments:

By this time my wife was carefully plotting her visits to the spa. The first of these, an Ayurvedic treatment for her long-standing sinus condition, took place the next morning, before breakfast. The Ayurvedic practitioner had her lie on a wooden massage table, which he then tilted to lower her head as he squirted a mixture of 62 herbs into her nose. Before long, the liquid had flowed down into her mouth. The doctor was surprised when this caused my wife to throw up, but, she recalls, he got out of the way in time; once this emergency had passed, and for the following month, my wife's sinus condition was cured! She was meant to return for two more meetings with the 62 herbs but quietly let the opportunity slip by.

And, finally, a morsel about Maldivian food:

Our first Maldivian dish was a clear tuna soup called Garudiya that, I had been told, every Maldivian family eats every day of the year; pieces of yellowfin tuna are boiled with vegetables and red and black pepper, and the result is pungent and deeply flavored. There were five other dishes, including a stir-fry of squash with mustard seeds and sweet ketchup; a redfish curry; a bright yellow sweet potato curry; a salad of the sweetest lettuces with fresh coconut, chili, and onion. It would have taken us a month or two to exhaust this place, in all of its novelty and variety, but far less time to exhaust our bank account.

These morsels do not quite do Steingarten justice. Excerpts never do, I suppose, but I promise delight to those who seek out the full text.

And, for those averse to Vogue reading, Steingarten can also be consumed in book form: The Man Who Ate Everything, and It Must've Been Something I Ate. (But you do thereby deny yourself the strange sensation of disjunction caused by reading about a spring roll binge on a page flanked by images of the waifiest of waifs.)

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 7:12 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

What, if Anything, I Taught Them

This fall, among other pursuits, I've been teaching one section of "Composition & Rhetoric" at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus. I've led fiction writing workshops at the university level before, but this has been my first foray into expository writing. At times, I've found myself questioning my professorial fitness (as regular readers of this blog may even now be doing); how can I claim to explain a set of forms that I haven't myself mastered?

But when it comes to writing, we're all apprentices (to paraphrase Hemingway), and I've been blessed with a group of creative, curious, and hardworking writers-in-training. Of my 16 students, 14 are enrolled in the Alvin Ailey School of Dance - which is to say that they're well on their way to being artists in another medium. This may account for the high quality of their work.

Or maybe it's the pedagogical principle I cribbed from my quondam teacher Lawrence Weschler: Assign your students readings that you really love. My syllabus, thrown together in a single manic week in August, wound up coalescing loosely around ideas of New York before and after September 11, 2001. Even in a week when my Socratic skills failed me, my class and I would at least have the consolation of having read something complex and beautiful, like the city itself. What follows is a diary of our mutual education.

Week 1: "Here is New York," by E.B. White (from Essays)

For me, this is what a good essay looks like, but at this point in the semester, I can't quite explain why. My instructions: "Go sit in Central Park when you read this. You can thank me later." They do.

Week 2: "Bartleby, the Scrivener," by Herman Melville (from Great Short Works) and "Bartleby in Manhattan," by Elizabeth Hardwick (from Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays)

One of the weird things about literary criticism at the college level is that students are often asked to write it without ever having read it. I'm hoping that this pairing might provide an object lesson in good criticism. My class, of course, prefers the story to the essay. The fiction writer in me sees this as a promising sign.

Week 3: "Still-Life," by Don Delillo (an excerpt from Falling Man originally published in The New Yorker)

I tell students to treat DeLillo the way Hardwick treated Melville. That is, critically. Instead, they fall in love with him. I end up thinking more highly of Falling Man than I did when I first read it, and liked it.

Week 4: "Echoes at Ground Zero," by Lawrence Weschler (from Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences and "Against Interpretation," by Susan Sontag (from Against Interpretation)

The Weschler reading, which included photographs, leads to a discussion of reading images critically - a skill we all need these days. Then we read the Sontag, which is kind of an argument against everything I've been teaching them up to this point. Is this brilliant, or suicidal?

Week 4: "Come September," by Arundhati Roy (from The Impossible Will Take A Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear)

Moving away from literary criticism and toward social criticism proves difficult, as many readers, myself included, find this essay frustratingly orthodox in its politics. We end up talking about "preaching to the choir," and the failure of partisan arguments to persuade their opponents. Victory snatched from jaws of defeat.

Weeks 5 - 7: The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin.

Rereading this clarifies some things for me. Among them, that an essay doesn't always have to be an argument; that it can be an exploration. This will become a theme. (Damn you, Sontag!)

Week 8: "What I See When I Look at the Face on the $20 Bill," by Sarah Vowell (from Take the Cannoli)

This one doesn't get quite the reaction I had hoped for; students find it a little didactic. Maybe I should have chosen "Ixnay on the My Way." Still, the Vowell essay on Cherokee history does offer an example of how exposition can be structured narratively.

Week 9-Week 10: "The White Album," by Joan Didion (from The White Album)

With its jagged, discontinuous structure, this memoir of the '60s provokes the strongest responses I'll probably get this year, ranging from, "I loved this" to "I hated this" - which is pretty much what I've been hoping for all semester. When I read my students' personal essays, I'll see that "The White Album" has challenged them to become better writers. It never hurts to expose undergraduates to a surgically precise stylist like Didion, either.

Week 11: "Dancing in the Dark," by Joan Acocella (from Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints)

Yet another of those frequent occasions when the professor learns more from the students than vice versa. The dancers tell me all about Bob Fosse, and evaluate Acocella's claims critically. In the end, most agree that Fosse's choreography is more about power than about sex. And again, exposure to a writer of Acocella's intelligence and lucidity can only help their prose. It's certainly helped mine.

Week 12: "Speak, Hoyt-Schermerhorn," by Jonathan Lethem (from The Disappointment Artist)

This should be interesting. We're now in the middle of the research essay unit, but I'd love to see my students push beyond the conventions of the term paper; to combine research, personal reflection, and critical thought as Lethem does in this essay about a subway stop.

Week 14: "Last Cigarettes," by Marco Roth.

