Up and Away

Mrs. Millions and I will be departing tomorrow for a trip to Greece and Turkey. Of all the many things to be excited about, we are most excited about the food. And in Turkey, we will have a local tour guide in the form of Emre, our longtime Turkish correspondent here at The Millions.

We're trying to travel very light, just a backpack each, and that doesn't leave much room for reading material. We allowed ourselves to each select a paperback (and a magazine or two) and presumably we will swap the paperbacks if we finish them before our trip is over. Mrs. Millions is bringing The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, and I have decided to read Maqroll for a second time. I'm also bringing the latest New Yorker, which is, regrettably, the Style Issue.

While I'm gone, the rest of the gang at The Millions will be taking over. See you soon!

- C. Max Magee @ 8:21 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

David Brooks and the BoBo Shuffle

Yesterday, as Emily was writing her response to David Brooks' most recent New York Times column, I was stewing about exactly the same topic. I had been similarly inspired a few months back, when Kevin wrote on the rise of pop-intellecutalism, but had found myself too enervated to complete a post. Now, spurred by Emily's questions, and those of our commenters, I thought I'd give it a try.

The answer to "the mystery of the two faces of David Brooks" is, I think, precisely that he is a divided soul. His New York Times columns and NewsHour appearances reveal a man torn between a heterodox sensibility (the Dr. Jeckyll who is clearly disappointed by the Bush years) and his paying gig as a 21st Century pundit... that is, as the Mr. Hyde whose job is to regurgitate talking points.

Unlike Robert Louis Stevenson's protagonist, however, Brooks' double life is heavily incentivized. The success of the Brooks franchise rests on his reputation as "The Republican Who Explains Republican thinking to Democrats." And so he's rewarded - financially and reputationally - for flourishes of ideological eclecticism. "Ah, what a fresh take on things," we think, reading his appeals for a new politics. "A center-right analyst who speaks his mind, regardless of partisan pieties." (It bears mentioning that there are few pundits on the left who show comparable flexibility or felicity.)

But it is documentable that Brooks' flexibility only lasts while the electoral stakes for the G.O.P. are relatively low - as they were for most of the long '07 - '08 Democratic primary season. Whenever things begin to look dark for the national Republican party, Mr. Hyde emerges, dagger in hand. As a deft reciter of the party line, Brooks becomes an apparatchik for the very status quo he spends 20 months out of every election cycle bemoaning. (This is, by the way, the exact pattern that has characterized the 2008 McCain campaign, except that it's easier to forgive McCain; he's a politician, not an "analyst.")

In print and on TV, Brooks comes across as a smart and sympathetic guy, but for at least seven years now, he's been (however consciously) perpetrating intellectual fraud. In Aristotelian terms, he embezzles from a surplus of hard-won Ethical appeal to support a slush-fund of Pathetic biases. A dramatic case in point comes from the 2004 Democratic convention, when, immediately after John Kerry's speech, he told PBS' Jim Lehrer that Kerry had done "quite a lot better" projecting "muscular centrism":

I think the lesson for Republicans is you're not going to destroy this guy John Kerry. You're not going to disqualify him from being president after this week. You're going to have to make the other alternative that you've got your own version of muscular centrism.

The next day, in the Times, Brooks, apparently unnerved by Kerry momentum, pronounced the same speech, "an incoherent disaster."

Perhaps Brooks actually bought his conceit that the "unforgiving light of day" had chemically altered the contents of the speech; a critic of partisan posturing should know better. More likely, he merely underrated the overlap between NewsHour viewers and Times readers. A writer who claims intimacy with the Bobo lifestyle putatively lived in, say, Chicago's Hyde Park - the "exlusive enclave" where my schoolteacher in-laws rent an apartment two blocks from the Obamas' lovely but by no means extravagant home - should know better.

In any case, it should have come as no surprise to see Brooks skewer Obama the day after the convention - particularly when I suspect that Brooks, like Paul Krugman, wrote his column on Thursday afternoon, prior to watching Obama accept the nomination. (Note the rhetorical ambiguity of Brooks' column, the way it skirts the question of whether it is a reaction or a prediction. Ask yourself if Brooks could have based his analysis not on Obama's delivery, but on the leaked text of the speech - a text he praised on the NewsHour, by way of denigrating the delivery. Now ask yourself again if you want to take Brooks' reaction seriously.)

Consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but, if history is any indication, David Brooks is consistently inconsistent, and so screwed either way. In the last two months before a closely fought presidential election, we can expect him to rediscover his talent as a canny, cynical partisan shill, for whom politics is merely a rarefied form of marketing, designed to play on consumers' fears. And in this, he will be no more or less than a member in good standing of a proud band of brothers and sisters - Frank Rich, Der Krauthammer, George Will, Cokie Roberts, et al. Perhaps we should rebrand the Op/Ed pages as what they really are - Special Advertising Sections - and be done with them. Me, I'll be off reading Andrew Sullivan.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 1:33 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

The Schizophrenic David Brooks

What to call David Brooks' column in the New York Times this morning? "Appalling" is the word that comes most readily to mind, but that is not quite what I mean. It is a hard piece of writing to classify. I think it was intended to be a parody of Obama's speech, but what it seems more like is a free-writing exercise performed by a hardened misanthrope under the influence of 15 martinis or some kind of psychotropic substance. In short, it seems like it was written by a crazy person. This possibly dangerous crazy alter-ego also wrote - interestingly, tellingly - an equally crazy column some time ago called something like "The Two Obamas" in which frequent references were made to "Fast Eddie Obama," a man who was fond of throwing people under trucks. If you happened to read Brooks' column of the day before Obama nominated Biden, this impression of madness is heightened: that piece was a matter-of-fact political analysis that might well have been written by someone of no party affiliation.

Dear Millions readers, do you have any insights into the mystery of the two faces of David Brooks? I find his duplicity fascinating and genuinely troubling and would be delighted to have it illuminated.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 9:30 PM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

Inter Alia #12: Tell No One I'm A Literary Snob

Film critics have lauded the French thriller Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One) with adjectives fit for a personal ad: "taut," "sexy," "smart..." Having recently caught a matinee, I'm willing to attest to its tautness. However, the climax reminded me that dramatic smarts entail more than a pensive hero and a Gallic pedigree. By way of elaboration, I will now spoil the ending: A bad guy, training a gun on the hero, maps out one of the most convoluted conspiracies this side of Behold, A Pale Horse. Then he orders the hero to keep listening: "But wait, there's more. I also killed your father."

The "Let me explain my master plan" speech is a staple of crime novels, and has enlivened any number of TV shows. We accept the convention without balking because generic narratives like The ABC Murders, Scooby Doo, and Murder, She Wrote aren't claiming to be "smart"; they're meant to entertain. But when characters who've been granted all the appurtenances of serious drama - histories, mannerisms, tastes - are suddenly reduced to conduits for information, as they are in Tell No One, the reader experiences cognitive dissonance. Who writes this stuff? he wonders.

The answer, in this case, is the quintessentially American Harlan Coben, from whose novel the film was adapted. In a memorable Atlantic Monthly profile last year, Eric Konigsberg portrayed Coben as a nice guy, albeit slightly insecure about his reputation vis-a-vis that of his Amherst dorm-mate, David Foster Wallace. But this being the Atlantic, the profile also attempted to pose questions (or stoke resentments) about the nature of literary distinction:

In Las Vegas, I asked Coben how he felt about being invisible to the world represented by The New York Times Book Review, and about the parallel-universe status that so much crime fiction, including his books, has. At first he was au fait about it, but then he got worked up. 'If I asked you to name five great books that survived 100 years ago that don't have a crime in them, you couldn't,' he said.

Not having read the work, I was willing to give Coben the benefit of the doubt. Now, after seeing the movie, I'm more inclined to agree with his later admission, "It's not like I'm an artist."

Konigsberg and Coben are right to suggest (and I've argued before) that the distinction between art and genre fiction rests on false premises. Cormac McCarthy alone should demonstrate that a novel can contain a murder, or an apocalypse, or a dead mule, and still be literature. Yet to imply that a writer of westerns, thrillers, or romances automatically deserves to be considered alongside Dostoevsky is to err in the other direction. If anything, the NYTBR's problem is not that it accords too little serious consideration to genre writers, but that it accords too much to novelists toiling in the vineyards of literary fiction.

