Black Garterbelt

The Invisible Handout

The Nabokov The Original of Laura manuscript saga is getting, well, I don't know if you can even call it Nabokovian anymore.  It's just weird.

To review, VN, who took ill suddenly and was unable to do the job himself, asked his wife to burn his final, incomplete novel TOoL.  She never did, and, following her death, only child Dmitri also has demurred, although he has been whetting appetites and provoking outcry by both dangling the manuscript and also threatening to go ahead with the bonfire.

And now:

Dmitri says he reached a decision after an imagined ghostly conversation with his dead father—one in a far different key from Hamlet's talk with his dead dad.

"I have decided...that my father, with a wry and fond smile, might well have contradicted himself upon seeing me in my present situation and said, 'Well, why don't you mix the useful with the pleasurable? That is, say or do what you like but why not make some money on the damn thing?' "

And so the imagined shade of V.N., demonstrating indulgent and affectionate fondness for his son's "present situation" (it's not clear what exactly that means, but it could refer to financial or heath problems or just the worldwide outcry to save Laura), gave him ghostly permission to raise some funds with it.

Odd, but I can relate.  My father gave me ghostly permission to raise some funds by mowing the lawn once.

Falling Into You (Part Two)

Some months ago, in questioning arbitration-type criticism, I asked, rhetorically: [W]hat's the value of the 250-word [album] review when samples of the music are available everywhere, for free?

It is now clear, if it wasn't before, that that type of criticism is officially dead, or at least hopelessly corrupt:

How is it that a magazine can review an entire album--and assign a star rating to it--without actually hearing the album?

Case in point: the “review” of Warpaint--the new album by THE BLACK CROWES--in the March issue of Maxim magazine.  The writer--who has not heard the album since advance CDs were not made available--wrote what appears to be a disparaging assessment anyway, citing “it hasn’t left Chris Robinson and the gang much room for growth.”

Incredulously [sic], the magazine gave the album a two and a half star rating--although neither the writer nor the editor could have heard more than one song (the single “Goodbye Daughters of the Revolution”).

When approached for an explanation, the magazine described the review as “an educated guess preview.”  Huh?

Black Crowes manager Pete Angelus says, “Maxim's actions seem to completely lack journalistic integrity and intentionally mislead their readership.   When confronted with the fact that they never heard the album they are claiming to 'review’ in their music section--with a star rating, no less--they attempt to explain that it was an 'educated guess.'  In an email correspondence, Maxim went on to state: ‘Of course, we always prefer to (sic) hearing music, but sometimes there are big albums that we don’t want to ignore that aren’t available to hear, which is what happened with the Crowes. It’s either an educated guess preview or no coverage at all, so in this case we chose the former.’” 

It's unclear to what degree Maxim is being disingenuous here.  A likely explanation is that the rating was awarded on the basis of a leaked copy of the album, but no one's admitting that, and so we're left with the official explanation, which perhaps the most casual expression of nihilism I've heard so far today.*

Then, there's this:

RAPPER Nas was shocked when Maxim gave his new album, "N - - - - r," a 21/2-star review - because it isn't even finished yet. "I'm finishing the album now, and it will be out April 22," Nas told Page Six. Maxim has since apologized for the premature review, but Nas doesn't care. "I'd prefer [a review from] Playboy," the rapper said. "That kind of stuff doesn't reach my radar or effect anybody around me. I don't know what a music rating from Maxim is . . . I don't know what it even means really." Maxim also reviewed the Black Crowes' album, "War Paint," without listening to it in its entirety.

Again, it's entirely possible that the reviewer was privy to some leaked working Nas tracks, but this is getting ridiculous.**

Falling Into You (Part One)

Let's talk about Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste.

Author Carl Wilson's post at Powells.com probably serves as the best introduction.  Watch him go:

My book is a lab experiment in disguise, in which I was the rat, being exposed to various test conditions or stimuli that might help me understand how millions of people could be fans of Céline Dion while I and nearly everybody I'd ever met couldn't stand her. The test tubes and beakers of the experiment are, of course, tangents. It is a travelogue of sorts, as the subtitle says, "a journey to the end of taste."

It was a weird experience to spend months on end thinking about Céline Dion, but much of the time I wasn't thinking about Dion so much as about the chemical components, the relationships and accidents and outside forces, that go into liking or disliking music in the first place. The book was kind of a far-flung exercise in suspension of judgment, about putting off a thumbs-up or thumbs-down for awhile, and one of the advantages of doing that is that in the interim, you might end up somewhere else than where you bargained for.

Now, I've been looking forward to this entry in the 33 1/3 series, but I couldn't help but be a little disappointed at the finish.  And not because Wilson does a poor job--far from it.  In fact, he's charmingly earnest, intelligent, insightful, engaging--all those lovely things with which the finest jacket blurbs and pull quotes are stitched.

Yet I wanted something more than the Charmin-softness of his conclusion, which belongs to the "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!" school of contemporary criticism (or perhaps somewhere between new historicism and reader response, if you like), and perhaps goes even a bit further in urging critics to reconsider voicing negative responses to--in this case--pieces of music.

