So who was the real Agatha Christie? Because Christie wrote the lines, “You know, you’re the sort of woman who ought to be raped. It might do you good,” under a pseudonym, the Telegraph‘s Laura Thompson appears to be in a great uproar. I’m not sure whether these striking lines say anything in particular about Christie as a person. (It is a common fallacy to equate a writer’s personality with the dark and disturbing things a writer sets down to paper.) Personally, I won’t be impressed until someone reveals that Christie managed to schtup half the men in Berkshire and single-handedly stopping a seditious affront to Mother England during her mysterious disappearance.
Something for Mr. Asher to consider in his forthcoming symposium: “The Problem with Pricey Paperbacks.” (Of course, Levi was on this issue before Alex Remington. Another example of print cribbing from blogs? For a print-financed blog no less!) (via Orthofer)
And speaking of Levi, this consideration of Richard Bach is madness. I was there when the friend in question screamed in horror. Levi held the book. There was a strange Zen-like grimace on his face, as if Levi had just finished having tea with the Dalai Lama. I had been talking with someone and stood silent and slackjawed and horrified when Levi then declared to all of us that Jonathan Livingston Seagull “wasn’t so bad.” I was then forced to exorcise the book so that Levi would be protected from future influence. Things proceeded okay from there. Let this be a lesson. Richard Bach is a dangerous man. Pick up his work at your own peril.
Jenny D is quite right about Gibson. Gibson’s houses are built on firm foundations of language and rhythm, and I think it can be sufficiently argued that his conceptual associations are likewise rooted upon these preternatural cadences.
Ah callow youth! Why are you so goddam non-rebellious when the world’s in the shitter? 64% of these little bastards “wake up happy?” Sixty-four percent? Christ, the generation after mine is disappointing the hell out of me. We were cynical as fuck and that was during the Clinton years! Maybe Charles Rangel is right. Maybe we should reinstate the draft just to give these smug little fucks a wakeup call. BLAM BLAM BLAM! What do you think of that, eh? If you want your nonfat hazelnut latte and your TiVo options, you’re going to have to march through the goddam DMZ to get them! HOW ABOUT THAT? Oh, what’s that? You need to go to the infirmary? Well, now that you’re in the middle of the GREAT CLUSTERFUCK YOU’VE BEEN GLEEFULLY IGNORING, that ought to put a damper on the whole “wake up happy” scenario, eh?
I figured that ignoring the LongPen(TM) was perhaps the best way to avoid getting too excited about a pedantic and rather preposterous invention that (a) is something of a satirical assault upon the author junket — alas, they think Atwood humorless and without machinations, but the way I figured it, she cooked up this thing and didn’t expect anyone to take it so seriously and so rolled with it — and (b) is of no benefit to the reader at all, contra claims made by the Atwood clan, febrile functionaries, et al. Thankfully, the Rake has provided the LongPenis(TM) its appropriate context. If the LongPenis authors start commenting upon their business cards or praising Huey Lewis, I won’t be surprised.
Mike Harrison on novel writing: “As long as you foster an incomplete relationship with yourself, & depend on an interest in form to show you what you could say (rather than learning ways to efficiently say what you already think you know), maybe you don’t need to worry about that. The implication being that I don’t want things to get easier. I want to avoid what I see as a superficialising methodicalness or rationality. I hope I mean it. It’s so important not to know who you are after all these years.” Which, given this rather interesting description, evocative in some ways of the famous passage from American Pastoral, makes one contemplate just how confident one is while simultaneously not completely knowing one’s self. This is likewise a form of anarchy I find comforting.
Tayari Jones has some significant words upon this whole “hot young author” business. I’m hoping for a substantial response to all this nonsense myself. But in the meantime, I point literary snobs to the John W. Campbell Best New Writer Award, which sets the criteria not upon whether an author is under 40 or under 35, but whether a writer’s first piece of fiction has appeared in a professional publication over the past two years. This seems to me more of an equitable criteria for determining who a “new” or “young” writer is. In fact, after John Scalzi won the Campbell Award, he did the math and found that they were as “old” as 52!
