Single-Screenless in San Francisco

It’s a sad time for San Francisco cinema. The Roxie is at death’s door. But unlike the bailout in 2002, this time, it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, unless some enterprising person gives Bill Banning $140,000 in the next 45 days.

This comes not long after the Coronet, the finest single-screen theatre for blockbusters, died a few months ago.

So what’s left? Well, I’ve never given the Castro a dime ever since the owners fired programmer Anita Monga last year and replaced the calendar with safe repertory programming. If the Roxie goes, the only decent single-screen theatres left will be the Balboa and the Red Vic.

Three single-screen theatres compromised in one year alone speaks ill of the future.

Top o’ the Morning

  • Paul Collins has unearthed a new scandal. It seems that author Misha Defonseca was denied royalties for her Holocaust memoir, Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years. A state appeals court upheld a $22.5 million award to Defonseca and her ghostwriter, Vera Lee of Newton. The specific publisher was Mount Ivy Press, founded by Jane Daniel. The court docket for the case can be found here. While Judge Kantrowitz’s opinion is not yet posted, it appears that the judgment amount may have been amended. The question here is whether $22.5 million was genuinely withheld from the two writers or whether the damages might be punitive. (via Moby Lives)
  • Scott Esposito talks with Richard McCann.
  • If Bill Clinton’s memoir wasn’t plodding enough, the paperback version will have additional pages. But get this: the extra pages are being added to acknowledge the criticisms about length. Isn’t that a bit like lighting up a cigarette in front of a cancer patient after you’ve been repeatedly asked to put it out?
  • Apparently, David Cronenberg wasn’t even in the running for the Palme d’Or for his new film, A History of Violence. As a Cronenberg fan, I blame Toni Morrison.
  • The University of Texas, now in the business of withholding books and volumes from undergraduates, will be getting Norman Mailer’s archives. The archives will be shipped with a full-scale reproduction of Mailer’s ego for articulate Third Wave feminists to whittle down in a nanosecond.
  • The “dead white male” reading list debate has been revived on the East Coast. But it appears that some teachers may be playing the multicultural card because Great Expectations is too hard for some students to read and because dense books like Heart of Darkness can’t be taught by teachers, even after playing the film Apocalypse Now in class. One reading list replacement is John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. Irving is inarguably white and male and some might argue that he is dead on page.
  • A $53,609 check was awarded to Claire Tomkin, a 21 year old fiction writer. The Sophie Kerr Award is the largest undergraduate literary award in the nation.

So Long As Leonardo DiCapprio Isn’t Involved, We’re Happy

A new adaptation of Macbeth is in the works. But this one has some interesting casting. Jennifer Connelly, whose beauty and talent often causes me to curl up into a fetal position, will play Lady Macbeth and Philip Seymour Hoffmann will play the infamous murderer. Todd Luiso is attached to direct. The film promises to be “a different kind of Shakespeare”. But whether this means Baz Luhrmann bombast or West Side Story, it’s difficult to say. However, Luiso might be just the guy to do this, given that he previously directed a film adaptation of Tom Stoppard’s short play, The Fifteen Minute Hamlet. (via Romancing the Tome)

SF Sightings — Tayari Jones

It was a preternaturally sunny afternoon in the City. But that didn’t stop Scott and me from checking out Tayari Jones at A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books. Jones, who initially attracted my attention when I learned that her next-door neighbor was Richard Powers, was there for the final stop on her book tour to support her second novel, The Untelling. Told from the perspective of a young girl who copes with the effects of a car accident on a broken family in Atlanta, Jones started the novel almost immediately after her first novel, Leaving Atlanta.

tayarijones.jpgJones, who is 34, read two passages from the book: the first segment setting up the family in question and the second involving a revelation on Halloween night. She read in a warm and mellifluous voice that evoked the purity of childhood and young adulthood covered within the novel (and wasn’t bad at all for a first book tour out). JOnes had recently rebounded from a two-week bout with laryngitis. Apparently, she had been conducting her readings without drinking any water. When she was kind enough to sign my book to “Ed the Champion,” I urged Jones to drink more water while on the road.

Jones started writing The Untelling in 2000. It took three and a half years to finish, with the last fifty pages coming out of her during the last year. The novel emerged when she started thinking about home ownership, specifically with the often unspoken issue of single women assuming “house power.” Jones was curious about how families assume multiple debts to take on a house. Since she had turned thirty near the beginning of writing The Untelling, these thoughts, along with the marital ambition that often plagues people around twenty-nine, had her focusing her instincts into her novel. She pointed out that marriage often prevents people from asking about parents, because a married person, when asked about her life, can simply point to her spouse and avoid the question of parents and siblings altogether.

Jones said that she is working on a third novel “about bigamy” and didn’t reveal much. But she did point out that in order for bigamy to work, one family would have to be complicit.

Lauren Cerand has informed me that Jones has an opinion piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about writing her first novel.

Tanenhaus Watch: May 22, 2005

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WEEKLY QUESTION: Will this week’s NYTBR reflect today’s literary and publishing climate? Or will editor Sam Tanenhaus demonstrate yet again that the NYTBR is irrelevant to today’s needs? If the former, a tasty brownie will be sent to Mr. Tanenhaus’ office. If the latter, the brownie will be denied.

When I saw this week’s cover with the NASCAR photo, I felt a sharp pain in my solar plexus. And it wasn’t just because Tanenhaus failed to capitalize all of the letters in NASCAR. (Yo, Sam, I’m about as uninterested in the Daytona 500 as the next guy, but even I know that NASCAR is an acronym for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing. This is about as absurd as referring to the Super Bowl as “the final Nfl matchup.”) The NASCAR book comparison, written by Jonathan Miles, isn’t a bad idea. But does it merit a cover review? Judging by the snide tone of Jonathan Miles’ review, the review favors snotty defensiveness rather than a genuinely interesting (and, dare I say it, inviting) exploration of the subject. Rather than indoctrinating a reader unfamiliar with NASCAR about the appeal, Miles opts instead for a red state/blue state divisiveness that is becoming as deeply cloying in today’s journalism as any reference to post-9/11 guilt, as if he genuinely believed that all blue staters equate watching the Daytona 500 with voting for Bush.

