Ron Rosenbaum: “But does anybody ever read this stuff? Does anybody take it seriously? Does the writer? It’s the Emperor’s New Clothes of prose. There’s a certain sadness to it, as well. To paraphrase that line in “Howl”: I saw some of the best writers of my generation destroyed by celebrity profiling.”
And Rosenbaum is just getting started.
(via Tingle Alley)
The Independent: “There is a rule in America that states employers must make up the difference in pay if any member of their staff earns below the minimum wage when their pay is added to their tips. This might mean customers in the US fear people will lose jobs if they don’t tip heavily.”
Mr. Welch, we tip because we know how little those working in the service sector actually make. We tip because they often don’t have health care and we know that they might be working a second job to make ends meet. We tip because the government’s answer to providing for the unemployed is welfare-to-work.
Instead of silly speculation, why not simply ask us why? Is this not, after all, what a journalist does?
I’ve had a mean spot of bronchitis. I could describe to you the Quincy Verdun-like phlegm patterns I’ve been coughing up. Or the mighty rattling coughs that jerk me out of bed at 2 AM. Or the troubling fact that I cannot laugh without coughing, making me wonder if I have a temporary future as a humorless accountant. Or the pleasant dizziness actuated by my shots of Robitussin. But instead I’ll simply bid a momentary adieu to this blog until I feel better.
RELATED: IMDB User Comments for “Empire” “Empire has got to be considered one of the most suspenseful movies ever made. 485 minutes, with every one of them keeping you on the edge of your seat, seemingly impossible for an eight-hour movie to accomplish. The scene changes are so subtle and quick, they barely seem to happen, making you feel as if the story hasn’t changed, all setting up each individual shock. The acting is fantastic, each character so stoic and emotionless, as if they aren’t in the scenes in the first place. Warhol does a fantastic job at threading each scene together, to make it appear as if it is just one ongoing one. Absolutely ridiculous that the AFI refused to include it in its 100 thrills list. See it, and prepare to have your imagination and sense of reality warped.”
James Marcus on Andrew Keen: “In any case, amateur is hardly the dirty word Keen makes it out to be, and his reflexive obeisance to people in charge cripples his polemic. After all, a James Madison (whom Keen cites approvingly for having a similarly jaundiced view of human nature) wrote: ‘The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted.’ I believe it was the professionals he had in mind.”
Ladies and gentlemen, denied a label in his native country, I introduce to you (if you don’t know him already) B.C. Camplight (more music here), who may very well be Pennsylvania’s answer to Todd Rundgren — that is, if Rundgren himself weren’t from Pennsylvania. Oh, what the hell, there’s room for two Rundgrens, is there not? I hope that B.C.’s latest album, Blink of a Nihiist eventually gets some kind of American release. The man is also neurotic as hell. Get this: “So nervous is he that he apparently has every doctor in his home town of Philadelphia on speed dial and recently diagnosed himself as suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.”
So there you have it. Batty melodic tunes like “Blood and Peanut Butter” and “Lord I’ve Been on Fire,” more hypochrondia than Glenn Gould, and possibly quite misunderstood in his own country. What more can you ask for in an indie act?
Erica Wagner, whose first name is Erica and whose last name is Wagner, displays needless padding in the third paragraph, which comes before the fourth and after the second, in her review of Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero in today’s issue of the New York Times Book Review. It would be disingenuous for me to say that these sentences are loosely braided together like slack rope, for they are about as extraneous as a congealed fatty bubble that a cook not only neglected to trim from a porterhouse steak, but cooked and served to a devoted carnivore. How did such a paragraph, which appears inspired by Bart Simpson offering an impromptu book report to Ms. Krabappel, make it through the editing stage?
Some YouTube links from Metafilter and casual Googling:
The War Game (1965): [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]
When the Wind Blows (1986): [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8]
Miracle Mile (1988) [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5] [Part 6] [Part 7] [Part 8] [Part 9] [Part 10]
The Survivors: Start here.
And if you really want to be depressed:
Threads (full movie). Ten times bleaker than The Day After.
There is a curious phenomenon underway in contemporary literature. Two recent novels, Marianne Wiggins’ The Shadow Catcher and Katherine Taylor’s Rules for Saying Goodbye, both feature characters named “Marianne Wiggins” and “Katherine Taylor.” (And both are set, oddly enough, in large part on the West Coast.) In approaching both of these books as a reader, I was both delighted by the miasma of invented subjective truths contained within these novels and somewhat curious as to why these respective subjective accounts were not executed in memoir form. Is it possible that in our post-James Frey memoir world that today’s writers are not allowed even a kernel of invention when setting down their stories?
