Category / Ames, Jonathan

by Edward Champion

The Bat Segundo Show #25

segundo25.jpg

Author: Jonathan Ames

Condition of Bat Segundo: Too easily complaisant to charlatan announcers.

Subjects Discussed: The controversial cover of I Love You More Than You Know, self-promotional footnotes, rules for writing, writing originating from unexpected requests, “tossed off” essays, depression and writing, essays which involve the penis, the somber and introspective feel of Ames’ latest collection, Ames’ lengthy self-asseessment of his book, George Plimpton, Glenn Gould, honesty, “throwaway pieces,” graphic novels, fiction, making a living as a writer, Graham Greene, Dean Haspiel and The Alcoholic, comic book scripting, Neil Gaiman, The Extra Man screenplay, upcoming pieces in GQ and Spin, on Ames letting down his guard, comedy vs. tragedy, the audience response to “Midlife Assessment,” Tim O’Brien, an odd and paranoid use of coffee, Ames’ place as a writer, the financial realities of being a writer, Moby, on getting distracted, the burden of email, writing discpline, chicken soup, San Francisco restaurants, Anthony Trollope, Jonathan Lethem, writers named Jonathan, Jonathan Franzen, living life to write about it later, on Ames bringing pleasure to himself (not the way you’re thinking), what Ames has been collecting from hotel rooms, and a hairy call.

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by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • Another day, another Robert Birnbaum interview. This time: Uzodinma Iweala.
  • Concerning the Jonathan Ames testicle controversy, it seems that the testicle is ahead of the shadow by a ratio of 5 to 1. Whether this will have any long-term impact on future perceptions of Jonathan Ames books remains to be seen, but there’s a rumor floating around that Augusten Burroughs has been considering “an accidental photo” for his next book. Just remember that Jonathan Ames was the first one there.
  • It seems that only John Freeman is allowed to talk with David Foster Wallace. That’s two articles in seven days. What deal did he cook up with Bonnie Nadell? Or is John Freeman part of the DFW inner circle of “approved” people? (Former Freeman link via Scott)
  • The history of mustard.
  • Believe it or not, Ivan Turgenev’s one and only play, A Month in the Country, is playing in North Carolina. Free Gutenberg text here. Background info here.
  • It started with a harmless exchange of information, but Maud and I have been trying to figure out why the Graham Greene-Anthony Burgess relationship was so strange. I sent Maud an interview with the two authors that I had read in Burgess’ But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?. Jasper Milvain dug up more, pointing out that Greene disowned the interview, claiming that “Burgess put words into my mouth which I had to look up in the dictionary.” The two authors fell out, apparently by 1990, when Burgess published his second autobiographical volume, You’ve Had Your Time. And while I don’t entirely trust Wikipedia, the Anthony Burgess entry notes, “In 1957 Graham Greene asked him to bring some Chinese silk shirts back with him on furlough from Kuala Lumpur. As soon as Burgess handed over the shirts, Greene pulled out a knife and severed the cuffs, into which opium pellets had been sewn.” Now if that latter tidbit can be corroborated, then it’s just possible that the Burgess-Greene relationship might be one of the strangest in literary history. As soon as I get an opportunity to hit the library, I’m going to follow up on all this. Did Burgess and Greene love to hate each other? Or did they hate to love each other? Or was it a little bit of both? Perhaps some bona-fide authorities might have some answers to all this.

[UPDATE: Jasper has an update on the Greene-Burgess contretemps, with some citations. And in the comments to this post, Jenny Davidson offers some materal from the forthcoming Biswell biography, which apparently deals with Graham Greene at great length.]

by Edward Champion

Jonathan Ames at the Booksmith

I suppose I could blame Jonathan Ames for missing a good chunk of Saturday’s Chinese New Year Parade and the Valentine’s Day Pillow Fight at the Ferry Building. But that really wouldn’t be fair because, in at least one case, I was blissfully unaware of the limitless events happening in my own city. Besides, I’m a grown man responsible for my own actions. Or so the theory goes. And if I was idiotic enough to ignore the Laughing Squid list for a week, then Jonathan Ames is not to blame. In fact, he should be commended for confusing me. We can never be confused enough in life.

Needless to say, on Tuesday night, an evening that what was referred to by at least one friend as Drink Without Guilt Night, I certainly wasn’t the only one at the Booksmith. Some 55 people showed up, many of them arriving late because of a stunning rush hour power outage at Montgomery Street Station and MUNI’s regrettable failure to provide rush hour buses in lieu of subway. Many of them were, in fact, couples. One couple I talked with revealed to me that they were there because Ames’ essays might unite them together for effective copulation. The power of Ames’ work knows no limits. Lust conquers all.

jonathanames.jpgJust before the reading, I said hello to Ames. I was glad he got a chance to see the On the Road MS. upon my recommendation. I asked him if he had been frightened by Peter Coyote’s disembodied voice, but he had to dash off. As it turned out, he had a lot to prepare for. Thomas, the Booksmith’s event coordinator, pointed out to me that Coyote had been one of the Diggers. I knew this, of course. But I didn’t think he would understand where I was coming from: namely, the notion of having Coyote’s voice interrupt you as your awe and concentration is devoted to the roll. Coyote’s voice can be unnerving at times, particularly when it is turned up loudly through a small television speaker and resonating in a room without windows. I suppose this is why he is used for so many documentaries, voiceovers and commercials. So I foolishly remained silent. I am shy and avoidant that way sometimes.