More egregiously, the “review,” if it can be called that, spends half of its length bogged down in tired rhetroric and unfounded generalizations (the only literary detractor Miles can dig up is Tom Wolfe and the essay cited is from 1965) before finally getting to the two books in question. There are laughable comparisons to commuter traffic and not a single reference to the pit area (where people perform incredible overhauls and refueling on a car between laps; when have you seen that during rush hour?).

Eventually, things get a little interesting (if not book-specific) with a cursory overview of Curtis Turner’s life. But not before Miles voices further contempt about NASCAR’s potential future, equating it to Elvis dying on the toilet. If Miles had even bothered to do any research, a quick look at NASCAR demographics would have turne up the following for him:

  • More than half of all NASCAR watchers earn between $30-75,000, a far cry from the NASCAR fans who “drive to the 7-Eleven to pick up a pack of smokes.”
  • 40.1% of all NASCAR fans have attended college.
  • In fact, there isn’t all that much in a disparity by region as the Southern picture painted by Miles. 38% of NASCAR fans are based in the South, but 35% of America lives into the house. 3% is hardly a figure substantial enough to invite stereotypes.
  • Between 1999 and 2002, Hispanic and African-American audiences for NASCAR have notably increased. Hispanics went from 3.6% to 8.6% of the fan base while African-Americans went from 4.9% to 9.1% of the fan base.

For wasting his space on such stereotypical assaults, encouraging such lazy generalizations, and blowing an opportunity to represent an area of publishing that might be of interest to the NYTBR‘s readers, there can be no other recourse than the Brownie Bitchslap Factor.

BROWNIE BITCHSLAP FACTOR: Two and a half pages devoted to this nonsense? What were you thinking, Sam? SLAP! (Minus 1.2 points)

THE COLUMN-INCH TEST:

Fiction Reviews: Six half-page reviews, two one-page reviews, a one-page Crime roundup, a one-page Fiction Chronicle. (Total books: 16. Total pages: 7.)

Non-Fiction Reviews: One 2.5 page review, one two-page review (Hitch, go figure), seven one-page reviews, four half-page reviews. (Total books: 14. Total page: 13.5 pages.)

No surprise. This is Tanenhaus on autopilot. With nonfiction coverage dwarfing fiction at an almost 2:1 ratio, this is disgraceful. Half-page reviews of today’s fiction, with the only one-page reviews going to Chuck P (who, with all his press, may as well be relegated to a half-page review) and Ann Beattie. 34% doesn’t cut it, Sam.

Brownie Point: DENIED!

THE HARD-ON TEST:

This test concerns the ratio of male to female writers writing for the NYTBR.

Thirteen male reviewers (with two of them getting at least two pages), with a mere ten female reviewers, most of them kept cooking and cleaning with thankless fiction blurbs.

This is a remarkable slip from last week and one that deserves zero tolerance.

Brownie Point: DENIED!

THE QUIRKY PAIR-UP TEST:

Now this, I must say is a nice move: Francine Prose weighs in on the overhyped Oh the Glory Of It All. Even if there is a typo on the web version’s headline, Prose is relatively fair on the book’s merits while getting in a playfully sarcastic opening paragaph.

Christopher Hitchens takes The John Hopkins Guide to Liteary Theory and Criticism to task for its obfuscatory stance on the language to be found in literary criticism.

Unfortunately, all this is thrown to the well when one considers the Walter Kirn’s review of Everything Bad is Good for You, or rather the way that Kirn has, in his work for the NYTBR continually stopped short of making a compelling and thoughtful point. Instead of explaining why Steven Johnson’s argument is persuasive to him (despite being empirical), Kirn makes the mistake of making Johnson’s claims more dubious and throwing in two references to Kojak to boot.

But the quirky mix is remotely interesting to get by.

Brownie Point: EARNED!

CONTENT CONCERNS:

[The NYT site is down this afternoon. I’ll weigh in on this later.]

CONCLUSIONS:

Brownie Points Denied: 2
Brownie Points Earned: 1
Brownie Bitchslap Factor: -1.2 points
TOTAL BROWNIE POINTS REQUIRED FOR BROWNIE DELIVERY: 2
TOTAL BROWNIE POINTS EARNED: -.2 points

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Tanenhaus Watch: May 15, 2005

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WEEKLY QUESTION: Will this week’s NYTBR reflect today’s literary and publishing climate? Or will editor Sam Tanenhaus demonstrate yet again that the NYTBR is irrelevant to today’s needs? If the former, a tasty brownie will be sent to Mr. Tanenhaus’ office. If the latter, the brownie will be denied.

Unfortunately, certain events prevented me from offering an encompassing pronouncement last weekend. To pursue the Brownie Watch with a completist’s gusto, I’m reviewing last week’s NYTBR on tests alone. The results from last week are remarkably surprising. The Content Considerations section will have to be overlooked, but I will pursue this week’s NYTBR with greater depth. For those who require further commentary, I direct Brownie Watch readers to this Observer editorial, which criticizes Robert Leiter’s review of Buried by the Times and puts the question into an influential context.

THE COLUMN-INCH TEST:

Fiction Reviews: 1 – 1 1/2 page review, 1 two-page Louisa May Alcott retrospective, 5 half-page reviews, 1 one-page Shel Silverstein review, 1 – 1 1/2 page children’s book roundup, 2 one-page children’s book roundups, 1 1-page Hans Christian Anderson overview, 1 one-page “Fiction Chronicle” roundup. (Total books: 23. Total pages: 12.5.)

Non-Fiction Reviews: 1 two-page roundup of atomic bomb books by Richard Rhodes, 2 one-page reviews, 2 half-page review, 1 one-page jazz book comparison, 3 – .75 page reviews, 1- 1.25 page reviews
(Total books: 13. Total pages. 9.5.)

