Pete Lit

More on Lazarus

I enjoyed Aleksander Hemon's The Lazarus Project to such an exquisite degree that I've decided to become somewhat of a Lazarus clearinghouse here for a while. Off we go:

+ Sara Ivry interviews Hemon at Nextbook.org.

+ An evaluation of the (to me, rather striking) cover design, at Publishers Weekly.

+ Some sort of Lazarus-related video here, at Hemon's site. Haven't watched this yet, but based on the physical beauty of the book itself, I'm sure it's a winner.

That's all for now. For Lazarus, and in general - we're heading off to Hilton Head tomorrow for a week of offline R&R (poolside lounging, beachcombing, Margarita-imbibing, sumptuous eating, copious reading) so don't be worried by the utter lack of activity here.

Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project

Every now and then I come across a book that defies description, one whose beauty and power I can't adequately convey in mere words. James Meek's The People's Act of Love is one such book, and another is Ander Monson's Other Electricities, as is - despite its considerable artistic deficiencies - John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

And now, also, Aleksandar Hemon's new novel, The Lazarus Project. Not that it can't be described, of course. Many critics and commentators will describe, at length and in depth, the book's narrative, structure and themes, along with the author's background and what his past brought to the telling of the story. Though I'll leave most of that discussion to them, I will still attempt a few words on this great book's behalf.

Through the shadowy and tragic real-life figure of Lazarus Avenbuch and Vladimir Brik, the fictional modern-day writer obsessed with uncovering Lazarus' century-old story, Hemon has crafted a courageous novel, one full of hope and longing and anger and isolation, one which explores the past while being vitally relevant to the present. Hemon's Lazarus does indeed rise - not from the dead like his Biblical namesake, but from the fog of forgotten history. He rises, and compels Brik to find out who he is, where he belongs, and what he wants out of life. As the story concludes, Brik hasn't figured any of that out, but he does see the negative of each - who he isn't, where he doesn't belong, and what he doesn't want out of life - in his present situation, which leads him to seek alternatives.

Yet despite these insights, Lazarus is a book whose greatness I can't adequately describe. For me it's one of those magnificent works of art, like the other books mentioned above or a Morphine song or Emil Nolde watercolor, that I simply can't do justice in words. All I can do is urge you to read and experience the book for yourself, as soon as you can.

"Shea as in stadium, Bon as in Jovi."

Terrific artist and FoPL Austin Kleon finally clarifies (for me, anyway) the proper pronunciation of Michael Chabon's last name. The source is Chabon himself, who delivers quite the NY/NJ-centric mnemonic:

"Shea as in stadium, Bon as in Jovi."

You'd think, given the striking Jay Ryan-designed poster print of the cover of The Final Solution that hangs in our front hallway, that I already would have known how to pronounce his name, but no. As an aside, Austin loves the book design of Maps and Legends, too. Guess I'm in good company.

Hemon's parallel narratives

I'm about halfway through Aleksandar Hemon's new novel, The Lazarus Project, and it's a pretty marvelous read - in many ways even better than Nowhere Man, which I loved. The book is structured as two parallel but interconnected narratives: the first is of an early 20th Century Ukrainian immigrant killed by Chicago police and branded as an anarchist in those feverish anti-immigrant times; and the second is of a modern-day writer, also an immigrant, who is obsessed with the anarchist's life and longs to write about it. I really like the parallel structure, which keeps each narrative fresh. My hope is that Hemon ultimately unifies these two threads in the book's conclusion, and doesn't leave each enigmatic and unresolved - I doubt that the writer character will ever truly find out who the anarchist really was, but I'm hoping this somewhat aimless soul finds himself in the process even if the anarchist remains an elusive mystery.

Harry, Excerpted

FoPL Mark Sarvas (oh, who am I kidding? he's friends of hundreds of litblogs) has a nice new piece, "The colour of Anna's coffin cushions", in the latest issue (theme: "Rage") of The Drawbridge. I strongly suspect this is an excerpt from his debut novel, Harry, Revised, which is getting strong notices from just about every literary outpost other than the most self-absorbed newspaper in New York.

Rumor has it that a copy of the book is making its way to my doorstep, possibly via an underpowered barge moving upriver against a heavy spring torrent. I'm really looking forward to reading this one, whenever it happens to get here.

