Edwin Turner

Biblioklept Talks to Daniel Nayeri About Capturing Voice, Being a YA Gatekeeper, and Writing His Novella Quartet on an iPhone

February 6, 2012April 4, 2012 Edwin Turner4 Comments

Daniel Nayeri was born in Iran and spent a couple of years as a refugee before immigrating to Oklahoma at age eight with his family. He is the author of Straw House, Wood House, Brick House, Blow, a collection of four novellas; Kirkus called it, “Provocative and deeply satisfying,” Bookpage named it “a delightful amalgam of the high and the low, the silly and the sublime,”and the BCCB mentioned the “breathtakingly vivid word smithery” in its starred review.

In addition to his writing, Daniel is an editor of picture books, novels, and graphic novels at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, an accomplished filmmaker, and a professional pastry chef.

Daniel was kind enough to talk to us about his work via email.

Biblioklept: Your book was composed entirely on an iPhone. Can you tell us a bit about that process? How did you start? How intentional was the process in the beginning? Did you use a specific program? Did you edit on the iPhone at all?

Daniel Nayeri: Several years ago, I was reading an article about the “cell phone novel” phenomenon in Japan. The tone of the article was basically, “check out this super popular thing in Japan that all the literary folks hate.” It described the authors as these quiet teen girls, and early-twenty-something women, who would dash off a few chapters on the subway and email them to a website service. The authors didn’t do themselves any favors by saying they disliked reading “real” books, and the critics didn’t do themselves any favors by flipping out and wondering out loud if this trend meant the “death of the author.”

For me, the fascinating tidbit came from a few comments that noted the possible effects of writing on a cell phone. Every undergrad discusses the interplay of form and content (Dickens’s serialized form, the oral iterations of the Iliad, etc). I got really excited about forcing my imagination to live in an incredibly small space. The Japanese authors discussed that when they moved to computers, their vocabulary became “richer” and their “sentences have also grown longer.” I wanted to see if I could push those boundaries out a little (maybe I’m the crazy person who tries to paint the Mona Lisa on an Etch-a-Sketch).

As for the program I used. I bought the first-gen iPhone, so I was using the notepad app that comes with the phone (without cut and paste). To edit, I got very tired of deleting sentences and retyping them three pages down, so I created a code system. For example, if I wanted to move a paragraph up by two pages, I would bracket off the section I wanted and place a symbol next to it. Then I would go up two pages and just place the same symbol. By the end of my editing, there would be pages of work that were nothing but symbols, connected with various prepositions.

Biblioklept: Did you always have the idea to write a quartet of novellas over different genres? How did the idea come about?

DN: I think in general, novels have gotten fatter. As an editor, my first pass on nearly every manuscript is to ask for major cuts. I’m actually kind of petulant about it. My position is that if a book isn’t going to be as good as Anna Karenina, then it probably shouldn’t be as long.

It’s a reactionary position to take, so I thought I would challenge myself with telling stories and building worlds as large and as complex as I could possibly make them, with the limitation of 35-45 thousand words. Obviously, I sort of cheated by connecting some of my thoughts and themes in a collection of four. Hypocrisy and petulance—that’s the sort of delightful company you’ll get if you find yourself working with me.

(Another reason was that I’m still young, and I’d like to learn a lot more before I start demanding the attention of readers for five hundred pages at a time).

Biblioklept: What challenges did you face when working in the variety of genres you worked in?

DN: Presenting four very different voices (to whatever extent one might think it succeeded) is the aspect of this project I am most proud of, actually. The nicest thing anyone has said about the book so far has been to say it is, “the literary equivalent of a singer with a four-octave range.”

To me, it represents the ability to assimilate—a quality any first-generation immigrant valorizes at one point or another. When I first came to the states, I quickly took up the Texas/Oklahoma speech patterns. I was a voracious cataloguer of idioms. When I moved to New York, I did the same. I picked up “kitchen Spanish” in my years as a pastry chef. I love local parlance. As a kid struggling with English, having a proficient knowledge of colloquial expressions represented mastery over the language.

So to me, genres and forms with heavy use of lingo (sports writing, noir, poetry) were the height literary achievement. It sounds backwards, but if you learned the queen’s English first, then you value Huckleberry Finn’s jargon highest of all.

Biblioklept: Straw House, Wood House, Brick House, Blow is being marketed as a YA book. There’s been some debate in the past few years about a perceived sense of darkness or violence in YA. What place do dark or violent themes have in YA fiction?

DN: I almost never think about this as a writer. I almost never stop thinking about it in my capacity as an editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. My personal interests keep me PG-13, generally. But geez, people send me some crazy-inappropriate material—even for general consumption. Lots of incest. Lots of racial hang-ups. Lots of creepy.

I believe strongly in an editor’s responsibility to put out well-written work (whether or not it’s politically or ethically aligned with one’s self). The old Voltaire quote -– “I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it” –- has difficult implications for “gatekeepers” in any media.

But just because there is an ethical challenge to acquire broadly, doesn’t mean the public can’t resist-—meaning that the marketplace often creates pressure to move material toward the unobjectionable. When minors are involved, however, I would hope there are adults who will curate the material. I think the majority of adults agree that there is such a thing as “age appropriateness.” I think both sides of the argument are often concern-trolling-—one side saying kids shouldn’t hear the f-word, and the other side screaming censorship to the culling of anything short of snuff-porn.

The conversation seems to dance around a rating system (as with the MPAA for films, or the ESA for video games), but that has a ton of complications. I’m not sure what I think of a rating system, personally. I just think the discussion would be more interesting than making fun of people over Twitter.

Biblioklept: What are you working on next?

DN: Straw House has four very western genres, so I’m working on another set of four stories, but this time in eastern genres. I’m from Iran and immigrated to Oklahoma, so collections about the East West interaction have always fascinated me (Rushdie wrote a great essay collection call East West).

There’s an Ibn Battuta travelogue, a 1001 Nights tale, a parable, etc. I’m about halfway finished.

Biblioklept: Have you ever stolen a book?

DN: I’ve never stolen from a retailer, but when I was in middle school, I volunteered at the local library. When I forgot to return books after a long time, the head librarian would let me go into the database and erase my fine, as well as the book itself. That’s how I got my first copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, a CD of Boston’s greatest hits, and a book on juggling. So basically what I’m saying is that I was pretty hardcore.

A Riff on the Kindle Fire

February 1, 2012April 4, 2012 Edwin Turner12 Comments

1. I got a Kindle Fire for Christmas this year, and have been using it for about a month now. I’m not sure how to go about “reviewing” this product, so I’m going to riff a bit.

2. Let’s get the whole Amazon-as-Evil-Empire thing out of the way up front: Yes, Amazon’s business practices are unsavory; yes, attempting to decimate the publishing industry as it currently exists is Not Good; yes, their practices threaten brick-and-mortar stores (the kind that actually pay local and state taxes!); yes their practices work to undermine key figures in the publishing industry—y’know, people like editors.

3. Picking up on that last clause: self-publishing (and the self-publishing “revolution” that e-readers like the Kindle Fire entail) may seem fine and dandy cotton candy, but there’s a reason that editors (and publishers and publicists, etc.) exist. These people make books better. These people make books. (And no, by the way, I’m not interested in reading your self-published ebook, so quit sending me email blasts).

4. Seems like I’m riffing out a lot of context, so let’s keep going: Perhaps you read whinypants Jonathan Franzen decrying the impending moral failures/societal breakdown that will result from ebooks replacing print editions. Franzen’s position is, of course, reactionary and conservative, and deeply rooted in the fear that the perfect Platonic permanence of books will be subverted or decimated.

5. Franzen’s reaction is rooted in part against a (common, teleological, utopian) misconception about the longevity and stability of digital content. Simply put, many people are operating under a dramatic misunderstanding of just how unstable digital content is. Where will all these books be stored, and in what format? Who will be responsible for archiving these materials?

6. A simple thought experiment, germane to item 5 above: Think back on all the obsolete media that you have used in your lifetime. I am in my thirties; my list would include cassette tapes, VHS tapes, laser disks, floppy disks, minidiscs, CDRs . . . (I don’t include vinyl records in this list. I still own hundreds of them and play them regularly).

7. To recontextualize: Printed books are a far more stable format than ebooks.

8. To wit: Ursula LeGuin in her essay “Staying Awake” from a 2008 issue of Harper’s:

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you are fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.

9. Points 2-8 seem like so much hemming and hawing, so much reticence to discuss what I seemed to promise at the outset: Some sense of what reading on the Kindle Fire is like.

10. Some things I like very much about reading on the Kindle Fire:

It creates its own light for night reading.

It’s easy to highlight and annotate passages (and then open up a new screen to look at just those highlights and annotations, isolated from the text proper).

It’s lightweight and ergonomic and, when I read with it over my head, my wrists don’t constrict and go tingly.

It holds a lot of books.

11. Some things I like about the Kindle Fire that I would think I wouldn’t like about the Kindle Fire, were I to read such a list from another person:

I can determine how far I have read into a book as a percentage.

I can stop and browse the internet in the middle of reading.

I can look up words or even wikis as I go by simply hovering a finger over a word or phrase.

12. My daughter loves the thing. Loves loves loves it. She is probably the primary user. She is four and a half. I think the interactive books she adores are marvelous.

13. Some things I don’t like about the Kindle Fire:

No book smell.

One texture for all books: This is probably the biggest problem I can see with the Kindle Fire.

It requires a battery charge, so there’s a built in level of accessibility; a sense that one must needs “prepare” ahead of time to read, perhaps (unlike our old friend the print book, which only requires a light source).

No bath time reading.

I can’t read it around my daughter, because she will attempt to take it, or, at minimum, curl up in my lap.

It is not possible to have like three or four books open at once.

Can’t read .cbr files. Why? Why?

I had to buy a USB micro B cable to connect the Kindle to the computer that I use to store digital content. Why not include this cable, Amazon? (It’s almost as if the company wants consumers to be solely reliant on Amazon’s services as a content provider . . .)

14. I’ve found it nearly impossible to read an electronic book on the Kindle that I started as a print book. For example, I’m about half-way through Teju Cole’s novel Open City; the kind publicist who sent it to me also sent me an electronic version of the text. I began the print copy in earnest, but the other night, after reading a bit of Hawthorne on the Kindle, I found myself wanting to sink back into Cole’s Sebaldian orbit. When I found my place in the text though, I felt alienated, bleak even, as if I were not reading the definitive version of Cole’s book but instead its cheap ghost. There is no intellectual or objective justification for this feeling. Call it a vibe or a habit.