This piece originally appeared in N+1, and has a lot to say about college, and becoming a writer. Like the Lethem essay, it pushes against the rigid boundaries of the "four rhetorical modes." If I've learned anything this semester, it's that good expository writing doesn't always adhere to such neat distinctions. Though at times I've wished I could tell my class, "This is how you write an essay," throwing them into the messy process of discovery may ultimately be a more honest initiation into the pains - and joys - of writing.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:22 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

The Notables

This year's New York Times Notable Books of the Year is out. At 100 titles, the list is more of a catalog of the noteworthy than a distinction. Looking at the fiction, it appears that some of these books crossed our radar as well:

• The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perotta: A most anticipated book.
• After Dark by Haruki Murakami: Ben's review.
• Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo: A most anticipated book.
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz: A most anticipated book.
• Exit Ghost by Philip Roth: A most anticipated book.
• Falling Man by Don Delillo: Tempering Expectations for the Great 9/11 Novel
• The Gathering by Anne Enright: Underdog Enright Lands the 2007 Booker
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling: Harry Potter is Dead, Long Live Harry Potter; Top Potter Town Gets Prize, Boy-Wizard Bragging Rights; Professor Trelawney Examines Her Tea Leaves; A Potter Post Mortem; A History of Magic
• House of Meetings by Martin Amis: A most anticipated book.
• In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar: The Booker shortlist
• Knots by Nuruddin Farah: A most anticipated book.
• Like You'd Understand, Anyway by Jim Shepard: National Book Award Finalist
• On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan: Booker shortlist
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid: Booker shortlist
• Remainder by Tom McCarthy: Andrew's review
• Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano: A most anticipated book; Why Bolano Matters
• Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris: A most anticipated book
• Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson: Garth's review
• Twenty Grand by Rebecca Curtis: Emily's review
• Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis: National Book Award Finalist
• What is the What by Dave Eggers: Garth's review.
• The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon: Max's review; Garth's review.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:54 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Making the Case for Classics and Against Blogs

Why is it that so many people are turned off by the classics? Is it because would-be readers are afraid they won't "get it?" Or does reading a well-known tome on the subway or in a cafe exude an air of pretentiousness, when it's more likely that the reader just never followed through on that English lit assignment?

In talking about his latest book, Classics for Pleasure, the Pulitzer Prize winning critic, Michael Dirda, said he not only hopes to make the classics appear less daunting and more accessible to the general public, but he also wants to "encourage people to read more widely."

Dirda, a columnist for The Washington Post's Book World, said his goal is to get people to "read beyond the recognized classics and read beyond the contemporary." He made his remarks Tuesday during a lecture, co-sponsored by the English-Speaking Union, at the Women's National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C.

Classics for Pleasure consists of about 90 essays, written by Dirda, that describe the importance of lesser-known authors such as Sheridan Le Fanu and Abolqasem Ferdowsi as well as literary giants like Henry James and Christopher Marlowe.

Each essay, ranging from two to five pages, serves as a primer on the era and author, with excerpts from famous works. They also offer some much-needed perspective, even for the seasoned reader, and are grouped together with topical headings such as Realms of Adventure, The Dark Side and Love's Mysteries.

But why should these classics, or any others for that matter, deserve a kind of sacred reverence?

"Truly distinctive voices, once heard, ought never to be forgotten," Dirda writes. "More than anything else, great books speak to us of our own very real feelings and failings, of our all-too-human daydreams and confusions."

From Dirda's point of view, some of those failings and confusions are commonplace on the Web, perpetrated by those who dabble in his trade. He said that while "blogs and the online bookish universe are a wonderful thing... there are no oversights for the most part," meaning no editorial review like the kind he gets from The Washington Post.

He went on to say that some online book critics have a tendency to make a name for themselves by writing "vulgar, rude, outrageous" reviews, and such pieces should not be the standard for literary criticism.

While that eventuality seems unlikely, Dirda's nonetheless uses the book to re-establish his high bar for criticism while drawing in readers to "discover" the classics of yesteryear. One is certainly easier to achieve than the other.

See Also: Classifying Classics; Nothing is Dead Yet: The Era of the Trusted Fellow Reader; Literature and History

- Timothy R. Homan @ 8:09 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

The Welcome Wagon

Join me in welcoming our newest regular contributor at The Millions, Timothy R. Homan. I've known Tim since grad school in Chicago. He's got a keen reporter's eye and an avid reader's sensibility.

Tim is a Washington-based journalist covering international trade and the global economy. He has a masters degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and one from The Fletcher School at Tufts University. His articles have been published in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and he freelances book reviews for Kirkus Reviews. He is also the founder of Not Your Mother's Book Club, now with chapters in Boston, DC, and San Francisco.

Welcome aboard, Tim!

- C. Max Magee @ 7:56 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Quarterly Report: Media Heavyweights Drive Book Sales

Every three months I've been looking at Barnes & Noble's quarterly conference call to get some insight into recent book industry trends and to see which books were the big sellers over the past few months and which are expected to be big in the coming months. Staving off a post-Harry Potter hangover, B&N's quarter ended November 3 was boosted by several titles that got major media attention, sending readers into stores to get in on the action.

Here are the highlights from CEO Steve Riggio on the Q3 conference call (courtesy Seeking Alpha):

• The most important factor now "is the effect of media on the book industry and on the sales of individual titles."
• The company was "pleasantly surprised when the third quarter opened quite strong with the release of Stephanie Meyer's Eclipse, which became the fastest-selling teen novel in our history." It just goes to show, people love vampires.
• "Media coverage of adult books was more extensive then typical, led by two shows, the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes and Oprah Winfrey."
• After feature stories on 60 Minutes, the publicity for "Alan Greenspan's The Age of Turbulence, Clarence Thomas' My Grandfather's Son and Joel Osteen's Become a Better You, and Valerie Plame Wilson's Fair Game shot those books onto the top of our bestseller list." In other words, it was a good quarter for books with the author's picture on the cover.
• Meanwhile, the backing of Oprah led to "phenomenal demand" for books like Jessica Seinfeld's Deceptively Delicious Cookbook, Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, Cathy Black's Basic Black, and Michael Roizen's YOU: Staying Young. In other words, self help and cookbooks remain in the Oprah wheelhouse. The "Book Club" lives on as well, "even sending classics such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera to the top of bestseller lists."
• And the last of the big media booksellers turned out to be Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, whose shows helped make a bestseller of Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!).
• Moving on to fiction, "it was a particularly good quarter for new releases for brand name fiction writers and those included John Grisham, David Baldacci, Patricia Cornwell, James Patterson and the return of Ken Follett with his World Without End."
• Of course, with big media being the hand that feeds the publishers, the writers strike could limit promotional opportunities. "We are already hearing of cancellations of writers that were scheduled to be on some of the major talk shows."
• "Nevertheless, several books by brand name writers with new and forthcoming titles including Sue Grafton, Jim Cramer, Steve Martin and Dean Ornish" are expected to do well in the coming months.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:51 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Kindle: Amazon's New Firestarter

The media is aglow with the heatless light of Kindle, Amazon's just launched reading device that is essentially an iPod for books, magazines and blogs. The online demo video trumpets the wonders of this text vessel. You can drop the thing, read it in direct sunlight and, most notably, use it and acquire new reading materials without a computer. Much of the mainstream print media is on board, as are the big publishing houses.

