Month / February 2005

by DrMabuse

And the Angst Goes to…

While Gil Cates is a terrible director (prima facie: Oh God, Book II) and a spotty producer of televised awards ceremonies, and while we wish to make it clear in almost every way that we are not, by and large, Gil Cates fans, we must applaud his efforts to cater to the basest audience impulses by publicly shaming Oscar nominees. Apparently, Cates’ plans involve having some of the nominees schlep on stage, whereby the winners will step forward while the runner-ups will be forced to stand in darkness.

Walter Murch is the strongest opponent of the plan: “To apply some kind of PMI (People magzine index) to the nominees and make this the criterion for whether they get to go onstage or not and speak to the Academy is disgraceful to the Academy.”

Murchie, love your work on Coppola’s films and your Touch of Evil restoration, but I got news for you, pal: The Oscars are all about PMI.

We applaud this in the most strenuous manner. Catfights, bad fashion decisions, crudely uttered stump speeches and televised spats are, after all, what the Oscars is all about. Affluent, well-coiffed and vacant-brained starlets pulling hissy fits when they aren’t LUVED by the Academy (a term, we might add, which has absolutely no educational or platonic value) are what we watch this silly ceremony for. Between this and Chris Rock hosting, Cates seems to be gearing us for a fantastic televised shitstorm.

by DrMabuse

Betting on the Tournament of Books

The Morning News Tournament of Books is alive and kicking. The truly strangest choice, however, was Danny Gregory’s endorsement of I Am Charlotte Simmons over Wake Up, Sir! “Slither slither” over a playful Wodehouse homage?

Well, nobody said this was perfect.

But since people seem to be betting on the results and we’ve recently been applying “thin-slicing” to nearly every aspect of our lives (to say nothing of our ignoble yet inconclusive efforts to get the inside dirt from the honorably recalcitant Mark Sarvas), if we were betting men, we expect Susanna Clarke to get deservedly flogged. We also believe that Jessa Crispin will say no to Cloud Atlas. Because heaven forfend that a damn fine novel get widespread recognition. We also predict that Maud will side with The Plot Against America.

So if our educated guesses make you a small fortune, you know where to send the 10%. And that concludes our Meyer Lansky moment of the year.

by DrMabuse

An Apology

I’d like to take the opportunity to personally apologize for the “Fuck you, crack open David’s skull and chug some blood” message that had appeared here for a few weeks. To be perfectly candid, I don’t know who David is, nor do I have any desire to crack open anybody’s skull, much less imbibe blood at a kegger.

Like other authors, the original plan was to leave a mysterious, yet profane message in reaction to all the angry Indians who had crashed this site. I was feeling morose that the usual publicity I got for this site had backfired. And I had briefly considered a one week experimental period as a vampire.

Unfortunately, to my great surprise, I discovered that I did actually enjoy the sunshine and that I did not burst into flames when I left my apartment. I was so pissed off at my failure that I decided to leave the message.

I still don’t exactly know what to do with this site. I’ve thought of donating it to the orphans. Perhaps they can come over and apply their box of Crayolas to my monitor.

by DrMabuse

Reason #4,762 Why Laura Miller is Incompetent and Has No Imagination

Salon: H.P. Lovecraft is “a hack,” “literature’s greatest bad writer,” “not very scary” (has she even read “The Rats in the Walls” or the Cthulu stories?), Cthulu as “an unpronounceable name,” “Cthulu isn’t scary,” “camp,” “purple prose,” relying desperately on Joyce Carol Oates’ asseessment of “The Colour Out of Space” when she obviously despises Howard’s groove, “hasn’t the psychological acuity,” and not “wholesome at all.”

by DrMabuse

So Long As It Spits Out a Coetzee Novel Instead of a Stale Bag of Doritos, We Love This Idea

Reason #246 Why Germany is Pretty Darn Cool: A few enterprising folks have placed books into vending machines (which are even available at Zoo Station!). The idea behind this is to get literature out into the streets. But the efforts go far beyond mere consumer consideration. A literary group known as the “door speakers” has been reciting poetry through apartment intercoms. All this has been designed to counteract declining book sales and spread the word that lit is good. One would hope that the Wenclas crowd was capable of thinking along these lines. But that would involve thinking outside the solipsistic box.

by DrMabuse

When You’re a Screenwriter, You’re a Screenwriter All the Way? (Does Robert Wise Have the Answer?)

