Biblioklept Interviews Michael Wiley about His New Book, The Bad Kitty Lounge

Edwin Turner3 Comments

Michael Wiley is a mystery writer and professor of British Romantic literature and culture at the University of North Florida. He’s published academic volumes about geography and migration in Romantic literature, but we spoke to him about the latest edition in his detective series, The Bad Kitty Lounge. Dr. Wiley was kind enough to talk to us via email about ambiguity and resolution in mystery fiction, giving readers what they want, and the prospects of Wordsworth with a Glock. The Bad Kitty Lounge is available new in hardcover from Minotuar/St. Martin’s. Read more press at Michael Wiley’s website.

Biblioklept: Your new novel The Bad Kitty Lounge picks up with P.I. Joe Kozmarski, the protagonist from your first novel The Last Striptease; both books are set in Chicago. When you were working on Striptease did you envision it as the beginning of a series?

Michael Wiley: I did. To tell the truth, The Last Striptease catches the story already in motion. I wrote an earlier Joe Kozmarski manuscript that I called Little Girl Lost, almost got published, and then tucked into a box, where it remains. I liked the character and the settings well enough that I wrote a new manuscript, which became The Last Striptease. I had set Little Girl Lost in August and Last Striptease in September, so when I started writing The Bad Kitty Lounge I decided to set it in October and aim for a series that covers each month of the year. There’s no great logic to aiming for a twelve-book series, but it seems as good of a number as any.

B: There’s a tradition in detective fiction of recurring characters (Chandler’s Marlowe comes immediately to mind). When you are writing these books, do you consciously follow or inject tropes of mystery and crime fiction? How important is it to give mystery readers what they want?

MW: It’s always important to give readers what they want. But readers might not know what they want until a book gives it to them. In genre fiction and mysteries and thrillers in particular, conventions matter, but if a writer sticks too closely to conventions the result is cliché. The key isn’t to ignore the conventions but to finesse them, use them in new ways, invert or subvert them. The best mysteries, I think, are recognizable in form but still manage to surprise us and give us great unanticipated pleasures. Before Chandler’s Marlowe, there’s Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and before Holmes, there’s Poe’s Dupin. Each of the greats has reinvented the form in big ways and has given readers what they’ve always wanted without knowing that they’ve wanted it. The rest of us innovate where we can.

B: Sometimes though it seems that writers who experiment too much with genre conventions can subvert, invert, or innovate in ways that trample on some of the great pleasures of mysteries and thrillers. I’m thinking explicitly about novels like Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music, which weds PK Dick with hard boiled noir, or Thomas Pynchon’s recent exercise Inherent Vice. Such books prize ambiguity, which leads to a shaggy dog story. There’s certainly a pleasure in reading them but many of us read mysteries because Dupin or Sherlock Holmes or Marlowe (or whomever) actually solves the case. How important do you think it is to give mystery readers an answer or solution? What place does ambiguity have in your detective fiction?

MW: Right. Most of the best mystery writing right now includes at least some ambiguity, though. I’ve been reading and re-reading James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux books lately, and while each of them solves a case at hand, we never have the sense that Robicheaux has restored a proper order to the universe. Just the opposite: we know that the universe is deeply screwed up and that Robicheaux is as much a part of the problem as he is part of the solution. Aside from that, some of Burke’s villains pop up again in later books even after we’re sure that Robicheaux has put them to rest.

My own books resolve crimes. At the end, we know who did what and when and why. But my books are also full of moral ambiguity. Some of the guilty parties don’t get punished. Some of the innocent parties do. Good people sometimes do bad things for either good or bad reasons. Bad people sometimes do good things. We get answers but we don’t necessarily like them.

B: I realize that I may have been putting carts before horses with some of these questions–can you tell us a little bit about the plot of The Bad Kitty Lounge?

MW: I like carts before horses. Here’s a synopsis that I wrote for the book flap:

Greg Samuelson, an unassuming bookkeeper, has hired Joe Kozmarski to dig up dirt on his wife and her lover Eric Stone. But now Samuelson has taken matters into his own hands. It looks like he’s torched Stone’s Mercedes, killed his boss, and then shot himself, all in the space of an hour. The police think they know how to put together this ugly puzzle. But as Kozmarski discovers, nothing’s ever simple. Eric Stone wants to hire Kozmarski to clear Samuelson. Samuelson’s dead boss, known as the Virginity Nun, has a saintly reputation but a red-hot past. And a gang led by an aging 1960s radical shows up in Kozmarski’s office with a backpack full of payoff money, warning him to turn a blind eye to murder. At the same time, Kozmarski is working things out with his ex-wife, Corrine, his new partner, Lucinda Juarez, and his live-in nephew, Jason. If the bad guys don’t do Kozmarski in, his family might.

In short, it’s a gritty hardboiled mystery set in Chicago. If your sense of humor runs the way mine does, it has some laughs. Booklist Magazine calls it “howlingly funny.” That may be overstating the case, but I appreciate the compliment.

B: Books critics must always be forgiven hyperbole, positive and negative.

You’re a professor of English literature; specifically, you’re an expert on the British Romantic poets. You might tire of this question–and forgive me if so–but do elements of British Romanticism find their way, consciously or not, into your detective fiction? It seems like a detective’s mission would be at odds with the spirit of Keats’s Negative Capability.

MW: From my perspective, it’s easier to deal with the positive hyperbolic criticism than the negative.

I once told an editor jokingly that I planned to write a mystery featuring William Wordsworth with a Glock. To my surprise, the editor was enthusiastic. I suppose there’s a market for these books. Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter has been doing well, and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was a hit.

I mostly think of my day job as a British Romanticist as being separate from my night job as a writer of pulp fiction, but I know that that the two intersect and inform each other. Wordsworth and Raymond Chandler are two of the great English-language locodescriptive writers, and they’ve both influenced my handling of place. William Blake deals with ideas of innocence and experience, good and evil, and heaven and hell in ways that no noir writer has ever surpassed. And Lord Byron is great for moral ambiguity, as is S.T. Coleridge though in different ways.

So, I’ll probably get to that Wordsworth-with-a-Glock manuscript sooner or later.

B: Wordsworth with a Glock sounds great. Then you could write John Keats Vs. The Lamia; make it a graphic novel. Or just a screenplay. For now though, is the next Kozmarski book already in the works?