I watched a portion of Charlie Rose's interview with Jeff Bezos last night, unimpressed by Bezos's forced-laugh self-satisfaction about this new product that, in his words, will "out book the book." Fact is, plenty of folks have been tinkering with this concept for years (see my piece about The Institute for the Future of the Book), but with Amazon's resources behind this endeavor, it seems clear that Kindle will attempt the same sort of market saturation that the iPod has achieved – and here lies the real essence of this development.

Now, the shift won't be complete, at least not at first, as Kindle cannot handle color images or illustrations, yet. When you receive your daily newspaper, or the latest issue of a magazine, you will be getting only the text. On Charlie Rose, Bezos claimed that the technology to handle images is currently in the lab and hearing him say this, for me, smacked of the planned obsolescence of the gadgetry we have embraced.

The same as the ideas behind furthering the book with multi-media, open-source applications possess a great deal of exciting potential, the notion of enslaving ourselves to yet another always-improving device is something that needs to be considered and not just ballyhooed blindly, for it seems that the issue of reading is at stake in how it relates to the readers. At one point during the interview, Bezos used the term "Amazonians," referring to the beta group of Kindle users. The term conjures the idea of tribes (something that Marshall McLuhan and Michel Houellebecq evoke in their work when considering the human relationship with technology). Like the iPod, Kindle, if Amazon succeeds in the way they seem hell-bent on, becomes a lifestyle networked into a corporate hub.

As Bezos explained Kindle to Rose he got most excited about what happens when Kindle reaches its new owner: "You turn it on and it already knows you." You need an Amazon account to buy this thing, and once you do, all of your preferences and browsing history are waiting for you. Filtered through Kindle, it seems fair to say that it is not just about text imparting information to its readers, so much as the text tracking its readers. If you resist the idea of libraries handing over their cardholders' borrowing histories, isn't this the same, but on some exponential algorithmic level?

This is not a Luddite's lament, but it is a call to not let the traditional book be demoted in its status as an invaluable tool. I stopped watching Charlie Rose last night after he asked Bezos about the future of books. Bezos nodded, expecting the question. He answered by saying there would always be that "cabinet of curiosities" but that he saw Kindle as the beginning of the future. The curios, in his mind, are codex books, and this is the wrong attitude because it creates a hierarchy that is a disservice to the exchange of ideas. It also seems to displace the ideas, channeling, in an admittedly off-the-cuff leap by yours truly, Plato's Myth of the Cave. The word "kindle" denotes the starting of a fire. Light from fire, according to Plato, cast shadows that people mistook for the actual world. The challenge of reconciling the object and the image is as ancient as human thought. Kindle, when talking about books and their content, furthers the metaphor, in a way destined to make the culture, or at least the market, forget about traditional books.

The book, as I seem to always write in these offerings, will never die (especially illustrated books). I believe this. Rethinking the book vis-a-vis the available technology is a natural human tendency. But forsaking the printed on paper words that have documented human history for the convenience of Kindle seems, as one comment on the NYT Paper Cuts blog posits, more like burning them, as opposed to improving them.

Bonus Links: The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts), With blogs available via the Kindle, Ed looks at how they ended up there and who's getting paid.

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

- Editor @ 10:11 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

The Millions Interview: Kevin Sites

Kevin Sites, author of In the Hot Zone, shed some light to his experiences in an interview with The Millions last week. An edited text of the transcript appears below, please see yesterday's post for more on In the Hot Zone.

The Millions: Did you always have the idea of a book when you embarked on the Hot Zone?

Kevin Sites: I was hoping that through the course of the journey that all the material we were gathering would transform itself – possibly a book, possibly a documentary. It just so happened that we were able to get both out of the material.

TM: How was it different to write the book compared to sending dispatches from war zones?

KS: The idea for online reporting was to make it as subjective as possible. For the most part the people I was covering during the journey were front and center in our storytelling: I really wanted to focus on their experiences. In doing the book I was able to look into two story structures: my journey and unique experiences in covering it and the parallel journey of the people I encountered. This was more of a memoir, more of a chance for me to meditate on what I learned instead of just providing observations from all these locations, actually thinking of what they meant in a cumulative sense.

TM: Did the book help you put things into context once you removed yourself from those environments?

KS: The book allowed me to think of what I had seen, instead of just reporting it. And the truth is, in all these wars, how we define war is really a misinterpretation. We define it as combat, which is probably its smallest component. When really how it should be defined is collateral damage, which is its most dominant feature and goes on for generations. Battles may only last a very short time, but the repercussions rip along for a long time.

TM: We saw and read a lot about collateral damage at the beginning of the Iraq War. Why do you think coverage of the greater effects of war are more limited now?

KS: We as journalist have a tendency to focus on the inherently more dramatic. We're drawn to the guns and the tanks and the armies and guerilla forces because they are easy to report on. The collateral damage is much more difficult to report on in a compelling way, keeping people interested in refugee camps and the suffering human beings for example – it's our natural tendency to turn away from them because they are harder to see.

TM: With so much to cover in Iraq, how did you decide to leave it - albeit temporarily - and go around the world?

KS: I'd spent almost the last two years of my life in Iraq, and I hope to go back. But I felt like my mandate was to get beyond the headlines. In most of the places I went, I was the only reporter. The smaller stories also lent themselves to this particular project. I knew I wasn't going to be able to be on the ground very long in any of these locations, so I had to limit my objectives to putting together profiles of people instead of telling the geopolitical story, for which I used the strength of the Web by linking to BBC country profiles.

TM: Any odd, uplifting experiences in your travels?

KS: I had a chance encounter with the Dalai Lama. That was kind of funny because I was so star struck that I couldn't say anything to him even though he sat right behind me in the plane. Here I am a man covering every war and here's the person who epitomizes world peace in many ways and I couldn't ask his counsel. I felt very sheepish afterwards.

TM: You're pretty critical of mainstream media in some of your writing, do you see yourself going back to network news?

KS: My major problem with it was the limitations of television news – we had so little time to tell our stories, and more specifically how NBC stepped away from me after the mosque shooting. I don't hate mainstream media and I don't look at the Web as a medium to displace it. I think we're in the same ballgame: we amplify each other's work. I was grateful to do something different, but I still love the impact of television. I would like to continue to be the multimedia reporter that I am, maybe for different sources or maybe one particular company.

TM: People point to The Hot Zone as the future of journalism, how was it for you to report for an online outlet?

KS: I don't think it's the future, I think it is the present. You see the evolution of this multimedia approach really across the board: every television network has a fairly rich Web site that provides both text and video, and every newspaper is now at a point where they're using still photography in a more animated fashion. Television didn't kill radio, the Internet's not going to kill television or newspapers – it's just going to force them to evolve.

