Tag: Books

Five Favorite Fictional Sons

Biblioklept2 Comments

A son is born to The Biblioklept! To celebrate–and, perhaps to respond to last year’s Father’s Day post, Five Favorite Fictional Fathers–I offer five favorite fictional sons. In the earlier post, I suggested that Western literature holds a certain ambivalence toward fatherhood, one that evinces in one of its most ubiquitous tropes–the hero-as-orphan. These orphan-heroes tend to have father-figures, but their biological dads are usually displaced in some way. So, to set some ground rules for the post, I chose heroes whose narratives are still deeply intertwined with their biological parents–particularly their fathers. Yet in the cases below, parental displacement remains.

1. Telemachus, The Odyssey (Homer)

The original angry young man. And who can blame him, what with dad away (having all the fun, tricking gods and monsters and bagging nymphs) and rude would-be step-dads gobbling up all the goods (and, uh, trying to bang your mom to boot). Although the swineherd Eumaeus was probably more of a dad to Telly-Mack than Odysseus was, there’s something touching about the end of The Odyssey, when the pair slaughter the suitors wholesale.

2. Hamlet, Hamlet (William Shakespeare)

Poor, grieving Hamlet–dad departed–a ghost!–revenge me!–uncle usurping dad’s role (and his promised throne (and banging mom to boot))–wait–I think we’ve hit a theme here. This has to be a theme, right? Kids need guidance, and Hamlet has none. No wonder he goes bonkers.

3. Stephen Dedalus, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses (James Joyce)

OK, we’ve definitely hit a theme. Through the sympathetic yet often repulsive figure of Stephen Dedalus, Joyce reworked Telemachus and Hamlet (and Icarus and everything else (hang on, shouldn’t Jesus be on this list?)). Bloom gets too much credit as a father figure. Reread Portrait–Simon looms large enough.

4. Quentin Compson, The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! (William Faulkner)

The theme is readily conceded. Compson funnels Hamlet’s neuroses and Dedalus’s intellectual acumen through a channel of Southern alienation. Plus, like Stephen, his dad’s a drunk. Like Hamlet, Quentin is ultimately a tragic figure, but he’s nonetheless a hero, a son who attempts to reconcile the traditions of his father’s world against the shifting dimensions of his own time (or something like that).

5. Hal Incandenza, Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)

A tennis champ with a secret marijuana addiction (or, more accurately, an addiction to secret behaviors) cursed with an eidetic memory, Prince Hal is easily one of DFW’s finest inventions. And yes, yes, yes, his relationship with dad James (again, a drunk) repeats the drama of Hamlet–right down to the ghost-demands-revenge scene and its usurping uncle (although Charles Tavis ain’t so bad). So, unwittingly, the theme finds its summation in Hal, a kid anyone would be proud to call son.

Ethical Realism (and Grim Decadence) in Hans Fallada’s Wolf Among Wolves

Edwin TurnerLeave a comment

On the heels of last year’s hugely successful first-time-in-English publication of Every Man Dies Alone, the good folks at Melville House have issued another of Hans Fallada’s epic novels, Wolf Among Wolves. Set during Germany’s 1923 economic collapse, Wolf centers on Wolfgang Pagel, a former soldier and itinerant gambler languishing in the corruption of Weimar Berlin.The beginning of the novel focuses on a single summer day in Berlin; Fallada’s naturalist, realist eye paradoxically puts all the minutiae of this world under a microscope even as it expands to capture a holistic vision of life in morally-decadent, post-war Germany. The effect is both devastating and enlightening. It is epic realism, the condensation of the everyday existence of an alien world. Another paradox–behind Fallada’s omniscient, steady, neutral narrative, so plain and descriptive and frank, there lies another voice, a moral, ethical voice that prompts Pagel to transcend the wolf-eat-wolf world. Indeed, Fallada presents a vision of moral cooperation in a world dominated by self-interest. Here’s a passage describing some of Berlin’s heady post-war decadence:

But the girls were the worst. They strolled about calling, whispering, taking people’s arms, running alongside men, laughing. Some girls exposed their bodies in a way that was revolting. A market of flesh–white flesh bloated with drink, and lean dark flesh which seemed to have been burned up by spirits. But worst of all were the entirely shameless, the almost sexless: the morphine addicts with their contracted pupils, the cocaine sniffers with their white noses, and the cocaine addicts with high-pitched voices and irrepressibly twitching faces. They wriggled, they jiggled their flesh in low-cut or cunningly-slashed blouses, and when they made room for you or went round a corner they picked up their skirts (which, even so, didn’t reach their knees), exhibiting between stockings and drawers a strip of pale flesh and a green or pink garter. They exchanged remarks about passing men, bawled obscenities to each other across the street, and their greedy eyes searched among the slowly drifting crowd for foreigners who might be expected to have foreign currency in their pockets.

Melville House’s edition of Wolf Among Wolves is the first unabridged English translation ever–scholars Thorsten Carstensen and Nicholas Jacobs have restored  passages originally omitted in Philip Owens’s contemporaneous translation.In his insightful afterward, Carstensen addresses why certain passages were not included in Owens’s original translation, pointing out that most omitted passages showed an inclination toward fairy-tale or mythic structures, aesthetics that “contradict the claim to naturalistic representation” one expects in Fallada’s work. By preserving the occasional “almost surreal mode of perception” omitted in the original, Carstensen argues that:

In short, the fully reconstructed text, with its enhanced inconsistency, provides the reader with insight into a literary aesthetics that is unique among the novels of German modernism: Fallada combines realist prose and ethical concerns with a narrative technique that renders ambiguous what is supposedly a semi-documentary representation, shaped by his very own experiences in the country.

We’re eating up Wolf Among Wolves right now, and will have a full review in time); for now, we recommend you pick it up for some good summer reading.

Paul Auster Explains Why Philip Roth Is Wrong

Biblioklept1 Comment

Paul Auster explains why Philip Roth is wrong about the death of the novel:

Sam Lipsyte, Book Thief

BibliokleptLeave a comment

Sam Lipsyte read live from his new novel The Ask last night at HTML GIANT’s Ustream channel. The reading was cool but the best part was the q&a session afterward. We asked Lipsyte the one question all true biblioklepts are dying to know (and the one question we ask every person we interview): “Have you ever stolen a book?”

Vodpod videos no longer available.

Here’s Lipsyte’s response, which you can hear/see at 31:25 in the video:

‘Have you ever stolen a book?’ There was one time when I stole a few books when I worked in a library; it was a university library and my job was to stick the metal strips into the spines of the books that would set off the alarm. And so if a particularly good book came through (and this only happened three or four times) I just wouldn’t–I don’t know if I’d call it stealing–but I wouldn’t put the strip in. And then once it was shelved I would take it.

That’s a pretty sophisticated operation. Kudos to Lipsyte for his candor.

Sam Lipsyte Will Read from His New Novel, The Ask, at HTML GIANT Tonight

BibliokleptLeave a comment

In the spirit of making my headline redundant: Sam Lipsyte will read  from his new novel The Ask at HTML GIANT at 9pm EST tonight (id est, 5.27.2010). Lipsyte will read via streaming video and a live chat q&a is planned to follow, so huddle around the warm glow of your monitors with your dearest loved ones for some good ole fashioned acerbic catharsis.

New Titles from Hawthorne Books

Biblioklept1 Comment

A lovely little crop of new titles from independent publisher Hawthorne Books arrived at Biblioklept World Headquarters earlier this week. We solicited for a reading copy of Monica Drake’s 2007 novel (okay, they weren’t all like, totally new) Clown Girl and the folks at Hawthorne were kind enough to send along their two newest titles as well, Frank Meeink’s The Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead and Loretta Stinson’s début novel, Little Green. Little Green tells the story of a teenage runaway coming of age in the drug culture of the Pacific Northwest in the late 1970s. Frank Meeink’s The Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead–told to Jody M. Roy (in the tradition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley)–chronicles how one of America’s most notorious neo-Nazis spiraled into a cycle of criminal violence before eventually finding redemption and purpose. Meeink was a guest on NPR’s Fresh Air a few months ago–you can listen to that story here. While Clown Girl doesn’t seem nearly as immediately grave as Meeink’s book or Little Green, it does have its gritty side. Set in the weird world of Baloneytown, Clown Girl follows the tragicomic life of Nita (aka Sniffles) as she tries to realize her dreams of artistic freedom through, uh, clowning. But economic realities threaten to force her into satisfying the dark needs of clown fetishists. Damn! Earlier this month Collider reported that SNLer Kristen Wiig is planning to write and star in an adaptation of Clown Girl.

