A Second Thought on Ngugi

In light of the epidemic of violence and political repression in Zimbabwe - and South Africa's African National Congress's insistence (until much of the damage had been done) that interference from "outsiders" was not welcome - avid fiction readers may want to revisit a sub-Saharan perspective on political misrule: Ngugi wa Thiong'o's Wizard of the Crow. Writing here a couple years back, I gave the book a mixed review, finding some fault with the breadth of the satire. But, much as magical realism is said to just be called "realism" in Columbia, broad satire starts to seem awfully pointed the more one learns about the tactics of strongmen like Robert Mugabe. Which is to say, Mugabe's decision to proceed with the election runoff in Zimbabwe borders on farce. As Ngugi shows, these antics can make for rich fiction. In life, of course, they are merely infuriating.

The latest: Mugabe declared winner in Zimbabwe's one-man election

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 11:16 AM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Pleasures and Disturbances: Reading Abroad

This guest post comes to us from Joan Silber. Joan Silber's most recent book is the novel, The Size of the World, described as "magnificent fiction" by Publishers' Weekly. She is the author of Ideas of Heaven, Finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize, and four other works of fiction, including Household Words, winner of the Hemingway Award. Her work appears in the 2007 O. Henry Prize Stories and in The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, and has been in The New Yorker. You can click here to learn more about The Size of the World.

I'm addicted to travel - particularly to Asia - and once I've decided where to go, the next question is: what to read? What I look for first is fiction by the country's writers. A traveler is always gazing at the windows of houses, wondering what's going on inside - I think of fiction as giving me a way in.

Anyone going to Japan, India, and China has lots of novels to choose from - to Thailand and Indonesia, far fewer (Vietnam is somewhere in the middle, and Laos is off the map). This has to do with translators, money, and markets. But something can always be found.

Family life unfolds in novels. For Thailand, I loved Letters from Thailand, by Botan (she only uses one name). It's actually a portrait of a Chinese family in Thailand, but it gives a full sense of how group ties work in Bangkok. For Japan, my longtime favorite is The Makioka Sisters, by Junichiro Tanizaki, an Austen-like portrayal of a family's trouble marrying off a middle sister; the social rules kept surprising me, until I came to see that the family itself (in the 1930s) is unclear about the rules. Japan is quite different now, but the book gave me a different angle on rigidities.

In Laos, I was thrilled when I found, in a tiny museum shop in Vientiane, a booklet of Lao Folktales: Tales of Turtles, Tigers and Toads, collected by Steve Epstein. In one of them, three adventurous flies leave home to storm the king's plate of chicken, only to be chased by fearsome guards with fly swatters - the flies escape with new appreciation for their humble home. The joke about wry resignation in this seemed quite Lao to me later.

Often, I can't help wanting the locals to see I'm hip enough to have a book by one of their writers. On a quiet beach in Lombok, the Indonesian island just east of Bali, I showed a woman vendor I was reading a novel by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, a famous writer who was banned for many years. Oh, yes, she knew his work. I was so tickled by her familiarity (on an island with limited schools) that I flashed the book again the next day. Yes, yes, I know you have it, she said. Yesterday I saw.

While reading intensifies my sense of place, it also fuses with what's seen - I can't always remember what I learned from observing and what I read. (Perhaps I am like that about everything.) During my stay, reading gives me the beautiful sensation that I'm an adept in whatever's going on around me, just as reading sub-titles in a movie can convince me I know the language.

I'm not above reading books by fellow foreigners, but I try to avoid those by travelers who only passed through (what do they know that I don't?) in favor of writers who've spent real time in the place. The fabulous Pico Iyer's The Lady and the Monk was a great introduction to Kyoto, and Suketu Mehta's Maximum City cracked open Mumbai in ways I never, never could have gotten to myself.

But what I really love is the past. I read composer Colin McPhee's accounts of Balinese music in the 1930s, in his memoir A House in Bali, while hearing gamelan players rehearse next door to my hotel. Before I went to China, I read letters from a missionary wife in China Journal, 1889-1900, by Eva Jane Price, and began thinking about writing fiction that could draw on them. (This later became the title story in Ideas of Heaven, published by Norton in 2004). In Luoyang, a provincial city in central China, I met an older man in the square who asked if his students could practice English with me. He'd learned his very good English, it turned out, studying with missionaries from Oberlin College, direct descendants of the ones I'd read about. I was astonished - he himself thought everyone had heard of his teachers - and we corresponded for years afterward. It was very gratifying to me to send him the book, with its foil medallion saying Finalist National Book Award and thanks to him in the Acknowledgments.

In Malaysia, I read Tales from the South China Seas, oral histories of the British in Malaya and Singapore, edited by Charles Allen, while taking the jungle railway up the spine of the peninsula. And these fed my next fictional project, a long narrative about Americans in southern Thailand in the 1920s. "Paradise," as the tale came to be called, also relies greatly on a 1923 memoir, Impressions of the Siamese-Malayan Jungle, by a Swiss prospector named Hans Morgenthaler. "Paradise" is now a crucial section of my current novel, The Size of the World, just released by Norton. It's a novel very much about travel, its pleasures and disturbances, and how history finds us.

- Editor @ 6:54 AM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

An Absence of Feeling: A Review of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland

Netherland is a good book, and much has already been written, here and elsewhere, to that effect. Its central conceit, that of the New York City immigrant subculture of cricket, provides a fresh perspective on a city about which so much has already been written, and the parallel story, of the dissolution of lonely Hans van der Broek's marriage, often cuts with the immediacy of real, unmitigated loss. But, and of course there is a but -- and perhaps it's only due to my predilection for stories that come at me "like a big hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky," as Stephen King put it in his introduction to The Best American Short Stories of 2007 -- there is a deep problem with Netherland, and it's that the book more often exemplifies rather than illuminates the central dilemma that draws its attention, the modern challenge of an individual trying to author a coherent story for his own life.

This is the problem facing Hans van der Broek as he surveys post-9/11 New York from his rented two-bedroom apartment in the eclectic Chelsea Hotel. His wife Rachel has decamped to London, taking their young son Jake with her. Her reason for leaving is ostensibly fear of another terrorist attack but really the problem is with Hans who seems barely present, wrapped in a malaise of his own divining. In Rachel's absence Hans falls into the subculture of city cricket. He's taking his suitcase out of the trunk of a taxi cab when he spies the driver's cricket bat lying in the wheel well. He inquires as he pays, and the next Saturday he's standing on a field on Staten Island, the only white man on a team of immigrants from Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and other former colonial tracts. Reading Hans' conversation with the cab driver, I was struck by the improbability of the social engagement that results. The divide between driver and passenger in a New York City cab is typically absolute and O'Neill presents their conversation as something like Alice's rabbit hole, a whole new world revealed in plain sight. By contrast with Alice's journey, though, Hans' is fairly low stakes. He is a tourist, not an adventurer in this new world.

Hans becomes a regular on the cricket pitch, through which he meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian immigrant with an entrepreneur's interest in cricket, though no real talent for the game. Chuck dreams of building a cricket stadium on deserted waterfront property in Brooklyn, thereby restoring New York - and America - to its cricket roots and making himself rich at the same time. Hans takes quickly and casually to Chuck, explaining, "Because his deviousness was so transparent and because it alternated with an immigrant's credulousness... I found all the feinting and dodging and thrusting oddly soothing." Hans finds Chuck's presence soothing, but not important. He has time on his hands with his family across the pond, and in that context, Chuck is a convenient diversion, a placeholder. There is never anything Hans has to learn from Chuck, or accomplish with him in order to get his life back on track. Such tenuous relationships are not the stuff of great literature, and absent real stakes in the story, the character of Chuck Ramkissoon is more inventive than artful.

Much the same is true of the rest of the architecture of Netherland, which comes across as contrived and clever more often than real and human. Certain problems are established at the outset of the book - a murder and a de facto divorce - but there is little effort throughout the narrative to explore them, unravel them, or even, often enough, to address them. Instead, Hans flits episodically through life in New York and remembrances of his childhood. Netherland is a character study more than a story and the central challenge facing the character is that he's been unable to craft a coherent story for his own life, one fortified with governing values, purposeful action, and consequential relationships. What's true in life turns out to be true in novels, too. It is hard to have a good one without those things.

