Smoking Makes You Look Cool
Charles Burns Annotates a Page from X’ed Out
At New York Magazine, Charles Burns annotates a page from his excellent new graphic novel X’ed Out. See the slideshow here. A sample–
Read (and Listen to) Another Unpublished Fragment from David Foster Wallace
Yesterday, we linked to an unpublished fragment by David Foster Wallace, and included the original audio from which it was transcribed. The Chief Howling Fantod himself, Nick Maniatis , was kind enough to point out that the fragments have been available for a few years now thanks to the transcription efforts of Matt Hale. You can get the pdf here, but we’ve gone ahead and reproduced our favorite section of the fragments (the audio is great too).
2nd FRAGMENT (Different boy mentioned in this; utterly different boy)
It is this boy who dons the bright-orange bandolier and shepherds the really small ones through the crosswalk outside school. This is after finishing the meals-on-wheels breakfast tour of the hospice downtown, whose administrator lunges to bolt her office door when she hears his cart’s wheels in the hall. He has paid out-of-pocket for the steel whistle and the white gloves held palm-out at cars while children who did not dress themselves cross behind him, some trying to run despite WALK DON’T RUN, the happy faced sandwich board he also made himself. The autos whose drivers he knows he waves at and gives an extra-big smile and tosses some words of good cheer as the crosswalk clears and the cars peel out and move through, some joshing around a little by swerving to miss him only by inches as he laughs and dances aside and makes faces of pretended terror at the flank and rear bumper. The one time that station wagon didn’t miss him really was an accident and he sent the lady several notes to make absolutely sure she knew he understood that and asked a whole lot of people he hadn’t yet gotten the opportunity to make friends with to sign his cast and decorated the crutches very carefully with bits of colored ribbon and tinsel and adhesive sparkles and even before the six weeks the doctor sternly prescribed, he’d given them away to the children’s wing to brighten up some other less lucky and happy kid’s convalescence and by the end of the whole thing he’d been inspired to write a very long theme to enter into the annual Social Studies theme competition about how a positive attitude can make even an accidental injury into an occasion for new friends and bright new opportunities for reaching out to others and while the theme didn’t even get honorable mention he honestly didn’t care because he felt like writing the theme had been its own reward and he’d gotten a lot out of the whole nine-draft process and was honestly happy for the kids whose themes did win awards and told them he was 100-plus percent sure they deserved it and that if they wanted to preserve their prize themes and maybe even make displayed items out of them for their parents, he’d be happy to type them up and laminate them and even fix any spelling errors he found if they’d like him to and at home his father puts his hand on Leonard’s shoulder and says he’s really proud that his son’s such a good sport and offers to take him to Dairy Queen as a kind of reward and Leonard tells his father he’s grateful and that the gesture means a lot to him but that in all honesty he’d like it even more if they took the money his father would have spent on the ice-cream and instead donated it either to Easter Seals or, better yet, to UNICEF to go toward the needs of famine-ravaged Biafran kids who he knew for a fact had probably never even heard of ice cream and says that he bets it’ll end up giving both of them a better feeling even then the DQ would and as the father slips the coins in the coin-slot at the special bright-orange UNICEF volunteer cardboard pumpkin bank, Leonard takes a moment to express concern about the father’s facial tick again and to gently rib him about his reluctance to go in and have the family’s MD look at it, noting again that according to the chart on the back of his bedroom door the father is four months overdue for his annual physical and that it’s almost eight months past the date of his recommended tetanus and T.B. boosters. He serves as hall monitor for period’s one and two but gives far more official warnings than actual citations. He’s there to serve he feels, not run people down. Usually with the official warnings he dispenses a smile and tells them you’re young exactly once so enjoy it and to go get-out here and make this day count why don’t they. Heroes UNICEF and Easter Seals and starts a recycling program in three straight grades. He is healthy and scrubbed and always groomed just well enough to project basic courtesy and respect for the community of which he is a part and he politely raises his hand in class for every question, but only if he’s sure he knows not only the correct answer but the formulation of that answer that the teacher’s looking for that will help advance the discussion of the overall topic they’re covering that day, often staying after class to double-check with the teacher that his take on her general objectives is sound and to ask whether there was any way that his answers could have been better or more helpful. The boy’s mom has a terrible accident while cleaning the oven and is rushed to the hospital and even though he’s beside himself with concern and says constant prayers former safety, he volunteers to stay home and field calls and relay information to an alphabetized list of concerned family friends and relatives and to make sure the mail and newspaper