That is, there is a distinction between art and entertainment; it's just not the one we've been thinking of. FSG's Jonathan Galassi and Grove/Atlantic's Morgan Entrekin came close to pinning it down at a publishing panel last year, when they suggested that "genre fiction" aims to repeat an excitement, by meeting established conventions, whereas literature inaugurates new conventions, and thus new excitements. (Of course, innovations of character and of language require more column-inches to explain to potential readers.) By this definition, plenty of the short stories in The New Yorker constitute genre fiction, while some "crime novels" - those of Richard Price, for example - are literature. And even great artists - the Dickens of Little Dorrit, comes to mind - can lean too heavily on crutches like the expository filibuster.

Without knocking the pure entertainment value of watching Harlan Coben's characters fulfill their generic destinies, Tell No One is no Crime and Punishment. It's not even The Fugitive. Yet it seems frivolous to bemoan the literary establishment's "parallel universe" when your own universe comprises a vast audience and sums of money Dostoevsky only dreamed of. If literary discrimination is, by definition, elitism, it is, in America, an elitism without teeth. And even when elitists like me campaign to preserve the meaning of the words "smart" and "literary," we know that a taut, sexy, and ultimately silly thriller is still nothing to sniff at.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 3:10 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Caro's Fourth LBJ Volume Still a Ways Off, But Getting Closer

Just about four years ago, we were asked when Robert Caro might wrap up his much praised, award-bedecked, and quite massive four-part biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. The best we could offer at the time was to say:

Well, the short answer is that they don't have a date yet, but we can at least hazard a guess. The first book, The Path to Power came out in 1982; the second, Means of Ascent, in 1990, and the third, Master of the Senate, in 2002. So, after doing some back of the envelope calculations, I would expect to see the fourth and final volume (tentatively titled The Presidency) some time between 2010 and 2014.

As it turns out, my guess may still be on target. Marking the 100th anniversary of LBJ's birth (which is tomorrow), Caro spoke with the AP on LBJ's legacy. The article offers this update on the book:

The historian says he has completed the opening section of his fourth LBJ book, filling hundreds of pages just to tell of Johnson's brief, unhappy vice presidency under John Kennedy, concluding with Johnson being sworn in as president after Kennedy's assassination. The last book will be "very long," although likely less than the 1,000-plus length of Master of the Senate. He is reluctant to reveal details, but says the Kennedys will be "more than characters; they are protagonists in this book."

Sounds like I might have just enough time to read the first three before this one comes out.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:49 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Amazon Buys Shelfari; Bookfinder Announces Its 2008 Top 10

A pair of interesting addenda to my post on Amazon from earlier in the month:

The online bookselling giant went ahead and snapped up the piece of book cataloging site Shelfari that it didn't already own.

As we had noted, after buying AbeBooks, Amazon suddenly owned the two big rivals in the book cataloging space, Shelfari and LibraryThing, and since, to this observer, it seemed like combining the two sites would be a non-starter, Amazon was likely to throw its weight behind one or the other. Unsurprisingly, Amazon picked Shelfari, as Tim Spalding, LibraryThing's founder, has long been wary of Amazon (though not hostile towards it). As TechCrunch speculates, Amazon may divest its shares of LibraryThing, and I'd guess that Spalding wouldn't mind that too much.

Secondly, bookfinder.com, the extremely comprehensive used book search engine (now owned by Amazon via its purchase of AbeBooks), has released its annual report on the most sought after out-of-print and hard-to-find books over the last year. Once again, Madonna's relic from the 1990s, Sex, tops the list. But from there the list gets very eclectic and interesting, with books like Bob Dylan's Drawn Blank, The Jerusalem Bible illustrated by Salvador Dali, and Bruce Davidson's photo book Subway. The report also has lists by genre and offers up a little background on some of the more interesting titles.

- C. Max Magee @ 8:34 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 65th in a Series (Poetry in the Waning Days of Summer)

Michael wrote in with this question:

For some reason (an end of summer shortening of attention span, perhaps) I'm in the mood for poetry, so I was wondering if, in the interest of discussing that other form of literature, the crew at The Millions could suggest some favorite poems, poets or poetry collections (the latter would be especially helpful, its the easiest way to carry around a dozen great mind in your pocket). Anyway, thanks for any suggestions.

A trio of Millions contibutors chimed in on this one:

Andrew: Full disclosure: my experience with poetry has been minimal, and for the most part it is my obsession with song and music that has led me to certain poets. In this context, then, I have been stirred most by the poetic voice of Leonard Cohen. The very fact that I know his voice intimately from his songs means that I hear his poems, too, spoken in my ear in that same voice. And while he's often labeled as a darkly intense romantic, in fact some of his finest poems have a light, playful quality. The one that first caught my attention is a little thing called "I Wonder How Many People In This City", from The Spice-Box of Earth, his second collection of poems from 1961. Here it is in its entirety:

I wonder how many people in this city
live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when I look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
looking back at me
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.

All his collections are great, and his first one Let Us Compare Mythologies, from 1956, has recently been reissued. Additionally, many of his poems (including the one cited) and song lyrics can be found within the pages of the massive Stranger Music.

Garth: Inspired by Craig Finn of the Hold Steady, I've been working my way through John Berryman's Dream Songs this year. Even for someone like me, who enjoys the fragmentary and fractal poetry of, say, John Ashbery, the Dream Songs were an adjustment, in that point-of-view and syntax are ever-shifting. For the first ten poems, I found myself searching for a way in. But this seems to be one of those great books that teaches you how to read it; I latched on to the rhythm, started reading the poems aloud to myself, and was off and running. One of the pleasures of reading this book is that so many of my friends turn out to have read it, and everyone has different favorites. Dream Songs Week at The Millions, anyone?

Emily: If you don't have a preexisting taste for a particular kind of poetry and you like browsing, there's really nothing like The Norton Anthology of Poetry - then you've got everything from Beowulf to Billy Collins (our former poet laureate, whom I loathe, but many people seem to like) in chronological order, along with brief bios of all the poets, and a bit of a reader's guide on versification (rhyme, meter, forms) and poetic syntax. But it's not cheap and with 1828 poems by 334 poets, it's not a pocket book either.

For price and selection - oh, most beloved of American publishers! - you cannot beat Dover paperbacks for poetry collections (where, right now, you can also get Obama and McCain paperdolls). All of their books are between a dollar and $10 and they have both single author collections (Yeats, Rochester - one of my favorites - a dirty, disillusioned Restoration poet, Browning, most wonderful Keats, Blake, Christina Rosetti, Tennyson, Sandburg), and multi-author collections. Favorite American Poems and 101 Best Loved Poems both looked good, but they have historical collections as well, like English Romantic Poetry, if you want to be more methodical in your reading.

I also highly recommend the Academy of American Poets. They have an extensive online collection of poetry by American and English poets - more poets than the Norton - and they also have recordings of many of the poets reading their work. I highly recommend listening to Gwendolyn Brooks reading "We Real Cool" or Langston Hughes reading "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." It's a very user-friendly site and in addition to better biographical sketches than the Norton, they have an index of occasional poems for those so inclined (wedding, funeral, etc).

As for individual favorite poems: I love Christopher Smart's crazy "Jubilate Agno" - it's a long poem, but a small portion of it gets anthologized and excerpted a lot as "For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry" or just "My Cat Jeoffry." I also love Ogden Nash's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man" (also, if you can find the recording of this, it's delightful). Robert Herrick's short poems: "The Night Piece, to Julia," "Upon Julia's Clothes," "Upon Prue, His Maid," "Delight in Disorder," and also his pastoral poems like "The Hock Cart" and "Corinna's Going A-Maying." Milton is great but he's a workout - his syntax can be a bit like taking part in WWF Smackdown for some readers. And Marvell's "The Garden," his "Mower" poems, and "Bermudas." Others to try: Gerrard Manly Hopkins, Christina Rosetti's "Goblin Market," Dorothy Parker's "Resume," Robert Graves, W.H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes' "The Thought Fox" ...There are so many more, but I think I've probably already said too much.

As a final note: I recommend you begin by reading William Carlos Williams' "This is just to say" and then read Kenneth Koch's "Variations on a theme by William Carlos Williams."

- Editor @ 7:52 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Appearing Elsewhere

Over at More Intelligent Life, you'll find my reflections on the Joseph Mitchell centenary. Mitchell is, for my money, the greatest reporter-stylist of his era; the essay points to a few reasons why. In related news, The New York Times today reports on a blog version of the diaries of that other great reporter-stylist, George Orwell.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 1:04 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Quarterly Report: Harry Potter Hangover

As we have every quarter for the last several, we're looking at Barnes & Noble's recent quarterly report to gauge the trends that are impacting the book industry - which books were big over the last few months and what's expected for the months ahead.

