Pete Lit

"This is not the kind of face that inspires confidence in a nervous and jittery stockholder."

The incomparable Groucho Marx penned this great letter in 1961 to the president of Franklin Corporation, of which Groucho had recently became a shareholder.

Mr Roth, Chairman of the Board, merely looks sinister. You, the President, look like a hard worker with not too much on the ball. No one named Prosswimmer can possibly be a success. As for Samuel A. Goldblith, PhD., head of Food Technology at MIT, he looks as though he had eaten too much of the wrong kind of fodder.

Though undoubtedly of the 1%, I'll bet Groucho's sympathies were with the 99% - for the 1%-skewering comic potential, if nothing else.

Boy's gotta have it.

The D.C. writing office of National Geographic's Wade Davis. Just fantastically, impossibly beautiful.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Now at Contrary

My latest piece, "Jane Addams and the snare of preparation", is now up at Contrary.

TOB, US v. UK

Over at The Millions, Max Magee reprises his great project of last year, comparing the U.S. and U.K. covers of eleven of the contenders in this year's Tournament of Books. Here's my take:

The Last Brother: US. That image of the half-fleshed, half-skeletal bird is just so wonderfully striking.
The Sense of an Ending: UK. Took a while to sink in, but the floating seed pods seem to suggest death, which is what I assume the "ending" of the title refers to.
Open City: UK. The yellow-on-gray lettering jumps out much more than red-on-yellow, and I like that the bird is more hidden than the US version.
The Marriage Plot: Neither. Both are pretty ordinary.
The Art of Fielding: UK. Nice old-fashioned feel.
The Stranger's Child: Neither. The US is bland, and the UK just looks like a stock photo.
1Q84: US. Love the mystery of the woman peering through the letters, while the UK is a mess.
The Tiger's Wife: UK. Even though that weird child-beast affection reminds me too much of The Tiger Who Came To Tea, a kids' book which I never cared for.
The Cat's Table: UK. This time it's the US that looks like a stock photo, while the UK evokes classic ocean liner posters.
State of Wonder: UK. Though it's not a very memorable image, at least it's not bland like the US version.
The Devil All the Time: UK. The US is a mess, which gives the slightest of nods to the UK even though I dislike the 90-degree rotation on the title.

My favorite of the bunch:

Laura

Contrarian that I am, today I will ignore the ridiculously overhyped Charles Dickens bicentennial, and instead give a birthday nod to Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was born on this date in 1867. Happy 145th, Half-Pint.

Aspiring booksellers, beware

25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore.

5. If someone comes in and asks for a recommendation and you ask for the name of a book that they liked and they can't think of one, the person is not really a reader. Recommend Nicholas Sparks.

Though I have recurring fantasies about opening a bookstore, the economic necessity of selling crap like Sparks makes me think I might not be good at the job. Instead, I would probably be like Jack Black's character in High Fidelity who responds to the customer who wants to buy a 45 of Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You" for his daughter's birthday, by berating the poor dad for his horrible taste in music.

(Via Coudal.)

"...believed that his remorse would prove lasting..."

Sad anecdote from Jane Addams' Twenty Years at Hull-House:

I recall a similar case of a woman who had supported her three children for five years, during which time her dissolute husband constantly demanded money for drink and kept her perpetually worried and intimidated. One Saturday, before the "blessed Easter," he came back from a long debauch, ragged and filthy, but in a state of lachrymose repentance. The poor wife received him as a returned prodigal, believed that his remorse would prove lasting, and felt sure that if she and the children went to church with him on Easter Sunday and he could be induced to take the pledge before the priest, all their troubles would be ended. After hours of vigorous effort and the expenditure of all her savings, he finally sat on the front doorstep the morning of Easter Sunday, bathed, shaved and arrayed in a fine new suit of clothes. She left him sitting there in the reluctant spring sunshine while she finished washing and dressing the children. When she finally opened the front door with the three shining children that they might all set forth together, the returned prodigal had disappeared, and was not seen again until midnight, when he came back in a glorious state of intoxication from the proceeds of his pawned clothes and clad once more in the dingiest attire. She took him in without comment, only to begin again the wretched cycle.

Other than a difference of fifty-something years and another continent, this could have come straight from Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.

Use your allusion

Interesting piece here by Elizabeth D. Samet on the use, and danger, of allusions in literature. On the one hand, allusion can make the writing richer and deeper by connecting it to other works, but it can also alienate the reader who doesn't catch the reference. One of my favorite books, Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make, is loaded with allusions to Chicago history - Carl Wanderer, Yellow Kid Weil, etc. - that I never fully understood during my first few readings. But that actually enhanced my enjoyment of the book, adding a bit of mystery to the narrative - and without being distracted by some editor's explanatory footnotes, I could stay immersed in the brutal poetics of Algren's prose.

The important thing is that Algren, with his great writing skill, was able to convey the meaning and mood of his references without explicitly explaining them. But from reading other books over the years, I've gradually learned many of the specifics behind his allusions, which made me appreciate the book even more. First I fell in love with the prose, and later the specific meaning. I doubt the experience would have meant nearly as much had I first read the annotated 60th anniversary edition of the book.

Month of Letters - REMINDER!

Just a reminder that I'm doing Month of Letters right now. The first two letters are already mailed, but at the moment I only have two other people who have indicated interest in hearing from me. If you want a good, old-fashioned, hand-written anachronism filled with my generally lucid musings, drop me an email (pete_anderson [AT] comcast [DOT] net) with your snail mail address. Or if you're sure I already have your address, then just leave a comment below. I may even include some thoughtfully chosen ephemera with your letter. Don't miss out!

