Category: Books

You Don’t Love Me Yet–Jonathan Lethem

Edwin Turner9 Comments

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I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Jonathan Lethem so far–Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude, Men and Cartoons, and his essay collection, The Disappointment Artist. So, while perusing the library’s excellent collection of audiobooks for the perfect aural accompaniment for the longish drive from/to Jacksonville to/from St. Pete Beach, I was excited to discover a copy of Lethem’s new novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet, read by Lethem himself. The six and a half hour unabridged recording was just the right length to get there and back. The prospect of hearing an author read his own work is always encouraging, and I didn’t imagine I’d have a chance to read the book any time soon.

So. Well. Anyway.

About halfway through You Don’t Love Me Yet, my darling lovely wife turned to me with the most charming of smiles and said: “This isn’t a very good book.” I agreed with her sheepishly. After all, I’d been toting Lethem as a pop genius. Unfortunately, she was right. I’d been secretly waiting for the book to get good: for the characters to charm me, for the plot to intrigue me, for the writing to wow me. Instead, I was repeatedly disappointed.

The dull plot of You Don’t Love Me Yet centers around Lucinda, bassist for an “alternative” band (Lethem’s words) in LA, trying to get their shit together. Improbably, Lucinda answers phones for a living as part of an art installation complaint line. A mysterious complainer intrigues Lucinda; she ends up falling in love. She also uses the complainer’s complaints (which she recorded as part of her job) as the basis for song lyrics that somehow magically transform the band from rank amateurs to rank amateurs with something. Unfortunately, that something, that kinetic potential, is never quite explained to the novel’s audience. Additionally, the band’s music is never really adequately described (I think that some of the generic “transition music” that precedes each new chapter is supposed to inform the reader that the band is kinda Pixiesish, maybe even a little White Stripesish). Most glaringly, the complainer’s lyrics that somehow stun the band and their audience–built around phrases like “Monster Eyes” and “Astronaut Food”–are really nothing special.

Other elements of the plot that only sound interesting include: kangaroo theft, a dance party where everyone listens to their own playlists on headphones, and lots of sweaty ugly sex (Lethem seems to want You Don’t Love Me Yet to be something of a sex novel). Lethem’s characters have a tendency to prattle about ephemera, often of the pop culture stripe; this was one of my favorite elements of The Fortress of Solitude, but it’s almost unbearably cloying in You Don’t Love Me Yet, with the single exception of the guitarist Bedwin’s fascinating analysis of obscured signs (like, literal signs, posted signs, advertisements, y’know) in the background of Fritz Lang’s Human Desire.

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Plot has always been a secondary consideration to rhetoric in my critique of books, and Lethem here allows a number of awful lines–pure groaners–to infiltrate his text (the worst offender: a description of the complainer attesting to his “penisy glamor”). Lethem’s writing is in no way aided by his clipped, earnest delivery. The right reader can often imbue an audiobook with the perfect cadence, delivering the story with added dimension and depth. Lethem delivers each line in one of two different and exact rhythms; by the book’s end the effect is somewhere between numbing and grating.

So yes and well yes this is something of a negative review. But. My love for Lethem is still strong. So instead of ending with a “Not recommended” (and of course I can’t recommend that you spend your precious time on You Don’t Love Me Yet), I implore you to pick up Motherless Brooklyn or The Fortress of Solitude, or, if you’re pressed for time, The Disappointment Artist. And to prove that there are no hard feelings, I vow to read Lethem’s debut novel, Gun, with Occasional Music over the Christmas break. So there.

I dare you to watch Lethem talk about his new novel (in which he calls it a “deliberately silly book,” incidentally) for fifty minutes on Youtube. I dare you!

Tolkien, Xenophobia, and the New World Order

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Last year, Rick Santorum made our list of the worst people of 2006 for, among other nefarious deeds, using imagery from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as a half-assed metaphor supporting the Iraq war. Apparently, Santorum’s literary criticism has sparked a whole new approach in conservative thinking.