MW: I see a series here. My friend Kelli Stanley has set mysteries in ancient Rome. She calls them “Roman Noir.” I’ll just add a “tic” and I’ll have “Romantic Noir.” In the meantime, Joe Kozmarski will ride again. St. Martin’s Minotaur has said that they want to publish the third in the series. It’s done, it’s called A Bad Night’s Sleep, and it’s the best one yet. It should be out in 2011.

B: You teach full time and have a family–how do you make time to write? What advice could you give to young writers who want to develop that kind of discipline?

There’s never enough time in the day — or the week or the year — to write a book. There are thousands of excuses for doing something else, and nearly all of the excuses are good. I accept these facts and then write anyway. I write in the morning before breakfast if I can, or write in the evenings after the kids are in bed. I write in between. And when I’m not writing, I’m often thinking about plot, characters, and setting.

I draw from my own experience when I give advice, which is very simply (and annoyingly) this: “Just write.” Writing seems to me to be more of an act of will than of discipline. Don’t spend time worrying that you’re not writing enough; don’t spend time thinking about the act of writing (unless that’s the subject of your short story or novel) — Spend your time writing. Tell your story. Then revise it. Then think of another story and tell it. Oh, and when you’re not telling or revising or thinking of new details for your story, read other people’s stories and learn from them. That seems important too: others have told better stories than I’ll ever tell. I can learn from them. We all can.

B: Have you ever stolen a book?

MW: No. But I hope someone steals one of mine.

Home Land — Sam Lipsyte

Edwin Turner1 Comment

In Sam Lipsyte’s 2004 novel Home Land, minor loser Lewis Miner sends missives to his high school alumni newsletter, Catamount Notes, about his awful, sad misadventures in small-time drug use, petty copy-writing, itinerant busboyism, and chronic masturbation (he has a strong erotic disposition toward leg warmer porn. If this idea repels you (with no reciprocal attraction) this book is not for you). Miner wants to be sweet but he can be mean. He’s obsessed with the past–and who can blame him? His nickname in high school was Teabag, an appellation literally thrust upon him by the dumbest of jock-bullies. He carries this kernel of spite for years like a pebble in the sock, one that rubs up a giant blister–Miner is all blister. Writing ostensibly to his former classmates, but really just for himself, another form of masturbation:

It’s always been this way, as many of you might recall. Somebody chucks a snowball, I’m scouring the school yard for rocks. The bully just wants to shove sadness around, shake me down for spare change, I’m looking to scrape out his eye. I lack a sense of proportion. I have no sensitivity to sport. I’m the aggrieved rider on the grievous plain. I’m still pissed about the parade.

For all his anger though, Miner is an engaging, preternaturally sensitive voice. Along with his best friend/foil Gary, he muddles through a wretched life, finding solace (and an outlet for an outsized comic voice) in his letters to Catamount Notes–even if disgraced Principal Fontana won’t publish them. Despite his censorious discretion, Fontana reignites a downright silly mentorship with Miner. Fontana, a man after Holden Caulfield’s heart who calls everyone a “phony,” plays a weird father-figure to our favorite loser (even though Lewis’s own “Daddy Miner” is an ever-present terror in this tragicomedy).

Fontana, Daddy Miner, and the other characters in Home Land often feel like props rather than fully-drawn beings. Take the aforementioned Gary, for example, flush with cash after suing the hypnotherapist who convinced him that his parents sexually abused him repeatedly as part of elaborate Satanic rituals. His ridiculous past is par for course in the book. Such characters are the stock-in-trade of Home Land; they are, paradoxically, both its strength and weakness, beings who seem to speak entirely in misplaced metaphors and fucked-up aphorisms. There are too many of them for the book’s 200 pages. The fast writing never sags under the huge cast, but, nonetheless, its spine, its plot, its quick rhythm can’t bear their weight. There’s a much bigger novel here, but I don’t think I’d want to read it. Even Lipsyte’s normals are grotesques–or maybe it’s just Miner’s bilious perspective. In any case, sympathy is in short supply in Catamount country.

None of this is meant to disparage the reading experience of Home Land, which is marvelous, quick, funny, and a little bit gross (in a good way). Lipsyte crafts his sentences with a concrete, witty excellence that is near unrivaled in contemporary lit. It’s true that he sacrifices the depth of his characters here from time to time, and then includes passages that add nothing to the plot as a whole, like this one:

An older shapely woman swerved past on rollerblades. Bronzed, undulant in black Lycra, she clutched a pack of menthol cigarettes, danced on her wheels to something pumped through headphones. It was an admirable kind of ecstasy, hard-won. I wanted her for a lewd aunt.

That last line, of course, tells us so much about Lewis Miner and is also indicative of his overall method of storytelling. Not that he sees his letters to his alumni newsletter as part of a larger narrative–indeed, he’s to be forgiven all his esoterica, his mean, incisive commentary on contemporary life that doesn’t add up. Halfway through the book he tells us:

It occurs to me, Catamounts, sitting here composing this latest update, that someday, if and when the collected works of Lewis Miner ever see the light of day, some futuristic editor-type might attempt to assemble these dispatches in a certain manner, to, for example, tell a story, or else effect some kind of thematic arrangement of interwoven leitmotifs: Work, Love, Masturbation, Gary.

This would be a mistake. There are no leitmotifs. There is no story.

Miner then goes on to makes a pretty convincing case against stories (or at least against narrative arcs) and, tellingly, Home Land is better as a series of ugly, gross, hilarious anecdotes than it is as a novel with a traditional character arc. Which it is–a novel with a traditional character arc, climax, all that good stuff. Strangely, this is the book’s biggest failure. But that failure doesn’t get in the way of what is a pretty great and often very funny reading experience. Miner’s voice is a pleasure to inhabit for a while, a postmodern Falstaff heavy on the self-loathing. Home Land is a quick, easy read, a novel destined for cult-status, and Lewis Miner’s pathetic ironic braggadocio will hit home for many folks. Recommended.

Home Land is available in trade paperback from Picador.