15. Books that I enjoy reading on the Kindle Fire:

David Markson’s The Last Novel, which perhaps begs to be read on such a device.

Anything by Nietzsche, but his aphoristic works especially.

A .pdf version of Luigi Serafini’s rare and expensive book The Codex Seraphinianus (one of many verboten tomes on my Kindle, but remember the name of this site if you please . . .)

Anything by Whitman, especially letters and other non-essentials that I would not normally pursue.

Ditto Hawthorne.

Ditto Dickinson.

Ditto Melville.

Oh, and beyond the overlooked and underfamous works of certain American Renaissance faves: Moby-Dick too, which seems looser, freer, more aphoristic on the Kindle. (Why?)

Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, which seems simultaneously dated and futuristic. Like William Gibson with a strong streak of Pynchonian sillies.

And Gibson: Rereading Burning Chrome. Had forgotten how good some of these shorts are.

Houellebecq’s Whatever: its brevity, its succinctness gels with my nascent Kindle habits, or perhaps instructs my Kindle habits, or more likely creates my Kindle habits.

16. To return to a point in #13 above: The Kindle Fire necessarily imposes a uniform texture on every book that one reads on it; this would be true of any e-reader. Sure, you can change the background (white, black, or a sepia color, which is what I prefer), fonts, sizes, spacing, etc. — but there is no sense of physicality, of individual identity, of, dare I say it, specialness, to the texts. I am aware that these are terribly subjective and overtly Romantic terms, but hell, I like physical books. I like their covers and their smells and their discolorations. I like leaving bookmarks in every book that I finish or abandon—I almost always find a new bookmark for every book that I read (the autobookmark on the Kindle is useful, but how can it compare with a photograph of my son or drawing by my daughter or a postcard from a stranger or a scrap of poetry from a discontinued textbook or an old grocery list of my wife’s from years before we were married?).

17. I titled this post “A Riff on the Kindle Fire,” but that’s a bit ambiguous I suppose: I did not compose the post on the Kindle Fire, which I find awkward re: blogging/wordprocessing. I used a laptop (with some help from an iPhone). Maybe the preposition “about” would be more suitable.

18. By way of closing, after four weeks with the thing:

It’s light.

It’s convenient for night reading, but you probably shouldn’t take it in the bath.

No book smell.

Buckaroo Banzai’s Marvelous End Titles Tell You Everything You Need to Know About This Strange Film

January 28, 2012November 2, 2018 Edwin Turner4 Comments

I’m almost ashamed to admit that I hadn’t seen W.D. Richter’s slapdash madcap sci-fi send up The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension until this summer. The film is so strange, so aggressively and willfully weird, that I don’t know how its cult vibes hadn’t enmeshed me earlier.

The film stars a deadpan Peter Weller as the titular Buckaroo, a neurosurgeon/rock star/superhero who, alongside his team/fellow bandmates, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, must stop the Red Lectroids from Planet 10. Or something like that.

The plot is a shambolic mess, sprawling out in bizarre directions. Buckaroo Banzai is never sure if it’s cyberpunk or Moonlighting or a winking jab at Flash Gordon or a riff on a rock movie. It’s enthralling and terrible at the same time.

But there’s no need to oversummarize here, when all one must needs do to get a feel for Buckaroo Banzai is watch its marvelous end title sequence. Go ahead, watch it:

There’s nothing I don’t love about these four minutes: The strutting! The skinny ties! Jeff Goldblum in furry chaps and a cowboy hat! Smokin’ hot Ellen Barkin! That little hop that Peter Weller does at 1:40! The promise of a sequel that never came! And that song! That jaunty joyful whistling slice of ’80s cheese! Love love love it!

I Riff on William Gaddis’s Enormous Novel J R (From About Half Way Through)

January 23, 2012April 4, 2012 Edwin Turner20 Comments

1. I want to write about William Gaddis’s novel J R, which I am about half way through now.

2. I’ve been listening to the audiobook version, read with operatic aplomb by Nick Sullivan. I’ve also been rereading bits here and there in my trade paperback copy.

3. What is J R about? Money. Capitalism. Art. Education. Desperate people. America.

4. The question posed in #3 is a fair question, but probably not the right question, or at least not the right first question about J R. Instead—What is the form of J R—How is J R?

5. A simple answer is that the novel is almost entirely dialog, usually unattributed (although made clear once one learns the reading rules for J R). These episodes of dialogue are couched in brief, pristine, precise, concrete—yet poetic—descriptions of setting. Otherwise, no exposition. Reminiscent of a movie script, almost.

6. A more complex answer: J R, overstuffed with voices, characters (shadows and doubles), and motifs, is an opera, or a riff on an opera, at least.

7. A few of the motifs in J R: paper, shoes, opera, T.V. equipment, entropy, chaos, novels, failure, frustration, mechanization, noise, hunting, war, music, commercials, trains, eruptions of nonconformity, advertising, the rotten shallowness of modern life . . .

8. Okay, so maybe that list of motifs dipped into themes. It’s certainly incomplete (but my reading of J R is incomplete, so . . .)

9. Well hang on so what’s it about? What happens?—This is a hard question to answer even though there are plenty of concrete answers. A little more riffage then—

10. Our eponymous hero, snot-nosed JR (of the sixth grade) amasses a paper fortune by trading cheap stocks. He does this from a payphone (that he engineers to have installed!) in school.

11. JR’s unwilling agent—his emissary into the adult world—is Edward Bast, a struggling young composer who is fired from his teaching position at JR’s school after going (quite literally) off script during a lesson.

12. Echoes of Bast: Thomas Eigen, struggling writer. Jack Gibbs, struggling ~~writer~~ human. Gibbs, a frustrated, exasperated, alcoholic intellectual is perhaps the soul of the book. (Or at least my favorite character).

13. Characters in J R tend to be frustrated or oblivious. The oblivious characters tend to be rich and powerful; the frustrated tend to be artistic and intellectual.

14. Hence, satire: J R is very, very funny.

15. J R was published over 35 years ago, but its take on Wall Street, greed, the mechanization of education, the marginalization of art in society, and the increasing anti-intellectualism in America is more relevant than ever.

16. So, even when J R is funny, it’s also deeply sad.

17. Occasionally, there’s a histrionic pitch to Gaddis’s dialog: his frustrated people, in their frustrated marriages and frustrated jobs, explode. But J R is an opera, I suppose, and we might come to accept histrionics in an opera.

18. Young JR is a fascinating study, an innocent of sorts who attempts to navigate the ridiculous rules of his society. He is immature; he lacks human experience (he’s only 11, after all), and, like most young children, lacks empathy or foresight. He’s the perfect predatory capitalist.

19. All the love (whether familial or romantic or sexual) in J R (thus far, anyway) is frustrated, blocked, barred, delayed, interrupted . . .

20. I’m particularly fascinated by the scenes in JR’s school, particularly the ones involving Principal Whiteback, who, in addition to his educational duties, is also president of a local bank. Whiteback is a consummate yes man; he babbles out in an unending stammer of doubletalk; he’s a fount of delicious ironic humor. Sadly though, he’s also absolutely real, the kind of educational administrator who thinks a school should be run like a corporation.

21. The middlebrow novelist Jonathan Franzen, who has the unlikely and undeserved reputation of being a literary genius, famously called Gaddis “Mr. Difficult” (in an essay of the same name).

22. Franzen’s essay is interesting and instructive though flawed (he couldn’t make it through the second half of J R). From the essay:

“J R” is written for the active reader. You’re well advised to carry a pencil with which to flag plot points and draw flow charts on the inside back cover. The novel is a welter of dozens of interconnecting scams, deals, seductions, extortions, and betrayals. Between scenes, when the dialogue yields briefly to run-on sentences whose effect is like a blurry handheld video or a speeded-up movie, the images that flash by are of denatured, commercialized landscapes — trees being felled, fields paved over, roads widened — that recall to the modern reader how aesthetically shocking postwar automotive America must have been, how dismaying and portentous the first strip malls, the first five-acre parking lots.

23. Franzen, of course, is not heir to Gaddis. If there is one (and there doesn’t need to be, but still), it’s David Foster Wallace. Reading J R I am constantly reminded of Wallace’s work.

24. But also Joyce. J R is thoroughly Joycean, at least in its formal aspects: that friction between the deteriorated language of commerce and the high aims of art; the sense and sound and rhythms of the street. (Is there a character more frustrated in Western literature than Stephen Dedalus? Surely he finds some heirs in Gibbs, Bast, and Eigen . . .)

25. Gaddis denied (or at least deflected) a Joycean influence. Better to say then that they were both writing the 20th century, only from different ends of said century.

26. And then a question for navel-gazing lit major types, a question of little import, perhaps a meaningless question (certainly a dull one for most decent folks): Is J R late modernism or postmodernism? Late-late modernism?

27. Gaddis shows a touch of the nameyphilia that we see (out of control) in Pynchon: Hence, Miss Flesch, Father Haight, the diCephalis family, Nurse Waddams, Stella Angel, Major Hyde, etc.

28. To return to the plot, or the non-plot, of J R: As I’ve said, I’m only half way through the thing, but I can’t see its shape. That sentence might need a “yet” at the end; or, J R might be so much chaos.

29. In any case, I will report again at the end, if not sooner.

Revisiting A Wrinkle in Time

January 16, 2012April 4, 2012 Edwin Turner3 Comments

Madeleine L’Engle’s seminal fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time turns 50 this year, and publisher Macmillan is celebrating by releasing a new anniversary edition with oodles of extras, including photos, manuscript pages, and new editorial content. They’ve also initiated a “50 Years, 50 Days, 50 Blogs Celebration Campaign” to promote the new book, and they asked Biblioklept to participate in the first week.

Here is the new cover:

And here is the cover to my beloved, ragged edition:

A Wrinkle in Time explores the strange intersections of space and time against a backdrop of adolescent angst. Our intrepid heroine Meg, her child genius brother Charles Wallace, and her would-be beau Calvin O’Keefe, go on a trans-dimensional quest to find her missing physicist father. They are aided (and initiated into) this quest by a trio of immortal women (shades of the Norns); their intergalactic mission finds them encountering angelic centaurs, motherly tentacled beasts, a red-eyed automaton, a disembodied brain, and more more more. Dr. Dad has disappeared while working on a mysterious project involving a tesseract.