The new issue of Harper’s Magazine contains a section from James P. Pinkerton’s essay, “The Once and Future Christendom” (click the link to read it in full at its original publication site, The American Conservative). In this essay (which, incidentally, I highly recommend reading for a larf), Pinkerton argues that, with its declining birthrates, “Old Europe” will become Muslimized, and hence a threat to the US. Pinkerton suggests that this Muslimization is akin to Sauron and his evil horde in the land of Mordor using the Ring of Power to unite all the creatures of Middle Earth as slaves to his dark power. Not one to point out a problem and offer no solution, Pinkerton recommends that, in order to “save” Western civilization, “poor children from such countries as Argentina [be brought] home to Europe.”

In Pinkerton’s analogy, Americans are like Hobbits–simple folk who “like to smoke and drink,” but on whom “all grander forms of world-girdling intoxication are lost.” “The Hobbits just want their Shire to return to normalcy,” writes Pinkerton. For Pinkerton, “normalcy” clearly means the Hibernian/Nordic values embodied by the Hobbits, an ideology starkly contrasted in Toklien’s Middle Earth with the bestial, murderous existence of the black-skinned orcs and the savage, dark-skinned Southrons. Although I love The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, I was somewhat bothered in my post-college reading of the books by their clearly xenophobic values. Pinkerton takes these values and suggests that a whole new foreign policy be created from them: “Tolkien offers a different sort of diversity–of genuine difference, with no pretense of similarity, let alone universal equality. In his world, it is perfectly natural that all creatures great and small–the Hobbits are indeed small, around three feet high–have their own place in the chain of being.” You’ve got to love any ideology that values the great chain of being.

The part of Pinkerton’s essay that bothers me the most–and I enjoyed it tremendously, as an application of literary criticism, I must admit–is that he’s dead serious. He’s not joking. He’s for real. Furthermore, taken in conjunction with Santorum’s comments, and everything the neo-cons have achieved over the past eight years, it’s more evident than ever that the modern conservative movement in America is quite willing to use a fantasy novel published in the 1950s as a basis for not just foreign policy, but also for its ideology as to just how America is to relate to the rest of the world. And that’s not just funny, it’s also scary.

Found Folktales

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I found this little gem at the bottom of a cardboard box in a locked cabinet in an abandoned teacher’s lounge. I had to break the lock: hidden treasure. Florida Folktales collects a range of folklore, ranging from ghost stories and trickster tales, to modern urban legends. I was intrigued by the back cover blurb by my one of my old professors at the University of Florida, Dr. Robert Thomson (he was the instructor for a folklore class I took. My project: I collected stories told by people who claimed to have had supernatural experiences while on drugs. Lots of LSD angels-and-demons stuff. I think I got an A-). Lovely book, University of Florida Presses.

 

 

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Under Florida Folktales I was pleased as punch (yes, punch: like this guy) to discover Virginia Hamilton’s retelling of traditional American Black folktales, The People Could Fly. I used a few of the tales the same day in class. Beautiful illustrations by Leo and Diane Dillon perfectly capture the axis of waking life and dreamworld these folktales express. Again, a lovely book.

 

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The Yiddish Policemen’s Union–Michael Chabon

Edwin Turner5 Comments

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Yesterday afternoon, I finished listening to the audiobook version of Michael Chabon’s much heralded 2007 novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, read quite competently by Peter Riegert.

I like audiobooks. They give me a chance to catch up with a lot of stuff that I otherwise wouldn’t have the time to read. Some people have a problem with audiobooks; apparently no one ever read a story to them. Or they’re just uptight. But that’s not what this is about. See, before I start picking at TYPU, I just want to preempt any Chabon fans saying: “Well, if you actually read the book, you would’ve liked it better.” No. I’m really good at listening to books on CD. Like, I can even make mental annotations. And I’ve enjoyed plenty of audiobooks in the past. This one, however? Nah.

I’m sure that many of you out there are staunch defenders of Chabon, and I won’t deny that he’s a “literary” writer, and one who, like one of my faves Jonathan Lethem, uses genre tropes and styles to great rhetorical effect. That said: this “detective story” is a completely overwritten, self-conscious barrage of hyperboles that rarely engaged me; worst of all,  the book leads nowhere. In Chabon’s alternate reality, the Jewish diaspora continues into the Alaskan frontier. On the eve of the Yiddish settlement of Sitka’s Reversion–and the attendant displacement of the Jews–Detective Landsman investigates the murder of a young man, the son of an Orthodox gangster, who may or may not have been the messiah. There are all sorts of other problems, too, of course. Lots of problems=good writing, right?

