On this blog, if I read an author and I think that the author in question is the cat’s pajamas, I can instantly declare this to an audience. The approbation may be fleeting. It may not be quite thought out. But it does represent the current moment. It does signal a natural reaction. This is not so much the case with a newspaper. If I am commissioned to write a review, I am forced to withhold my enthusiasm for an author until the review runs, or perhaps allude to the author’s considerable worth in an oblique manner. There is indeed a tradeoff here. Many newspapers, for understandable ethical reasons, don’t want authors or publishers to know precisely how reviewers feel about a particular book in advance. But the editors can help me to shape a piece or demand more of me (knowing full well that I have a tremendous work ethic) and, since it is a professional gig, my work ethic compels me to write at peak form. Alas, the conundrum remains. There is one such author I wish I could tell you about, but I cannot right now, but will elsewhere. And so my lips remain tight. But I do intend to check out this author’s backlist. Perhaps the immediacy I wish for now in the present can be atoned somewhat by this future dip into the past. I am sure that other reviewers have this problem. I am sure that the declining level of passion seen in certain reviewers I could name, but won’t, is largely because the journalism game demands that something so innately joyful, such as enthusiasm for a book, must be curtailed. Which is a bit like demanding that one withhold a giddy scream while throttling over the hump of a rollercoaster. Humans aren’t in the habit of doing this. Not unless they are also in the habit of always keeping the top button of their shirt fastened. (Aside: It should be noted that Nixon jogged in a shirt and tie. Yes, he actually exercised this way. And yet it is the famous photo of Lyndon Johnson pulling the ears of his dog that makes Johnson seem more of a scoundrel by comparison, if we use just these two examples. And while LBJ was in many ways an SOB for other reasons, I think it could be sufficiently argued that Nixon’s devotion to daily exercise is equally inhuman, perhaps more so. Which is not to compare literary people to U.S. Presidents, but to suggest a finer point about how we judge the inhuman nature of people by certain qualifying factors that involve others.) (Another aside: I wrote this paragraph before stumbling upon Wyatt Mason’s blog post concerning enthusiasm and reviews, which also has a few interesting thoughts on this dilemma — albeit not pertaining to the instant visceral response I am trying to describe.)
This post was intended as a roundup, but I see that it has transformed momentarily into something else. Were I employed as a USA Today copy editor, I would not have allowed this headline to pass. I would have demanded more wordplay in the headline. I would have spent thirty minutes attempting to persuade someone that this was an insufficient headline that didn’t perform complete justice to the presented possibility. We are told that Meyer’s fans “light up.” But while fans, meaning those on a literal level who are acolytes, certainly do “light up,” if we consider a double meaning, fans are not in the habit of “lighting up.” Perhaps they might “whirl” over the saga’s end. I could live with that. But I presume “light up” was settled upon because some member of the top brass did not wish to offend the devoted Meyerites. There are indeed comments on this article. And someone at USA Today is obviously employed to moderate these comments. So perhaps “light up” was settled upon to save the moderator some work. In the end, the headline suffers. And I can only hope that the people at USA Today put some more thought into their headlines in the future.
James Miller is causing something of a stir across the pond. I’m becoming a bit suspicious of novels that concern themselves with privileged children or adolescent wunderkinds or behavioral generalizations that stem from such topics. Personally, I’m fascinated by the kind little girl who lives on the first floor of my apartment building. She spends her summer days looking outside the window, clearly fascinated by every observational possibility. She says hello to everybody. And we all say hello back. She enjoys this. And yet because we’re all in a rush, we don’t stop to ask her what her name is or why she is so drawn to the window. That sense of kindness and curiosity is considerably more interesting to me than another hackneyed variation on how today’s emerging youth want this or demand that. Let us consider Miller’s hasty generalization: “They feel powerful playing those games, because in real life they feel powerless. One 12-year-old girl I taught was an advanced wizard in the World of Warcraft, who would trounce adults in magic battles.” The subscriber base for World of Warcraft is estimated to be somewhere in the area of 16 million. But while this is certainly a large number, there are 73.7 million children in the United States alone. If we assume all Warcraft players to be children (which is folly, but provides us with a working statistic to put Miller’s generalization into perspective), then what of the 80% who don’t play Warcraft? What of those who prefer to spend their time looking out the window? This may sound like some overly sincere A Tree Grows in Brooklyn premise, but it does nevertheless offer a less premeditated starting point with greater possibilities than Miller’s overly simplistic viewpoint. All one has to do is start asking questions.
