Curiosities

• Author Elaine Dundy died last week. Terry Teachout excerpted his introduction to her book, The Dud Avocado. Edan mentioned the book not long ago in a "staff picks" post.
• "The One-Room M.F.A. Program"
• For John O'Brien, "Three" is not the magic number.
• Car names deemed "too academic:" Dodge Dissertation Defense V8, Chrysler Course Calendar Convertible, etc.
• AbeBooks' online symposium on book burning.

- Editor @ 10:39 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Scarification: Ondaatje in the Library

As I watch a crowd build for readings at the public library, it is always with some anxiety that I survey my strange companions - chess geeks there for Gary Kasparov, decomposing leftists to hear Lawrence Wright on Iraq - and worry about my place among them.

Last Thursday, when Michael Ondaatje came to the Philadelphia public library to read from Divisadero, there was no such trepidation however. It may set me on edge to share politics with a room of people, but it is intimate to share a story. While we waited for Ondaatje to appear, a library staffer poured water into a glass beside the lectern and I chatted with the woman sitting next to me. Neither of us had read Divisadero, but we had The English Patient between us. She had finished it well after midnight, in bed on a Tuesday. I was on a train headed for Albany, pulling along the Hudson, when I put my copy down.

Ondaatje took the stage in standard touring author attire, a loosely cut gray suit over a white dress shirt, open at the collar. He had a puff of thinning white hair and a beard to match and a round of middle age paunch drooping over his waist. Never having met the man, I could have picked him out of a room of strangers.

Ondaatje explained that he began his writing career as a poet and
that tonight, before he began Divisadero, he wanted to read a few stanzas. I could not tell if this was routine, or if he'd been grabbed by an impulse on the way over. Either way, the room was rapt as he read "The Cinnamon Peelers Wife" which contained the question, "what good is it to be the lime burner's daughter/ left with no trace/ as if not spoken to in the act of love/ as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar." There was ample nodding as he went along, and some affirmational sighing at the end. It was reassuring to feel that out of this monotonous book tour, there might be some live pleasure in tonight's performance. That, I think, was at least half the enjoyment of the poems, both our own, and what we hoped he gained by reading
them.

Book readings, particularly of literary fiction, often have an awkward quality. Athletes and actresses practice their craft in public and we consume it in the company of other people, but books are private affairs from start to finish. Ondaatje read a considerable amount from Divisadero, which is written in three parts and plays with time and memory much like The English Patient does. His prose has the same impressionistic, scattered quality as his poetry and subsequently Ondaatje talked about learning to write as if creating a collage. He was affable and warm and seemed genuinely happy to be in a basement auditorium with a room of people who had filled the interstices of their lives with his work.

When it came time for questions, a man of approximately Ondaatje's same age alluded to Henry James and Evelyn Waugh and asked Ondaatje to comment on the miscegenating effects of his work. Ondaatje answered he was glad if his writing had that effect, but that it was not really on his mind when he wrote. I raised my hand next. I wanted to know why he thought it was that it takes time before tragedies and wars yield themselves to art, such that the first efforts are rarely as good as later ones. He answered that he was not really interested in writing about political themes, and preferred to take the perspective of small characters with peripheral relationship to big events. I don't think he meant to elide the question. It was more that from the perspective of his own creative experience, my question did not make any sense. As more questions followed, Ondaatje seemed a little befuddled by the inquiries and connections people drew from his work. They were clearly not the same provocations which had spurred him. It is possible for two people to love the same thing for different reasons and that was the space which developed between Ondaatje and the crowd as the event neared its finish. He had the pleasure of writing his stories, and we had the pleasure of reading them, and the limit of that relationship was like the pleasure of a scar.

- Kevin Hartnett @ 8:56 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Welcome Kevin

Join us in welcoming our newest regular contributor at The Millions:

Kevin Hartnett lives in Philadelphia with his fiance Caroline. He works as a community organizer for public education reform and enjoys his days most when they are full of people. He spends his off hours running along the Delaware River, and wafting from cannisters of loose tea at a store that recently opened near his apartment.