In short, Chabon takes a cool premise–(what he believes to be) a Chandleresque detective story set in an alternate universe (à la PK Dicks’ The Man in the High Tower)–and crams in far too many tertiary plots, red herrings, and awkward symbols. Although Chabon’s prose is often funny and sometimes moving, in TYPU, his love for his own exaggerated metaphors and overstuffed similes distracts from the pacing and rhythm in what should be a gripping murder-mystery full of intrigue and suspense. Instead, I found TYPU to be clunky, and at times down right dull, but I kept listening: this book had gotten rave reviews, right? It was at the end of the book, when Chabon suddenly shifts perspective and lazily dumps an entire plot-essential back story on the reader, that I began to realize that this book was not the detective story it was claiming to be. No, the detective story was, like, a ruse, a trope, a form for Chabon to utilize in telling a story of Jewish identity, loss (infanticide lurks at the heart of this novel), and the metaphysical significance of chess. Chabon doesn’t really care about telling a good detective story (compare to Lethem’s lovelier and leaner Motherless Brooklyn, a detective novel that succeeds in telling a good mystery story and being all deep and shit). Instead, Chabon is happy to deadpan pseudophilosophy and use dippy conspiracy theories to help resolve his dangling plot threads. Not recommended.

Ulysses, Typography, Potatoes

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I was delighted to stumble across the design work of Itamar Lerner whilst looking for Joycean images on the web (I now give myself one demerit for using the execrable phrasal verb “stumble across” to describe a web search, two demerits for using the unforgivably pretentious and archaic conjunction “whilst,” a hundred demerits for not editing the original sentence in the first place, and a thousand demerits for this long-winded excuse).

Lerner’s images of Ulysses do justice to both the humor and the pathos of Joyce’s complex episodes. Lerner’s self-described medium of “ink on cut out papers” creates a shaded depth that evokes comic strip art by way of a Punch and Judy show. I like it!

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Lerner’s portfolio attests to his masterful fontsciousness: in addition to his original typefaces, he’s designed alphabets in wax, cement, and–my favorite–potatoes:

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We Who Are Not as Others–Daniel P. Mannix

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I’m not exactly sure if I stole Daniel P. Mannix’s immortal classic We Who Are Not as Others or if it was in a box of free books. I was in the eighth grade; it was the tail-end of a class trip to colonial Williamsburg, and I guess we had some time to kill, because they (they being the adults in charge) took us to a huge outdoor flea market. This was 1991 and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X had initiated a fad of wearing ball caps with a large solitary X emblazoned upon said cap. Some jokers at the flea market were selling hats emblazoned with a large solitary O, which the nimrod jocks in our class really thought was funny. They all bought the O hats; the counter-fad lasted about a fortnight after the Virginia trip. My love for We Who Are Not as Others, however, is immortal. My friend Tilford was rooting through a box of books: he claimed that the books were all free, although there was really nothing to indicate this. The mercenary setting of the flea market I now recall doesn’t seem to support Tilford’s assessment of the box. Nevertheless, we each wound up with a copy of We Who Are Not as Others. I read this book every year at some point. I implore you to read the back cover:

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Look, I can’t top that, and I’m not going to even try. The blurb is wholly accurate. Anton LaVey’s assessment (and the fact that the leader of the Church of Satan endorses the book also attests to its literary merit) is spot on: this is a tender, tender piece of literature. Although We Who Are Not as Others was withdrawn only a month after its initial 1976 publication, it was fortunately reprinted in 2000 by Juno books, and is still available.

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“[…] only one anus between them”–you must admire Mannix’s attention to detail. Good stuff.

Dialogism–Michael Holquist

Edwin Turner1 Comment

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Michael Holquist’s Dialogism, a highly approachable introduction to the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, is the most enjoyable book of literary theory I’ve wrapped my head around in quite a while. Bakhtin’s dialogism is–and I’m drastically paraphrasing here–a way of interpreting texts in terms of the way that they “speak” to other texts. In Bakhtinian dialogism, language exists in an endless play of call and response, of modulation and echo of all language that has come before and all language that is to come after. Written in short, concise bursts of information, Holquist’s Dialogism illuminates Bakhtin’s complex ideas; additionally, Holquist reads Bakhtin against heavyweights like Roman Jakobson, Kant, Saussure, and, uh, Albert Einstein. Most useful and enlightening of all are Holquist’s own dialogical readings, particularly his reading of Shelley’s Frankenstein. Dialogism is an essential introduction to an important philosopher, and, more importantly, a pretty good read.