Earlier this year, I read Anthony Burgess’s two-volume autobiography (which he preferred to style, St. Augustine-style, as “Confessions”), Little Wilson and Big God and You’ve Had Your Time. One of the joys of reading these picaresque narratives was to observe precisely how Burgess invented himself. By his own admission, Burgess relied almost exclusively on his memory, occasionally verifying his wild ontological tales through whatever notes he had at his disposal. This approach raises some interesting questions. Can we believe that a preteen John Wilson (Burgess’s real name) truly coaxed numerous maids into sexual intercourse? Can we believe that, as a struggling writer, he was able to provide money for some of his sexual conquests? I don’t think these questions of verisimilitude matter so much, because one reads these memoirs largely to observe how Burgess created himself and what his particular perspective revealed about his view of the human condition. Let us not forget that human nature is as much defined by what one choose to remember and how one remembers, as by what actually happened.
But now only two decades later after Burgess’s truth, in an age that demands a video taken from a cell phone and uploaded to YouTube for veracity and a letter published to the New Yorker demands Kafkaesque fact checking to clear up a quibble, I’m wondering if some of the fun has been taken out of these narrative liberties and this flexibility for heightened perspective has been notably impaired. Some recent posts on this site have featured subjective reports of events and a few people have written in to express how “mediocre” they are because they do not match up with their own respective memories. Daniel Mendelsohn chooses to believe that I “fawningly asked to shake [his] hand,” when this was not the case at all. However, I was doped up on Benadryl to fight a cold. So Mendelsohn may have misperceived this condition as obsequious. I choose to believe, perhaps wrongly, that Mendelsohn was not referring to himself when he referred to “98% of these emails were from those ‘sitting in his underwear with a laptop'” — in large part because he did indeed express frustration, only minutes later, with the confessional nature of emails that came in response to his excellent memoir, The Lost. I’m wondering why we cannot live in a world in which both subjective truths and both unique contexts are possible.
If we are, as Mendelsohn stated on Thursday night, in “a crisis about reality,” and I agree with Mendelsohn that we are, why then is there such inflexibility to varying subjective accounts? Can we not accept another person’s right to a subjective report? Can we not accept the disparity between authorial intention and reader interpretation? Or have we become so hyper-sensitive as a culture that any account which does not portray people in anything less than a celebratory light causes, those like Donna Masini, to be “rather shocked” that anyone would perceive something different. I will no doubt be taken to the task by the peanut gallery for “waffling,” but, for what it’s worth, I intended to portray Mendelsohn in a picaresque light, which he took objection to. He assumes that I intended to belittle him for his “hyper-articulitis,” when in fact I recognize the affliction in myself and intended to celebrate it. It makes Mendelsohn who he is, and I think the world is an interesting place because of it. Likewise Matt Mendelsohn assumes that I have seen his brother multiple times when I have only seen him once, along with numerous other untrue speculations by others about me in the thread.
It’s no surprise then that Wiggins and Taylor have turned to the novel format for the kind of thing once commonly found in memoirs or gonzo journalism. In the novel, respective liberties can be accepted because everyone accepts the work as “fiction.” Until, of course, the current fervor for absolute truth extends beyond the limits of nonfiction and starts to apply to the novel. Then where will we all go?
It appears that my camera lens was damaged during the course of the move. So I’m afraid I don’t have decent photos to accompany what went down on Thursday night at Housing Works — a most excellent bookstore, I might add — where A.M. Homes and Daniel Mendelsohn were in discussion on the memoir’s current state.
It might seem to some readers that I’m stalking a certain person, who I will refer here only as Colonel Klink in order to avoid yet another tedious mention. Honestly, I attended this panel because it was impossible to resist such an interesting pair-up of authors. I did not know that Colonel Klink, again out of his league though more tolerable this time, would be moderating the panel. Maybe I was a bit naive to expect otherwise. This was a pity, because juxtaposing Mendelsohn’s hyper-articulate vernacular, involving sentences with clauses within clauses within clauses, with Homes’ clear enthusiasm was a smart way to keep the panel going.
Approximately sixty people showed up to the event, with the front rows reserved for Homes and Mendelsohn’s respective families, leading me to wonder if Col. Klink was prepared to shout, “Let’s play the Feud!” I was disappointed not to run into Matt Mendelsohn, who long-time readers might recall leaped to his brother’s defense when Mendelsohn declared litbloggers as the devil incarnate. (Give Mendelsohn some points for being ahead of the pugilistic curve.) But I did run into Homes’ brother while standing in line to purchase a book.