Here’s a nifty visualization of the tesseract:

Like a lot of young people, as a child I was deeply fascinated by the concept of “tessering” away to a strange, marvelous, dangerous place, and it was surely this idea that most enthralled me as an early reader of the novel. I was probably ten when I first read the book, which I’m pretty sure was a gift from my aunt who brought it to me while our family was living in New Zealand. I actually wrote my name and our six-digit phone number into the book, which suggests that I loaned it out quite a bit.

A Wrinkle in Time gelled with all of the stuff I was reading then: lots of Tolkien, C.S.Lewis, and Douglas Adams, but also plenty of crappy Dr. Who novels and lots of execrable fantasy novels. L’Engle’s novels (of course I read all of them after reading Wrinkle; to this day, Many Waters is probably the one that stands out the most, weird and sexy as it was) were of a piece with Tolkien and Lewis (especially Lewis’s oft-overlooked space trilogy)—but there was something distinctly American about L’Engle’s characters—her writing even—that intrigued me. I had spent my entire childhood expatriated and was constantly looking for avenues of American expression, ways “to be American” (yes, I realize how silly that sounds now).

In retrospect, it’s not the tesseract and its fantastical properties that I so recall from A Wrinkle in Time so much as it is L’Engle’s characters, especially mercurial Meg and her future-husband Calvin. While much of literature emphasizes the clash between individual desires and societal conventions, L’Engle’s particular tone and characterization is keenly sensitive to the difficulties adolescents face navigating this conflict. In a sense, L’Engle is working out the early blueprint for what would become the conventions of Young Adult literature. L’Engle wrote a specific brand of sci-fi/fantasy that, on the surface, sets her apart from S.E. Hinton and Robert Cormier—but what these writers share in common, what makes their work so enduring even as society changes, is the essential emotional reality their characters share with readers.

Wrinkle endures also because of its handling of complex themes of conformity, idealism, faith, and science. It’s a book that challenges a youngish audience to read in new ways. It’s also a frequently challenged book—always the sign of something good—suggesting that it’s not going anywhere soon. In this sense, Wrinkle’s literary legacy externally recapitulates its internal themes of nonconformity.

Of course, characterization and strong themes probably wouldn’t get too far with young readers if Wrinkle didn’t deliver the goods that YA readers demand: a good yarn. Wrinkle is spry and engaging at fifty, and while it’s not as bloody as new kid on the block The Hunger Games (the protagonist of which owes some small debt to Meg Murray) it nevertheless negotiates the dangers of existence (both physical and metaphysical) with greater emotional intensity.

But I’ve veered off course here, invoking a newer, more violent YA star at the end of my riff, when what I really want to do is encourage young people who haven’t read Wrinkle yet to pick it up (okay, especially young people who think that Collins’s trilogy is the bee’s knees). It’s a wise, endearing, and enduring classic, one that deserves attention on its golden anniversary.

I (Sort of) Review the the Trailer for Wes Anderson’s New Film, Moonrise Kingdom

January 13, 2012April 4, 2012 Edwin Turner7 Comments

If you hate Wes Anderson—and hating Wes Anderson seems like a special kind of sport in 2012 (or at least it did after his last two films, The Darjeeling Limited and Fantastic Mr. Fox)—the trailer for his new film Moonrise Kingdom will surely give you fuel for that fire or arrows for your quiver or whatever you need for your particular metaphor.

I like Wes Anderson’s films: I like the strange blend of earnestness and irony, the precociousness and preciousness, the calculated soundtracks, the fussy set and costume design and faux-’70s color schemes; I like the crumbling families, the failed and failing geniuses, the narcissists and the hacks; I like the fantasy of it all. I like the sentimentality of it all. I like the tents and special societies and secret compartments and fake books. I like the depression behind the charm.

I especially like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, which I think are the films that best navigate that special space between fantasy and reality (and theatricality) that is Andersonville. My least favorite film of his is his first, Bottle Rocket—too realistic (what a strange claim!), too naturalistic, not mannered or fussy enough.

I more or less understand why so many people hate Anderson’s fantasies, although I think it’s weak criticism to dismiss them as empty exercises in style without substance; still, watching the new trailer, I can see why anyone with a quarrel with Wes Anderson will positively hate this Wes Anderson movie before it’s even come out.

Here is that trailer:

So:

We’ve got a charismatic young man in the Max Fischer mold.

We’ve got a never-was early 1960s (?) sleep-away-camp (?)

We’ve got Edward Norton in a scouting uniform (in shorts!) saying: “Jiminy Cricket, he flew the coop!” (this is like +100 flaming arrows in the quivers of Anderson-haters, I imagine; it made me cringe my own self).

We have a portable turntable on a Northeastern beach.

We have the kind of tracking close up shots that went out of fashion, what, thirty years ago now?

Also:

A 1960s French pop song.

A play.

A house in a tree.

Some sailing shots that somehow remind me of Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons.

Old Bruce Willis.

Frances McDormand.

And:

Well, did you watch the end? Did you see those final moments, the shirtless Bill Murray with the ax propped over one shoulder, bottle of red in the other? Well, that’s why I tend to like these films.

Riff on Recent Reading, 1.09.2012 (Gaddis, Vollmann, Dragons, Nausicaä, Patti Smith)

January 11, 2012April 4, 2012 Edwin Turner5 Comments

1. Just Kids, Patti Smith

Really slowed down on this one, mostly because the spring semester hath begun, wreaking all sorts of destabilizing tasks on me. Momentum and reading habits will inevitably return. Anyway, Smith’s book is more or less a litany of famous meetings and infamous moments with lots and lots of descriptions of talismanic objects. The scene where she meets Allen Ginsberg is pretty cool. Smith presents herself as earnest, passionate, but also somehow at odds (or at least outs) with the whole Chelsea Hotel scene.

2. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Vol 1, Hayao Miyazaki

Completed the first volume of Miyazaki’s groundbreaking manga and started the second. The art is well crafted and distinct, but often extremely busy and even frenetic. It sometimes feels squashed in the panels, like it needs room to breathe. I can’t help but compare it to the film that followed, which is visually richer and more expansive. The film, in a sense, helps me to fill out the scope signaled in Miyazki’s inky illustrations.

The story in the manga so far differs subtly but significantly from the film; without adding spoilers (I think fans of the film will enjoy the book), the political dimension of the plot is heightened and gender roles are explored with greater concern. Nausicaä’s initial rashness is also presented with greater intensity (read: violent consequences). More to come.

3. Imperial, William T. Vollmann

Chapter 3 of Imperial, “The Water of Life,” is some of the best gonzo journalism I’ve ever read. Vollmann (along with an improbably game ex-Marine/hotel clerk) takes a raft—a cheap rubber dinghy, really—down the infamous New River, purportedly one of the most polluted waterways in North America. This river is filled with dead birds, dead fish, probably dead humans, lots and lots of garbage, industrial runoff, and lots and lots of human shit.

Of course, Vollmann can find beauty and strangeness and ugliness all at once:

The chapter does everything one wants from the book, and if you’re at all intrigued, there’s a version in the excellent Vollmann reader Expelled from Eden, which is a good starting point for his work.

The next chapter, “Sublineations: Lovescapes,” is this awful emo exploration of a bad breakup and the following heartbreak Volls feels after. It was torturous to get through, the sort of thing that screams for an editor. It also underscores how deeply deeply deeply personal the book is to him, though. More to come.

4. A Dance with Dragons, George R. R. Martin (audiobook read by Roy Dotrice)

Well goddam if I didn’t finally finish it. As I’ve lamented elsewhere in these e-pages, Martin’s fourth and fifth books in the A Song of Ice and Fire series (I hate that name, by the way: Game of Thrones (without the indefinite article) is way cooler sounding) are bloated, sagging, overfilled beasts sorely in need of an enema. Still, Dragons picks up in its final third, and ends with some shockers that, if I remember them 12 years from now when he finally finishes the next one, I may want to read it. Roy Dotrice = a very gifted reader. A great audiobook (still, I can’t believe this one topped so many year end lists).

5. JR, William Gaddis (tandem reading with audiobook read by Nick Sullivan)

Big thanks to Dwight at A Common Reader for suggesting the audiobook of JR read by Sullivan. I’m a few hours in; I’ve also been rereading bits immediately when I get home (I listen mostly in the car or on walks), retracing the lines that I’ve mentally underlined. Sullivan is a gifted voice actor who brings the many, many voices of JR to vivid life (that line seems hackneyed but it is in no way insincere. If I weren’t riffing I’d revise. If I weren’t riffing I’d edit parenthetical excuses. I’m gonna drink more red zin now). I’m reminded in some ways of RTE’s full-cast unabridged recording—performance really—of Joyce’s Ulysses. I’d read Ulysses twice before, but I feel like the full-cast production was an equally definitive version to the one in my head. Like Ulysses—especially the Sirens episode—JR is extremely aural; it’s mostly dialogue.

I’ve laughed out loud several times so far—had no idea the book would be this funny. Also, reading/hearing it, I can’t help but see how profoundly David Foster Wallace was influenced by Gaddis here: the bizarre corporate-speak, the disjunctive rhythms, the absurd humor, the satire on modernity, the ironic-earnest axis—even the passages of naturalistic description.

On deck: The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, Open City by Teju Cole, Smut by Alan Bennett and more more more.

An Incomplete List of Stuff I Wish I’d Written About in 2011

December 31, 2011October 8, 2013 Edwin Turner21 Comments

Let me get this out of my system:

In no particular order a list of stuff I wished I’d written about in 2011:

1. Renata Adler’s amazing novel-in-vignettes Speedboat.

2. Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson. End of the world cultural riffage. No raffage.

3. The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake: soul-crashing sad. [Not a typo].

4. Season two of Boardwalk Empire: The Oedipal complex as a plot arc hasn’t been done so well since The Sopranos. Most HBO shows seem to be about capitalism and law (see also: Deadwood, The Wire, The Sopranos).

5. That first episode of Luck. I love David Milch. Michael Mann seems imminently capable of filming things (although I think Heat is overrated, even though it has Val Kilmer, and he’s radness in the form of a lion in the form of a sea lion). The opening episode was dry like vermouth. But I will watch, because of Deadwood.

6. Hung. My wife and I are the only two people in America who liked Hung. Then it got canceled.

7. Captain America: All of the shots + set design in this film seem to have been straight up stolen from the Star Wars films—except the shots that were stolen from the Indiana Jones films. It’s funny in a way because Lucas (and Spielberg) were stealing from old serial films that were contemporaneous with the age that Captain America is meant to be set in. (And, oh, yeah, the movie was contrived bullshit).