Wilson journeys from loathing Céline Dion to, well, enjoying and appreciating her, if only on a limited basis.  With the scales now fallen from his eyes, he can see the appeal of Dion, and also why some people find critical darlings--such as, say, Pavement--annoying.

Which leads, ultimately, to this:

What would criticism be like if it were not foremost trying to persuade people to find the same things great? If it weren't about making cases for and against things? It wouldn't need to adopt the kind of "objective" (or self-consciously hip) tone that conceals the identity and social location of the author, the better to win you over. It might be more frank about the two-sidedness of the aesthetic encounter, and offer something more like a tour of an aesthetic experience, a travelogue, a memoir. More and more critics, in fact, are incorporating personal narrative into their work. Perhaps this is the benefit of the explosion of cultural judgment on the Internet, where millions of thumbs turn up and down daily: by rendering their traditional job of arbitration obsolete, it frees critics to find other ways of contemplating music.

When I say he reminds me of Heidi Julavits, I'm thinking of this in particular:

[S]nark is a reflexive disorder, whether those who employ it realize it or not; the pointlessness of fiction only comes back to suggest the pointlessness of its commentator. The real question then becomes: If you don’t believe in this, what do you believe in? What do you care about? What is the purpose of this destructive clear-cutting, if you don’t have anything to suggest in its place, save your own career advancement?

But it is rhetorical and useless to ask 'other people' what they believe. Maybe the only questions I have the right to ask is: What do I believe? What do I care about?

These thoughts are central to Wilson's argument, as well, and he goes on at length about cultural and social capital and the relationship between taste and power.  (No surprise to any of us, of course, that a teen punk's embrace of one kind of music or rejection of another is usually about little more than "career advancement"--aka cultural or social capital--or that we typically carry this poison on into adulthood, where it is found in LD-50-type levels in music critics.)

I used to be "with it," but then they changed what "it" was. (Redux)

Except for the somewhat unwieldy format, I quite like Bookforum, so it's tough to keep the cynicism in check and not jump to awful conclusions when I hear that it's going to be "revamped."

But when I read this:

"We all felt that in order to really have an increased circulation, we needed to cover current affairs in some way...[w]e're waiting to see how it evolves."

I hear this:

MORE BRITNEY COVERAGE!!!

Perhaps literature is news that stays news, but money is good news, in a voice that rustles.

Your pal here is no MBA, but from the layman's position is hard to see how an increased focus on current events--that is, doing what every other book review outlet is doing--helps differentiate your publication to the point that circulation is substantially boosted.  (Could it be that, whether or not more readers rush to pick up the latest Bookforum, an increase in current events pieces opens up new sources of ad revenue?  I dunno.  Help me out here.)

Developing, as they say.

Leaving that aside, BF does have James Wolcott on Donald Barthelme available online, and it's worth the time.  Particularly here, where Wolcott is dead on the money:

Today, I would hazard (I’ve always wanted to hazard), the track marks of Barthelme's suave, subversive cunning are to be found less in postmod fiction—although David Foster Wallace’s dense foliage of footnotes suggests a Barthelmean undergrowth and George Saunders’s arcade surrealism has a runaway-nephew quality—than in the conscientiously oddball, studiedly offhand, hiply recherché, mock-anachronistic formalism of McSweeney’s, The Believer, The Crier, and related organs of articulate mumblecore.

Yep.  And all those outlets, whatever their various charms, stand as cautionary tales for those who would try to ape their heroes too closely.

The re-publication of Not-Knowing gets short shrift from Wolcott here, but I picked up a not-really-used copy of the first edition in Missoula years ago for $4, and I've found it valuable, if variable in quality.  The title essay is quite good, not to mention hilarious on the subject of postmodernism, and the interviews can be mined for aphorisms, for those inclined.  (Padgett Powell, I found, leans heavily on Don B. quotes as pedagogical tools, and he's not wrong.)  The transcript of a symposium between Barthelme, Gass, Paley, and Walker Percy is also here, and interesting.

But I'd be content to just pick around for the humor, as there are a clutch of lighter pieces, pulled from The New Yorker and elsewhere, that deploy the delightful Pop mix found in any Barthelme short with perhaps a more down-to-earth sensibility.

McSweeney's fans should see Barthelme's review of Superman III, "Earth Angel," in particular.  Barthelme borrows the mock Q&A format of one of my favorite stories--"Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel"--and kills the movie softly by taking it seriously, and then again not-at-all seriously at the same time:

Q. Do we really need Superman III?
A. Clearly not.
Q. Yet it's here. Must be a response to something, some kind of need....
A. Financial exegencies undiscussable on the plane of the cultural slash aesthetic.
Q. To which we will stalwartly adhere. Would you like to be able to fly?
A. I've always wanted to fly.  In the air.
Q. A basic human yearn. To fly.
A. A conquering of dailyness. Whoosh!

It's true that this sort of thing has been done many times over since, and also that its practitioners have come in for some sanctimonious tsk-tsking for wasting their talents on snark.