Moby Award Winners Announced; Zach Galifianakis (and Other Less Famous People) Honored

BibliokleptLeave a comment

The Moby Award Winners were announced last night for best, worst, and, uh, other book trailers. From Melville House’s press release:

The winners of the first Moby Awards for Best and Worst Book Trailers were announced earlier tonight before a standing-room-only crowd at a black tie ceremony held at New York’s chic Griffin club. Organized by the MobyLives book blog, the event included book industry celebrities such as author John Wray and critic Dale Peck handing out awards to, among others, Dennis Cass for Best Performance by an Author, Jonathan Safran Foer for Most Annoying Performance by an Author, and Zach Galifianakis for Best Cameo. Kathryn Regina won for best trailer from an independent publisher, and Maurice Gee won for best trailer from a conglomerate publisher.

“The idea was to spoof the fact that the book business too often looks to the movie business as a model,” said organizer and master of ceremonies Dennis Johnson, founder of MobyLives. “But as it turned out some writers make some pretty good videos and there was something to celebrate after all.”

Winners were selected by members of the MobyLives Academy, and included book industry luminaries Colin Robinson of OR Books, Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times, Megan Halpern of Melville House, Jason Boog of Galley Cat, Ina Howard Represent, Inc. Troy Patterson of Slate.com.

Winners received a statuette of a golden whale. “The only problem was it was a gray whale,” said Johnson. “Sperm whales, as Captain Ahab could tell you, are very hard to locate.”

Zach Galifianakis snagged one for his “work” on the trailer for John Wray’s Lowboy:

You can see all winning videos at MobyLives.

Here’s the full list of winners; some awards seem to have been arbitrarily invented for the occasion, which is absolutely marvelous with us, of course:

Trailer Least Likely to Sell the Book:
Sounds of Murder by Patricia Rockwell

Best Performance by an Author:
Head Case by Dennis Cass

Most Annoying Performance by an Author:
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

Best Cameo:
Zach Galifianakis, in Lowboy by John Wray

Best Low Budget/Indie:
I Am in the Air Right Now by Kathryn Regina

Best Big Budget/Big House:
Going West by Maurice Gee

Biggest Waste of Conglomerate Money:
Level 26 by Anthony Zuiker

Best Foreign Film Book Trailer:
Etcetera and Otherwise: a Lurid Odyssey by Sean Stanley, illustrated by Kristi-ly Green

Bloodiest Book Trailer of the Year:
Killer by Dave Zeltserman

Most Annoying Music:
New Year’s At the Pier by April Halprin Wayland

Kill Shakespeare

BibliokleptLeave a comment

I hadn’t heard of Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col’s new comic book series Kill Shakespeare until this afternoon, when I heard Neal Conan interview them on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. From the print edition:

In Kill Shakespeare, Conor McCreery and Anthony Del Col’s graphic novel, the Bard’s heroes and villains conspire to track down the evil wizard, William Shakespeare.

McCreery says you might be surprised at how big the crossover is between Shakespeare and comic books. “Kill Shakespeare‘s actually really done a nice job of reaching out to … the hard-core comic fan,” he tells NPR’s Neal Conan. “But we’ve also had a lot of first-time readers of comics come in because they’re really interested in this whole mash-up of the Bard we’re doing.”

The series brings all of Shakespeare’s trademarks to its panels — action, drama, lust, violence, double-crossing and cross-dressing.

NPR’s also published an excerpt from Kill Shakespeare.

The series seems appealing, and I’m all for anything that might introduce Shakespeare to a wider audience. At the same time, Kill Shakespeare seems indicative of a larger trend of literary mash-ups–think of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for instance–and I’m not sure how I feel about all of that. But maybe I should go to my local comic book shop and buy an issue and read one of the damn things, and then, you know, make some kind of informed judgment.

Friends, Lovers, Family; Kevin Bacon

Biblioklept3 Comments

From Lapham’s Quarterly, via Chris DeWeese via HTML GIANT.

James Wood on Harold Bloom

Biblioklept2 Comments

In his essay “Shakespeare in Bloom,” critic James Wood performs one of the strangest, most backhanded (and yet earnest) defenses I’ve ever read of Harold Bloom‘s aesthetic reaction to (what Bloom has called) “The School of Resentment” — deconstruction, Marxism, gender and queer theory, postcolonial theory, all that good stuff. Wood comes out strong, arguing, that in his prolific output, Bloom “has kidnapped the whole of the English literature and has been releasing his hostages, one by one, over a lifetime, on his own spirited terms.” Wood suggests that “this ceaselessness has produced some hurried, fantastical, and repetitive work,” before going on to throw around words like “garrulous” and “shallow.” Wood then takes Bloom to task over his famous (and improbable) claim that “Shakespeare invented us,” situating the claim against Bloom’s own most famous theory, the anxiety of influence. Wood says–

In truth, Bloom’s word invention is an enthusiastic Wildean necessary exaggeration. It is Bloom’s way of registering our almost religious sense that we live in Shakespeare’s shadow and that he does not simply represent human beings but brings new life, more life, into the world. . . . Bloom’s determination to honor Shakespeare’s godly primacy is a kind of secular theology.

The second section of Wood’s essay should be required reading for all English majors (or anyone serious about literary criticism). Here, Wood provides a wonderfully succinct overview of the history of literary criticism, connecting Freudian analysis and the New Critics to the various theories that Bloom would come to call the “The School of Resentment.” As we bring up the term again, we should note that we consider it a bit pejorative and utterly reactionary, and, to borrow from (and perhaps misapply) Wood, shallow. Wood points out that “Deconstruction brings a generalized suspicion to bear on language and in particular on metaphor (or ‘rhetoric’), which it suspects of hiding something–namely, its own metaphoricity.” In short, literature always metaphorizes, and thus hides, some other impulse, one always politicized. Wood continues: “Political criticism, including cultural materialism, converts Freud’s analytical suspicions into political ones. . . . The poem is read as if it were covering something up, as if it were an alibi that is rather too fluent to be entirely trusted.” It must be interrogated to reveal its secret, the secret prejudices of its age. Wood continues, after a page or two–

This is a long way around to Bloom, but it may explain the venom and desperation of his attacks. For although deconstruction did not intend to, it has produced mutant modes of reading that, when combined with leftish political guilt or ressentiment, seem to threaten the existence of literature as a discipline.