If you think it’s hard enough to be a weekend novelist, try being William Nicholson for almost thirty years. Nicholson, who considered screenwriters to be “wannabe artists,” watched his debut novel migrate to the remainder bin. Never mind that he found considerable success with Shadowlands (now available in at least three forms, rivaling the late Bill Naughton’s multiple adaptations for Alfie). Nicholson now has another novel out, The Society of Others, which involves “an apathetic young British man” stumbling into an unidentified country where violence has broke out. Unfortunately, reviews of the new novel have been half-hearted so far.

by DrMabuse

Would You Like Fries With Your Ego?

Never have I seen so many tiny penises erect over the “power of the blogosphere.” You’d think that they’d all just gotten lucky with Neal Kozody or something. Our President utters lies on a regular basis. Our government, whether guided by Democrats or Republicans, prevaricates more on a single day than any average Joe does in a week. Failing that, there’s the whole issue of human error. Which happens from time to time. Yes, even from journalists. So you’re going to tear a news executive a new one for fucking up? Well, fair is fair. Let the bastards have it.

But don’t come crying to me when you’re declared an inveterate amateur. Or your subjective bias is so out of control that it kills your credibility.

It must be easy for a blogger to delude himself into the idea that he’s an “investigative journalist” or a “pundit” when he’s never set foot in Iraq, or he hasn’t bothered to talk to an actual soldier. How comforting it is cling to half-hearted speculations when he could be going out into the field asking questions (much as the bloggers failed to do at the conventions last year), or comparing several perspectives of what went down at an event.

Eason Jordan screwed up. That goes without saying. But Jeff Jarvis is full of shit if he thinks that “everyone” has access to the policies and the confidential memos or that the power has somehow shifted to the people or that bloggers control all the cards. It was Eason Jordan who made the decision to resign, not the bloggers. For all we know, there could have been peripheral reasons. The burnout factor that comes with almost a quarter century of looking human horror straight in the eye. As a man who considers CNN to be a form of journalistic pornography, I still have to ask: Did any of these magnificent geniuses on the blogosphere consider actually getting Jordan’s take on the resignation?

Or perhaps it’s as simple as this: If you think you can run with the big dogs, then you probably haven’t stayed on the proch long enough with the pups.

by DrMabuse

Retro Marquand

John P. Marquand’s first novel, The Unspeakable Gentleman, is available in its entirety online. The novel was Marquand’s first attempt to break out of the slick romantic stories he had been writing. According to Millicent Bell’s Marquand: An American Life, Marquand’s agents had sent it along to Ladies’ Home Journal to be printed in four installments. By Marquand’s own admission, “I think it is pretty damned bad, but I wish you would undergo the strain of looking at it, if you can. Bad as it is, I’ve seen Scribner’s use worse.” Whether the tale of “duels, galloping horses, midnight escapades and lots of good red wine” was intended as a send-up or not remains a mystery. But as Bell notes, Marquand composed some preposterous ad copy for his own novel: “‘The hour is growing late. Put down the pistol, Henry.’ So spoke the Unespeakable Gentleman on that evening a hundred years ago, as he leaned across a table in the firelight, but his words were not obeyed.”

(Thanks, Stacy!)

by DrMabuse

Thin-Slicing Fiction

Malcolm Gladwell‘s Blink isn’t as satisfying as The Tipping Point — in part, because Gladwell’s tendency to generalize is more prominent this time around. (Case in point: We’re supposed to marvel over John Gottman’s ability to determine if a married couple will still be together in fifteen years. Gottman can assess this with a 90% accuracy. Never mind that half of all divorces occur within the first seven years of marriage and that, depending upon what authority you consult, it is generally agreed that roughly half of all marriages end in divorce. An existing 50% probability weighed in with Gottman’s concentration on couples in their twenties — that is, divorces more inclined to occur, because younger people are more likely to divorce — and Gottman’s educated guesses leave a lot of wiggle room for the remaining 40%.)