I hope the reader here will forgive me if I elide Colonel Klink’s needless digressions from the record and dwell upon the considerably more thoughtful remarks from the subjects.
There was initial discussion about what the memoir is. Mendelsohn identified it as “a genre with a very long history.” He suggested that the current explosion in memoirs was comparable to the similar explosion that followed the French Revolution. He offered his “nutty mad scientist” theory linking the rise of the memoir to the end of the Cold War, comparing the memoir to new trees rising after a forest fire. “When old narratives collapse, the new ones pop up.” Mendelsohn was adamant about distinguishing biography from memoir, calling the former merely the writing of one’s life “from soup to nuts, presumably” and the latter involving how one’s life is a kind of prism to thinking of life’s issues.
Homes suggested that its rise had something to do with how postwar America had failed at the American dream and that the lost notion of imagination had led to more fact-based societal experiences. Mendelsohn interjected that the explosion of psychotherapy had much to do with it, leaving Homes to volley back about the “I’m not okay, you’re not okay” culture.
I enjoyed these conceptual volleys between Homes and Mendelsohn the best. Mendelsohn suffered from a kind of leonine hyper-articulitis, speaking in sentences like, “Some of the exhaustion of the novel — at least on the perception of the readers — may have something to do with this as well.” You’d expect Homes to translate for Mendelsohn, but she’d often offer a wild digression instead. It was a clear case of contrapuntal craziness, and Colonel Klink’s moderation was quite unnecessary. The two authors were just fine on their own.
Homes carried on about how her investigation into personal history became very much about world history. Mendelsohn, his right hand fixed in the air as if expecting Michelangelo to paint in the details, pointed out that reality is “a function of increasing representation and reproduction.” He pointed out that everybody marching through Europe between 1892 and 1912 appeared to have heavy boots, since they were always depicted in memoirs as on the go.
Homes observed that the voice of the novel is less stabler than that of the memoir. Quoting Popeye’s “I yam what I am,” Homes said that the novel was more fluid and constantly changing, but that the memoir was rooted in unshakable personal experience. Mendelsohn went further, pointing out that, “Whatever happened, it would make into the book.” There was, as readers of The Lost know, a point late in the book where he thought things had ended and had written a final chapter, only to learn of a dramatic discovery that caused him to write a new ending.
Homes noted that there was “nothing too unbelievable to be true.” Mendelsohn noted that what an author leaves out is a non-memoir. He then noted, with a smug air, about how he’s on the treadmill every day and sees the stuff on daytime television, a telltale sign that you can’t put everything into something.
Homes observed, “The average contemporary memoir isn’t written at all.” By this, she meant that there were many books written by people with an incident to tell, but that the larger thematic point identified by Mendelsohn was often overlooked or not considered.
Mendelsohn pointed out that the memoir has to engage the reader and leave out elements that are unnecessary. “It can be true without being the whole story.” He also pointed out that he received a great number of emails from people who had read his book and who would thereby confess their stories to him. Here, Mendelsohn segued into disappointing elitism, pointing out that 98% of these emails were from those “sitting in his underwear with a laptop.” He expressed contempt that these readers would think him his friend.
Later during the evening, Mendelsohn would point out how he was frustrated that readers couldn’t latch onto characters in The Iliad. “Think outside of the box!” exclaimed Mendelsohn. Considering his previously uttered generalization about people on the Internet and his insistence that he wasn’t interested in many of the stories from these readers, perhaps Mendelsohn should follow his own advice and be more tolerant and kinder towards the people who took the time out to write to him.
Mendelsohn characterized The Lost less as a memoir about the Holocaust and more as “a memoir about memory.” He was disappointed in many of the reviews of his book, which were more interested in the biographical details.
Homes expanded on this latter point, noting that we are “living in a culture that has Alzaheimer’s and has problems with memories. Even our government doesn’t remember what it did last week.”
Mendelsohn suggested quite interestingly that this was because of a “failure of the master narrative.” Unfortunately, due to his hyper-articulitis, he got too mired in his own thoughts and didn’t elaborate upon this interesting idea.
Homes made the bold claim, “Most memoirs are easier to read than a novel.” Novels, she said, are harder to navigate. But she did note that “we don’t live in a culture of readers.” People now relate by spilling their guts. She observed that she also received many emails from people spilling their guts after The Mistress’s Daughter.