In one particularly well-wrought episode from the book, Hans is approached in a Manhattan diner by Danielle, a fleeting acquaintance from his former life in London. The two go on a date and then pass a romping night together in Hans' apartment. Danielle has no precursor in the story, nor any legs. She appears and disappears and at the end of her section, I wrote in exasperation, "Is it possible to deepen an understanding of the character without deepening the plot?" In Netherland the events are connected only through Hans, as he experiences and remembers them. This leads, in Hans, to a sense of vertigo and groundlessness, tethered as he is only to himself. In me as a reader, it led, quite frankly, only to boredom. My intellect was engaged and my aesthetic sensibilities stimulated, but at almost no point in the book did I really care about what was happening.

Halfway through the book, Hans takes shoeboxes of old photographs to a woman named Eliza who arranges photo albums for a living. She says to Hans, describing her work, "People want a story. They like a story," to which Hans replies, "A story. Yes. That's what I need." Tantalized by O'Neill's writing and very often drawn in by the creativity of his sets, I was filled with optimism as I read this. A story was all that remained to redeem Netherland, just as it was all that remained to rehabilitate Hans. But unfortunately, the story never comes, and the lasting impression of Netherland is a thought, an idea, not a feeling, and it is not for such things that I read novels.

See also: Garth's take on Netherland

- Kevin Hartnett @ 7:37 AM ~ comments: 5 ~ Links to this post

 

The Great New York Novel?: A Review of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland

It has been said, though by whom I can't remember, that the Great New York Novel is as elusive a creature as the Great American One. Because this city (the argument goes) concatenates the fictional challenges of other urban settings - the scale of Tokyo, the insularity and cinematic overfamiliarity of Paris, the mutability and lunatic vitality of Bombay - no novelist can own it the way Dreiser and Wright and Farrell own Chicago or Dickens owns London. And so Ishmael pushes out to sea, Isabel Archer steams for England, and Gatsby is left standing at West Egg, chasing the green light. The world's most expensive real estate beggars the literary imagination.

Of course this is more truism than truth. Melville, James, Fitzgerald, Wharton, Ellison, and, more recently, Doctorow and DeLillo and Auster have done the city justice. Three great novels by Saul Bellow - Seize the Day, Herzog, and Mr. Sammler's Planet - constitute their own kind of New York Trilogy, rendering midcentury Manhattan indelible for all time. (Bellow, of course, cut his teeth on Chicago). But it speaks to the size of Joseph O'Neill's ambitions - and the sublimity his accomplishments - that his third work of fiction, Netherland, merits comparison with these authors. Indeed, in its extraordinary literariness, it invites such comparison. It is, for long stretches, a Great New York Novel.

The book is deceptively slim, and concerns a Dutch-born investment banker named Hans van der Broek who becomes estranged from his family and from himself in the wake of (though not because of) the September 11 attacks. Exiled in a haunted Chelsea Hotel and a benumbed city, Hans finds a measure of belonging in a cricket league populated largely by working-class immigrants.

Hans' narration has a Proustian sensitivity - and, more strikingly, a Proustian elasticity. Making scant use of page- and chapter-breaks, Netherland travels backward and forward in time, arranging events by emotional, rather than chronological, logic - and, in the process, creating suspense. We learn in the first few pages that by the end of his story, Hans will have settled back into bourgeois stolidity, in London. But how will he have gotten there? we wonder. And will he have learned anything in the process?

The answer to the latter question is, of course yes; Netherland, which starts as a murder mystery, is really a novel of awakening. The vehicle for that awakening is O'Neill's finest creation, a dynamo named Chuck Ramkissoon who will, by 2006, end up face down in the Gowanus Canal. Chuck is an operator, a calculator, and a charmer, but he takes the American dream quite earnestly. "'Think fantastic,'" he tells Hans. "'My motto is, Think fantastic.'" He has interests in a kosher sushi business, a numbers game, and real estate. His most ambitious project, however, is to convert a little-used airfield in outermost Brooklyn into Bald Eagle Field:

"I'm talking about an arena. A sports arena for the greatest teams in the world. Twelve exhibition matches every summer, watched by eight thousand spectators at fifty dollars a pop. I'm talking about advertising, I'm talking about year-round consumption of food and drink in the bar-restaurant."

Or rather, I should say, Chuck's most ambitious project is Hans. Initially a cricket buddy, he becomes a kind of mentor for Hans, Quixote to Hans' Sancho Panza, West Indian Gatsby to his Continental Carraway, shuttling him through insalubrious outer-borough locales and slowly pulling him out of his deep freeze. "He was going to fascinate me," Hans says, describing both the trajectory of the book and Chuck's strategy for drawing Hans into the tangled business of "Chuck Cricket, Inc."

As James Wood noted in his New Yorker review, O'Neill finds in cricket a beautiful controlling metaphor; it comes to stand variously for upward aspiration; for camaraderie; for innocence; for fragile, ridiculous, sublime democracy - for all the things Hans feels he lost in the fall of 2001. Beautiful, too, is the way O'Neill puts the metaphor to work, letting his diction suggest, rather than insist (just as he does with the novel's other preoccupation, the aftermath of September 11). In a scene that recalls Levin among the mowers in Anna Karenina, Hans trims the grass of the wicket-to-be:

We took turns driving a lightweight fairway mower with an eighty-inch cut and fast eleven-blade reels. Chuck liked to stripe the grass with dark green and pale green rings. You started with a perimeter run and then, looping back, made circle after circle, each one smaller than the last, each one with a common center. They would soon be gone, but no matter. What was important was the rhythm of the cutting, and the smell of the cutting, and the satisfaction of time passed fruitfully on the field with a gargling diesel engine, and the glory and suspensefulness of the enterprise. [...] For all of its apparent artificiality, cricket is a sport in nature. Which may be why it calls almost for a naturalist's attentiveness: the ability to locate, in a mostly static herd of white-clothed men, the significant action. It's a question of looking

O'Neill's writing is this luminous, this precise, this cadenced, and this understated throughout the novel. It creates, in Henry James' formulation, the present palpable-intimate: Even as the above passage evokes a world, its aphoristic intelligence evokes a worldview, and in the modulation from hesitation ("it calls almost for...attentiveness") to penetrating insight (It's a question of looking), it embodies Hans' weaknesses and capacities. Perhaps even more deft, because less exquisite, is the way O'Neill gives us Chuck Ramkissoon, almost entirely through gesture and dialogue. Along with The Emperor's Children and The Line of Beauty, Netherland contains some of the most immaculately written English prose of the new century.

When O'Neill is using his miraculous instrument to capture the underrepresented precincts of Eastern Parkway and the Herald Square DMV and the Chelsea Hotel and Floyd Bennett Field, it takes on a moral majesty. With the great hole of the World Trade Center smoldering in the background, to record is to memorialize; and apprehending the world as clearly as Hans does becomes a kind of metaphysics, as in the novels of Bellow. It is not a question of looking, but one of seeing.

That said, although Netherland moves like a great book, it is, like The Emperor's Children, sometimes merely a good one. Which is to say that sometimes, Hans merely looks. The stakes of the novel, the things we're led to believe matter most to him - his wife, Rachel, and his child, Jake - never fully matter to us, because they never assert their independence from Hans' literary imperatives. A lovely description of Jake's "train-infested underpants" makes a statement about Hans (what an eye!), rather than one about Jake; whereas Keith Neudecker playing catch with his son in DeLillo's Falling Man actually, if laconically, sees the boy. Of Keith, James Wood wrote, "He had never been, perhaps, an easy husband - uncommunicative, driven, adulterous, tediously male," but when it comes to relationships with other people, is there really so much difference between DeLillo's protagonist and O'Neill's?

Even at the end of the narrative, Hans doesn't quite seem to see Rachel or Jake as real people, nor is his failure in this regard presented ironically. And because of the novel's chronological structure and its insistence on the importance of seeing, this threatens to become a serious flaw beneath the novel's manicured surface. If Hans has been vouchsafed some kind of revelation, there in the green fields of Brooklyn, why are his feelings for his wife so much less convincing than his feelings for Chuck Ramkissoon? And how are we to feel about his return to the IKEA'd embrace of bourgeois "lifestyle" from the dicier terrain of actual life? Is this growth or surrender?