Succumb to the Gaping Void

I've been enjoying Hugh McLeod's Gaping Void cartoons (all of them written on the back of business cards, often while imbibing in bars) for a while now, even though most of them are much more bitter, pissed-off and pessimistic than I generally am. But his latest, "live in paris", so perfectly nails the allure of Paris to American expatriate writers that I thought I'd link to it here, on this sort-of-literary blog of mine.

Song of the Week: Crash Test Dummies

Crash Test Dummies: Superman's Song

Crash Test Dummies are best known for their one hit, "MMM MMM MMM MMM", but while I only know of two other songs of theirs, both are far superior to their hit: a cover of the Replacements' "Androgynous", and this ode to the Man of Steel. While the obvious highlight of the song is the impossibly deep voice of frontman Brad Roberts, the lyrics are quite sharp as well:

Tarzan wasn't a ladies' man
He'd just come along and scoop 'em up under his arm
Like that, quick as a cat in the jungle
But Clark Kent now there was a real gent
He would not be caught sittin' around in no
Junglescape, dumb as an ape doing nothing

Superman never made any money
For saving the world from Solomon Grundy
And sometimes I despair the world will never see
Another man like him

Hey Bob, Supe had a straight job
Even though he could have smashed through any bank
In the United States, he had the strength, but he would not
Folks said his family were all dead
Their planet crumbled but Superman, he forced himself
To carry on, forget Krypton, and keep going

Tarzan was king of the jungle and Lord over all the apes
But he could hardly string together four words: "I Tarzan, You Jane. "

Sometimes when Supe was stopping crimes
I'll bet that he was tempted to just quit and turn his back
On man, join Tarzan in the forest
But he stayed in the city, and kept on changing clothes
In dirty old phonebooths till his work was through
And nothing to do but go on home

Having only minimal familiarity with the band, I hadn't thought of Crash Test Dummies in years. But recently I picked up the first two issues of Mark Russell's Superman Stories, a very funny and thought-provoking zine which imagines the everyday life of Superman. Sure, he has superpowers, but he has plenty of human weaknesses too - a violent temper, emotional impenetrability, boredom and much more. I strongly encourage you to give Russell a read.

And pondering the less-than-super traits of Superman that Russell writes about couldn't help but remind me of this wonderful song. I hope you enjoy both.

Open Book

There's a nice story in today's New York Times on Open Book, the literary arts center in Minneapolis which houses the Loft Literary Center, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and Milkweed Editions, and which has anchored the revitalization of its neighborhood. With old-fashioned, low-tech, supposedly-irrelevant-in-the-fast-paced-modern-age books. Decaying Rust Belt cities, please take note.

"...eolean harps in which the wind sings..."

Hjalmar Söderberg's 1905 novel Doctor Glas revolves around the inner thoughts of a middle-aged Stockholm doctor who has never truly lived life. Though professionally successful, he has all but sat on the margins of life, with no lovers or even friends, never truly connecting with humanity and in fact mostly showing disdain for others. Yet even as he recognizes this distance and seems to revel in it, he still envies artists who are able to absorb the world into themselves, reflect and interpret their thoughts for the public, even if by doing so they sacrifice their free will and become servants of their muse.

I couldn't become a poet. I see nothing that others haven't already seen and given shape and form. I know a number of writers and artists - strange creatures, in my opinion. They have no will of their own, or if they do, their actions contradict it. They're merely eyes and ears and hands. But I envy them. Not that I would give up my will in exchange for their visions, but I might wish I had their eyes and ears in addition. Sometimes when I see one of them sitting quietly, absently, staring out into space, I think to myself: perhaps at this very moment he sees something no one has seen before, something he will soon compels a thousand others to see, among them me. I don't understand what the youngest of them produce - not yet - but I know and predict that once they are acknowledged and famous, I, too, will understand and admire them...And the poets themselves - do they really dictate the laws of time? Lord knows, though I hardly think they seem capable of it. Instead it seems more likely they are instruments that time plays on, eolean harps in which the wind sings. And what am I? Not even that. I have no eyes of my own...I think of Hans Christian Andersen and his tale of the shadow, and it seems to me that I myself am the shadow who wished to become a man.