TM: Did reporting for a Web publication affect your access to sources, especially in high places?

KS: It was interesting because in so many places I traveled as an NBC reporter I had to explain who I was working for. But when I told people I was working for Yahoo! they knew. It also was a double-edged sword because people could access my reporting right away. A Hezbollah source was sort of patronizing: 'What are you, a blog?' And then he goes to the site and the first thing he sees is images of U.S. soldiers because I had just been embedded in Iraq. So it was interesting to face that and explain it.

TM: It has been three years since you taped the mosque shooting in Fallujah, what are your feelings about the whole episode – the event itself, the hate mail you received, etc. – now?

KS: The hate mail has tapered off. For me that particular incident – I think about it a lot, because I talk about it a lot – I certainly came to peace with what happened there. With one exception: I recently found out by putting in a freedom of information request that one of the insurgents was shot 23 times in the back after I left the mosque and I felt somewhat complicit about it.

TM: You write about the U.S. media's decision to self-censor the coverage of the Fallujah mosque event, where are we three years later?

KS: It's still going on. When's the last time you saw a wounded or dead soldier or marine? The war has become very sanitized for us in America. There's a problem with that because it doesn't show you the true face of war. I'm not for showing you gratuitous violence but you do have to show that people get killed in war – it isn't a sterile environment and we do have to show the good, the bad and the ugly. When we don't do that, our public and our democracy suffers because the public can't understand what's going on and can't make the informed choices they need to make about those conflicts.

TM: Are you yearning to go back to covering conflicts?

KS: It wasn't so much conflict that drew me, it's the idea that within conflict you're witness to a lot of different spectrums of human conditions: we struggle with so many different ethical and moral choices within a war, that's fascinating to me. At the same time I don't want become one of these war correspondents that can't come back home again. I think soldiers feel somewhat same way. When you're gone you're constantly dreaming of coming home but when you're here you can't wait to go back.

- Emre Peker @ 2:14 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Going Solo: A Review of In The Hot Zone by Kevin Sites

There are about 30 ongoing conflicts in the world. Contrary to conventional wisdom and blissful ignorance, the big wars since World War II have not been limited to Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, or the current wars endearingly known as Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom – i.e., the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Kevin Sites broke with the Iraq-War pack of journalists in 2005 to embark on an ambitious project: covering all current armed conflicts in one year. He missed a couple here and there, but in the end Sites made it to 21 war zones, some planned (like Somalia), others ad hoc (like the Lebanon-Israel 34-Day War). More importantly, however, Sites went beyond the numbers: his coverage was not about the death toll and the money spent, but about the civilian cost of wars.

The damages appeared in written dispatches, photo essays and videos on the Yahoo Hot Zone Web site. The project was unusual not only in its geographic span – after all, with more than 4,300 U.S. troops dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Washington Post, and many more injured, how often do we hear about Chechnya or Haiti or Sri Lanka – but also for its journalistic ambition. Sites traveled as a SoJo (solo journalist) utilized all media available, reported for the Web and was not bound by editorial limitations of network TV (his previous employers include ABC, CNN and NBC).

Hot Zone gained a steady readership; it got more than 970,000 hits a month, according to a New York Times article. And, it became the front page for stories otherwise only intermittently told.

Sites is no stranger to telling the mainstream stories, however. He is responsible for one of the most controversial pieces of journalism to come out of Iraq: the shooting of captured enemy combatants in a mosque during the 2004 Battle of Fallujah. NBC's decision not to air the tape in its entirety showed Sites one of the biggest problems in media: not trusting the public with the information.

This lesson, albeit a hard one for Sites who still receives hate mail for being unpatriotic, informed his reporting and style for Yahoo!, where he reported with sincerity, presenting the information without a network filter.

It's been slightly more than a year since Sites came back. In the span of four quick months, he compiled his memoirs, Hot Zone stories and videos in a package that includes a book and a DVD documentary: In the Hot Zone – an intimate look into Sites' mind and the world he lived in for a year.

In the Hot Zone's best qualities are its quick, newsy style and its ability to add another layer of humanity to war by providing the honest reactions of a Westerner. I couldn't help thinking of the late Ryszard Kapuscinski while reading Sites' account of conflict in Africa. And while Sites does not possess Kapuscinski's lyrical formulation in presenting tragedies, his straight-forward style lends itself perfectly to telling the stories of those most affected by war.

Sites accomplishes one of his main goals, "providing more coverage to the world's nameless and voiceless conflict victims," by bringing the story home in a published form after successfully keeping readers abreast of developments in far flung corners of the world.

In The Hot Zone is a fresh look at wars that flash across CNN once in a while or make for good feature articles in the weekend edition of your paper. What Sites reminds the reader is that his subjects, whose lives are torn apart by wars, are very real – whether you realize it or not.

Tomorrow: An interview with Kevin Sites.

- Emre Peker @ 8:20 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Staff Picks: Harvey, Jergovic, Endo, Helprin, Walton, Greene

The "staff picks" shelf in any good independent bookstore is a treasure trove of book recommendations. Unmoored from media hype and even timeliness, books are championed by trusted fellow readers. With many bookselling alums in our ranks, we thought it a good idea to offer our own "Staff Picks" in a feature appearing irregularly. We hope you discover something you like.

+ Inside by Kenneth J. Harvey recommended by Andrew

A tough, spare, bruising novel from Newfoundland author Kenneth J. Harvey, Inside depicts the experience of a man released from years in prison, cleared on DNA evidence. Not guilty but far from innocent, our man attempts to reconnect with his family and reclaim his life. The novel's edgy, fragmented prose is sometimes tough reading, but I read it a year-and-a-half ago when it first came out here in Canada, and its images and tone still haunt me.

+ Sarajevo Marlboro by Milijenko Jergovic recommended by Garth

Among the splendors of the short-story is that it needn't teach us anything. Also among its splendors: that it often does, anyway. With this collection, journalist Jergovic uses a deceptively casual style to tally the cost of war. Stories like "Beetle" and "The Excursion" bring to life the human beings caught in Sarajevo during the war, moving us without ever hectoring. They are exemplars of the William Carlos Williams dictum: "No ideas but in things."

+ Silence by Shusaku Endo recommended by Ben

It's strange to me that Shusaku Endo's fine novel Silence has yet to be canonized as a masterpiece of world literature. Although I'm not generally a booster of Japanese writers, this story of faith and suffering is one of the best novels I've read.