Homes said that she wanted to be “as clean and direct in the telling of the story.” Mendelsohn had differing sensibilities, pointing out that he wanted to see the page dirtier. He pointed out, in light of the rise of narrative nonfiction, that every good story has the same elements.
During the discussion of reviews, Mendelsohn complained about The Lost being categorized by the L.A. Times Book Prize as “Biography.” “Maybe that’s why I didn’t win,” said Mendelsohn with a sour grapes gravitas.
Homes noted that there was a “general big mess about the memoir.” It’s the same setup as reality television, where everything is scripted.
Mendelsohn pointed out, “We’re in a crisis about reality.” The whole culture, he noted, is about irreality and thus more anxious about accuracy. Allusions were made in the Q&A part of the panel to Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, which played looser with the truth but was more accepted by its audience. Mendelsohn observed that he doesn’t read Goodbye to All That for an Einsteinian truth about the universe, but because he wants to know what Graves thought about his story.
Homes noted that her memoir helped her determine that she had the right to exist, whereas she didn’t feel this before. She now feels legitimate, regardless of her parentage, and she feels connected to all of her families. Mendelsohn then commended Homes with an excited “You see, that’s what I’m talking about!” flourish, pointing out that Homes ability to describe a theme is what sets her apart. He declared his own theme as the acknowledgment of multiplicity of family identities. All memoirs, he said, should end well as an artistic object. And on that note, the panel ended, with nobody in particular objecting to this genre categorization.
Moderator: John Freeman
Panelists: Dan Simon (Publisher, Seven Stories Press), Sarah McNally (owner, McNally Robinson Bookstore), Hannah Tinti (editor, One Story), Michael Orthofer (Complete Review), and Tim Brown (freelance reviewer).
On Wednesday night, a crowd of thirty — mostly over the age of 40 — gathered at the New York Center for Independent Publishing for yet another round in what John Freeman described as “part of an ongoing…uh…educated campaign to save book reviews.” I’m not sure what Freeman meant by this. Is the campaign itself educated? Perhaps it’s one of those partisan presentations uninterested in considering opposing views. Or perhaps the idea was to assemble a group of people who all very much believed in the same thing. Freeman, dressed in a blue shirt with the top buttons open, resembled a cross between a thirtysomething John Travolta ordering two slices of pizza and a schoolboy who hoped to impress. His neck was, at least from my vantage point on the right, almost nonexistent. He moderated the panel with a mumbling lack of confidence and, when he spotted me, immediately began tossing around references to reviewers I knew, calling his favorite reviewer “Adam Kirsh,” a clumsy attempt to be a wiseacre, seeing as how other bloggers were in the crowd. He visibly panicked when I managed to procure the microphone to ask a question and did his best to keep the conversation going to avoid the apparent muckraker holding the mike.
But more on this later.
The panel’s ostensible purpose was to explore the connections between independent presses and book review coverage. Freeman began by mentioning how he had observed a crowd of people around a giant TV screen on 6th Avenue, bemoaning how the image has devoured the printed word. “We’re here in a bunker,” said Freeman. I looked around and saw only an inviting library, with a malfunctioning globe light flickering on and off as the tepid conversation continued. Were there MREs hidden behind all the books?
The panelists, as the above photo will attest to, appeared bored. Dan Simon, who spent much of the panel chatting with Sarah McNally to his left in an effort to keep interested, pointed out that, historically, book reviews made all the difference and that a “wonderful electricity,” clearly not applicable to the globe light, started with the book reviews. More recently, however, a book featured on the NYTBR cover does “not even make a ripple.”
Freeman then noted, “The New York Times Book Review is healthier than ever,” and began a considerable series of references to an “eco-system” in which book reviews were a vital part.
Unfortunately for Freeman, Sarah McNally outlined the hard business of what it is to sell books. She would later point out that readers respond to blurbs and that “placement is more important than reviews.” She noted that she would not order books in catalogs if they did not contain review quotes.
Elaborating from the onset on whether book reviews caused people to purchase books, McNally noted that “it depended on the generation.” She expressed her dismay that there weren’t enough local or regional conversations, and then noted that “that Australian guy from Grove Atlantic, Tim Flannery” had made a difference because of these “literary conversations.” McNally doesn’t seem to know her stock. Actually, it was Richard Flanagan and his most recently released book, The Unknown Terrorist, that McNally was referring to.