As was noted last quarter, amid a challenging environment for both of the big chains, there was much speculation that Barnes & Noble would snap up struggling Borders. Now, it appears that Barnes & Noble has lost interest in going that route. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Barnes & Noble's decision not to bid reflects in part the tight lending markets that likely would make it difficult to arrange bank financing. The retailer was also known to be concerned about the length of some of the leases that Borders has signed."

Beyond that, Barnes & Noble's Q2 was surprisingly ok, surpassing Wall Street's admittedly dim view of its prospects by keeping a tight lid on costs.

What follows are insights gleaned from Barnes and Noble CEO Steve Riggio's comments on the quarterly conference call for the quarter ended August 2nd. (Transcript provided by provided by Seeking Alpha.) The Harry Potter hangover was in full effect in Q2, as it marked a year since the series' final book came out. Up against the boy wizard-fueled numbers of a year ago, Barnes & Noble's revenue dipped by -1.6% from a year ago. Just like last quarter, Riggio didn't really discuss any individual titles, though in the past he has been known to run down top sellers and look ahead to highly anticipated books. It may just be that there's not much out there getting the book exec excited these days. A couple of other highlights:

• Riggio explains that the book business may not be in as bad shape as many assume: "The closer examination of sales will reveal that even in this soft retail environment across America, the book business is stubbornly holding up. If we normalized our sales without the impact of Harry Potter and its add on sales last year, throw in the double digit decline we're still experiencing in the music business, the rest of our business was relatively flat so as we've said for many years, the book business is a relatively stable business."
• The Olympics are expected to take a small but noticeable bite out of sales in Q3, as folks stay glued to their TVs and put off shopping and reading.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:37 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

We don't live in Rabbit Angstrom's world anymore, though maybe we wish we did

The early years of this century have inspired an uncommon amount of speculation about America's advancing age. The Olympic Opening Ceremony in Beijing, and the ensuing changing-of-the-guard buzz it inspired, was only the latest, and most pointed, example of the creeping feeling that America, while hardly a senior citizen, might be past its prime.

The change, if it happened, was sudden. I took an international relations class in 2002, my junior year of college, and all of books we read focused on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the new age of American unipolar dominance. Such thinking seems wistful, if not naive today, squeezed and suddenly vulnerable as we are to the unpredictability of terrorism, the rise of petrostates, and the momentum of China. The changing complexion of the world has inspired a raft of books on American descent, some of which look outward in their analysis, like Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World, and others, like The Omnivore's Dilemma, that look inward at our unsustainable national habits.

This shift in the national mood was brought home to me when, this summer, I reread Rabbit, Run, which I had first picked up in high school, and at the time appreciated largely for the basketball on the cover and the scenes between the sheets. The novel opens with Rabbit trapped at home, with a pregnant, alcoholic wife in a dingy apartment. The coat closet door bangs against the television set when he opens it partway to hang up his suit coat, a precise and simple illustration of the confined place the former high school basketball star has come to in his mid-twenties. Sent by his wife Janice to retrieve their young son Nelson, Rabbit instead steals into the family car and points his way out of town. Rabbit does not get far though. He's disoriented soon after crossing from Pennsylvania into West Virginia, and by daybreak the next morning he is back in the bowl of Brewer, ensconced mere miles from the his wife and kid, first with his old high school basketball coach and then for a longer stay with a wounded amateur prostitute named Ruth.

I read Rabbit, Run several months after finishing two novels from our time featuring troubled male protagonists. Frank Bascombe in Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land and Hans van den Broek in Joseph O'Neill's Netherland are constructed similarly to Rabbit, in that they are distinctively strong and confident in one part of their lives, but fundamentally weak and uncertain in the emotional dimensions that matter most. Though he's some years out of high school, Rabbit still maintains the cocksureness and presence of a talented athlete. Frank and Hans are confident and assured as well-off, successful professionals, yet like Rabbit, they are emotionally feeble and crippled in their marriages.

The characters are similar in design, yet reading Rabbit, Run, I was struck by just how differently Updike depicts Rabbit's dislocation, compared with the renderings Ford and O'Neill give their characters fifty years later. The last line of The Lay of the Land describes Frank's descent into a Minneapolis airport, bound for the Mayo Clinic with his second wife tight by his side. "A bump, a roar," Ford writes, "a heavy thrust forward into life again, and we resume our human scale upon the land." The idea of returning to the ground, and to life, marks a break with the feeling of suspension that permeates the three books of the Bascombe trilogy. Battered by the tragedies that have accumulated in his life, Frank floats down the many miles of the Jersey turnpike, and drifts just out of reach of his emotions and the other people in his life. A similar sense of distance accents Netherland. Hans surveys New York from an upper floor of the Chelsea hotel and appears to have the same vantage on the events of his own life, dazed, almost, as if drugged, a surveyor hanging by the foot from a hot air balloon.

Rewind fifty years, however, and Updike offers a different view of the situation. To hear Rabbit tell it, he is anything but adrift from the circumstances of his life. He is more besieged, and the language throughout Rabbit, Run is abrasive and aggressive. Rabbit is "irritated" by Ruth's friends. The strap of his golf bag "gnaws at his shoulder." The chair in his living room "attacks" his knees and his son's strewn toys "derange" his head. He is beset at every turn, gripped as if trying to escape the clawing branches of a phantasmagoric forest. Though Frank and Hans are just as up against it as Rabbit, Updike's language, describing such direct conflict, seems of a simpler time, when the antagonists in the world could still be so clearly named. A bag strap, a chair, some children's toys.

The stresses Rabbit faces are the stresses of youth, crucible pressures which bore in on him. It's not pressure, though, that afflicts Hans and Frank. They face instead the dissolution of narrative, the escape of once familiar boundaries and reliable sources of meaning. Frank has confronted the loss of his son, the end of his marriage, and cancer, unknowable episodes from Rabbit's vantage. Frank's losses have not left him with the oppression of a place he knows too well, the way Brewer confronts Rabbit, but instead with the void of a place he knows not at all. That the world becomes less intelligible, not more, as we grow older, is the wisdom Frank has to offer Rabbit, an allowance to ease the struggle, and perhaps a message for our time.

- Kevin Hartnett @ 8:15 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

An Answer to a Frequently Asked Question

Lots of people I know seem to be going on vacation in the next few weeks, and not a few of them have asked me to recommend some books to tote along to the beach or woods. It has occurred to me that I get these requests quite often so I thought it might be a good idea to put some of my favorite books all in one place for easy access. So, if you are one of those people who might be interested in a book recommendation, check out the list I just made on Amazon.

A few caveats: This list contains only books I have personally read (even though I have often been known to recommend books I haven't read based on what I've been hearing from my trusted fellow readers). This list contains only fiction (I may do a non-fiction list at some point). These are just the books I came up with while sleepily sitting at my desk this morning; I'll add to the list as I think of more books that I have liked (and in the future, as I read more). Enjoy!

- C. Max Magee @ 7:18 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 64th in a Series (Closed Room Mysteries)

Judy wrote in with this question:

What is a "closed room mystery?" I came across this term in the blurbs for the ARC of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, which I have been assigned to read for a certain project.

I googled the term and got some hints, such as that all the suspects are in one room, but not an actual definition. The term is used in all kinds of reviews and critcism and I would like a definitive definition, if you know what I mean.

Judy, imagine you and five other writers are at a retreat on a remote estate working on your books, and then, one day, promising young novelist Jonathan Foster Gatsby turns up dead. As you and the other four remaining residents of what is now seeming like an awfully remote piece of real estate stand over the body, a chilling fact dawns on you and your colleagues: everyone in the room is the suspect. Luckily you have a knack for detective work, and following a few clues (and sidestepping a couple more dead bodies), you determine that it was the soft-spoken Zelda Eyre that did it.

That is a very hasty and very silly example of a "closed room mystery." Essentially, from the moment the mystery commences, every character in the book is a suspect, and typically some form of isolation precludes the notion that the culprit came from outside this group. Millions contributor Emily suggests some examples: [Agatha Christie's] Murder on the Orient Express or And Then There Were None (originally titled Ten Little Indians) or the boardgame Clue.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:50 PM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

Living With Crazy Buttocks (and other crazy titles)

It began as a way to pass the time at the Frankfurt Book Fair: find and log the strangest book titles of the year. And so the Diagram Prize For Oddest Title of the Year was born. Now, thirty years later, and indeed not to be outdone by the fine folks over at the Booker, we will soon have a Diagram of Diagrams.

You can read about the history of the Diagram prize at Bookseller.com, see the list of past Diagram prize winners and vote for the Diagram of Diagrams.