8. I wish I’d reviewed How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive by Chris Boucher. It was new and fresh and strange and deserved a good review from this blog, but it was very difficult to write about. I tried. It’s simultaneously sad, funny, too-experimental, but also rich and rewarding. An excellent flawed début.

9. The Trip: Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon take a trip through Northern England, eating at Michelin starred inns, creeping on the wild misty moors, referencing plenty of Romantic lit, and riffing—and backbiting—a lot. Comedy + tragedy done right. Lovely.

10. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension: Okay, frankly, I was ashamed to admit that I hadn’t seen it until this summer. Batshit insane interstellar hi-jinks. Rasta aliens. Buckaroo and his men are in a band! The ending credits sequence is the second best I’ve ever seen (after Lynch’s closing credits for INLAND EMPIRE).

11. The last Harry Potter movie. It was good. I’m glad they’re over though.

12. Baudolino by Umberto Eco, which I listened to on mp3 while refinishing a room in my new house. The first half was great—silly, bawdy, funny—but it unraveled into a sloppy mess by the end.

13. The Hunger Games by whoever wrote The Hunger Games, I think her name is Suzanne Collins, but Christ I’m not gonna waste any time checking: I listened to this audiobook working on the same room project that I worked on while listening to Baudolino. Look, I get that these books are for kids, and that they’re probably a sight better than Twilight, but sheesh, exposition exposition exposition. There’s nothing wrong with letting readers fill in the gaps (especially when your book is ripping off The Running Man + a dozen other books). Also, there’s a character in this book who I think is named after pita bread.

14. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller. Another audiobook that I listened to working on the aforementioned project—only this book is pure excellence, a post-apocalyptic examination of faith and meaning set against Big Nothing. The first third recalled Blood Meridian to me, although McCarthy’s book must have been composed 25 years after Miller’s.

15. I finally watched Party Down after all of my friends kept telling me, “You gotta watch Party Down!” Have you seen Party Down? You gotta watch Party Down!

16. Various short stories by Melville and Hawthorne: I read a lot of short pieces from these guys, mostly obscure, often half-baked stories that were still better than 99.9% of the contemporary stuff American writers are doing.

17. Uncreative Writing by Kenneth Goldsmith. Goldsmith is a hero: Ubuweb is magic. But a lot of Uncreative Writing just felt like an excuse for Goldsmith to share his favorite riffs on avant gardism from the classroom. And I know he’s probably a great and inspiring teacher, and I’m sure his Uncreative Writing class was gangbusters and meaningful for his students. Maybe it’s because I teach at a community college; maybe I’m conservative—I’m a fan of Dada; I get Walter Benjamin, blah blah blah. I just think we should cite sources still. Originality may be a fiction, but synthesis isn’t. Research and documentation are meaningful. Still, an entertaining book.

18. Music. Although most writing about music sucks.

19. Probably several dozen other books, movies, TV shows, etc. But there’s always 2012 to become overwhelmed by!

Happy New Year!

Riff on Recent Reading, 12.31.2011

December 31, 2011April 4, 2012 Edwin Turner1 Comment

1. Donald Harington, The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks

I want to publicly thank blogger BLCKDGRD for sending me this book; it arrived in sections, the binding glue cracked, its abused condition surely a sign of love. I happened to be recaulking the margins of my screened in porch the day it arrived, so I used silicone caulk (along with c-clamp) to repair it.

The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks rightfully should have shown up on my Books I Didn’t Read in 2011 post, but it was doubly neglected, left under a pile of half-read books that I intend to keep reading: Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces, the Vollmann reader Expelled from Eden, a volume of stories by Breece D’J Pancake (two stories remain unread; I am sure they are awfully sad), Stendahl’s The Charterhouse of Parma. In short, I didn’t want to own up to abandoning it because I intend to go back and finish it. I read a little over half of Harington’s big, rich, funny history of Arkansas, told through the lens of the species of spaces inhabited by the Ingledews and their fellow Stay Morons. The book is lively, deeply ironic, and stands with Kurt Vonnegut as perfect American satire.

2. Just Kids, Patti Smith

I found Just Kids, which was a Big Deal book in 2010, while looking for a copy of Lillian Smith’s The Killers of the Dream (don’t fret; I found that book too). I’ve loved Smith’s music since I was a kid; like The Talking Heads, she was hard to place, not outright punk rock, definitely not pop, very weird.

I usually read the first few pages of books in the store if I think I’m going to buy them; I ended up reading about 10 pages of Just Kids, taking it home, and then reading for a few more hours. I’m almost finished with it now.

Smith documents a fascinating time in a fascinating place (New York City’s art/lit/music scene in the late sixties/early seventies), but her perspective for most of the book is that of an outsider, a would-be artist struggling to help Robert Mapplethorpe become famous for his art. Smith is in love with literature, particularly Romantic French stuff.

She’s also an object fetishist; I can’t think of another book that details so many tchotchkes, so many surfaces, so many contours, so many things. She’s an aesthete. There are also several incidences of book theft. I’m not sure if I’ll write up a proper review of this book—it won the Nat’l Book award and made all the year end lists in 2010—but I have been enjoying it as a chronicle of creative energy.

3. Imperial, William T. Vollmann

There’s a strange shift between the first and second chapters of Vollmann’s massive book about Imperial County. The first chapter, “The Gardens of Paradise,” reads like a magazine article (and it was; it was published in abbreviated form in Gear in 1999)—lots of dialogue, short paragraph breaks, a spare, lucid syntax, but nevertheless rippling with verve. The second chapter, “Delineations” is a heady brew, a page right out of Ishmael’s big book, as we see Vollmann try to delineate or define his white whale Imperial. And yet he seems to realize that delineation is a fantasy:

People say it was miraculous that Christ walked across the water, and yet they don’t think twice when the same is performed by this entity invisible everywhere except in its representations, whose substance is comprised of equal parts imagination, measurement, memory, authority, and jurisdiction! Delineation is the merest, absurdest fiction, yet delineation engenders control.

The territory and the time Vollmann treks in just a few dozen pages astounds . . .

4. MetaMaus, Art Spiegelman

Okay—not really recent reading, although I did pick it up again and thumb through it before writing this piece; mostly, I wanted to try to write something about this book before the end of the year (I put it on my “best of ’11” list, by the bye). This book is Spiegelman’s attempt to measure Maus: where it came from, how it was made, what making it did to him and for him—and to his family. Like Smith’s book, MetaMaus is very much about the creative process (forgive the hackneyed phrase)—only, where Smith breathlessly gushes in the glowing, enriching flames of art, Spiegelman guides us through the nitty-gritty nooks and crannies of how he made what is perhaps the signature work of comics art of the twentieth century.

The book is beautiful. Take a gander:

5. Pancha Tantra, Walton Ford

The index at the end of Pancha Tantra contains a series of citations that illustrate Ford’s paintings (hang on, the elements of that last phrase should be vice versa, right?). To wit:

6. A Dance with Dragons, George R. R. Martin (audiobook read by Roy Dotrice)

I really liked the first three Game of Thrones books (yeah, I know they have that long silly name; I’m not gonna write it). I listened to them on audio, all read by Roy Dotrice—who is a great reader—and I gave them a positive review. The first three books detail a world of Machiavellian scheming, a phallocentric, desacralized universe where power is constantly shifting and idealism will get you beheaded. The character development is excellent, the plots are engaging, and the prose is good enough.

The fourth book, narrated by John Lee, was almost too much to get through. Here are some words to describe it: bloated, plodding, sagging, lazy, meandering, over-expansive.

I’d heard that A Dance with Dragons was much better, knew that Dotrice was narrating again, and knew that the book picked up with some of my favorite characters who were left out of that fourth book (Tyrion, Danaerys).

I’m nearing the end—it’s much better than the last one, but not nearly as good as the first three. Martin could probably make the book a third shorter simply by cutting out the endless descriptions of food, the awful, gross sex scenes (actually, he can go ahead and keep those), and the terrible stock phrases. (How long do things last in ADwD? “Half a heartbeat.” Also, I would love to never hear the phrase “Much and more” again in my life. I’m not even kidding. And “Useless as the nipples on a breastplate” doesn’t need to show up more than once in your book).

Even with my gripes, there have been some good episodes so far, including a creepy cabin fever Sadean setpiece that reminded me of the South Africa episode of Pynchon’s V, which is like one of my favorite things in literature.

7. Various public domain books on Kindle Fire, including Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson

I got a Kindle Fire. I like it. I downloaded a bunch of obscure American Renaissance stuff—letters, reviews, essays—and have been scrolling over it quite a bit late at night. More thoughts on this device to come.

Books I Didn’t Read in 2011 (And Books I Will Try to Read in 2012)

December 28, 2011April 4, 2012 Edwin Turner29 Comments

Okay. So obviously a list of the books I didn’t read in 2011 would be, y’know, long.

This post is about the books I set out to read, tried to read, wanted to read, abandoned, neglected, acquired and thought looked interesting, etc. It’s also about what I want to—what I plan to—read in 2012.

A reasonable starting place: I wrote a post in early January of this year detailing the books I would try to read in 2011. I actually read most of the books I named in that post. But:

I failed to read past page 366 of Adam Levin’s incredibly long novel The Instructions, although I think I was a bit too harsh in my semi-review. Chalk it up to exhaustion.

I failed to even begin to try to read William Gaddis’s incredibly long novel JR. (But I swear to read it one year. Not next year, but maybe the year after?).

I failed to read past the first chapter of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love.

I read most of the Tintin collections I picked up last year, but I didn’t get to volumes 5 or 6.

Moving beyond that early post, books that I recall abandoning (although I’m sure there must be more):

I abandoned Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Italian romance The Marble Faun after about 30 pages.

I abandoned 334 by Thomas Disch after about 50 pages. Somehow simultaneously dense and loose, it struck me as intensely imagined and sloppily composed.

I abandoned John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing after the first chapter; it was a great opening chapter, but I thought it was going to be, I don’t know, more like Blood Meridian.

I also abandoned Chad Harbach’s big book The Art of Fielding (after 100 pages) because it was lame (notice it’s not pictured above because I traded in that sucker), but I had a nice dialog with some readers who responded to a post I wrote about abandoning it, so that was a plus.

Books I bought in 2011 that I aim to read in 2012:

Correction by Thomas Bernhard. Bernhard was a repeated suggestion from readers in the aforementioned Harbach post/rant, and he was apparently a huge influence on W.G. Sebald, so, yes, looking forward to this.