are brought in and to keep the home’s lights turned on and off in a random sequence at night as officer Chuck of the Michigan State police’s Crime Stoppers public school outreach program sensibly advises when grown-ups are suddenly called away from home and also to call the gas company’s emergency number, which he has memorized, to come check on what may well be a defective valve or circuit in the oven before anyone else in the family is exposed to risk of accidental harm and also, in secret, to work on massive display of bunting and penance and Welcome Homeland World’s Greatest Mom signs which he plans to use the garage’s extendible aluminum ladder—with a responsible neighborhood adult holding it and supervising—to very carefully affix to the front of the home with water-soluble glue so they’ll be there to greet the mom when she’s released from the I.C.U. with a totally clean bill of health which Leonard calls his father repeatedly at the I.C.U. payphone to assure the father that he has absolutely no doubt of (the totally clean bill of health), calling hourly, right on the dot, until there is some kind of mechanical problem with the payphone and when he dials it he just gets a high tone which he duly reports to the telephone company’s new automated 1618 Trouble Line. He can do several kinds of calligraphy and has been to origami camp twice and can do extraordinary free-hand sketches of local flora with either hand and can whistle all six of Telemann’s Nouveaux Equators and can imitate any birdcall Autobahn could even ever have thought of, don’t even mention spelling bees. He can make over twenty different kinds of admiral, cowboy, clerical and multi-ethnic hats out of ordinary newspaper and he volunteers to visit the school’s K-through-2nd classrooms teaching the little kids how, a proposal the Carl P. Robinson Elementary principal says he appreciates and has considered very carefully before turning down. The principle loathes the mere sight of the boy but does not quite know why. He sees the boy in his sleep, at nightmares’ ragged edges; the pressed checked shirt and hair’s hard little part, the freckles and ready, generous smile; anything he can do. The principle fantasizes about sinking a meat hook into Leonard Steel’s bright-eyed little face and dragging the boy face down behind his Volkswagen Beetle over the rough new streets of suburban Grand Rapids. The fantasies come out of nowhere and horrify the principal, who is a devout Mennonite. Everyone hates the boy. It is a complex hatred that makes the hater feel guilty and awful and to hate themselves for feeling this way and so makes they involuntarily hate the boy even more for arousing such self-hatred. The whole thing is totally confusing and upsetting. People take a lot of Aspirin when he’s around. The boy’s only real friends among kids are the damaged, the handicapped, the slow, the clinically fat, the last-picked, the non-grata. He seeks them out. All 316 invitations to his eleventh birthday Blow-Out Bash—322 invitations if you count the ones made on audiotape for the blind—are off, sent printed on quality velum with matching high-rag envelopes addressed in ornate Philippian calligraphy he spent three weekends on and each invitation details in Roman Numerated outline-form the itinerary’s half-day at Six Flags, private Ph.D.-guided tour of the Blanford Nature Center and reserved banquette-area-with-free-play at Shakey’s Pizza & Indoor Arcade on Remembrance Drive, the whole day gratis and paid-for out of the paper and aluminum drives the boy got up at 4 a.m. all summer to organize and spearhead, the balance of the drive’s receipts going to the Red Cross and the parents of a Kentwood, MI third-grader with terminal spina bifida who dreams above all-else of seeing Landry and Greer and ‘Night Train’ Lane live from his motorized wheelchair and the invitations explicitly call the party this: A Blow-Out Bash in balloon-shaped font as the caption to an illustrated explosion of good cheer and good will and no-holds-barred, let-out-all-the-stops fun with the bold-faced proviso: Please, no presents required in each of each card’s four corners and the 316 invitations—sent via first-class mail to every student, instructor, substitute, aid, administrator, custodian and physical plant employee at C. P. Robinson Elementary—yield a total attendance of nine celebrants, not counting parents and L.P.N.s of the incapacitated, and yet an undauntedly fine time was had by all was the consensus on the Honest Appraisal and Suggestion cards circulated at party’s end. The massive remainders of chocolate cake, Neapolitan ice cream, pizza, chips, caramel corn, Hershey’s kisses, United Way and Officer Chuck pamphlets on organ tissue donation and the correct procedures to follow if approached by a stranger respectively, kosher pizza for the Orthodox, biodegradable napkins and dietetic soda in souvenir Survived Leonard Steel’s Eleventh Birthday Blow-Out Bash, 1964 plastic glasses with built-in crazy-straws the guests were to keep as mementos all donated to the Kent County Children’s Home via procedures and transport that the birthday-boy had initiated even while the big Twister free-for-all was underway, out of concerns about melted ice cream and staleness and flatness and the waste of a chance to help the less blessed and his father, driving the wood-paneled station wagon and steadying his cheek with one hand, avowed again that the boy beside him had a large, good heart and that he was proud and that if the boy’s mother ever regained consciousness as they so very much hoped, he knew she’d be just awful proud as well.