Wood espouses some common sense here uncommon in literary criticism, taking a long view that recognizes–and attempts to step outside of–the fact that it’s not all academic when it comes to how we read our books. History and politics matter, but so does our passion, our love for our books (as silly as that may sound). He defends Bloom’s work even as he calls it an overreaction. He credits deconstruction as having “produced some brilliance and many distinguished readings (no one could deny the acuities of Derrida, of Paul de Man, of Barbara Johnson).” Wood’s essay “Shakespeare in Bloom” is the kind of thing that students and aspiring critics alike should read before they feel the need to draw arms. You can read it in the second printing (the first in a decade) of Wood’s essay collection The Broken Estate, which debuts in June, 2010 from Picador.

The Periodic Table of Super-Powers

Biblioklept2 Comments

By ComicsAlliance writer Chris Sims.

Emma Donoghue Uncovers the Six Most Perennially Popular Plot Motifs of Attraction Between Women in Literature

BibliokleptLeave a comment
Rosalind and Celia -- Henry Nelson O'Neil

In her new book Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature (on sale May 25, 2010 from Knopf), Emma Donoghue discusses the six most common recurring girl-on-girl plots in literature. From her introduction:

TRAVESTIES: Cross-dressing (whether by a woman or a man) causes the “accident” of same-sex desire.

INSEPARABLES: Two passionate friends defy the forces trying to part them.

RIVALS: A man and a a woman compete for a woman’s heart.

MONSTERS: A wicked woman tries to seduce and destroy an innocent one.

DETECTION: The discovery of a crime turns out to be the discovery of same-sex desire.

OUT: A woman’s life is changed by the realization that she loves her own sex.

We’re enjoying Donoghue’s book so far. It proceeds from this initial folkloric classification with a balance of erudition and wit and a keen eye for the desire writhing between the lines. More to come.

Biblioklept Interviews Keri Walsh about Her New Book, The Letters of Sylvia Beach

Edwin Turner1 Comment

Keri Walsh’s new book The Letters of Sylvia Beach sheds light on one of modern literature’s most fascinating figures. Sylvia Beach was the nexus point for the ex-pat/Lost Generation/Modernist scene in the first half of the twentieth century. Along with her partner Adrienne Monnier, Beach ran the Left Bank bookstore Shakespeare & Company until the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1941. She was the first publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses, she translated Paul Valéry into English, and she was close friends to a good many great writers, including William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, H.D., and Ernest Hemingway. Walsh’s book compiles Beach’s letters, revealing a woman who cared deeply about literature and art, who was funny and sincere, and who loved her famous (and not so famous) friends dearly. Over a series of emails, we talked to Dr. Walsh about The Letters of Sylvia Beach, which is out now from Columbia UP. Keri Walsh teachers 20th Century British and Irish Literature at Claremont McKenna College in Los Angeles.

Biblioklept: How did you get interested in Sylvia Beach?

Keri Walsh: I got interested in Sylvia Beach in the same way that many English-speaking visitors to Paris do: when I stumbled upon the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris.  Of course, the current bookstore is its own entity: it’s not the direct descendant of Beach’s.  It was founded after the Second World War by George Whitman, and it’s been there so long that it’s now legendary in its own right.  Today it’s run by Whitman’s daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman.  The shop preserves many of the qualities of Beach’s original: the whimsicality, the friendliness, the sense of being a gathering place for expats. So it was easy to fall in love with it and to want to learn more about its origins.

Sylvia Beach grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. Beach’s father was minister of the Presbyterian Church just up the street from the university campus. I didn’t know that when I began my Ph.D. studies in the English department there.  I was delighted to learn that Firestone library, where I worked every day, owned a vast collection of Sylvia Beach’s letters, photographs, books, and belongings.  They even had the original “Shakespeare and Company” sign that had hung in front of her store.  I started to read through her letters, beginning with the ones she wrote as a teenager.  Even then she was always reading.  I was charmed by how funny she was, and how resourceful. She could talk her friends into just about anything– including smuggling illegal copies of Ulysses into the United States.

Her correspondents were so illustrious that I was surprised to learn that her letters had never been published. Because she wrote to Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, H.D. and others, I hoped that this volume might make a contribution to the study of modernist literary culture.  But I also wanted to share Beach’s story for its own sake, because she was so fascinating and endearing.  I had a hunch that there would be other readers like me who wanted to know more about Beach, and about the sensibility that informed Shakespeare and Company.  I thought about all the people who love modernist Paris and independent bookstores.  Beach is a kindred spirit for bookworms, expatriates, bohemians, bluestockings, francophiles and salonnieres of all stripes.

Keri Walsh at Shakespeare and Company, Paris

B: You mention Sylvia Beach Whitman. I’ve read that she’s an ancestor of Walt Whitman–is that true?

KW: About Sylvia Beach Whitman and the Whitman connection– I don’t know.  But I do know that the original Sylvia Beach had a Whitman connection, and she was proud of it.  An aunt of hers had visited Whitman and asked permission to dig some manuscripts out of his trash bin.  Sylvia had these on display in her shop. She writes in her memoir of “several little manuscripts of Walt Whitman scribbled on the backs of letters.  These were the gift of the poet to my Aunt Agnes Orbison.  Aunt Agnes, when she was a student at Bryn Mawr, had gone with her friend Alys Smith to Camden to visit Walt Whitman . . ..Manuscripts were strewn all over the floor, and some of them . . . were in the waste-paper basket.  She got up the courage to draw out a few of these scribblings, mostly on the backs of letters addressed to Walt Whitman, Esq., and asked if she might keep them.  “Certainly, my dear,” he replied.  And that’s how our family got its Whitman manuscripts” (20).

B: Can you tell us a bit about Beach’s involvement in smuggling copies of Ulysses into the States?

KW: As for the smuggling of Ulysses, Beach tells us in her memoir Shakespeare and Company that some of Hemingway’s friends in Toronto smuggled copies to the Ulysses subscribers underneath their clothes.  The original edition of Ulysses was paid for by subscribers in advance, so when Ulysses was banned in the US, it wasn’t a matter of getting copies into bookstores, it was a matter of getting them to the people who’d already bought them.  Beach’s letters show us that she relied on her old friend Marion Peter to do some of the smuggling, receiving the books in non-descript looking parcels and forwarding them on to the subscribers in America.  “You were such an angel to take all that trouble bootlegging for me!” she wrote to Marion Peter in 1923, a characteristically Sylvia-esque joke at the height of Prohibition to her eminently respectable friend.

