Month: August 2010

Obama Picks Up Franzen’s Freedom

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Proving that he’s the kind of elitist Harvard-educated snob who reads literature, President Barack Obama picked up an advance copy of Jonathan Franzen’s forthcoming novel Freedom today. Obama also picked up copies of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony for daughters Sasha and Malia (spoilers for S & M, undoubtedly faithful Biblioklept readers both: Boo Radley isn’t so bad, that white dude raped his daughters, and they have to kill the pony’s mama. But not all in the same book). Also, our president is photographed outside the bookstore wearing what appears to be socks and sandals. (Okay, looked like socks and sandals in the light. But we’ll give BO the benefit of the doubt).

The New York Observer Profiles Tao Lin (in the Style of Tao Lin)

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“Tao Lin Will Have the Scallops” by Christian Lorentzen. I’m about halfway through Lin’s forthcoming novel, Richard Yates, which is somehow both far out and totally banal at the same time. Its cover is pretty awesome–

NPR Features James Baldwin

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NPR’s Morning Edition featured James Baldwin today as part of their continuing “American Lives” series. Listen and read here. Their lede–

The writer James Baldwin once made a scathing comment about his fellow Americans: “It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak.”

As an openly gay, African-American writer living through the battle for civil rights, Baldwin had reason to be afraid — and yet, he wasn’t. A television interviewer once asked Baldwin to describe the challenges he faced starting his career as “a black, impoverished homosexual,” to which Baldwin laughed and replied: “I thought I’d hit the jackpot.”

In the piece, NPR talks with Randall Kenan, editor of a new collection of Baldwin’s essays, speeches, and articles called The Cross of Redemption. The link above includes a great excerpt of one of Baldwin’s essays, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare.” A taste–

The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love — by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him. It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it. I think it is simply that he walked his streets and saw them, and tried not to lie about what he saw: his public streets and his private streets, which are always so mysteriously and inexorably connected; but he trusted that connection. And, though I, and many of us, have bitterly bewailed (and will again) the lot of an American writer — to be part of a people who have ears to hear and hear not, who have eyes to see and see not — I am sure that Shakespeare did the same. Only, he saw, as I think we must, that the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them.

“My Kushy New Job” — Wells Tower Slings Hash(ish) in Amsterdam

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Biblioklept fave Wells Tower details his temp job working in an Amsterdam weed bar in his new GQ article, “My Kushy New Job.” A few quotes from the essay–

At quarter of nine on a Wednesday morning, I report for my first shift. I’ll be working at de Dampkring on the Handboogstraat, a cheery alley just off the Damstraat, a heavily touristed promenade connecting the Flower Market to Dam Square. The Handboogstraat shop, a cozy enclave that can comfortably seat thirty or so, is a study in Art Nouveau psychedelia. Lava-lamp swirls predominate. The coffee bar is nearly overwhelmed by a biomorphic plaster mass aglow with party bulbs. The shop is pleasant and trippy in a somehow classic fashion. It’s like being inside the lovely bowels of Toulouse-Lautrec.

And later–

By midafternoon, my hands are sufficiently caramelized with THC resin to merit ejection from a major league pitcher’s mound. Rubbing my thumb against my forefingers rouses little rat turds of hashish. There’s probably enough intoxicating filth that gnawing my fingertips would affect my mood, but I don’t nibble them, taking seriously the house prohibition against dealers getting high on the job. Though other employees gripe about the policy, I hardly need a hit of anything. Simply working here makes me feel, in the worst possible way, as if I’m stoned to the limits of my capacity. The mere act of weighing the product, which must be done with ticklish exactitude, to the hundredth of a gram, while the customer rails at you—”Big buds! What’s with all the shake? I’m not paying for that stem!”—is an occasion for nervousness and paranoia of the first order. A third or so of the customers buy hash, most of it cheap stuff, which is hard as a boot sole and requires a kitchen knife to apportion. If you don’t nail a perfect gram on the first chop, you have to make the weight by laboriously shaving brown flour into the scale pan while the customer volubly wonders who let this fumbling idiot behind the bar.