Endo was a Japanese Catholic, and many of his works explore the conflicts between his faith and his culture. Silence takes place in the 17th century and follows two Portuguese priests as they try to introduce Christianity to Japan. The Japanese government resists their efforts, and the two are forced to go underground, running from a public official who tracks them relentlessly. As their flock is captured one by one, the priests are forced to a final showdown, where their faith is put to the test. Equal parts heart-wrenching and thought provoking, this beautifully written and moving book grapples with the meaning of faith in a world where prayers are met only with silence.

+ Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin recommended by Emre

Forget about global warming for a second and pick up Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale - a perfect companion to the season that will immerse you in a world steeped in fantasy. Peter Lake's journey from the end of the Gilded Age to a futuristic 1990s world doesn't cover much ground; most of it is in New York. But, the creation of the City as a central character, the use of Winter to tickle warmth, and the struggle between the ideal-imagined and real-lived will take you on a ride that illuminates beauty in the ordinary via the fantastic.

+ The Compleat Angler: or, The Contemplative Man's Recreation by Izaak Walton recommended by Emily

Although I am not "a brother of the angle," I count Izaak Walton's 1653 Compleat Angler among my favorite books. And it would seem that I am not alone: Walton's book has been in print continuously for the past 355 years and by some counts it is the most reprinted work in English after the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress. To describe this delightful book, however, is no easy task. "The waters are nature's storehouse in which she locks up her wonders," Walton writes, and his book sets out to be the meandering catalogue of these and much else. Like so many other books of its age, Walton's Angler is hard to classify. It is part fishing manual, part meditation on the joys of rural life, contemplation, and patience, part compendium of whimsical fishing and river lore (an account of the Sargus, a fish who crawls onto land to impregnate sheep, stories of mythical rivers that dance to music, light torches, or cease to flow on the Sabbath), part miscellany of pastoral verse, and part cookbook, all united by the deeply humane and amiable voice of the narrator, Piscator. Recommended for: All restive souls, especially city folk afflicted with pangs of bucolic longing.

+ The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene recommended by Max

This Graham Greene classic takes on crises of faith as a "whiskey priest" in Mexico is pursued by a stern lieutenant and the specter of a firing squad and must contemplate his own shortcomings, his worthiness, and his ordained duty to his flock. Heavy stuff, but as winter takes hold in northern climes, readers will appreciate Greene's backdrop of the humid closeness of the Mexican jungle - you may feel some perspiration on your brow - not to mention a cast of characters who serve only to heighten the priest's moral ambiguity. Whether read as a layered allegory of faith or a tense romp through the tropics, The Power and the Glory deserves its place among Greene's best works.

- Editor @ 7:16 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Book Giving Season

The holidays are nearly upon us, and longtime Millions reader Laurie wrote in to share a number of ways to give back with books this year.

• Room to Read works in developing countries with low literacy rates to create kids books in local languages using local writers and artists.
• A Peace Corps rep asks for books in Honduras.

Laurie also adds: "Our local B&N is conducting a book drive to put new books into the hands of local kids who would otherwise not have any to call their own. B&N will only accept books bought in the store, though (or, one clerk told me, 'possibly books that look new if you can show a receipt for them'). I understand the need to provide a poor kid something new, not a 'hand-me-down,' but this approach is so self-serving it detracts from the charitable aspect. Then again, it puts more new books in the hands of kids who have none in their homes, so maybe turning charity into a for-profit business tactic isn't totally evil? Or maybe donating to a nonprofit like First Book is a better choice."

Here are more links to nonprofit book charities:

• Directory of Book Donation Programs
• Bring Me a Book
• Ethiopia Reads

- C. Max Magee @ 11:33 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Time in a Bottle: A Review of Gregoire Bouillier's The Mystery Guest

In a genre dominated by by-the-numbers sagas of suffering and redemption, Gregoire Bouillier's is a refreshingly odd voice. The bulk of his memoir, The Mystery Guest takes place in the space of a single day - a day in which not much happens. And yet, with its restless intelligence, The Mystery Guest manages to encompass all the thematic preoccupations of its touchstone, Mrs. Dalloway: time, fate, and the meaning of life. And unlike Ms. Woolf, Bouillier keeps us laughing.

When we meet our protagonist, a failed writer and ex-boyfriend pushing middle age, the filmmaker Michel Leiris has just died. A wry depressive, Bouillier (it's unclear how much of the book is fictionalized) is interrupted mid-eulogy by a call from his ex-girlfriend, whom he still loves.

"How appropriate flashed through my mind. And on the same day Michel Leiris died [...] Of course that's what had happened: she'd heard about Michel Leiris and somehow the fact of his disappearance had made her reappear."

She invites the narrator to a birthday party for the conceptual artist Sophie Calle, who each year has a friend choose a "mystery guest." This year, the mystery guest is to be...guess who? In the ensuing hundred pages, the narrator will fulfill his role as mystery guest, hoping for some closure with his ex-girlfriend. And of course, once at the party, he will behave like a complete ass - albeit an enlightening one.

Until near the end of the book, The Mystery Guest seems content to be a sort of Gallic Woody Allen routine. Bouillier's prose, in a supple translation by Lorin Stein, turns every interaction between the narrator and his fellow guests into a comic meditation on the impossibility of communication... And then suddenly, in a stunning reversal, Bouillier sets off the depth charges he's quietly been planting throughout the book. In the end, we discover that The Mystery Guest isn't a symphony of missed connections after all, but a kind of hymn to possibility. And though we've paid nearly 10 cents a page for the privilege of reading this slim paperback, it leaves us moved, even as we shake our heads in disbelief.

"The significance of a dream," Bouillier writes early on, "has less to do with its overt drama than with the details; a long time ago it struck me that the same was true of real life, of what passes among us for real life." The Mystery Guest pursues this intuition until the boundaries between the imagined and the fizzle away, leaving the reader in a state of grateful intoxication.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:12 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

50,000 Words in 30 Days

This November, three of my bravest (read: most insane) students are participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). While some of you may make fun of NaNoWriMo enthusiasts, I hold my tongue, for writing 50,000 words (no matter how poorly chosen) in only 30 days is impressive. Besides, another student of mine, Kelly Wiles, participated two years ago, and after over a year of diligently revising her manuscript, she has a clever and very readable novel, ready to send out to agents. So there.

Kelly participated in NaNoWriMo because her friend bribed her with a week's worth of free coffee, and because she'd been lately caught in a web of procrastination, unable to finish anything she eventually started. Is this why my other students are currently undergoing such creative lunacy?

Paria Kooklan, who's writing a children's fantasy novel that includes ghosts, time travel and a Scottish castle, actually had three chapters of the book before she began. She's been trying to write this novel since graduating from law school two years ago; after months of being in outline purgatory, she then wrote and rewrote the beginning. She hopes NaNoWriMo, in forcing her to move forward and not edit, will help her overcome writer's block. This extreme process, she says, may be her only hope.