Algren Award

Just made my third stab at the Nelson Algren Short Story Award, submitting my recent story "Echoes Down the Line." Previous attempts were made with "Mahalia" (later published in Midwestern Gothic) and "The Way Business Is Done" (still unpublished). I have pretty much zero chance of winning, but there's no entry fee and they accept online submissions, so I went right ahead anyway. Today is the last day for entries.

"Some bad bourbons are more memorable than good ones."

Walker Percy on the aesthetics, though not the connoisseurship, of bourbon.

But what to say? Take a drink, by now from a proper concave hip flask (a long way from the Delta Coke bottle) with a hinged top. Will she have a drink? No, but that's all right. The taste of bourbon (Cream of Kentucky) and the smell of her fuse with the brilliant Carolina fall and the sounds of the crowd and the hit of the linemen in the single synthesis.

My dad was a bourbon drinker, but I still haven't fully developed a taste for it. I'll still keep trying, partly for the connection to him, and also intend to read Percy's acclaimed The Moviegoer.

Boy's gotta have it.

Sweet book, sweet history, sweet design.

"If you want the basket, put the kittens in the brass thing."

Love this: Mark Twain's notice to "the next burglar."

"...the fiery Spirits blaze..."

I quite enjoy this passage from Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock", on coffee:

For lo! the Board with Cups and Spoons is crown’d,
The Berries crackle, and the Mill turns round.
On shining Altars of Japan they raise
The silver Lamp; the fiery Spirits blaze.
From silver Spouts the grateful Liquors glide,
And China’s Earth receives the smoaking Tyde.

If I ever own a coffeehouse, there will definitely be a "Smoaking Tyde" on the menu.

Jane Addams, American Opium-Eater

Surprising anecdote here from Jane Addams from her time at Rockford College during the 1870s:

At one time five of us tried to understand De Quincey's marvelous "Dreams" more sympathetically, by drugging ourselves with opium. We solemnly consumed small white powders at intervals during an entire long holiday, but no mental reorientation took place, and the suspense and excitement did not even permit us to grow sleepy. About four o'clock on the weird afternoon, the young teacher whom we had been obliged to take into our confidence, grew alarmed over the whole performance, took away our De Quincey and all the remaining powders, administrated an emetic to each of the five aspirants for sympathetic understanding of all human experience, and sent us to our separate rooms with a stern command to appear at family worship after supper "whether we were able to or not."

"Weird afternoon", indeed. Hard to believe that the aspiring missionary women at Rockford would have easy access to such a libertine work of literature. Addams is coming across as being much less stodgy than I had expected.

Month of Letters

I think I'll give this a try: The Month of Letters Challenge.

I have a simple challenge for you.

1. In the month of February, mail at least one item through the post every day it runs. Write a postcard, a letter, send a picture, or a cutting from a newspaper, or a fabric swatch.
2. Write back to everyone who writes to you. This can count as one of your mailed items.

All you are committing to is to mail 24 items.

Care to hear from me via good old-fashioned snail mail? Drop me your address at pete_anderson [AT] comcast [DOT] net. I can't guarantee that whatever I send will be earth-shattering or even enlightening, but I'll do my best. (And now, thanks to this project, Aztec Camera's "We Could Send Letters" will be stuck in my head for the rest of the day.)

(Via Boing Boing.)

"...bearing my responsibility as best I could..."

Curious anecdote of Jane Addams from her early childhood, as recounted in her memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House:

That curious sense of responsibility for carrying on the world's affairs which little children often exhibit because "the old man clogs our earliest years," I remember in myself in a very absurd manifestation. I dreamed night after night that every one in the world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the responsibility of making a wagon wheel. The village street remained as usual, the village blacksmith shop was "all there," even a glowing fire upon the forge and the anvil in its customary place near the door, but no human being was within sight. They had all gone around the edge of the hill to the village cemetery, and I alone remained alive in the deserted world. I always stood in the same spot in the blacksmith shop, darkly pondering as to how to begin, and never once did I know how, although I fully realized that the affairs of the world could not be resumed until at least one wheel should be made and something started. Every victim of nightmare is, I imagine, overwhelmed by an excessive sense of responsibility and the consciousness of a fearful handicap in the effort to perform what is required; but perhaps never were the odds more heavily against "a warder of the world" than in these reiterated dreams of mine, doubtless compounded in equal parts of a childish version of Robinson Crusoe and of the end-of-the-world predictions of the Second Adventists, a few of whom were found in the village. The next morning would often find me, a delicate little girl of six, with the further disability of a curved spine, standing in the doorway of the village blacksmith shop, anxiously watching the burly, red-shirted figure at work. I would store my mind with such details of the process of making wheels as I could observe, and sometimes I plucked up courage to ask for more. "Do you always have to sizzle the iron in water?" I would ask, thinking how horrid it would be to do. "Sure!" the good-natured blacksmith would reply, "that makes the iron hard." I would sigh heavily and walk away, bearing my responsibility as best I could, and this of course I confided to no one, for there is something too mysterious in the burden of "the winds that come from the fields of sleep" to be communicated, although it is at the same time too heavy a burden to be borne alone.

It's interesting that she saw nightmares as involving recognition of one's duty and a crippling inability to perform that duty. It's also fascinating that a mere six-year-old could have been so troubled by her presumed duty that she would try to learn how to make wagon wheels herself, in order to meet the responsibility she envisioned in her dreams. This innate sense of responsibility must surely have compelled her toward the great work she achieved as an adult.

Ander Monson

Interesting interview with Ander Monson at The Lit Pub.

I think that every artist feels isolated. There’s a reason why most of us who are drawn to making art are outsiders in one way or another. I suspect you have to engage in that kind of retreat from the world in order to see the thing from enough distance to want to talk about or iterate or engage with it in language or image. I find that even the sort of self-imposed isolation of several hours of silence, that is, me not talking, often starts to build up a tension in me that often leads to a burst of writing.