Buoyed in large part by the Chldren’s Book Section, Sam Tanenhaus has done the unthinkable. He’s offered most of the NYTBR‘s pages to fiction. And not just any old fiction: he’s included a Louisa May Alcott Libary of America volume, a translated novel and a modest return to the Chip McGrath days of championing midlisters like Jane Alison (whom Max Millions is crazy about). Or to look at this in hard numbers, a good 57% of the May 15, 2005 issue is devoted to fiction, well above the 48% minimum threshold requried.

I sincerely doubt we’ll see numbers like this again. But because some unexpected force has allowed Mr. Tanenhaus to come to his senses, all brownie bitchslap factors for this week will be withheld.

Brownie Point: EARNED!

THE HARD-ON TEST:

This test concerns the ratio of male to female writers writing for the NYTBR.

Here again, Tanenhaus has somehow balanced things out. This week, there are eleven male reviewers and twelve female reviewers. While most of the ladies have been relegated to the Children’s Book section, I’m still pleased to see that some smart ladies have been granted the pen (and hopefully the keys to Joe Queenan’s car, so that Queenan will be too busy to contribute more of his tired bluster for the NYTBR).

Brownie Point: EARNED!

THE QUIRKY PAIR-UP TEST:

Could it be possible that Tanenhaus will, for the first time in Brownie Watch history, earn three out of three brownie points? Indeed, it is.

First off, Richard Rhodes is the kind of guy we like to see offering thorough roundups about history in the NYTBR‘s pages. It’s more of a history than a review proper, but if this is the way that Tanenhaus must squeeze in his political obsessions, that’s okay by us.

Meg Wolitzer is an interesting choice to write a children’s book roundup. However, I’m not sure if Ms. Wolitzer knows what audience she’s writing for. At one point, she addresses “you obsessive, Egypt-factoid-gathering kids,” which, personally speaking, may have been a valid address to me twenty-five years ago, but now it has me wondering why I’m dunking a graham cracker in milk as a Sunday morning hangover cure. And I’m not certain if complaining about the registered circle is worth a paragraph.

But an even stranger choice than Wolitzer is M.P. Dunleavey. This might be an instinctive reaction, but I don’t entirely trust a personal finance consultant to dispense advice on children’s books. Particularly when she sees a children’s book as something to “lull a the little ones to sleep.” Part of the point of reading a bedtime story is to get as caught up in the narrative as the kid is. In fact, I’d venture to say that had not my father read me the Lord of the Rings and Oz books when I was a wee tyke, my appetite for epic tales (albeit, better ones than Tolkein) wouldn’t be nearly as great as it is today. Dunleavey’s slightly bitter take on children’s books belongs in Good Housekeeping, not the NYTBR.

Then there’s Steve Erickson’s welcome presence. Erickson’s review is by-the-numbers, perhaps because of the reduced space granted to him. But it’s still good to see Tanenhaus throwing in a trusted experimental fiction writer to weigh in on the books of our time.

I’m tempted to bitchslap Tanenhaus for the Dunleavey review, but since all brownie bitchslaps are verboeten, I’ll instead commend him for the steady crop of matchups.

Brownie Point: EARNED!

CONCLUSIONS:

I’m as shocked as anyone else, but Tanenhaus met the burden (and then some) for his work on the May 15, 2005 issue. Brownies will be sent to him this week.

Brownie Points Denied: 0
Brownie Points Earned: 3
TOTAL BROWNIE POINTS REQUIRED FOR BROWNIE DELIVERY: 2
TOTAL BROWNIE POINTS EARNED: 3 points

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Somewhere Over the Rainbow

I’ve started reading The Rainbow Stories as part of The Vollmann Club. The last book of Vollmann’s I read was The Royal Family, which was about four years ago. Scott has remarked on Vollmann’s tendency to repeat himself in that book, suggesting that Vollmann wants the reader to become as bored with this world as the whores are. The idea here being that Vollmann considers it a duty to indoctrinate his audience into the daily grind, something they (certainly not a suburbanite reclining on a chaise longue with a tumbler of bourbon and a book) may not be wholly familiar with and that indeed might make most readers shy away.

But I think Vollmann is doing something more audacious. He’s unafraid to comment directly to the reader about the character traits he finds important, or the very human observations of supremely troubled people, moments as valid as the hard details that Balzac remains celebrated for, but that contemporary literature often turns its back on. The interesting thing is that this results in his books resembling some confluence of hard reportage and Vollmann’s fervent imagination.

Consider this passage which describes Sapphire in Section 378 of The Royal Family:

I do not propose to ‘explain’ her, because I do not understand her. But I love her more than any of the other characters in the book, except perhaps for Domino, and I refuse to refrain from praising her. Should astronomers and ethicists ever succeed in proving that God resembles her, then lost and weary Cain won’t need to flee anymore.

And there is this similar address in an early moment in a radiology clinic in The Rainbow Stories:

The man after him was very calm, and did not wince when the needle went in. But he looked away. I think it is very funny that if you shoot yourself up four or five times a day you do not mind the needle going in, but you cannot bear to watch someone else do it.

Vollmann then remains a curious narrator, one willing to reveal his own limitations while simultaneously looking hard into the face of the truth (whether metaphorical or strictly observational) he sees and the truth that is often ignored on a daily basis right in front of us.

This is not exactly postmodernism and is it not quite journalism. It certainly offers us an important glimpse inside Vollmann’s consciousness. But I would suggest that, in openly confessing his amusement by something as horrifying as a junkie finding fear in a needle (away from his alley, away from a rotting apartment), or in pointing out that not even he (a no-holds-barred observer) can fully understand his subjects, Vollmann is more of a reassuring narrator than an opportunist or an outright mocker. His goal here is to humanize, but in selecting a tableau of lowlifes, he’s daring us to look beyond the easy labels of good and evil that antidrug campaigns, do-gooder reformers, and hazy two-hour sashays by self-proclaimed pundits often mistaken for qualified expertise.

It’s worth observing that The Rainbow Stories includes a revised color spectrum near its beginnings. And while colors themselves are used as starting points for this collection of sordid tales, the salient point here is that, if there is an idealistic goal somewhere over the rainbow, the human spectrum needs to be broadened beyond an easily recognizable selection of hues.