The Reivers by William Faulkner. I read A Light in August this year and reread most of Go Down, Moses. My plan is to read one Faulkner a year for the next ten years.

Ferdydurke by Witold Gambrowicz. I struggled to make it through Gombrowicz’s bizarre jaunt Trans-Atlantyk, but once the novel taught me how to read it, I was enchanted by its strange humor and frenetic syntax. Over some beer and wine, I had a conversation about Ferdydurke with my father-in-law’s priest who is Polish. His pronunciation of Ferdydurke should win an award for charm.

I will read Georges Perec’s big book Life: A User’s Manual.

I have already promised to read William Vollmann’s Imperial.

There are many, many more, of course (too many, really).

Books people sent me to read and review that look really cool that I will be reading and reviewing at some point in the very near future:

Satantango by László Krasznahorkai: I will read this and review this in the very near future.

The Funny Man by John Warner: Comedy, drugs, celebrity culture.

The Book on Fire by Keith Miller: This one is about a biblioklept. It’s been at the top of my stack for a few months now, but I keep letting myself get distracted.

Thirst by Andrei Gelasimov: Apparently this novella about a maimed alcoholic war vet is funny. (I hate the cover).

Mule by Tony D’Souza: Middle class man sells marijuana cross country. (I love the cover).

Various titles from Melville House’s Neversink line: I’ve got a few in the stack.

Also: I got a Kindle Fire for Christmas. I actually stayed up really late last night reading free public domain books from Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson; I’ll read a contemporary novel on it this year—Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, perhaps? Suggestions welcome!—and try to review both novel and the process of reading the novel on a warm glowing machine.

And: I’m sure there are a ton of novels that will come out in 2012 that I’ll want to read; I’m already primed for Dogma, Lars Iyer’s sequel to Spurious.

So: What are you guys looking forward to reading in 2012? What did you fail to read in 2011?

Novels Make Lousy Gifts (But We Should Give Them Anyway)

December 21, 2011April 4, 2012 Edwin Turner6 Comments

Novels make lousy gifts.

Now, if you have even a passing acquaintance with this little blog, you know that I love novels, that Biblioklept primarily focuses on novels, and that I love books in general. I am not anti-novel or anti-giving-novels-as-gifts. Send me a novel as a gift. I will appreciate it (or trade it toward another book, which is kinda sorta a form of appreciation).

I went to my favorite bookstore today, in fact, to buy some books for Christmas presents. But I restrained myself from picking up novels as gifts.

If you love books like I do, I’m sure that some of your most favorite gifts ever have been novels. Some of my most favorite gifts have been novels. The remaindered copy of The Lord of the Rings (from the South Barwon Library that some friends of the family gave me on Dec. 5th, 1990 when we visited Melbourne (the one in Australia, not Florida)) is probably one of my all-time favorite gifts. I know the exact date because the nice lady who gave it to me wrote a kind note in book and included the date in her note.

I could never bear to get rid of an inscribed book given as a gift, but lots of people do get rid of inscribed books. This is a monstrous practice, one that attests to just how easily people will discard your oh-so-earnest gifts. If you spend a lot of time in used bookstores (I do) you will come across these sad markings. Because it’s close at hand, and I’m aware of its inscription, I’ll share the note that Jean wrote to Helen (no, of course I know neither of them) in my copy of Balthus’s memoir, Vanished Splendors:

I am aware that the memoir of a pervy artist is not the same as a novel, and that, as my first illustrating example, I already seem to be losing my metaphorical balance, but again, it was close at hand, right near the Tolkien in fact (by the bye, Vanished Splendors is pure gold).

In any case, I think Balthus’s memoir “reads” like a novel, which is to say that it’s mostly big chunks of text that require time and energy to decipher, set against the backdrop of TV, internet, movies, etc. It has some pictures, but not many. There’s no gimmick to it. I’m guessing that Helen just wasn’t into Balthus, or, if she had a passing interest in his art, it didn’t translate into wanting to read his memoir. She certainly didn’t read any of it (yes, I have a special sense that tells me when a book has been read. This baby was a virgin). Every time I look over the book, I feel sorta bad for Jean, whose gift seems to have gone unappreciated (by Helen; not by me. I was happy to pick it up used).

To return to an earlier point: yes, some of our favorite gifts ever might be novels. However, most of the life-changing novels I received were rarely given as birthday or Christmas gifts. They weren’t gifts of obligation, if you’ll forgive the ugliness of that term. Most of the great novels that were given to me were handed along free of occasion, given because the giver thought (knew) I should read them.

At Christmas though, we feel obliged to give. Sometimes we get some great novels as gifts. More often though, it seems like that relative who knows you “like to read” gives you a novel by, I dunno, Clive Cussler or Tom Clancy. The worst though are those tiny little hardback books that are designed specifically to be gifts, little faux-tomes of faux-philosophy usually connected to golf or angels or some other bullshit (I was horrified last year when DFW’s “This Is Water” speech got this treatment). Anyway, if you like books, you probably just go trade in this bullshit toward the books you like.

But this post isn’t really about the problem of getting airport novels or gimmick books as gifts. This post is about those of us who insist on giving novels we love to people who we know don’t really love reading novels. Especially really big, somewhat (or very) experimental novels. Important novels. Those novels that we read and decide that everyone needs to read this to become a fully realized human being [gags on that phrase].

I think sometimes we give our friends and relatives novels as gifts because we love them so much and we also love the book so much that we are maybe gunning for an intellectual three-way. We want them to read the novel so that we can share in it together, discuss it, rant about it, argue about it (remember though: that’s what the internet is for).

What often happens though is that these gifted novels (forgive the ambiguous, awkward modifier) tend to lurk about the giftee’s abode, brickishly unread, like dour unwanted houseguests. They skulk at the margins of bookshelves or migrate to the bottom of “to read” stacks; a lucky one might find occasional fingering above a commode. They are ugly reminders to the giftee, signals of how he or she has failed to meet your expectations (your expectations re: 9 or 15 or 25 or 30 hours of her time). (Young people, by which I mean college students in the liberal arts, are the exception here; they probably aren’t going to read the novel, but they are absolutely fine with putting it out for show).

People like books with pictures though, generally.

Even though I think novels tend to make lousy gifts, we should give them to our friends and loved ones anyway, even on those days of obligated giving. We should still offer novels up like they were somehow a part of our own selves in the deluded hope that the giftee will read them and discuss them with us, and that the novel will become an internal, virtual, shared experience. We should give them knowing that it’s likely they’ll go unread, that they may even be a point of shame for the giftee (especially when we ask, “Have you started . . . ?”). We should give them aware that they might point toward our own selfish desires.

Even if a novel may be a gift that implies a certain level of intellectual work, it also implies a sense of trust and respect toward the giftee, and in this sense, giving a loved novel is a clear way to show love.

I Review Def Jam 25, the Overstuffed Illustrated Oral History of a Record Label that Helped Change American Culture

December 17, 2011April 4, 2012 Edwin TurnerLeave a comment

It’s hard to underestimate the influence that Def Jam Records brought to bear on contemporary culture. Not only did the label help to legitimize rap and hip hop as commercially viable (and artistic) art form, it also helped to redefine attitudes about fashion, culture, race, and even business. At its core, the early days of Def Jam were an energetic experiment in synthesis, combining the DIY spirit of punk rock with the nascent rhythms of hip hop, all twisted up in a graffiti writer’s aesthetic. Def Jam 25, a huge, overstuffed illustrated oral history of the label’s first quarter century, details the fascinating beginnings, successes—and many, many troubles—of the strange child of Rick Rubin and Russell Simmons.

Rick-Rubin-History-of-Def-J — Rick Rubin Hard at Work

Def Jam 25 focuses its initial energy on Rick Rubin, who comes across as the dark, eccentric spirit whose aesthetic and temperament would come to define the label’s early successes. Rubin started the label out of his NYU dorm to release a single by his artcore band Hose. Rubin was soon introduced to Simmons (by Vincent Gallo, of all people), and the duo would go on to produce and release huge hits from the Beastie Boys, L.L. Cool J, Run DMC, and a host of others.

Def Jam 25 combines photographs and essays with shorter eyewitness commentaries from the artists, designers, musicians, producers, and business guys who helped define Def Jam. The effect is intriguing, often insightful, occasionally funny, and especially fascinating when folks share very different accounts of how things went down. The early years of the label are documented with an energy that matches the verve of Def Jam’s pioneering work in the ’80s, and if I dwell on the first thirds, it’s only because there’s something so electrifying about those early years, when Slayer and Public Enemy were labelmates and Aerosmith and Run DMC could craft a top ten hit together.

walk this way — From the "Walk This Way" Sessions

Def Jam’s success continued unabated after Rubin’s departure in 1988, and it’s hard to argue that a label putting out records by EPMD, Nas, De La Soul, Public Enemy, and the Roots was somehow less artistic and more commercial after that point. Still, Rubin’s strange punk rock energy was clearly irreplaceable, and while it remains part of the Def Jam template to this day, it’s hard to get as psyched about Rihanna and Ja Rule as it is about Slick Rick or even Onyx. But that has little to do with the actual book I suppose, which is lovingly crafted and impeccably designed.

Def Jam 25 is a great big coffee table book for people who actually like to read (and for your guests who don’t like to read, the book explodes with vivid imagery). The book reveals (and reflects) Def Jam Records as a marvelous synthesis of art, design, fashion, and business, a label that was (and is) dramatically unstable and also wildly innovative. The book will appeal to fans of music and culture alike. Def Jam 25 is new in hardback from Rizzoli.

rubin russell 2009 — Rubin and Simmons, 2009

Riffing on Michel Houellebecq’s Novel The Elementary Particles

December 12, 2011April 4, 2012 Edwin Turner14 Comments

1. If I had anything resembling a decent thesis about Michel Houellebecq’s 1998 novel The Elementary Particles, I’d try to write a proper review; but I don’t have anything approaching a thesis about it, so I’ll just riff a bit.

2. Re: item 1: there are just too many “big ideas” to hash out without a second reading. The book tackles social and cultural evolution, taking a hard aim at what the boomers hath wrought: it attacks the concepts of the free market, free love, and even free will.

3. The themes of The Elementary Particles: sex and death.

4. Les Particules élémentaires is the original French title. The book was sold with the title Atomised in its British publication. The Elementary Particles is the “American” title; it’s fine, I suppose, but Atomised strikes me as more fitting. Both titles allude to the book’s plot, which involves molecular biology as well as the “metaphysical mutations” that happen over human history. But the American title seems too positive—it connotes imagery of building blocks, of growth, of possibility. Atomised conjures disintegration, which is more in tune with the novel’s tone.