Nevertheless, Gladwell’s interests in sociological and marketing casuism are always food for thought, particularly since he’s keen to serve up fascinating anecdotal examples. While he barely scratches the surface of “thin slicing” — the term Gladwell coins to describe what happens when someone uses latent subconscious impulses to serve up a quick judgment — he has got me thinking about how much of the publishing world is fixated on immediate judgment.

Terry Southern once remarked that, when he worked for Esquire, he could judge the quality of a manuscript based off of the first sentence. I’m wondering whether certain types of fiction are doomed because of the thin slicing editors have been applying to the slush pile. Was Richard Yates never published in the New Yorker because the editors trained themselves to react distastefully to Chekhovian naturalism? (Magical realism and postmodernism was very much the order of the day when Yates submitted his wares.) And just how much of this mentality is in place today?

(And I should point out that we’re all guilty of this. I don’t wish to inure myself. Recently, while reading its early pages, I was ready to damn Tricia Sullivan’s Maul based on what I perceived as tedious cross-cutting between the game going on in Meniscus’s mind and the cramped confines of a lab, until I gradually became aware of the subtle cultural allegory. Had I not kept reading after 100 pages, I would have probably have dismissed what turned out to be a daringly rugged novel.)

Further, if thin slicing is endemic to the book world, is this mentality what causes once popular authors like John P. Marquand (who made the covers of Time and Newsweek in 1949) to go out of print?

In one chapter, Gladwell uses the musician Kenna as an example for why certain forms of thin slicing aren’t always the best indicators. Kenna, who had earned nothing less than contagious kudos from such luminaries as Fred Durst and U2 manager Paul McGuinness (who flew him over to Ireland), along with repeated MTV2 airplay, built up such a sizable buzz that he packed a sizable crowd into the Roxy in less than 24 hours’ notice. But Gladwell notes that when Music Research did marketing, Kenna scored miserably and was thus unable to secure Top 40 radio airplay.

Gladwell suggests that Kenna’s failure with the number crunchers was because only certain forms of thin slicing works. Kenna’s music was not easily classifiable. Gladwell implies that some opinions are best formed over time and that corporations who are introducing products that are slightly foreign (such as the Aeron chair, another example that Gladwell uses) need time to be accepted (which may explain the repeated rejections that Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land received before becoming a cause celebre).

Since fiction is a form that often requires a careful reader to weigh in a story, it would be curious to know just how much of it is getting short shrift from today’s editors. The number of careless typos that one finds in today’s novels (that indeed manage to make it all the way to the paperback release) is often extraordinary, signaling a growing lack of regard for how a book is typeset and put together. But it may be even more alarming to consider how many of today’s experimentalists (say, the David Marksons or Gilbert Sorrentinos of our world) are more the victim of overtaxed thin slicers whose waning passions for the written word waltz hand-in-hand with the first impression gone horribly amiss.

by DrMabuse

Woe is the Know-It-All

A.J. Jacobs responds to Joe Queenan’s infamous review of The Know-It-All. While Jacobs’ essay is the kind of cathartic confessional that sometimes cuts too close to Believer-style “I’m okay, you’re okay” histrionics, it’s still a moderately interesting glimpse at how an author takes a review. But I still think Jacobs is coming across as petty as Rob Schneider. He sold books, didn’t he?

by DrMabuse

The Blake Bailey Drinking Game

It was Le Haggis that got me reading much of the Richard Yates’ catalog after the books languished in one of my bookpiles for several months. About the least that can be said about Richard Yates is that you should read everything he’s written immediately. Stewart O’Nan’s essay is a good place to start., if you’re unfamiliar with his life and work.

Along the way, I read Blake Bailey’s excellent biography, A Tragic Honesty, which proved far more sad and gripping than I expected it to be. While Bailey is a dutiful biographer, I did notice a few commonalities. Since Bailey’s bio seems to be making the rounds in the litblogosphere, I’ve devised a drinking game for those who haven’t yet read the book — that is, if you’d like to be thoroughly sloshed after just one chapter.