Söderberg was a true artist, so in this instance it can hardly be said that the writer was using his narrator as a mouthpiece. Instead, Söderberg was clearly the perceptive aesthete that Doctor Glas so envied. But elsewhere in this mesmerizing book I can't help but hear the writer's opinions and beliefs ringing through, loud and clear.

Page 123 Meme - Never Come Morning

Marshall Zeringue at Campaign for the American Reader has tagged with the Page 123 Meme, which requires the following:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Right now I'm reading Nelson Algren's novel Never Come Morning. (An interesting coincidence, given the fact that I once wrote a Page 69 essay for Marshall on Algren's The Man With the Golden Arm.) In doing this meme, I'm going to take a slight liberty. The last two of the "three sentences" are fragments - the first just an adjective and a noun, the second a proper name (which is followed by four more proper names and then another fragment). The speaker of this passage is reading from a list, and so Algren's structure is faithful to normal human speaking patterns (Algren had a great ear for human dialogue) rather than standard written-word conventions. Because stopping after the third "sentence" (which isn't really a sentence at all) wouldn't make much sense, I've continued on to present the entire "phrase."

Page 123 of Never Come Morning involves one of Algren's favorite settings, the police interrogation. (Despite the fact that Algren wasn't a crime writer per se, many of his stories include scenes in interrogation rooms, police lineups and jail cells.) The protagonist, Lefty Bicek, has been arrested after a botched holdup in which the victim was accidentally shot. The interrogator, Captain Tenczara, couldn't really care less about the victim, but has instead hauled Lefty in to try to get him to implicate himself in a murder which Lefty did indeed commit. Lefty tries to downplay the holdup and shooting, implying that the victim was only slightly wounded and was an old man who didn't really matter anyway. After stringing Lefty along for a while, the Captain bluntly utters the following, implying that the victim was killed and was also a family man:

"Bullet through the groin - zip," he added, his words coming flat and unempathetic, reading from the charge sheet without understanding. "Five children. Stella. Mary. Grosha. Wanda. Vincent. All underage."

But the cagey Lefty doesn't take the bait, and doesn't let this revelation shock him into confessing to the more serious crime. Blunt, simple and to the point - just like much of Algren's dialogue. Great stuff.

That said, I'm now tagging Ben, Nick, Jason, Brandon and Richard, plus the ever-lovely Julie. You've been memed!

The Humo(u)r of Hunger

Chris Killen is my new hero - a fellow traveler who also appreciates the great humor in Knut Hamsun's otherwise bleak Hunger.

I think comedy often comes from dark places, and I think there's a very fine line between something being funny and something being horrible.

I've read Hunger from many different angles during the past twenty-plus years, humor being just one of them. The fact that the book works so perfectly on so many levels - including being funny and bleak at the same time - is one reason it's still the greatest book I've ever read.

(Via Dogmatika.)

Writerly Words to Live By

I have absolutely no idea who Nicolas Fargues is, but I like what he has to say.

NOVICE: You have none of Pierre Michon’s magisterial language, Echenoz’s elegant reserve, or Houellebecq’s powers of analysis. But if you take great care not to lose sight of who you are, you just might succeed in finding a way.

Don’t “make literature.” Don’t write because that’s what people expect of you now that you’re a “writer.” Don’t write for the beauty of the gesture or the love of art. Beware of fine phrases and well-turned maxims: That’s not your thing. Watch out for words that strike a pose. But do let your memory and your instincts flow—let the most apt words, the words that resemble you most closely, come of their own accord. Call a spade a spade (you do it beautifully, sometimes without even being aware of it). Write while it’s still warm, before distance intervenes, before you allow yourself to be corrupted by your desire to please. And don’t let yourself be misled by what editors, journalists, or readers might expect of novelists in general: style, energy, provocation, audacity. Forget all that, even your own recipes. Empty your mind and let come what comes.

Let necessity come and find the courage to drop it if nothing does (and try to persuade yourself that maybe it isn’t so bad, even if you don’t believe a word of it).

Be alone in order to remain free. Alone in order to keep a clear head. What a privilege, what an incomparable stroke of fortune it is, to know how to listen to yourself.

(Hold on, I’ve just cribbed a bit of Pennac.)

I recommend reading the entire Bookforum piece, which collects short essays from various writers on "words they found particularly suited to their ways of thinking about the novel" (trust me, the essays are livelier than that phrase might lead you to believe), in association with the upcoming International Forum on the Novel in Lyons, France.