Read (and Listen to) an Unpublished David Foster Wallace Fragment
Read an unpublished fragment of a story (or novel?) by David Foster Wallace at 454 W 23rd St New York, NY 10011-2157 (uh, that’s a blog, not, like, an actual physical address (although I guess it could be an actual physical address to. But, you don’t have to go there to read the story. Just click on the link. You know how the internet works, don’t you?)). Not sure who actually transcribed the piece (maybe the folks at 454?), but die-hard DFW fans will likely have heard the author read it himself. If you want to hear it, download it here (it also includes a hilarious reading (also unpublished) about a perfect boy who everyone hates). Here’s the first paragraph of the audio transcription–
Every whole person has ambitions, projects, objectives. This particular boy’s objective was to press his lips to every square inch of his own body. His arms to the shoulders and most of the legs beneath the knee were child’s play but after these areas of his body, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six.
The Ask — Sam Lipsyte
I listened to the audiobook version of Sam Lipsyte’s hilarious, wistful, mean, and devastating novel The Ask last week. I invented chores and took any scenic route available when driving to get more of the book faster, frequently laughing out loud, or grimacing, or even feeling weird and shameful pangs of remorseful identification with the book’s protagonist and narrator, Milo Burke. I’m going to do my best to unpack the book’s themes–particularly the way it simultaneously eulogizes, valorizes, and mocks the American Dream–but first I need to get something out-of-the-way, a mea culpa of sorts.
As I mentioned, I listened to the book, but I don’t have a copy, so, shamefully, I can’t really quote any of Lipyste’s marvelous sentences. He is a master stylist, capable of zapping our dead modern idioms with the kind of alarming twists that highlight just how vacant language has become. Lipsyte also has a gift for rhythm, tone, and cadence, and he’s a master of the deadpan punchline. While the sentences in his last novel Home Land sometimes felt overly fussed over, straining under their own polish, The Ask showcases an effortless style that both seduces and repels. Lipsyte reads The Ask audiobook himself, yet lets the tone and cadence of his words dictate the tone and timbre of his voice. It’s all very good. And you’ll have to just take my word for all that as I have nothing to quote now (I’m sure I’ll re-review the book when I pick it up in paperback, though).
The plot is rather thin: Milo Burke, who once aspired to being a celebrated painter, now works for the grants department of a mediocre liberal arts college. His job, essentially, is to beg wealthy parents and alumni to donate massive gifts of cash to the school — this is “the ask.” Or rather, that was his job before he got fired for losing his cool with the spoiled brat daughter of a major patron. This leaves Milo moping around Queens, drinking too much, and pissing off the wife he is slowly becoming estranged from. Which is a shame, because he’s trying to be a good husband and father to his young son; despite his own shitty childhood–boozing, philandering father, emotionally absent mother–Milo is doing his best to give his family the American Dream. He’s more or less abandoned his own dreams of being a painter, and along with it, the weird faith he located in the various theorists–Marxists, feminists, deconstructionists, etc.–who informed his art school years. Much of the novel finds Milo pondering not just on the value (or lack thereof) in his liberal arts education, but also on the friends and anti-friends who he slummed with in those days. Just as the narrator of Home Land dwells on his high school days, Milo Burke can’t quit thinking about his college years in The Ask.