I would love to read more fiction from Monson one of these years. Other Electricities was great, and even nearly compelled me to vacation in Iron Country. 

English noblemen, American heiresses

Fascinating: the literary and historical roots of Downton Abbey.

In To Marry an English Lord Ms. Wallace and Ms. MacColl (who married an Englishman, though not a lord) write that in the 1860s "a whole new group of people began making money in industry — in armaments, in railroads, in preserved meats to feed the soldiers, in harvesters that freed workers from the fields. These enterprises made a lot of men very rich, very fast. And when they got rich, they came to New York."

But when they arrived, the aspiring nouveau-riche folks were not accepted socially by the vieux-riche clans, so they looked eastward across the Atlantic to England, France and Italy, acquiring titles and lineages they felt would give them prestige, at least for the next generations.

Julie is already hooked on the show, and I suspect that I will too, once I start watching. And I've never read Wharton (who is referenced heavily in that article) but probably should soon.

Hull House to close

I had been wondering what book I should read next, and now I know: Jane Addams' Twenty Years at Hull-House.

Hull House to close
By Kate Thayer, Chicago Tribune, January 21, 2012

The need for its services is as strong as ever, but after years of rising costs and dwindling income from fundraising the Jane Addams Hull House Association will close and file for bankruptcy, the agency said Thursday.

"For the last several years the agency has had trouble in the fundraising side of things," said Stephen Saunders, chair of the association's board of trustees. "After many years of struggling, we have to close our doors. It was a very difficult decision."

The 123-year-old agency, headquartered at 1030 W. Van Buren St., provides foster care, domestic violence counseling and prevention services, child development programs, and job training to about 60,000 children, families and community groups each year.

Sad, but times change, and we have to change with them.

New Orleans coffee, 1935

I love the riot of signage in this Walker Evans photograph, taken in New Orleans in 1935. And though at that exact moment it was 11:45, or past primo coffee-drinking time, I still would still have stopped in at that restaurant for a cup of Luzianne coffee. This photo was reproduced in Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America, and when I searched for it online, the first result that came up was at Shorpy, my favorite photoblog. Serendipitous.

Fantastical!

Behold Harry Clarke's 1919-23 illustrations for Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination, at The Public Domain Review. The above image is for "Descent Into the Maelstrom" and, indeed, makes me feel like I'm descending. Plummeting, even.

Going Hollywood

Those eagerly waiting (like me) for Cormac McCarthy's next novel, after his unforgettable The Road...will have to wait a little longer.

Agents for the 78-year-old Pulitzer prize-winner had been expecting the first draft of a new book, but received instead what is believed to be McCarthy's first "spec" script for a new movie.

Can't blame a guy for trying something new, especially at 78. I hope I'm as bold 30-plus years from now.

Help out a used bookseller!

This is awful: this week, Popek's Used and Rare Books (Otego, NY) had a water pipe freeze and burst, flooding the store. (The owner, Michael Popek, runs the blog Forgotten Bookmarks which I've linked to before.) Michael estimates that they lost about $10,000 worth of books, which is bad news for any bookseller but especially for a small operator. (He also has a newborn baby at home, and all the expense that involves.) If you're on the lookout for used or rare books, I suggest you browse their online store and strongly consider buying there, just to help out a little.

And he also lost most of his forgotten bookmarks. Doubly sad.

Peter Orner, Esther Stories

Depending on your perspective, Peter Orner's debut, Esther Stories, is either a story collection, or one-half story collection and two novellas-in-stories. The "novellas" - Fall River Marriage and The Waters - are the strongest part of the book, and especially the former. Fall River Marriage tells, in fifty brisk pages, the story of Walt and Sarah Kaplan and their forty years together, from their quickie out-of-state marriage (with Sarah three months pregnant at the time) to Walt's early death, at 59, from a heart attack. The brief but vivid stories are almost like photographs of their marriage - funny, touching and sometimes sad. A wonderful piece.

The Waters tries the same approach but is less successful, primarily because the focus is much broader, spanning multiple generations instead of a single married couple. The story is also told by several narrators, making it sometimes difficult to follow who exactly is speaking. I don't think the multi-generation, multi-narrator structure quite works with the minimalist, fragmentary narrative that Orner seems to prefer. And interestingly enough, the story's Chicago setting didn't grab me nearly as much as that of the first piece (Fall River, Massachusetts). I would have thought a Chicago story would have really hit home.

As for the individual stories in the first half of the book, only two really stuck with me - the sad "Cousin Tuck's" (about the doomed relationship of a one-eyed pool shark and a community activist) and the darkly funny "Two Poes" (about a town plagued with two Edgar Allan Poe impersonators, who were hired for tourism promotion and never bothered to leave) - while the others soon faded from memory.

In all, Esther Stories was a worthwhile read, though mostly for Fall River Marriage. Orner has recently published his first novel, Love and Shame and Love, which I now definitely have my eye on.

Someone to pull the trigger

In 1936, a young William Saroyan wanted to be a magazine editor, and wrote to H.L. Mencken for advice. Here is Mencken's response, in its entirety:

I note what you say about your aspiration to edit a magazine. I am sending you by this mail a six-chambered revolver. Load it and fire every one into your head. You will thank me after you get to hell and learn from other editors there how dreadful their job was on earth.

Like me, Mencken was literary, curmudgeonly and born on September 12. No wonder I'm a fan.

"...the little invisible novels that get written between two people every day..."

It looks like this David Mitchell quote has already made the rounds of teh internets, but I like it so much that I'll still reprise it here.