New Hemon novel!

From the new Bookforum I was delighted to learn that not only does Aleksandar Hemon have a new book coming out (The Lazarus Project) but even more so that it's a novel. I knew he had something in the works, but thought it was nonfiction. Not that Hemon's nonfiction would be any less of a pleasure to read, of course - I'd probably enjoy reading his grocery list. But a new novel from him is a very pleasant surprise indeed, and Patrick McGrath's review leads me to believe it's a great one.

Here, Hemon finds a story big enough to contain and structure his extensive repertoire of fiercely held obsessions, which include, in no particular order, Bosnia, America, identity, history, young men’s friendships, death, resurrection, the nature of evil, storytelling, the impossibility of truth, the siege of Sarajevo, old photographs, the absence of God, violence, war, fraud, and espionage.

In other words, most of Hemon's familiar themes, which he has apparently executed extremely well. McGrath clearly thinks the book is great, and considering that this glowing assessment comes from a reviewer who thinks Nowhere Man (one of my favorite novels) "doesn't quite work" makes me even more eager to read the new one. Sounds like a terrific book.

Etgar Keret, "Knockoff Venus"

My review of Etgar Keret's "Knockoff Venus" is now up at The Short Story Reading Challenge. Terrific little story - even if reviews aren't your thing, at least please read the story itself if not the review. I'm running behind on my review quota over there (I've committed to ten for this year but only have two so far) and need to pick up the pace. I haven't read nearly as many short stories this year as I anticipated. But I hope to review Jonathan Messinger and Elizabeth Crane over there soon.

"...I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself..."

Nelson Algren's 1941 novel Never Come Morning was the second of his career, and the first to garner establishment backlash for his audacity at realistically characterizing the underclass and the ways they struggled in their daily lives. Specifically, the Polish establishment of Chicago's Northwest Side was particularly incensed that the underclass that Algren depicted included characters named Benkowski, Konstantine and Bicek. That politically influential bloc eventually succeeded in getting Algren's book banned from the Chicago Public Library for many years, before Algren's renown in the rest of the world (particularly Europe) helped correct the travesty and put the reactionaries in their place. Today Algren is widely celebrated in his former home city, even by the establishment, but it wasn't at all that way during the prime years of his writing career.

Algren understandably took issue with the censorship of his book, but reserved even more venom for the well-heeled and self-righteous community leaders who not only failed to identify with the underclass but condemned the poor for "immorality" or, even worse, refused to admit they existed at all. Throughout Algren's career he held as a credo Walt Whitman's moving phrase, "I feel I am of them - I belong to those convicts and prostitutes myself, And henceforth I will not deny them - for how can I deny myself?", which he used as the epigraph for Never Come Morning. In his preface to the 1963 edition of the book, Algren quite memorably expounds on Whitman's theme:

The source of the criminal act, I believed twenty years and ago and believe yet, is not in the criminal but in the righteous man: the man too complacent to feel that he - even he - belongs to those convicts and prostitutes himself.

And how completely the righteous have failed here is plain enough when we recall that the greatest change that twenty years have brought in our police work is that, while police were then splitting fifty-fifty with ex-cons for whom they set up scores, today they do the stealing themselves.

Nor all your piety nor all your preaching, nor all your crusades nor all your threats can stop one girl from going on the turf, can stop one mugging, can keep one promising youth from becoming a drug addict, so long as the force that drives the owners of our civilization is away from those who own nothing at all.

It's that very empathy and compassion that Algren shows - in all of his writings - to the unfortunate and forgotten members of society which makes him my favorite writer.

Chabon's Beautiful Book

Lately I've found myself increasingly interested in book design. Maybe I'm just more aware of it these days (especially since I've been contemplating launching my own press of handcrafted limited editions) or maybe because publishers are making more of an effort to make their physical product more distinctive. Probably both.