This being a novel, style provides the answer, or at least begs the question. O'Neill's, ultimately, is elegiac, and so, like the tide Fitzgerald's boats beat against, it keeps tugging Hans toward the past, which is the book's, and Hans', center of gravity. The point is not that Hans' suffering clears the way to redemption, but that for a few moments, it seemed it could have. As the book nears its conclusion, Hans circles back and back to the moments when he came closest to grace, seeing them with ever fiercer clarity. The paragraphs take on the surging rhythms of Hans van der Broek's wounded heart. Which is a rather too literary way of saying that, in Netherland Joseph O'Neill has accomplished something even more impressive than the Great New York novel. He has brought - has restored - Hans van der Broek to life. We see him.

See also: Kevin's take on Netherland

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 10:09 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 63rd in a Series (Chicago Stories)

Rob writes in with this question:

I'm a seventeen year old who is going to be spending five weeks this summer in Chicago (to be specific – Evanston, since I'll be part of Northwestern's summer high school music institute). I'm a life-long New Jerseyan, and have never been in the city of broad shoulders for longer than three days.

So, since I like reading books about the place I'm visiting, I was wondering if you could recommend anything that captured the essence of Chicago – I'm looking for works that encapsulate Chicago in the same way Kavalier & Clay encapsulates New York.

I was thinking about The Lazarus Project and Carl Sandburg's work. Do you have any other ideas?

Chicago has inspired some of America's greatest fiction and continues to be a fruitful setting for contemporary writers. I've just completed The Lazarus Project (review hopefully forthcoming), and its twinned stories - set in Chicago 1908 and present day Eastern Europe - mine Chicago's multicultural past and ignominious history. The book, based on the true story of the mysterious death of immigrant Lazarus Averbuch reminded me a lot of The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson's non-fiction account of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the serial killer who lurked in its shadows (my review here). Both Devil and Lazarus vividly evoke the chaos of Chicago, a turn of the century boomtown of slaughterhouses, nascent industry, and the first "skyscrapers" that was quickly aligning itself as the country's center after only decades earlier being its frontier.

An interest in this era in Chicago will inevitably lead one to Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel The Jungle is a muckraking, contemporary account of the slaughterhouse workers who drove Chicago's economic engine. The novel is a landmark among American social novels.

Jumping forward in time, Chicago produced one of America's greatest novelists, Saul Bellow, who haunted the hauls of Northwestern in the 1930s. Garth writes that "the greatest Chicago novel ever is The Adventures of Augie March, which is highly recommended for someone who liked Kavalier & Clay." This contention is hard to dispute.

Patrick points us to another, more contemporary literary lodestar for Chicago: "The poet laureate of Chicago is Stuart Dybek (I mean, I don't think he actually is, I just think he should be). The Coast of Chicago and I Sailed With Magellan are both absolute must reads. They both entirely take place in Chicago (mostly the South Side, but not exclusively). He's one of my favorite authors, and somebody who should have a much larger audience."

Patrick also throws a more recent selection into the mix: "Also, it's not like a totally Chicago Chicago book, but I think [Joshua Ferris's] Then We Came to the End is about Chicago in a really interesting way, as it encapsulates life in the Loop, full of business people commuting from all the suburbs, folks who live in Lincoln Park, people who drive up from the South Side. Plus it's really fun."

To these I would also add Adam Langer's well received duo of books set in West Rogers Park, a neighborhood at the northern edge of the city not far from where I used to live: Crossing California and The Washington Story. Finally, anyone interested in Chicago fiction should consider Chris Ware's landmark graphic novel, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth. It's another twinned story, with threads taking place in the near present and during 1893 Chicago World's Fair, for so many the moment of Chicago's emergence. Ware's pathos is haunting and his spare, eccentric drawings are mesmerizing. Along with Devil in the White City, it is a favorite of contemporary Chicagoans.

We've undoubtedly skipped over much worthy Chicago literature, so please enlighten us with further suggestions in the comments. Rob, thanks for a great question!

- C. Max Magee @ 7:57 AM ~ comments: 11 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 62nd in a Series (Book Review Aggregators)

Margaret wrote in with the question:

Why does there not exist (or if it does exist, why isn't it easy to find) a website for books analogous to Rotten Tomatoes for movies? Wouldn't that be one way to drive traffic to newspaper book reviews? (In their online form, at least; that would have the added benefit of being trackable, and proving the number of people that actually do read book reviews.) I'm imagining something that would index reviews from major newspapers, magazines, and blogs, all together in one place, so that I can say "Hey, I wonder if Title X is any good" and I don't have to hope that the New York Times reviewed it, or figure out who did. Metacritic did this for a while, I think, but their coverage was spotty, and their "metascores" seem sort of antithetical to what good book reviewing ought to be. In any case, they've stopped, so whatever they were doing to fill this hole isn't exactly helpful any longer.

I realize this is a bit un-questiony, but I really would like to know your (and the other Millionaires') take on such a thing

This is actually a very common question, up there with: "Why isn't there an IMDb for books?" I've often wondered about these questions and my best guess on the paucity of such sites is that there are number of factors in play.

The first is volume. There are a huge number of books put out every year, and even if we narrow those down to the books one might read for fun, the number is still quite large. And so, putting together a comprehensive site would be a Sisyphean task. Still, thousands of albums come out every year and Metacritic makes short work of many of them (and allmusic dutifully catalogs them), why not so for books? Especially considering that even looking at twenty books a month in this fashion would be at least adequate for many readers.

The second reason might be competition. Amazon has been around a very long time, is very closely identified with books, and, in a way, already serves the Metacritic function. Most of its pages for relatively current books have a number of reviews, or at least blurbs, listed. Combine that with the reader reviews and other meta-data and it's hard to imagine how a competitor might improve upon it. Meanwhile, sites like Goodreads and Librarything do ample cataloging and aggregating on a more user-centric model.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, book fans aren't quite like film and music fans, and book reviews aren't quite like the film and music reviews. Film and music are far more likely to be consumed in group settings than are books, and so large group endeavors devoted to the cataloging of those media seem more fitting somehow. Even as there is an amorphous and no doubt large community of avid readers, it is a solitary enjoyment that does not always lend itself to the scorekeeping at the heart of the big meta-review sites. Likewise, book reviews are rarely as easily classified as film and music reviews (which often come with their own arcane scoring system, so as more easily to be averaged in with the rest). To my mind, it is a relatively poor book review that simply describes how good or bad a book is, while those that mine the book's context in the service of a broader discussion tend to be more rewarding. How do you score something like that?

Having said all of that. There are a few spots worth checking out (some of which I've already mentioned).

• The Complete Review is well known and much beloved by many readers. In Metacritic fashion, M.A. Orthofer parses the coverage available for the book in question and assigns scores accordingly, adding his own often insightful reviews to the mix. For some readers, one drawback is that Orthofer's taste in books is a departure from the mainstream, with a heavy bias towards books in translation. Of course, the Complete Review's fans see this as a strength, and avid followers of the site are sure to be introduced to many unfamiliar titles.
• Reviews of Books is a very lo-fi site that may be closest in spirit to what Margaret is looking for. The site aggregates the reviews of a handful of the most notable books of the week. The site can be useful, but the number of titles is limited and it's not the easiest to navigate.
• Bookbrowse does some aggregating (see the "thumbs up icons.") But here again, I find the navigation a bit challenging.
• The Week, one of my favorite magazines, aggregates reviews on a handful of books on a weekly basis. There are no archives to dig through or anything, but it's not a bad way to keep up to date.
• Amazon actually has a pretty great page called "Best of the Month." It doesn't explicitly aggregate book reviews but it does a good job of pushing to the fore the handful of books that would probably rise to the top as a result of such aggregating. Plus they add a sprinkling of intriguing meta-data and stats to give a sense of what's "hot" right now. It's worth bookmarking.
• Finally, there's no aggregating going on there, but I should mention them again. LibraryThing and Goodreads emphasize just how much word of mouth matters when it comes to books, often at the expense, I might add, of book reviews.

Those are the sites I'm familiar with, but if you know of any others, please let us know about them in the comments. Thanks for the question, Margaret.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:16 PM ~ comments: 4 ~ Links to this post

 

Have You Ever Drunk Bailey's Out of a Shoe?

What is it about the English that draws them again and again to cross-dressing as a cornerstone of comedy? You'd think that three-hundred and some years on from Charles II's allowing women on the stage - thereby making pre-pubescent male Juliets a thing of the past - we'd have long ago seen the last of stubbly-faced ladies. Oh, but we have not, and it's a good thing too.