Midlife crisis. Age. The heart gets more interesting than structure. I’ve got kids, I’ve got a wife, we’re stuck with each other for a while. And suddenly there’s an understanding that this is what life is — it’s actually the mess, it’s the mud, it’s the tangle. It’s not the clean, hygienic...fireworks. It’s the little invisible novels that get written between two people every day of their lives. It’s the subtle power shifts. It’s the love, it’s the less-noble sentiments that make every single day either good or bad or not so good or wonderful or moving through all these things at the speed of West Cork weather. This is interesting stuff. Why go out there in search of extraterrestrial life when it’s already here?

Cloud Atlas is finally on my reading list for this year, and based on the obvious sensibility expressed in this quote, I'm sure I'lll enjoy it quite a bit.

The Rooster Croweth

The Morning News has announced the sixteen entries in this year's Tournament of Books. I haven't read any of them, and have interest in only two - Salvage the Bones and The Devil All the Time. (And barely two - I just removed Pollock from my Goodreads list a few days ago. At first I got all caught up in the hype surrounding that book's publication, but the more I've thought about it, I've decided that the rural/working-class/violent-white-guy trope doesn't really do that much for me. Not that I'm against any of those qualities - just that, put together, they seem to have been overworked lately.) I'm not even interested in Ondaatje, although he and I share a birthday. It seems that I drift further from current literary relevance every year, or at least that relevance as represented by the ToB. Still, I know I'll enjoy every minute of the proceedings this year, even without a Franzen smackdown to look forward to. Here's the list:

Nathacha Appanah, The Last Brother; Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending; Teju Cole, Open City; Helen Dewitt, Lightning Rods; Patrick DeWitt, The Sisters Brothers; Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot; Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding; Alan Hollinghurst, Stranger’s Child; Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones; Haruki Murakami, 1Q84; Téa Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife; Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table; Ann Patchett, State of Wonder; Donald Ray Pollock, Devil All the Time; Karen Russell, Swamplandia; Kate Zambreno, Green Girl.

New at Contrary

My latest post, "Twain on the installment plan", is now up at the Contrary blog.

The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

During 2011, I methodically made my way through The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, which Julie found for me at a garage sale during the summer. The book is a 2005 compilation of author interviews from the McSweeney's magazine The Believer. Though I had read very few of the authors beforehand, I enjoyed most of the interviews, particularly for the many insights into the art of writing. Some of those insights meshed with my own feelings while others clashed, but either way the interviews really got me thinking of my own perspectives on writing. That said, however, the book did finally wear me out and I quit reading several interviews short of the end. Below is an index of the various excerpts I've posted here, for your browsing enjoyment.

Tobias Wolff on the discipline of finishing
Ian McEwan on being influenced by great writers
Edward P. Jones on writing to an audience
Grace Paley on needing two stories to have one story
Chris Abani on writing programs
Joan Didion on writing about your childhood home
Marilynne Robinson on getting cozy with your protagonist
Jonathan Lethem on the future of books
Shirley Hazzard on coincidence in fiction
Haruki Murakami on the role of concentration in writing a novel
George Saunders on assembling story collections
Francisco Goldman on the tug of war between writing life and personal life
John Banville on the difference between writing fiction and criticism
James Salter on tiny details that somehow are remembered
Jamaica Kincaid on finding a story's ending
August Wilson on revising too much

Booga Books

What? You've never been to Booga Books? It's my wife's Amazon storefront, and right now she's got some knitting books, kid books, and fiction from Porter Shreve, Nami Mun, Joshua Furst and Morgan Llywelyn, plus the Dennis Cooper-edited Userlands anthology from Akashic. Shop today!

"The click of the balls as beautiful as your own heartbeat."

Memorable opening passage to "Cousin Tuck's" by Peter Orner, from his collection Esther Stories:

She had trouble getting dates, so some nights she'd march into Cousin Tuck's and wait for the one-eyed man to finish playing pool. His name was Tito, and he wore a black patch over his left eye. He was a small-time hustler who could clear tables at will, using a combination of ball-smacking power and quiet, surgical, intricacy. He was also a teacher. Really more of a teacher than a hustler, because those of us who were regulars didn't dare play him for more than a few quarters a game. But lots of us would play him to learn. He'd set up your angles, a little left, a little right, pick out spots on the ball, call pockets on shots you never would have dreamed of making had he not whispered that if you hit the 13 into the right edge of the 7 with just enough oomph to bank it off the left side - fuckdawango - you could make that shot. Tito made you feel that you could be consistently good at the game, that you really were capable of mastering the geometry. The click of the balls as beautiful as your own heartbeat. On those nights, after four, five beers, you'd be soaring and people in the booths would start to murmur about you, point the necks of their bottles your way. You standing against the wall, chalking your cue and kissing your knuckles as if all of a sudden Cousin Tuck's was Bally's in Atlantic City and you were the guy. Everybody's guy. But on those nights Tito wasn't around, you'd be back to hitting slop, back to whacking the ball all over the table, because it was Tito who made you.

I used to play quite a bit of pool, and was a pretty good player back in the day. Fiction that directly describes playing pool is fairly rare, and I think this passage captures it extremely well, especially the feeling when you're playing in a bar after a few drinks and all eyes are on you, like you're performing on stage.

At first I objected to the narrator's reverence for Tito's "ball-smacking power." Hitting the ball hard in pool is just showing off and is generally worthless - instead, good players use gentle finesse which gives greater margin for error and sinks more shots. But then I came to realize that the narrator is just the sort of slop player who admires the showing-off of power shots, so that reverence is indeed appropriate. And if Tito is really that good of a player, he probably doesn't shoot with power very much anyway, but those rare instances still get the narrator's attention.

A strong story overall, one I definitely recommend.