Caroline Donahue "desperately clawed" her way through last year's NaNoWriMo without any prior preparation and loved it, even though she hasn't worked on the manuscript since. The process was liberating, she said: she could indeed write enough words to fill a book! This year Caroline has prepared in advance, picking a story that will hold her interest once the month is over - in this case, historical fiction about art forgery and theft in Paris during the German occupation. Although Caroline has a blog and contributes to another, and has been writing short stories for my classes, she says she doesn't write nearly as much as she'd like. She hopes the momentum of NaNoWriMo will help her keep up a regular writing practice in the future.

Manny Chavarria is writing a mystery/horror/love story involving a fictionalized version of himself hiring a private detective to find a girl he's lost - but he assures me it's much more grotesque than that. Like Caroline and Paria, before this month, Manny wasn't writing as much as he'd like. Without structure, he was slacking off, and real life was intruding.

Aside from Joyce Carol Oates, I doubt anyone is writing as much as they'd like to. When things aren't going well with my work, I often question my writing process: maybe, I reason, I should stop reading each paragraph out loud, or maybe I should write by hand, or maybe I should write in the evening instead of the morning... I could go on forever like this. The funny thing is, I've never been able to change my creative routine. I'm pretty certain that if I did participate in NaNoWriMo, once December rolled around, I'd be back to my daily tortoise-pace, editing as I wrote, planning ahead, and so on.

But Kelly tells me that NaNoWriMo did change her writing process for the better. She says a month of maniac output taught her how to deal with writer's block; now she doesn't worry if her prose isn't perfect, she simply keeps writing because she knows inspiration will return, and because revision will always rescue a bad sentence.

These are terrific lessons, but as Paria says, "Not everyone needs to take such extreme measures. If you already have a writing practice you're comfortable with, you don't necessarily need to do it." Thank you, Paria.

Part of me thinks writing a novel in 30 days would take some joy out of the process. A novel is much larger in scope than a short story, and the complexity of that world demands time to explore it. I don't want to rush through the first draft of my book because I'm enjoying the process of investigation and experimentation. Writing a novel, for me, is more than putting one word in front of the other.

Still, I must admit, I'm a little envious of my students: the way the nearly impossible word count sends their characters in surprising directions; the community of writers the project provides, and the good old fashioned competition among friends who are also participating; the feeling of success with each daily goal reached, the column of pages rising and rising and rising.

All of my students say NaNoWriMo isn't as hard as they thought it would be, and that the amount of work they've already accomplished is invigorating. I applaud them, and I look forward to reading their new books!

- Edan Lepucki @ 8:52 PM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

Denis Johnson Wins 2007 National Book Award

Last year we noted that by honoring William T. Vollmann in 2005 and then Richard Powers the following year, the National Book Award seemed to be making a move toward "honoring some of the names on the leading edge of American fiction," as opposed to the old guard or the merely obscure. One could say that the NBA has always filled this roll, but it seemed to have lost its focus in the years before 2005, particularly in 2004, when five relative unknowns were nominated for the fiction prize and the entire literary community seemed collectively bewildered.

The NBA has stayed true to form, however, in 2007 with a strong slate of nominees and with this year's fiction winner, named last night, Denis Johnson, for his Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke. In discussing the finalists, we called Johnson the "presumptive favorite," and he was a favorite that many readers seemed to want to win. We have a review of the book available, and curious readers can also check out an excerpt. With Johnson away on assignment in Iraq, his wife accepted the award for him.

Moving to the other categories, Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A. (excerpt) took home the non-fiction prize, beating out Christopher Hitchens. Sherman Alexie, whose adult fiction has never made the cut for the fiction award, was a winner in the Young People's Literature category for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (excerpt). The poetry award went to Robert Hass for Time and Materials (poem).

For more on the award ceremony, check out the Times writeup. And Ed, who attended with several other bloggers, offered his own coverage as well.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:33 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Pandora Goes Classical

I haven't bought music in years, my interest in seeing live music has waned as well, but I remain obsessed with Pandora, a site where you can create your own radio station and hone it to your precise tastes over time by rating the music you hear.

On a Pandora, I have a few stations that I curate for myself. Over the last year, I've been spending a lot of time with my jazz station. I've always enjoyed jazz but knew next to nothing about it. However, after several months listening to my jazz station on Pandora, I've become a jazz fan who is at least semi-literate in the genre, able to pick out the name of an artist when I overhear some jazz at a restaurant, for example.

Noticing my newfound jazz knowledge, I hoped that a Pandora station might be able to help me with my other musical blind spot (or would that be deaf spot?): classical music. However, I was dismayed to find that Pandora didn't have classical music... That is, they didn't until today. So check back with me in a few months. By then my new classical station (named Soooo Classic, of course) will have made me something of an aficionado.

Bonus Link: Alex Ross in The New Yorker: "The Internet may be killing the pop CD, but it's helping classical music."

- C. Max Magee @ 10:11 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

If you're in New York tonight...

Stop by the stately Mercantile Library at 7 p.m., where the literary magazine [sic] will be hosting a party. I'll be reading from, and signing copies of, A Field Guide to the North American Family, and the illustrious Diane Williams, editor of NOON and author of Excitability, among other titles, will be reading from her new book, It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature. The Merc is located at 17 E 47th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues. I'd love to see you there.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 3:44 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

A Feast of Comics Goes Online

Now, this sounds like a good idea: Marvel Comics announced today that is has put more than 2,500 comic books online with more to come. The idea is that with a subscription, readers can get unlimited access to the online comic vault. Clearly Marvel's still working out the bugs - I tried to view some of the "free samples" but got a bunch of errors - but the move makes a lot of sense. Traditional publishers are experimenting with online readers, but the widgets are designed to make it easy to view snippets of books rather than whole books. With comics, much more easily consumed on a computer screen, these efforts seem more viable, as a trove of comics a click away will likely tempt many fans.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:15 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

From the Dark Corners of the Library

Where's Arthur's Gerbil?; A Pictorial Book of Tongue Coating; The Fangs of Suet Pudding: all real books apparently. Inspired by Bizarre Books: A Compendium of Classic Oddities, a new book collecting history's odd, obscure, and weird volumes, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Book Page is soliciting strange book titles from readers. The first entry might be the best: Cooking with Pooh, and why doesn't it surprise me that this one has become an Amazon collectors' item, with the cheapest copy on offer now going for the low, low price of $92.80.

(Thanks Laurie)

- C. Max Magee @ 11:12 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

The Little Strike That Could Do What, Exactly?