B: In Beach’s letters, she comes across as both a friend and a fan to many of the authors to whom she writes. At times, there seems to be a tension there–there’s a late letter to Ezra Pound (#188), for example, where she seems almost ironically deferential; there’s a letter to Hemingway (#211) where she apologizes ahead of time for early “references to [his] domestic life” in her memoir Shakespeare and Company that “should be deleted.” How important was Beach to these writers, and how important were they to her? What was the response to her memoir?

KW: It must have been hard to know what to say to Pound in the years after the Second World War.  His politics during the conflict had been abominable, and his mental health was precarious to say the least.  Beach was a tactful person who disliked turning her back on anyone, so I think she struck a compromise, holding Pound at a distance but remaining polite.  Beginning in the early 1930s her letters register her discomfort with his attraction to Italian fascism.  In 1931 Beach wrote to Hemingway that “Ezra Pound is making us a visit, and an Italian tried to stick a stiletto into him during a soiree given in his honor at the Brasserie de l’Odeon.  I think people should control themselves better” (134-5).  You’re right to pick up on that ironic deference in the later letters.  Perhaps it was her way of “handling” Pound: “Do tell me what the “factual error” was in my piece.  Not the color of your shirt, I hope.  I could swear it was blue.  But I know how inaccurate I am. Adrienne is in despair over it” (214).

Her relationships varied, but as a general pattern her relationships with women like Bryher, H.D., and Adrienne Monnier were deep and mutual.  One gets the sense that Joyce was more important to her than she was to him.  Beach and Hemingway were genuine kindred spirits in the 1920s, and they retained a fond regard for each other throughout their lives.  I think that by the 1950s Beach felt less certain about her friendship with Hemingway, wondering whether this cultural icon and Nobel Prize-winning writer still had time for her.  But it was a gesture of thoughtfulness on her part to write to him wondering how much of his private story she could share in her memoir.  And he responded with implicit trust in her judgment, telling her that anything she wrote would be OK.

One of my favorite Hemingway moments to come out of the Sylvia Beach archives nicely demonstrates their mutual understanding.  Beach recorded on Hemingway’s Shakespeare and Company bill of 1934 that “Hemingway read Wyndham Lewis’s article ‘The Dumb Ox in Life and Letters’ and punched a vase of tulips on the table.  Paid SB 1500 fr damages.  SB returned 500 fr.”  (“The Dumb Ox” was, of course, Lewis’s famously unflattering study of Hemingway’s writing).

B: You mention that “One gets the sense that Joyce was more important to her than she was to him.” There’s a letter published in the volume that Beach never actually sent to Joyce that is extremely angry and shows that, at least to some extent, she felt hurt by Joyce’s treatment of her–that she felt used. The letter also reveals the economic difficulties faced by writers and publishers alike, and perhaps hints that Joyce was more mercenary than he would have liked his public to know. To what extent was Beach merely a bank to Joyce?

KW: That letter is remarkable, isn’t it, because it shows the deep resentment Beach eventually felt toward Joyce. But more characteristically, especially in the early 1920s when they were working together on the publication of Ulysses, Beach was indulgent about the privileges of genius.  To an extent that amazes me, she welcomed his incursions on her goodwill.  She loved his writing, and she made a conscious decision to serve him and his art. This attitude was probably integral to her success.  A less devoted, tenacious, and flexible person would simply not have been able to get Ulysses into print.  But their intense and one-sided relationship proved unsustainable as his needs escalated and her resources diminished during the Depression.

Beach wasn’t the only one who put Joyce ahead of her own needs: Harriet Weaver, Paul Léon, Samuel Beckett, and Eugene Jolas were similarly devoted. Now, ideally, Joyce would have repaid these personal debts with magnanimity and grace.  Sometimes he did.  And sometimes he didn’t.  In her recent piece on Beach’s letters in the London Times, Jeanette Winterson expresses the frustration that Beach admirers often feel:

“Joyce’s gigantic ego nearly ruined her. He took her cash, let her take all the risks on his (at the time) unpublishable book, and later reneged on the letter and the spirit of their agreements, simply reselling to Random House when he was famous enough to do so.”

But whatever his weaknesses of character, we have to remember that Beach indulged them.  She was moved by Joyce’s work ethic in spite of his wretched health, the fact that he was terribly short of funds, and that he always seemed overmatched by circumstance.  Her letters give us a glimpse into the sufferings he endured with his eye surgeries, for instance, and it’s harrowing reading.  No, they never patched things up, but Beach remained loyal to Joyce’s family after his death, and she was a careful guardian of his legacy.

B: Beach lived with her partner Adrienne Monnier for years. To what extent were they “out” among Paris society, their literary friends, and their family?

KW: Most people who knew them accepted Beach and Monnier as a couple.  Paris in the 1920s was tolerant of alternative lifestyles.  As George Orwell put it in “Inside the Whale,” “for a time, the populace had grown so hardened to artists that gruff-voiced lesbians in corduroy breeches and young men in Grecian or medieval costume could walk the streets without attracting a glance.”

Beach was considered a member of the Monnier family and spent weekends and summers at Monnier’s parents’ home in Rocfoin.  In Women of the Left Bank, Shari Benstock offers an insightful analysis of their relationship.  She notes that Beach and Monnier’s relationship differed from Gertude Stein and Alice Toklas’s in its mutuality, and in its refusal of butch/femme roles or the model of heterosexual marriage.  “Perhaps because both partners were strong feminists,” says Benstock, their relationship was characterized by: “an egalitarianism unusual in either homosexual or heterosexual relationships of the period.  It was not marked by self-destructive behavior, neither was it given to self-indulgence.  Indeed, this union might well serve as an alternative model to the more popular view of Paris lesbian experience… (210-211).”

Of course, then, as now, intolerance could rear its head at any time.  I came across one patently homophobic response to Beach and Monnier’s relationship.  It came from William Carlos Williams’ Autobiography.  He wrote of Monnier: “She enjoyed the thought, she said, of pigs screaming as they were being slaughtered, a contempt for the animal—a woman toward whom it was strange to see the mannishly dressed Sylvia so violently drawn” (93).  I think he misunderstood Monnier’s sense of humor, and the fun she had shocking the sensibilities of Americans.

B: Have you ever stolen a book?

KW: Hmm . . . does picking up novels left behind on planes count?