That past returns in the form of Purdy, a rich kid who slummed with Milo and his druggy art kid friends back in their college days. Purdy is incredibly wealthy even after the stock market crashes of the late 2000s, and has Milo specifically reinstated by the university to officiate an intended “give” (the answer to “the ask”). Purdy’s real intention though is to turn Milo into a kind of bag man, a go-between to deliver large sums of cash to Purdy’s caustically embittered illegitimate son Don, an Iraq War vet who’s lost both his legs to an IED. This arrangement thrusts Milo into Purdy’s surreal world of privilege and power, but also puts him into contact with a deranged, maimed, and deeply, deeply hurt young man who will, essentially, change the way that he examines the world and his role in it.
I’m now going to gloss over much of the book: there are many, many very funny situations, strange characters, and wonderful little insights. And now that theme I mentioned: the death of the American Dream.
Late in the novel, Milo calls America “Dead America.” Earlier in the novel, he complains that America never got to be Rome; that America is a dying, crumbling empire that never even got to revel in its hedonist excesses. Milo is keenly aware that his own white, white-collar, privileged, urban existence as a liberal-arts-educated American puts him in a position of greater material comfort than 99.9% of the rest of the people in the world, yet this fact does nothing to assuage his despair–in fact, it exacerbates it. Milo is ashamed of his despair, too-cognizant of its implications. His shame becomes a meta-, self-referential shame, and it leads to Milo essentially surrendering any power or agency he might have claimed in the universe. His liberal arts education and his own sensitivities render him feckless and bitter, always grumbling over the cosmic injustice of modern, Dead America. He is a walking, rambling critique of power, yet–as his wife likes to point out–he never does anything about the injustice he perceives. It’s only after interacting with Don that Milo begins to see an inroad to agency.
Don is, it must be said, a miserable, caustic human being, a racist blackmailer, and perennially cruel to anyone who extends a hand. He’s also performed the most real “give” in the novel–he’s lost his legs for Dead America, sacrificing his own mobility and freedom (those constituents of the dream) for the freedom of others, or at least for the illusion of other people’s freedom. Don’s toxic behavior makes him utterly repellent and thoroughly anti-heroic, but in Milo’s identification with the young man–and in Milo’s willingness to lose financial security and familial stability by essential siding with Don over Purdy– there is a glimmer (just a glimmer) of redemption and agency for Milo. Don embodies everything about America that Milo (and presumably Lipsyte) hates, yet he has also answered “the ask,” both literally and symbolically. The novel invokes then not just scathing ironic attack on the American Dream, but also a pity that reveals an intrinsic (and perhaps childish) wish to believe, a wish to make Dead America live again. The novel ends with Milo reclaiming (or maybe just claiming) some degree of agency, beginning with getting back an old war knife his father had given him, a clear symbol of paternal, phallic power (the kind that his liberal arts education told him was bad, bad, bad). And yet there’s no resolution, no pat answers–how could there be? Instead, the novel ends in another crisis–not Milo’s this time, but Don’s. But I won’t spoil that, because, hey, you’re going to read this now, aren’t you? Very highly recommended.
Goethe’s Death Mask
X’ed Out — Charles Burns
If you like Charles Burns, go ahead and pick up X’ed Out, the first (and very promising) entry in a new trilogy. Skip this review. You’ll probably be happier (and more unsettled) just experiencing all that vivid, glorious weirdness for yourself without any potential spoilers. If you need convincing, read on.
X’ed Out begins in a strange fever-dreamland that doesn’t immediately announce itself as such. Instead, we tentatively enter this weird world with Doug, the book’s protagonist, who, like Alice following the white rabbit, chases his (long dead) childhood cat through a crack in the wall. Doug traverses a cavernous, ruinous place, littered with murky detritus and swamped in a strange flood, to finally arrive in a bizarre desert town that approximates William Burroughs’s Interzone. Populated by mean lizards who dress like Mormon slackers and other grubby grotesques, the terrain readily recalls both Tatooine and Asian bazaars. Hapless Doug, still in pajamas, house coat, and slippers — and marked by an as-yet-unexplained head wound — soon finds himself under the guidance of a strange little diapered dwarf, who may or may not have his best interest in mind. The dreamworld unravels as Doug glances an old man — an “oldie,” as the dwarf says — who we will learn later is Doug’s father. An all of a sudden we’re back in the real world, back in waking life.