My personal favorites: 1982's Population and Other Problems, 1986's Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality (with a sequel!), 2002's Living With Crazy Buttocks, and for those with a penchant for the macabre: 1995's Reusing Old Graves and 2005's People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It - (It's the What to Do About It part that I need to know).

Sadly, there are no links to text excerpts for any of these titles. It is left to my fertile imagination, then, to envision how one actually lives with crazy buttocks (and just how crazy they need to be to require instruction).

I'm sure there are countless odd titles out there that have been neglected. Feel free to comment with your favorite unsung odd title, or tell us your favorite odd title from the full list.

- Andrew Saikali @ 6:50 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

The Millions Quiz: The First Time is Always the Best

So that you may get to know us better, it's The Millions Quiz, yet another occasionally appearing series. Here, as conceived of by our contributor Emily, we answer questions about our reading habits and interests, the small details of life that like-minded folks may find illuminating, and we ask you to join us by providing your own answers in the comments or on your own blogs.

Today's Question: What was the book that started it all for you?

Edan: According to my mother, I could read novels before I was potty trained. I'm not contesting that mythology, but the first time I remember being totally enamored with a book was later than that, at about age 8, when my mother bought me Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery. I'd read and liked other books - The Babysitters Club series, of course, and nearly everything by Judy Blume - but Anne of Green Gables felt more magical, and more mature. It took me to a faraway world, specifically, to Prince Edward Island in the early 20th century, and used big, unfamiliar words (I remember asking my mom what the word "abundance" meant on the ride home from the bookstore - I had a small tingling of fear - or was it excitement? - that this book would be difficult). I loved that the story's protagonist had carrot red hair, and, even better, freckles like mine! I took to calling people "kindred spirits" and wondering if I could pull of puffed sleeves. I spent the next couple of years reading Montgomery's entire oeuvre, and I started taping the following warning into my inside book covers:

This book is one thing
My fist is another
You take this
And you'll get the other

Andrew: During my senior high school year, on an otherwise unremarkable school night, my English teacher - an inspiring educator named Robert Majer - took the entire class out to Zappi's Pizza, where, on a large screen, Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange leapt off of the wall, tossed aside plates of steaming pizza, and grabbed each one of us by the throat, commanding our attention. The next day, in a private moment following a discussion of the film, Mr. Majer brought out his own copy of the novel (we weren't actually studying the novel in the class) and lent it to me.

There had been novels that floored me before (Salinger's Catcher in the Rye affected me as strongly as it did countless other youths) and in a matter of months I would immerse myself in American masters from Hemingway to Irving, by way of Vonnegut, not to mention all those nineteenth-century Russians. But the singular experience of reading Anthony Burgess, who contorted and then caressed the English language, made a huge impression on me and left me with a feeling that anything could be achieved with language. And that fiction is an expansive and limitless medium.

Emily: The book that started it all for me was Little Black, A Pony, by Walter Farley. I, aged three, woke my parents up sobbing with the anguished announcement "I can't read!" Thanks to my mom and trusty Little Black, I am now an accomplished reader (and a competent horsewoman). While this 1961 children's book has recently been translated into Navajo and re-illustrated by Baje Whitethorne, Jr., the one I knew and loved had a little very blond and very crew-cutted Hardy Boys looking boy on the cover, and this original edition is still available for about five bucks (including shipping) through Amazon Marketplace. Not for the last time (ehem, cat dissertation), I found myself entranced by the animal's eye-view.

Emre: You pose a difficult question and at best I have 15 different answers. Agatha Christie and Jules Verne were my elementary school darlings, but I really turned the corner summer of junior year in high school with an unexpected choice that is brilliant in its simple collage of people, geography, life, death, love and suffering. I was high on Kemal Tahir's Yorgun Savascı, which we had read during the school year. My father was quick to seize on my excitement about this novel, which told the story of the resistance against the occupying Allied Powers in post-World War I Istanbul and the budding independence movement in Anatolia. So, my dad casually suggested I leaf through Nazim Hikmet's Human Landscapes from My Country. At the time a copy of Hikmet's epic rested in our bathroom, atop the laundry machine. (Yes, laundry machines are often found in bathrooms in Turkish homes, to me it was the most normal thing growing up. And, yes, newspapers and assorted literature were always abundant in our domestic restroom.)

One evening I took my seat on the porcelain throne and picked up Human Landscapes from My Country - never to put it down. My legs went numb and I forgot where I was as I dug into Hikmet's verses, which in plain yet moving terms paint a startling picture of Turkey and its people. Starting with a traveler drinking at Haydarpasa, Istanbul's second primary train station on the Asian side, the 17,000-line epic chronicles landscapes and people, wars and the birth of a nation. Don't get thrown off by that latter part. Hikmet was a communist who, to the shame of the republic he loved so much, spent 12 years behind bars because of his political beliefs, eventually fleeing to the USSR. Naturally, he inserted his struggles with the republic's authoritarian tendencies and his time in prison into Human Landscapes from My Country. But the beauty of Hikmet is his humanism, his ultimate love and trust in the brotherhood of all men. The verses reflect his deep-seated belief in people, who appear from all walks of life to provide a perfect landscape of Turkey from the bourgeois to peasants, politicians, factory workers, war veterans, struggling mothers and hopeless romantics. I still pick up Human Landscapes from My Country to reaffirm my own faith in people - it never ceases to make me weep or laugh with sadness and joy.

Garth: True story: when I was in second grade, and in my second year of reading "chapter books," I found a copy of To Kill A Mockingbird in a ballfield dugout after pee-wee league practice one day. That cryptic title haunted me, and when my mother was teaching the book to her high school class a couple of years later, I asked if I could read it, too. She agreed, provided I would promise to read it again when I was in middle school, again in high school, and again in college. It would mean something different to me each time, she said. (Years later, when I attempted Middlemarch, she would extract a similar promise... the difference being that I was actually in college at that point.) I complied with my mom's wishes, but nothing came close to that very first reading, which may have taken me two months. The possibilities of books (to be complex, to be layered, to communicate things the characters themselves don't know) had grown by an order of magnitude or so. To paraphrase Bruce Springsteen, and with apologies to Beverly Cleary (whom I still love): "It was bye-bye, Ramona Quimby... we were airborne."

Max: As a young insomniac, I read myself to sleep each night, and it turned out to be habit forming. My shelves bulged with Beverly Cleary, The Hardy Boys, and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series. I even discretely dipped into The Babysitters Club to see if I could get some intelligence on how the other half lived. ("They're my sister's!" I exclaimed to friends if I ever carelessly left a copy in plain sight.) Round about 7th grade I started raiding my parents' large and haphazardly curated library. There were quite a few false starts, but one day I dipped into John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany and never looked back. It made me immediately realize that all the books I had been reading were "kids" books, and opened my eyes, ultimately, to the mind-bending (especially to a 12-year-old) possibilities of fiction. From there I read all of Irving, Kurt Vonnegut, and T.C. Boyle, acquired the hobby of haunting local bookshops, and was on my way.

So, tell us, in the comments or on your own blog: What was the book that started it all for you?

- Editor @ 7:05 AM ~ comments: 9 ~ Links to this post

 

"Why So Serious?" Batman and the Intellectuals

Reading Nikil Saval (my Stanford friend and colleague)'s review of The Dark Knight at n+1 today, I found myself of two minds about his take. I too had exclaimed angrily about the impossible bustiness of the whole troupe of Russian ballerinas Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) kidnaps on his yacht, and the befuddling reappearance of Cillian Murphy (villain psychiatrist from Batman Begins), as well as the almost unwatchable chaos that was most of the action scenes, and the manipulative gotcha "black criminals are human too!" scene. I had exclaimed about other things Nikil hadn't mentioned - like why bother getting the wonderful Maggie Gyllenhaal to play just another insipid damsel in distress (albeit, weakly disguised as a "strong, independent woman": she's a DA! and she kicks the Joker in the balls while wearing an evening dress!)

But the meat of Nikil's review was his reading of the Dark Knight's plot as political allegory. I am a rather bad reader of allegorical plots and having been told in vague terms by many people that the political implications of this Batman were intense, I hoped my symbolic reading skills were up to the task. My reading of the plot as allegory went something like this: our country has been taken over by a demented clown who burns money and oil and whose motives are incomprehensible. As you can imagine, I was very disappointed reading thus - I thought that this was not a very useful or provocative take on the current state of the union. I had also been told that Batman "goes over to the dark side" in this movie, but as far as I could see, except for wearing the black he always had, he was still the good guy (we knew his motives remained pure). Never, not once, did he seem taken in by the thrilling chaos that the Joker was peddling. (I had had a vague image of Batman and the Joker a la Danny Aiello and Bruce Willis in the under-appreciated Hudson Hawk synchronizing a heist by both singing "Swinging on a Star" in the same tempo. Holding hands while causing mayhem together! What fun! Try pulling that plot off next time, Christopher Nolan!) Again, I was disappointed.