This isn’t a theft, but it did feel like a piece of good luck: while editing Beach’s letters, I wanted a copy of her translation of Henri Michaux’s A Barbarian in Asia. I ordered one though a second-hand bookstore online, and when it arrived, I found that it was inscribed with the name of Sylvia Beach’s Ulysses-bootlegger friend Marion Peter.  It was the copy Beach had sent to her as a gift when it came out in 1949.

Hilary Mantel on Thomas Cromwell; James Wood on Thomas More

Biblioklept5 Comments

I’m coming to the end of Hilary Mantel’s brilliant treatment of the Tudor saga, Wolf Hall. Sign of a great book: when it’s finished, I will miss her characters, particularly her hero Thomas Cromwell, presented here as a self-made harbinger of the Renaissance, a complicated protagonist who was loyal to his benefactor Cardinal Wolsey even though he despised the abuses of the Church. Mantel’s Cromwell reminds us that the adjective “Machiavellian” need not be a pejorative, applied only to evil Iago or crooked Richard III. The Cromwell of Wolf Hall presages a more egalitarian–modern–extension of power. Cromwell here is not simply pragmatic (although he is pragmatic), he also has a purpose: he sees the coming changes of Europe, the rise of the mercantile class signaling economic power over monarchial authority. Yet he’s loyal to Henry VIII, and even the scheming Boleyns. “Arrange your face” is one of the book’s constant mantras; another is “Choose your prince.” Mantel’s Cromwell is intelligent and admirable; the sorrows of the loss of his wife and daughter tinge his life but do not dominate it; he can be cruel when the situation merits it but would rather not be. I doubt that many people wanted yet another telling of the Tudor drama–but aren’t we always looking for a great book? Wolf Hall demonstrates that it’s not the subject that matters but the quality of the writing. Highly recommended.

Cromwell’s greatest foil in Wolf Hall is Thomas More, who is also the subject of the first essay in James Wood’s collection The Broken Estate. I got my review copy in the mail late last week, so it was pure serendipity that I should read “Sir Thomas More: A Man for One Season” after a full day of listening to Wolf Hall (did I neglect to mention that I listened to the audio book? Sorry). Wood is harsher on More than Mantel; whereas she lets us despise him within the logic and framework of the Tudor court, Wood aims to find a contemporary secular standard from which to judge him. He finds license to do so through the work of John Stuart Mill, citing the influential essay On Liberty. Wood writes:

So it is enough for secular criticism to argue that More should have acted differently, and in asserting only this, secular criticism gives birth to itself. It is enough for the secularist to say that there are categories and modes of being which possess a transhistorical and universal status equivalent to sainthood’s, and by which it is therefore permissible to judge More’s actions.

I think in some ways Mantel’s work performs a kind of transhistorical secularist critique of More, albeit one that steps outside of historical or literary criticism or philosophy, one that remains in the logical limits of historical fiction. Mantel does not ask her Thomases to be something that we in the 21st century want them to be, but by centering on Cromwell, she engenders a sharp critique of More’s hypocrisy, a hypocrisy endemic to his time. Cromwell is a humanist (who does not know that he is a humanist, perhaps) and his complicated view of More forms the thrust of any critique we might choose to find in Wolf Hall. Cromwell admires More’s erudition but despises his arrogance; he respects More as a family man but resents his attitudes toward women. In Mantel’s London, Cromwell works to save More’s life not because he wants to avoid creating a martyr, but because he feels genuine compassion and pity for the man’s family. More’s selfishness is all the more apparent in light of this. Further reflection Wood’s book to come; this second printing (the first in a decade) of Wood’s essays debuts in June, 2010 from the good folks at Picador.

David Foster Wallace Reading from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again at the MOCA, San Diego

Biblioklept1 Comment

This video, Another Random Bit: The Perspective of David Foster Wallace, is hardly new, but I hadn’t seen it before, so, you know, there you go. David Foster Wallace reads excerpts from one of my favorite books ever, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

Dave Tompkins Discusses His New Book about Vocoders on NPR

Biblioklept1 Comment

If you missed this morning’s interview on NPR with Dave Tompkins on his new book How to Wreck a Nice Beach (Melville House) you can listen to it here. Tompkins discusses national defense, A Clockwork Orange, Kraftwerk, hip-hop, and autotune. Good stuff.

In Brief — Nick McDonell, Deirdre Madden, and Simon Rich

Biblioklept3 Comments

Loved loved loved Nick McDonell’s collection of reportage on the US Army in Iraq, The End of Major Combat Operations. It’s not the sort of thing that I’d normally pick up, so I’m glad that it showed up as half of McSweeney’s 34. Embedded with the 1st Cavalry, McDonell offers a series of tightly-drawn close-ups of the soldiers in Iraq, their interpreters, and ordinary folks trying to make a life in Baghdad. Great stuff. You can read an excerpt now at Salon.

Deirdre Madden’s novel Molly Fox’s Birthday takes place over the course of just one summer day in Dublin, Ireland. Perhaps that sounds a bit familiar, but Madden can’t be accused of trying to riff off Ulysses–even if her book is funny and erudite. Molly Fox, a famous stage actor, is abroad for a few months; in the interim her playwright friend, the unnamed narrator, takes residence in her home. The book opens with a strange dream sequence, full of joy and mystery, which ushers in a host of questions about the intertwined past of the narrator, Molly, and a TV art critic named Andrew. Madden’s book is a sustained investigation into how our friendships endure–and change–over the course of all the masks we wear. Molly Fox’s Birthday, a Picador trade paperback original, is new in the US this month.

Earlier this week I got a review copy of Elliot Allagash by 25-year old SNL writer Simon Rich. Now, normally I’d say all kinds of nasty things about Rich simply because he’s a debut novelist who’s younger than I am and, let’s face it, I’m a jealous hater. But Elliot Allagash‘s initial pages are charming and quite funny and seem to impel further reading, so I’ll probably just do that (i.e., you know, read it) instead of making snap judgments. Here’s one of the better book trailers in recent memory, starring SNL-er Bill Hader and Simon Rich (who apparently borrowed his father’s ill-fitting suit for the occasion):

Elliot Allagash is available May 25, 2010 from Random House.