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden — Helen Grant

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The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, Helen Grant’s debut novel, negotiates the razor’s edge between childhood’s rich fantasy world and the grim reality of adult life. When young girls start disappearing in her small German village, eleven year old protagonist Pia sets out to investigate, armed with her powers of imagination–an imagination fueled by the Grimmish tales spun by her elderly friend Herr Schiller for the pleasure of Pia and her only friend, StinkStefan. Like poor Stefan, Pia is ostracized by the town after her grandmother spontaneously combusts on Christmas. She takes to playing detective, but as she investigates the girls’ disappearances, the illusions of her fantasy life cannot protect her. As the story builds to its sinister climax, it reminds us that most of the folktales we grew up with are far darker than we tend to remember.

The Vanishing of Katharina Linden makes its American debut this month from Delacorte Press.

Buy J.D. Salinger’s Toilet

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Buy J.D. Salinger’s toilet on eBay—

Only one million dollars? For the Toilet Commode that Salinger PERSONALLY OWNED & USED?! Hmmm . . . could it be a phony?

“It will come to you uncleaned”? Wow.

“I Never Went to Blanes” — Diego Trelles Paz Remembers Roberto Bolaño

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Diego Trelles Paz remembers Roberto Bolaño at n +1. Although Paz never met the author (despite several attempts) they corresponded, and he shares some of the emails. Here’s Paz on The Savage Detectives—

What did I like about Bolaño’s novel?

In formal terms, it was clear to me that his prose, while apparently simple, has a restrained and suggestive lyricism and a powerful musicality that are very different than what the authors of the “Boom” produced. Reading Bolaño generated an instant addiction in me: whether due to the lucid and demystifying spirit with which he adopts diverse genres or to his eagerness to involve us as active readers, to offer us fragmented works so we might fill them in with our imaginations. We become accomplices who search for truth through narrative devices that blend reality with fiction, facts with conjectures, apocryphal characters with historical ones. As the critic José Miguel Oviedo has said, “Bolaño always ends up turning his readers into detectives.”

The article also features this marvelous image of Bolaño enjoying an ice cream cone–

Why You Shouldn’t Rely on CliffsNotes

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“Hard Read,” from the geniuses at The Perry Bible Fellowship.

The Passage — Justin Cronin

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Apocalypse literature, when done right, can inform us about our own contemporary society. It can satirize our values; it can thrill us; it can astound us with its sheer uncanniness. I’m thinking of Russell Hoban’s Ridley Walker, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novels, Cormac McCarthy’s novels Blood Meridian (yeah, Blood Meridian is an end-of-the-world novel) and The Road, Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence and Brave New World. There are many more of course–hell, even the Bible is bookended by the apocalypse of the flood (and Noah’s escape) and the Revelation to John. Then there are the movies, too many to name in full at this point (China Miéville even called for a “breather” a while back), but the ones that work become indelible touchstones in our culture (George Romero’s zombie films and Children of Men spring immediately to mind).

So, my interest in such works foregrounded, perhaps I should get to the business of reviewing Justin Cronin’s massive virus-vampire apocalypse saga/blatant money-making venture The Passage. But before I do, let me get anecdotal: earlier this summer, because of my aforementioned interest in apocalypse lit I tried to listen to the unabridged audiobook version of Stephen King’s The Stand. I bring this up here because Cronin’s book is utterly derivative of The Stand. I also bring it up because I had the good sense to quit The Stand almost exactly half way through–good sense I did not extend to The Passage. Yes, dear reader, I listened to the whole damn audiobook, all 37 hours of it. It helped that I had a home renovation project going that took up most of this week. So I listened to Cronin’s dreadful prose, hacky twists, and derivative plots while sanding joint compound and painting for eight hours at a stretch. True, it’s a much easier audiobook to follow than, say, something by Dostoevsky–but that’s only because anyone with a working knowledge of apocalypse tropes has already seen and heard it all before.