The event began. Ames was introduced. And he expressed his hope that, after the reading, “things will become more amorous.” He then offered an explanation on the I Love You More Than You Know cover controversy. Ames had previously concluded that the world can be divided into two groups of people: those who like scatological humor and those who don’t. The cover had revealed a second dichotomy: those who believe that Ames is revealing his testicle and those who believe it to be a shadow. Ames is currently taking a poll among his readers about this and the details can be found here.

Ames then unveiled an oral version of his tale, “I Called Myself El Cid,” which can be found in the latest book. This essay concerns an unexpected fencing triumph in Ames’ youth with an ending that I shall not reveal. Ames delivered this with considerable animation, adopting a slight Shakespearean tone and seizing a pen in his hands as a surrogate sword. I could definitely see such brio could be used to win a sword fight. It was now being used to tell stories.

The oral story was received with great applause and Ames stopped to catch his breath, reading “Club Existential Dread” in the vocal timbre that I’d style Jonathan Ames Mode 1. Mode 1 is a slight sophisticated Anglicized inflection that I thought had been confined to his fiction, but apparently applied across the board. What was interesting to me was that the part of this essay that I had always found particularly interesting, the moment where five girls are lying on a bar, was rejoined with a kind of silent horror. Could Ames really be reading this in public? I suspected that Ames sensed the same problems with tone that I did, because he later suggested to the audience that there were parts where, contrary to expected responses, one was not expected to laugh. I can only chalk up this audience response confusion to the fact that we were assembled in a bookstore on Valentine’s Day.

Just before reading “No Contact, Asshole,” Ames was perturbed by the presence of a small child in the audience. Upon getting sanction from the mother, he read this and followed this up with “The Thick Man.” During the latter piece, Ames apologized, mid-read, for being so modifier-happy with female anatomy, noting that “Sometimes it happens when you write these things.”

There followed a session of Q&A.

There was a question that wasn’t really a question about Ames appearing on Oprah about the truthfulness of his work. Thankfully, Ames’ response was brief. Something to the effect of “I don’t think so.”

Ames was then asked if he was happy with his current book tour. He said that he was on this latest tour, largely because Nextbook has already coaxed him away from Brooklyn and he persuaded the publisher to chip in for a few more cities along the way. He pointed out that authors were never completely happy about their book tours, in large part because they genuinely believed that the publisher never provided enough PR. But he did note that the chip on his shoulder had grown smaller over the years.

Ames had received many interesting things from readers along the way. An offer from a transexual escort, the like. But at the Seattle reading, Ames had received a comic called “Things Are Beautiful,” a small chapbook bound in red string. (Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any trace of this online.) Ames had been delighted with the first 10-12 pages, in which various objects were declared beautiful, with accompanying text. But after this, things took a turn for the worse. Ames encountered a pair of glasses, with the words, “These glasses would be elegant…” He turned the page, only to see a picture of a bald man that looked suspiciously like Jonathan Ames himself. The text then read, “…if I hadn’t ripped your eyes out like Oedipus!” Ames wondered if there was a subconscious message. After all, he was bald and this illustration closely resembled him.

Since I had forgotten to ask Ames (a second time!) when I interviewed him, I asked him about his use of exclamation marks. He simply stated that he wasn’t against them and that he didn’t understand why people are told not to use them. He mentioned Graham Greene’s use of colons.

When asked about whether he included “everything” in his nonfiction, Ames pointed out that he was not a polymath. He name-checked David Foster Wallace, pointing to these “great folders” (i.e., the footnotes) that DFW had a tendency to open up in his essays. He openly wondered why DFW was wasting his time in fiction when he could be working for the government.

The last time Ames had come through the Booksmith, he had stripped down to his waist to display acupuncture cupping marks. Given this and the testicle issue on the cover, there was a question then implying whether Ames was some sort of subdued exhibitionist. Ames revealed that the current cover came about because of a photo shoot. The boxer photo had not been used. The original book cover had “I Love You More Than You Know” displayed on the back of a flasher’s coat. Ames was appalled by this. Flashers weren’t exactly strong selling points.

During the writing of I Pass Like Night, Ames had used his father’s boss’s name during one of the drafts. His father was paranoid about this. After the book was released, everybody in Ames’ family went to family therapy. And yet with his father in the audience as he performed on stage, his father had laughed when other scatological revelations had been revealed.

Ames then performed a hairy call and bid the audience good night.