Stuff You Can Buy/Stuff That Is Free

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Fiery Furnaces latest, Widow City drops today. I love it. It’s really good rocknroll. It’s great. You should buy it. You’ll love it. Or maybe you hate music? You don’t hate music, do you? Then prove it, sucker.

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Also, read today’s Village Voice interview with chief-Furnace Matt Friedberger. Prove you’re cultured, damn it!

Also out today: the Vintage paperback edition of Dave Egger’s sorta fictionalized memoir What Is the What? I haven’t read this yet, but my copy should be showing up by next week via Amazon. So I can’t say if you should buy it or not. A lot of folks tend to hate on Eggers without having read his work (I’ve seen people on the net identify his writing as extremely ironic: all one has to do is read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (an overrated, completely self-indulgent, but still enjoyable read) to see that this guy is completely earnest. But: many who have read Eggers hate on him as well. So. Granted: McSweeney’s tends to be pretty hipster-smartassed-ironic at times. Still. Earnest, people, earnest). I think it’ll be pretty good though. Will let you know.

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If you’re ordering all this stuff online, you might as well pre-order the paperback printing of Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital: it drops later this month. I read it and loved it, despite the fact that my edition was hardback (I find hardback books, particularly those of epic length, awfully difficult to read). You can read all about my love for The Children’s Hospital here.

And while I’m completely shilling for McSweeney’s, and championing capitalism in general, I should point out that the October issue of The Believer has a pretty cool interview with Animal Collective’s Panda Bear (or maybe he’s just Panda Bear’s Panda Bear, after the shining genius of Person Pitch) as well as a great essay weighing psychoanalysis against neuroscience. But this is really just a segue to an attempt to redeem my rapacious shilling for the industrial-military complex that is propped up on book and CD and magazine sales. Said segue:

You can read the aforementioned essay without shelling out eight bucks by simply going here, to The Believer‘s website. The current issue’s interview with Optic Nerve writer-artist Adrian Tomine is also up.

But “So what?” you say, “there are plenty of interviews and essays out there. Who cares? Give me something substantial!”

Something substantially funny: Clarke and Michael, the not-so-real-life (but-maybe-sort-of-real-life?) adventures of Clarke and Michael as they shop their screenplay around LA. I love this show.

Also, great archive of free e-books here, if you’re into permanent eye damage.

Finally, you probably don’t know about this yet: Biblioklept has a major scoop: British band Radio Heads plans to release their new album, In Rainbows, tomorrow, for free (technically, you can pay what you want to for it. Which, if you are like me, is probably nothing).

That’s right, folks: you can get music on the internet for free. More italics to emphasize this point. You can get that Radio Heads album here starting tomorrow October 10th.

Alphabet Soup: K

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K is for King Richard III, the misanthropic Machiavellian megolomaniacal hero of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Marvel as cruel Richard psychotically removes all those who stand in between him and the throne of England, including his own little nephews. At the same time, sympathize for poor “deformed, unfinish’d” Richard, whose hunchedback and game leg have kept him from any saucy fun with the ladies. Throughout his ambitious quest, Richard wavers from a proto-Iago, devilishly–gleefully even–manipulating the hapless pawns around him, to a manic depressive unhorsed on the battlefield, less than half a man. Poor guy.

Check out Sir Ian McKellen (y’know, Gandalf) doing Richard III in the 1995 film version set in a fictional fascist England of the 1930s. Because, um, Shakespeare’s like, um, better when recontextualized.

Resident Genius Samuel Kimball to Speak at UNF

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UNF English Professor and super smart genius Sam Kimball will give a talk entitled “When Does Jesus Smile?” on October 11, at 7:00 pm in the UNF Gallery. In the talk, Dr. Kimball will explain the thesis and outline the content of his new book, The Infanticidal Logic of Evolution and Culture. Dr. Kimball has also promised to try to answer the question posed in the title of his presentation.