As Nikil's review will show you, I missed rather a lot. The crux of the allegory and the moral ambiguity lies in Batman's recourse to criminal methods to get the job of crime fighting done: his creation of a god-like surveillance system that violates the privacy of every resident of Gotham to find the Joker, and his beating information out of the Joker about the location of hostages and ticking bombs. In this, we can see the spectral reenactment of our own political situation: The US, which imagines itself as the world's superhero, the champion of good, betraying its ideals (civil rights, the sovereignty of law, peace, justice) to defend these same ideals. Here was the genuine ambiguity and the interesting symbolic plot I had missed. As Nikil puts it "to fight anarchy is to lose one's bearings, and move one's own soul dangerously close to evil." And this anarchy, of course, is terrorism and terrorists embodied in the Joker.

No matter what you might, in the end, think of Batman's (or the United States') ultimate moral affiliation after these adventures, Nikil's plot reading holds. My being of two minds takes issue more with Nikil's idea that The Dark Knight is somehow a propaganda classroom, manufacturing citizenly consent for US policy and reinforcing in even its youngest viewers "every conceit that this childishly self-regarding nation has about its mission in the world":

And so the Joker, like other criminals in the film, is treated by Batman the way America treats terrorists: he is tortured. Intellectuals who favor the use of torture in the United States often reduce the ethical question to a hypothetical "ticking bomb" scenario, in which a terrorist reveals he has a plot to blow up thousands of people in one hour, and the only way for officials to extract information from the lunatic in time is through ruthless physical violence. "Ethics 101," Charles Krauthammer calls it. "Hang this miscreant by his thumbs. It is a moral duty." It doesn't matter that, in a real Ethics 101 class, one would learn that legal ethics is not reducible to a childish theoretical picture; that there is not a shred of historical or present evidence on which to base such hypotheticals. (There are bombs in the real world, but they never tick.) Yet the real-world debate over torture is frequently reduced to this argument, because it has a terrifying simplicity to it. As in the scenario itself, the argument doesn't even give you time to think: you are simply asked to decide, and your decision then becomes actual policy. When it is presented in something like real time, as it is in The Dark Knight, it actually functions as "Ethics 101" for the children who see the film.

And I take issue with this not only because, dunderhead that I am, the only childishly self-regarding conceit I came away from the movie with on my own was "our president is a psychopathic jester who is burning down our economy and must be stopped at any cost - damn the law." No, I take issue with this because it means that there is no difference between art and life - that the moral and social rules and actions we observe and tolerate in comic books and novels foist themselves upon us as we read and work their way into our real lives. Saying that children who watch Batman are being primed to condone their country's use of torture is like saying that reading Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels will make us kill our rich friends and assume their identities - or, at least, that we'll approve of those who do.

This just gets what movie-going and novel-reading is about all wrong. I think most people go to the movies for escape - we get out of our own heads, away from our own worries, we suspend the real world for a while to move into a variety of different, often joyfully impossible, worlds. Here we find respite from our own lives. I also think the rules of genre are comforting. Real life-plots are unpredictable: We never know in real life when we're walking into a chapter of personal tragedy, when things might take a romantic turn, when they'll go Beckett-y or Kafkaesque, but if I rent, say, 27 Dresses or The Holiday, I have the comfort of knowing how it will go, even though I have the pleasure of not knowing quite how it will go. It's soothing. And I don't, unless I'm Don Quixote, get up from either movie and expect life to yield up to me the personalities or plots I just watched. Just as I don't get up from Batman thinking that I wouldn't mind seeing more terrorists water-boarded, even if, obedient student of the comic book genre that I am, I accepted whatever "the good guy" had to do to get the job done as "good" - which is probably why I missed identifying Batman's "criminal activities" as such ("Yeah, but it's Batman who's spying on everyone. Now if the Joker, it'd be another story").

Admittedly, this is part of a larger resentment and even anger I harbor against intellectuals at the movies - and indeed part of my somewhat perverse occasional campaign against taste and connoisseurship generally. Should Batman induce such anguish and demand such moral seriousness at it does at n+1? ("Why so serious?" as the Joker puts it.)

Although I agree with much of Nikil's reading, I find in it something repellent (morbid, paranoid, despair-inducing) that I associate with the Leftist intellectual temperament. I have written before about Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, Reflections on a Damaged Life and it is from Minima Moralia that I find the purest expression of this attitude that troubles and repels me:

There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror; even the innocent "How lovely!" becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely, and there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better…The malignant deeper meaning of ease, once confined to the toasts of conviviality, has long since spread to more appealing impulses... Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse.

Adorno's book is a long collection of fragmentary meditations in the same inconsolable tone as this one. And while I have moments of deep sympathy for his tragic worldview, his sense that everything in our world is broken and sinister and corrupting, I think, for myself, that to linger in this mindset for long would be devastating. I would kill myself. I continue to marvel that the anguished consciousness on display here managed to survive itself for 250 pages. There is something of Adorno in Nikil's take on the Dark Night - that watching this movie - maybe movies generally? - can be dangerous and morally suspect: That we Americans are watching our crappy, multi-million dollar nation-affirming movies while the world we set on fire burns. We retreat into movies (becoming ever easier in this era of Netflix, iTunes, and pay-per-view), neglect the world, and become dumber for our retreats into escapism, thus less capable of fixing the world we fled in the first place. "History will record," Nikil writes, "that, while a monumental catastrophe overtook the world financial markets and a new colonialism destroyed the lives of nations, the United States still found time and money to resolve in its films what it could not, for the life of it, perform in the world."

Maybe History will. And maybe my logic is disgraceful and maybe I am deluded - or just weak (a junkie). The number of head pats, cheek pinches, and chin chucks I continue to get even now that I am almost 30 suggests that intellectual seriousness continues to elude me: but I love movies. And I defend them. They allow me to go into worlds that are more beautiful and make more sense than ours. Going to the movies, reading novels, is a kind of idealism for me, a longing for order and beauty that I will never find in this world. Maybe this isn't morally justifiable, but it's psychically necessary. Even Batman, flawed as it was, gave me a much needed respite from myself.

Is Batman the problem? Is Batman a bigger problem than is an impenetrable seriousness, than a relentless critical certainty that would seem sometimes to insist that despair is the moral highground?

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 6:53 AM ~ comments: 8 ~ Links to this post

 

The Novelist, the Entourage, the Senator, and His Lover

The majestic tawdriness of L'Affaire Edwards had us scrambling for literary precedents - The Scarlet Letter?, Silas Marner? - but, amid the swirl of rumors, we almost overlooked The McInerney Connection. Luckily, our trusted fellow readers at The New York Times were there with the scoop: In the mid-1980s, John Edwards' apparent paramour, Rielle Hunter - then known (somewhat less mellifluously) as Lisa Druck - ran with New York's literary Brat Pack. Indeed, Jay McInerney based a book on her. Mr. McInerney told the Times that his 1988 novel, Story of My Life,

was narrated in the first person from the point of view of an ostensibly jaded, cocaine-addled sexually voracious 20-year-old who was, shall we say, inspired by Lisa...

This revelation was apparently enough to vault Story of My Life into Amazon's Top 500 books.

In an impressive feat of commitment and/or masochism, Peter Miller of the Freebird Books and Goods blog actually sat down this weekend and read Story of My Life in its entirety. His findings are fascinating and suggestive. Of an older conquest, for example, Lisa/Rielle/"Allison" tells us, "I never thought he was very good-looking, but you could tell he thought he was. He believed it so much he could actually sell other people on the idea." And: "He seemed older and sophisticated and we had great sex, so why not?"

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 4:42 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Millions Interview: Nam Le

Nam Le is the author of the debut short story collection, The Boat, which Junot Diaz calls, "an extraordinary performance." Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times wrote that Le's "sympathy for his characters and his ability to write with both lyricism and emotional urgency lend his portraits enormous visceral power." I agree. I went to graduate school with Nam, and in our first week, he called to me from across the bar: "I read your story... you animal!" It felt like a real creative writing buddy moment. It's been great fun seeing him gain all of this much-deserved acclaim.

The Millions: Although you capture a wide range of voices and locales in these stories, the prose in this collection feels distinctly yours, from the well-placed sentence fragment to the descriptions of light. Can you talk a little bit about how you craft sentences, and how language creates the worlds you're exploring?