But no. That’s not right. Not “back” — we were never in the waking world to begin with. Significantly, X’ed Out begins in the Burroughsian dreamworld and then moves to a conscious, concrete reality. Burns’s dreamworld sequences explicitly reference Belgian cartoonist Hergé’s seminal Tintin comics (you can see how X’ed Out’s cover riffs on the Tintin adventure The Shooting Star here). Doug’s dream face is an expressive, stark mask, a naïve, cartoonish contrast to the bizarre nightmare to which it reacts.
Doug — the waking world Doug, the “real” Doug, that is — pulls a similar mask over his more realistically drawn face later in the story when he does his “Burroughs thing” at a slummy art punk party. Alienated from the scenesters who don’t get his cut-up poetry performance, Doug takes up with Sarah, a girl from his photography class with a thing for razor blades and pig hearts. The same night they meet, he loses his girlfriend, and her crazy boyfriend goes to jail for assaulting a cop. They initiate their romance in Patti Smith records, lines of cocaine, and sick Polaroids. Ah, young love.
But all of that is in another kind of dreamworld, the past, a retreat for the “real,” contemporary Doug, who spends his few waking hours cringing in his bathrobe, poring over old photos, and eating the occasional Pop Tart. At night he eats pain pills and goes to Interzone-land, a place that seems as real and solid and valid as his past with Sarah, a past he has apparently lost. Doug bears a huge patch over half his head (significantly x-shaped in his Interzone version), and both this wound as well as the psychic trauma he’s obviously endured (and is enduring) remain unexplained throughout X’ed Out. However, Burns’s often-grisly images hint repeatedly at a past event filled with violence and loss. X’ed Out leaves us in the Interzone, with the dwarf making long-term plans for Tintinized Doug. There’s even talk of establishing residency and employment–it feels like Doug is here to stay (at least in his non-waking hours). X’ed Out ends maddeningly with a girl who visually recalls Sarah being borne by lizard men to a giant hive. The dwarf explains that she is their new queen–and like some insect queen, she is a breeder. Yuck. The ending is the biggest problem with X’ed Out, simply because it leaves one stranded, wanting more weirdness.
In Black Hole, Burns established himself as a master illustrator and a gifted storyteller, using severe black and white contrast to evoke that tale’s terrible pain and pathos. X’ed Out appropriately brings rich, complex color to Burns’s method, and the book’s oversized dimensions showcase the art beautifully. This is a gorgeous book, both attractive and repulsive (much like Freud’s concept of “the uncanny,” which is very much at work in Burns’s plot). Like I said at the top, fans of Burns’s comix likely already know they want to read X’ed Out; weirdos who love Burroughs and Ballard and other great ghastly fiction will also wish to take note. Highly recommended.
X’ed Out is available in hardback from Pantheon on October 19th, 2010.
Blood Meridian Contest Winner Announced
Big congratulations to Michael Cooke, a librarian from Flower Mound, Texas who is the winner of our Blood Meridian contest. Michael will receive a copy of the 25th anniversary hardback edition of Cormac McCarthy’s seminal anti-Western/awesome Western courtesy Biblioklept and Modern Library. Michael had the unfair advantage of being from Texas, and he totally cheated by sending in a baker’s dozen postcards, which was totally awesome. Cheating and being evil is the core of Blood Meridian. Each of Michael’s stark, garish, gritty, surreal, or just plain wicked postcards came with a wonderful corollary quote from the novel. The postcards come from Michael’s personal collection; he’s had some of them for years, and they’re from all over the place, several came from New Mexico, Cormac McCarthy’s chosen home. Here comes the weird–
James Franco and Michael Cunningham on Writing and MFA Programs
Historic Photos of Outlaws of the Old West
The romantic myth of the Western outlaw still remains central to American identity. If we are part Puritan, we also like to think of ourselves as the kind of anti-social cowboys who go out and manifest our own destiny. It’s no wonder that we have a tradition of valorizing outlaws like Billy the Kid, the Dalton gang, and Frank and Jesse James, transfiguring their bullying and theft into a kind of partisan resistance to hegemony. These men did not steal from the rich to give to the poor, yet we like to pretend that they were Robin Hoods. Turner Publishing’s new collection Historic Photos of Outlaws of the Old West presents 200 archival images of infamous (and not so famous) robbers, road agents, and rascals in the kind of gruesome detail that outlines just how awful these people really were. The Old West isn’t so romantic after all.