But let's be serious.  Superman III exists for no reason other than simple pleasure, a cheap and brief conquering of "dailyness."  Who's to say that that simple pleasure can't be found in some wit snapping Supe's too-tight underpants?

Sing along with the common people, sing along and it might just get you through

I pledged (at least to myself) to stop being Blog Quixote when it comes to print-based haterism, but here my pledge ends, as a kind, if mischievous, fellow has directed me to this article.  You say it has vague, unoriginal talking points about blogs courtesy of James Wood?  Fine, I'll play the fool again.

Here we go.

The internet, far from stepping in where print no longer publishes, has proved no boon, in terms of blogging. "It licenses first thoughts, vituperation," [Wood] says. "I don't go on much to those sort of blogs because there are better things to do with my life."

First of all, I love the use of the word "licenses" here.  It's the sort of thing one should say as one fastidiously buffs the dust off one's monocle with the slightly stiffened corner of a silk handkerchief.

But I digress.

There's nothing inherently vituperative about the blog form; the degree of vituperation varies according to each blogger's conscience.  That most people online have very little conscience says more about what people tend to do in the dark than it does about this particular vehicle of expression.  (It should also be noted that literary bloggers tend to be relatively well-mannered, despite what the pearl-clutchers would have you believe.  On the vituperation scale, at highest pitch, most rate below a slightly perturbed high school football coach.)

And do blogs license first thoughts?  Short answer: Yes, and so what?  Long answer: It varies according to the blogger's conscience.  But we certainly hope that what a blog lacks in polish it makes up in spontaneity, humor, tonal and cultural range, voice, and so on.

As it happens, there is a proud historical and literary precedent for like the kind of blog I'd love to preside over:

A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that "great wits have short memories:" and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day's reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there. For, take this for a rule, when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit, as a merchant has for your money, when you are in his.

And:

Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus instructed them how to do it . . .The practice spread everywhere in early modern England, among ordinary readers as well as famous writers like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Locke. It involved a special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality. . . . The era of the commonplace book reached its peak in the late Renaissance, although commonplacing as a practice probably began in the twelfth century and remained widespread among the Victorians. It disappeared long before the advent of the sound bite.

Certainly a man carrying a torch for the living tradition of criticism that predates English studies has heard of this sort of thing.  I'd love to hear what he'd make of the connection, if he saw fit to dedicate some original thought to the matter.

...To See What Condition My Condition Was In

Why? Because the endless parade of inch-deep critiques into blogs was getting me down.  So were the James Wood and BR Myers defenders.  I have no idea why you'd care to spend your time defending either of these fellows--especially Myers--but if you do, you have to come up with something better than the standard cry that bloggers are amateur, low-class, and mean.  Half the goddamn lit blogs love Wood, and the other half has combined to put forth a critique or two that goes beyond name-calling.  Paraphrasing Eddie Murphy, we manage to fit some ideas in between the curses.  Stop clutching yr pearls and respond to the substantive part of the critiques, would you?

*    *    *    *    *

We need to establish the Camile Paglia Threshold.  If you read Ms. Paglia, probably out of morbid curiosity, you know that every once in a while, every few months, say, she might write something that smacks of insight.  Unfortunately, what you have to wade through to get there is so void of intelligence and chock-full of sophistry that the end result is that gullible readers are sure to get progressively dumber just by being exposed to her meandering, boomer-punk piffle.  (Example: Wading through paragraphs of global warming denialism to get to the revelation that Al Gore can come off a bit smug.)

In other words, it ain't worth it.

The first head on the block under rule of this threshold is my old friend BR Myers.  Does he stumble across a decent point every once in a while?  Sure.  But if he can't get in a few criticisms of Denis Johnson without indicting the whole literature-reading public as collaborators in the intellectual crimes of Bush and Co., or smugly dismissing an opening sentence that he's completely misunderstood, then he's off the job.  Reading him is like commissioning solid gold shovels in the hopes of digging for buried tin.

*    *    *    *    *

Also, what Jeff said.

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Re: Carver: In my heart of hearts, I think that revisiting, restoring, and republishing (RRR'ing) these Carver stories is a mistake.  For me, Carver restored his reputation with his late, sans-Lish work, and with some of the stories that have already been republished in "restored" form (e.g., "A Small, Good Thing").  However, every time the Lish business--and by "Lish business" I mean the fact that Lish must more or less be credited as co-author on some of the early Carver stories by almost any reasonable definition of "author"--is trotted out, Carver takes a hit.  What happened between this particular author and editor is what it is; even as a Carver fan, I think it looks unseemly, and Carver's subsequent and by-now well-rehashed misgivings, when he wasn't so fragile and in need of a mentor/friend/authority figure, would seem to bear this out. 

At one point, Carver needed, or at least allowed, Lish's writing and editing to greatly intrude upon his own writing.  (The editing he needed, I would argue.) Later, this intrusion was neither needed nor wanted, and Carver proved he could very well stand on his own as an outstanding author of short stories.

As a reader, I cleave to the later Carver.  Thus, as Carver's literary executor, I wouldn't voluntarily invite any further scrutiny into the early, collaborative Carver if I could help it.