You may remember the two reviews Kevin penned for us earlier this year. His next offering will be up shortly.

- Editor @ 8:35 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

That Button Doesn't Work

Yesterday in a crowded elevator, I watched a man punch furiously at the door-close button, trying to guard his territory from further invasion. And I thought back to the April 21 New Yorker, in which Nick Paumgarten dropped this bombshell:

In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn't work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button's power. It's a little like prayer. Elevator design is rooted in deception.

For me, this was a Lewinski-sized revelation. Granted, Paumgarten phrases it as a kind of aside (much as Lawrence Wright broke the news in the January 21 issue that he's been the subject of FBI wiretapping.) Still, I expected this news to spread rapidly - and to lead to a sharp decline in door-close-button pushing. Of course, my assumption that hundreds of thousands of Americans share my enthusiasm for Nick Paumgarten's writing about just about anything appears, in retrospect, to have been misguided. I'll be curious to see whether The Millions, with its vast readership among elevator riders, can finish what Mr. Paumgarten started. The Door-Close Button Doesn't Work - pass it on!

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 3:53 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Alas, Poor...?

Reuters' "Oddly Enough" column ventures this week into the realm of literary history and intrigue: The mystery of Schiller's skull. When he died of tuberculosis in his forties, Friedrich Schiller, the eighteenth-century German Romantic poet, playwright, and philosopher, was buried in a mass grave. Several decades later, the mass grave was dug up and Schiller’s skull identified by comparison with his death mask and its size, and placed in a more distinguished tomb in the city of Weimar. In 1911, the mass grave was turned up again and another skull found that was claimed to be the real memento mori. This second skull was also placed in Schiller's tomb.

Now, DNA researchers attempting to tell the true skull from the false by comparison with DNA samples taken from Schiller’s relatives, have discovered that neither is a match.

In one of Lucian of Samosata's second century Dialogues of the Dead, Diogenes tells Pollux that in death, "man and man are as like as two peas... when it comes to bare skull and no beauty."

So it would seem.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 6:53 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

The Shop Around the Corner

How does an independent bookshop not only survive, but remain vital amid the encroaching chains? How does a tightly-knit community bolster its authors in a cut-throat industry? Independent bookshop owner Heidi Hallett has tackled both these issues by doing what the best independent shopkeepers do - opting for the intimate, the local.

As this recent Globe and Mail article explains, Hallett's Halifax bookshop, Frog's Hollow, has its fortunes interwoven with that of her community. By hosting book launches and in-store author appearances of regional scribes, Hallett keeps her dream alive: "Local literature is a vital part of our culture here, and I am concerned that if more independent bookstores like mine start going under, we risk losing that history and heritage forever."

- Andrew Saikali @ 8:57 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

The Reading List: A Tale of Comp Lit Disillusionment

Bryan Miltenberg is 22 and he lives in Brooklyn. This is in reply to Emily's post from earlier today.

Emily,

I loved your response. You have written an aesthetically competitive post about competitive aesthetics. Remarkable. And it's a good one, too. I admire your meta-oneupmanship there. Let me see if I can elaborate on my original comment.

Reading back over your post and my own comment on the original post, I'm pretty surprised at what I wrote. I've never been someone who's cared about cultivating high art sensibilities (I have little patience for film; I eat mostly cereal and plain pasta for dinner) or projecting my literary tastes as a reflection of myself. And yet there I was, sitting at my desk, agonizing over whether someone would recognize my name and realize that I had read not one but two Oprah's Book Club books, and that I had been about seven years late to the Dave Eggers party, one long left by anyone with any literary respect for themselves. Why did I care? What had happened?

I had started out with so much potential. I arrived on my first day at college proudly toting my On the Road and HOWL (sure to be found buried deep in the closet of any "serious" comp. lit. major - far from the sightlines of any potential visitors), ready to set the world on fire with my "I don't give a f---" attitude. I wanted to find a community of literary encouragers, rather than competitors, in terms of both reading and writing. And I don't think I was alone in this. I was one of many wide-eyed suburbanites (I'm originally from Long Island - there goes my literary credibility...) who had signed on to meet others to start the next great literary movement.