A Meme That Involves Ears

1. The person (or persons) who passed the baton to you.

The trusty Tito Perez — whom I wish I had run into while at Coachella.

2. Total volume of music files on your computer.

Somewhere in the area of 40 Gigs, although it could be quite more than that. I have a horrible tendency to put everything in one place, which includes music I buy, music I — *ahem* — try out, and music that slips into my hands at gunpoint.

3. The title and artist of the last CD you bought.

This Perfect Day, C-60. As some regular readers know, I’m madly addicted to Swedish rock. (The Shout Out Louds, for example, was one of Coachella’s highlights. And I sung along to almost every song!) For whatever reason, Swedish rock contains a sense of purity that really needs to be explored and understood more. And in the Shout Out Louds’ case, I can’t think of anyone else willing to use xylophone so unapologetically in a live set. My guess is that it has something to do with Systembolaget, which I’ve yet to try. But I’d hazard a guess that drinking the stuff would probably make me pick up my guitar again and write cheery goofball songs.

4. Song playing at the moment of writing.

Doves, “Ambition” (a supremely sad song from a very good album, Some Cities)

5. Five songs you have been listening to of late (or all-time favorites, or particularly personally meaningful songs)

I’ll stick with the songs in my head at the moment:

M.I.A., “Bucky Down Gun” (Really, how can anyone resist this track? Old school hip-hop mixed with crazed banshee-like rapping, a clarion call that is deliberately artificial and lyrics that demand a call to revolution, which seems particularly apposite in our current political clime.)

Nine Inch Nails, “You Know What You Are?” (Look, I’ll confess that With Teeth is a spotty album and that even a cursory examination of this song’s lyrics shows that Reznor makes little sense. But I still contend that Trent Reznor shrieks “fuck” perhaps better than most. And somehow, I’ve really come to appreciate that crazy-as-fuck percussion.)

Of Montreal, “Oslo in the Summertime” (Thank you, Kevin Barnes, for yet another addictive album, The Sunlandic Twins, that sneaks up on you after several weeks of listening. What’s particularly striking about this track is the semi-electro tone mixed with the languorous Ray Davies feel to the lyrics. The first time I heard this song, I was mildly annoyed by the buzzy timbre. The third time, I had a goofy grin on my face. And now the song just won’t go away.)

Doves, “Almost Forgot Myself” (I don’t think I’ll ever hear a track this year as uncoditionally directional as this one is this year. This may be the best use of a percussive clang in a pop song since the Beatles’ “Everyone’s Got Something to Hide Except For Me and My Monkey.” Plus, it sums up what’s so fantastic about the Doves: a moribund tune in a minor key driven by a defiant snare and a guitar fuzz that involves carrying on in the face of existential chaos.)

Royksopp, “Eple” (What is it about Nordic pop exactly? I’ve been relistening to Melody A.M. for the first time in about two years, and hoping that these folks might get me crazy about electronica again. This track, in particular, which offers a goofy downbeat drive just this short of mellow without coming across as yet another pretentious ambient nightmare designed for the New Age, Air-listening crowd.)

6. The five people to whom you will ‘pass the musical baton’

Maud Newton, who I hope will remind me about the importance of guitars
The Old Hag, because I’m damn curious about what she’s listening to these days
Mark Sarvas, because I know there’s more than meets the eye to his audio palette than certain CM-lead bands that get too much airplay
Speedy Snail, because he’s been considerably silent on the musical question (and I blame his insane devotion to Neal Stephenson)
Scott Esposito, because he’s younger than me and probably has a better set of ears than I do

Clarifying the Panties Issue

If you’re coming here from James Callan’s Telegraph article (not yet available online), welcome. I’m not certain how accurate he was about calling this place “an addictive mix of urbane musings and taut riffs against the pack mentality of the traditional book-reviewing press,” but I’m honored nonetheless.

Callan is absolutely right about the panties, however. Callan got the info out of me only because he was an affable gent who asked a lot of interesting questions. I never announced the panties here, because I feared that this would invite more packages of panties to the P.O. Box. (Frankly, I’m more interested in panties that are worn on ladies and, if the mood is right, slid down sinuous legs, ideally with a soul attached. All this is the aftermath of a remarkably repressed upbringing, in which the very mention of sex was enough to cause melodramatic pronouncements of surprise, if not flames to spontaneously burn onyx sppors through my bedroom. The many Victorian novels I read growing up certainly didn’t help things.) But perhaps one day, I’ll offer a rundown of the odder packages I’ve received over the past year.

Nightmares & Solutions

If you thought that Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident, brother, have I got a serious wakeup call for you.

Read this. Then come back here.

The people in charge are letting inhuman monsters perform acts that fly in the face of decency. Ask yourself if you would treat your worst enemy this way. And ask again if you would let such a corrupt gang of goons eke out such vile and despicable acts on other humans. But the key part of the article, the thing that goes far and beyond simple hatred for the enemy is this paragraph:

It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.

This is not a matter of being red state or blue state. This is not a matter of being liberal or conservative. This is a matter of being American and standing up for what’s right. And that sure as hell doesn’t involve denying a manacled man water or humiliating a man far beyond the call of mere Saddam underwear pictures or letting a man die because he was a cab driver who happened to be wandering around in the wrong area.

I got the link from this Metafilter thread. It was suggested by the posters that this article and that this information be distributed to churches. Churches, as most people know, are the congregation points for many who live in the heartland. They are instrumental in disseminating information to ordinary people and promoting decency. And I think that anyone reading that article would be hard-pressed to argue that what we have here is something that speaks beyond the realm of what is decent and germane.

Inspired by the thread, this afternoon, I sent a group fax of the article to ten churches in Alabama, thinking that a state that had a history of bombing a church and killing four little girls back in 1963 because of the color of their skin might be more receptive to the current plight, which involves torturing and letting people die because of the color of their skin.

But within this idea lies the potential to take back this country. I urge anyone reading this blog to send a copy of this article by fax or by mail (keep in mind that hard copies offer a physical quality which cannot be easily deleted and that not everyone in this nation is hooked to the Net) to churches of varying stripes and distinctions.