Images from Codex Seraphinianus

Biblioklept2 Comments

Images from Luigi Serafini’s surreal cryptoencyclopedia, Codex Seraphinianus. Learn more by reading Justin Taylor’s essay from the May 2007 issue of The Believer.


Continue reading “Images from Codex Seraphinianus” →

Vice Interviews Bret Easton Ellis

BibliokleptLeave a comment

Vice interviews Bret Easton Ellis at length. Topics include troublesome editors, that “Cranky old bastard” J.D. Salinger (“who hated us all, by the way”), the weirdness of L.A., and his forthcoming novel Imperial Bedrooms, the sequel to his first big hit Less Than Zero. Here’s a taste of the interview, where BEE talks (mild smack) about Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, and former classmate Jonathan Lethem:

Vice: [I]t seems like people will never get tired of probing you about how much of your fiction is autobiographical.
BEE: I wonder why? No other authors, when I read about them, get asked this. Michael Chabon doesn’t get asked this. Jonathan Franzen doesn’t get asked this. Jonathan Lethem doesn’t get asked this. I get asked this. Maybe because I’m just not as good a writer as they are.

Vice: No. You’re as good or better than all of them. But I don’t know, I don’t want to get off topic too much. Never mind.
BEE: I want you to just briefly get off topic. You can say anything you want to me. I really don’t know any of them. I mean, I know them kind of, but I’m not friends with any of them.

Vice: I like Chabon, but I get this weird sense that I wouldn’t like him as a person. Not that that matters, of course.
BEE: No, it doesn’t matter. Always look at the art, not the artist.

Vice: But it’s difficult for me sometimes. I think there’s something kind of too cute about Lethem, or at least something too cute about his last novel, Chronic City.
BEE: I really like The Fortress of Solitude. That’s the only book of his I’ve liked. And the only book of Michael Chabon’s that I really liked was Kavalier & Clay.

Vice: That was great.
BEE: And I really don’t like anything by Jonathan Franzen but The Corrections, which I think is a great American novel.

Vice: Those are kind of their inarguable books I guess, those three.
BEE: Yeah, but everything else by those three is just, you know, I go, “Grrrrrr.” You know, I went to school with Jonathan Lethem.

Vice: Oh, really?
BEE: We were in the same class at Bennington.

Vice: I didn’t know that. What was he like in school?
BEE: Nice. He was a nice guy. I had no idea that he wanted to be a writer. He wasn’t in any of the main workshops. Like Donna Tartt would be in there, and Jill Eisenstadt. You know, the people who really wanted to write were the people who always managed to get into the major workshop that term. And Jonathan never got into any of them. And then I got a galley in the mail a long time after we graduated, and it was for a novel by Jonathan Lethem about talking animals or something. And I was like, “What the hell is this?”

Brontë Sisters Power Dolls!

BibliokleptLeave a comment

Biblioklept Interviews Librarian Josh Jubinsky about the Jacksonville Public Library’s Zine Collection

Edwin Turner4 Comments

Jacksonville Public Library’s Zine Collection is one of the first–and largest– such collections in the Southeastern United States. Librarian and collection archivist Josh Jubinsky was kind enough to talk to Biblioklept about the collection, the essence of punk, the future of zines in an increasingly technologically-mediated world, and the million-fart bill. We corresponded via email, although we could have done the interview in person easily–in full disclosure, I should mention that Josh lives down the street from Biblioklept World Headquarters.

Biblioklept: What is a zine?

Josh Jubinsky: A zine is a self-published pamphlet that ranges in format, size and topic. Although zines are clearly something dating back to the chapbooks of beat poets, to early science fiction fanzines and writings, to the 1960’s super hero comic zines such as Alter Ego which help spearhead a comics industry focusing more of masked avengers than horror and romance stories – my involvement with them has been only over the last 10 or so years and from a predominantly punk background.  Whether the zines are music fanzines, literary journalistic diatribe, or DIY projects of a particular focus they are grounded largely in a punk music subculture and involve some sort of activism or simply an independent alternative media appeal. Physically speaking, a zine is typically a stack of 8 1/2 x 11 paper folded in half and stapled along the folded edge – although size and format does drastically vary.

B: Tell us a little bit about the Zine Collection at the Jacksonville Library.

JJ: The collection at the library had it’s grand opening party during the October Artwalk of 2009. It was started mostly on donations we had accumulated from my contacts from having a record store and distro [Deadtank distribution — ed.] (the store for 2 years, and the distro about 8.). We’ve gotten some funding from the library that, while it may not be much money compared to many other library activities, it goes a long way when you’re purchasing zines that cost $1-$2 a piece. Everything in the collection circulates, nothing is purely a reference material. As of now we have about 500 zines, and most everything has been checked out at least once. The circulation stats are great considering the size of the collection, averaging around 100 – 150 items a month.

Personally, it’s become a great vehicle for me to branch out into other programming at the library. I work in children’s library so in the past my programming outlets were confined to children’s programming – storytimes, outreaches to schools. I took that and applied my personal tastes and preferences to the job by teaching guitar lessons, doing classes on bike repair and safety, getting a children’s band together and having kids play all the instruments à la Rock Camp. But that sort of personal job molding increases tenfold when you can do programming in the name of the zine collection. The outreaches are to the Harvest of Hope Festival, to Cinema Sounds, to punk rock shows in warehouses. The programs are bands playing and zine authors reading or being part of a panel discussion. And that focuses back on my being in the children’s department. I started and now run a weekly creative writing and comic drawing class for kids called Zine Machine. The projects the kids work on get put into a zine that becomes part of the library collection. We’re not just creating library patrons, we’re creating authors.

Josh (right) and some of the Zine Machine crew

B: Zine Machine sounds really cool. What are some of the things the kids are writing about?

JJ: The first issue was just completed. It’s writings, collages, comics, etc. from January to April. The writing covers everything from short bios on themselves (with self-portraits of course) to designing a car. Some writing prompts are for basic journal entries, writing a review of a book, movie, or video game, asking things like what sot of super powers they’d like to have and why, describing how they think libraries could be better. . .  It’s really interesting to see what kids come up with and how they approach the writing and the comics. The class is for kids ages 8-13, though I can’t seem to say no to the 7 years olds that show up. To talk about the difference between a magazine and a zine and have the kids understand that – to be exposed to what an advertisement is and why they are in magazines – to learn about why zines are important and how hey can do this themselves – it’s all really empowering for anybody, especially young kids. Before these kids even have it ingrained in them that “writing is hard” or “what you do isn’t good enough” or “it’s hard to get published” – they are learning and experiencing the opposite. The next issue won’t be from as long a time period of writing.