There could well be some academic value to a RRR version of Carver, meaning that some who might not be able to get to Carver's papers would be interested and enriched by this volume.  That pool of readers is likely close to infinitesimal in number, in my view, though, and and I'd say that the further complication of Carver's legacy isn't worth it.

*    *    *    *    *

As far as Nabokov goes, I don't see the value in burning TOOL-in-manuscript.  To protect...what exactly?  His reputation can stand the perusal of some novel fragments, which would most certainly be taken for what they are.  This isn't a posthumous volume cobbled together by some shabby opportunist, and Nabokov has suffered at the hands of some wildly unscrupulous opportunists and survived, already, regardless.  Both Nabokov's widow and his son have failed over a span of 30 years to burn this material, as ordered, and Dmitri, certainly a careful curator of his father's legacy, has been known to drop juicy hints about the manuscript (e.g., TOOL is "the most concentrated distillation of [my father's] creativity.").  Dying wishes are not without merit, but I'm guessing that very few people actually get buried facing down so the world can kiss their asses, if you know what I mean.

*    *    *    *    *

Who gives a fuck about an Oxford Comma?/
Somethin' somethin' Michelle Obama

*    *    *    *    *

Dan has had interesting things going over at his place, re: Carver and Nabokov, but I should clarify something:

The Rake further suggests that it would be useful for other contemporary writers to publish earlier drafts of their work, allowing the reader to pursue the pressing question "How Was It Done?". For those interested enough in a particular writer to want to read discarded drafts and other marginalia, it is probably true that such an offering would simply satisfy a curiosity and wouldn't really affect their estimation of the writer's published work. I myself have never been much interested in the "how" question. I'm more concerned with the "what": What kind of work is this? What's going on? If reading alternative versions of a work of fiction helps me to better answer these questions, I am willing to examine them. If what I find there somehow enhances my subsequent reading experiences, it will have been a worthwhile exercise. If it merely illustrates "the actual human effort behind the pages, the grinding, nuts and bolts stuff," as the Rake further puts it, it doesn't seem worth the time, since I'm pretty sure I already know that writing involves much grinding.

Granted, we all "already know that writing involves much grinding," but I am quite interested in the character of the grinding. This is why I--and I understand it's probably just me--read and re-read Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself even though I don't have much interest in reading Mailer's novels.  The Fourth Advertisement, which is about the last draft of The Deer Park, I never get sick of, simply for the way Mailer compellingly describes coming up against his own mammoth ambition and his physical and intellectual limitations (and the publishing industry's), and failing.  Again, I'm in the minority, surely, but I think this is gripping stuff, if quite apart from the pleasure, depth, and challenge of reading a novel.

*    *    *    *    *

David Foster Wallace in Harper's?  It's difficult to get too excited, even if the prose is good. He does give the finest description of an infant's pulsating snot bubble that I've ever read.  I'm a father, this is not a Daddy Blog, and I'm serious.

*    *    *    *    *

See you in a fortnight. Or something.

I Was a Teenage Carverian

I've procrastinated enough regarding the latest round of Carver/Lish revelations.

So much so that the New Yorker has helpfully printed a reader's letter that more-or-less encapsulates my feelings about the matter.  Thank you, Mr. Keith Mikolavich of Oakland, CA:

...Sometimes writers need editors to protect them from themselves.  It seems that Carver needed Lish, and then needed to break away to forge expansive stories like "Errand" and "Blackbird Pie," which, alongside his earlier, minimalist pieces, reveal his continual growth as one of the great American practitioners of the short story.

Now, I find myself a little indifferent this go-around, after being fairly scandalized when I first read "The Carver Chronicles" as a young Carver acolyte.  Carver's objections to Lish's edits, though deeply felt and meant, I'm sure, seem more than a little maudlin almost a decade after the initial reveal.  And I couldn't care less about Lish's occasionally ruthless cutting, although the instances of the old sorcerer literally injecting his writing into Carver's stories, where much of it remains, word-for-word, to this day, still strikes me as very unseemly.  Reading the restored "Beginnings" (aka "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love") makes it clear that early Carver left to his own devices tended to plod about and tell too much, though why Lish's "deadpan last lines" were often accepted verbatim and not reworked is baffling. 

(The temptation to perform some amateur psychology here is great, but suffice to say that Carver's greenness, his admiration of and gratitude towards Lish, probably granted the latter enough sway to occasionally ghostwrite, at least at first.)

But here's where we are with all this:

Now Tess Gallagher is hoping to re-publish all the stories in Carver's second book in what she believes is their "true, original" form. The story published here, "Beginners," was the submitted draft of a story that Lish cut by more than a third and retitled "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." Gallagher is eager for people to read "Beginners." And yet Lish's work helped transform a more conventional story into an exemplar of an astringent and original aesthetic—the aesthetic that helped win Carver his initial following. "I see what it is that you've done, what you've pulled out of it," Carver wrote to Lish about "Beginners" in his long, aggrieved letter, "and I'm awed and astonished, startled even, with your insights." Carver may well have regretted, to some degree, the way a number of his stories appeared in "What We Talk About," and, in the compendium "Where I'm Calling From," which appeared a few months before he died, he republished three stories in their "original" form. But most of the stories, including this one, he republished as Lish had edited them.