The book moves from the beginning of photography in the early 1850s to the unlikely end of an era, the 193os when the West Coast finally settled down and civilized (at least a little bit). Larry Johnson provides informative and unobtrusive text, letting the stark and often grisly photos convey the tone and emotion of the book. Simply put, this isn’t for kids. There are plenty of dead bodies, many hanging from nooses or laid out in a row, like this charmer of the Dalton gang–
Or how about Ned Christie, unfairly framed for the murder of Deputy Marshal David Maples in 1887, Oklahoma? This picture of Christie reveals that the emerging art/science of photography allowed for a certain fetishizing of the dead body–that the corpse, via mechanical reproduction, might somehow live on. Grisly.
We can see the same fascination with death in this famous image of Jesse James, who was shot in the back by Robert Ford while adjusting a picture. (Their complicated story is told in the brilliant revisionist film The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, by the way).
There are less famous but equally intriguing figures as well, like Benjamin Hodges, a black Mexican cowboy who made his living as a con artist in Dodge City. Here is the confident confidence man–
The images in Outlaws of the Old West are both fun and unsettling, and Johnson never glosses over or sugar coats the ugly truths behind these images (he even points out that, though we see the shootout at the OK Corral as a kind of archetypal battle between good vs. evil, the Earps and their pal Doc Holliday were hardly angels). The pictures in this book gel more with the imagery we find in revisionist Westerns like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or Sam Peckinpah’s bloody films, which is another way of saying that they aren’t for the faint of heart–and I enjoy that about the volume. Check it out.
“Money” — Lydia Davis
“Money” by Lydia Davis, from Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, collected in the forthcoming volume The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis—
I don’t want any more gifts, cards, phone calls, prizes, clothes, friends, letters, books, souvenirs, pets, magazines, land, machines, houses, entertainments, honors, good news, dinners, jewels, vacations, flowers, or telegrams. I just want money.
“Three Figures and a Dog” — Roberto Ransom (A Single Sentence Animation by Andre da Loba)
Andre da Loba animates a sentence from Roberto Ransom’s “Three Figures and a Dog.” Published in Electric Literature No. 4. Here’s the first paragraph–
He liked to be in the chapel at dawn, and also in the afternoon when something similar, though not identical, occurred. For that to happen, he had to leave home when his wife got up to milk the cow. He’d finally wake himself up by putting his hand into the bucket next to the well and wiping his face. He usually carried a loaf of bread, a piece of onion, and sometimes a little cheese, wrapped in a handkerchief. He’d leave his brushes, pencils, paints, and other tools in a corner of the chapel, behind some stones that hadn’t been used during its construction. He didn’t paint at that hour. He was waiting for the right color. He’d observe the sky and mix paints in a small clay vessel, smudging them with his finger, measuring quantities, adding water or oil or, on one occasion, wine. He imagined that if the wine was his blood and the blue of the sky he was seeking was the Virgin’s color, and the Virgin was his mother and if he and the Virgin were of the same blood, then maybe…
Albert Dubout’s Charming Illustrations for Don Quixote
Überblog A Journey Round My Skull has posted (another) fantastic set of illustrations for Don Quixote, this time by French cartoonist and illustrator Albert Dubout. See some of our favorites below, but check out A Journey’s post for more (including a link to all 381 images from the book)–
“Riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s” — Stephen Crowe Illustrates Finnegans Wake
At Wake In Progress, Stephen Crowe has given himself the daunting task of illustrating James Joyce’s novel/linguistic black hole Finnegans Wake. It’s pretty cool stuff, and we love projects like these (see also: Six Versions of Blood Meridian and One Drawing for Every Page of Moby-Dick). Crowe’s site makes an interesting if different companion for the ongoing project at Ulysses “Seen.” Good luck to Stephen–keep them coming! (and thanks to @RhysTranter for sharing). More images–
The Mike Hammer Novels — Mickey Spillane
Online auctions allow book-lovers to engage in what could be labeled “biblio-sharking.” Some poor sap needs to clear out his basement to make room for a foosball table or a Jacuzzi, and readers take his books for an extraordinary profit. While the seller may hesitate to dispose of their treasures, I’ll readily pay negligible sums to compensate him for his losses. So, if your rumpus room means more to you than fiction, please please please place your ads on Ebay.