There are hundreds upon hundreds of churches in this country. Even if we were to reach just one, we would plant a seed demanding greater accountability for our government’s actions.

Never Knock the Doctor While He’s Down

Apologies for being down and out for the count. Back in the day, we made the mistake of registering our domain with Network Solutions and it took several angry words to explain to the unhelpful little bastard on the phone that we had been screwed over by his company and that the company itself hadn’t bothered to send us any notice that we hadn’t renewed this domain. So if you emailed us lately, we didn’t get it. (Of course, our backlog and response rate is so embarassing that we apologize for this too.)

And while we’re at it, we’ve got to stop using first person plural. Last we heard, we hadn’t been coronated by anyone. And in fact, the last time we played checkers, we recall very clearly never being crowned once.

All this is to say that we apologize for the delay and we offer a return to ferreting out the finest literary news of our time.

List of Possible Titles for New Brigid Hughes Magazine (Dated March 2005)

A Private Shack
A Soul Apart
A Ryder Rental
Plimpton’s Enigma
Won’t Sell Out
George is Holding on Line Five
Revue Review
Lit My Fire
Lit Me Darkly
Lit Me Beer Me Seduce Me
Literary Merlot
Tales for George
Tower of Richard Powers
Surrender, Dorothy Parker
Bridgid’s Bitchin’ New Mag
Hughes & Plimpton: Together Again
The Peoria Review
The Paris Review Review
Melt My Tallow
The Disbeliever
The Atlantic’s Remains
Kiss Me, Short Story
Do What You Like
Do Like You Do
Mr. Do’s Literary Castle
Slush Puppy Pile
Form Acceptance Letter
We Put the Ink in Slink
SweecMeeney’s
Quarterly Schmarterly
A Public Bus Shelter
A Public Telephone
A Public Television Pledge Drive
We Pay Writers, They Don’t
Playstory
A Private Cache
A Private Privacy
A Public Privacy
A Public Space

Shortly After Noon

And They Said the Literary Magazine Was Dead!

Former Paris Review editor Brigid Hughes (Plimpton’s short-lived successor) will be launching a new magazine. What’s particularly cool is that she’s enlisted Richard Powers (one of my favorite living novelists) and Yiyun Li as contributing editors. Hughes is also reportedly luring away Paris Review contributors for the new venture, which will be called A Public Space. This reporter is certainly curious to see how this will all turn out.

Episode III

1. Amazing as this may seem, in Revenge of the Sith, George Lucas does recapture the Saturday matinee cliffhanger feel of the IV-VI trilogy. (In fact, characters hang from ledges fairly frequently in this film.)

2. George Lucas has no business writing love scenes. Mr. Lucas grasps intimacy about as well as I grasp Fermat’s theorems. And while said scenes are in short supply in Sith, they are about as egregious as it comes.

3. Obi-Wan rides one of the coolest Star Wars creatures since the Tauntaun.

4. So what the hell, George? What’s with the despicable gender gap in the Star Wars universe? The only chicks we have are Padme (quite literally, a barefoot and pregnant Ophelia archetype) and one token Jedi chick who gets eviscerated in seconds. Further, all the younglings are white and male, supporting my theory that the Republic/Empire represents a strange eugenics-inspired confluence of Nazi Germany and late 20th Century America. (Factor in the Germanic-sounding Vader and it all becomes self-evident.)

5. Jar Jar appears, but does not speak. But he is not flayed alive, as he rightfully should be, during one pivotal massacre.

6. The transformation of Anakin into Vader is very cool and very Return of the King-inspired.

7. I actually enjoyed the gradual black eye shadow applied to Hayden Christensen as the film went on. But while Christensen delivered a less cringe-worthy performance than the last film, he was again very silly and over-the-top near the end. Fortunately, through Ewan McGregor’s sneaky underplaying, the film’s denouement wasn’t completely demolished by Christensen’s histrionics.

8. Believe it or not, there was a minimum of Lucas’ environmental clutter. It was a relief to finally watch a film in which I didn’t have to pay attention to 6,000 CGI elements at once.

9. The traditional Star Wars dissolves weren’t nearly as intrusive as they were in the last two films.

10. The so-called “darkness” wasn’t nearly as “dark” as Lucas made it out to be. Certainly not Empire Strikes Back-dark and certainly not worth a PG-13 rating.

11. I have to ask: Does the Jedi Council just cavalierly sit by as one of its members kills an unarmed man? I mean, call me crazy, but if I were a member of the Jedi Council and some snotty little kid did that on my watch, I’d box his ears. It doesn’t take “the Force” to second-guess an asshole.

12. I’m not sure who was the genius who casually suggested to George that people often use contractions in their speech, but thank fucking god. Contractions go a long way to improving Lucas’ wooden dialogue. (ANAKIN: “I sense Count Dooku.” OBI-WAN: “I sense a trap.”)

13. Wookie Planet! Yes!

14. Yoda’s Jedi moves have improved considerably. He no longer resembles Sonic the Hedgehog, largely because Lucas is wise to keep Yoda’s back flips in long shot.

15. When lightsabers don’t have the allure they once had, what do you do? You have a cool fight scene where one character wields four of them.

16. R2D2 finally has character again! He beeps, he’s active, and he zaps people. I had completely forgotten R2D2’s charm, which hasn’t been seen since the first trilogy.

17. Jimmy Smits, are you going to fall asleep? Jimmy Smits, are you going to fall asleep?

18. Inconsistent is Yoda’s grammar, yes? Put to rest, the tired green guy.

19. Despite wars, revolutions and political upheaval, traffic apparently does not stop in the Star Wars universe. Just another day on the flying car bypass. Move along.

20. Finally, a compelling scene in the Senate chamber! Who knew that the place would be more interesting once the talking stopped?

Three stars. Mabuse says check it out.