"An editorial relationship is a private one, and nobody can see it fully and completely," Gary Fisketjon, an editor who helped Carver make the selections for "Where I'm Calling From," said recently. "Clearly, there was a catastrophic breakdown here that's interesting but ultimately unknowable." What can be known is that, by the mid-nineteen-eighties, Carver's relationship with Lish was at an end. Lish told D. T. Max, "I don't like talking about the Carver period, because of my sustained sense of his betrayal, and because it seems bad form to discuss this." Gallagher, for her part, thought that Lish had been claiming too much credit for Carver's achievements.

I can't object to the stories in question being re-published in their "true, original" form, but I'm hoping that the emphasis falls on original rather than true.  In other words, re-publishing is fine insofar as the people behind it realize that what they're putting out is going to be mostly of scholarly interest and probably will not serve to change any minds.  We've already been exposed to Carver with and without Lish--and to some early Carver stories "restored" to their more expansive versions--and a fair number of readers, myself included, prefer the later, Lish-less Carver of "Cathedral," "Blackbird Pie," and "Errand" to the so-called minimalist Carver guided (and in some cases, partially composed) by Lish.  There's already plenty of Carver's output upon which to form a strong opinion.

Not that an of-scholarly-interest or serious-fans-only edition of Carver is a bad thing; in fact, I've been wondering why the publishing world doesn't explore this expanded-remastered niche in the same way the recording industry does.

Me, I belong to the AMB: All My Bum

This is in(s)ane.

As your pal the Rake understands it, members of the NBCC were asked to participate in an "Ethics in Book Reviewing" survey.  Peep some of the responses to the litblog-centered questions from these professional book reviewers:

Should literary blogs adhere to the same rules of ethics, whatever the consensus may turn out to be on them, as newspaper book-review sections?

• I don't know what a literary blog is.
• Blogs seem to me nearly irrelevant, so unregulated are they.
• kind of an irrelevant question; so far as I can tell, no ethics apply to blogs.
• Frankly at the moment review blogs are such jokes, it doesn't really matter. It's like asking what rules apply to people's comments on Amazaon (sic)
• No, they shouldn't. Blogs are the toilet paper of reviewing -- quality varies, but none of it is worth keeping.
  

Should a literary blogger review the book of another literary blogger to whose blog she or he links?

• Who cares.
• I don't know what a literary blogger is.
• Blogs are irrelevant to me. I have only in the past few months discovered what they are.
• Who's going to read it?
• Who cares?
• Does anyone except the bloggers really care?
• it doesn't matter. bloggers don't matter.
• I have no opinion. I don't read blogs
• How do I know? At my age, I do not blog or read blogs.

(Stolen almost wholesale from the Lit Saloon)

As a general remark, let me say that the state of book reviewing is such that NBCC members have little reason to look down their noses at litbloggers.  Let's be a little careful whom you choose to insult and alienate, my clay-footed friends.

'Cause I still love my parents and I still love the old world

I see that Salon's holiday gift suggestions for book lovers include "In the Library," a parfum that is "[b]lended to evoke old English novels, Russian and Moroccan leather bindings, and a soupçon of wood polish."  This can only lead down a dangerous path: I picture hordes of horny bloggers descending upon the rare book rooms of our nation to make furtive love to the folios.

And it's not the social ostracism I worry about; it's the paper cuts.

If you must indulge, I say carve out a little privacy, close the curtains, spray "In the Library" all about, and take advantage of those literary napkins Salon's also touting.  I wonder if they have one printed with "Love Again."

Anyway, to bring this shameful post to a close, I'm recommending a Rake Original Invention I call the Papercraft Kindle to all my literary friends this holiday season.  It has all the awesome functionality of Kindle with the addition of that well-crafted, olde timey charm.

Check 'em out:

Book, Be of Use!

Somewhat interesting exercise here: If you film it…: 21 good books that need to be great films, like now.

The Long Walk is a good choice, I think.  As is Cloud Atlas, which comes with this (rather ambitious) suggestion for a two-part structure:

Large-scale, ambitious fiction doesn't work in films when hacked to pieces and squished into 90 minutes, so two movies and a Peter Jackson-esque dedication to perfection would be needed for David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. The book has six stories presented in different formats; Cloud Atlas Vol. 1 would launch the stories of a 19th-century seafarer (as related in a diary); a 1930s composer (as related in letters); an investigative journalist in the '70s (as written in a novel); a present-day book publisher (as shown in a film); a clone in a dystopic future (as told in an interview); and a primitive tribesman in a far, post-apocalyptic future (as related in verbal storytelling). Cloud Atlas Vol. 2 would then work backward through the stories' conclusions, ending with the seafarer. Why now for Cloud Atlas? Because it's been a long time since there's been a good film in any one of its genres.

All that said, I'm begging that A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius not be made into a movie. 

Ever.