Well, of course, we didn't. And we still haven't. So what happened? How did a legion of idealistic poets become an embittered group of literary critics? Let's see if I can explain it.

As a freshman sitting in an upper-level comp. lit. class, one thinks he may have found that "vibrant discussion" that he read so much about in a college pamphlet. But soon he starts to notice something a little different happening. His passionate, reader response-ish discussion answer on a novel is met with crickets (maybe even a snicker). Meanwhile, somewhere else in the room, a grizzled senior has peppered his lengthy dismissal of the novel with only the obscurest Lacan and Derrida references, the professor has fallen out of her chair, and the admiring eyes of every female in the room are on him. One starts to get the idea.

On college campuses today, the obscure literary theory expert is the new high school quarterback. His field is the lecture hall; he captures the crowd not with touchdown passes but with high-flown theoretical sparring sessions with professors who, of course, see in him a younger version of themselves, and are willing to endlessly heap praise. And that is the ultimate currency on the college campus, is it not?

And so the race is on. Who will bring the most obscure texts to the discussion? Who will wow the world with their feats of Foucault and Spivak? The question becomes not "How can I find the text that will change me?" but rather "How can I find the text that will change the way others view me?" The literary snobbery of academia is vicious, and one can only exist in that environment for so long before succumbing to it.

And that's what went through my head when my reading list was aired to the world. I pictured Margaret Vandenburg reading it aloud in 3000 level Postmodernism, to the cruel laughter and pointing of hundreds of prematurely bald soon to be Ph.D. candidates.

So even though I try my best to live in opposition to aesthetic snobbery, you can understand my knee-jerk response. The high school quarterback had just pulled my pants down in front of the whole cafeteria.

- Editor @ 4:15 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

Competitive Aesthetics

Reading our recent graduate's response to our book question #59 post, I've been thinking about taste and literature. Why is it, with bookish people especially, that taste (in books and film, and music, and other variables like visual art, food, wine, beer, architecture, interior design), is such a sensitive matter?

Our reader seemed somewhat aghast at having his reading list exposed - as aghast as I might have been, some time ago, had someone inventoried in public the contents of my kitchen while I was studying for my university orals (gin, red wine, coffee, Equal, macaroni and cheese, chocolate pudding, soy burritos, cigarettes, Xanax, multivitamins), or my video rental history from the summer I took my qualifying exam (Mandy Moore's A Walk to Remember - oh, how I wept - Britney Spears' Crossroads, Blue Crush, How High, The Skulls). Granted, my response to the culture of aesthetic oneupsmanship in which I live is to wallow in what many of my peers would call - with a slight grimace of distaste or a shiver of disquiet - mass culture. I think it's alright, myself. Some of it. (There's plenty of shit too.) And I think a diet of only "great books" and auteurs - Wagner, Goddard, von Trier, Proust, Marx... pick your poison... leaves one a bit milquetoast-y.

I've read Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, subtitled "Notes from Damaged Life", in which he, a German Marxist intellectual living, at the time, in Los Angeles, reflects with pungent horror on modern popular culture and the deceptive comforts and conveniences of modern life. Adorno's fragmentary pensées are one of the most visceral, moving portraits of alienation you'll ever encounter. I look at the book sparingly and seldom because its sense of horror and melancholy is infectious. It's also insane: how could anyone so full of despair and repulsion not have shot himself four or five fragments in? The wonder of the book is that the consciousness that produced it was able to survive itself for several hundred pages. While the book moves me, it is also a cautionary tale about psychic price of absolutist snobbism.