The Donkeys Need A Little Galloway In Their Diets

British MP George Galloway demonstrated what a politician can and should be doing in response to the shoddy ad decidedly undemocratic groupthink that passes for political discourse in this nation. By comparison, the Donkeys continue to come across as weak-kneed cowards. Nancy Pelosi’s ethical standards is a nice idea, but it still won’t demonstrate to the blank-eyed Little Orphan Annies who voted last November what political action is all about. Galloway is an inspiring yet sad reminder that there was a time when conviction not only meant something, but was absolutely essential to the political process. By my calculations, we are now less than eighteen months from midterm elections. Yet where is the mobilization? Where are the grassroots campaigns? What is the strategy to at least get a house or two back come November 2006?

I see nothing in the cards. Nothing in the way of commitment, nothing in the way of thinking forward, nothing in the way of divergent viewpoints. It’s a sad time indeed to be a principled progressive. Paul Robeson, a ghost playing through my speakers, bellows on repeat.

Oh, the Hype of It All

Oh, the Glory of It All, a memoir written by McSweeney’s editor Sean Wilsey, has been getting hyped hyped HYPED. Wilsey is the son of Dede Wilsey, a wealthy socialite here in San Francisco. And the book, which purports to be this year’s answer to Mommie Dearest and has folks in this town (including Armistead Maupin) claiming mighty conflagrations, arrives in bookstores this week. It’s got the Dave E________ Seal of Approval. It’s had launch parties bounced from the San Francisco Art Institute. it’s got the New Yorker excerpt, and now, as if that sort of publicity wasn’t enough, it has this lengthy Gray Lady profile:

The title of his book, “Oh, the Glory of It All,” was something Mr. Wilsey uttered when he was alone and things were glorious: The first time he can remember saying it, he writes, was “alone in the bathroom, when I finally got a grip on potty training.”

rulesbear.jpgSometimes a shaggy dog is just a shaggy dog. (Or in this case, probably just a guy in a bear suit.) I’ve had a lot of experiences alone in the bathroom too, but no matter how much money you gave me, I don’t think I’d ever commit them to the spine of a tome. I respect human decency too much.

If this memoir is what it’s cracked up to be and if Wilsey is today’s answer to William Styron, then why couldn’t Wilsey come up with a better pulp-inspired title? (Why not My Momma Screwed the Rich Men Over on Mink?) Further, how “brave” is it really for a privileged man to badmouth a number of local socialites in the interests of “revealing all” in the process? Isn’t this exactly what Egghead gave Toby Young hell for when he penned his memoir, How to Win Friends and Influence People?

But to hell with casual hypocrisy and another jaunt down Jean Renoir Lane. The gang at SFist have a better take on this mess than I do.

He Also Gave Peter Sellers a Wedgie, Which Explains Why Sellers Was Never Cast in 2001

Roger Ebert has been offering some good coverage of Cannes, butin this entry, Ebert reveals something quite interesting:

…it reminded him that Stanley Kubrick sometimes drove up in front of the houses of his friends, talked to them on his cell phone, and then drove away “without seeing a single person.” I was not sure about the purpose of this anecdote, but I was happy to hear it.

Revenge of the George

This may be a colossal mistake, but somehow I’ve been roped into the 12:01 AM Revenge of the Sith show.

Regular readers of Return of the Relutant know that while I have fond childhood memories of Episodes IV-VI, if I had to choose between one of the two bloated mainstream sci-fi Hollywood franchises (as all Americans must do), I would lean towards Star Trek (discounting anything beyond Deep Space Nine, because that hot Tasha person was right you see when she said it NEVER happened!).

Yet I’m heading into this bastard, no doubt contributing my hard-earned ten bucks for another rumpus room on George Lucas’ palatial estate (the evil bastard is laughing at us!), because (a) I sat through the other two crappy movies and if I’m to be disappointed by a trilogy, I may as well go the distance and (b) if I get through this movie, whose climax and outcome is as predictable as a bad prix fixe menu, I will have the grand consolation of never having to experience Star Wars in any form again.

So look to these pages at some point on Thursday morning and you’ll get a no-holds-barred assessment on Sith from Dr. Mabuse. Will it be another steaming piece of turd (“That is the sound of a lot of bad cash coming our way!”) or will it be, as some reviews have indicated, an unexpected point of redemption? Will that Jar Jar bastard die? Will Anakin and Padme get it on with all the explicitness of a Bollywood movie? Probably, to the last question. But your humble reporter hopes to answer these hard questions (and many more).

Greenfield & The Popular History Question

Without even bothering to read the book in question (David McCullough’s 1776), professor David Greenberg has declared war on popular history in a two part argument on Slate. Specifically, Greenberg suggests that McCullough’s “surfeit of scene-setting and personality, the meager analysis and argument, the lack of a compelling rationale for writing about a topic already amply covered” will drive Greenberg and his academic colleagues up the wall.

Greenberg’s assault is largely composed of ad hominen tactics and arguments without support. Without citing any specific examples (the stuff that one would expect from a professor), he has declared popular history “vapid mythmaking that uninformed critics ratify as ‘magisterial’ or ‘definitive.'” But if the alternative to popular historians along the lines of Stephen Ambrose or Will Durant is a populist reading public that is not concerned or curious about history, I have to wonder why popular history is such a bad thing.

In a paragraph on academic vs. popular history, Greenberg bemoans doctorates who “command little scholarly respect” — again, without citing examples or clarifying why. He then points to an anti-Zinn Michael Kazin essay that is similarly sparse with its supportive examples (the Greenberg argumentative approach in a nutshell). (Kazin, for example, complains, “The doleful narrative makes one wonder why anyone but the wealthy came to the United States at all and, after working for a spell, why anyone wished to stay,” apparently not aware that it remains a triusm that, irrespective of class, families, sometimes lacking resources to migrate, will subject themselves to misery to (a) survive and pine for a better tomorrow and (b) insure that their families are taken care of.)

Even more curious, Greenberg takes offense to journalists who write about the past ending up in scholarly footnotes. But if a journalist has confirmed a fact or talked with a primary source to confirm a detail, how is this any different from what a scholarly historian does? It would be difficult, for example, to accuse bestselling biographer Robert A. Caro of being anything less than thorough in his lifelong work on Lyndon B. Johnson. His footnotes alone could probably squash out an ant colony.