Russian journalists aren’t the only one facing persecution (and, in some cases, mysterious murders). It seems that Russian writer Pavel Astakhov has faced libel charges — now dropped — for daring to depict corrupt cops in his novel, Raider. What’s quite interesting about the charges is that Astakhov appears to have been pursued not for naming specific cops, but for sullying the image of the Russian police. One wonders if this will encourage the Russian authorities to go further.
I profoundly disagree with Levi’s condemnation of Luc Sante’s excellent overview of the many versions of On the Road that are now available. Levi does have a point about the NYTBR‘s regular employment of reductive-minded bozos who wouldn’t know a literary visceral charge even if they were hooked in series with a tome and a Tesla coil. But he’s wrong in declaring Luc Sante the wrong guy for the job. Unlike Adam Gopnik’s PKD takedown in the New Yorker (or, for that matter, much of the NYTBR‘s dismissive posturing against genre and other types of books that are perhaps “not literary enough”), Sante, with this piece, actually offers something that one doesn’t often find in a weekly book review section, particularly one as airless as Tanenhaus’s lead balloon: namely, a comparative analysis of multiple texts, an effort to understand how Kerouac — both the writer and the legend — came to be, and the circumstances which caused this book to be written. In other words, even if, as Levi suggests, Sante had only a modest passion for Kerouac going into the piece, unlike Gopnik, he went out of his way to understand its mechanics and its place. I hope we’ll see more pieces like this from the otherwise flaccid NYTBR, if only because it could really use some flaxseed right about now.
And in other literary woos to weekly book reviews, the LATBR has successfully courted Lionel Shriver to its pages. Shriver examines Amy Bloom’s Away, tying that novel in with Philippe Vasset.
This week, at the Litblog Co-Op, the folks are discussing Matthew Sharpe’s fantastic novel, Jamestown. There will also be a podcast interview unveiled on Friday, as well as two additional podcasts: (1) the fourth and final podcast in our Authors Named Kate series and (2) a lengthy interview with a man who is funnier than you might think involving coats, blankets, Belgian magnates, cigarettes, and an interesting association posited by Ed Park (and answered!). The latter podcast also involves this author and Our Young, Roving Correspondent getting kicked out of a hotel bar midway through the interview. Stay tuned.
C. Max Magee — who is now once again balder than me — goes Hollywood — or, perhaps more accurately, its literary equivalent. But if NPR truly is that comparably glitzy valley where all cultural figures go to be lionized, I want to know when we’ll start seeing the high-priced callgirls and strung-out heroin addicts that come with the territory. Thankfully, Mr. Magee is neither a high-priced callgirl nor a heroin addict. But to prevent him from getting too smug (not that he would or anything, but it’s good to have insurance), I’ve arranged several packages of humble pie to be delivered on Tuesday morning.
In response to Dan Green: Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country is a fantastic (if flawed) novel precisely because there is no direct parallel between the events of the divorce and 9/11. In juxtaposing the WTC against the divorce, is it not possible that Kalfus is — at least as I read it — taking the piss out of anyone who attempts to draw a direct parallel between life and history or who clutches onto 9/11 like a bright orange life preserver preventing them from embracing life’s choppy waters? Sure, all of you hipsters are looking to Gary Shteyngart as the guy who might be “the next Vonnegut,” a strange term that I have heard in certain circles no less than twelve times in the past four days. Okay, that’s fine. But while Shteyngart certainly brings great talent to the table, it is Ken Kalfus who goes that necessary extra step further in our current literary age and who offers a very necessary kick in the ass towards conventional reader interpretations. Let me put it this way: Disorder so thoroughly wowed me with its bawdiness and its gleefully caustic tone that Kalfus immediately bumped himself up to one of those authors whose every volume I would read upon publication. Just so I can watch where he’ll go.
Sarah answers the question that every mystery reader has been wanting to know: Where did Marilyn Stasio come from? Not surprisingly, there was a time in Stasio’s career in which she still had a bit of piss and vinegar. Regrettably, that epoch seems to be over.
I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree less. I’m into subject-verb agreement, but when it comes to silly idioms, it’s something of a mess.
Is James Wood “brutal?” There’s been a lengthy post on the subject of literary criticism sitting in my drafts folder for quite some time. But I look forward to reading Garth’s promised essay.