Forget quotidian hazards such as beer and hot fudge sundaes. Email is the new peril. I do not know anyone who has personally died from email. But it is possible to keep up. Particularly if you type at a very high speed. I am not as efficacious as I’d like to be with my Yahoo account, in part because this represents a secondary account. But I do respond to just about every email on the main one. Of course, I’m also unafraid to respond at extremely strange hours. The way around email, of course, is to kill about 20 emails with one two-minute phone call. But then people are also terrified of picking up the phone. I do not believe that a 1,500 word article on the subject was necessary. At least not with this “email is the new ebola” angle. It is, oddly enough, just as troublesome as a rambling 1,500 word email (and I sometimes write these; I apologize; I am only responding). But then the nice thing about a silly article like this is that you don’t have to hit the reply button. (via The Book Publicity Blog)
And now another conservative has written a book bemoaning hip-hop, suggesting that it cannot affect social change. This is mostly true, but I believe that this misses the point of hip-hop. I find myself more in Michael Eric Dyson’s camp. Why can’t pop music also serve as social criticism? Pop music can certainly serve as a weapon. Consider the relentless music used to torture Abu Ghraib prisoners and the hard rock employed to smoke out Manuel Noriega.
This is not the way to make poetry accessible for Web 2.0. This looks like it was made by a 15-year-old who has just discovered After Effects, with Lemm Sissay resembling a man who has spent the last two decades pining desperately for a small role in an Antonioni film. Too bad Antonioni’s dead.
The question of whether it is really that late is, of course, determined by what you consider to be late.
It is late. Later than it should be. Later than when I had started. Later than I anticipated it to be. There is work to do. And this will mean sleeping less, so that I will not be late on other things. To bring this roundup full circle to the initial question, perhaps staying up late is comparable to Nixon jogging in his shirt and tie, while turning in work late is the equivalent of LBJ pulling the ears of his dog. It’s all in the angle.
If anti-Obama books are the new bestsellers, I intend to write an anti-bestseller that is the new literary Obama. The novel will presented with a hopeful corona, keeping you spellbound in its initial narrative campaign, only to betray you midway through with shameful appeals that confirm the prejudgments of literary cynics. But since you’ve read this far into the book, you’re obliged to go the distance. Even though you’ve realized that the book in question is just another pandering novel. (And perhaps this type of book may be close to what Wyatt Mason describes.) I do not know if anyone can make money from an anti-bestseller structured along these lines, but if someone can make a persuasive case that one can, I may commit a modicum of labor for such a narrative experiment. (Latter link via The Publishing Spot)
I’m with Matthew Tiffany on this: This has to be one of the most appalling literary interviews I’ve read in a while. Who is Drew Nellins? And why is he wasting Chris Adrian’s time? One could easily obtain more substance from a telemarketer trying to sell you a $16.99 delicacy, with dung and a chickenhawk’s cloaca listed as the main ingredients, shipped third-class from an island nation that you’ve never heard of, than the hopeless results emerging from Nellins’s bradykinetic four-lobe throttling pattern. Step it up, Mr. Nellins. Intelligence will be rewarded, but slum it at your own peril. This has been a shot across the bow.
Solzhenitsyn has kicked the bucket, traveling to that great gulag in the sky. That is, if you believe in that stuff. I’ll give him “One Day” and Cancer Ward to some extent, but I never quite took to Archipelago. Thought Gulag was turgid stuff that preached to the converted. (Explain yourself at length! Well, maybe one day.) Then again, I’m one of those odd readers who looks to the text, rather than an author’s miserable experience, for merit. The biggest upset here is that nobody thought to book Solzhenitsyn and Elie Wiesel for some demented pay-per-view boxing match.
Warren Ellis on the reality of SF magazines. Much of this, I suspect, has to do with the graying of science fiction fans. Or rather the graying of austere acolytes hostile to emerging voices and pining for hard science fiction the way that the rest of us look for a grand cross between Kierkegaard and a roller coaster. Don’t worry. The dour codgers will die off eventually, their unsmiling lips tarnished with talcum and a mortician’s assiduous cover. Unfortunately, Ellis is right. There are few ebullient pubs that will pick up the slack in print. Maybe if Gordon Van Gelder submits to disemvoweling, there might be some hope for tomorrow’s speculative Coovers, if only by accident.