Then with a hasty conclusion, Greenberg concludes, “institutional status hardly correlates with quality.” I absolutely agree. In fact, I’d argue it from a radically different perspective. After all, it was a self-taught amateur (Heinrich Schliemann) who discovered the ruins of Troy. A history book, whether popular or scholarly, is subject to whatever level of scrutiny the public (or academics) will give to it. But to suggest that a wall between academic and popular history exists is to remain inflexible to the transitory nature of books and scholarship. For those who insist upon maximum scholarship, that market will always exist — if not in books, then through communications among scholars.

One sizable problem with Greenberg’s argument is that it is laced with a strange contempt. At one point, Greenberg openly confesses his jealousy to losing a job because of another man’s dissertation, but he also proudly confesses his deliberate ignorance of its contents. Is the inability to read what you’re criticizing the stuff of scholarship? I would certainly hope not.

Greenberg also complains about radical histories being “tinged with a sentimental celebration of ‘average Americans’ that no more prods us to critical reflection than does a Richard Brookhiser biography of Alexander Hamilton.” So if I understand Greenberg correctly, it’s apparently a mistake to comb over the everyday people who populate this planet in favor of the leaders, artists and sundry mighty figures who were essentially history’s administrators (rather than the people who voted for a leader or, as Goldhagen has chronicled, those who followed genocidal orders without question). Furthermore, Greenberg fails to elucidate us on what he considers “sentimental.” For example, if the reader stares into the famous Dorothea Lange photo, “Migrant Mother,” one will indisputedly have a “sentimental” reaction. But to cover, say, the Great Depression without referencing this would overlook a seminal photograph that captured a moment at a particular time. Is it the historian’s fault that the reader actually feels sad by the photo?

While Greenberg seems completely adverse to the notion of popular history (he is more a booster of the academic beating out the easy explainer), he does have a few solid points about how histories, whether academic or popular, can be improved. In particular, Greenfield’s second part, while directed towards academics, is far more constructive on this topic.

Greenberg does have a good point when he bemoans the cult of personality now coveted by historians. If I had my way, I’d suggst that certain academics be wiped from the face of television after five appearances on Charlie Rose. If you’re a historian pining for an east wing to add to your palatial home, then become a ruthless capitalist, not a talking head.

I concur with Greenberg when he suggests that analysis should co-exist hand-in-hand with narrative, although I would suggest that something be left for the reader’s perspective. And I also agree that banishing jargon isn’t the answer. I would suggest that publishing books which explain things in clear and understandable terms are part of the answer. For example, last year, I read a book by David Bodanis called E=MC2 that went to the trouble of explaining nearly every part of Einstein’s famous equation. I was finally able to understand not only what the damn thing meant, but how it influenced thermodynamics in the process.

Greenberg is also right to point to historian Christine Stansell’s review of Edmund Morris’ Theodore Rex, pointing out that history without varying context or new perspectives fails to ensure a fresh perspective. Then again, this is only one example, not several. One could also also argue that there’s plenty of fresh perspectives in popular history. What of Joseph Ellis’ American Sphinx, which focused exclusively on Thomas Jefferson’s character? I’m curious to know if Greenfield considers this a novelty or a contextual triumph. And are we to discount Ellis’ Founding Brothers, which used Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians as the inspriation for its comparative portrait of figures from the Revolutionary War?

Greenfield provides an interesting perspective, but I’m troubled by his generalizations and his inflexibility to certain fields of history. He says that “we need critics who will expose the perils of the historical blockbuster trend and show us more substantial ways to think about the past,” but I would argue that there is plenty of criticism out there already.

Since Greenfield didn’t bother to check out review coverage, I’ll do it for him. Here are some review excerpts for David McCullough’s books:

On John Adams:

Sean Wilentz writing in The New Republic: “In conveying so much about Adams’s goodness, in vivid and smooth prose, McCullough slights Adams’s intellectual ambitions, his brilliance and his ponderousness, his pettiness and his sometimes disabling pessimism. McCullough scants, in other words, everything that went into rendering Adams the paradox that he was: a great American who would prove virtually irrelevant to his nation’s subsequent political development. And in its very smoothness and vividness, McCullough’s life of Adams is useful also in another way. It gives a measure of the current condition of popular history in America, in its strengths but also–rather grievously–in its weaknesses.”

Michael Waldman in The Washington Monthly: “This is not a tome for scholars, or for those who want a detailed rendering of political differences between Federalists and Republicans. At times the reader wonders if the prickly Boston lawyer is being subtly reworked into Give-‘Em-Hell John.”

And in the most recent New Yorker, Joshua Micah Marshall writes: “McCullough, whose books include superb biographies of John Adams and Harry S. Truman, rarely finds his way into clashes of ideas or vast impersonal forces. (The word “equality” gets its only mention halfway through the book.) This is history at the ground level, sometimes even a few inches below.”

All of these reviews criticize McCullough’s smooth-as-silk approach to history. However, none of them suggest alternative paths about how we should look and chart history. At the very least, we should probably thank Greenfield for reminding us to ask that very question.

[UPDATE: Kevin at Collected Miscellany also weighs in.]

Invasion of the Google Snatchers

The folks at the University of Texas at Austin have decided to do away with books for undergraduates. 90,000 volumes in the undergraduate libraries will be replaced by something called an “electronic information commons.” Instead of doing research by sifting through magazines, tracking through footnotes to determine primary sources, and otherwise performing the bare minimum of research that a properly investigated and fact-checked essay requires, books are to be done away with because students aren’t using them. What’s even more distressing is that the students are being encouraged by librarians and professors.

On Symbiosis Between Humans and Books

The book medium itself is a trusty format. It can be read and reread. It can be started or stopped at any point. It can persused at any speed: as slow as Ulysses or as swift as a throwaway potboiler. For the truly devoted reader residing in an urban environment, with careful dexterity and enough practice, even a bulky hardcover can be balanced in one hand while standing in a moving subway during rush hour.