Drink if:

  • Richard Yates drinks.
  • Richard Yates smokes.
  • Richard Yates yells at someone.
  • Richard Yates criticizes a story with ruthless honesty.
  • Richard Yates damns the New Yorker.
  • Richard Yates tries to find work.
  • Richard Yates’ living quarters is described as a sad and impoverished place.
  • Richard Yates hits on a younger woman.
  • Kurt Vonnegut shows up.
  • Andre Dubus shows up.
  • Richard Yates asks for an advance.
  • The influence of F. Scott Fitzgerald is referred to.
  • Richard Yates has difficulty breathing.
  • Dookie Yates shows up.
  • Richard Yates can’t climb stairs or has difficulty walking.
  • When the phrase “to hell with _____” appears.
  • John Irving’s The World According to Garp is trashed.
  • Yates vomits.
  • Yates hacks.
  • Yates spends quality time with one of his daughters.
  • Hollywood is trashed.
  • Yates has a mental breakdown.
by DrMabuse

Cape Horn Revisionism?

capehorn.jpgIf you’ve ever made the drive to Reno or you’ve had the good fortune of riding today’s version of the Central Pacific Railroad, chances are you’re familiar with the Cape Horn grade. Near Colfax, the railroad juts upward and if you are fortunate enough to ride the railroad, one makes out a stunning view overlooking the American River.

The story promulgated over the years is that the grade was effected by Chinese laborers. White men could not do it. Indeed, they could not be coaxed to stick around, despite the best efforts of CP flack men. The Chinese did. And in fact, when they saw the diabolical mountain, they persuaded the engineers that they could cut through it. They did so by constructing sturdy bamboo baskets hung ominously over a vertical precipice. The laborers worked tirelessly, drilling gunpowder into the ravine and exploding staggering amounts of mountain rock for the cutaway view in existence today. And the tale of Cape Horn’s creation (along with the exploitation of Chinese laborers) stands as a West Coast legend comparable to Dutch settlers bamboozling Manhattan Island from natives for about twenty-four dollars in jewelry.

Edson T. Strobridge, however, disagrees with this well-established story (spelled out in nearly every railroad history book). While I admire the audacity of his brazen stance, one has to consider his ulterior motives. It ws James Harvey Strobridge who was, after all, the foreman of the project. Strobridge, so the story goes, was initially resistant to using Chinese labor. But when work progressed, even he had to confess that they got the job done.

One of Edson T. Strobridge’s chief defenses is that no record of the Cape Horn cut can be found in Collis P. Huntington’s papers. Well, it’s worth noting out that the CP also didn’t keep a record of Chinese casualties either. It strikes me as a bit naive for anyone to assume that businessmen would memorialize their more illicit deals.

It’s also difficult for anyone to remain objective when they are more concerned with restoring the reputation of “much maligned” ancestors. The history of the railroad is ripe with fantastic achievements and scandals from laborers and businessmen alike. But when hot heads get in the way of exposing human achievement, it’s about as distasteful as reading a priapic military historian who arrives on the scene with preconceived notions.

by DrMabuse

Neal Stephenson Five Minute Interview

We certainly can’t compete with this, but it’s worth noting that back in late fall, Return of the Reluctant coaxed Neal Stephenson into an interview.

STEPHENSON: Five minutes, son. Can’t you see you’re cutting into my brooding time?

RotR: Okay, I’m very sorry. You’re a novelist of ideas. I’m positive you have additional wisdom to impart.

STEPHENSON: It’s all in the books and the Wiki. Do you need me to hold your hand? But if you need an example for your little article…

RotR: It’s a blog, actually.

STEPHENSON: Oh, one of those. Okay, here goes: The very design of the bench you’re sitting on right now developed out of serious scientific talks in the Netherlands. The bench is a recruiting center for libertarians, meaning that if enlightened geniuses hadn’t devised an acceptable length between the two ends, your posterior might not feel as safe and comfortable as it does right now and as it will no doubt feel tomorrow.

It is the terrorist who favors a comfy chair, while the government advocate prefers a sofa. By this I mean that only the libertarian is willing to apply sanded wood, generally coming to us from an export processing zone, to his buttocks and sit up straight, sitting down like a real man. You will not find slouched shoulders on a libertarian, nor will you find a limp penis.

These are some of the many conundrums I’ve worked out in my novel. And it is why I am so misunderstood.

RotR: But you’re asking readers to sit through 3,000 pages of scientists and philosophers talking about ideas. Surely, even you have to confess that this is a bit much for a narrative. Why didn’t you come out with a treatise? At least with Vollman, you get gripping first-person accounts in Third World nations.