Nam Le: There are so many ways to think and talk about this (you're basically asking for my ars poetica!) Here's how I've been thinking about it of late: every sentence carries within it a certain set of charges, vibrations, shapes - and what I try to do is chase down a state that's maximally charged, or shapely. Sometimes that state is more visually concerned - how a word looks - fits - into a sentence, and sometimes more aural; sometimes it treats more with images, other times abstractions. This is what I mean by a text's organic imperatives: these "states" can't be pinned down on a pulled-back level; they're not conformable, in isolation, to describable tendencies (long or short, cerebral or sensory, complex or simple). They have to be dealt with on their own terms, within their own contexts. Of course the effect this has on a technical level is pretty disheartening: it suggests that every sentence that is, on first go, serviceable, efficient - even competent - can almost always be improved, can be brought to a fuller communicability.

TM: How long did you work on the stories in this collection, and what was the revision process like, especially once you conceived of these stories as a book?

NL: I worked on this book about four years all up. It's tough to divvy up the time because the whole process can be so lurching and spasmodic: basically the first versions of these stories were written over two years, then they were rewritten and revised pretty intensely for the next year (those that got placed in magazines in collaboration with the respective editors), then again, for another year - at times from the ground up - with my U.S. editor at Knopf, Robin Desser, and, to a lesser extent, my Australian editor at Penguin, Meredith Rose - both tough, sensitive and superb editors. As tough as they were, though, inevitably I was my own toughest critic. I wanted to discharge what I knew to be the insane privilege of getting published with the personal undertaking to myself that every word, every choice, would be weighed, tested, spoken for. I wanted to be able to stand behind each story (even if only, at the end, to boot them out of the room).

Revision's hard, of course. There's none of the typical pay-off of plowing new turf, it's a constant challenge to fence with different sensibilities as well as to gauge the slippery sensibility of that hypothetical reader, and maybe worst of all, the whole thing's potentially endless. Time and time again you have to convince yourself you're completely done with something - then time shows you again and again you're not. A case in point: "Halflead Bay" arose out of the germ of another story, "The Keeper," the former clocking in at about 20,000 words, the latter 16,000. Not a single sentence made it from "The Keeper" into "Halflead Bay" - that despite the fact that I was at one time convinced (at the end of many drafts) that "The Keeper" was absolutely done. This sort of anticipatory second-guessing can make it hard to knock off a story, let alone a collection of stories (where by the time you're done with one story, you've got all the others to re-contend with as well).

TM: In "Meeting Elise", the narrator receives a painful colon exam. Have you ever received this kind of treatment, and if not, how did you go about writing about such a subject? How far will you go in the name of research?

NL: I know your game, Edan - you want me to deny this so that later, when I refuse to deny something else, you can infer it's true! Did I undergo a painful colon exam? I'm certainly not going to answer this kind of question and the answer is certainly no.

That said, I'm not averse to going as deep as possible in the name of research. In this case, for example, I consulted doctor buddies, looked up medical sites and blogs and checked out photos and videos (which in themselves were plenty painful for me). Generally speaking, nothing's off-limits when it comes to research - it's just a case of from how far into the rough you like to putt.

TM: I know that you repeatedly watched the pilot to the television show "Friday Night Lights", at one point charting the various plot points introduced. Why - was it more than mere curiosity? Do you look to other forms of storytelling (television being one example) to help you with your own work?

NL: Wow, it's like we're friends or something - like you actually know me! (Either that or you have a hidden recorder on my TV set, which is something I'd rather not think about...) Look, if there's one thing we literateurs like to lament even more than the inferiority of TV to books, it's the implied inferiority - aesthetic, intellectual - hell, political and cultural too - of TV-watchers vis-a-vis book-readers. There's overlap between the groups, obviously, but it's not exactly subversive to suggest that TV, more than literature, caters to society's lowest common denominator. I don't disagree with this, but I do think this lowest common denominator might be higher than we give it credit for. For me, TV (and yes, other forms of storytelling too) can provide instruction in a lot of particulars, but perhaps, especially, in the art of narrative manipulation. Watching the pilot of "Friday Night Lights" - a network, not cable, show, mind you - makes me newly sick with envy of the brutal economy of film. (If a picture is worth a thousand words, how to calculate the worth of a thousand pictures, stitched together to convey continuous real-time motion, and then underlaid with sound?) When it's well done (and in "Friday Night Lights" I think it is) TV serves to remind us how sophisticated even the "commonest" audience is - how many narratives it's capable of holding at any given time, how deftly it can unpack story and character ramifications based on the scantest of cues, how easily it can calibrate plots and sub-plots working at parallel- and cross-purposes. Of course there's massive shorthand at work, and the recognitions evoked are typically shallower, more familiar, less textured, than arise out of literature - but in truth I find the narrative structures of "cheap" TV shows more adventurous and formally emboldened than those of "literary" fiction. Plus TV's often more fun - and I'm sure a large chunk of my own fiction could probably use a primer there too.

TM: You were a fellow at Provincetown - a place that would certainly terrify me in the winter, especially if all I had to do was write. What did you do with your time there? Does your writing process change with any of these moves in locale?

NL: Provincetown during the winter is a magical place. The most beautiful thing about it is how it coheres with the mood of your work; that feeling you usually have to spend time and energy and luck chasing down before being granted access, that feeling that, in the real world, is constantly short-circuited - by the real world. In P-town, it's as though your creative sensibility is never shut down, is left on permanent standby, and you're always writing, even when you're walking, or watching TV, or cooking, or clamming, or playing ping-pong. On top of that, P-town brings together three elements which make me feel more fully alive - the beach, big weather, and a community of artists not limited to just writers. There was only one downside. I lived in the A-framed top floor of a barn and the toilet was tucked into one of the vertices; I half-sprained my back every time I took a piss.

TM: What's your impression of the American literary scene, now that you've had a book published and been on book tour?

NL: So far as I can tell: in terms of clout, cash, influence, reach, interconnectedness, and, to my mind, aesthetic ambition and distinction (in all senses of the word), it's still the biggest game in town. I don't mean that as provocative statement (I'm writing this from Australia) but as a surmise based on my limited personal observation. Big is both good and bad. Looked at from a mainstream vantage, the American literary scene can seem oligarchic, self-sustaining, incestuous - the same conglomerations publish the prohibitive majority of books sold and given serious attention - and, too, soulless and numbers-driven. Yes, it's a machine. But now I've been chewed up and spat out by it, I can report that it's a machine with many moving parts, many points of input, potential jams, and built-in redundancies. It's a machine still largely fueled by aesthetic passion and enormously dependent on voodoo, timing, and serendipity. It's a machine still tended by human beings working in something close to a state of faith (or, in another way of thinking, professional negative capability) - because, amazingly, no-one yet knows how exactly the machine works - or how exactly to work it.

From a more inside-baseball perspective, the literary scene can actually seem quite decentralised and diverse. This is particularly true on the emerging end, where MFAs teem and thrive alongside literary presses, magazines, journals, zines, blogs, etc, as well as - all the way up the spectrum - festivals, readings and reading series, book clubs and groups, independent stores, and various reviewing and lit crit forums. There's a lot of news about literary culture currently being under siege - and a lot of truth to that - but having felt the community and energy out there I can't help but wonder whether this might be, in fact, the ideal condition for literature.

TM: What was the last great book you read?

NL: Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

- Edan Lepucki @ 7:06 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Amazon Extends its Reach in the Online World of Books

If you visit a book-focused startup online these days, chances are Amazon owns a part of it. On August 1st, the online bookselling behemoth snapped up yet another, the online used book marketplace AbeBooks, perhaps the service most widely used by online booksellers putting their wares online, also bringing into the fold two smaller and very visible book-related sites that AbeBooks owns.

It's a very smart move by Amazon, whose profit margins are higher for its Marketplace third-party sales as compared to its traditional business. While it may seem counter-intuitive that Amazon happily lets used book sellers "compete" with it by offering cheaper copies of almost every book it sells, it's actually an amazing business. Whenever a used book sells on the site, Amazon gets 15% of the selling price plus additional fees amounting to a bit more than two dollars (and less if you sell a lot). The only thing Amazon has to do is kick back a "shipping credit" to the seller, $3.99 for standard domestic shipping. (Incidentally, this is how people get away with selling used books for a penny on Amazon; what profit there is in that case comes from the shipping credit.) What this means is that Amazon uses its existing infrastructure to let people sell books on the site. All that extra revenue comes at very minimal cost - in fact, less cost (and thus more profit) than if Amazon sold you the book itself. The purchase of AbeBooks brings as many as 110 million books from AbeBooks into Amazon (though in practice, probably a fair amount fewer, since many used booksellers listed their inventories on both sites.) All in all, a very shrewd buy for Amazon.