A book can be the subject of a conversation. Hey, wazzat your reading? Any good? or That’s a great book! or Fertheloveofchrist, why are you reading Judith Krantz? In certain situations, the book operates as a sociological indicator. There are books that everyone is reading (e.g., Reading Lolita in Tehran), books that literary types are reading (e.g., My Name is Red) and specific books that are only read by an I-could-care-less-what-you-think-of-me sort of person (perhaps someone reading a thick Vollmann volume). There are even people who eschew books altogether, wondering why there’s “nothing” of value on their 57 channels. If only these people realized that a book represents one in a limitless array of channels, that the book is often smarter and that, on the whole, it is devoid of troubling, flashy and stress-inducing advertisements, save Don DeLillo’s “Celica.” Of course, for those who need an explicit visual medium, there are always pop-up books, which are known to amuse small children and John Birch Society members.

Books come in different sizes and shapes. There are mass-market paperbacks, which are short and thick and sometimes have questionable content and often fall to pieces if they have been packed tight in a box. There are trade paperbacks, which are almost as expensive as hardcovers but offer a very disingenuous price buffer that is often as little as five dollars, an emotional threshold that is perhaps most humiliating when the trade paperback edition is released months after a reader has purchased its hardcover edition, causing remorse for having neglected it, shame for having not read it, and a very peculiar kind of rage that is outside the understanding of most citizens. And of course, there are the robust hardcovers, which demand to be read without dust jackets, lest the jacket be torn or folded and thus divested of its “new” condition. In this sense, “preserving” the hardcover is the closest the bibliophile comes to anti-wrinkle cream, hair implants and liposuction. Like a mere mortal trying to squeeze a few years out of time, the obsessive hardcover enthusiast does not understand that time moves in only one direction and that books, like anything else, are suspect to age and will eventually fall apart. In fact, the book sometimes outlives its owner. And if imbued with a sturdily constructed spine, a book can last multiple lifetimes.

From a posterity standpoint, we can safely conclude that books pose a threat to humans. While dumb humans may beget dumb humans, books themselves are incapable of such inept procreation. And dumb books (and, sadly, dated books), unless having a fey appeal along the lines of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, are unlikely to endure. However, some smart books are likely to be forgotten because the rampant and variegated nature of the book population means that a reader cannot read them all. In this sense too, the book is superior to the human. While a book may come into contact with multiple humans throughout the course of its duration, often passed around through libraries, used bookstores and through social networks, it demands that the human adjust to its pleasurable format, forcing the human to recline, lie, sit or sometimes stand with hands perched out to hold both ends. What’s interesting is that the human demands no such physical contortions from the book on a regular basis, save through comfortably turning its pages and perhaps cracking the spine. Indeed, it should also be noted the book has remained in its rectangular form for several centuries.

While books have no specific sentience (although, ironically enough, books contain elements of human sentience), books also have no sexual needs whatsoever. And this too shows the unfair disparity between books and humans. If a book contains licentious elements, it is likely to be the victim of spontaneous jisms, which stain the page and cannot be properly cleaned up (unless paper is eventually replaced with Formica, a slippery affair that would alter the steady relationship between book and human). Even worse, while the book does not secrete any liquids whatsoever (save perhaps the ocassional wood shaving), the book often serves as a surrogate napkin or bandage, almost always without the human asking. Humans bleed, leave crumbs of sandwiches, write notes, and deface the book in numerous ways that they would never do to other humans. Through these various defacings, the book is very much a passive and innocent victim.

As preposterous as it may seem, some humans even burn books because they genuinely believe them to be a threat. In the many centuries that the book has been around, a book has never harmed or killed anyone, save perhaps in clusters overturned on large shelves collapsing and maiming other humans. But is it the book’s fault that the humans have failed to construct their bookshelves adequately? Or that humans have failed to exercise their sentience and work out how many books can stand on a shelf or how many shelves can rest in a building?

That humans would use such energies and waste such wanton aggression when books themselves remain harmless and somnolent suggests that either the human is more of a savage creature than he advertises or that books pose a belligerent menace that is utterly foreign to this thinker. Books have not declared war. They have not executed anyone. They have not locked themselves up in filthy prisons. And they certainly have not let anyone go cold and hungry. (Indeed, in a pinch, a book can be thrown into a fire for warmth or the paper eaten.) They have instead served as amicable beacons which convey information from one human to another. It is a pity that humans take this unique and seminal symbiotic relationship for granted.

Morning Tidbits

  • Bill Moyers, responding to attacks by “the right-wing media and their allies at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” says that the Internet represents the future to serve the public with a variety of perspectives. And that includes downloading hot MILF action with George Seldes’ voice ranting about the evils of controlled media over the soundtrack.
  • Gawker features an interview with Jamie Clarke, author of an unpublished novel, Vernon Downs, that involves a young writer who stalks Bret Easton Ellis. If you join this Yahoo group, you can read the novel in question. However, judging from what I’ve seen, it doesn’t look like much and it’s laden with grammatical mistakes. The first sentence reads: “James stared out the airplane window, focusing on a cloudbank [sic] in the shape of the disappointment he expected to find on his parents face [sic] when they picked him up from the airport.” The dialogue doesn’t fare much better: “There’s a psychotic out there imitating the crimes in A Complete Gentleman and he’s threatened to come after me. My picture in the paper will only facilitate this threat.”
  • Andrew Sean Greer’s The Confessions of Max Tivoli has won the California Book Award. The awards, now in its 74th year, will be held on June 14 at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Greer will apply considerable skin lotion before that evening, but he (and the skin lotion manufacturers) has personally guaranteed that he will not age backwards during the ceremony.
  • As Maud reported this morning, Jonathan Lethem will pen a new comic book series based on little known 1970s character Omega the Unknown. The ten-issue series will launch in early 2006. Reportedly, Omega won’t suffer from Tourette’s syndrome.
  • James T. Farrell, author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy, will have one block in Chicago named after him. Farrell’s block, which proved too controversial for two blocks, has been confined to the South Side, where the block will be forgotten for several years until an omnibus set of blocks is issued (with considerable controversy) by a distinguished zoning authority.