With a smiling Michael Orthofer mostly laconic throughout the panel, I’d have to say that Tim Brown struck me as the most interesting and thoughtful guy there, and the only one of the bunch who kept the conversation pertaining to small presses throughout. Perhaps he should have been the guy to moderate. When Brown wasn’t looking up into some unidentifiable area of the stacks to his left, he would express his concern about books that were never covered. He cited Rain Taxi as a must-read literary journal that did a good job of covering independent titles and that everybody in the crowd should subscribe.
Hannah Tinti offered a brief summation of One Story, which arose to fill the gap left by the now defunct Story Magazine. She viewed the literary magazine as a stepping stone for literary writers. “We exploded as much as you can explode in the literary magazine world,” said Tinti, with no particular hint of a Bleak House-style spontaneous combustion in her answer.
Orthofer, the most relaxed of the panelists, pointed to the origins of the Complete Review, noting that it had begun as a way to explore “the possibilities of the Internet.” At the time he began, there were very few places that would link to other reviews, but spoke highly of newspaper reviews, noting that, “Weblogs will just write about their reading habits.” He bemoaned the attention given to Tina Brown’s book.
Freeman noted that he could not write about a lot of books, noting, in an awkward attempt at alliteration, that there was “a fealty to the front-list publishing.”
Simon said that he loved the words “independent” and “corporate” to identify the two communities. He styled the NBCC members as “partly picaresque, true believer characters,” but didn’t cite any specific examples. Indeed, as the conversation went on and the crowd and panelists unfurled sentiments about the NYTBR, it became quickly apparent that book reviews may not have lived up to Simon’s definition.
Tinti observed that it was the independent bookstore that often talked to a local newspaper to get an author event looked at. Brown elaborated, observing that, “By and large, journalists are very lazy people,” bemoaning that some of the reviews he read resembled press releases.
“It sounds like we should have a party here between small press and critics!” interjected Freeman, presumably hoping to prove Brown wrong about those fun-loving journalists. Alas, Freeman’s awkward remark was rejoined by crickets before the crowd loosened polite laughter. As Simon and McNally continued to chat to themselves, Freeman snapped them a stern look and they quickly shut up.
“You can’t read 200 news sources a day,” said Freeman. “Unless you spend all day on the Internet.” Obviously, Freeman has never heard of RSS feeds.
Orthofer continued, pointing out that there was a marked difference between generations. “Newspapers are just a different kind of medium,” he said. Simon then quibbled that in the age of the Internet, there was no arbiter role. Meanwhile, Brown suggested that book reviewers could be more pro-active. “Pro-activity. I cannot emphasize this enough. Maybe there should be more of me out there.” Brown noted that he was only paid in contributor’s copies.
Responding to Freeman’s boasting of the NBCC Awards, McNally observed that awards made little difference in selling books, with the exception of the Booker. She had no clue as to why the SoHo book crowd was so interested in the Booker.
Freeman revealed again that he could not write about certain books, pointing out that he had attempted to write in the first-person for a review of Dennis Bock’s The Ash Garden that he penned on September 11th, only to see the paragraph elided. A woman in the crowd observed that she had given up on the New York Times Book Review and asked the panel if there were any book reviewers writing with pizazz. Freeman pointed out that he had written for the NYTBR, although a search through the Books section from 1981 onward reveals nothing authored by Freeman.
Simon observed that book review sections did champion small presses, pointing out that if you considered that small presses occupy 3% of the marketplace, books got a better percentage in book review coverage.
Brown compared the 400-600 word review to a villanelle and pointed out that he had learned everything he knew about book reviewing in the third grade.
Despite Brown’s clear enthusiasm, I felt, given the staid air in the room, that the panel needed to be shaken up. So I beamed a broad smile to the kind woman with the mike and, when Freeman tried to keep the conversation going as long as possible, deferring my question until the last possible moment, I asked Freeman why book reviews should be saved if they faced the kind of dryness and inability to write in first-person that he had personally described. I asked him why there had been little introspection. I asked him why book review sections didn’t grab their readership by the lapels as frequently as they could and why we all weren’t looking to the book review section, not as electric as it could be, as the culprit.
“You can’t make a generalization like that,” responded Freeman.
“You just asked the panelists if they could name great critics and they responded with a small handful of names.”
“I think that if we sat here, we could offer a long list of names.”
Simon bailed Freeman out, noting that he had agreed in part with my “provocation.” He once again pointed out that things were good for small presses on the book review front, proportion-wise. Tinti offered similar remarks.
Before the panel was over, Freeman got in a dig at a “3,300 page book” he reviewed that “drove me insane.” That’s funny. When Freeman covered the book for the Boston Globe, he didn’t seem to feel that way.