Some poor mug did just that last week, allowing me to take home 18 detective novels for five clams and nominal shipping and handling charges. Because anthologies were included in the package, I scored twenty-four books for about thirty cents apiece. Ed Biblioklept, kept busy for weeks at a time supervising hooligans and future delinquents of America, has granted me permission to review one of my purchases, the New American Library’s collection of Mickey Spillane’s first three Mike Hammer novels—I, the Jury, My Gun is Quick, and Vengeance is Mine.
Spillane sold hundreds of millions of detective and spy stories during a long career, and the Hammer stories guaranteed him an interested and rabid following. Although private dick Mike Hammer finds himself in any number of slippery situations, Spillane’s central character, rather than any individual plot twist, is what makes these stories both convincing and compelling.
Hammer is the archetypal square-jawed detective, but he demands that you listen to his recollections of a case because he’s clever, resourceful, and vulgar. Although indelicate by today’s standards, Hammer is a tough guy for his times, beguiling dames who are used to getting just what they want, burning through decks of unfiltered Luckies, and drinking brandy for breakfast. What’s timeless, though, is his belief that bad guys are afforded too many protections by an impotent system of justice and that once all the pieces are put together, one extraordinary man performs a public service by putting a few slugs in the guts of murderers. In each of these stories Hammer begins unraveling the mysteries only after someone close to him has been killed.
This was the first collection of detective stories I’ve ever finished, and each page dragged me further into a black and white world filled with villains, vixens, and corrupt politicians. The reader becomes an unpaid extra in a B-level film noir.
Hammer explained to me, a snob, the enduring popularity of the literary detective: “You’ve forgotten that I’ve been in business because I stayed alive longer than some guys who didn’t want me that way. You’ve forgotten that I’ve had some punks tougher than you’ll ever be on the end of a gun and I pulled the trigger just to watch their expressions change.” Mind what you think.
Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question Wins the Booker Prize
The Guardian and other sources report that Howard Jacobson has won the 2010 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Finkler Question. The novel, which we haven’t read, is apparently a comic piece about love, loss, Jewish identity, and male friendship. The win is perhaps something as an upset, as many folks had Tom McCarthy’s C pegged as the favorite (last week bookmaker Ladbrokes even suspended betting on the Booker after bets on C crowded out the competition). Read our review of C here.
Uncivil Society — Stephen Kotkin
Stephen Kotkin’s Uncivil Society earned rave reviews when it debuted last year in hardback; this week Modern Library releases the trade paperback version. Uncivil Society is a revisionist history that dispels the romantic myth that a “civil society” of dissenting citizens orchestrated the fall of Eastern European Communism (and its symbol, the Berlin Wall). Rather, Kotkin (along with colleague Jan T. Gross) concisely and methodically shows that the Eastern Bloc’s demise resulted from the corruption and incompetence of the ruling class of bureaucrats and ideologues–the “uncivil society” who borrowed massively from the West to buy consumer goods they could not afford. Kotkin finds case studies in East Germany, Romania, and Poland, but his analysis extends beyond these countries to indict the Soviet model.
Kotkin’s writing is direct and precise, stuffed with concrete facts and political analysis without sacrificing narrative integrity. In other words, he takes a murky subject and illuminates it. The narrative proper is slim at under 150 pages, making the book a quick and ideal survey of a widely misunderstood time. Students and politics of history will wish to take note of Uncivil Society, a straightforward and agile read.
Biblioklept 