As I book I liked at the time--yes, liked!--I can't see any way of adapting it without a) turning it into a giant puddle of syrup and b) subjecting me to the E***** media blitz all over again.  Please, Hollywood, no.

Closing the Loop

Hey: Your pal made the NY Times.  (Sort of.)  For being somewhat of a jackass.  (Of course.)  But I am also man enough to admit that there is, in fact, an ad for Barbary Shore that is perhaps the grandfather of the recent Discomfort Zone ad.*  (It gets points for including J.R. "Bob" Dobbs' evil twin, but I would say that the Deer Park ad is funnier.)

It should also be noted that Franzen's publisher skews 5-to-2 in favor of positive blurbs.  That's not cricket.

(*Mr. Garner's facts were wrong only insofar as he was thinking of the Barbary Shore ad instead of the one for The Deer Park to which his commenter was referring.)

Fran-ZOOOOOOOOONE!

Garth Risk Hallberg at The Millions brings our attention to the print ad campaign for the paperback version of Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone, which uses both positive and negative blurbs.  For example:

• "Luminous, essential reading" - Tim Adams, The Observer (London)
• "Odious...incredibly annoying" - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

This is the appropriate approach for someone whom I find to be humorously Manichaean.

I'm sorry to say, however, that even if effective the campaign isn't terribly original.  Mr. Esposito somewhat rhetorically asks: Am I the only one to find the "counterintuitive" marketing of Franzen's paperback a big yawn?

That might be because you've seen this Full Disclosure/Hairshirt & Humility approach used a time or two before.  (Ahem.)

It also might be because the Franzen-branded FD/H&H is a very hedged (neutered?) version of the gambit Norman Mailer played for The Deer Park in, uh, 1955.

Here's some background:

Critics, aware that the wunderkind of The Naked and the Dead had evolved into an enfant terrible, were not happy. In fact, the two novels Mailer wrote during this period, the politically charged Barbary Shore (Rinehart, 1951) and the sexually explicit The Deer Park (Putnam, 1955), received mixed reviews. Mailer, true to form, fought back. He designed a half-page ad for the Village Voice that read: "All over America, The Deer Park is getting nothing but RAVES." The ad went on to quote only the most damning reviews, a print equivalent of giving his critics the finger.

And some more:

In the '50s, New York Times Magazine editor Harvey Shapiro was in on the inception of The Village Voice. When asked his advice, Shapiro told colleague Mailer that his idea to publish a page of terrible reviews of Deer Park in the Voice was a silly gimmick that wouldn't work. "I was totally wrong," Shapiro later admitted. "It made him famous."

See a scan of this "silly gimmick" after the jump.

Wuzzah?

Props for Stephen Dixon...in Esquire?  Believe it, friends:

I'd argue instead that Tom Perrotta is engaged in a more complicated and paradoxical project, one well suited to a postliterary age. He's writing books for people who don't much like books -- satires for nice people, fuck books for prudes. The problem with this approach is that it's not really satire at all. It's situational comedy. Perrotta's not gunning for laughs so much as light chuckles, perfect for a compassionate and confident grin. But less good for readers who'd be better served checking out David Gates or Stephen Dixon or simply giving up on books altogether and going to the movies.

I hate to say it, but even with the Dixon mention aside, that's not half bad.

The Spoils of War

We don't deliver the news around here very much, but this one's worth a shout: Friend of RP/BGB Nick Arvin's novel Articles of War was chosen as the 2007 selection for One Book, One Denver.  From the Denver Post:

"Articles of War," like other wartime novels before it, centers on the question of when does fear turn into cowardice.

The book's protagonist, George Tilson - known as Heck because of his reluctance to use foul language - is an 18-year-old Iowa farmboy who is sent to Europe in World War II. His reaction to his first taste of battle could be seen as cowardice, and Heck struggles with his conscience for the rest of the war.

Heck's path crosses that of Pvt. Eddie Slovik, the only U.S. serviceman to be executed for desertion since the Civil War. Although the outcomes of their actions are vastly different, the novel points to certain parallels between the lives of the two men as well.

Don't be afraid to pick this one up, even if you're not lucky enough to live here.  It's short--which your pal loves--and a good one.

(RP's previous Arvin coverage can be found here, here, and here.)

What can Humbert Humbert tell us about No Child Left Behind?

There's really no point in trying to shame Bush fils when he starts dropping literary references; just stand back and enjoy the comedy as it unfolds.

Whether he's voraciously devouring Camus and three Shakespeares or completely misappropriating Graham Greene, the man leaves you breathless.  Shock and awe, indeed.

The argument that America's presence in Indochina was dangerous had a long pedigree. In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called, "The Quiet American." It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism -- and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."

After America entered the Vietnam War, the Graham Greene argument gathered some steam. As a matter of fact, many argued that if we pulled out there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people.

In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: "What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen and may never heard of?" A columnist for The New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: "It's difficult to imagine," he said, "how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." A headline on that story, date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: "Indochina without Americans: For Most a Better Life."

The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.

But the same token, perhaps the problem with Lennie Small is not that he failed in hugging Curley's wife, but rather that he let go too soon.