The most popular recent incarnation of this phenomenon is Matt Lucas and David Walliams' two-man sketch comedy extravaganza Little Britain. If you've somehow managed to miss this, it is well worth a search on YouTube (at least). The cross dressing skits are hilarious (Emily Howard, Vicki Pollard, and Anne are fine examples), though my favorite pair is Andy and Lou, an indecisive faux cripple and his benevolently idiotic friend and minder.

For those of a more venturesome disposition, I recommend the League of Gentlemen. The title refers to the four actors who play virtually all of the inhabitants of the eerie fictional town of Royston Vasey - Jeremy Dyson, Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith. While Little Britain occasionally verges into the scatological (a woman who vomits profusely whenever she encounters a racial or ethnic minority, for example), The League of Gentlemen can be utterly baffling and disturbing. There's a short, impenetrable skit with two minstrels - men in blackface - eating cereal and listening to a broadcast on the radio about the recent mass influx of minstrels. Explain that one if you will. I have suspicions that the writing of certain skits may have involved psychotropic substances. Nonetheless, for Tubbs and Edward, a husband and wife team who keep the "Local Shop," the show is worth a watch. (I wish I could find the one where Tubbs nurses a piglet - you are intrigued now, I know! - but, alas, I could only find this.)

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie are also exceptional in drag and if you've watched House, M.D. and don't know where it all began, A Bit of Fry and Laurie is a must. Hugh Laurie in a head kerchief and over-applied rouge, speaking not a word, is a side-splitting, pants-wetting thing to behold

But the inspiration for this post was my most recent encounter with this genre, a clip from a show called The Might Boosh. I warn the faint of heart against Old Greg, but for those fuzzy little man-peaches out there who dare to drink Bailey's from a shoe, chin chin!

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 1:44 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Ask a Book Question: The 61st in a Series (World War II Books for Younger Readers)

We compiled some excellent lists of World War II fiction and non-fiction a while back, but one topic that wasn't broached during those discussions was books about the war for younger readers. Ryo wrote in with a question that has spurred us to close that gap:

Im a Thirteen Year Old Boy who is interested in WW2. I like books where the character is actually in the war. Can you recommend few for me?

This is really a perfect question for a librarian, but not having one close at hand, I searched around and was able to find some great lists on the topic, specifically a pair of pdfs. One from Thomas Branigan Memorial Library in Las Cruces, New Mexico and another from Grand Rapids Public Library in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Both offer up a wide selection of books to look into. Here are a few titles and descriptions from each list that seem like they might fit what Ryo is looking for.

• The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat - Originally published in 1951, "One of the classic naval adventure stories of World War II, Monsarrat's novel tells the tale of two British ships trying to escape destruction by wolf pack U-boats hunting in the North Atlantic."
• Under a War-Torn Sky by L.M. Elliott - "In 1944, 19-year-old Hank is an American pilot flying his 15th bombing mission when his plane is shot down over Alsace, near the Swiss border. Locals assist him in getting to neutral territory. There, a Red Cross doctor advises him to attempt an escape from Europe across France with the help of the French Resistance. Hank's many adventures as he makes his way toward home and freedom comprise the rest of the story. This is a gritty, unblinking look at the horrors that the Nazis visited upon France during the occupation."
• Soldier Boys by Dean Hughes - "Parallel stories follow teenagers Spence Morgan, a farm boy from Utah, and Dieter Hedrick, a farm boy from Bavaria. Stirred by complex feelings of patriotism and adolescent insecurities, both young men find themselves fighting for their respective countries in World War II. The first part of the story follows Spence from his small-town life to the rigors of basic training as a paratrooper; Dieter has left his family in order to supervise other Hitler youth, digging trenches on the German border. Then suddenly, both teens are thrust into the chaos and carnage of the Battle of the Bulge."
• A Boy at War: A Novel of Pearl Harbor by Harry Mazer - "Adam Pelko has lived for only two weeks in Honolulu, where his father is an officer assigned to the USS Arizona in nearby Pearl Harbor. When he befriends Davi Mori, a high school classmate whose parents are Japanese, Adam's rigid father forbids him to associate with Davi, fearing that the anti-Japanese sentiment so rampant on the island will tarnish the Pelko family and Lieutenant Pelko's navy career. When his father is called back to the ship unexpectedly, Adam slips away from his house the following morning-December 7, 1941-to go fishing with Davi and another classmate. Rowing close to the fleet in Pearl Harbor, they witness the horrific Japanese air attack and are nearly killed themselves, their boat shot from beneath them by a low-flying fighter plane. Desperate to reach home and find out if his father is alive, Adam is spotted by an officer who mistakes him for a young enlisted man and orders him into action to help rescue survivors and restore order."
• Soldier X by Don L. Wulffson - "Veteran and teacher Erik Brandt's students deem him a hero, but he confides to readers that in WWII he fought for the Germans--not the Americans. He then flashes back to March 21, 1944, when at age 16, Erik, the son of a (deceased) German father and Russian mother, and a member of the Hitler Youth, boards a train bound for battle in Russia."

Readers, if you have any other suggestions, let us know. Ryo, thanks for your question. Let us know if you read any of these.

- C. Max Magee @ 9:28 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

The Millions Quiz: Fresh, Old, and Moldy

So that you may get to know us better, it's The Millions Quiz, yet another occasionally appearing series. Here, as conceived of by our contributor Emily, we answer questions about our reading habits and interests, the small details of life the like-minded folks may find illuminating, and we ask you to join us by providing your own answers in the comments or on your own blogs.

Today's Question: New, Used, or Antequarian?

Edan: My preference is for new books - to me, reading someone's yellowed copy of Pride and Prejudice feels too much like wearing that same someone's stinky sneakers. Well, maybe it's not that bad, but I can never drum up the same kind of lust for the used as I can for the new. This might have its origins in childhood trips to Children's Book World in West L.A. where I went to attack L.M. Montgomery's entire oeuvre, or to get the latest installment of the Babysitter's Club series. My appreciation for the new became part of my job at Book Soup; there I spent a lot of time stacking smooth hardcovers and shiny paperbacks, and oohing and aahing over what the receiver unpacked next. Even now I can't help but fix displays at my local bookstore - it's just too pleasurable to handle all those new novels.

For me, buying a new book is an event, and after a day or two of reading, I write my name, and the month and year, on the book's inside cover. I rarely get rid of the new books I buy; the connection is too deep. I love starting with a stiff and shy paperback, and ending with something dog eared, scribbled on, and creased - in that process, the book becomes read, and becomes mine.

Andrew: I know I've been in a good used-book shop if, upon leaving, I begin to muse what it would be like to quit my job, buy the shop in question, and become Andrew Saikali, bookseller, Esq. Then reality usually sets in, and I forget this fanciful notion.

Second-hand book shops are like an extended version of my den - they are what it would resemble if I had the resources. So, for me, because of the experience of buying used, coupled with the cost-savings, second-hand books trump even the shiniest new books. That said, on occasion I'll comb the city looking for a just-released title, price be damned. (Bob Dylan's Chronicles was a case in point.)

While I admire antiquarian books - taunting me as they do from their snobby little perch behind the glass, behind lock and key - I've always resisted the temptation to splurge. However, if anyone wishes to initiate me into the rarified world behind that glass, my birthday is in April. You've missed this year's, but you can begin to think about next year's. I also like imported wine and fine chocolate.

Kevin: I don't know if the problem is with me or with used book stores, but either way, the relationship always ends in disappointment. I want to like used book stores, to see them as little pockets of virtue in the miles and miles of new, shiny waste sold by other stores on the block. I want to admire the shy, balding hippy who runs the place, and his quiet young apprentice, who volunteers five hours a week for unlimited free trade-ins. In my first year in every city I've ever lived in, I've made the rounds of the local used bookstores. Usually my initial trip is also my last. My latest such dalliance was with two places down in Old City Philadelphia. Not wanting to leaving empty handed, I walked out with a frayed history of colonialism in Latin America and a collection of Vonnegut short stories. Both are sitting just where I left them when I came home, in a stack at the foot of my bed. One problem with big chain bookstores, I suppose, is the way they press books upon you, with table displays and prominent shelf placements. It's hard to discern value that way, too, as hard as it is to determine the same among the undifferentiated clutter of most used book stores. That's why, all in all, I prefer hand-me-downs from friends, and the library.