5. Frank Wynne translates.

6. Is it silly to say that I find the novel very French? I think this is a silly comment, one that says more about me than the book.

7. Still, I find the book very French.

8. The Elementary Particles isn’t a “novelly novel.” Don’t read this book if you are interested in plot arc, character development, or emotional uplift. Catharsis? Validation of the existential human drama? Not gonna happen here.

9. This isn’t a book for everyone. This is probably not a book for most people, in fact.

10. I loved it though. It was funny and mean and shocking. Bristly, brisk, engaging. Most of all, I was fascinated by Houellebecq’s intelligence.

11. It is possible that many readers will be annoyed or aggravated at Houellebecq’s artless ventriloquizing of his characters, who often deliver long, occasionally polemical, speeches on any number of subjects, including the Huxleys (Aldous and his brother Julian), problems with the French education system, the merits and tragedies of anonymous sex, the emotional cost of a culture mediated by advertising and consumerist desire, the terrors of post-boomer moral fallout (ritualized slayings and the like) . . .

12. Things that The Elementary Particles reminds me of:

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

William Burroughs

Albert Camus

The Marquis de Sade

Aldous Huxley

J.G. Ballard

Neuromancer

Pornography

Wikipedia

Flat narrative voice-overs in films both foreign and domestic

Nietzsche

Peter Greenaway’s film A Zed and Two Noughts

The late twentieth century

13. What do the two half-brothers of The Elementary Particles crave? Motherly love.

14. Sensationalism that repels more than it titillates in The Elementary Particles: group sex, voyeurism, exhibitionism, ritualistic Satanic murder.

15. A weak shot at plot summary: Michel and Bruno are half-brothers. Their mother, a selfish hippie (there can be no other kind in Houellebecq’s world), abandons them to be raised by different family members. Bruno, more or less forgotten by his father, is brutalized in boarding school. Michel, raised by his paternal grandmother, becomes emotionally isolated and withdrawn. He grows up to become a brilliant molecular biologist whose work on DNA mapping leads to a new type of cow (later he does something that changes the course of humanity forever, but hey, no spoilers). Michel cannot make human connection and finds no interest in sex. Bruno, in contrast, spends his life in arrested development, lusting after young girls like a sex-crazed maniac (which he kinda sorta technically is, I suppose). Both men reconnect with each other, connect with meaningful women, and some other stuff happens too.

16. Look, the plot isn’t really that important in The Elementary Particles. It’s an idea novel. A novel of ideas. [Shudders].

17. A lot of people hated this book; that is, they hated the ideas in this book and the presentation of those ideas.

18. Here’s Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times:

The reader of the newly translated English version can only conclude that controversy — over the book’s right-wing politics and willfully pornographic passages — accounts for the novel’s high profile. As a piece of writing, ”The Elementary Particles” feels like a bad, self-conscious pastiche of Camus, Foucault and Bret Easton Ellis. And as a philosophical tract, it evinces a fiercely nihilistic, anti-humanistic vision built upon gross generalizations and ridiculously phony logic. It is a deeply repugnant read.

19. I generally disagree with Kakutani, who is often disingenuous or lazy as a critic. I think that she completely misreads the novel.

20. I find it reassuring that Houellebecq offends Kakutani.

21. Kakutani loved Gary Shteyngart’s awful dystopian sex and death and aging novel Super Sad True Love Story; I super hated it! While reading Houellebecq’s novel, I occasionally thought about Shteyngart’s book, which I think seems not just watery and weak next to The Elementary Particles, but cowardly.

22. Is The Elementary Particles sci-fi? Maybe. Sort of. Not really.

23. Is it dystopian? I think that it posits the globalized, post-boomer world as a dystopia, as a place obsessed with aging and image, as a world of enslaved people who falsely extol their own freedom. But it works its way toward a positive vision of life.

24. Is it utopian then? No, not really. I mean, this positive vision of life doesn’t include human beings.

25. The ending of the book is a philosophical dodge, the kind of misanthropy that too easily dismisses the entirety of history, philosophy, religion, and even basic biological impulses.

26. Maybe the ending is ironic. So much of the book is blackly bleakly ironic, that, hey, yeah, it’s possible the ending is ironic.

27. I’m not really sure, of course.

A Blood Meridian Christmas

December 8, 2011April 4, 2012 Edwin Turner3 Comments

Cormac McCarthy’s seminal anti-Western Blood Meridian isn’t exactly known for visions of peace on earth and good will to man. Still, there’s a strange scene in the book’s final third that subtly recalls (and somehow inverts) the Christmas story. The scene takes place at the end of Chapter 15. The kid, erstwhile protagonist of Blood Meridian, has just reunited with the rampaging Glanton gang after getting lost in the desert and, in a vision-quest of sorts, has witnessed “a lone tree burning on the desert” (a scene I have argued is the novel’s moral core).

Glanton’s marauders, tired and hungry, find temporary refuge from the winter cold in the town of Santa Cruz where they are fed by Mexicans and then permitted to stay the night in a barn. McCarthy offers a date at the beginning of the chapter — December 5th — and it’s reasonable to assume, based on the narrative action, that the night the gang spends in the manger is probably Christmas Eve. Here is the scene, which picks up as the gang — “they” — are led into the manger by a boy–

The shed held a mare with a suckling colt and the boy would would have put her out but they called to him to leave her. They carried straw from a stall and pitched it down and he held the lamp for them while they spread their bedding. The barn smelled of clay and straw and manure and in the soiled yellow light of the lamp their breath rolled smoking through the cold. When they had arranged their blankets the boy lowered the lamp and stepped into the yard and pulled the door shut behind, leaving them in profound and absolute darkness.

No one moved. In that cold stable the shutting of the door may have evoked in some hearts other hostels and not of their choosing. The mare sniffed uneasily and the young colt stepped about. Then one by one they began to divest themselves of their outer clothes, the hide slickers and raw wool serapes and vests, and one by one they propagated about themselves a great crackling of sparks and each man was seen to wear a shroud of palest fire. Their arms aloft pulling at their clothes were luminous and each obscure soul was enveloped in audible shapes of light as if it had always been so. The mare at the far end of the stable snorted and shied at this luminosity in beings so endarkened and the little horse turned and hid his face in the web of his dam’s flank.

The “shroud of palest fire” made of sparks is a strange image that seems almost supernatural upon first reading. The phenomena that McCarthy is describing is simply visible static electricity, which is not uncommon in a cold, dry atmosphere–particularly if one is removing wool clothing. Still, the imagery invests the men with a kind of profound, bizarre significance that is not easily explainable. It is almost as if these savage men, naked in the dark, are forced to wear something of their soul on the outside. Tellingly, this spectacle upsets both the mare and her colt, substitutions for Mary and Christ child, which makes sense. After all, these brutes are not wise men.

[Ed. note — Yes, this post is recycled (regifted?) from last year].

“It Might Be a Week or a Year for the Right Head to Show Up” — Biblioklept Talks to Click Mort About His Wonderful, Surreal Sculptures

December 7, 2011April 4, 2012 Edwin Turner5 Comments

DuckCarrotsDoghouse — Duck and Carrots Putting the Final Touches on a Doghouse -- Click Mort

Click Mort makes surreal, charming, disarming sculptures that synthesize pre-existing figures into strange new forms. Largely self-taught, Click works out of his home in his native L.A., where he lovingly decapitates and recapitates antique statuettes. Click’s sculptures were featured in a solo exhibit earlier this year in L.A.’s La Luz de Jesus gallery and are currently on display at the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, Texas. Click was kind enough to talk to me in detail about his work over a series of emails around Thanksgiving. Check out Click’s website to see more of his fantastical stuff.

Biblioklept: I love your sculptures. They’re disconcerting and surreal but also charming. They’re bizarre and clever, but not whimsical. Can you tell us about how you make them?

Click Mort: Thanks. I’m especially happy to hear them described as “not whimsical.” As for how they’re made, I should probably backtrack a bit since the porcelain pieces I’m doing now weren’t the actual starting point. The first things I tried recapitating were resin figurines from the 99 Cent Store: cute kid couples strolling hand-in-hand, adorable angel-tots, etc.. They were pleasantly awful on their own merits, but when I saw some particularly crappy plastic barnyard animals in the toy section that were roughly the same scale, the gears started turning. Those first head-swaps were pretty crude: I’d just hack off both heads mid-neck with a jeweler’s saw, attach the non-native head with some sculpting resin, and paint over the seam. Voila … Angel-tot with a pig’s head (or angel-pig with a tot’s body, depending on how you look at things).

After a few years of working with cheap resin figures, I kind of burnt out on them. My technique had developed to the point where the swaps were reasonably undetectable, but the available subject matter — tots, tots, and … tots — had gotten monotonous. Also, the figures gave off a really horrible smell when sawed; I strongly suspected they were made of something creepy like melamine. At that point, I decided to try doing the same thing with porcelain figures.

Right … so now I can answer your actual question. Once a suitable head and body match have been found (and describing that process would add a few more paragraphs to an already inhumanely long and dull answer) the first job is to remove all the unwanted material. A jeweler’s saw — or any cutting implement whose description doesn’t include the words “diamond-edged” — won’t even mar the finish on porcelain. I use a high-speed Dremel with some sort of diamond-dust edged cutting tool attachment. Assuming we’re talking about a human body getting an animal head, everything from the collar up has to go on the body figure. This includes hair, headgear, ribbons, or whatever connecting the head and body. If any of these drape over a collar or lapel, those parts have to go too. For the heads, the amount that gets hacked off depends on the animal. On a quadruped, because of the different angle the spine intersects the skull relative to a biped, almost everything behind the ears and under the jawline has to be removed and then re-sculpted after the head has been attached to the body.

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In order to get a really good bond between the head and body, I fill the upper torso with sculpting resin and sink an aluminum rod into it. A length of rod is left protruding up, and the head—which also gets stuffed with resin—is then positioned on it. After that, all the missing areas have to be sculpted back on. Finally, whatever painting is needed to cover the recreated areas and blend them into the original parts gets done.

And however tedious that was to read, the actual process is several thousand times more so.