Harry Potter was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me

I've never read a Harry Potter book.

But I'm not operating under the illusion/delusion that I won't be reading them to and with my child in a few years.  I'm sure I will.  And I'm sure that they have their delights.  Hundreds of millions of people probably aren't wrong, although there's pretty solid evidence that untold thousands of them are a little hysterical about this.

(And, no, the "social phenomenon" aspect of Potter doesn't really interested me either.  Grown-up boreds, discontents, non-conformists, and misfits taking refuge in costume-wearing & child-like whimsy?  As Madge used to say: You're soaking in it, all day, every day.  Especially in the late summer, when college football gears up.)

Still, I'm not here to slag off Potter or creepily seduce doe-eyed undergraduates.  That's Harold Bloom's job.

I'm here to point to this:

This, it seems to me, might be a moment of opportunity for a literary critic. A chance for someone with the requisite chops to publish in the popular press an article that said something about the Potter books as literature, something smart and insightful that made me think "hey, this guy has smart things to say about books!" Something that would situate the books in some kind of context vis-a-vis the much larger cultural sweep of the novel. Something that might get an intelligence person who enjoyed the Potter books interested in some larger, more highbrow segment of the literary enterprise. Instead, the publication of each Potter book seems to herald the publication of a bunch of stuff like Ron Charles whine in The Washington Post which, to me, makes Charles -- and through his role as a stand-in for the larger enterprise, all the literati -- look like sneering losers who've decided to elevate their idiosyncratic hobby above everyone else's in order to look on the rest of us.

Not that the literary world is unique in this regard, but it's a weird impulse. If someone expressed an interest in some niche product that I enjoy I would, I dunno, try to convey some of my enthusiasm about the subject. Try to share some wisdom. Try to build further enthusiasm. Make recommendations. Anything other than act bitter and petulant.

And, later, from the same fellow:

Needless to say, it's not anybody's responsibility to get me interested in literature. But insofar as people who are interested in literature make themselves come across as horribly unpleasant people whom one would never want to meet or speak to, and whose primary interest in books is as an adjunct to the vicious hatred of human beings, then I think it's natural that lots of people won't develop an interest in literature.

Now, slow down.

It's Not What Junot, It's Who Junot

The urge to use that title was simply overwhelming.

But, certainly, the appearance of Mr. Díaz's novel must mean that the long-awaited Rake novel (Code Name: EPB) is due to drop at any moment.  Say, right around the time Chinese Democracy finally shows up.

The Gas Face #2

The summer heats up as hitmaker James Patterson delivers a spine-tingling courtroom thriller that's simply electric!

Despite what they'd have you believe, Patterson doesn't write these books. 

Also, there are no such things as "Beach Reads."  These are simply books--grouped in the most insulting, desultory manner possible (i.e., under a happy sun and umbrella graphic)--that if you read you would have read anyway, as there's nothing about the beach that necessarily makes one fall into the sweaty coconut madness, which chases the intelligent sunblinkered soul from away from Zizek into the arms of Daddy's Girls. 

Otherwise, you just hate reading and want a prop that, unlike an eyepatch or dookie rope, doesn't give you unfortunate tan lines.

So Chelsea Handler gets the gas face, yeah.

Sara[h], You're the Poet in my Heart

Your pal here hasn't been following this Laura Albert/"JT LeRoy" legal case too closely, but it seems odd that Albert got sued for fraud just as the story got interesting.  (It seems like anyone who was paying attention knew the LeRoy character was 95% bullshit, realness of the teenage hustler notwithstanding, so isn't it more intriguing to know that the whole thing was orchestrated by a woman who looks like Michael Jackson at his most Greta Garbo'd?)

Naturally, here comes someone who not only likes Albert's writing, but thinks that she's our mirror, to reflect who we are, in case we don't know:

Before the scandal broke, I taught [Sarah] in a college class (called Sexuality and Literature): Most of my students loved it. Though the book's narrator is, as "LeRoy" was, a cross-dressing Appalachian teen prostitute, the novel is not and could not be a slice of any imaginable real life. Instead, Sarah is a defiantly unrealistic fantasia on the difference between memoir and fiction. It's also a poke in the eye for anyone who thinks—as many people around "LeRoy" thought—that a novel should document an author's life.

This much I am willing to accept.  I tend to think Albert's writing is more of a comment on how luridness buoys bad prose, allowing it to float defiantly upon the snotgreen sea of critical praise, but as long as we agree to keep speculation about the purity of the author's intentions out of...wait, we're not going to do that?

OK:

And if you never had a question, then you'd never have a problem

In life, friends, there are puzzlers.

Loyal Simpsons viewers remember when a Sphinx-like, stoned Homer stumped Ned Flanders with the question "Can Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cannot eat it?"

Then, there are simple curiosities, such as "Why is it every time I read an article about the evil of blogs, I find it hard to follow the muddled arguments, but I swear I can smell the author's urine-soaked underwear?"

Life, a rich tapestry indeed.