Since Milton's epic invocation to the muse in Paradise Lost

Of Man's first disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden

Taste has come to mean much more to us than what we like to eat. For Milton, salvation hangs in the balance. As Denise Gigante, the author of Taste: A Literary History (and my advisor), has written, Milton's sense of "taste is more than a physical sensation or appetite (though that is critically implicated too): it is a highly freighted philosophical concept with serious consequences for the creation of selves in society." Eve's eating of the apple was more than metaphor, and since her - or at least since Milton's description of her - we have all been a little uneasy about what we consume. What if we are what we eat - and what we read? What if my watching all of the "O.C." (not the fourth season - I do have some standards) has had moral - and mortal - effects? And has it just had its way with my aesthetic soul or my immortal one as well?

An 18th century moral philosopher whom I'm quite fond of - Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury - believed that our capacity for morality is like aesthetic taste, and that beauty in nature and art is aligned with goodness. He believed that goodness is beauty of a moral sort, and that in the same way we recognize beauty in the proportions of a statue, or harmony in the colors of a painting, we recognize moral goodness in human actions. While he claimed that this faculty was innate in human beings, he hedged his bets a bit in insisting on the need for a good education. And the troubling suggestion he leaves us with is that those who aren't properly educated in art and the classics and history, might be a little morally iffy as well.

If you're around people with babies, it's sometimes easier to notice this conflation of food for the body and food for the mind and soul. Only organic home-made baby food, no TV, carefully selected books and toys. The underlying idea is that the care the parents take in maintaining the quality of what the baby consumes will ultimately make it a better person. Smarter, stronger, more coordinated. Sadly, David Shipler's The Working Poor suggests that this caution is well-founded. The lack of micro-nutrients in the diets of children raised in poverty often affects cognitive development. A child who starts life malnourished can become a child who's behind in math and reading several years later; just as a child who suffers from emotional neglect in infancy is more likely to suffer from emotional and behavioral problems in later life.

I am far afield from my original point, I fear. Having meant to soothe our reader with a meditation on the universality of his anxiety about taste, I find myself in baby food, by way of Milton and Adorno. My own feeling is that the game of competitive aesthetics is a wicked one. One I have played - one I will likely play again - I cannot help myself - but an unwholesome one nonetheless. It can give an electrifying surge of self-satisfaction, when you know the good things better than anyone else. But it won't save your soul:

A now-lost friend of mine, when he visited San Francisco a few years ago, went straight for my CDs. "You've got some good stuff here," he said (pointing specifically to some Cat Power and Chet Baker), and he seemed to relax once he'd seen that, taste-wise, I hadn't "lapsed." His attitude towards people had always seemed to suggest that the people worth knowing were exquisite objets, and I was still up to snuff. (I'm not exempting myself - It takes a snob to know a snob: Or, at least, when you've known one too many aesthetic moralists, you, if not become one, often develop an inner one and don't mind praise from an outer one.) The thing that made this visit more interesting as a case study for an aesthetics vs. morals debate is that my friend had just been excruciating rude to my roommates (one of whom was letting him sleep on her couch; the other of whom had just offered him a glass of whiskey). My visitor, while my roommates were watching "Will and Grace" had described its stupidity in detail: The word "crap" was used a lot and there was a sort of sneer employed in his disquisition on its crappiness. Many people, I think, would keep their mouth shut in such a situation: So, "Will and Grace" is dreadful: these people are putting me up for the night, I can keep my opinions to myself. But he couldn't - as though there was, in the religious sense of the word, a moral imperative to condemn the damnable.

A bigger lie was never written than this: De gustibus non est disputandem.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 7:31 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

PEN World Voices Report: A Tribute to Robert Walser

After four World Voices events in as many days (scaled down from a perhaps overly ambitious six), I was about ready to hang up my spurs. Nonetheless, I dragged myself back into midtown's London-style drizzle for Saturday afternoon's "Tribute to Robert Walser" - and was glad I did. Twentieth century German-language literature produced some of my favorite novelists (Mann, Musil, Broch), but I've never read either the Swiss Walser (1878 - 1956) or the Austrian Thomas Bernhard, the subject of another World Voices panel. (German-language cultural institutions like The Goethe-Institut, the Austrian Cultural Forum, and Deutsches Haus seem to have poured resources into this year's festival.) I attended both events hoping to discover what the Wirbel was about, and though "Bernhard: The Art of Failure" struck me as uneven, the Walser tribute delivered.