Less ambitious book titles

Inspired by this post, here are "less ambitious book titles" based on some books I've read during the past three years.

Jude the Nonexistent
Out Looking at Horses
Elmer Fudd
Dozing
Fungi in the Earth
Beopup
The Beige and the Gray
Well-Rested Square
Gulliver's Staycation
Partial Cloudiness at Noon
Chicago: City on the Up and Up
A Good Man Is Quite Common, Actually
The Adventures of Huckabee Finn
I Am Moderately Familiar in Certain Circles
Little Timeshare Three Miles from the Beach

"I miss you very much,are you happy? 2"

I've written poetry from email spam in the past, piecing together one line each from various random spams I've received. But until today I never got a spam that could pass, verbatim, for verse:

I miss you very much,are you happy? 2
this is a good news.
The website XXXXX is doing the marketing activities and offering a big discount.
also the quality are well .
Beacuse I have bought some .
They mainly sell all kinds of MP3,TV,Motorbike,Cellphone,Laptop etc.
with very fashionable styles.
you'd better spend one or two minutes have a look,
maybe you can find what you are interested in .
bless you and your family .
2pete

Genius. Almost makes me want to buy something. Almost.

12 for 2012

My book selections are usually made on a whim, casually picked from the shelf after somehow catching my eye. That said, here are twelve books I plan to read in the upcoming year.

Kent Haruf, Where You Once Belonged
All of Haruf's four novels are set in the fictional small town of Holt, Colorado. I absolutely loved the best known of these, Plainsong and Eventide, which makes me eager to dive into this earlier novel and see what else Haruf has to tell about Holt and its hardscrabble citizens.

Knut Hamsun, Tales of Love and Loss
Robert Ferguson, Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun
Hamsun was renowned almost exclusively as a novelist (Hunger being my favorite book ever), which makes this short story collection even more intriguing as an answer to whether he could pull off short stories as well as he did novels. And with Hamsun indeed being an enigma - from brilliant young iconoclast to aging Nazi sympathizer - I hope Ferguson's biography will help me understand that disconnect.

Budd Schulberg, The Harder They Fall
What Makes Sammy Run? was the best book I read in 2009, a savage satire of show business and ruthless ambition. And Schulberg will always have a place in my heart for writing the screenplay of On The Waterfront, my favorite movie ever (his novel adaptation, Waterfront, was pretty good too). The Harder They Fall is supposed to be one of the very best boxing novels, and given both my admiration of Schulberg and my weird fascination with boxing (I abhor violence, but am still somehow drawn to the sport's primal rawness), it was inevitable that this book and I would meet.

Ben Tanzer, My Father's House
Ben is a great friend of mine, and I eagerly read everything he writes, but I've already put off this one for several months already. This novella is about a guy who is losing his father to cancer (based loosely on Ben's own experience), a narrative that I immediately knew would hit very close to home for me, after losing my own dad seven years ago. So I deferred reading it (with Ben's blessing), figuring the emotional impact would probably be too painful. But of course I'll read it, and will probably cry my eyes out several times while doing so.

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Julie is a big fan of Mitchell, has read every one of his novels, and says this one is his best and the one I should absolutely read. I value her opinion far more than the litblog world, which seems pretty much in concurrence as to the book's greatness as well. So finally I'll dive in, despite the book being somewhat longer than I usually prefer.

Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect
Yes, I should probably read several of his novels instead (I've only read Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle and Galapagos, despite him being Julie's favorite author), but even his ephemera is interesting. I'm particularly looking forward to the letter he wrote home from Dresden, whose WWII firebombing he not only survived but birthed Slaughterhouse-Five. Then after this, I'll probably get all gung-ho for more of the novels.

Tarjei Vesaas, The Ice Palace
I wasn't overly impressed with this book when I first read it, over twenty years ago. I had read Vesaas' The Birds in college, and tracked down The Ice Palace at the great John K. King Books in Detroit a few years later. Both have sat on my shelf for decades, for reasons I couldn't have explained (I purged dozens of other books during that time which I had no interest in re-reading), before I finally re-read The Birds two years ago, and loved it. Maybe the intervening years will be similarly kind to The Ice Palace.

Peter Orner, Esther Stories
I loved Orner's contribution to Akashic's Chicago Noir anthology (though he's not a crime writer) but haven't read anything else of his, so when I saw this one priced cheap at a used bookstore this fall in Hilton Head, I grabbed it. During the course of our vacation week, I kept the book atop a pile on the kitchen table, and whenever I was standing around waiting for Julie or Maddie to get ready to go somewhere, I found myself picking up the book and leafing through it. I liked the brief passages I read, and am looking forward to more.

Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad
Because I want to see what all the hubbub was about, and whether the book even comes close to justifying the hype. Julie was thoroughly unimpressed with it, which predisposes me to a thumbs-down, but I'll give Egan the chance to really surprise me.

Tom Williams, The Mimic's Own Voice
This one comes with the raving recommendation of Mr. Tanzer. That's more than enough for me.

Mark Twain: The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 1
Like several hundred thousand others, I got caught up in the hype of this book's release, which was one of the biggest literary events of 2010. I asked for it for Christmas, and got it, but not until it arrived did I fully appreciate what a massive physical object it is, and how mentally daunting. I've heard that even the introduction runs to around 250 pages, at which point in a novel I would already be getting antsy and counting down the pages until the end. So I'll have to get creative with this one, reading 5-10 pages every now and then, before setting it aside again for a while, as I continue to read other books. I've used a similar process during the past two years with two other lengthy nonfiction books (Studs Terkel's Working and The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers), and it's worked well for me. I would never read such books exclusively, cover to cover, but with this method I can make it through. I'll also be blogging the Twain book as I go, which should keep me focused and moving forward.