Hawthorne has created some really marvelous aesthetic objects here, and the Portland, Oregon based indie seems to have achieved a pleasing house style. These trades are a bit taller than what most of the big publishing houses put out, with heavy, thick covers and double French flaps. The thick bright white acid-free pages are also a nice touch. Full, in-depth reviews forthcoming.

Elliot Allagash — Simon Rich

Edwin Turner1 Comment

Poor Seymour Herson, protagonist of Simon Rich’s début novel, Elliot Allagash. Overweight, unpopular, and often bullied, he becomes yet another target when Elliot Allagash shows up as a new student in his school. Not that Elliot bullies Seymour. Instead, Elliot targets Seymour as part of a weird Pygmalionesque experiment to manipulate the social hierarchies of Glendale, the middling Manhattan private school the two attend. Why is billionaire Elliot attending such a low-rent school? Simple: He’s been kicked out of every other school in New York at one point, and Glendale needs his father’s largesse. Elliot, bored evil genius that he is, spies Seymour sitting all alone and quickly singles him out as his chief puppet in a Machiavellian scheme, one that soon pays off for Seymour as well. Under Elliot’s supervision (or manipulation), Seymour sheds his weight, becomes a figurative and literal baller, and soon earns (or, uh finagles) the respect of his peers and teachers. In time though, Elliot’s creation craves autonomy–and turns on him.

Although Elliot repeatedly insists that his work with Seymour is a mere experiment to occupy his interest during his tenure in the hell that is Glendale, it becomes clear that he genuinely craves Seymour’s friendship, and, at times, he even admires aspects of his puppet. “You’re lucky you can still experience pleasure,” he tells Seymour early in their relationship, “I’ve become accustomed to a level of decadence so extreme that to go without luxury for even a minute fills me with a powerful rage.” The line is a great example of Rich at his best in Elliot Allagash–cartoonish comedy that tips into pathos. The roots of Elliot’s decadence are revealed a few pages later when we meet his awful, awful father Terry, a billionaire monster of the Mongomery Burns school. In a scene both funny and painful, Terry explains to an artistic genius that, not only will no one besides Terry ever see the paintings he’s commissioned from the artist, but that those paintings, along with the rest of his “Personal Museum” will be destroyed when he dies. The artist cries and pleads to renege the Faustian bargain he’s struck with his patron; Terry counters with a chilling (and hilarious) story about making a Pulitzer Prize-winning author write a “profoundly beautiful novel . . . in longhand” in front of him. “I read his book in a single sitting and then burned it in my fireplace,” he tells the shocked artist. Talk about decadence. While the scene is both funny and dreadful, the relationship between Terry and his son is downright sad. He attaches a note to a gift that he gives to Seymour when he and Elliot visit Seymour and his parents (they all play Monopoly in a scene of awkward comedy). The note says: “Dear Seymour, Thank you for spending so much time with my strange, strange boy. What is it like? You must remind me to ask you sometime.”

Terry’s note about his son is just one of many instances in this novel that speaks to the alienation that many adolescents feel. These themes match nicely with Rich’s tight, descriptive writing, which moves quickly, propelled by snappy dialogue (and plenty of punchlines, both verbal and visual). I don’t think that Elliot Allagash is being promoted directly as a Young Adult novel, but it will have a ready audience in the same smart crowd who dig funny, bright novels like C.D. Payne’s Youth in Revolt and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Recommended.

Elliot Allagash is available today in hardback from Random House.

“It’s a Book”

BibliokleptLeave a comment

“Can it text?”

Via The Casual Optimist.

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

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.

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.

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.