We’re focusing all month on a single project of designing a country. They are drawing maps, flags, and currency, making laws and deciding things like the country motto and tree. I am so excited about it. The variations in projects from kid to kid are so vast. The variation is amazingly refreshing – amazingly unique- for someone who’s only been alive for 8 years. Some kids have currency that is all based on roman numerals they look up, and others – the king of the country “Only Boys!” has currency based on farts. Everything from a 5 fart coin to a 1,000,000 fart bill. The class is hilarious and fun.

B: I guess you know you’ve made it when your face is on the million-fart bill.

One of the things I like about zines is that they tend to be the products of a very personal, different perspective; they tend to be obsessive and weird. Do you have any particular favorites from the collection you could highlight for us?

JJ: One that I really enjoyed and I wish I saw more of is A La Maison. It’s a french zine, written in English though. It’s a guide to the city of Lyon, France by some people who live there. Definitely a punk perspective on the city, maybe like a punk travel guide. It goes through the city section by section with what bars, falafel places and record stores are best. And it comes with a CDR of all these bands from Lyon. It’s amazing. The people who put out the zine set up a show for my band [Josh is in about seventy bands –ed.] when we toured Europe. I got the zine for the library when their band came through Florida on tour. Touring with your band selling a zine and CDR for a few bucks, advertising how awesome your town is – it’s amazing. Another favorite of mine is a zine called Snakepit. It’s perfect for the short attention span comic reader. Books compiling the issues focus on an entire year of his life, where every three panels is a day. Some Florida ones I love are America? by Travis Fristoe and Seven Inches to Freedom by Joe Lachut. Travis is just an amazing writer that I can’t recommend enough. Joe’s zine is primarily about music, record collecting in terms of hardcore punk. We have the book version of Zine Yearbook 9; it’s a good “best of” type-thing that helps find what you like.

B: You bring up punk music, which many people closely associate with zines. What about non-punk zines? Or is zine-making punk in and of itself, despite aesthetics/ideology/taste/style?

JJ: We’re getting into really loaded words here, and I don’t think a conversation about what I think is punk and not punk will be too helpful for anyone. But yes, there are plenty of “non-punk” zines in terms of subject matter. Though to me they almost all seem like something punk – indeed not by musical interest, but an aesthetic appeal or just the fact that you’re doing a zine. People may not identify with being punk in some way, but if you do a zine you have a lot in common with punk. In terms of like doing it yourself, being part of a grassroots publishing world – in part, the medium is the message. I can’t really separate myself from that, although lots of bizarre gray areas exist. Are those little religious pamphlets people leave at the post office punk? Are these zines? That’s people expressing themselves, right? And they are sharing there thoughts at a grassroots level. Essentially, they already have the most published book in the world working for them. Take for example the Zine Machine zine. Nine year old kids aren’t automatically punk for contributing to a zine. But more punk than a kid who didn’t, maybe? It’s a very empowering exercise. It’d definitely be appreciated by anyone I’d consider punk. Does that sound too insular?

The zine collection is definitely helping me to branch out and find zines that aren’t somehow tied to the music scene I’m part of, to find zines besides fanzines, or amazing literary zines that are of course full of punk culture references or that I first got into because I know the author some other way (his or her band, label, meeting them at a show). Being a part of creating this is helping me understand it all more.

B: Why are zines important or meaningful in the age of the blogging? How are zines different than blogs? Is technology bad for zines? What’s the future of zines?

JJ: Maybe this sounds like an overused reason for me (since it’s the same main reason I give when people ask why I have records), but, essentially that zines are tangible. Personally, that tangibility helps me remember them. I can barely tell you what I read online yesterday, but I can tell you about the book or zine I’m reading. You can bring zines along when you go on a tour or go fishing or go to the bathroom or sit in the park – and you don’t have to have an expensive device you must charge to read them. They also exude a sense of time and place. A zine is self-contained, obviously not in literary or musical references, but you can’t get bored with it and click to an updated version. You can’t add it to your blog reader. Like a record, it’s not convenient. It’s romantic. You aren’t jogging while listening to an audio book – you aren’t trying to maximize productivity. You sit, enjoy and get fresh air at the same time.

The interruptions are minuscule compared to reading something online. Right now as people are reading this I bet they have other windows open – your friend messaging you, some work you need to finish, your email. These readers won’t read this without clicking over to something else. What sort of compromises are we making, as readers, with this convenience? How much are we losing from what we really want to be doing by always trying to do something else in tandem? Technology isn’t bad for zines, it’s just different. Blogs and zines, these have very different cultures around them. You used to mail order zines from a paper catalog or get them at your local record store. Those catalogs are gone. Those stores stay open largely because some kid who doesn’t care about his credit is paying rent on his credit card, or people live in the back room. I’m not saying any of this is good or bad, it’s just different. The idea of convenience is literally changing our landscape. Sometimes it’s more convenient to work around modern day conveniences, and even when it’s not, you want to because it’s what you love. Zines help me relax. I like [love — ed.] your blog and I have one too, but – the internet is so full of crap. It just adds to the rushed feeling of our days. Increasingly days are becoming more and more just a series of errands and obligations. When I want to read something, I don’t want to be in front of the same machine, sitting in the same position, probably at the same place, that I do work at.

I see the future of zines as a larger part of what Jacksonville and Florida is about. Our collection here is great and items circulate rampantly. On the librarian level, we just presented at the Florida Library Association conference to roaring optimism. People are scheduling us to teach classes about how to start a zine collection. I’m hoping the local populous answers this collection’s existence, answers the authors whose work are represented with works of their own. What you do, what you write, what you create can be part of the library. It’s not lowering the bar for what we catalog – we use the same standards any other department does. It’s adjusting the aperture of our collection. We’re letting in more light, more opinions, more voices. The goal of a library it is to create equality, to level the playing field. Any economic background or any ethnic group, the library is here for you to use. Now, more than ever, it’s here not just for its community to become it’s patron, but part of its collection.

B: Have you ever stolen a book?

JJ: How dare you! I work at a library!