STEPHENSON: I don’t need editors. Editors restrict the natural creative impulse. After the Civil War, fiction followed the logical course that science and technology did. It developed plot, characters, prose, and other stylistic devices. Out of this came the MBA program, which came into being shortly after the Manhattan Project. What I am doing is harkening back to the antebellum novels, the novels of real ideas.

RotR: Most of them are forgotten or out of print.

STEPHENSON: Have you even read System of the World?

RotR: It only came out yesterday.

STEPHENSON: Are you a member of the Libertarian Party?

RotR: No. But you remind me of a skinnier John Milius.

STEPHENSON: Well, you’re one of the many reasons I don’t do these interviews. Please dispense with your sense of humor. You might be able to accomplish something without such a frivolous personality trait.

by DrMabuse

Gray Lady Last to Discover That Willow Gets Around Outside of Sweeps Week

New York Times Corrections: “A picture in The Arts yesterday with a chart listing television shows that portray women kissing, to increase ratings during sweeps weeks, misidentified the actress being kissed by Alyson Hannigan in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer.’ She was Iyari Limon; Amber Benson is another actress kissed by Ms. Hannigan in the series.”

by DrMabuse

Miller Gone

Arthur Miller has passed away. He was 89.

I have a tremendous amount of words to unload for just how important Miller was to me, along with considering the influence of The Crucible and Death of a Salesman. But it will have to wait until I get some time.

For now, all that needs to be said is that another genius has left the world, and we are all the lesser because of it.

by DrMabuse

The Romance of Reading Glasses

It’s not enough for Andrea Levy to win the Orange and the Whitbread. She’s just been nominated for a third award: the Romantic Novel of the Year Award.

Normally, we wouldn’t have any problems with this. We’ve long been awaiting Small Island‘s inevitable paperback version of a long-haired hunk mounting some bodice-ripped brunette against a conflagrating background — if only to have the hopeless Harlequin crowd accidentally reading a moving tale of two couples on an island.

The chief problem here is that the prize is sponsored by FosterGrant Reading Glasses. And while our librarian fetish is well documented, we have to point out that FosterGrant frames aren’t exactly daring or, for that matter, romantic.

And they damn well should be.

One would think that after centuries of eyewear technology, FosterGrant would have stumbled upon the ultimate solution — frames that provide practical vision for the far-sighted while considering the requirements of lascivious literary types.

Expansion of eyewear translates into expanding ideas of romance. And for far-sighted novelists, we’re talking a sharp dropoff in “slither slither” Wolfe-style bad sex and a veritable rise in “romantic novels.” So what of it, FosterGrant? Where are the reading glasses I can wear for the dominatrix? If we can’t be indecent on television, then we can surely be naughty in literature.

by DrMabuse

In Praise of Bart Davenport

davenport.JPGBerkeley singer-songwriter Bart Davenport is, in fact, the second scrawniest singer working in showbiz today. (I won’t name the scrawniest. I’ll only say that seeing such an exceedingly gaunt man run up and down trying to prove his virility was one of the most unpleasant stage experiences I’ve encountered in five years.) Davenport’s weight, however, should not be held against him. Because, believe it or not, he cuts the mustard. While Davenport has yet to realize that wearing three layers of clothing (here’s a hint, Bart: lose the jacket) draws attention to his disturbingly thin physique, he is, nevertheless, well worth seeing. He sells himself live with an endearingly spastic stage presence, which involves perpetually dilated eyes, a somewhat perplexed disposition, and an inveterate passion for Mick Jagger-like histrionics that comes across as unexpectedly innocous. Such was the initial impression that Davenport made on me when I saw him open for Of Montreal several months ago (where, to my surprise, he won me over after the third song); such was the impression he made on me when I saw him again for a record release party on January 29 at Bottom of the Hill.

Davenport has unveiled three albums so far. The first, a self-titled affair, signaled a man unapologetically mining the depths of acoustic 1970s rock with a 21st century lo-fi sensibility. One of the strongest tracks, “Summer Afternoon,” was a Nick Drake-inspired ballad that provided a moving transformation into subtly funky prog-rock. Drake’s undistilled influence held sway on such tracks as “New Cool Shoes.” But not to be undone, Davenport’s quasi-adenoidal voice worked in his favor for such light-hearted, drum-machine romps as “Terri’s Song.”