Anyway, I was at the bookstore today and was delighted to come across Michael Chabon's latest, Maps and Legends, which is a truly beautiful physical object. (Admittedly, that title alone - a subtle nod to early-period R.E.M. - was already enough of a grabber for me.) That's a picture of it above. The dust jacket is constructed of three irregularly-shaped, layered pieces - the blue ocean at the bottom, the green forest at the middle and the brown mountains above that - and the black portion at the top (with the author name) is part of the (hard) cover itself. The title is also imprinted directly onto the cover, and is visible through the jacket via a die-cut window at the center. I admired the book for quite some time before finally wondering who the publisher was. I flipped open the cover and found it's - no surprise - McSweeney's. Regardless of where you stand on McSweeney's literary or attitudinal merits, you have to admit that their books are almost always aesthetically beautiful. They always seem to put a lot of attention and imagination into their book designs, and for that they should be applauded.

I really can't do justice in words to the physical beauty and artistic ingenuity of Chabon's book design. Next time you're in the bookstore, I strongly encourage you to seek out the book yourself. You won't be disappointed.

Local Linking Love

My fellow Chicago writer and RAGAD contributor Spencer Dew gets the hallowed Book Notes treatment at Largehearted Boy, and displays his staggeringly diverse musical tastes. (Johnny Cash! The Clash! Shakira!) I've done a few readings with Spencer, and the antic energy of his performance simply has to be seen to be believed. Check him out, and the book (Songs of Insurgency) too.

At CCLaP, Jason Pettus raves about Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails, repeatedly invoking Haruki Murakami as he does so. Pettus' praise is even more impressive given the very lukewarm review he previously gave to Meno's much-loved Hairstyles of the Damned. (I had a few issues myself with that book, but really enjoyed it overall. I guess I'll add Boy Detective to my list.)

And on a non-literary note: Chicago, from 36,000 feet at night. Stunning. (Via Coudal.)

Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

On the subject of including only the essentials in a story, John Self recently quoted Anton Chekhov: "One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” It's a familiar conceit, but one which I hadn't realized went back to Chekhov. (As I commented on Self's blog, the version that I'm most familiar with is that of songwriter Peter Case, who once sang "A gun in the first act always goes off in the third.") I happened to come across the quote while halfway through Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, and I was struck by the ways O'Brien violates Chekhov's wise dictum.

From the very first words of the book - in fact, the title itself - O'Brien is at odds with Chekhov. The "third policeman" of the narrative doesn't make his first appearance in the book until twenty pages from the end, and though his presence is somewhat memorable, it hardly seems consequential enough to warrant naming the book after him. Referencing a character in a book's title and never having that character play a vital role in the narrative goes even further than Chekhov's unfired rifle in terms of introducing extraneous detail, and is the most obvious example of the numerous misplaced or unnecessary story elements which O'Brien can't seem to resist including. Another "unfired rifle" is the narrator's obsession with the fictional physicist/philosopher de Selby. I never really figured out what the philosopher had to do with the rest of the story, other than perhaps serving as the brunt of O'Brien's satirical take on the ridiculousness and borderline lunacy of abstract philosophical thought. (As an aside, I think Swift handled this idea much better, in describing Gulliver's travels amongst the Laputians, as I mentioned here yesterday.)

O'Brien's book is undeniably entertaining, often in a woozy, funhouse-mirror sort of way, but I doubt if it will stay with me for more than a week or two. The biggest problem for me is that I never believed, not even for a minute, that any of these characters were real. Instead I get the feeling that every one of them is a metaphor, some big symbol whose meaning I can only vaguely comprehend. The narrative also has, particularly at the beginning, a picaresque feel to it, a somewhat disjointed series of scenes that perhaps O'Brien couldn't quite figure out how to synthesize. And some of it just doesn't ring true. The narrator's premise in seeking out the police barracks in the first place - that the police would somehow assist him in finding the strongbox of the man he just murdered - is so ludicrous that the premise seems like nothing more than a lame excuse for his subsequent encounter with all the wacky and surreal goings-on at the barracks and all the entertainment value therein. And when key plot elements like that don't ring true, a book faces an almost insurmountable barrier to winning my heart.

I really wanted to love this book, having heard such great things about O'Brien and being such a fan of both satire and Irish fiction. But I just never figured out the point of it all, and that lack of meaning prevented me from ever being fully engaged, which means the book was a failure for me.