Good Reading 2011

2011 was a slow reading year in terms of quantity - I only finished 19 books, mostly due to it taking me four months to slog through just Great Expectations and Jude the Obscure during my Summer of Classics. But here is my annual list of the best that I did manage to read, several of which were excellent.

Top Ten:
1. Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude (Review)
2. Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses (Review)
3. Sholom Aleichem, Selected Stories (Review)
4. Alan Heathcock, Volt (Review)
5. Nelson Algren, Nonconformity: Writing on Writing (Review)
6. Ben Tanzer, You Can Make Him Like You (Review)
7. Ben Katchor, The Cardboard Valise (Review)
8. Isaac Bashevis Singer and Richard Burgin, Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer (Review)
9. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
10. Aharon Appelfeld, The Iron Tracks (Review)

Honorable Mention: Stona Fitch, Senseless; The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers; Jim Thompson, Savage Night

Re-Reading: Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (Review)

Comments:
+ Oddly enough, my top three books were all translated works. Though I usually read a fair amount of translations, they never sweep the top rankings. And the translations I read usually skew toward Scandinavian, which this year only includes Petterson. So I broadened my reading somewhat this year, with Yiddish (Aleichem), Czech (Hrabal) and Appelfeld (Hebrew).
+ Great year for Structured Reading (with Aleichem, Singer and Appelfeld all making the top ten), but only marginal for Summer of Classics (enjoyed Hardy but only endured Dickens). I've decided to go more modern in my classics next year, with Hemingway, Faulkner, etc.
+ My great friend Ben Tanzer finally cracks my top ten, which had nothing to do with only reading 19 books. I thoroughly enjoyed You Can Make Him Like You, which would have made my list in pretty much any year.
+ Another light year for non-fiction, with Algren, Singer and the Believer book (plus Len O'Connor's autobiography) being the only ones I read. Something I'm looking to rectify in the coming year.

2010 List
2009 List
2008 List
2007 List
2006 List
2005 List
2004 List
2003 List
2002 List

Books given, books received...

...actually, it was a light year for gifts received as books, so here are just those that I gave as gifts.

Michael Ruhlman, Ruhlman's Twenty: Cookbook that came so highly recommended by Julie as a gift for someone else, I bought it for her too; Per Petterson, In Siberia: Loved Out Stealing Horses, bought this one in the hopes of someday borrowing it back; Pamela Losey and Shirley Beene, Cary and Fox River Grove (Images of America): Photo history of my hometown and its across-the-river neighbor, from Arcadia’s endlessly fascinating series; Andrew Ervin, Extraordinary Renditions: Strong debut novel (or linked novellas, whatever) by a writer friend of mine; Austin Kleon, Newspaper Blackout: Given to my niece, whom I can easily foresee becoming a newspaper blackout junkie; Aaron Petrovich, The Session: The only book I’ve ever been paid to review (by the Chicago Reader), one that’s still stuck in my head years later; Alan Heathcock, Volt: One of the best debuts in recent years, and deserving of even more hype that it’s gotten; Kirby Gann, Our Napoleon in Rags: An old favorite that I somehow never gave anyone as a gift, an oversight now rectified with my apologies to the author (also a friend) and publisher (Ig Publishing, to whom I’m currently pitching my first book); Dan Leroy, The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique: Because it’s time to get someone else hooked on Continuum’s fantastic 33 1/3 series; Bonnie Jo Campbell, Once Upon a River: Have heard plenty of good things about this one and am eager to read it myself; James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice/Double Indemnity/Mildred Pierce: Handsome Modern Library hardcover edition of Cain’s classic noir novels; Lee Sandlin, Wicked River: Historical narrative about the Mississippi before it was tamed physically (by dams and levees) and mythologically (by Mark Twain), which I also hope to read soon.

Oh, one more thing...three of these are for my nephew, who won't be getting them until he comes home in February, so keep this on the hush-hush from him.

"...working hard, I missed my original idea that I started with..."

In The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, playwright August Wilson talks to Miles Marshall Lewis about not over-revising:

How much is too much? At a certain point, you can overwork something. I've seen painter overwork a painting. I've done some drawings and my wife, she'll go, "It's overworked." I'll go, yeah, I worked real hard on that. And working hard, I missed my original idea that I started with. That can happen in the plays, too. You can work so hard and rewrite so much that you get confused or can't remember what's in there, ain't in there, or why this particular thing is in there. Then you're lost. That's too much. But as long as you have some control over your materials and you're working to make the story clearer, working to improve it...As long as you don't get lost up in the rewrites, you're OK. Once you get lost and you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, you're in trouble.

For better or worse, I never do any more than four or five revisions of any piece. I figure if the writing isn't getting better by then, it probably never will, and so the piece is done. If that means it's not perfect, then so be it.

A Very Jim Thompson Christmas

Just this morning I started reading Savage Night, because nothing says Merry Christmas, Joy To The World and Peace On Earth quite like a Jim Thompson tale of murder, mayhem and lust. It occurred to me that I've probably read more books by Thompson than any other writer, but that's probably as much a function of their quantity (he wrote more than 30) and brevity (usually under 200 pages) as anything else. The list currently stands at nine: The Grifters, The Getaway, The Killer Inside Me, After Dark My Sweet, Wild Town, The Nothing Man, The Kill-Off, Pop. 1280 and now Savage Night.

It's interesting to note that although The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280 are generally considered to be his best, I thought both had major flaws and neither was a favorite of mine. The ones I've enjoyed most are The Getaway (great suspense), The Nothing Man (killer plot twist) and The Kill-Off (brilliant inverted structure: not a whodunnit but a who'll-do it). Thompson is definitely a guilty pleasure of mine.