The ripples from the Hollywood writers' strike are felt well outside of the Hollywood pool. Broadway has gone darker than the plot of a Eugene O'Neill play as the stagehands show their solidarity. Production workers for NBC's "The Office" are out on their ear. Ellen DeGeneres caught in the middle (She and Oprah have both had tough Novembers). Others like Leno and Elaine from Seinfeld seen walking the picket lines with their pasty, underpaid worker bees (dust off the sensible shoes). The windows of houses across the nation glow blue with original "unscripted" Reality TV programming. One feckless young man with literary aspirations turns entrepreneur by selling shirts that read 'Striking Writer.' Somewhere, Aaron Sorkin weeps. Eugene Debs shudders in his grave. France smiles knowingly. Alex Rodriguez laughs.

The rest presumably writes itself...

- Noah Deutsch @ 11:00 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

So Long, Sweet Scientist: Norman Mailer Dies at 84

Norman Mailer, a colossus who bestrode worlds both literary and journalistic - and, at his best, combined them - has died of acute renal failure, according to the Times. Mailer had been in poor health for some time, and, given his hospitalization last month and his advanced age, his death comes as no surprise. And yet, in another way, it seems shocking: of the celebrated Jewish-American men who remade our literature in the middle of the last century (Bellow, Roth, Malamud, Salinger), Mailer seemed the most ecstatically alive. He rarely shied from a fight, or turned down an opportunity for self-promotion on the grounds that it might be beneath his dignity. Pursuing a life that would be its own kind of art - or at least entertainment - he indulged a vast range of interests: sports commentator, filmmaker, celebrity, co-founder of the Village Voice, mayoral candidate, drunk.... And this prodigious energy, this tendency to follow it whither it led, may explain why, of the authors cited above, his ratio of dross to gold was the highest. One occupation Mailer never seriously explored, to my knowledge, was editor.

That said, his death should clarify certain things about the Mailer canon, among them this: When he was good, he was brilliant. I cannot claim to have waded through Ancient Evenings, but The Executioner's Song, in its own strange way, surpasses the journalistic achievements of Capote's In Cold Blood, and leaves almost every other novel written in the Seventies looking morally and intellectually trivial. A writer less vainglorious - less convinced of his own ability to get all of life on the page - could never have written this book. In a way, Mailer was the last of the Romantics, more an heir to Byron than to Hemingway. Let us hope that his own heirs will be able to see through the glare of his celebrity to the writer, the sly rope-a-doper, who hid behind it.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 9:17 AM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

Laura Ingalls Wilder Revisited

Though the Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley isn't the most "sexy" of critics (Pete Dexter's comments notwithstanding), I've always enjoyed his columns. He will champion anything he believes is worth reading, even naming a book by John Grisham as one of the "best" of the year in 2005. He also clearly loves to read, and it shows in his writing, as opposed to, say, Michiko who I'd imagine dreads every book that crosses her threshold. Yardley also has a wonderful column called "Second Reading" that does away with the tyranny of the new and allows him to select and ruminate over any title from the vast trove of books he's read. This week revisits a classic that I remember warmly from my childhood, Little House in the Big Woods, the first book in Laura Ingalls Wilder's well-known series about life on the frontier.

Yardley offers some tidbits that were new to me: Wilder didn't start writing the books until she was in her early 60s, and her daughter, a popular journalist and novelist, co-wrote, or at least heavily edited, the books. In revisiting the book, Yardley doesn't succumb to nostalgia, but he does acknowledge why the books have had such staying power:

Some of the readers who've urged me to include one of Wilder's books in Second Reading have said that they can be as satisfying for adult readers as for younger ones. In the sense that I had a pleasant time rereading Little House in the Big Woods, I guess that I agree, but it's not exactly an adult pleasure. Wilder's prose is clean, her people are immensely appealing and the details she provides of frontier domestic life are fascinating, but we shouldn't try to persuade ourselves that these books are more than what they are: very good books for children that -- as I realize far more keenly now than when I was a boy -- paint a rather idealized picture of the American past. Wilder herself never seems to have pretended that she wrote for any except young readers, so let's take her word for it.

If you've read the books, you'll enjoy the essay.

Bonus Links: The Home-Schooling Book Boom, The Little Men Who Love Little House

- C. Max Magee @ 7:32 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Beowulf on the Big Screen

Seamus Heaney's seminal 2000 translation of the Old English epic Beowulf brought the work, first put to paper by an unknown Anglo-Saxon about a thousand years ago, into the 21st century. Heaney considers Beowulf "one of the foundation works of poetry in English." Now that cornerstone is getting the Hollywood treatment, and, as you might expect, some of its rougher edges have been smoothed over.

Most of us are familiar with the story: Beowulf, the Geat, comes to the aid of Hrothgar and the Danes by slaying Grendel, a man-eating monster that has been terrorizing the great hall at Heorot. I had a wonderfully illustrated version of Beowulf by Kevin Crossley-Holland and Charles Keeping that I would read and look at often growing up, and returned to the tale when someone gave me Heaney's translation. But the illustrations in the book I had as a kid have defined the visual elements of the story for me.

In what I always considered a bizarre and chilling twist, Beowulf, after vanquishing Grendel, tearing the beast's arm off with his bare hands, is forced to do battle with Grendel's mother in her lair at the bottom of a miasmic mear. The beast's mother? How weird, to use an Old English word in its modern sense. Keeping's drawings of the she-beast in the illustrated book are indelible (a sample).

So imagine my surprise when I found that, for the motion picture adaptation of Beowulf, Grendel's mother is played by... Angelina Jolie? That's right, the she-beast has been scrubbed just a bit, as you can see from this still. Apparently the movie's writers took other liberties with the story as it relates to the relationship between Beowulf and Grendel's mother. Well, that's Hollywood, and hey, a sexy makeover can make any mother's day. But what I would really like to see is Jolie voyage to the Danish countryside and return with a hulking, hirsute, one-armed ogre with a taste for human flesh as the latest addition to her ethnically diverse brood of adopted children. Monsters need love too.

- Noah Deutsch @ 10:14 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Modern In A Post-Modern World

There's an old Woody Allen nightclub routine, dating back to his stand-up days in the mid-60s, that goes a little like this:

"I was in Europe many years ago with Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had just written his first novel, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said that is was a good novel, but not a great one, and that it needed some work, but it could be a fine book. And we laughed over it. Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

That winter Picasso lived on the Rue d'Barque, and he had just painted a picture of a naked dental hygienist in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Gertrude Stein said it was a good picture, but not a great one, and I said it could be a fine picture. We laughed over it and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald came home from their wild New Years Eve party. It was April. Scott had just written Great Expectations, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said it was a good book, but there was no need to have written it, 'cause Charles Dickens had already written it. We laughed over it, and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

That winter we went to Spain to see Manolete fight, and he looked to be eighteen, and Gertrude Stein said no, he was nineteen, but that he only looked eighteen, and I said sometimes a boy of eighteen will look nineteen, whereas other times a nineteen year old can easily look eighteen... That's the way it is with a true Spaniard. We laughed over that... and Gertrude Stein punched me in the mouth."