[UPDATE: There are additional reports of the panel now up from Marydell and Richard Grayson, who offers a report more comprehensive than this one. There’s also a report from Art Winslow up at Critical Mass.]
Author: Scarlett Thomas
Condition of Mr. Segundo: Recovering from Scarlett fever.
Subjects Discussed: Prodigious fiction authors, pursuing the novel of ideas, Neuromancer, moving away from families to loner characters, striving for authenticity in a middle-class literary culture, smart women characters and sex, breaking rules, codebreaking, academic environments in novels, plots dictated by ideas, the importance of preplanning a novel in a notebook, the relationship between teaching and writing, the difference between a reader and a reading audience, the dangers of information processing, Derrida, relative narrative vs. the Jungian collective unconscious, devising the troposphere, the mashing up of literary and genre, Arturo Perez-Reverte, the question of whether genre is superior or inferior, formulaic plots, narrative ambiguity in the novel of ideas, responding to Mark Sarvas’s narrative quibble about The End of Mr. Y, and the New Puritans.
EXCERPT FROM SHOW:
Thomas: The family in the Lily Pascale novels was very much a combination of a fantasy and a lie. I mean, I’ve had quite — I guess everybody’s had a strange crazy life in some ways. But for me, I knew when I was a teenager that I didn’t want to have children for myself. I didn’t have a cozy, middle-class upbringing at all. My life was really very complex growing up. And when I decided I was going to write, I almost made this weird decision at the very beginning of my career that I was going to write as a kind of mask. I was going to do something completely different from what I try to do know. I mean, now, authenticity is very, very important to me. At the time, I felt like writing was kind of a game, a construction. And I don’t know why I created such a nauseating bourgeois family back then. I think partly, I wanted to come from that. Because then my life would make a more usual kind of sense.
Dwight Garner, newly minted blogger of The New York Times Book Review, apparently has few new ideas on how to blog and is now content to rip off ideas from the blogosphere.
Case in point: “Living With Music”, an egregious ripoff of Largehearted Boy’s Book Notes. This is particularly shameful, because I can tell you that David Gutowski is one of the most generous bloggers around, more than living up to his moniker.
At this rate, I fully expect Garner to unleash The Cat Primero Show, a bold new podcast that offers a counterpart to Sam Tanenhaus’s social ineptitude as “podcast host.”
[UPDATE: Sarah has more observations.]
[UPDATE 2: I have left a comment pointing out the similarities to Book Notes on Garner’s blog. I suspect that the comment will not be approved, but we shall see.]
[UPDATE 3: Yup, Garner has censored my perfectly reasonable comment. Jeff has also been running a few amusing experiments, demonstrating that Garner isn’t interested in any dialogue other than conversational fellatio. That’s too bad. There are far more interesting things that a head can do aside from bobbing up and down on Garner’s cock. Garner also claims that he’s “never seen Largehearted Boy before,” but has promised many future lists. But if that’s the case, why does his post look so similar to a Book Notes entry? Perhaps Mr. Gutowski might want to check his IP address log to see if anyone at the Times has been visiting his site to set the matter straight.]
If you want to continue to see independent presses thriving, do help out Soft Skull and McSweeney’s. Both presses have reduced the prices of their stock to offset the shortfall in promised revenue from AMS. (McSweeney’s reports that $130,000 of earnings is now gone.) Carrie has some recommendations.
Between my laptop being afflicted with a virus and rendered unbootable (with the potential data loss of 10,000 words of my novel, several short stories, two radio plays, two acts of a play, audio data for five podcasts, and too many notes) and my inability to respond to any edrants emails for a while because of the draconian Port 25 requirements (“You can host your domain with us!”) and the almost total misrepresentation (“Actually, we won’t have static IPs in your neighborhood for another two weeks. Or maybe longer. [insert barely concealed laughter from tech guy]”) of my broadband provider, I’m limping along here as best as I can between deadlines. (At least one computer still works!)
The moral of the story is this: Back up your data, and back it up often. And get your broadband quote on paper, no matter what these bozos promise you.
If you’ve sent me an email to the main address, I can read them, but I won’t be able to answer them for a while. I’m sorry. Try arizona_jim at yahoo.com for the next two weeks if you need to get in touch with me in a hurry. I’m hoping to get back to everyone once these technical issues are worked out.
In any event, I hope to offer an update tonight or tomorrow.
Dwight Garner has joined the blogosphere, which means, of course, that Sam Tanenhaus can start ignoring its own pages and calling its own material “sub-literary.”