Opening Lines

"I'd caught a slight cold when I changed trains at Chicago; and three days in New York - three days of babes and booze while I waited to see The Man - hadn't helped it any."
- Jim Thompson, Savage Night

"Since the end of the war, I have been on this line, as they say: a long, twisted line stretching from Naples to the cold north, a line of locals, trams, taxis and carriages."
- Aharon Appelfeld, The Iron Tracks

"The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry."
- Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

"Early November. It's nine o'clock. The titmice are banging against the window. Sometimes they fly dizzily off after the impact, other times they fall and lie struggling in the new snow until they can take off again. I don't know what they want that I have."
- Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

"Picture the room where you will be held captive."
- Stona Fitch, Senseless

"Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk."
- Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

"Bright, clear sky over a plain so wide that the rim of the heavens cut down on it around the entire horizon...Bright, clear sky, to-day, to-morrow, and for all time to come."
- O.E. Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth

"Click! ... Here it was again. He was walking along the cliff at Hunstanton and it had come again ... Click! ..."
- Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square

"It is 1983. In Dorset the great house at Woodcombe Park bustles with life. In Ireland the more modest Kilneagh is as quiet as a grave."
- William Trevor, Fools of Fortune

"The cell door slammed behind Rubashov."
- Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

(A compendium of memorable opening lines of novels, updated occasionally as I come across new discoveries.)

Vonnegut, writ large

Although the subject of this photo is specifically the creative re-use of seats from Indianapolis' old Bush Stadium, I couldn't help admiring the large Kurt Vonnegut mural on the building in the background. Nice touch. I assume this is in the vicinity of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.

(Via Unconsumption.)

Ben Katchor, The Cardboard Valise

Despite my great admiration for Ben Katchor's work, it took me a while to really get into his latest, The Cardboard Valise. For most of the book there's little plot or narrative cohesion, but instead a series of typically quirky episodes. The book follows two primary characters in the fictional Fluxion City - Emile Delilah, the long-forlorn son of a corporate executive, and Elijah Salamis, a "supranationalist" idler who forsakes all cultural and national influences in a quest for universal purity. But while both men live in Fluxion City, neither really belong to it, Emile because he is compulsively drawn to the vacation locales of Tensint Island and Outer Canthus, and Elijah because he distances himself from all things local.

While all of these episodes are entertaining in themselves - and also incisively muse on consumerism, nationalism and religion - the book didn't really seem to go anywhere, and after a while it began to feel more like an anthology of unrelated strips than a unified narrative. But then, just a few pages from the end, Katchor marvelously brings Emile and Elijah together, reuniting Emile from his estranged parents and giving Elijah a final act of personal accomplishment. Yet even that very satisfying conclusion doesn't end the book - instead, Katchor defies convention and has the final page depict the return of the deposed king of Outer Canthus from his exile in Fluxion City back to his home, neatly transported by the very suitcase of the book's title. Another lively, weird story from Katchor, whom I continue to believe is the best graphic novelist going.

Quote

"Christmas, of course, is an anachronism in New York. It belongs to non-converted brownstone houses and gaslights and streets banked high with snow, to a day when there were still suburbs on Manhattan Island. The perpendicular city has no place for it." - Wolcott Gibbs

More on Gibbs here, by Patrick Kurp. Saying that Gibbs' writing holds up better than that of the revered likes of James Thurber and Dorothy Parker seems like a pretty strong statement, but having never read Gibbs yet I'll have to trust Patrick's judgment.

Structured Reading: Old-school Jewish writers

I recently completed my latest Structured Reading exercise, this time with old-school Jewish writers. The three books - Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholom Aleichem's Selected Stories and Aharon Appelfeld's The Iron Tracks - were each very different, yet were somehow cohesive when read in succession.

Conversations is a series of discussions between Singer and editor/writer Richard Burgin, in which Singer expounds on his theories of literature, philosophy and humanity. Singer was certainly a traditionalist, revering Dostoevsky and Chekhov while having little interest in modernists like Beckett and Joyce, and values old-fashioned storytelling over what he saw as the style-over-substance emphasis of modern fiction. Though the discourse was often invigorating, I wish I had first read more of Singer's fiction (I've only read Gimpel the Fool) which would have helped me make more sense out of the book-specific discussions between Singer and Burgin. Maybe I'll re-read the book ten or twenty years from now after I've had a chance to read more Singer.

At one point in Conversations, Singer says:

"The Jews are waiting for another Sholom Aleichem and America is waiting for a new Mark Twain or for an American Gogol. But I don’t think the American people would appreciate a really humorous book about themselves. They would say it’s false, it’s not accurate, it’s contrived. This is also true about modern Jews. If they had a Sholom Aleichem today, they would call him a Jewish anti-Semite. They would complain that he makes us look silly and that he helps our enemies."

Over the course of reading Selected Stories, I came across several other references elsewhere to Aleichem being "the Yiddish Mark Twain." I think that description is accurate in that Aleichem depicted old-fashioned Jews, often humorously, in fable or tall-tale form, much like Twain did with Americans. But beyond that I don't think the Aleichem-Twain connection really fits - Twain was cranky, cynical, pessimistic and certainly no fan of the majority of the human race, while in these stories Aleichem comes across as much more warm, generous and loving even while he playfully skewers the absurdities of small-town Jewish life. Selected Stories is a wonderful collection which showcases the range of Aleichem’s talent - the humorous stories are joyful and entertaining even as they focus on the downtrodden of Jewish society, and when he turns more serious (especially in "Hodel" or "You Musn’t Weep – It’s Yom-Tev"), the results are emotionally powerful.