Instead of a straight panel discussion of Walser's work, the Morgan Library arranged for a set of short readings by writers who admire it. This may have been more risky than it sounds; even listening to authors read their own work (I was learning) demands a certain level of stamina. Walser, then, is lucky to have had novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, translator Susan Bernofsky, and especially polymath Wayne Koestenbaum and short story writer Deborah Eisenberg give voice to his fiction.

The sumptuous auditorium - an ideal space for this event - was packed with at least 100 audience members. Edwin Frank, the editorial director of NYRB Classics, introduced the readers - plus the German novelist Michel Krüger - and then Krüger took over. The author, most recently, of The Executor, Krüger is to German publishing roughly what George Plimpton was to American letters (or would have been, if Plimpton had run Random House in addition to his other activities)... and it was easy to see why. Working entirely without notes, in limpid English, he delivered a rigorous yet accessible introduction to Walser's life and work.

Then Bernofsky, who has translated Walser's novels for New Directions, read excerpts from The Assistant and the forthcoming The Tanners. Her delivery was crisp, and I was impressed by the way her translations captured the delicacy (to borrow one of Walser's favorite terms) of his prose. The second excerpt was a bit long for my taste, but toward the end, it opened out into a radiant vision of the urban everyday, in which I caught a glimpse of a familiar-feeling, yet completely original, sensibility.

(Susan Sontag attempted to sketch that sensibility in her introduction to Walser's Selected Stories: "Anyone seeking to bring Walser to a public that has yet to discover him has at hand a whole arsenal of glorious comparisons." Hers include Paul Klee, Robert Musil, Leopardi, and Kafka (natürlich); I would add Frank O'Hara, Peter Altenberg, and Italo Svevo to the list. "But any true lover of Walser," Sontag continued, "will want to disregard the net of comparisons that one can throw over his work.")

Deborah Eisenberg read next, weaving together three pieces from Jakob von Gunten. "I adore this novel," she said, and it showed. As at Thursday's "Something to Hide" event, Eisenberg proved to be as remarkable an interpreter of other writers' work as she is of her own. She managed, with her idiosyncratic delivery, to capture the quality of dreamy bemusement in Jakob's account of life at the Benjamenta Institute for Boys:

For me our classes in dancing, propriety, gymnastics, seem like public life itself, large, important, and then before my eyes the schoolroom is transformed into a splendid drawing room, into a street full of people, into a castle with old long corridors, into an official chamber, into a scholar's study, into a lady's reception room, it just depends, it can be anything. We must enter, make formal greeting, bow, speak, deal with imaginary business matters or tasks, carry out orders, then suddenly we're at table and dining in a metropolitan manner and servants are waiting on us.

By this point, the audience was palpably spellbound.

Eugenides followed, tackling a short, feuilleton-style piece called "Trousers" with amusing mock-seriousness. ("I am thrilled to be writing a report on such a delicate subject as trousers.") And Koestenbaum, who in both his passion and his urbanity seems like an ideal dinner guest, rounded off the reading. He began with a list of six reasons why he loves Walser, and then treated us to three more feuilletons. Like Eisenberg, he seemed harmonically attuned to Walser's temperament.

In the question-and-answer session that followed, Bernofsky talked about the "microscript" - millimeter-high writing - Walser perfected, and about his eventual institutionalization. Eight and a half volumes of his work have been translated into English, she said, and nine and a half more remain. She suggested that the evening's readings had demonstrated the diversity of Walser's output, but I found exactly the opposite: I had been immersed, throughout, in a consciousness I found intoxicating. Twenty-four hours later, I'm halfway through Jakob von Gunten, and, grateful to PEN for introducing me to this most wonderful writer, I look forward to 17 more volumes.

