Roundup
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on June 26, 2008
Filed Under Roundup, Uncategorized
- Within blocks of my apartment, there is a dumpster serving as a veritable buffet for vermin. Last night, while walking home, I observed the most corpulent rat I have ever seen. It was nearly the size of a medium-sized cat with a swirling tail nearly a foot long. Its belly was so large that it could not even scamper properly. It was reduced to a slight kangaroo hop on its hind legs. Its gait reminded me of Leroy Anderson’s “Plink, Plank, Plunk.” A typical New York sight. But what amused me was the unknowing film crew that had set up a craft services table within five feet of this dumpster the next afternoon. Someone — presumably the property owner — had cleaned up this rat haven in the morning, making it look as if the trash was picked up nightly. I also know that a restaurant operates almost adjacent to this dumpster. Nice folks, but they’ve told me that they don’t have insurance. And I am understandably reluctant to eat there. This question of proximity has me pondering just how much we might be sharing our meals with the rats in this fantastic filthy city.
- Tao Lin wants his next novel to be like a 10-piece chicken nugget meal. There are two novels I’m working on right now. It is now quite a race to see which one will cross the finish line first. If I had to offer a dining metaphor for my own work, one is like a series of hastily made peanut butter sandwiches that are wolfed down under trying circumstances in the middle of the night, with the fridge light flickering and the possibility of the gas being shut off. The other is a collection of variegated brunches that I hope will cause the diners to appreciate the food they’re enjoying and the circumstances they were prepared under.
- Ian Rankin, what a dick. (via Bookninja)
- It seems that Jon Krakauer has cracked over his forthcoming book, The Hero. Unhappy with the manuscript, Krakauer is holding onto it, sleeping with it, feeding in formula, waiting for the words to goo-goo back at him and comfort him in the middle of the night. I won’t let you go! We’ll be together FOREVER! I’ll protect you from those foster parents at Doubleday! You won’t end up a latch key kid, manuscript. I’ll be the bestest daddy you ever had! Let the state try and take you away! They’ll throw me in jail before I relinquish you, my darling darling manuscript!
- It’s fascinating to see that Richard Eder’s review of Albert Camus’s most recently translated final notebook — something you’d think was a shoe-in for the Sunday section — can now only find life in the daily New York Times.
- If Ian McEwan’s recent outburst is an effort to deflect blows from buddy Martin Amis, it’s a disastrous tactic.
- There’s an intriguing-looking BBC1 documentary attempting to search for Murakami. But it wasn’t much of a search. Murakami showed up rather quickly and didn’t scamper away. I feel cheated and I haven’t even seen the film. Considering the promise, one hopes for a diligent search, an overturning of rocks, an unexpected insight into the man in question. Could it be that the majority of BBC1 arts producers wish to make the literary equivalent of a hunt for lost keys the stuff of dubious import?
- The self-published author J.D. Sousa has an odd plan. If he gets his book into Blockbuster stores, enough people will buy it. By some strange magic, it will be turned into a Hollywood movie. I don’t know if Sousa is fully informed of the shift in the last few years to VOD and DVD rentals by mail. And do Hollywood producers really hang out in Blockbuster? But he is selling one or two books a day at various stores. Sousa’s march may not have the gangbusters quality of a Starbucks Book Tour, but I can certainly see a future in which authors and publishers initiate more exclusive chain store distribution methods.
- Fritz Lanham seems convinced that Hitchen’s thesis about funny women is wrong in Texas.
- I haven’t read Michael Ian Black’s book, but I’m almost ready to support his campaign to defeat David Sedaris. Sedaris no longer has any interesting personal experiences to mine for his essays, and he hasn’t been funny in years. What prevents me from full partisanship here is Black playing things too safe. I want devastating vivisections of Sedaris’s prose. I want pugilism. If Black wants to do this, then he needs to go whole hog. He needs to earn this. Lukewarm challenges might win points at the PTA meeting. But this is New York, dammit. And if Black must pull his punches, to evoke Axl Rose’s immortal wisdom, get in the ring motherfucker and I’ll kick your bitchy little ass.
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
From the second article you link on the Amis (now Amis-McEwan) affair:
“Martin Amis, the novelist whom McEwan was defending, found himself in hot water when he published an essay in which he wondered whether Muslims should be prevented from traveling and even deported.”
Bearing in mind that propaganda is the art of half-truths: Martin Amis published no such essay; the remarks were made in an interview with Ginny Dougary for the Times Online, Sept. 2006.
It was an extreme remark that he has apologized for and retracted, but the remark was never about his purported “racial” hatred for Muslims, but his anger at what he perceived as tacit support in the UK’s Muslim community for the 7/7 bombers.
Re: Krakauer (who I haven’t read) — It takes some guts to do that. If only other big-name authors would occasionally do the same when their manuscripts haven’t yet come together. I don’t remember anyone grousing when Michael Chabon took that extra year or so to finish a new version of Yiddish Policeman.