Now, we come to the question of whether a person of woman born can compose a question so stupid that Chuck Palahniuk gets offended.  Wonder no longer:

Q: It's the apocalypse. You're allowed one weapon—what is it and why? —nflux

CP: One weapon? Can I get a machine gun with an endless supply of shells? Would you ask Susan Sontag this question? Joyce Carol Oates? What weapon did Grace Paley ask for?

Clearly, the answer is "A Bible," but he was either playing coy or doesn't know. 

He might also not know that Susan Sontag is dead.  The living Susan Sontag prolly woulda armed herself with Anne Leibovitz's deadly boring anecdotes about doing smack with the Rolling Stones and short-sheeting Jann Wenner's bed. 

Your pal called Joyce Carol Oates and she said "Paper!  More paper!  Wait, no.  A pen!  But a pen without paper..."  And then she trailed off into obscenities.

Grace Paley, reached in Vermont, said she'd gladly tear off one of Palahniuk's hypertrophied arms and finally put it to good use pummeling the postapocalyptic zombie armies.

So that's that.

Next time, we'll explore if Palahniuk could shit in a paper bag and sell it to fanboys, and, if so, would they still insist it didn't stink. 

The Roar of the Masses Could Be Farts

I reckon I have it figured.

The main problem with litbloggers is that they're cursed with pathetic enemies.  First, n+1, and now Dick Schickel?  As mentioned before, the only danger attached to this desperate sputter is that someone takes it seriously and ends up associated with the shrill and poorly reasoned arguments therein. For example:

The most grating words I've read in a newspaper recently were in a New York Times report on the shrinkage of book reviewing in many of the nation's leading newspapers.

The piece suggested that this might not be an entirely bad thing. Into the breach, it argued, will charge the bloggers, one of whom, a former quality-control manager for a car parts maker, last year wrote 95 book reviews for his website.

"Some publishers and literary bloggers," the article said, viewed this development contentedly, "as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books."

Anyone? Did I read that right?

Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's) entire body of work, among other qualities.

Mr. Schickel offers nothing but accusation and platitudes--well, also a poor understanding of his potential future audience, but more on that later. 

He seems to be so pleased with himself for putting forth the naughty idea that "elitism is good" that he forgets to tell us whether Mr. Wickett's 95 book reviews are worthwhile.  I presume they're not awful simply because they exist in such bulk.  Are they any worthwhile, Mr. Schickel? 

It's impossible to know, given this article.  (Perhaps he forgot to look at them, a common mistake of avowed blog haters.)  In the absence of a reasoned critique of these reviews,  I don't see how the fact that they originated from a "a former quality-control manager for a car parts maker" matters, unless Mr. Schickel is engaged in attempting to send a clumsily coded message back to the court at Versailles.

Going forward from the above quoted passage, Mr. Schickel's dispatch only grows more pretentious and, oddly, childish: He's on the side of Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve & Edmund Wilson & Orwell against, ahem, fingerpainters.

The most amusing aspect of blog hit pieces is that they almost invariably contain the seed(s) of their own destruction--in other words, they're full of unintentional irony and read like Swiftian satires of themselves.  Accusations against the so-called angry unwashed amateurs of the blog-o-sphere are undercut by illogical arguments, misplaced aggression, and hand-wringing, and all of this unburdened by any specific, firsthand accounts of the very thing they seem to know and hate so much:

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

Maybe most reviewing, whatever its venue, fails that ideal. But a purely "democratic literary landscape" is truly a wasteland, without standards, without maps, without oases of intelligence or delight.

I don't know about you, friends, but I'm ready for my sackcloth & ashes now.

This is all very sad.  It's even more sad that Mr. Schickel, who needs his own neck saved along with Sainte-Beuve's, is content with appealing to the Get Off My Lawn constituency.  The GOMLers are dwindling, however, and you're hardly going to win over the fingerpainting whippersnappers by tilting your nose, waving your AARP card, and slagging off the blogs.

In your heart of hearts, Mr. Schickel, I think you know that already.

See also. And also.

The Gas Face #1

Theme Months.

It's true that people I like and respect carry water for "events" like National Poetry Month, so it's not as if a refusal on BGB's part is going to cause any of the festivities to fall through the cracks.  Still, it's tough to see what the purpose of NPM might be, other than to answer the question of what it would look like if a tipsy marketing campaign stumbled into a wake, covered in flop sweat.  You might as well celebrate Brooklyn Dodgers Month, for all the good it would do.

Listen, either every month is poetry month, or no month is.  Even if the condensation of true poetry appreciation into one month outweighs the cost of the rather transparent ghettoizing of same, then it's still just Literary Sweeps Week(s).

It's tinsel.  It's marketing.  It's not even adept at churning out disposable products I'd enjoy. 

BGB wants the experiment taken to its logical extreme: Gimme my Nike Gerard Manley Hopkins ("Get SPRUNG!"), so I can dunk.  My Hank Bukowski can coolie'll keep my Pabst cold.  I want to wake up to a big bowl of Langston Hughes' Raisin in the Sun Nut Crunch.  Watch the ladies come a-runnin' when I splash my neck with Eau de Cologne Larkin.