But Amazon doesn't just get AbeBooks. AbeBooks also owns bookfinder.com, easily the most comprehensive used book search out there, aggregating results from dozens of used book listing services. Perhaps even more interesting, AbeBooks was also a minority investor in LibraryThing, the very successful book cataloging community, and that stake will pass on to Amazon. Like many in the online world of books, LibraryThing, its founder, and its users have aften looked somewhat warily at the bookselling giant, and so it will be interesting to see how LibraryThing adjusts to its new big investor (if it adjusts at all).

One of the big selling points of LibraryThing is its impressive recommendation system, which plumbs the community's vast array of individual libraries to come up with book suggestions. The unique element of LibraryThing's recommendations has been that they are based on what you own versus Amazon's, which are based on what you buy, which can be very different things. I would imagine that Amazon would be very curious to dig into those recommendations, and it will be very interesting to see if it ever has the opportunity to do so. For the time being, it won't, and it may never. LibraryThing founder Tim Spalding wrote on the LibraryThing blog, " Abe gets only anonymized and aggregate data, like recommendations, and they can only use it on Abebooks sites. Nothing has changed here."

Amazon's reach doesn't stop there, it is also an investor in LibraryThing rival Shelfari.

Finally, while we're on the topic of Amazon, there has been much speculation on how many Kindles the company has sold, blog TechCrunch did some digging and was able to come up with a number, 240,000.

Doing a little back of the envelope math, that brings total sales of the device so far to between $86 million and $96 million (the price of the device was reduced to $360 from $400 last May). Then add the amounts spent on digital books, newspapers, and blogs purchased to read on the device, and you get a business that has easily brought in above $100 million so far. (Each $25 worth of digital reading material purchased per Kindle, add $6 million in total revenues).

- C. Max Magee @ 9:37 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

The "My Year As..." Book

Rex Sorgatz (who runs the excellent Fimoculous) has noted a trend in the accessible non-fiction category: the "My Year As..." book. The author spends an entire year reading the OED or gorging on the competitive eating circuit, all to provide a window into a subculture, give the author an opportunity to poke a little fun at him or herself, and ultimately provide fodder for a book. Were I to trace the genesis of its trend, I would speculate that it's the offspring of Morgan Sperlock's gluttonous and popular experiment Super Size Me and the proliferation and popularity of reality television, wherein a regular Joe endures a contrived concept and the world watches. Sorgatz has compiled a list of these books, which at 22 strong, inclines this observer to think that the "year" may be nearing its end for this type of book.

This trend, of course, replaced an earlier trend, "biographies of things," which had "changed the world," according to the assertions of the authors and publishers, perhaps achieving its apotheosis with Mark Kurlansky's Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. This trend was succinctly dismissed by Richard Adams in the Gaurdian, writing

In a sense, yes, all these things have changed the world, but only in a general sense that everything that exists changes the world.

- C. Max Magee @ 2:33 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Selling Yourself: Tao Lin and Wallace Shawn

Tao Lin, a young writer with a flair for cleverly drawing attention to his work, is in the news again. His latest scheme is to take investments from "the public" in his novel-in-progress in exchange for a portion of the royalties.

The move appears to have been successful; shares are no longer available and Lin got written up in several mainstream publications, including a fairly lengthy piece in the Telegraph, and dozens of blogs. What nobody mentioned, however, is that this has been done before, some 40 years ago, by another outsized, New York personality.

In the early years of his career, playwright and actor Wallace Shawn did the same thing, according to a John Lahr piece that originally ran in the New Yorker and is collected in his book of profiles, Show and Tell published in 2000. Shawn, son of legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn, was a struggling writer going out of his way to achieve literary success without tapping into his father's considerable influence. Lahr writes:

Back then, Wally was forced to follow his own quirky, unconventional path. He told me he'd "sold stock in himself" - his way of rationalizing a twenty-five-hundred-dollar loan he took from a consortium of friends in the sixties, in order to go off and write his plays. (To this day, the investors receive a small yearly check).

The juxtaposition of the two schemes presents an interesting notion. $2,500 40 years ago got you some small percentage of a budding artist's career in perpetuity. $2,000 now only gets you 10% of the royalties for a novel. Inflation, I suppose.

Finally, despite Shawn's scheme (I believe) initially being revealed in a New Yorker piece and despite Shawn's obvious ties to the magazine, The New Yorker, in its (admittedly very brief) mention of Lin's plan on its own blog, did not catch the Shawn connection.

Given the fractured state of publishing and the enthusiasm for trying new models, perhaps this shareholder form of patronage will take off, but it will have been Shawn, not Lin, who was the first innovator.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:04 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Writing School for the brave, enthusiastic, and talented

I've added some fiction writing classes to the Writing Workshops Los Angeles fall roster. If you live in the LA area, and you're interested in participating in any of these, please email me at writingworkshopsla@gmail.com to reserve a spot. All classes will be held in my Los Feliz home, where refreshments (and the occasional gourmet cheese) will be served.

I'm especially excited about the Novel Writing Workshop I'm teaching, a course I've been devising since the day I began my own beast of a book...

Introduction to Fiction Writing: Weekend Seminar

Saturday, September 6, 2008 and Sunday, September 7, 2008
10 am to 3 pm (includes one hour lunch break)

In this seminar we will explore the major tenets of fiction writing, including characterization, narrative voice, prose style, point of view, scene and summary, dialogue, and structure. Over the course of the seminar, we will continually return to certain questions: How can we use language to capture the uncapturable? How can a bunch of words on the page move us, make us understand what it means to be human? How can form and technique help us to improve as writers? In an attempt to answer these questions, we will look to published fiction for guidance, and dive into various writing exercises. Students will leave the seminar with the beginnings of several promising projects, as well as the skills to follow through with them.

No prior fiction writing experience is required for this course, although more experienced writers will also find the course useful.

New student rate: $125/student
Enrollment Limit: 8 Students

Novel Writing Workshop

Mondays, September 8, 2008 to November 17, 2008 (11 weeks)
7:30 pm to 9:30 pm

Because the novelist faces different struggles and joys than the writer of short fiction, I've created an 11-week course specifically designed for those students working on longer projects.

We will begin this class by discussing The Great Gatsby from a writer's perspective, analyzing how Fitzgerald constructed (or failed to construct?) his masterpiece. From there, we will alternate weeks between critiquing students' novels-in-progress, and discussing craft as it pertains to novel writing - in particular, structure, voice, character, and pacing. We will workshop one manuscript (up to 100 pages) every other week, devoting an entire class to each student's work-in-progress. In our craft discussions, the writings of Aristotle, John Gardner, E.M. Forster, and James Wood will be explored; we'll also do a few in-class exercises. On these craft weeks, there will be no outside reading or writing assignments so that students can give attention to their own novels, and to the upcoming workshop manuscript.

To qualify for this class, you must have at least 80 pages of a novel manuscript written before the class begins.

New Student Rate: $385/student
Enrollment Limit: 5 Students

Advanced Short Fiction Workshop I

Thursdays, September 4, 2008 to October 16, 2008 (6 weeks—no class on 9/11/08)
7:30 to 9:30 pm

This 6 week workshop will be a deeper exploration of various fiction techniques such as voice, character, structure and point of view. We will spend the first two weeks doing in-class writing exercises and reading published short fiction from a writer's perspective. The remaining 4 weeks of the course will be devoted to workshopping student work in an intense yet respectful environment designed to challenge and inspire every member of the class. Each student will have the opportunity to workshop one short story manuscript.

New student rate: $325/student
Enrollment limit: 8 students

Advanced Short Fiction Workshop II (Same class as above, just a second section)

Thursdays, October 23, 2008 to December 4, 2008 (6 weeks—no class 11/27/08)
7:30 to 9:30 pm

This 6-week workshop will be a deeper exploration of various fiction techniques such as voice, character, structure and point of view. We will spend the first two weeks doing in-class writing exercises and reading published short fiction from a writer's perspective. The remaining 4 weeks of the course will be devoted to workshopping student work in an intense yet respectful environment designed to challenge and inspire every member of the class. Each student will have the opportunity to workshop one short story manuscript.

