- Salon’s Allen Barra believes that Point to Point Navigation is merely a irrelevant rehash of old ideas.
- Terrible news from Philadelphia: anywhere between 68 to 71 staffers have been laid off from the Inquirer, possibly more. To my knowledge, the layoff list has not been made public yet. Hang in there, Frank and do stop by at Books Inq. to wish the hard-working Books team some well-deserved support. Given the circumstances, I hope everyone emerges out of this as unscathed as possible.
- Need to step behind the beady curtain and get your Gatsby fix? Yardley and Sarvas are your well-hung men.
- For those who have expressed horror that Bat Segundo would get involved with Nina Hartley, rest assured that we’ll be classing up the joint in a few days. Keep watching the airwaves.
- Justine Larbelestier on paragraphs.
- Amerdeep Singh examines the effects of shifting the MLA to the first week of January.
- The band Seven Seconds of Love is upset at Coca-Cola for pilfering their dance moves for a commercial.
- RIP Philippa Pearce.
- RIP Tillie Olsen. The Bluestalking Reader has more.
- Micawber Books, the Princeton bookstore, has closed. The owner, Logan Fox is upset that movies and television shows have replaced books as cultural cocktail party banter.
- One would presume that the Judith Regan story was as dead as the dodo, but not for Kimberly Maul, who, dredging for desperate controversy, reports that a temp claims Regan didn’t make the crazed anti-Semitic remarks on the phone. Right. Because we all know that temps are the most indispensable and highly regarded employees in the office. And we all know that this temp followed Regan everywhere during her one week of employment. Come on, Ms. Maul, it ain’t that slow a news day.
- Jerome Weeks responds to recent arts coverage changes at the Dallas Morning News, observing, “The problem for newspaper arts coverage has little to do with editors’ fears of cultural ignorance or what readers want. The problem has to do with the fact that local arts (and book publishing) do not generate much ad revenue. That might explain why the only critic that the DaMN is currently replacing with someone actually in town is — the restaurant critic. Restaurants provide ad revenue.” I’m not sure if I entirely buy this. Are we to assume that arts coverage readers don’t eat or purchase products aside from books?
- Kassia Krozser on book price fluctuations.
- 50 Cent has set himself a new goal: “the top of the literary world.” So does this mean that we’ll see an alliance between Nas, Jadakiss and Norman Mailer? We haven’t seen a literary feud for a while and I suspect that 50 might be just the man to get one going again, gangsta style.
- Tibor Fischer on Hannibal Rising.
- Vendela Vida is A-List? Who knew?
- Don’t miss Darby Dixon’s “Books I Failed to Read in 2006.”
- The Jack Vance Treasury!
Month / January 2007
“Against the Day” Roundtable, Part Two
[VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: In case it wasn’t clear, the Quite Balding Moderator wishes to note that this post came from the mordant wit of Carolyn Kellogg and not from his dunder-soaked head.]
[IMPORTANT NOTE (Not as Important as the First, But Important Nonetheless): The discussion can also be followed at Metaxucafe. Previous installments: Part One (Max) and Part Three (Megan).]
And so the New Chums of Chance continued their great rightward list (as opposed to Danielewski’s leftwrist twist) through the mammoth volume, still finding accommodations in Part One although undaunted by Messr. Pynchon’s dutiful chronicling and celeritous introduction of characters, some logged in history books and others escaping scholarly notice. Then the moment arrived in which Captain Carolyn Kellogg remarked upon Mr. Clarke’s findings — as it turns out, in many guises herself:
Big thanks to Max for parsing Part 1 so effectively. He does a great job as a reader of Pynchon. But as a currently-enrolled MFA student, I couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if Pynchon tried to bring this to workshop….
Tom Pynchon: OK, guys, this is Part One of my novel-in-progress. It’s called Against the Day. I’ll be quiet now and let you discuss.
Cranky MFAer: Part 1! This is 119 pages—and it’s single spaced. We’re supposed to go double-spaced. And our max is 30.
Professor: OK, I know it’s long, but let’s talk about what’s here.
Chirpy MFAer: I really liked the description! But I was … kinda confused.
Helpful MFAer: Yeah, Tom? I counted and you have, like, 60 characters in 119 pages. People can’t keep track of that many characters. How about 5? Five characters? Maybe 7? Then we could figure out who is who.
Echoey MFAer: Exactly! Like, Scarsdale Vibe is the bad guy, right? But why does he need a sidekick? And you know, everyone has a sidekick? You could really pare down if you got rid of the sidekicks.