I made it through fifteen minutes of this film and I had enough. There wasn’t one moment of humility. Not one moment of self-deprecation. Not one moment where the “artistic” worth of the two main subjects was questioned. In fact, the damn thing was a selfish and humorless affair. I felt like I was stuck in a DUMBO hipster hellhole.
The level of self-absorption, narcissism, and self-entitlement contained in Four Eyed Monsters appalled me. Do these two kids not know anything of humility? I understand that this film was a hit at Slamdance. But is this the best that the emerging generation of Internet filmmakers can offer us? Begging for money for their precious pretentious nonsense as if they are entitled to it? Fawning in such a self-absorbed show for the cameras and failing to give us one goddam whit of humanity about the growing development of online relationships? Jean-Luc Godard did this kind of documentary many times before and, compared to these kids, he’s the humblest filmmaker now working in cinema. That’s saying something.
Maybe I’m becoming that grumpy old bastard shouting at the kids to get off my lawn, but, as much as I look out and try to support work by new artists, Four Eyed Monsters is about the most solipsistic cinema I’ve had the misfortune to sit a quarter of the way through. Imagine 70 minutes of lolcats in cinematic form. Sure, it’s cute for the first minute. But can you really sit there and take it for 70 minutes?
Nobody’s going to say it. Because these kids have amassed a tremendous credit card debt. Nobody’s going to say it. Because it’s the dream that everybody wants: to be a self-sufficient artist.
It’s impossible to create after working a nine-to-five job? What a bunch of bullshit.
Glam rock is back, boys and girls. But it’s worse than it was in the 1970s. Because where the glam rock artists realized that their stage presence was a pretense and that there was compartmentalization between this presence and the real life, these new glam rock amateurs, in the form of Arin and Susan, do not.
And the hell of it is that they will be rewarded for their crass irresponsibilities, both fiscal and artistic.
I lived in San Francisco for thirteen years. All of my twenties. A fragment of my thirties.
I’ll miss the fog and the summers in the Mission and the drum circle on Hippie Hill. I’ll miss the burritos. I’ll miss the Haight-Ashbury, the neighborhood that I’ve been lucky enough to call home for the past two and a half years. It’s going to be extremely hard to find a replacement for Rockin’ Java, where many things were written, or the Booksmith or Ploy II or, hell, just everything really. I’ll miss the fag hags, the creative swindlers, the misunderstood people on the more interesting half of Polk Street, the guy who drums the same beat for hours on plastic buckets on Powell Street next to the meticulously groomed evangelist telling all who will listen that sex is evil. I’ll miss Frank Chiu, the tech geek crowd, the strange exhibitionist empathy, and the unapologetically corrupt politicians. I’ll miss Dan Leone’s Cheap Eats column. I’ll miss many friends and acquaintances, those noble soldiers of the Sunday Writing Circle, and I’ll even miss the sneers of some of my enemies. I’ll miss trips to Berkeley and the Great American Music Hall and the Red Vic and the Lucky Penny, easily the worst diner on the West Coast. I’ll miss Ross Mirkarimi. I’ll miss the incongruous automated voices inside MUNI buses, the capacious thatch of Dolores Park, the dogs flitting about Duboce Park, the almost perennial sixty degree temperature, the sex subcultures, the San Francisco Independent Film Festival, Bottom of the Hill, the Edwardian and Victorian houses, the many confused kids and misfits demanding spare change, the martinis at Blondie’s, the post-2AM crowd at Sparky’s, The Mint, the hills and the valleys, the earthquakes, the smell of oak trees in the Panhandle, the interesting developments around Divisadero Street, the snobs at Reverie, and the pretentious Marina crowd. I’ll miss the Exit Theatre, the Castro Halloween Parade, the lonely people I talked with during Christmas, the nice Russian ladies at the Yellow Submarine, the influx of Indian food in recent years, the notebooks at the Blue Danube, the sand hills near the Pacific, the drunks writing for the Guardian, and too much to list here really.
Goodbye San Francisco. It was a great run.
I uncovered this remarkable Craig’s List ad:
Small publishing company seeks qualified writer to interview director Michael Moore during press conference June 19 in New York. The ideal candidate will have the ability to write and communicate and produce the interview quickly and cleanly. Candidate will have access to Mr. Moore’s press conference. The candidate will have to deliver the article by June 22 with 1,300 words and incorporate the asked questions during the interview (specific questions will be sent to you in order to provide guidance and focus for the article/interview). Payment for the final written article is limited to $200.00. We understand this is amount is low, but the opportunity is unique for a strong writer to interview Michael Moore. Send resume and writing samples to editor Karl Hente by June 12.