His second album, Game Preserve, broadened the palette with sunny acoustical work (“Sideways Findways”), dreamy straight-shooter ballads like “The Saviors” and the irresistably Van Morrison-tinged “Euphoria.” The album suggested an inveterate record listener who had somehow managed to make sense of his many influences without coming across as an outright bandit — no small feat, given the current clime of endless brother-sister acts whose work, however fresh, was hindered by the need to retain the sensibility of underground trash.

Davenport’s third album, “Maroon Cocoon,” is his most mature yet, although I suspect it’s an unintentional maturity. It offers a sharp contrast to the first two albums, while retaining autobiographical aspects that Davenport may not be in the know upon. He has clearly been raked across the coals because of a bad relationship. But where this would prove a bane for other artists, with Davenport, it allows him to expand his influences into unexpectedly intimate territory. Accompanied by curiously androgynous roommate/longtime bandmate Sam Flax Kenner on saxophone and recorder, Davenport succeeds with a scaled back sound. Aside from the unfortunate track “Sad Machine,” on the whole, Davenport’s lyrics suggest a man defiantly avoiding growing up. “Paper Friend” is a beautiful yet painful ode to a woman just outside Davenport’s grasp, while “Clara” represents the futility of identifying with a lover just beyond one’s existential reach.

On January 29, nearly every track on “Maroon Cocoon” was performed live. Davenport was stunned to see the audience reduced to quietude. (And, in fact, violence nearly broke out as two drunken oafs talked and were shushed with threats as Davenport bared his soul through “Paper Friend.”) I suspect that Davenport doesn’t truly comprehend the emotional cadences of his music (which explained his mystified reaction). But part of the fun of seeing him live is wondering just how Davenport will develop, while silently wondering if the emotional resonance of his songs will scar him in permanent ways.

If you’re interested in catching Davenport before it’s “too late,” he’ll be playing at Cafe du Nord this Saturday, February 12 (along with the groovy opener Call and Response). It’s definitely one of the best $10 shows you’re likely to find in the San Francisco area this year.

by DrMabuse

The Voice of a Generation

We are, of course, beyond grateful that someone out there has seen fit to provide indelible evidence demonstrating just how malleable Mr. Lipsyte is in a supine position. Forget prose, plot, character, exposition, and a dependable collection of laughs. Hero worship is, after all, the m.o. behind any breakthrough novel.

These days, Mr. Lipsyte is more popular than Jesus. He is so hot that Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney are now leaving long voicemails on Mr. Lipsyte’s machine, wondering if Stolid Sam might have any “leftover groupies” that might remind them of the glory days. Mr. Lipsyte, to his considerable credit, has vowed that he won’t be reduced to lecturing about wine in ten years. To which we offer him considerable props. Nor will he be languishing in Hollywood banging out novels revisiting the same territory explored in Home Land.

While this is the kind of tricky situation that might tarnish a one-trick pony, in Mr. Lipsyte’s case, it has worked out quite well. Because Mr. Lipsyte also has a short story collection to back up his streetcred.

So we’re exceedingly grateful to everyone promoting the current efforts. We were beginning to think that we were the only ones out here who read Home Land with a roll of toilet paper within arm’s reach. Splashy debut novels often have that effect on us. We reacted the exact same way when reading Revolutionary Road and Tender is the Night. In Mr. Lipsyte’s case, as we read the book, we laughed like a dormouse pondering the ineffectual cheese traps devised by pesky homo sapiens. Home Land: funny shit, yo. Pass it on. Pay it forward.

But (with all due respect, of course) wait for Novel #2 before declaring Sam the voice of a new generation. That’s all we have to say on the matter.

Incidentally, we’re back. The indignant Indians have fled the coop. We have a redesign in the works. We could offer a lengthy tale about our momentary bout with the flu and the fact that our computer died, but we’re just damn happy to be alive and well. Hoping you are the same.

[UPDATE: As Maud was kind enough to point out, Home Land is Novel #2. To prevent any future mishaps, we’ve enrolled in a six-week counting class that starts next week, discovered in our local extended education catalog.]