Biblioklept: I liked reading about the process, but I suppose when we do something all the time, it seems tedious to us. Your process fascinates me, because the images of your figures don’t show any “seams” — your figures look like little mass produced statues from an alternate dimension. There’s a surreal synthesis at play in your work, not just in the actual combination of, say, a dog’s head on human body, but also in the tone of the work. Your pieces strike me as both creepy and tender at the same time. I’m curious how you know if a piece “works” — when are you satisfied with your figures?

CM: That mass-produced quality is something I really try not to lose when putting together the figures. There’s something inherently familiar and low-key about mass-produced objects, and I like the idea of art that doesn’t scream for attention but just sort of sits there mumbling to itself. The down side to this is it sometimes works against the figures getting noticed at all. In the few gallery shows they’ve been in, it seemed a lot of people never looked at them from closer than a few feet away. Maybe they thought someone had just lined up a bunch of old lady tschotske crap as some sort of conceptual piece.

As for the figures working as much on a tonal as objective level, yeah, that’s becoming more and more the case. Or at least my intention. On the early pieces, I was getting figures that I thought were awful to begin with and simply trying to change the nature of their awfulness. Over the course of hundreds of hours on eBay looking for working materials, I started noticing how great some of these cheap figurines were in their own right, particularly the stuff made in Japan in the fifties and sixties. At that point, I really started paying less attention to what kind of head would seem funniest on a piece and focusing more on how the shape and expression of the new head would fit into what was already a wonderful figure. It became more about trying to maintain the geometry of the whole thing while shifting the mood.

“Creepy and tender” is as good a description as I’ve heard. I guess the tenderness is a product of my real affection for the original figures showing through. And while I don’t consider the finished pieces particularly creepy, a lot of people have described them that way. As near as I can figure, it’s because the heads I like to use almost always have sort of neutral expressions, and that lack of expression is unsettling to us on some fundamental level.

And to a great degree, when a piece “works” is determined almost as soon as I have the original figure in hand. The only finished pieces I’ve been unhappy with are ones where as soon as I unpackaged a figure bought online, I hated it but followed through with a head-swap anyway rather than just eat the cost of the figure. Usually though, if I like the original piece, I’m going to be happy with the finished figure. It might be a week or a year for the right head to show up, but I’ll know when it does. And from there, it’s only a matter of taking the time (and typically, this is something like ten to twenty hours) to bring the two together.

ClockHeadedHarpy — Clock Headed Harpy -- Click Mort

Biblioklept: There’s a clear appreciation or even adoration of kitsch in your work, but there’s also this level to it where you’re literally grafting two tchotchkes to each other in a way that transcends kitsch (I don’t know if that description is clear or valid). What I like about your work is that it doesn’t rely solely on an ironic aesthetic shared by both artist and audience, but that’s nevertheless part of the experience. What is it about the awful that attracts us?

CM: I wouldn’t describe my composite pieces as transcending their components, but that’s probably an extension of my regard for the original, unaltered figures. I mean, obviously I don’t think they’re sacrosanct or whatever or I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. Still, if there were only one — rather than thousands — of a given figure, I’d absolutely leave it alone. The same holds true for figures I think are already so wonderfully bizarre that anything I could possibly do to them would only diminish their oddity.

I guess I consider what I do as just condensing what I like about these things: taking the most expressive elements of each and putting that all in one figure in a way that enhances (but doesn’t necessarily transcend) what was already going on to some degree in the original.

It’s really hard to say what perceptions I share with whatever audience my work has. Originally, the only place that would carry them was a little boutique retail store, and now the figures have gotten into a couple of gallery group shows. In both instances, I almost never know who’s bought them, so there’s no opportunity for any sort of dialogue. For me, there’s no irony whatsoever at work in these things, but I’m pretty much literal to the point of dullness and don’t really see them as operating on any level other than the apparent. All I’m trying to do is get objectively incongruent elements and make them visually and aesthetically congruent.

But that’s just my take on them. I can be a didactic goon about a lot of stuff, but it would really be pointless to try and dictate what anyone else is or isn’t seeing in these pieces. And while there’s a definite attraction to awfulness, I don’t perceive these figures as awful. Alien, yeah. Absolutely. Which is pretty funny, given that they were originally produced as innocuous home garni and now something like a Norman Rockwell figurine is about as familiar as one of those lumpy Paleolithic Venus figures.

Biblioklept: A few of your pieces reference authors (Didion, Hemingway), but it’s not necessarily a recurring theme. How did these authors find their way into your titles? What do you enjoy reading?

CM: Titling the pieces is probably my least favorite part of the process. Usually, I just slap on whatever gibberish pops into my head and that’s that. The two figures you’ve posted are the only ones with literary references and, oddly enough, refer to one author who knocks me out and one I think is flat-out terrible (and I don’t think Didion is terrible).

As for what I read, it’s sort of a weird grab bag of stuff. Rather than trying to categorize my likes, I just grabbed the pile currently on the nightstand. Here’s what was there:

Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon’s Army & Other Diabolical Insects

Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction

Zippy Goes to School (The titular Zippy is a chimp, not the better-known pinhead.)

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Keep trying to read this but invariably drop it in favor of something like Zippy Goes to School)

Tank Warfare: A History of Tanks in Battle

Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo: The Incredible World of Japanese Fantasy Films

And there’s other stuff I like and have been reading and rereading for decades: Saki and Flannery O’Connor are two particular faves.

EasterBunny2011 — Portrait of the Artist with the Easter Bunny, 2011

Biblioklept: You’ve mentioned that you don’t have an art school background. I’ll concede up front that this is one of those questions that interviewers aren’t supposed to ask, but I’d really like to know—what artists move you?

CM: Not to flip the interview, but why aren’t you supposed to ask stuff like that? It seems like a reasonable question.

Besides lacking an art school background, I’ve got a pretty skimpy art foreground. I’ve just never paid all that much attention to visual art. There are a few artists who for whatever reason caught my attention like Mark Ryden, Basil Wolverton, and Norman Saunders, but that’s about it. Oh, and Norman Rockwell, whose paintings are as wonderful as the figures inspired by them aren’t. And oddly enough, I seem much more moved by sounds than sights. It’s probably just a matter of how my neuro-wiring is laid out.

Biblioklept: I don’t know where I got the idea that you weren’t supposed to ask the interviewee questions like “What artists do you like?” or “What books do you read?” — maybe my high school journalism teacher? Not sure. I guess it just seems lazy on my part. But the questions are asked in good faith, I think.

You bring up music—I know you played guitar for The Cramps in the early eighties—do you have any musical projects underway now?

CM: Nope. While I still spend a fair amount of time banging on guitars, the interest and/or enthusiasm for any sort of group effort just isn’t there. I mean, I guess I could go the digital recording route, but rock and roll — and that’s all I really care about — has always been a real immediate, physical kind of thing to me. Anything other than playing with a clutch of similarly-minded goofballs just seems kinda clinical.

Biblioklept: What are you working on now? What projects do you have on the horizon?

CM: I’ve attached pictures of the figures currently in progress. This seemed kinder than subjecting your readers to the equivalent two thousand words.

As for events outside the “studio” (which is my apartment’s kitchen and breakfast nook), about a dozen pieces will be in a show opening December 4 at the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, Texas. Also, La Luz de Jesus here in L.A. will have a clutch of them on hand through December. And my website will have an ongoing influx — and hopefully, outflux — of new figures.

Biblioklept: Have you ever stolen a book?

CM: Not recently, but yeah, I’ve lifted a volume or two. For a big stretch of my adult life I was a junky, and like most junkies had a terrifically flexible — and convenient — sense of morality. I used to steal books from used bookstores under the theory they were already used, so if I read them and then took them back, no one was really out anything.

And I usually did return them, but as often as not it was to sell the store their own book.

When I finally cleaned up, I felt like a crumb for having done this. All the same, I wasn’t about to risk some hothead filing charges if I told them I was sorry about what I’d done and wanted to settle up. Instead, I just went back to the various stores involved and, over time, bought all the books I’d sold them and those just read and returned. To me that seemed to square things, but this could be just more convenient moral reckoning. Beats me.

The Obligatory Best of 2011 List(s)

December 5, 2011April 4, 2012 Edwin Turner7 Comments

Best Books I Read in 2011 That Were Published in 2011 (Or Close Enough to 2011)

MetaMaus, Art Spiegelman

The Avian Gospels, Adam Novy

Spurious, Lars Iyer

The Third Reich, Roberto Bolaño

Humiliation, Wayne Koestenbaum

The Pale King, David Foster Wallace

Between Parentheses, Roberto Bolaño

***

Best Books I Read in 2011 That Were Published Before 2011

The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq

Wittgenstein’s Mistress, David Markson

Expelled from Eden: A William Vollmann Reader

Ray, Barry Hannah

Trans-Atlantyk, Witold Gombrowicz

The Garden of Eden, Ernest Hemingway

Light in August, William Faulkner

Hadji Murad, Leo Tolstoy

First Love and Other Sorrows, Harold Brodkey

Airships, Barry Hannah

Speedboat, Renata Adler

Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry

Vertigo, W.G. Sebald

***

Best Rereading

Candide, Voltaire

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Best Audiobook of 2011

The Collected Fictions of Gordon Lish, read by Gordon Lish

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Best Film of 2011

The Tree of Life

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Most Charming Film of 2011

Midnight in Paris

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Most Overhyped Book of 2011

The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach

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Best Book Cover of 2011

***

Best Book Series Design

Melville House’s Neversink Imprint

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Weirdest (Yet Nevertheless Moving) Novel of 2011

How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, Chris Boucher

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Book I Read in 2011 That Still Confounds and Haunts Me

The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell

***

Saddest Book I Read in 2011

Tie: Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry; The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, Breece D’J Pancake

***

Best Essay (Print)

“Some Notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary,” Lydia Davis (The Paris Review)

***

Best Essay (Online)

“Nude in Your Hot Tub, Facing the Abyss (A Literary Manifesto After the End of Literature and Manifestos),” Lars Iyer (White Review)

***

Worst Literary Trend of 2011

Tie: Lame “literary fiction” novels; Articles that link everything to David Foster Wallace

***

Best Literary Trend of 2011

Plagiarism!

***

Most Obvious Disclaimer

I did not read or see or hear every book or essay or audiobook or film or TV show or record or video that came out in 2011. Also, there are some days left in the year. These are all, just like, opinions man.

“Novels Are Fantasies of Powerlessness and Power” — Biblioklept Talks to Adam Novy About His Novel The Avian Gospels

December 1, 2011April 4, 2012 Edwin Turner8 Comments

Adam Novy’s debut novel The Avian Gospels is one of the best novels I’ve read this year, and one of the best contemporary novels I’ve read in ages. It’s a surreal dystopian magical romance set against the backdrop of political and cultural repression, violent rebellion, torture, family, and birds. Lots and lots of birds. (Read my review).