I’m wondering precisely how any journalist can “write” or “investigate” a piece, if the journalist’s questions are “prepared” by another party in advance (were these questions, for example, pre-approved by Michael Moore?). A Google search reveals that Karl Hente appeared with Ivan Weiss at a May 2006 conversation, revealing that he copy-edited at the Washington Post (“Current projects: new business development, grantwriting, research.”). Hente’s involvement with the Washington Post is corroborated by his work here on an April 2007 “Community Guide” as copy editor. Although Hente claims to have left the Post, a “Karl F. Hente” is listed on the WaPo staff page.
So what happened? Was a Post staffer assigned the Michael Moore piece? And did he then walk away in disgust when Moore’s staff demanded all of his questions cleared in advance? Did desperate editors proclaim that a Michael Moore piece was too important not to feature, no matter how fabricated the journalism, and did copy editor Hente then continue on in panic? And did this then result in the Craig’s List ad with this “unique” “journalistic” opportunity?
I will be making calls on Monday to determine if this was indeed a Washington Post article or possibly a side project. I certainly hope that such dubious ethics aren’t being practiced by the Post or elsewhere.
Memo to Giuliani: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
RELATED: Gothamist: “According to Time’s Up!, Robert Carnevale was arrested while videotaping the bike raid after he asked one of the officers for his badge number. Carole Vale, a nurse observing the scene, was also arrested when she asked why Mr. Carnevale was being detained. Mr. Carnevale was held for 22 hours and Ms. Vale was held for 13 hours. Time’s Up!, along with the 6th Street cycling community are asking for a meeting with the commanding officer of the Ninth Precinct to explain the actions of the NYPD and to ask for their bikes back.”
So Mollie Wilson took issue with John Colapinto’s article, “When I’m Sixty-Four,” a Paul McCartney profile riddled with the kind of spoon-fed, been-there-done-that tone of a bona-fide hack. Why, asked Wilson, would The New Yorker, one of the top magazines in the country, revisit the same tired legends? Any remotely educated culture vulture knows very well that “Yesterday” started off as “Scrambled Eggs.” Further, Colapinto idiotically suggests that some hard-core fan asking for an autograph “could have been another Mark David Chapman” and then has the temerity to put this social gaffe in his piece!
But the story gets even stranger. Colapinto began leaving comments on Wilson’s blog, including this morsel:
As for my re-telling of the often-told tale of “Yesterday” beginning with the nonsense lyrics about scrambled eggs: any true Beatles fan would know that the point of re-telling that story was that Paul has added vital new info–something of which he’d only lately been reminded: that the actual lyrics to Yesterday were written while on a 3 hour car trip from Lisbon to southern Portugal with Jane Asher.
I’m a true Beatles fan. And Colapinto is dead wrong. The information concerning Jane Asher has been floating around for some time. And while my Beatles books are currently still packed, I do know that this information has been reported since at least 2003. (e.g., see “McCartney’s Yesterday had a nudge from Nat” by Maurice Chittenden, The Times, July 6, 2003). In fact, the far more interesting question, which came up around the same time, is how close “Yesterday” is to Nat King Cole’s “Answer Me.” Then again, since Colapinto is less concerned about the musical origins of one of the most remembered pop music ballads of the past fifty years and more interested in who McCartney was fucking when he wrote “Yesterday,” one shouldn’t look to Colapinto for compelling arts criticism.
This is by Colapinto’s own admission:
You, instead, wanted an essay on the subject. And that’s why you’re a blogger and not a writer. And, if you can handle hearing this, it’s why you’re barely a reader. You should also understand that the New Yorker is divided into sections; there are feature stories, like the kind I write, and there is the critics, at the back; I do not and never will be a critic. I don’t like them. They’re usually up-their-ass on precisely the matters you and I have been discussing here.
So there you have it. A New Yorker writer, vastly uninformed about the origins of “Yesterday” and their ubiquitous availability to any Beatlemaniacs, isn’t interested in writing, much less reading the kind of in-depth music features that you and I might be interested in. This is arrogance of the first order. And I’m truly stunned that the New Yorker would be dumbing down their features by assigning them to clumsy thugs like Colapinto.
If a 5,000 word essay that goes out of its way to investigate in a way that nobody else has tackled the subject makes one a blogger and not a writer, then call me a blogger any day of the week. Even if my “blog post” is published in a newspaper or a magazine.