Dr. Kimball specializes in psychoanalysis and deconstruction. He’s an expert in sci-fi movies and Greek myths, etymology and pop culture, nineteenth-century American literature and Derrida (basically, all that is cool). Dr. Kimball tends to produce disciples instead of students. He’s consistently challenging, bewildering, enlightening, and affirming, one of those teachers who manages to turn a “no” into a “yes.” Plus, his initials spell “A.S.K.” So there’s that. The UNF Gallery isn’t that big, and space will undoubtedly fill up quickly. Check it out if you can.

Dubliners — James Joyce

Edwin Turner7 Comments

#1 Stunna James Joyce thinkin’ deep thoughts

James Joyce’s Dubliners was one of those books I read in college, shelved under “got it,” and moved on without a second thought. I just re-read (and then re-re-read) the collection again: there’s much, much more to this book than I remembered. Dubliners has always been overshadowed by Joyce’s later works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. A closer reading of these fifteen short stories–which effectively unite as a work of complex structure–reveals that many of the themes of the later masterpieces, as well as Joyce’s rhetorical technique, are prefigured in Dubliners. On the surface, the stories seem straightforward–at least in a modernist/realist sense–slice of life urban literature, stripped of romance. Indeed, Dubliners seems to take all of its characters at an ironic distance, treating the protagonists to a series of negative epiphanies. Joyce explores the literally vulgar language of commerce, rife with trite clichés and placeholders, to show how what is not said in customary discourse jars against what custom does permit. The greatest aspect of psychological realism (whatever that means) in Dubliners results from the conflation of voices at play in the stories. The characters imagine their identities in language, a language culled from equal parts Romantic poetry and Bible verses and street signs and post office directories. The intense self-consciousness revealed by the characters calls for a strange mix of empathy and loathing and ironic distancing and even embarrassment on the part of the reader. I think that this style, combined with the anti-epiphanies figured in each story, is something so thoroughly normal, even expected by the contemporary reader, that it becomes easy to overlook just how groundbreaking and prescient these stories were at the beginning of the twentieth century. If you’ve read these, take the time to re-read them. If you haven’t given Joyce a shot, this is the right place to start.

If you don’t have time to read all fifteen in the collection but still want the rhetorical gist, read: “The Sisters,” “Araby,” “An Encounter,” “Eveline,” “Two Gallants,” “A Little Cloud,” “A Painful Case,” and, of course, “The Dead.” Or, if you’re really pressed for time: “The Sisters” and “The Dead.” Have at it.

We Will Never Forget (And Neither Will You, Kids)

Edwin Turner6 Comments

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So, I work at a high school, and every year, around September 11th, I get some kind of memo from my boss–the school’s principal–reminding the teachers to “talk to the kids about 9/11.” Each year I get roughly the same version of a 9/11 narrative from the kids. The following phrases are pulled from actual past narratives, and are chosen because they represent the basic thrust of most of the writings. Occasionally a narrative will be of some interest–maybe a kid from New York or D.C., or a particularly thoughtful or sensitive kid–but on the whole, the following is pretty standard:

“They turned on the TV. My teacher was crying. I didn’t know what was going on. I was in middle school [ed. note–in the past couple of years, depending on the grade I teach of course, the kids tend to be in elementary school–this years batch were about ten years old in 2001]. I was scared, but then I was happy because I got to go home. It didn’t really effect me. I didn’t really care. We should get school off every 9/11.”

The memo this year likened 9/11 to life-changing “I remember where I was when _____” events like the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Apollo moon landing, the JFK assassination, and (no kidding) the 2004 World Championship of the Boston Red Sox.

On one hand, I have no problem with this: I will never forget where I was on the morning of 9/11 (asleep and hungover in my brother’s old bed in my parents’ house) or what I was doing (nothing; I was unemployed; I was supposed to move to Tokyo the following week) or how I felt (shocked and scared and weirded out and secretly selfishly ashamedly worried that my international plans were now in jeopardy). I add my own experiences parenthetically, because the are of no importance; still, the spectacular disaster of 9/11–no matter what your take on the whole thing is (how it happened and who did it and why it was done, etc.)–the spectacular disaster of 9/11 exists as an ideological construct demarcating a social shift: hence the term post-9/11 and all things post-9/11, etc. etc. etc.