Adam was kind enough to talk to me about his work over a month-long series of email exchanges; the interview presented below reveals much of his generous, creative energy.

Adam currently teaches writing at Scripps College, Pasadena City College, Long Beach City College and Orange Coast College.

The Avian Gospels is available now from Hobart.

Check out Adam’s website.

Biblioklept: I have a lot I want to ask you about what’s in your novel, but I have to start by asking about the physical book itself. The Avian Gospels is a lovely little two volume pocket-sized monograph—textured oxblood covers, gilded pages with line numbers, inset bookmarks. Visually, it recalls a Gideon bible, I guess, only not, I don’t know, chintzy. Where did the design idea come from?

Adam Novy: My editor at Hobart, Aaron Burch, had the idea of making the book look like a Bible. He’s an excellent designer and does a wonderful job with Hobart. Some boheemith press in New York City should really snap him up.

Biblioklept: How did the idea for The Avian Gospels come about? When did you start drafting the book? How long did it take to write?

AN: After 9/11, there was a moment where I felt like all Americans were on the same team. Now I wonder if we’ll ever feel that way again. Pardon me for living in the moment, but this country is just so completely fucked. This sensation of being American swiftly curdled into panic, but by then, the coordinates of my work had all been changed. I wanted to find a voice with room for both the historical and the intimate, which led me to a kind of first-person plural officialese. It ended up creating this echo-chamber effect where the personal and political identities of each character were different, and nobody could quite be who they were supposed to be, or wanted to be.

It took months of screwing around to figure this out, and most of it, of course, was accidental. The Lord of the Rings was on TV a lot at the time, and sometimes I thought I wanted to sound like Gandalf if Gandalf was full of shit and, like, a genocider who felt sorry for himself, but still was Gandalf, all mystical and officious, bossing everyone around. I understood the characters right away, except for Jane, who was always hard to deal with. She gets in arguments a lot and she’s usually right. I think I have hard time writing characters who are right. I myself am never right, so I had trouble relating to her. Of course, now she’s my second-favorite character in the book, after Mike.

I started the book in spring of 2002 and finished it in fall of 2005. In 2006, I found an agent and Hobart took the book in 2008. I went through five apartments, three different cities, three computers, one personal trainer and three therapists in that time. And nine adjunct faculty positions.

Biblioklept: It’s interesting that you mention the LOTR movies as a kind of ambient influence, because they were pretty ubiquitous in the last decade—and there’s so much of the last decade’s zeitgeist in your book: torture, despotism, political and cultural repression, the plight of a refugee class, the idea of “green zones,” etc. You foreground these themes by crafting Gospels as a kind of dystopian novel with elements of magical realism, but it’s also very much a novel about family, and even a love story. (By sheer coincidence I watched the restored edit of Metropolis in the same time frame that I was reading Gospels, and saw so many echoes there). How conscious were you of genre conventions? I’m curious because your book sometimes blends genre tropes, sometimes blurs them, and sometimes straight-up explodes them . . .

AN: The book is quite deliberately a mash-up. I think it’s normal in conversation to try out different ways of seeing things—a fussy way of saying this might be “experiment with different hermeneutics.” For example, one might reference the NBA, The Wire, Shakespeare and Dazed and Confused in a discussion about Obama. I wanted the book to enact this kind of embeddedness, this flailing for a context that makes sense, and I wanted the narrator to sound as though its vernacular was ornate and obsolete, like it trafficked in a pleasure that justified itself as satisfaction while remaining an inadequate moral lens. That’s why I write violence like I do: I want it to be horrifying and beautiful. Unfortunately, violence is cool. I’m not immune—I always watch Kill Bill and Scarface when they’re on cable. It’s disturbing. Everyone knows that torture doesn’t work as an intelligence-gathering method, but our country did it anyway because it simply couldn’t stop. It was a kind of jacking off, the only kind that certain political parties seem to approve of.

Whenever we write about power, we should always defend the powerless, even if they’re just as bad as those in power. I think I saw that in Cioran, and did you know Cioran was a Nazi sympathizer? I just read that Gertrude Stein was, too. I don’t know what kind of paradigm can reckon with this world.

Biblioklept: I had no idea about Stein or Cioran’s Nazi sympathies, but I guess many artists and writers and intellectuals were attracted to the power of fascism, particularly in the modernists’ day (I suppose Ezra Pound and GB Shaw stand out as easy examples, and Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party). Although in our own age, I suppose we also see intellectuals and writers support terrible causes—I think of Christopher Hitchens’s aggressive support of the Iraq War and Bush administration’s policies, for, example.

I don’t want to drop spoilers, but your novel traces an arc that shows how those who are powerless might, given power, recapitulate the aggressive violence that they themselves were once subjected to. In turn, you also reveal how characters who seemed to occupy a clear power position (I’m thinking of Mike here, specifically) are perhaps doomed as well to a life without agency. I found my sympathies shift dramatically throughout the novel. How important are sympathetic characters?

AN: Every writer, including me, wants the reader to cathect to their book with their whole heart. I want my readers to utterly and helplessly engrossed. But sympathy is a means to an end and not the end itself. Technically speaking, it’s just not that hard to accomplish. It’s a skill, like dribbling in basketball is a skill, but it’s not the whole game.

In The Avian Gospels, the character named Mike Giggs is seen in only one scenario—exerting power in the manner of his father—for the first two hundred pages, so he comes off like a jerk until he encounters someone who actually loves him: Chico the band leader. Suddenly, Mike discovers a love of life, a sensitivity and a feeling of camaraderie for his fellows. Not only is he is capable of compassion, he is governed by it. This leaves him ruined in certain ways, but allows him to discover who he can be, and makes him (hopefully) sympathetic.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the book, the character named Zvominir, who was whimperingly sweet for longer than Mike was mean, is meaner than Mike. Novels are fantasies of powerlessness and power—among the zillion other things they are—and I feel like we should at least be conscious of what’s happening to our minds as we are reading. How we deal with power is a serious moral question; counting how many times that we go awwww is not. We have cats on the internet for that. Still, Chad Harbach was probably right when he said that the books that get the best reception are simply “affable.” In desperate times, a nation of New York critic types are turning to . . . Mitt Romney? Or like, Cheever without the psychosexual guilt?

I don’t mean to single out Chad Harbach, whose work I haven’t read, except for his piece on Grantland about the Brewers, which I liked. But what he said is accurate. These days, people seem to feel that art should be uplifting, like art owes it to them, in a customer-service type-way. Have you been to Kinko’s, or excuse me, FedEx Office, lately? It is not a happy place. Novels used to to give the reader the truth in ways no other social narratives would. I’m pretty sure I’m not just being sentimental. There used to be a social lie which said the world was making progress and ascending, but this reversed like fifteen years ago and now we all feel doomed. We need books to tell us how we got here, not to lie about how meaningful our journeys are or however we say it these days. Of course our lives are meaningful, but such a narrow focus on making folks feel better is superficial and disempowering. Our emptiness and dread are trying to tell us something.

Biblioklept: I think you point toward a distinction between art and entertainment here. We want entertainment to comfort us, to ease our worries. In contrast, art challenges us with what we don’t want to see, or can’t see, or can’t see that we can’t see. And yeah, there’s a kind of “literature of comfort” out there, books that simply reconfirm the tropes and tricks and forms of “literary fiction” — so that, even if the protagonists suffer, that suffering is is part and parcel of some greater telos — and not just in terms of the plot, but also in the structure of the novel itself. (Lee Siegel called this camp “Nice Writing” a decade ago, pointing to its “violent affability,” its “deadly sweetness”).

At the risk of asking one of those questions an interviewer is never supposed to ask (but, hey, I really want to know the answer and I think our readers would too), what books move you as a reader?

AN: I think I’m moved by pretty standard stuff. The Portrait of a Lady. Charlotte’s Web. To My Twenties, by Kenneth Koch. On Seeing the Elgin Marbles, by Keats. Places to Look For Your Mind, by Lorrie Moore. Testimony of Pilot and Return to Return by Barry Hannah. Antony and Cleopatra. Stone Arabia, by Dana Spiotta, which is the best new book I’ve read in 2011. Chopin in Winter by Stuart Dybek. The last paragraph of CivilWarLand In Bad Decline. The scene in American Tabloid where Ward steals the pension fund books. The Widow Aphrodissia by Marguerite Yourcenar. There must be fifty different scenes in Buffy that make me cry, and five in Battlestar Galactica. Certain scenes in Lost. This is such a conventional list, I feel like I need to start a fight. FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS SUCKS AND YOU ARE ALL A BUNCH OF SAPS. I should also say I’m moved by spectacles of massive human folly. The image of Slim Pickens riding the bomb and waving his hat in Dr. Strangelove and the scene where Kramer and his intern throw the ball of oil out the window are somehow very moving to me.

Biblioklept: I’d love to hear your thoughts on the Occupy Wall Street movement—The Avian Gospels taps into and explores this idea of civil unrest, of disenfranchised voices, of a paramilitary state coping with a populist uprising. You’ve indicated that your novel is in some ways a response to 9/11, but it also seems predictive of the fallout we’re seeing a decade after the fact.

AN: A massive, indescribable injustice was inflicted on our world by the likes of Goldman Sachs and we seem to have no recourse. Law enforcement could not possibly care less, and seeing how they cleared Zucotti Park, they seem jealous of the impunity of Wall Street. In his review of Ron Suskind’s book, Ezra Klein suggests that Washington just did not have the will to pass a stimulus that was big enough. Slavoj Žižek is right when he says this moment is a challenge to our imagination. I think that what happened at Penn State may be a better lens for the recession than Occupy Wall Street. A massive patriarchal network mobilized their resources to preserve an ongoing atrocity. No one will admit that they were wrong, especially the figurehead, Joe Paterno. The community just does not seem to give a shit. They keep telling out-of-towners we don’t get it and rioted in self-pity. I guess this is just how power acts.

Biblioklept: What’s next? What are you working on now?

AN: I’m writing a novel about the life and times of Medusa. It’s called The Gore and the Splatter.

Biblioklept: Have you ever stolen a book?

AN: I think the only book I ever stole was an anthology of world literature, which had a really coherent definition of French symbolist poetry. I can’t find this book now, so someone probably stole it from me. Serves me right.

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