Wrong Track MFAer: I don’t mind the sidekicks, but these Chums of Chance leading everything off made me think you were writing some meta comic book. They were funny, but if you want the book to have, you know, weight, you need to signal that up front. Instead of a dirigble, maybe they should be flying something more—threatening, like a military plane. Or maybe instead of a naked lady running around below them, it should be the scientists talking about the math that you’ve put in later.
Chirpy MFAer: About the science stuff? That left me really confused. Like, is it real or fiction? Am I supposed to Google it or something?
Cranky MFAer: Yeah, you’re asking a lot of your readers. If you want them to look stuff up. Or know stuff.
Echoey MFAer: Right? Like, Chicago World’s Fair, am I supposed to know when that was? Because I get that it’s a big fair, but I don’t know if it was back in the 1980s or 1950s or what.
Wrong Track MFAer: I looked it up—it was 1893. But how are we supposed to know this from the text? Maybe you could have a billboard or something that advertises, like, Introducing the New 1893 Coca-Cola! I mean, I don’t know if there was Coke then, but are we supposed to figure out the date by just trains and a haberdashery? Or know about World’s Fairs? Because that’s pretty arcane.
Chirpy MFAer: Can we talk about the science stuff? Because I didn’t get it at all.
Helpful MFAer: I don’t know if I needed to get all the science, and that was OK with me. But I kept looking for plot. Like, where is it? At first I thought it was the Chums of Chance’s mission, then I thought it was going to follow that little girl Dahlia, then I thought it was going to have something to do with Scarsdale Vibe and Tesla, and then there was this Webb Traverse guy blowing something up …. that’s like 5 books. It’s too much. To make this one book you need less—a lot less.
Tom: Um, can I say something?
Professor: Yes, Tom. That would be a change.
Tom: Well, this is only about the first tenth of the novel. I mean, there’s a lot more to come, not less. More characters, more plots, a lot more science, and yes, they all kind of ebb and flow, but the answers won’t be in part one ….
Tom is drowned out by cries of “How long?” “More characters?” “I don’t get the science at all!” etc. etc. And never returns to workshop—or public, for that matter—again.
I’m a new—and believe it or not, enthusiastic—MFA student, so I couldn’t help but read this thinking that a workshop would hate it. Pynchon does so many things that are verboten in writing class. He writes long. He writes complicated and dense as hell. Part 1 is comprehensible, but only in retrospect, really. Keeping track of characters and significant details as you go is near impossible: yet a careless ice cream on page 89 winds up having relevance hundreds of pages later. As Max said, the only way (that works for me) is to let the book wash over you and then go back to paddle around a bit.
And for my part, I promise more detailed paddling for Part 2. Which is when my reading-with-post-its really took hold.
In Washington, Every Generalization Under the Sun
Let us stipulate that rinky-dink columnists can be divided into three categories. At the top are Jimmy Breslin (not yet dead, but not currently writing a column) and Hunter S. Thompson (dead, but did he really write a column?) — who write well-crafted, uncompromising essays that the many hacks who now occupy cramped cubicles couldn’t come close to even if .41 Derringers were pointed at their cantaloupes — straight, no chaser. At the other extreme we have hacks — no names here, because I’m a spineless and dishonest turd and quite likely one of these unnamed hacks myself for being so goddam prolific and having an email address named mondaylosers@aol.com — who write what can be charitably called bullshit, deliberately dumb articles laced with generalizations and gimmicks (such as jejune taxonomies and dash-laden sentences) because if they turn in a column, they’ll lose their precious berth even if what they write has little to do with the real world. In between, we have writers of many types which I won’t identify, because it would be a little bit like showing a pornographic film to a small child.
And then there’s Patrick Anderson, a man who I suspect is quite humorless, who won’t comprehend the timbre of this clearly satirical post, and lost his ratiocination skills sometime in the late 1970s. It’s safe to say that this book reviewing savant can be classified in one of the three categories mentioned above. But since I’m a litblogger who doesn’t talk down to his readers, I’ll let you decide which tier Mr. Anderson belongs to.
Adapt or Perish, Mr. Stein. Op-Ed Columnists Are a Dime a Dozen These Days.
Joel Stein: “Don’t e-mail me….Here’s what my Internet-fearing editors have failed to understand: I don’t want to talk to you; I want to talk at you. A column is not my attempt to engage in a conversation with you. I have more than enough people to converse with. And I don’t listen to them either. That sound on the phone, Mom, is me typing.”