And so well this is my problem: what are we doing when we mark the day to these children; specifically, what am I–a teacher–doing when I affirm the ideological significance of 9/11 to my students, despite the fact that they clearly–repeatedly–have no interest beyond self-interest in the whole thing (“We should get the day off school”)? This is not a rhetorical question; this is an earnest and most sincere question, one that I don’t have an answer for. My students display the same distanced ambivalence toward 9/11 that I might hold for, say, the U.S. exit from Saigon or the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It’s something that I’ve been told I should care about for a range of historical reasons beyond my personal control or personal range of power; somehow, it should inform my identity (“American”) and my ideology (“good American”). I accept these ideological markers as “historical facts” and neglect the margins of history in favor of a much easier story to follow.

I’m not railing against the “importance” of 9/11 or whether or not 9/11 is important: I go back to my question in the previous paragraph: what am I doing when I affirm the ideological significance of 9/11 to my students? Exactly what ideology is being affirmed? Why is 9/11 like the Apollo moon landing or the JFK assassination? By transitive property of its I-remember-where-I-wasness? Clearly this has to be a public where-I-wasness, a shared where-I-wasness; nobody is going around comparing 9/11 to the day they lost their virginity or the day their child was born (although undoubtedly people got laid for the first time and children were born on 9/11/01). But this need to make sure our children recognize 9/11 as an ideological marker cannot simply be rooted in a shared where-I-wasness, can it?

My gut feeling is that the post-9/11 ideology may seem vague and amorphous, and may seem to be as-yet-undefined and up for grabs and still under debate, but in reality, there are forces at work shaping this ideology: the grand spectacle of 9/11 insured a public where-I-wasness that has honestly marked me. Now that mark, that trace, is something that I am expected to re-mark on, to pass on, to send down into my students. Only I’m not sure exactly what the mark means, and their vacant eyes affirm what I think I fear: my personal experience of where-I-wasness is just a symptom of acute exposure to spectacle, and nothing these kids really care about. And should they care?

Biblioklept: Big Blog Birthday, Unabashed Book Buying, and Nabokov at a Bargain

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So today Biblioklept turns a healthy one year old. When I wrote that very first post about A Raisin in the Sun, I had no inkling of the vast riches on my horizon. Ahhh…simple youth. Them were the days, etc. etc. etc.

I’ll celebrate this momentous occasion by recounting my recent trip to my favorite used book sellers, where I loaded up on more than I can possibly read in 2007. Eidetic readers may recall my last book buying spree: I’m happy to report I read 5.5 out of 7 of the books bought on that trip (I’m only counting half of The Portable Faulkner): that’s almost 79%! Not bad. Because that’s what reading’s all about: percentages and stats. Like baseball.

The goods:

Finnegans Wake, James Joyce

I’ve been dipping into the select chapters of FW included in The Portable Joyce for a few years now. I’m currently enrolled in a Joyce seminar but we won’t be reading more than a sentence or two of the book. My professor described it as a “vortex, a black hole from which no one returns.” He said this with a smile and meant it in good humor but maybe he has a point. The book is possibly probably incomprehensible unless you’re someone like, say, Terrence McKenna or L. Moholy-Nagy (whose graphic organizer for FW appears below) or Joseph Campbell.

 

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I recently listened to a series of lectures given by Joseph Campbell on Joyce; Campbell suggests that FW is the dream that happens after Molly and Leopold Bloom fall asleep at the end of Ulysses. Campbell also posits that Joyce has a final book planned that would finish the four book cycle that began with Portrait; he thinks that the book would be very simple and clear and probably short, and would be thematically based on the mother-as-ocean. Campbell’s lectures are brilliant, beautiful, human, and humorous, and best of all, they are enlightening. Besides explicating the book as a whole, he also guides his audience through select sentences of FW in ways that make you go “!!!” Brilliant stuff.