An unexpected errand prevented me from staying. And since Ames was mobbed, I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye. (Sorry, Jonathan!)

But on the way out, I ran into Steve Rhodes, who had snapped a good deal of photos during the reading. I’m hoping he’ll post some of them in the not too distant future.

There’s also another Ames Segundo interview in the can that I hope to get up in the next week or so.

by Edward Champion

75 Books, Books #5-7

Last week was a busy week, but if there was any advantage to MUNI’s stunning inefficiencies of late (thank you, Nathaniel Ford!), it’s the extra 45 minutes per day of reading time.

Book #5 was Gilbert Sorrentino’s Little Casino. When I initially started reading this, it seemed to me that this was not so much a “novel,” but more of a collection of throwaway pieces. The book is constructed in short chapters, each chapter split up into two sections. The first is a memory fragment of some unknown human, some random incident of a fey and often funny nature, the second is a sort of intellectual response to it that often clarifies details through a voice that may or may not be the “author’s.” Of course, this being the world of Sorrentino, each fragment involves either a grisly death, sex or a fixation on cigarettes. Even when a chapter isn’t successful (and there are plenty that aren’t, some of them read like as if they’ve been pulled out of an MFA student’s journal, but this approach may in fact be the point), the book can be enjoyed as a collection of vignettes or possibly an effort to track various characters (some of them specific names, some of them merely “hes” and “shes”) who may or may not match up.

Strangely, I found myself preferring Sorrentino’s stylistic exercises to many of the calls and responses. There is, for example, a “lengthy” deposition transcript that points out the hypocrisies of political correctness and frivolous litigation which is quite hilarious, but it could have been thrown into just about any Sorrentino novel. And while I always enjoy Sorrentino getting goofy with self-imposed prose limitations (one chapter, for example, has every sentence begin with “Had X not Y”), I wondered how much of the book was genuinely “experimental” and how much was filler. I didn’t so much mind the lack of unity, but, unlike Mulligan Stew, I really felt that much of this work was written to pad it out to 200 pages and didn’t always find myself relishing the work. So this book is probably for Sorrentino completists only. For everyone else interested in dipping their toes into Sorrentino, still one of today’s most underrated novelists, I highly recommend Mulligan Stew and Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things.

For more on Sorrentino, check out this lengthy Gerald Howard profile.

Book #6 was Jonathan Ames‘ I Love You More Than You Can Know, a nonfiction collection that Ames had suggested to me was a collection of throwaway pieces — essentiallly, the remaining nonfiction that he hadn’t yet assembled in book form. I should have known that he was being typically self-effacing. This is not his answer to The Salmon of Doubt — in large part, because this isn’t a posthumous collection. Because many of these essays are as funny as anything Ames has ever written, particularly the leftover New York Press pieces. What’s particularly interesting is that Ames saved a good deal of essays involving his penis for this book. This time around, however, Ames seems even more introspective (if it can be believed) and a tad gloomier than his two previous books of nonfiction. Or perhaps I was a tad cheerier. Whatever the case, his more recent pieces from the past three years read as if they’ve been written under duress. But if you haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading Ames’ essays, it’s definitely worth it for the laughs.

Incidentally, the Young, Roving Correspondent will be talking with Ames again when he strolls through San Francisco. I’m honored to announce that Jonathan Ames will be the first guest to appear twice on the Bat Segundo Show. And while I’m unlikely to reveal any future Segundo-related books after the podcasts have been posted, in Ames’ case, I wanted to make a special exception, as I must honor the tacit agreement of constant Ames promotion.

[1/23/06 UPDATE: And as fate would have it, Jonathan Ames has a new essay about cleaning his fridge up over at The Morning News.]

Book #7 was Tim O’Brien‘s Lake in the Woods, which was my first O’Brien novel and it certainly won’t be my last. The book tells the story of John Wade, a veteran of My Lai and one-time teenage magician who morphs into a politician. One day, shortly after catastrophically losing a U.S. Senate race just after a personal scandal that isn’t entirely spelled out, his wife disappears. The reasons for her disappearance and the circumstances of Wade’s life are unclear, but are gradually revealed to the reader. What makes the book work so well is that way O’Brien plays with context and keeps many fascinating details from the reader. O’Brien is daring enough not to answer all of the questions and is deft at balancing style (chapters containing excerpts from “interviews” and books on war and politics provide context, as do other chapters offering hypotheses on what may have happened) with a reader’s expectations. Unfortunately, once O’Brien’s revealed his hand, the book starts to flag near the end. But as a study of concealment, both personal and historical, O’Brien’s book is gripping, written in an effectively austere manner.

It’s also interesting that shortly after writing this novel, O’Brien published a painfully personal essay about surviving My Lai and what his life was like years later. He revealed thoughts of suicide, sleeping pills and memories of a girlfriend who left him. He also reveals that the name of his real-life girlfriend is Kate (also the name of John Wade’s wife).