So what is it? In The Passage a government virus turns people into vampire-like zombies with hive mines. There’s a mystical little girl at the center of it all. Does she hold the key to mankind’s salvation? Does all of this sound terribly familiar? Cronin’s book begins in the not-too-distant future, tracing the origins of the virus that will unleash doom and gloom; then, about a third of the way in, he skips ahead about a 100 years to explore what life is like for the survivors. While the commercial prose had taxed me about as far as I could go, I have to admit that this twist a third of the way in intrigued me–what would life be like for these folks? What savagery did the “virals” (also called “smokes,” “dracs,” and a few other names I can’t remember) unleash? Luckily, there’s plenty of exposition, exposition, exposition! Cronin saturates the second part of his novel with so much background information that he essentially ruins any chance the book has to breathe. There’s no mystery, no strangeness–just many, many derivative plots and creaky set-pieces thinly connected with enough chapter-ending cliffhangers to make Scheherazade blush. This wouldn’t be so bad if Cronin’s characters weren’t stock types that would seem more at home in an RPG than, I don’t know, a novel. It’s hard to care about them as it is, but as the novel progresses he frequently puts them in mortal peril and then saves them at the last-minute–again and again and again. The derivative nature of The Passage wouldn’t smart so much if the characters weren’t so flat and the prose so mundane. The action scenes are fine–just fine–but when Cronin gets around to like, expressing themes and ideas the results are risible. It’s like the worst of Battlestar Galactica (you know, those last three seasons), maudlin soap opera that tips into mushy metaphysics.

But I fear I’ve broken John Updike’s foremost rule for reviewing books — “Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.” I think that Cronin has set out to make money here, and he’s written the type of book that will do that, the kind of book that will make some (many) people think that they are reading some kind of intellectual alternative to those Twilight books. There will be sequels and there will be movies and there will be lots and lots of money, enough for Cronin to swim in probably, if he wishes. In the meantime, go ahead and skip The Passage.

Author Jonathan Franzen Uses Video to Object to the Making of Author Videos

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“Portrait of the Cartoonist as a Dog Owner” — Joe Sacco

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In this week’s New York Times, cartoonist Joe Sacco is a little less serious than usual. Just a little.

Roger Ebert’s Lovely, Sarcastic Tweets about E-books

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Great series of tweets today from Roger Ebert about e-books. Here’s what he’s done so far–

Here’s my old e-book “10,000 Jokes, Toasts and Stories,” and written inside “To my boy Roger from Daddy.”

Look at this theater ticket stub I found! I used it in an old e-book, from Stratford-upon-Avon.

Needed: New Yorker cover showing Dr. Johnson in his library, a cup of tea at hand, with shelves and piles of his e-books.

I found this e-book on a top shelf of a used e-book store. Its cover somehow reached out to me.

I love to relax in my library and let my eyes stray over my e-books, each one triggering its own response.

We only met in the first place because she spotted the cover of the e-book I was reading across the aisle on the train.

Great stuff!

“Muggins Here” — David Mitchell

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The Guardian has published David Mitchell’s short story “Muggins Here” as part of its summer fiction special (other authors include Hilary Mantel and Roddy Doyle). Here’s an excerpt–

A proper mental Saturday it is, what with New Sue off with her hernia and the Lukes of Hazzard gone AWOL, so Muggins Here’ll have to cover for everyone else’s break. Not New Sue and Beverly are still giving me the silent treatment ’cause I can’t let them take the bank holiday off, but it’s water off a duck’s back by this point. By ten o’clock the queues are looping back, and it’s like all Greenland’s one of those swilling dreams you get with ‘flu. Full of eyes, drilling into me. Philpotts can’t get close enough to fire off a “What are half your team doing without their name-badges, Pearl?” but I need the loo – no chance, not ’til all the breaks are over. This beardy customer’s spitting, “Twenty-three minutes I’ve been in this queue!” I tell him, “It certainly is a busy morning” so in he leans, breath all pilchardy, and says, “Then hire – more – staff!”, like I’m backwards, like Gary used to do sometimes. I ask for his “I Love Greenland” Loyalty Card and while he’s fishing through his wallet I’m working out that I’ve still got three hundred and forty minutes ’til I can go home. Last week I turned forty-five so that’s nineteen years ’til I retire, though now they’re reckoning we’ll have to work ’til seventy. Seventy! Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? I really really need the loo. When I ask the man, “Cash back?” he gives me this withering, “That’s exactly what landed the economy in the crappers in the first place” and then, “What’s so green about Greenland Supermarkets dishing out fifty plastic bags to every customer?”

“I Finally Got Tired of Being Angry at Roth” — What Jonathan Franzen’s Been Reading

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Time profiles Jonathan Franzen this week (part of the push for his new novel Freedom, out later this month). Franzen also talks about five works that have “inspired him recently.” Here are his comments on those books–

The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal

Instead of sitting for years at his writing desk, pulling his hair, Stendhal served with the French diplomatic corps in his favorite country, Italy, and then came home and dictated his novel in less than eight weeks: what a great model for how to be a writer and still have some kind of life! The book is at once deeply cynical and hopelessly romantic, all about politics but also all about love, and just about impossible to put down.

