AUTHORS: Do You Have What It Takes?

It’s the ultimate reality series, the ultimate game show and the ultimate half-hour of intriguing storylines. The Ultimate Author is an awesome television program packed with entertaining, engaging and interesting events. Each week, contestants go toe-to-toe in a writing competition that tests their ability to develop attention-grabbing content.

Casting Call: June 16, 2007. Fort Lauderdale, FL.

[via gawker.]

Someone invited me to this thing called “Good Reads.”

My profile is here.

I reviewed my own book, EEEEE EEE EEEE.

I reviewed almost every book I like.

They link to places like Amazon to buy books from.

You can go to other places though.

The cash is in your hands.

The choice is yours.

McNally Robinson ships any book anywhere in the world.

I will give you some advice now.

Some practical advice to actualize your liberal politics in concrete reality.

1. To get free books go to your pile of books, in your room, and pick up an Amy Tan book, in your hands, bring it to Barnes and Noble or Border’s, and exchange it for a book by an independent press.

2. If an author you like is reading at Barnes and Noble or Borders and you want to give them your book, that you wrote, go to the bookshelf in the store, take the book, in your hand, write a note in it, then bring it to the author who is reading who you like, and give it to him or her.

Barnes and Nobles in NYC, and probably in other places, don’t have tags in the books, but I think Borders has tags in some books. You can just flip through the book and find it though, and take it out, and put it on somewhere else.

Go to Good Reads and be my friend and read my reviews.

I reviewed Noah Cicero, Lorrie Moore, Joy Williams, Richard Yates, Lydia Davis, Matthew Rohrer, Jean Rhys, Ann Beattie, Todd Hasak-Lowy, Bobbie Ann Mason, Kobo Abe, Celia Farber, Peter Singer, Mary Robison, and some other people.

The Bat Segundo Show #49

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Author: Dave King

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Unknown, replaced temporarily by a shady documentary producer fulfilling a contractual obligation.

Subjects Discussed: Modeling, painting, making a transition to writing, ambition, disabilities, self-help, italicized words, iambic pentameter, sincerity in an age of literary realism, Richard Yates, the early ending to The Ha-Ha, getting The Ha-Ha published, Vietnam and war, Tim O’Brien, cities as reference points, conformity vs. uniqueness, sincere language co-opted by Hallmark, Matthew Sharp, the semantics of symbolism, Americans and passports, on being skeptical about self-improvement, A Clockwork Orange, Akiva Goldsman and the Ha-Ha film adaptation.

Another Tragic Biography?

Blake Bailey, the author of the Richard Yates A Tragic Honesty who inspired a drinking game here earlier in the year, has a new John Cheever biography coming out. The Boston Globe caught up with Bailey. Thanks to a $42,000 Guggenheim fellowship, Bailey says he plans to spend the next two years explaining how Cheever arrived at his tombstone. (Bailey has until December 2007 to deliver the manuscript.) Which suggests an equally arduous and equally moribund biography of another great writer. But Bailey says that he plans to approach Cheever’s life as “a redemptive fable.” Bailey has already talked to half of his 150 sources and read all 28 volumes of Cheever’s private journals.

The Blake Bailey Drinking Game

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

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

Drink if:

Product Placement in Fiction

I’m not completely against describing products and cultural minutiae in fiction, but I have a distinct problem with the way Tricia Sullivan does it in Maul. This fascinating novel, an interesting cross between hard science fiction, riot grrls gone wild and cyberpunk which has yet to pick up a U.S. publisher, deals with a two-strand narrative. In the distant future, a Y-virus has wiped out nearly every male on the planet, leaving male clones (taken from existing tissue) to carry out a simulated program that involves teenage girls battling in a mall. Sullivan’s novel is stacked to the nines with ideas. In fact, as if channeling Kathy Acker’s ghost, it opens daringly with a girl masturbating with a gun and somehow manages to elude heavy-handedness. It’s truly the work of a writer to watch.

However, Sullivan’s too obsessed with girls wearing Red Hot Chilli Peppers T-shirts or handing over a Snapple. Okay, Tricia, we get the consumerist angle. It’s clear enough by the title. But why would Sullivan choose bands like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers who have long lost their lustre in the present among the teenage crowd. Why not take a speculative fiction environment and create brand new companies? Isn’t that a good deal more fun?

But even more infuriating is how these pop cultural asides get in the way of Sullivan’s fascinating effort to explore feminism. The product concentration detracts from the intellectual expose and dates the book almost instantly. Which is interesting because it was published in 2003.

Conversely, Richard Yates’ fiction (which I’ve finally begun reading after Lizzie threatened to have several Young Republicans remove one of my testicles) hasn’t dated at all. Even a story like “A Glutton for Punishment,” which deals with a 1960s-1970s corporate environment (and should date), still packs an emotional punch, while achieving a startling purity. I suspect that it’s because Yates avoids product placement and uses sparse terminology (”cubicle” is mentioned once) to describe his environments. He is more concerned with what a character is feeling, the look on another person’s place, the heat of a room, etc.

I used to believe that this so-called literary product placement was of value in fiction. The immediate example that came to mind was an image from a Stephen King novel that I can’t immediately recall: something along the lines of a Skippy peanut butter jar filled with coins. The image’s startling presence, however, has more to do with the effort to remove all the peanut butter from a jar and use it as a piggy bank.

The problem with using brands as shorthand for character attributes is that, when we’re considering the perseverance of fiction, today’s telltale brand could be tomorrow’s failure. (Who can’t chuckle at the Pam Am flight seen in 2001, which immediately undermines its future?) I’m inclined to believe that unless fiction involves a specific time and place, on the whole, brands really don’t belong in literature.