Emre: I find it hard not to get new, crisp books. There is a certain delight in slowly molding a novel's spine until the covers bend for a comfortable one-hand-hold read. And, they smell good. That said, I prefer used books when reading not-so-recently published works. I appreciate three qualities in used books: artwork and fonts from a different era, notes by various previous owners (I enjoy the conversation regardless of whether we agree or not) and the randomness that often characterizes how I get them. So far they have - through friends, hole-in-the-wall bookstores or sidewalk vendors - introduced me to Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and The Sirens of Titan, and Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, among others. As for collecting and caring for vintage books, I got nothing. Some sort of book karma seems to be recycling everything that passes through my hands.

Emily: Although I love a good rare books room (nothing like the feel of vellum and a little paleographic challenge), I don't own anything much that's worth more than the paper it's printed on. I do own a first edition of Mary McCarthy's first novel The Company She Keeps, but that wasn't more than fifty dollars. No, the most expensive book in my collection, coming in at a whopping $92 plus shipping, is (try to contain your jealousy) the out-of-print Life, Letters, and Philosophical Regime of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, edited by Benjamin Rand (1900). It's a discharged copy from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and falling apart in spite of the fact that quite a few of the pages were uncut when it arrived. This purchase was practical: The Stanford library didn't have a copy and since I didn't make it to see the manuscript version of Shaftesbury's regimen at the National Archives in London, this was the most expedient solution. In general, I'm pretty cheap when it comes to books. My most recent acquisition, for example, was a copy of La Princesse de Cleve (1678) by Madame de Lafayette, considered by some literary historians to be the first European novel. And that was free! (The only treasure in box of books left outside a used bookstore after hours.) Probably my best "find" after a copy of Colley Cibber's classic (and then, perhaps still, out of print) early eighteenth century play The Careless Husband that I found on the sidewalk in Park Slope.

Max: All three types of books speak to me. I blossomed as a reader thanks to used bookstores in Washington, DC and Charlottesville, where the books were cheap and I could easily compile the oeuvre of whoever I was obsessed with at the moment, Vonnegut or John Irving or Hemingway. But I've soured a bit on used books because too often used bookstores are hobbies of hoarders and impossible to navigate, or they are too polished and expensive. I will always love, however, the pocket paperbacks of the 50s to the 70s. I love the cover designs across those eras and I love being able to have a book with me, quite literally in my pocket, without having to schlep it awkwardly under my arm.

But new books are in most cases better. I find them incredibly tempting with their shiny covers and crisp pages, though, as noted, I do get a bit weary of lugging hardcovers. As for the antiquarian books, I sometimes fancy the idea that it might be fun to be a book collector, but I know I do not have the temperament for it. I cannot see books as objects in that way, and, with the few books of value I have accumulated over the years, I fret about what I am supposed to do with them... sell them? Lock them in a safe? They sit in a box so that they won't get wrecked. And that's no place for books to be.

So, tell us, in the comments or on your own blog: Used, new, or antiquarian?

- Editor @ 5:35 PM ~ comments: 6 ~ Links to this post

 

Hage Wins the IMPAC

This year's IMPAC shortlist was quite eclectic, as we noted when it was released. One side effect of this is that the 2008 IMPAC won't have an impact on the "Prizewinners" tally that we keep. The upshot, of course, is that the IMPAC shed its spotlight on some less well-known names, including this year's winner: Beirut-born, Canadian novelist Rawi Hage, who won for his debut effort, DeNiro's Game.

Andrew reviewed the book for us last year, writing "Less a political tract than a survival story, DeNiro's Game illustrates how a war breeds anarchy which then gives way to militia rule." Elsewhere, The Globe and Mail covers the award and offers an excerpt from Hage's acceptance speech.

- C. Max Magee @ 7:57 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Leaving the Bedside: Creating a DIY Literary Scene

Bryan Miltenberg is 22 and he lives in Brooklyn.

On occasional Friday and Saturday nights, my otherwise highly domestic living space (couches, TV, dining room table) is transformed, with the help of roommates and friends, into an impromptu artspace/music hall. For anywhere between five and zero dollars, anyone can come in and enjoy the show. And as with any regular apartment gathering, there are no age restrictions, and attendees are free to bring their own preferred methods of bacchanalia.

Although I enjoy this concept immensely, I don't point to it as a form of self-congratulation. In fact, it happens fairly rarely, and the work that goes into it is probably one-tenth of that which goes into running other similar but much more active alternative art spaces in Brooklyn, such as the Silent Barn, Market Hotel, Death by Audio, and Dead Herring. Rather, I bring this up as a way to highlight the way that these independently operated spaces have not only energized the Brooklyn/greater New York City music scene, but entirely shifted the paradigm in terms of the way we as concertgoers think of shows. The recent resurgence of the loft/apartment showspace has allowed artists and musicians to end their long-standing reliance on bars, bar owners, booking agents, sound men, and expensive covers and drinks - all of which make life inexorably tougher on forward-thinking/avant-garde performers who may have less commercial appeal. At the same time, it has allowed audiences to get much closer to the source - and transformed a struggling enterprise into an organic community.

And now, without further preambling, the point I am coming to in all of this - I believe that it is possible to create an equally thriving literary scene by applying these same methods and practices.

The present mode for the performance/exhibition of new literature is not only severely outdated but utterly unexciting. On top of that, it tends toward ageism and exclusivity.

In the "Intellectual Situation" section of Issue 2, the editors of n+1 trotted out the phrase "A reading is like a bedside visit." And surely, this resonates with many who have been to any number of awkward or flat out boring readings. But I disagree wholeheartedly with n+1's claim that it is the concept of the reading itself that is fundamentally flawed or inherently unnecessary.

It's not that. It's that we're doing it wrong.

Given the prevailing literary current of the day, we should be able to look towards MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs for a sense of an active and exciting literary community. But unfortunately this does not seem to be the case. I'm not an MFA student myself, but from everything that I have observed, the sense of competition in such programs and the thrust towards publishable works are antithetical to the livelihood of a mutually inspired community of writers. Yes, there are events that take place within these programs, but they take place at bars and in classrooms and are mostly university-sanctioned. I have seen them, and they do not excite.

Outside of MFA programs, most young writers are islands. I grant that the process of writing itself is solitary, but I can't accept that a disjointed literary community is the necessary result of that process. We can do more. Yes, there are a number of great independent bookstores which host readings - and very commendably, too. And there are non-MFA reading series which are very positive forces.

But make the trip to Silent Barn or Dead Herring on a Friday show night - watch the bands (whose drummers are usually set up in what would normally serve as an apartment kitchen); see the excitement on the faces of a hundred packed-in kids, all there on account of word of mouth or the internet, taking in this art directly, free of any distorting medium. Watch this, and tell me why this type of excitement can't be generated about new literature - tell me why we need to be MFA-approved, literary agent-approved, publishing house-approved, book review-approved before we can get excited about what we are writing.

Let us open up our doors for writers the way that so many, not only in Brooklyn but across the country, have done for musicians (check out www.dodiyusa.org for an idea). The internet and its social networking sites have made the promotion of independent arts events not only extremely easy but extremely cheap (if not altogether free). If we as readers become the curators of our own literary events, we take the power out of the hands of publicists and publishers with bookselling agendas, and create a more organic experience. Furthermore, by hosting readings and performances outside of bars, we open doors to the under-21 crowd, which has a great literary energy but little access to events outside of the undergrad sphere. And the beauty of the reading as opposed to the concert is that noise (which is the main reason alternative-space shows get shut down) is a non-issue.

I envision a network of home reading/performance spaces at which local zines can set up tables to sell or distribute. Even more ideally, local zines could curate performances of authors as launches for current issues, providing a much-needed physical presence to online-only publications (n+1's opinion "There ought to be nothing more irrelevant than an author's face" be damned).

In a recent interview, Millions contributor Garth Risk Hallberg responded to a question about the ideal literary venue with "My ideal place to read would be a packed church basement, like the kind Dischord bands used to play in in D.C. Packed, sweaty, teeny, revolutionary but wholesome and devoid of unearned 'tude." Why is this not a possibility? If I can get my favorite Brooklyn band to play in my living room, why can't you get your favorite local author to read in yours?