Aharon Appelfeld may be a more modern writer than either Singer or Aleichem (not to mention still being alive), but many of his themes in The Iron Tracks - Jewish identity, religious devotion, coping with the traumas of the past - wouldn’t be out of place with either of the older writers. The novel follows a mostly-unnamed narrator who travels by train during the 1980s through Austria, collecting Jewish religious relics (either discarded or completely devalued) which he sells to wealthy benefactors for eventual return to Israel. But as the story progresses he slowly reveals the real purpose of his travels - to track down a WWII work camp officer whom he blames for the murder of his parents. The overall tone of the novel is joyless and grim, as the narrator repeatedly connects and disconnects with old acquaintances at each station along the line, broods endlessly over memories of his tragic childhood, and faces his ultimate mission of revenge. Yet even that act of revenge brings him no emotional lift or redemption, and as his life goes on mostly as before he realizes that the atrocities of the past can never be corrected - just as the small-town Jewish culture can never be restored to Austria, which warrants the removal of the relics to Israel and the hope of a brighter future there. The Iron Tracks is a deeply contemplative and satisfying novel, and my first exposure to Appelfeld, a writer I’m sure I will be returning to.

"Because it crests in some way that satisfies me."

In The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, Jamaica Kincaid tells Robert Birnbaum about how she knows when her stories are done:

The last story in my first book - the title story, "At the Bottom of the River" - took me six months to end. But at the end of the six months, I had not added one word. During the six months, I read "The Prelude," Wordsworth's great narrative poem. I spent six months reading, and at the end of it I understood what I had been writing was finished. And that's almost always true of my writing. I know it's finished through some odd way, not by actually finishing it. I go over it in my mind and say, "That's the end." Because it crests in some way that satisfies me. Not that it ties things up. It just ends.

I've never read anything by Kincaid, and from the description of her work by herself and Birnbaum, I'm not sure I even care to. But I still admire her distaste for tidy endings, for over-explanation - I prefer the unsaid and just the right degree of ambiguity.

Liber Floridus

Gorgeous images here at BibliOdyssey from Liber Floridus, a Medieval encyclopedia published 900 years ago in Flanders. Love it.

Ahasuerus

I just started reading Ben Katchor's The Cardboard Valise, and couldn't help smiling upon learning that the valise is the "Ahasuerus" model. I had always associated that name with "The Wandering Jew", which would certainly be appropriate given Katchor's past subject matter - particularly the meandering Julius Knipl. But immediately it occurred to me that I knew little about the myth, which sent me to my phone and this:

The Wandering Jew is a figure from medieval Christian folklore whose legend began to spread in Europe in the 13th century. The original legend concerns a Jew who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming. The exact nature of the wanderer's indiscretion varies in different versions of the tale, as do aspects of his character; sometimes he is said to be a shoemaker or other tradesman, while sometimes he is the doorman at Pontius Pilate's estate.

Interesting stuff. Which now makes me I realize that I should revisit Pär Lagerkvist 's The Death of Ahasuerus, which I read many years ago but remember absolutely nothing about. It's intriguing to note that Lagerkvist also wrote along a similar parallel with his novel Barabbas, which imagines the life of that criminal after being spared by the Romans at the time of Christ's crucifixion. Barabbas wants to have religious faith but can't bring himself to believe, and is condemned to live out the rest of his life in some sort of limbo. Whereas the Wandering Jew is condemned "to walk the earth until the Second Coming", also after a chance personal encounter with Christ. But though I love Barabbas, given that parallel I wonder if The Death of Ahasuerus will seem redundant upon rereading.

Note to self...

...write a short story, or at least a character sketch, around this passage from Aharon Appelfeld's The Iron Tracks.

Meanwhile, his buffet is meager, and the customers are few. Once his young wife breathed life into the place, but since her sudden death he has aged. He neglects the buffet and sits by the window most of the day, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.

Brief and plainly written, yet with so much hidden depth.

"...the unknown reader I sometimes say I imagine..."

In The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, James Salter (talking with Dan Pope) brushes past a question about formal recognition of an author's accomplishments (publication, awards, etc.) and reflects on a surprise reader reaction to one of his books:

There are few thrills like the first one, but not long ago at a party a woman I was being introduced to said simply, "Did she really just read a magazine?" She was referring to a scene in A Sport and a Pastime. She assumed I would know. My God, all the things of inconsequence she might have said! I don't remember her name, but she was the unknown reader I sometimes say I imagine, the woman in her thirties or forties who perhaps lives in Buenos Aires.

It must be a thrill for any writer to encounter a reader who mentally retains the big themes or major characters or settings of one of the writer's books, but even more so when they remember a tiny detail like the one Salter mentions. That shows how vividly rendered the tiny detail was, which really points out the writer's skill. Most writers can nail the big theme or major character, but if one can also nail the tiny details, now that's a real writer.

I also like Salter's idea of the "unknown reader", which to me means that one reader out there which the writer is trying to connect with. It might mean simple motivation for the writer ("This is who I'm writing the story for") or a reality check. For me it's the latter. When I'm writing, now and then I imagine a few specific (not "unknown") family members and friends as future readers, and ask myself: "Would my reader think this character is believable? That this is really how people talk? That this plotline is plausible?" All of which keeps me grounded.

That Tanzer character is at it again!

  

Two more new books from the ridiculously fertile mind of Ben Tanzer: So Different Now, a second collection of stories set in a small town not unlike his hometown of Binghamton, New York (a followup to his earlier collection Repetition Patterns) which is available as an e-book in the standard CCLaP pay-what-you-want mode; and The New York Stories, which combines Repetition Patterns and So Different Now into a single, super-deluxe, handmade, illustrated volume. Just in time for your holiday gift-giving, or for your shameless self-indulgence. Or both.