The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley

There’s nothing fancy about the writing in Smiley’s masterpiece, and yet every sentence of its eight hundred pages is clean and necessary. For the two weeks it took me to read it, I didn’t want to be anywhere else but in late-medieval Greenland, following the passions and feuds and farming crises of European settlers trying to survive in the face of ecological doom. It all felt weirdly and plausibly contemporary.
Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth

I finally got tired of being angry at Roth for his self-indulgent excesses and weak dialogue and thin female characters and decided to open myself to his genius for invention and his heroic lack of shame. Whole chunks of Sabbath’s Theater can be safely skipped, but the great stuff is truly great: the scene in which Mickey Sabbath panhandles on the New York with a paper coffee cup, for example, or the scene in which Sabbath’s best friend catches him relaxing in the bathtub and fondling his (the friend’s) young daughter’s underpants.

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Wharton’s male characters suffer from some of the deficiencies that Roth’s female characters do, but the heroine of House of Mirth, Lily Bart, is one of the great characters in American literature, a pretty and smart but impecunious New York society woman who can’t quite pull the trigger on marrying for money. Wharton’s love for Lily is equal to the cruelty that Wharton’s story relentlessly inflicts on her; and so we recognize our entire selves in her.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

A lifelong heavy drinker with his most famous novel well behind him, Steinbeck set out to write a mythic version of his family’s American experience that would embody the whole story of our country’s lost innocence and possible redemption. There are infelicities on almost every page, and the fact that the book succeeds brilliantly anyway is a testament to the power of Steinbeck’s storytelling: to his ferocious will to make sense of his life and his country.

J.M. Coetzee and Ethics — Anton Lesit & Peter Singer

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In their introduction to J.M. Coetzee and Ethics, editors Anton Lesit and Peter Singer make the claim that the essays in the new collection “show the folly of Plato’s idea that literature has nothing to contribute to philosophical discussion. Instead they are an invitation to a dialogue that can sharpen the issues that literature raises while making philosophy more imaginative.” Lesit and Singer briefly review the philosophical tradition, from the time of Plato’s call to banish the poets to the current wars between pragmatists and postmodernists, specifically foregrounding the case for Coetzee’s literature as a legitimate source of philosophical inquiry. They identify three specific features of his works — reflectivity, truth seeking, and an exploration of social ethics — that merit critical attention. The essays in the volume address “the psychological and moral phenomenology of personal relationships; the consequences of human suffering, evildoing, and death for human rationality and reason; and the literary methods invoked to open areas of experience beyond the abstract language of philosophers.” The editors also point out that “Unsurprisingly, the ethics of animals looms large in this collection,” a concern that might attract animal ethicists and others interested in animal-human relationships who might not immediately turn to literature for answers (or questions). On the whole, J.M. Coetzee and Ethics, while obviously a specialty volume, strives to appeal to a wider audience, eschewing much of the acadamese that plagues (and obfuscates the arguments of) so many critical volumes. Fans of Coetzee will wish to take note. J.M. Coetzee and Ethics is new in hardback from Columbia University Press.

All My Friends Are Dead — Avery Monsen and Jory John

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All My Friends Are Dead by Avery Monsen and Jory John. From Chronicle Books.

The AV Club Interviews Terry Zwigoff about His Movie Crumb

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The AV Club interviews director Terry Zwigoff about his movie Crumb (and some other stuff). From the interview–

The idea was to do a documentary on the three Crumb brothers. It was never a documentary about Robert Crumb in my head. I had met Charles and Max and liked them both, and I collected artwork from all three brothers. I even spent a night at their parents’ house, and met his father when he was still alive. So it started taking shape in my mind, and it seemed to me like a good idea for a film if Robert would do it. Not so much because I had access to Robert and he was willing to cooperate, but because I felt comfortable knowing that as his friend, I’d been exposed to facts that other people wouldn’t have known. And there were some things Robert never even thought to tell me about, not because he was trying to withhold information from me, but because he couldn’t tell what would be interesting and what wouldn’t. He couldn’t be objective about it.

Here’s a clip from the movie–