Bonus links: For more on Walser, try Ben Kunkel's intelligent essay in last year's New Yorker, or J.M. Coetzee's NYRB piece from 2000.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 7:16 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

The Early Days of Big Money: A Review of A. Alvarez's The Biggest Game in Town

The poker craze may have peaked, but it was a big thing there for a bit. About five years ago, ESPN's prominent televising of the World Series of Poker and the emergence and proliferation of online poker sites where amateur card sharps could test their skills against other players around the globe fueled an explosion of interest in what was once a back-room pastime. To a lesser extent, a pair of books fanned the flames as well: James McManus' Positively Fifth Street, a journalist and amateur poker player's tale of parlaying an advance for a Harper's piece on the World Series (and other related topics) into a miracle run to the final table and Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House, an apparently substantially apocryphal tale of MIT geeks who used their considerable mathematical abilities to bilk millions from Las Vegas casinos using card counting schemes. (Yes, the latter is about blackjack, but it seemed aimed squarely at the suddenly booming poker market and tapped into the same "get rich quick" bravado.)

So, for the many poker novices who have taken up no-limit hold'em over the last few years, whether via a neighborhood game, or more likely online, the earlier, though not to say more innocent, years of no-limit hold'em and the World Series of Poker will be surprising in many ways.

Such was my reaction to reading The Biggest Game in Town, a journalistic account of the 1981 World Series of Poker by New Yorker contributor and accomplished essayist, novelist, and poet A. Alvarez. On the one hand, it is interesting to know, some twenty years before ESPN began broadcasting poker seemingly every day, that the World Series, held annually since 1970 at Binion's Horseshoe Casino, was a notable event even back then. Alvarez describes "television teams trail[ing] their cables around the room," major newspapers carrying the results, and spectators "packed against the rails." At the same time, these early years seem almost impossibly quaint compared to the madness that is described on TV now. In 1981, there were 75 entrants competing for $375,000 in prize money. In 2007, it was 6,358 going after $8.25 million (and that was down from 8,773 and $12 million the prior year). Alvarez's description of the players' introductions sums up the scene:

Jack Binion climbed onto a chair at the back of the room... He motioned for quiet, did not get it, then introduced the players over the babble of the casino: name, place of origin, a word or so of praise. His favorite description was "plenty tough."

This familial atmosphere allows for Alvarez to paint compelling profiles of a dozen or so of the participants. Unlike the online moonlighters and poker tourists that you might find at the World Series nowadays, these are hard-bitten bunch, and more candidly hooked on gambling than any drug addict and as prone to peaks and crashes. From the likes of Amarillo Slim, Johnny Moss, and Nick "the Greek" Dandalos emerges Doyle Brunson, a survivor in the poker world, thanks both to an uncharacteristically even-keeled demeanor compared to most of the poker pros that Alvarez meets and to a popular and highly technical poker manual he wrote, Doyle Brunson's Super System: A Course in Power Poker. It's not uncommon to see Brunson on ESPN still today, revered as a poker god among the hordes of newcomers. Even his children have become celebrity poker players.

While Brunson and his small-town Texas bonhomie are at the heart of the book, his colleagues provide the color. What's particularly interesting is that this book, far more than McManus' Fifth Street, is a book about addicts. It just happens that these addicts are incredibly good at what they do and so can improbably make a living at it, albeit one that sometimes has them losing hundreds of thousands in a matter of hours and opening a line of credit with a casino (or some shadier operation) in order to get back on track.

The World Series, we surmise, is just an attempt clean up poker and market these latter day cowboys for the tourists. It's telling that the World Series itself isn't particularly interesting to the participants, Alvarez, or this reader, rather it's the numerous "cash games" that spring up when the world's top poker players occupy the same zip code. In these games, which Alvarez describes with something like awe, the $375,000 that World Series participants spend a week competing for might be lost (and won) in a single hand. Members of the top-tier poker fraternity compete ruthlessly, and have no qualms about absolutely cleaning out the deep-pocketed amateur who gets in over his head. It's an ugly world, lived in windowless rooms with smoky air, and trailing lost jobs and broken families. There's glamor and excitement in the sums involved but, Alvarez's book makes clear, never satisfaction.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:43 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post