New student rate: $325/student
Enrollment limit: 8 students

- Edan Lepucki @ 1:46 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

From Medieval to Modern: The Frankfurt Book Fair Through The Ages

For over five hundred years, barring a few interruptions, Frankfurt has been a magnet, both commercial and cultural, attracting publishers and printers, scribblers and spies. From neighboring towns to neighboring lands, then later from all of Europe, and eventually from all corners of the globe, anyone with a vested interest in the printed word would make his way to Frankfurt.

Gutenberg might have been there, back at the beginning, in 1454. Maybe. We're not entirely sure. But Peter Weidhaas makes a good case for it, illustrating the possibility with a short tale of a man of Gutenberg's demeanor walking through the narrow streets of Frankfurt as the book fair was taking its nascent steps.

This little bit of speculation opens Weidhaas' recently-published A History of the Frankfurt Book Fair. No stranger to the fair, Weidhaas served as Director from 1975 through to the new millennium, and is uniquely positioned to offer colorful detail on the five hundred-year-old event. While at times there might just be too much detail (do we really need a half-page list, in the middle of the narrative, of publishers and printers attending the fair in the early 1500s?), there are still enough fascinating tidbits and tangents, woven together with what amounts to a quick history of printing and the printed word, to make this an engaging read.

The fair rose and fell and then rose once more. Whether he attended or not, Gutenberg's presence was felt, as, in the 1400s, Frankfurt began to gain fame as a center of trade for the printed word. Printers came to the city in droves, not just in Frankfurt, but in its arch-rival Leipzig.

We get a glimpse into the development of paper as a replacement for parchment, and the rise of the paper mill, allowing information to reach the masses (or at least the educated among them) instead of just the economic elite who could afford paper's pricey precursor. The demands of the book market were beginning to be met. By 1498 there were 118 publishers in Europe.

Weidhaas gives us a taste of book culture at the time. The development of Humanism led to a revival of the classics. And there was a rise in popularity of travel-related publications. Let's linger on that for a moment. What we're actually talking about are accounts of voyages by Columbus and Vespucci to the New World and Marco Polo in China. Travel lit indeed!

From Weidhaas's peek into the 1500s, we find out that books were shipped unbound, and would be bound upon arrival at the fair. Later, much later, books would be sent bound and so could be sold year round. Publishers would eventually not need the fair (as it was then) to sell books. But then, as now, it was the sale of books that drove the book fair.

Some colorful asides from that era: Weidhaas gives us a scathing account by Erasmus of getting a room at a German inn, and Weidhaas also notes the popularity, in the mid-1500s, of prose versions of German epic ballads from the Middle Ages - many with such titillating and enticing titles as "Emperor Octavian, how he banished his wife and two sons to a life of misery; and how, amazingly, they were once again reunited in France with good King Dagobert." This verbosity was effectively an early form of sales advertising.

While money was the driving force, Frankfurt was also becoming an intellectual hub of the time, despite not having its own university until 1914. Professors would meet each other at the fair; as would librarians, poets, archivists, mathematicians.

Pamphlets of Martin Luther's writings were made readily available to the people of Frankfurt. And later, during the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), we see mathematician Johannes Kepler flogging his books at the fair.

Then there was a long, protracted fall. Between 1680 and 1690, nearly every publishing house in Frankfurt collapsed due to the indebtedness of publishers. As a result of this there was an anti-Semitic backlash, Jewish financiers becoming the scapegoats for the failure of the publishing houses, and regulations were imposed forbidding trading to Jews. In fact, it was the wars instigated by Louis XIV, and repercussions of the War of the Spanish Succession that crippled the economy.

As well, the Reformation had moved the intellectual hub north, and the center of trade was shifting east, giving Leipzig an edge over Frankfurt. Bookshops in Frankfurt turned into bars.

By the mid-1800s, even Leipzig was in decline. Book fairs - as they were envisioned then - had had their day, as the book trade was no longer dependent on fairs.

The modern era of the Frankfurt Book Fair, after a few false starts, began in the late 1940s. The 1950 fair was a major success. It was both a cultural exchange and a trade show emphasizing merchandising and marketing. A literary peace prize had also been established - Albert Schweitzer won it that year - giving the fair an added PR boost.

There was no shortage of intrigue in the post-war book fair. The Cold War and the building of the Berlin Wall led to the infiltration of West Germany (and the Frankfurt Book Fair) by East German spies! Beginning in 1967 and continuing into the 70s, undercover agents (using pseudonyms) from East German publishing houses were covertly checking out the activity at the fair, seeing which of their authors had books there.

Weidhaas also flags some modern trends: the rise of paperbacks in the 60s to the more recent rise of the CD-ROM, the effects of the fatwa issued against Rushdie and the necessary security for publishers exhibiting his books at the fair, the banning (for two years anyway) of Iran from the fair, and the rise of inflated advances for big-name authors, at the expense of niche writers.

A couple of caveats: When Weidhaas comes to the part of the fair's history that was under his watch, and needs to refer to himself, he does so in the third person, which I actually found curiously endearing.

Also, some of those same chapters are loaded with a bit too much minutiae - details of who exhibited where, and lots of internal politics. Those bits strike me as being of interest to those who were in attendance, less compelling to a casual reader. But as the book is divided into short chapters, it's easy enough to skip over bits. It's guaranteed there will be a fascinating surprise around the next corner.

- Andrew Saikali @ 8:21 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Happy Belated Birthday James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 - November 30, 1987)

Buzz Poole, the managing editor of Mark Batty Publisher, has written for numerous publications, and is an infrequent contributor to The Millions. Keep up with him and his adventures in surprising iconography at the Madonna of the Toast blog.

The first time I encountered James Baldwin, when I read Another Country, his work resonated immediately. With his ability to render an educated, upper-middle class white woman as perceptively as an ignored, begging-for-attention black musician who hurls himself off the George Washington Bridge, Baldwin revealed to me the problem with the race problem: no one really wants to talk about it. In America, it seems preferable to avoid the problem, or ignore its magnitude all together. Nothing in any of Baldwin's writing seems dated today. The reason for this is simple (and disheartening): he understood America because it had made such an indelible and problematic impression on him, the people he grew up around and lived amongst, black and white.

In identifying the central issue of racial tension in America as America's unwillingness to accept the fact that it doesn't have the faintest clue how to endeavor the Herculean feat of resolving the problem, Baldwin proselytizes the faith of the individual, investing in every single person the power to enact change.

In the March 31, 2008, issue of the New Yorker, George Packer wrote a piece titled "Native Son," a response to Senator Barack Obama's, "rap on race" (to borrow another title from Baldwin, and Margaret Mead) at the US Constitution Center in Philadelphia on March 18. With the exception of some random comments in blog posts, this article marks the only searchable connection that has been made between these two figures.

Packer accurately characterized Obama's Philadelphia speech as one of "moral and intellectual intricacy," likening it to Baldwin's essay "Notes of a Native Son," which is framed by the death of Baldwin's father, "the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas." The essay wrestles with Baldwin's realization of why his father had become so full of hate, for everyone, and how that hatred was really Baldwin's only inheritance. Baldwin's father's attitude about the world at large was a symptom of a rage that "can wreck more important things than race relations... [and] one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it."

Packer wrote of Baldwin's essay that it is "about the distorting power of rage, the charge to acknowledge the inheritance of racism without being defined by it." These last five words - "without being defined by it" - undercut one of the revelatory tenets of Baldwin's entire body of work, however. For Baldwin, it was not the fact that he was black that caused him consternation, but what it meant to be black in America. It was racism that defined his country and his place within it.

To be sure, at the heart of all of Baldwin's writings, fiction and nonfiction, the issue of race throbs. It cannot be denied that issues of race formed America, and continue to do so today. What Baldwin urged readers to do is accept this fact and from acceptance create a dialogue that permits true communication. In his seminal essay, "The Discovery of What it Means to Be an American," Baldwin declared, "The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here." Perpetuated by entities such as the government, media, corporations and the church, the American myth has always been very powerful, but also very misleading. Baldwin recognized this contradiction and spent a lifetime attempting to defeat the deception, or if nothing else to confront it head-on. For all of the constrictive structures Baldwin dealt with in his writing, both social and physical, he ultimately laid the responsibility for change in the only place change can really occur: with the individual. In the essay "Everybody's Protest Novel" he wrote, "[O]ur humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult - that is, accept it."

The essay "A Stranger in the Village," from the collection of essays Notes of a Native Son, exemplifies this notion of acceptance in his dissection of how the residents of a small, isolated Swiss mountain village react to his presence, which includes shouts from children of "Neger! Neger!," the children oblivious to the "echoes this sound raises in [Baldwin]." Such reactions, in light of the setting - namely, not America - did not offend Baldwin so much as magnify for him what it takes