- Editor @ 10:50 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Curiosities

• Much linked elsewhere, Triple Canopy has published the first complete English translation of the Roberto Bolano's 1999 speech accepting the Romulo Gallegos Prize.
• Keith Gessen of n+1 and All the Sad Young Literary Men has started a blog. People who like to make grand pronouncements about such things and/or snark about them are all aflutter. (via)
• Onward in snark, Tao Lin describes the "Levels of Greatness" for the American novelist. Spoiler alert: Philip Roth wins again. (via)
• Robert McCrum chronicles his ten years as The Observer's literary editor in ten chapters, from "Chapter 1: New Blood: Zadie Smith" to "Chapter 10: The Kindle."

- Editor @ 5:36 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Palace Scenes: Ceridwen Dovey's Blood Kin

Sitting down to reflect on Blood Kin, Ceridwen Dovey's debut novel, I realized that there are many ways to approach a book, and a review, and that in this particular case, circumstances have handed me one. Dovey was a classmate of mine in college and when I saw that she'd published a book, I went out to get it with a combination of curiosity and jealousy, excited that a peer had written a novel and interested to see what provocations, over something of a shared span of time, had moved her to write.

The book is set in an anonymous country, in the immediate aftermath of a military coup, through which the President and his closest associates have been taken captive in the presidential summer retreat by a man known only as the Commander, a strutting cryptic figure who has usurped their power. In design, Blood Kin recalls Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, the two sharing a cloistered, claustrophobic setting which frees the characters temporarily from the violence that prompted their situation, and yet which threatens, inevitably, to destroy it. There is also a common attention to the ancillary trades which attend power. Bel Canto spun around the sublime talent of soprano Roxanne Coss. Blood Kin directs its attention to more mundane, but no less potent roles, the President's barber, his portraitist, and his chef, the three of whom trade off first-person control of the narrative.

It's a promising set-up, which makes it all the more disappointing that over the course of 180 pages, it does not really go anywhere. The premise, and the small points of action which occur in turn, are used mainly as jumping off points from which the characters recall moments from the past, their own idiosyncrasies, former lovers, and remaindered sensations of childhood. Early in the book the barber escapes for a late night tryst with the Commander's wife, an episode that might be filled with tension and sensuality, but which deflates under the weight of the barber's long recollection of how he came into the trade and came to serve the president. A scant portion of the chapter is devoted to the actual present-tense unrolling of events, which makes what action there is feel almost beside the point.

The problem is not that the digressions are poorly written or awkwardly conceived. In fact, they are often quite imaginative and authentic, standing solidly on their own as the peculiar ways in which a life might have been lived. When the portraitist recalls a scene from his youth, of a child building sand animals on the beach using an empty dishwashing detergent bottle, it rings true as one of those unexplainable things which stick in memory after so much else has been forgotten. And Dovey's digressions about each tradesman at work are knowing and confident. She describes the thick patina of paint which has accrued on the portraitist's palette, the glancing touch by which the barber infuses physical pleasure into his haircuts, and the experienced way the chef stalks prone abalones, sneaking up on them with a rolling pin so as to kill them by surprise, before they can stiffen in fright.

One challenge of the first novel, I imagine, is getting free from all the thoughts, images, and experiences you as a writer have collected prior to beginning to write. Blood Kin never begins to feel autobiographical, but it does at times feel like a repository of the many little set-pieces and conceits that must have occurred to Dovey throughout her life, prior to the specific conception of this story. While the component parts are good, they don't build together, so that by the end of the book, our understanding of the characters compares with the advancement of the plot; they both lie more or less in the same place we began.

- Kevin Hartnett @ 6:44 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Welcome Minnesota Public Radio Listeners!

If you're arriving here because of my appearance on Midmorning, welcome! By way of a little background, I started The Millions in early 2003 when I was a bookseller at an independent bookstore in Los Angeles. I've since moved on from there, but the blog has stuck around. We now have several contributors besides me, and we write daily about books and other cultural topics.

Regarding the topic of today's show, you can read some additional thoughts of ours in these posts.

• Bandaids for Broken Book Sections
• The Era of the Trusted Fellow Reader
• Authority, an Anniversary, and Book Reviewing

We also suggest that you take a look at our Book Review Index, which includes all the reviews ever penned for The Millions by both our regular contributors and our many, many guests. The reviews range from our longest considerations, to our briefest squibs, to appreciations and ruminations. And don't miss our Year in Reading, our end-of-the-year series for which we asked dozens of well-known writers and bloggers to tell us about the best book they read all year.

Finally, if you like what you see here, please bookmark the site or subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks!

Update: A link to listen to the segment should be up at the MPR site soon (I went on around minute 35). If you heard the segment, let us know what you thought. Leave a comment below.

- C. Max Magee @ 11:28 AM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

Appearing Elsewhere: The Millions on Minnesota Public Radio

I'll be on Minnesota Public Radio show Midmorning tomorrow (Thursday) for a discussion of newspaper book sections and blogs. Also appearing on the show will be former LA Times Book Review editor Steve Wasserman. The segment starts at 11am Eastern and I'm told that I'll be on from 11:30 until noon.

Those of you not in Minnesota can listen in online here. Hope you enjoy it.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:30 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Sex and the City Creates Fans of Fake Book

This story brought me back to my bookselling days.

A consumer alert for the millions who have seen the Sex and the City movie: There is no such book as Love Letters of Great Men, which Carrie Bradshaw reads while in bed with Mr. Big.

The closest text in the real world apparently is Love Letters of Great Men and Women: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day, first released in the 1920s and reissued last year by Kessinger Publishing, which specializes in bringing back old works.

Rarely a day went by at the bookstore without a strange request: books long out of print or requests for misremembered titles were common. I can imagine beleaguered booksellers across the country taking pains to untangle the confusion wrought by Carrie Bradshaw et al. Meanwhile, Sex and the City fans who have purchased Love Letters of Great Men and Women - the book has achieved an astonishing #123 sales rank at Amazon - are becoming acquainted with the likes of Victor Hugo, Goethe, and Alexander Pope, according to the bits of the book and table of contents available at Google Books. Sometimes it is a strange world we live in.

(Via my mom, who made a good point when she directed me to this story: "sounds like an opportunity for a fast writer.")

- C. Max Magee @ 10:29 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

J.K. Rowling's Busy Retirement

For someone who's not writing any more books about Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling sure is doing a lot of dabbling. She sold The Tales of Beedle the Bard a "book of five wizarding fairy tales, referenced in the last book of the Harry Potter series" to Amazon for close to $4 million in a charity auction. And now she's sold an 800-word Potter prequel at another charity auction for $48,858 (that's $59 a word, as USA Today notes).

If two makes a trend, then I wonder, will Rowling spend her post-Potter career gamely agreeing produce bits of Potter ephemera for various auctions, thus filling out the Potter world in a seemingly unplanned way? Does it matter if the average Potter fan never gets to see them?

Perhaps more importantly, will all this dabbling eventually convince Rowling to pick up the pen and write another Potter book? It certainly won't quiet the speculation. Rowling professes to have no plans to write another full-length Potter, but if she does it certainly won't be the first time a pop-culture phenomenon reappeared after a long hiatus. Indiana Jones and Star Wars come to mind and we all know how those turned out.

- C. Max Magee @ 10:28 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Swine-Brained

As any student of the history of the English language - or of Walter Scott - knows, our having, as English speakers, different words for food on the hoof and food on the table is no idle fact. Consider the opening scene of Ivanhoe, in which the swineherd Gurth and Wamba the jester debate this very point:

Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on their four legs?" demanded Wamba.

"Swine, fool, swine," said the herd, "every fool knows that."

"And swine is good Saxon," said the Jester; "but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?"

"Pork," answered the swine-herd.

"I am very glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?"

"It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool's pate."

After the Norman Invasion in 1066, Norman French became the language of power in Britain, spoken by the king and court and any who wanted favor from them. The conquered residents of Britain, speakers of the Germanic Old English, were those who raised, tended, and hunted animals: Thus, cow (kuh), calf (kalb), swine (schweine), deer (deor), sheep (schaf), and hen (huhn) for living animals, while the wealthy Norman conquerors tended to be those who enjoyed the animals at table: Thus, beef (boeuf), pork (porc), mutton (mouton), and poultry (poulet).

The English words have always seemed to me more sturdy - as well as more coarse. Like chewing a mouthful of rocks or biting into the branch of a sapling - too fibrous to chew, sour with sap. The French words seem like tiny exhalations of essence - bouef, mouton - the soul of the thing rather than sinews and bones.