You and I both know that I will probably never read this book in its entirety. That’s okay. It’s a vortex of fun.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon

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I almost bought this book in the central train station in Rome two summers ago; I bought Eugenides’s somewhat disappointing novel Middlesex instead, because my wife had more interest in it. I’ve actually started the book already (despite having a ton of Joyce and Joyce-related academic crap to read); it’s pretty good. I’ll probably finish it if I can keep up this pace.

Gun, With Occasional Music, Jonathan Lethem

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It’s no secret that we’re big fans of Mr. Lethem around the ‘klept. This is supposed to be a mystery novel involving memory-annihilating drugs and thug kangaroos. My plan is to read this over the Thanksgiving break.

Vanished Splendors: A Memoir, Balthus (with Alan Vircondolet)

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As with most of the books that I end up buying in labyrinthine used books stores, I found this by mistake. For some reason it was mixed in with children’s hardback picture books. Balthus is one of my favorite painters of all time, so of course I had to buy his memoir. The chapters are short, vague, and achronological, making this a book that you can just pick up and read at random (kinda like Finnegan’s Wake).

Nightfall: Country Lake, David Cunningham and Whistling Thorn, Helen Cowcher

If I wasn’t so lazy I’d go heat up the ole scanner and show you some of the beautiful images in these “children’s books.” I find that lots of children’s “picture” books tend to be condescending or just plain stupid, and finding good ones is not easy. I spent over 40 minutes plumbing through dusty boxes before coming across these two. David Cunningham’s gentle and dark-hued watercolor depictions of a lake at night are deep and soothing, as is the simple text that accompanies the illustrations. Cowcher’s Whistling Thorn details the evolution of acacia, giraffes, and rhinos. Lovely stuff.

Slow Century, Pavement (DVD)

I never look at the used DVDs; I have a Netflix account, library card, and a program called DVDShrink, so if I want to own a DVD it’s a pretty simple operation. Still, there are rare cases where I want the packaging, usually music films like Sonic Youth’s Corporate Ghost DVD. Like the Balthus book, I happened across this two-disc Pavement film among the children’s books. I’d seen it before: the hour long documentary is really good, and the videos are excellent. The concerts…well, I dunno. I’m not really into that kind of thing, unless Martin Scorsese and The Band are involved.

From said documentary: Pavement destroys Lollapalooza in West Virginia:

I think that’s it for this recent trip.

Now, I would be remiss if I didn’t include a book theft in our birthday edition, so here goes.

There really isn’t much to this story, and I’m actually deeply ashamed of this one. No irony, no joke. Most of the book thefts I discuss on this site are books that I’ve borrowed and never returned or books that I’ve purloined that no one was going to read anyway. This one is a straight-up theft from an indie book store. Ouch.

When I was a young stupid college freshman (note the defensive tone)–it was my first semester in fact–I had to go to a certain Gainesville book store to buy my course texts. They seemed outrageously overpriced and I was outraged, despite the stipend the state of Florida was giving me as part of my scholarship to buy books (I thought of this as beer money). In order to “get even” with these high prices, I not-so-subtly swiped a copy of Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark: I simply picked it up after I’d paid for my course texts, walked out of the store with it, got on my bicycle, road home, and never read it. That was about ten years ago. Mea culpa. I’ve never done anything like that since, and, like I said, I feel bad about it now, so bad that every time I pick up the book to give it a shot, a small shudder of shame creeps through me and I put it down.

So there you go: new books and a book theft. Here’s to another year of cranky commentary with elitist overtones.

How to Write a Review for Pitchfork

Biblioklept7 Comments

1. Brainstorm: Good writing always starts by brainstorming. You need to figure out the Official Editorial Position Pitchfork will be taking on the artist being reviewed: are they an old favorite trying something new? Are they an old favorite that are not doing something new? Were they once-loved but now no one’s sure how to feel about them? Figure out how your audience should feel about the album ahead of time, as this will make it easier to review the album when you actually listen to it. Remember, millions of kids are reading the site everyday; they need to know who to think is cool and who to think is washed-up and who to never give a chance to at all (it might be worth pointing out that the Official Editorial Position should be neatly summed up in the album’s 0.0-10 “score,” making it easier for the semi-literate to quickly figure out how they should feel about the album).