What the hell? Ed’s writing something positive about the New York Times? Yes indeed. And I should also point out that I absolutely loved the theme for Sunday’s crossword too! I mean, that kind of wordplay takes an adept hand, depth and wit, if I do say so myself.
Hitotoki, which merges fiction with a Google Maps-like interface, has unveiled a Paris version. This website seems to me a more purposeful use of location than the steady stream of middling noir books (Wichita Noir! Peoria Noir!) from Akashic, where rough and tough regional voices who have gritty things to say about the cities they know have been overlooked by “literary” names who not only lack a feel and understanding for these locations, but who are not familiar with the most elementary components of genre. Then again, when one considers the collective hubris of Johnny Temple, a snotty dunderhead more resembling Bernard Black than Frank Black who wears the constant look of a man incapable of balancing his checkbook, and Johanna Ingalls, a dour and humorless shrew as ungrateful as a Williamsburg hipster, one is not surprised by this onslaught of mediocrity. Oh well. At least this insufferable duo publishes Elizabeth Crane and Joe Meno. Too bad they can’t be bothered to maintain the most elementary professionalism, which one finds from smarter indie houses.
Now wait just a minute here! We’re not supposed to speak ill of the indies! The indies represent a true alternative to the corporate oligarchy that controls the publishing industry. Well, yes and no. Let us not forget that the publishing industry is a business, and that indies need to generate revenue just as much as the majors. Recall the AMS bankruptcy snafu of early 2007. The indie publishers did not control the cards. The distributor did. Indeed, AMS was unable to pay monies due to many of the publishers. Books in production had to be repackaged so that the books could sell. And while Jonathan Karp was forced to confess that indies have access to the same resources as the big boys, and that non-generic books were the wave of the future, the ability of major publishers to distribute books far and wide that keeps them ahead of the game. And the indie reliance on tenuous distribution might just have an effect sometimes on their ostensible iconoclasm. One must not necessarily judge a book by its publisher, for all publishers are beholden to the invisible thumb.
One can have no privacy on Twitter anymore. When big publishers begin to follow your ostensibly “private” thoughts and little personal asides, the time has come to abandon Twitter. So no mas for me! It was fun while it lasted though!
What a load of fucking nonsense. One of the thing that distinguishes “fucking” as an adverb (and you’ll get no asterisks here from me in discussing the words; I trust readers to be adult — well, mostly adult — about cunning lingua franca) is the magical manner that it stands out without that “-ly” (in Middle English, it was “-lich(e)”) just before a modifier. English speakers, recognizing the innate dissonance of of “fucking” and “ly,” rejected “fucking”‘s deployment in our vernacular as a typical adjective converted to an adverb. Perhaps because “fucking” serves as a kind of spoken forbidden fruit, there was some compulsion to make it slightly idiosyncratic. Roy F. (“Fucking” or “Fuckingly?”) Baumeister misses the important fact that the English language is often quite flexible about converted adverbs. We can use adjectives like “slow” or “quick” and say or write that we “drove slow” or “drove slowly.” Both are acceptable adverbs and both are, suffice to say, without suffixes! Indeed, Baumeister is so unimaginative about adverbs that he hasn’t even considered the more intriguing “fuckwise” as an adverb: “fuck” as a noun and the suffix “-wise.” “Fuckwise ridiculous” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, but it’s certainly more interesting than “fuckingly ridiculous.” But maybe there’s an adverbial application for “fuckwise” at the end of a sentence. “I was in a fucking huff” is okay. But “I was in a huff fuckwise” does not. Perhaps one should accept no substitute for “fucking.” Nevertheless, I will attempt to find usage for “fuckwise” in future posts.
Giles Coren is an angry man. And his fury is focused on the elision of an indefinite article in one of his articles. I do not know whether or not Coren is currently enrolled in an anger management program, but I certainly trust this man to drive a cab in Manhattan.
I’m skeptical about the two guys replacing Ebert and The Spastic Chipmunk Who Was Never One Tenth As Good as Siskel But Who Cannot Be Named Here.