I think brains can take the character of their mother tongues. I am quite sure my brain is Anglo-Saxon - all sap and fibers and rocks and bones.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 2:24 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Inter Alia #11: The Death and Life of Literary Spaces

Last week, Manhattan's Mercantile Library emptied the shelves of its shambling, elegant midtown mansion and locked the doors for good. The Merc, one of Old New York's several private libraries, had occupied its East 47th Street location continuously since 1932, but could no longer outrun the fiscal exigencies of arts funding and NYC real estate. Executive Director Noreen Tomassi did her best to put a positive spin on the Merc's search for a new home, pointing out in the Times that a downtown relocation could put the 175-year-old institution closer to the center of the current literary scene:

The vibrant centers of the city have changed. The challenge the board faced was trying to run a capital campaign to raise money to refurbish the building in an area which does not have the kind of residential community and vibrant night life that we believe is important to the institution to grow, where young writers are living who we can help.

Nonetheless, count this young writer among the pessimists. The Merc's move strikes me as both a huge loss for bibliophiles and an indictment of the self-annihilating quality of the current "Warhol economy."

What kind of loss? It's hard to describe the charms of The Merc to anyone who's never visited, but I suspect that denizens of other literary cities can find analogues in beloved (and perhaps shuttered) bookstores, museums, and libraries. Originally a resource for merchants and their clerks - one pictures Melville's Nipper and Turkey calling up books from the stacks - The Merc became, in its East 47th Street incarnation, nothing less than a temple of the book. As the Times noted, the building provided a "midtown perch" for 75 years' worth of writers, known and unknown. And the ghost of readers past - in the open shelves and dusty stacks, the sunken armchairs, the uneven stair a Pulitzer winner may once have stumbled over - gave the place an auratic quality that would be difficult for any renovation (and impossible for any relocation) to preserve.

Of course, the American city is defined by change, whether at the hands of developers, of neighborhood associations, or of government. At their best, the three exist in a kind of dynamic tension. (The Merc's rebranding as a "Center for Fiction," offering studio space, reading groups, classes, and awards, is an example of what might be called intelligent re-design.) But it seems to me that our increasingly culture-driven economy has a vested interest in sustaining the cultural spaces that sustain it; instead, a kind of remorseless accounting - in which potential funders scrutinize "metrics" - threatens to strip them of their distinctions.

Moreover, in a city where the distance between culture and commodity is increasingly notional, The Merc's visible continuity with a literary history encompassing Thackeray and Twain offered a welcome corrective. This is not to say that a quantum of glitz doesn't help the cause of literature, but there's more than enough of that going around. Young writers need the courage to be marginal, and to write for posterity, just as much as they need pressure to speak to "the vital centers." When I had the pleasure of giving a reading in the old building this winter, it was precisely its distance from the "vibrant night life" of downtown that made the event meaningful to me. People were there to engage, rather than to be seen.

By nature of its inherent privacy, literacy is one of the cultural practices most insulated from the vagaries of fashion. It takes years to write a book, and sometimes weeks to read one, and this acts as a check on the hype cycle. To put it another way, literature and real estate trade on different notions of "vitality." Spaces where readers and writers can congregate help bridge the divide between the two, literalizing an otherwise imaginary community; the quality of that community will, perforce, inform the quality of the work written for it. And so literary spaces are worth protecting.

The foregoing is doubtless an oversimplification. The Merc will continue to foster literary vitality once it finds a new home, as the central branch of the New York Public Library (where I've been logging many hours of late) will survive its Steven Schwarzman-funded renovation. But the private equity moguls and cultural stewards who have created the conditions for the gut renovation of Gotham would do well to remember Walter Benjamin's warning: "What is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object." That is, a building like the old Mercantile Library will look great as condos, but, absent neighborhood cultural draws, good luck finding anyone who wants to live there.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 10:09 AM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Icelandic Charm School

Do you know the band Seabear?

It is possible that you do and you do not know it if you've seen the strange and enthralling Michel Gondry movie The Science of Sleep (kind of a cross between The Life Aquatic or Rushmore and Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth), which featured Seabear's song "I Sing, I Swim." But the song that had me at hello was "Arms," of which there is a delightful homemade video on YouTube. I dare you not be taken in - by the song itself ("you left your dark horse in the stable"), by Ole saying "banjo" and Inga's rolling of her "r," and by the anonymous little Martha Graham in the background. (It is a desolate soul that doesn't have a nook for Seabear.)

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 4:52 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

 

A Belated and Brief BEA Debriefing

Buzz Poole, the managing editor of Mark Batty Publisher, has written for the likes of The Believer, PRINT, Village Voice and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is also the author of Madonna of the Toast, a look at the cultural ramifications of unexpected religious and secular icons. Keep up with his adventures in surprising iconography at his Madonna of the Toast blog.

In light of the many detailed and more timely reports from this year's Book Expo America, this is not so much about BEA, but about how the setting of this year's American publishing-industry high holiday really defined BEA 2008. Unlike the other two events of that paper and ink (and more recently pixilated) trinity - Frankfurt and London - this event ventures out from New York from time to time, and this year it tucked itself into downtown Los Angeles - not quite as sexy as American Apparel would lead you to believe, though it is not difficult to interpret those ads as remnants of lascivious thoughts burped up by Charles Bukowski as he leered at a waitress in some cafeteria in this very same downtown. You can imagine how the fact that I stayed in the Stillwell Hotel, a place right out of a Bukowski book (except this hotel reeked like curry) would skew how I was taking in the days. Like all great cities, Los Angeles has a feel that is unmistakable and, for better or worse, wholly its own.

That je ne sais quoi struck me on the flight, in fact. The woman sitting next to me, a relationship expert and author, barraged me with her war stories, from her first publishing gig working at Grove Press, fielding phone calls from Sam Beckett (who was asking where his money was) to schooling me about how you know when a television interview has gone well (hers went well on "Oprah", but not so well on "The Today Show"). And so it began.

I arrived on Thursday. A blue-haired resident paying her rent, in cash, delayed my check-in to the Stillwell. Once she counted that $400 out - it took her so long that I worried about her several bags of frozen dinners thawing - I ditched my stuff and was back on the streets. Sunset portioned downtown into stark blocks of shadows and light as I noticed droves of people - young and old, of all ethnicities - snaking into a hotel. I assumed a publishing event, but I was wrong. A toothy, plastic-looking woman informed me that it was a "creating happiness seminar." This notion alone made me pretty happy, so I decided not to attend.

After a busy day of meetings on Friday, I kept away from industry parties that night, opting to hang out with an old friend of mine in Santa Monica, but even there the star-studded grip of publishing choked me. Someone I met works for a talent agency and this guy is a celebrity handler, and had been hanging with Slash the night before, who just so happens to have a book out. I know, because I had seen Slash earlier that day, smaller than I would have thought, but wearing his trademark top hat as he signed books. If you're not a celebrity in LA, it always seems like you're only one conversation away from talking about a celebrity.

All three days drew people in search of free tote bags and celebrity autographs, but once all of the initial business was done - the true purpose of BEA, the selling of books, foreign rights and film rights, which mostly happened on Friday - things seemed subdued. As Saturday got underway, everyone was talking about how attendance was down. Not only was day one public attendance down by thousands compared to previous years, but everyone was joking about all of the agents, editors and publishers that did not bother making the trip from New York, let alone Europe.

And so we were all there, spending the days under artificial lights, nursing hangovers and figuring out where to head at 5pm for some hair of the dog. The big houses threw lavish parties, like Simon & Shuster's late-night star-studded Prince concert, which happened at his abode. The Consortium/Foreword Party at Hotel Figueroa, peppered with celebrities of the indie publishing realm, also exuded that "only in LA" vibe, what with all of us standing around a pool, blinded by the sun. Yes, we were all in Los Angeles, and most of us seemed ready to be back home, especially once the open bars ended.

Some other random BEA observations:

Leonard Nimoy has spent lots of time photographing obese nude women (Lucien Freud would approve): check out his The Full Body Project.

I, like many others, made it a point to get an advance of Robert Bolano's 2666, one of BEA's big stories.

Bill Daniel's Mostly True: The Story of Bozo Texino (Microcosm Publishing, distributed by AK Press) and Over and Over (Princeton Architectural Press) represent the two best trades I made over the weekend.

