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.
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.
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.
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.
I am finding that June is making everybody crazy. In some cases, it’s the gas prices and the dawning reality that a vacation involves feeding over a few more twenties into the gas tank. In other cases, it’s the heat or some unanticipated weather. In still more cases, it’s prices rising in general. I am wondering if this is what is likewise causing Hillary supporters to freak out about Obama a week after the latter secured the Democratic election. I am wondering if people are reacting like this because they realize that, in some sense, the world will not change no matter what we do. This is not to suggest that we can’t at least enjoy the grand slide into anarchy. Or that we can’t position ourselves to be somewhere in the future where we can then strike unpredictably for the greater good. Even if nobody sees this coming.
If you missed the news, Rawi Hage won the IMPAC Award. And Nigel Beale has a podcast interview with the man.
Phone sex operators revealed. This fascinating gallery reminds me of the scene in Short Cuts when Jennifer Jason Leigh is changing a diaper while talking dirty into the phone. (via C-Monster)
And the latest on the Sam Zell/Tribune front: Scott C. Smith has stepped down. The memo: “Sam, Randy and I agree it’s time for new leadership to lead the next wave of market driven change in our business.”
At 5:15 AM, the humidity in New York creeps onto your flesh like a warm and stubborn leech you can’t flick off with a sharp knife. All this is to say that one must get up early to get things done. But even then, one understands less within the clarity of a cooler room.
the next night we eat whale. I must say that I was considerably underwhelmed by Tao Lin’s latest collection, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, a book so slim and perfunctory that I finished it in twenty minutes, and I think this YouTube clip reveals why. Tao Lin now wants to play his crowd without putting the time into his work, rather than keep his crowd guessing with more elaborate and iconoclastic poetry. I do think Tao has talent, but the more that he surrounds himself with Tao imitators and people who will be amused by everything he writes and who feed his desire to please others, the lesser he becomes as a writer.
The Rake is back, with an alarming evocation of a writer’s corporate visage.
Black Oak Books on Irving Street wasn’t the greatest bookstore, but I am stunned to hear of its closing. There used to be another used bookstore across the street many years ago, and I’m sad that this stretch of Irving is now without a decent bookstore.
I missed reporting this when the desktop was down, but Jane Friedman is out. Leon Neyfakh observes that Friedman’s resignation was unexpectedly abrupt. More prognostication from Sara Nelson. Were desperate ideas such as Bob Miller’s profit sharing model last-minute factors that Friedman was putting into place to turn around HarperCollins (sales were up, operating profits were down) before Friedman’s contract expired in November? Motoko Rich has done some actual reporting here, pointing out that Friedman was squeezed out by Rupert Murdoch and that the timeline was changed. But it remains unclear just who leaked this to Gawker in the first place.
Jeanette Winterson, Will Self, and Alain de Botton on home. None name-checks Kansas. (via Sarah)
The Washington Postprovides succor for Luc Sante and others on trying to get rid of books. But the article in question doesn’t account for the therapy costs that some sobbing bibliophiles are likely to accrue after days of sobbing. (via Bookslut)
The Onion interviews Harlan Ellison: Part One and Part Two. As usual, he gets a number of things very right and a number of things very wrong.
I have been apprised that the DSL man is coming tomorrow. The current roundup malaise, which is ever so slight, involves a great deal of my possessions in disarray. Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to apply more wit, even though the shaky connection may very well result in an inadvertent capitulation of what I am trying to type.
I see that the Chicago Tribune has shown some good sense by employing one Lizzie Skurnick to limn S.E. Hinton’s oeuvre, sans Michiko’s ungainly verb, while another Lizzie, who answers to the title of books editor, interviews Ms. Hinton as well. However, one very important question has been elided from Ms. Taylor’s queries: What does Ms. Hinton think of Brian Atene’s performance?
A number of bloggers are now tackling Anne of Green Gables. I had no idea that an annotated version existed!
Pinky tempts with this picture of Michael Silverblatt. There are important questions here: Was there audio? What occurred during the inevitable conversation? I understand that there have been many run-ins between a certain Silverblatt impersonator by the name of Tod Goldberg and Mr. Silverblatt himself, but none have been memorialized in audio form. The least one demands from such a meeting of the minds is documentary evidence. Future scholars must know just how much the KCRW vernacular infringes upon the real-life Silverblatt. And if Ms. Kellogg reneged on this historical obligation (as did Mr. Fox with his BEA videos?), then a gross journalistic injustice has almost certainly been committed.
Are BBC stars being paid too much? In the interests of self-preservation, leave it to BBC News to set the record straight. “You recently got married. When did you get married?”“Do you think it’s better than the last series?” That’s right! Such penetrating journalistic insight can be yours for £6 million/year. For the price of Jonathan Ross’s three-year salary, you could feed a great number of homeless people. I would contend that if you were to remove Jonathan Ross from television, the chances are almost certain that very few would notice his absence. Six million sandwiches in one year would make a bigger impact on the landscape than a year’s worth of Jonathan Ross’s insipid questions.
Bob Hoover contends that there’s nothing to get excited about at BEA this year. He suggests that there isn’t a single buzz book — “no frontrunner for the eagerly anticipated novel or sensational memoir.” I must presume that Bob Hoover is no fan of Bolano.
Word has at long last leaked out about David Ulin’s clones. In fact, there are at least six Ulins that I know of. One was actually in Brooklyn over the weekend, helping me move. Another was at a Burbank studio, serving on the panel for the prospective reality television pilot “America’s Next Book Critic.” This leaves two more Ulins that have yet to be accounted for, although a few embarrassing photos have been uploaded to Flickr. What I do know is that Ronald D. Moore was so inspired by the many Ulins that a pivotal storyline in Battlestar Galactica‘s fourth season was drawn from these developments.
YA authors are now demanding seven figure advances. There are even a few unreported requests for manservants, underground seraglios, helper monkeys, football stadium-sized swimming pools for the summer, and only the finest cocaine. These YA authors are not only determined to become very rich, but they hope to flaunt their avarice with all the eclat of a sportscar driving through Detroit. (via Gwenda)
Thanks to some technical trickery, I am now stealing wi-fi on my relocated desktop computer. This casual pilfering should last only a few days, and I have tried to keep this bandwidth theft to a minimum. Which means that email is spotty these days. (I should also point out that I am not really answering email because of this thing called settling in.) But now that we’re all here (or, rather, some of us are here; many are at BEA), let’s get down to business.
Marc Weingarten writes about McSweeney’s, discovering Yannick Murphy and other fine authors two years after everybody else has. For his next piece, Mr. Weingarten will be writing about this really cool new band, LCD Soundsystem!
Jeff points to a bookstore trick now becoming a more increasingly common practice: more bookstores are returning books 90 days before the tab is due.
There is little left to mine, Mr. Sedaris. Please draw your attentions outward and evolve as a writer so that your humor can once again flourish. (via Quill & Quire
Nicholson Baker reviewingin the NYTBR? Has hell frozen over? (Richard Russo and Marisha Pessl are in there too, making me wonder if Dwight Garner is turning the joint into a literary answer to those periodic Battle of the Network Stars specials that once aired on ABC. As it so happens, two of these reviews are quite good. You can probably guess which of the three is written with abject narcissism, instead of insight in mind.