Jenny Diski on sleep. I can only speak for myself, but dreams are a vital part of who I am. They unveil my inner prevaricator, cause me to dwell on fears and perversities that I sometimes choose not to discuss with others, and force me to reconsider why I glue together needless shards of propriety atop the ever-shifting china of the real. Dreams are certainly the most unreliable and fragmented of memories. They suggest for many minutes that they are real and they are often so persuasive that you must engage in something truly banal (making coffee, brushing teeth) in order to take in as many details as you can, which depart from your head like a train leaving a Roman depot in 1930. The dreams cannot be trusted, and yet they must be trusted. I sometimes forget about the wild and fierce qualities of my imagination, and I am reminded of where I sometimes do not go and must go because of a dream. Once some rational awareness has kicked in and I am fully ensconced in the waking world, I know that the dreams are not real. But I am also aware that the natural anarchy of the real has just had yet another barrier removed. So thank you, noggin, for the Kafkaesque nightmares, the great epics in which I fight off insect armies armed with ping pong balls, the talking buildings, the giant nostrils, the strange sounds, the amazing orgies, and the really crazy taboo-breaking stuff. There have been many wonderful mornings in which I’ve questioned my own sanity and become determined to paint more frequently outside the lines.
The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit asks if Comic-Con’s geek chic is fading, pointing to appearances by Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. But what he really needs to understand right now is that geeks are the mainstream. If the $300 million that The Dark Knight claimed in the past week didn’t make this clear, then I don’t know what will. It’s quite likely that Hilton and Kardashian are heading to Comic-Con because, well, that’s where it’s at. They may have heard something about a save throw being a cant term for riches and opportunity. And frankly the notion of a Stormtrooper informing these party girls of certain geeky thrusting advantages and getting lucky while clad in full Lucasfilm-approved regalia amuses the shit out of me. For those of us who have been geeks all along, I suppose this is all a bit confusing. Suddenly, we’re a damn demographic? Suddenly, we’re being scouted? But have no fear, geeks. There will come a time in about five years when we’ll be as despised as we were fifteen years ago. Trends change. The way I see it, right now, geeks are about where hippies were circa 1968. Instead of the record labels scooping up the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and hoping to cash in, the movie companies are scooping up anything that might carry a similar imprimatur on the comics front. Rest assured, there will be disillusion. Perhaps a geek version of Altamont that could prove deadly. And if that happens, well, say hello to a decade (perhaps the 2010s?) that will make all the bad stylistic decisions of the 1970s look like art nouveau. Honestly, the best thing to do is to enjoy this little fiesta while it lasts. And if things get too mainstream, well, there’s still plenty of crazed subcultures to join or form. (via The Beat)
For those who are keeping up with this James Wood silliness (which still has little to do with the book in question and still suggests to me that a People cover may not be as crazed a notion as conjectured yesterday), James Wood has now responded to Leon Neyfakh. Will Nikki Finke get in on this action?
I don’t really find all the summer romance titles particularly silly, but I certainly find Cathy Horyn’s attempt to understand a fairly predictable trend extremely silly. Consider these extraordinary sentences. “There is no question that certain brands, like certain summer resorts, have a talismanic effect.” “But this summer’s brand-flogging novels also reveal a kind of empty clink at the bottom of fashion’s well.” Fashion & Style, in case you were wondering, I can write sentences that are even more preposterous than this, and I can style them as acrostics and can figure out a way to tie Ralph Lauren and Wittgenstein together.
The cure to this (pretty clear, but not officially recognized) recession? Sure as fuck not the Recession Special at Gray’s Papaya, which I made the mistake of trying out tonight. (Hey, I was desperate.) But perhaps, just maybe, the giant pork.
Ed Park on The Delighted States: “Some things cannot be blogged about!” Yeah, I’d say that’s the case for me too at the present moment. I hope to atone.
Galactica 1980 is available on Hulu. This is something that requires time I don’t have, lots of beer, and WordPress. Can anyone take up the challenge? (Related to this roundup: “The Return of Starbuck,” the episode commissioned out of desperation to save the flagging series, begins with a horrendous colloquy about whether dreams are significant. Perhaps someone might pay Jenny Diski to make sense of all this.)
All this suggests that I should end this longass roundup with zombie dating. Perhaps, one’s morning erection would be conducive to such rigor mortis scenarios. Perhaps not. This is, just like many other conceptual gimmicks, a simulacrum. One that will give a lonely soul momentary comfort in the night, but will have us crying in the tears of our own desperation in the morning. Why not liberate yourself from the computer, talk to that glorious geek a few feet away, and see where you can go to from there? It seems better to pretend in the bedroom, when there’s a better chance of nabbing even a vicarious piece of ass, then wasting these energies on fantasies that will either (a) not pan out or (b) result in a quite orgasmic Kleenex experience. Not that (b) isn’t so bad. But the unmarked road is sometimes worth traveling.