Beyond any logical explanation, BEA did include a teeth-whitening booth (right in the mix close to scores of children's book publishers, as well as Continuum and McSweeney's). A session cost $99, and the few times I made it a point to go and gawk, there were always at least three people getting treated, their mouths painted a strange electric cobalt.

I've never seen such a booth at BEA before, but it struck me, like most everything else about the weekend, as emblematic of where I was, something about the authenticity of the superficiality. There are lots of us that rely on these trade shows to pay our bills - if sales people don't sell titles, bookstores would be empty and publishers would fold; writers, editors, designers, illustrators, proofreaders and indexers wouldn't get paid; agents and publicists wouldn't have clients; critics and academics would have to... I don't know what they would do.

Don't get me wrong: I am one of these people. And when you get a bunch of us together - anywhere in the world - there can be some good times, because one way or another we're all in it for the books. For three days last week, there was an enormous cache of books stored in the Los Angeles Convention Center, yet there was a sense that this year the books mattered less, while being seen was the imperative, for those who bothered to show up. For those of us that did make the trip, what really seemed to come to light were the differences between the independent presses fighting like hell to remind everyone that they exist and the big-money houses that spend more money promoting books than it costs to produce them. Of course, this happens when BEA is in New York (and it happens in Frankfurt and London), but LA really seemed to exert itself. Maybe it was just me. I guess between all of the happiness and teeth whitening, however, there were plenty of folks with nice smiles.

- Editor @ 8:40 PM ~ comments: 1 ~ Links to this post

 

Amazon's $3.6 Million Outage?

On Friday, as you may or may not have noticed, Amazon went down for about two hours. These days, we're used to 100% uptime from the internet's supersites - Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, et al - but the Amazon outage reminded me of the late 1990s when even the biggest dot-coms, struggling to scale to the explosive growth of the Web, suffered routine and sometimes prolonged outages. (Of course, some more recent start-ups still experience such growing pains).

As Amazon returned to service on Friday afternoon, speculation kicked into high gear about just how much revenue the world's largest Internet retailer had lost during the two-hour outage. A little back-of-the-envelope math gives a rough idea. When the company reported its first quarter numbers, it estimated that it would have net sales of between $3.875 billion and $4.075 billion in the second quarter of this year. The midpoint of that is $3.975 billion: $43,681,319 per day or $1,820,054 per hour. So, theoretically, the outage lost the company $3,640,109, with the caveat that this is just averaging the numbers out and not taking to account how busy mid-day Friday is, as opposed to other times of the week. Regardless, a decent chunk of change.

Of course, as Silicon Alley Insider pointed out, "When customers who wanted to buy something from Amazon went to the site and found it down, the majority of them likely figured the glitch was temporary and decided to check back later this afternoon. And lo and behold--it was temporary. So they're probably placing their orders right now." So, in reality, the likely damage is probably minimal. It would take repeated outages for Amazon to start feeling the impact from downtime.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:40 PM ~ comments: 0 ~ Links to this post

 

Murakami Reflects

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has a reflective piece on becoming a novelist and his love of running, presumably adapted from his forthcoming memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, in the current Summer Fiction issue of The New Yorker. The piece isn't available online, but in it he mentions his first two novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973. As Ben explained a year ago, both are out of print in the U.S. and both have essentially been disowned by Murakami, who views them as something like juvenalia. However, the curious can check out our post that links to a pdf version of Pinball, 1973, along with some commentary from Ben.

- C. Max Magee @ 1:17 PM ~ comments: 2 ~ Links to this post

 

The Millions Quiz: Nightstand Reader

So that you may get to know us better, we introduce The Millions Quiz, yet another occasionally appearing series. Here, as conceived of by our contributor Emily, we answer questions about our reading habits and interests, the small details of life the like-minded folks may find illuminating, and we ask you to join us by providing your own answers in the comments.

Today's Question: What's on your nightstand right now?

Emily: Deciding where the nightstand stops in my dorm room is something of a quandary. And sadly, in this final dissertation push, pleasure reading is a thing of the past (Swift Studies 2006, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory, The Chicago Manual of Style...). But among the piles that daily encroach on my bed are two recent purchases: Dover's paperback editions of Goya's print series Los Caprichos and The Disasters of War. If you haven't seen them, take a look. I hesitate to call either a pleasure, but they are, in their ways.

Edan: I'm about to read The Great Man by Kate Christensen, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award this year. I enjoyed her previous novel, The Epicure's Lament, and this one, about a recently deceased painter and the women in his life, sounds like something to dive into.

After that, I'm going to give Edith Wharton my attention, beginning with The Age of Innocence. I also have a galley of Joan Silber's novel, The Size of the World, the follow-up to her terrific and pleasing story collection Ideas of Heaven (which was nominated for a National Book Award).

I just snagged the latest issue of Field, the poetry journal published by the Oberlin College Press, and a copy of Darcie Dennigan's debut poetry collection, Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse. Aside from this poetry reading, I'll be steamrolling through months of unread New Yorker and Gourmet magazine issues.

Garth: I seem to be having a big books problem this summer; my nightstand is about to collapse under the weight of three of them. The first is Roberto Bolano's 2666, which I'm about 600 pages into (out of 900). The second is Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, which I'm about 300 pages into (also out of 900)... and let's just say that, for all that she does well. Gertrude lacks the, shall we say, narrative velocity of Mr. Bolano. Finally, clocking in at over 1000 pages, I've got Joseph McElroy's Women and Men, which seems insane and brilliant and possibly unfinishable. I keep thinking there are only a finite number of gigantic books, and that once I get them out of the way I can move on, and then I learn about writers like McElroy. I'm also hoping to get to Robert A. Caro's The Power Broker this summer. Seriously. In order not to get hopelessly depressed about my rate of reading, I try to read really, really short things in between the long things. My current favorite amuse-bouche or palate-cleansers are Lydia Davis' Varieties of Disturbance and Ted Berrigan's Sonnets. It occurs to me that I may be suffering from some variety of disturbance myself. Call it gigantobibliomania.

Ben: I have 18 books on my nightstand at the moment, three of which I think I'm supposed to be reviewing. Most interestingly, I have two autobiographical accounts by historians who retraced the steps of Mao's Long March. When I learned would be going to China this summer, I briefly toyed with the idea of spending a few months traveling along the route taken by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as they fled from the Kuomingtan. The three year journey was a harrowing race across thousands of miles of China's most unforgiving wilderness, and it would eventually go on to become the founding myth of the CCP. Its story is replete with violence and political intrigue and following in its steps while observing how China has changed in the intervening years "would make one great book," I thought. I was wrong. It has made two mediocre books. The Long March by Ed Jocelyn and The Long March by Sun Shuyun

Andrew: It would appear that thirty or so books have taken up occupancy on or near my nightstand. This is where the triage happens. Every few weeks, books seem to show up, sometimes all at once, sometimes individually. Compulsive second-hand book-buyer that I am, I'm afraid I can't control the in-flow.

Like an ER, this may seem to be a chaotic place, but it's functional and I give prompt attention to the book that demands to be read next. When completed, the book is transferred to the recovery area (aka the bookcases in my den), a much more orderly place. Calm. Perhaps too calm.

I began M.G. Vassanji's The In-Between World of Vikram Lall a few weeks ago, then had to abruptly stop when my life took a chaotic turn, and now that calm reigns once again, I've restarted it. Up next will likely be A History of the Frankfurt Book Fair, by Peter Wiedhaas, unless some literary emergency comes in off the street.

Emre: My oft-cluttered, permanently dusty nightstand is home to months-old copies of Harper's and New Yorker magazines, the occasional New York Times Magazine and four books. The books are all byproducts of articles I read in the aforementioned publications. Yet, despite the enticing reviews/mentions I find myself unable to read any of them. Top of the list is Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities. After reading an article about the Bronx's revival and realizing that as an adopted New Yorker with literary vices it is a sin not to have read a single Wolfe novel, I immediately picked up a used copy. Despite my best intentions to get going with it right after finishing Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, I am still only some 20 pages into the book. But it remains my top priority. Kind of.

I might have a commitment problem. The second book is Parag Khanna's The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order. A book review in the NYT, as well as an excerpt from the book which appeared in the Times Magazine, sounded oh so interesting and timely that the politics wonk in me returned from the depths, turning me into the four-eyed nerd that I actually am to