Alan Rudolph's 1988 film The Moderns dips into the same well. Set in Paris, in 1926, the central story is a fictional love-triangle. Weaving in and out of the story, however, are Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, being oh so iconic and giving the film much of its historical flavor, and its humor.

"Modern" is certainly a fluid term, and to flatly state that any one era permanently defines the term is, I suppose, arrogant. But Paris in the early part of last century, and in particular the 1920s was, indeed, a remarkable era of Modernism in which literature, visual arts, music and the theories behind all of these not only propelled themselves forward but bounced off of each other.

And at the centre of it all was Gertrude Stein, mentor to such then-unknown writers as Ernest Hemingway, champion of unknown painters like Matisse and Picasso, writer and linguistic innovator who would herself be influenced by Picasso's stylistic shifts to the point where her own writing was seen as cubist. Her Saturday night salons brought together the painters and writers who are now seen as being the stars of the modern era. She introduced the world to the Moderns.

The best memoir of this remarkable era is Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Written late in his life, these twenty short, masterfully crafted vignettes depict his life in Paris from 1921 to 1926, a period of tutelage, as it were, at the feet of Gertrude Stein, whose pronouncements on what was "important" and what was "modern," were taken as gospel by the young writers and painters of Paris. Stein impressed upon Hemingway the necessity of choosing the exact words to convey the reality of the story, a lesson which informed everything he would write.

A Moveable Feast is also a memoir of a place, specifically Montparnasse on Paris' left bank. We see Hemingway at home with his wife Hadley and small child, braving cold Parisian winters. We see him in the cafes and bars of the quarter, surrounded by strangers, yet blocking them out and focusing on the writing at hand. We see his blossoming friendship with the troubled Fitzgerald, and his association with Ezra Pound. It's a fascinating collection of stories, and remains my favorite Hemingway book. You feel like you're reading a fine short-story collection. These tales easily match the clean, precise prose of his best short fiction. Except, I realize, for the "fiction" part. But that's nitpicking.

Another book that covers some of the same territory, and features many of the same players, is Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. This memoir, written by Stein in the 1930s, adopts the gossipy, conversational tone of her partner, Miss Toklas, recounting the story of her life, and centering on her relationship with Miss Stein, who effectively becomes the central character, the catalyst in this "autobiography." So, despite the title, it's really an autobiography of Gertrude Stein herself, who suspends her normally abstract literary style to assume the voice of Miss Toklas. Which I admit all seems very post-modern for a memoir by and of one of "the moderns." The conceit - adopting Miss Toklas's voice, spares the reader what might have been a head-scratchingly abstract memoir. On the other hand, Stein's adoption of her partner's flighty tone fills the memoir with an inordinate amount of frivolousness and gossip.

Still, there's enough meat in this memoir to make it a must-read for anyone interested in this era of literature and painting. Stein, through Toklas's eyes, gives us glimpses into the formative years of the wonderful composer Erik Satie, and era-defining painters such as Picasso and Matisse, who were regulars at Stein's salons, and whose early works were on display at the Montparnasse home shared by Stein and Toklas. And, not surprisingly, young Hemingway makes several appearances in Stein's memoir. A favorite of hers (though, seemingly, less so of Alice's) we see her intellectually doting on him with great affection. And, as in Hemingway's memoir, Paris itself is a character, both Montparnasse on the left bank, and also the storied Montmartre further north.

As it happens, I was in Paris in early September, having come up by train from southwestern France, and was met at the Gare d'Austerlitz by my friends Doug and Anna who had come down from London. Item one on the agenda: a lingering lunch, replete with champagne, wines, and spirits at the Closerie de Lilas, a favorite haunt of Hemingway's, and a locale that figures prominently in A Moveable Feast. This set the tone for the next few days. If Hemingway ate or drank or wrote there, who are we to walk by without symbolically paying our respects.

It's all a romantic conceit, of course. Paris moved on after the "Modern" era ended, but for fans of Hemingway and the Moderns, why not let A Moveable Feast spread itself before us? Place Contrescarpe, rue Cardinal Lemoine, the Pantheon: there they are. There's something to be said for sitting on a stoop across from the Pantheon at two in the morning, Doug and Anna poring over the map, me staring at the Pantheon, mesmerized by its grandeur, my stupor enhanced doubly by the two a.m. September stillness.

The adventure continued the next day. Anna having returned to London, Doug and I decided to trek up through Montparnasse, across the river, through central Paris, up to Picasso's digs. Up to Montmartre. Me hobbling, having fallen moments after stepping onto the sidewalk.

I do this. I fall down a lot. A flight of recently polished stairs, I can careen down it in half a second. Stepping off my old back porch after a light snowfall? I become a gymnast, somersaulting down with expertise. And then there's the now-legendary "incident" on the stairs leading down to London's Leicester Square tube station a few years ago. I slipped on the rain-slicked top step and bounced down the remainder, with no one, NO ONE, seeming to notice.

So there I was, limping my way from Montparnasse up to Montmartre, looking like a transplanted Ratzo Rizzo to my friend Doug's Joe Buck, knowing that somehow, somewhere, Ernest Hemingway was shaking his head and Gertrude Stein was rolling her eyes. But what the hell, in our post-modern world, you're only modern once.

- Andrew Saikali @ 10:08 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Bookslut, All is Forgiven

Bookslut, I know we've had our differences in the past, but after this, all is forgiven.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 6:41 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Hatfields, McCoys, and Book Banning

Pat Conroy recently unleashed a verbal beating on a West Virginia school district that, prodded by complaints from parents, suspended the teaching of two of his novels. English teachers, in particular, will smile when they read this. It begins:

I received an urgent e-mail from a high school student named Makenzie Hatfield of Charleston, West Virginia. She informed me of a group of parents who were attempting to suppress the teaching of two of my novels, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. I heard rumors of this controversy as I was completing my latest filthy, vomit-inducing work. These controversies are so commonplace in my life that I no longer get involved. But my knowledge of mountain lore is strong enough to know the dangers of refusing to help a Hatfield of West Virginia. I also do not mess with McCoys.

Keep reading.

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

 

Gladwell is Back

Both on his blog and in The New Yorker.