2. Research: Okay, you can go ahead and listen to the album now that you know how to feel about it. While you’re killing time, troll the internet for any juicy or salacious info on the artist in question that might come in handy: is there a gimmick or an angle to the artist? Are they fat? Black? Brother-sister team? Crazy? People nowadays want more from their indie music than just good tunes. Figure it out (conversely, maybe the fact that the artist is “trad” indie–four-on-the-floor white guys–could be your angle. Just sayin’).

3. Outline: If you don’t outline your writing, you’ll end up with an amorphous blob of a review. You probably have less than 800 words, and you don’t want to waste them on peripheral and superfluous info, like a description of the music or the lyrics. If you need help developing your outline, refer to the steps below.

4. Introduction: Normally when one writes, it’s a good idea to introduce the subject with a thesis right away, so that the reader knows what’s going on. However, Pitchfork’s Editorial Staff clearly sees itself as continuing the tradition of the Lester Bangs school of music criticism; therefore, it’s a good idea to start off your review with a tedious personal anecdote or seemingly unnecessary condensation of the band’s history up until now. You can even wax pseudo-intellectual on some of that deconstruction shit you learned in college, especially if you’re reviewing superior music that no one can understand because it’s so superior and odd and seemingly unmusical to those who just don’t get it (noise music, f’r’instance). You need to contextualize the Official Editorial Position right away. This is where that research will come in handy. It’s also good to be cryptic and vague about your position on the actual music–that’s what the album’s score is for, after all.

5. Body: Again, normally when one writes, the body of the essay should contain specific evidence that supports the thesis proposed in the introduction. However, if you’ve written your introduction properly, you shouldn’t have a clear thesis and therefore you don’t have to worry about supporting it. This frees you up to riff on whatever you feel like–social trends that are bugging you, a movie you recently saw, girl trouble, politics–whatever. It’s important to come off as cool and hip and authoritative here. If you get around to it, you can talk about a song or two, and even some of the lyrics or music. Just be careful not to go overboard describing the way the music sounds (which shouldn’t be too difficult, because describing music in words is actually not so easy).

6. Conclusion: Is it even possible to write a real conclusion in this post-modern world? Challenge your readers by finally giving them a thesis of some kind. This will insure that they’ll have to go back through the review to figure out what you were trying to say (as if that Official Editorial Position album score wasn’t enough). Or, better yet, leave them hanging–give them a question to chew on, or a quote or something. That’s some deep shit, man.

7. Diction: Remember, you’re writing for a hip internet site and your vocabulary needs to reflect that. Whenever possible use verbs that “pop”–don’t worry about how inappropriate or unfitting they may seem, if they invoke a strange action, especially one that doesn’t seem to go with listening to music, go with it. Also, don’t waste your time describing the musicality of the album when Pitchfork has already created its own lexicon to help you. Using vague adjectives like “sun-kissed” and “art-damaged” will lend authenticity to your review and make your readers nod their heads knowingly.

8. Score: As I mentioned, Pitchfork reviews score the album on a 0.0-10 scale. Although no one really understands this sliding scale, it’s important to note that most people won’t really read your review: they’ll look at the score and skim it (hence the need for all that diction that “pops”). Still, it seems like any score below a 7.0 is not passing; 8.5 or higher is reserved for the cream of the crop. Special cases may call for a 0.0, like the review of the Flaming Lips’ album Zaireeka, an album that must be played on four CD players at once (of course this album warranted a 0.0; who could possibly take the time to find three friends with CD players, share the communal experience of quadrophonic sound the Lips intended–actually listen to the album–and write a review in time for a deadline? Not possible). Save 0.0s for Big Editorial Statements (I’m reminded of the “we don’t love you anymore” message sent to Sonic Youth after NYC Ghosts & Flowers). Similarly, really high scores should be reserved for Grand Artistic Statements by new bands that no one will care about next year.

9. Parting Thoughts: Remember, have fun with it, but not too much fun–after all you’re writing for the hippest music site there is, one that even has it’s own weekend festival dealie now. So just remain calm, cool, and collected–you have the weight of the Official Editorial Position behind you, so you’re allowed to let a nasty, hipper-than-thou attitude seep into your criticism. Finally, as was elaborated repeatedly above, whatever you do, don’t focus too much on the music at hand. Got it? Now you too can earn the fame, fortune, and crazy free sex that every aspiring Pitchfork writer deserves.