Gulliver Among the Laputians

Reading Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman has lead me to think about, for lack of a better term, fabulist satire. A major narrative element of O'Brien's book is the narrator's lengthy discourses (most of them in footnotes) on the theories of the fictional physicist/philosopher de Selby, who all but defines the term eccentric genius. The descriptions of de Selby's highminded but reality-detached scientific theories and philosophical musings immediately reminded me of the Laputians from Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

Of the four sections of Swift's masterpiece, the section which includes the voyage to Laputa is probably the least well-remembered, coming in far behind the voyages to Lilliput (little people) and Brobdingnag (giants), and probably even behind the Country of the Houynhyms (horses), but it's probably my favorite. This description of the Laputians' daily lives is particularly delicious:

I observed, here and there, many in the habit of servants, with a blown bladder, fastened like a flail to the end of a stick, which they carried in their hands. In each bladder was a small quantity of dried peas, or little pebbles, as I was afterwards informed. With these bladders, they now and then flapped the mouths and ears of those who stood near them, of which practice I could not then conceive the meaning. It seems the minds of these people are so taken up with intense speculations, that they neither can speak, nor attend to the discourses of others, without being roused by some external taction upon the organs of speech and hearing; for which reason, those persons who are able to afford it always keep a flapper in their family, as one of their domestics; nor ever walk abroad, or make visits, without him. And the business of this officer is, when two, three, or more persons are in company, gently to strike with his bladder the mouth of him who is to speak, and the right ear of him or them to whom the speaker addresses himself. This flapper is likewise employed diligently to attend his master in his walks, and upon occasion to give him a soft flap on his eyes; because he is always so wrapped up in cogitation, that he is in manifest danger of falling down every precipice, and bouncing his head against every post; and in the streets, of justling others, or being justled himself into the kennel.

Intellectuals who are so distracted that they would regularly fall off cliffs were it not for servants who slap them back into consciousness. Perfect.

John McGahern, The Barracks

For the past several Marches I've made it a tradition to read one or two Irish novels. At first I thought I'd work my way through all of Joyce's works - two years ago I read and loved Dubliners, even if it required a history primer near at hand to catch all of the period references, but last year I slogged through Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which definitely had moments of greatness but overall seemed too self-consciously 'artistic' for my tastes. Though Dubliners initially gave me enough courage to consider tackling Ulysses, after reading Portrait (which isn't generally considered a "difficult" work) I decided to step away from Joyce and move on to other worthy Irish writers.

My next stop was John McGahern. I hadn't ever heard of him until he passed away several years ago, but what I read of him at that time reminded me quite a bit of William Trevor, one of my very favorite writers. I figured if McGahern was anything at all like Trevor I'd really enjoy reading him. Last week I finished reading McGahern's first novel, The Barracks, which I very much enjoyed. It's a good novel, or, to qualify that somewhat, it's a very good first novel. The story itself - set in rural West Ireland just after WWII, when the country was still adjusting to self-determination after several decades of independence - is a sensitive, emotionally gripping one. The story revolves around Reegan, a police sargeant and former partisan who finds himself thoroughly disillusioned that his country's fight for freedom merely exchanged the oppression of a colonial occupation for the oppression of a self-imposed bureaucracy, and his wife Elizabeth, who's struggling with both breast cancer and a failing quest for self-fulfillment. Reegan and Elizabeth live together but never truly connect - she never really senses how much he's chafing under the constraints of the police force or appreciates his dream of quitting the force and buying a farm, and he's so preoccupied with scraping together enough money to pursue his dream that he never realizes how much pain she's in. Neither of which is simply a case of either being oblivious to the other, however - they never really make the effort to reach out to each other, and instead settle for wallowing in self-absorption.

The passages written from Reegan's perspective are, to me, more effective than those of Elizabeth. Maybe that's just the guy in me talking, but I really connected with his frustrations. I think one reason that his passages worked best is that they were delivered via action and dialogue - working his potato patch on company time and getting caught by his snooping boss and having to cringe his way through saying all the "right" things to appease him, or enduring the endless but quite funny banter of his patrolmen. In contrast, the passages written from Elizabeth's perspective were largely internal dialogue - often long-winded, sometimes abstract and overall relentlessly grim. (Which is not to say many of them weren't extremely powerful - in particular, I won't be forgetting any time soon the tormented scene in which she wakes up in excruciating pain after tumor surgery.) I suppose the internal dialogue makes sense, because Elizabeth is, even more so than Reegan, very much alone. I just felt that her passages needed to be tightened up a bit to be as effective as they could have been.

Despite my preference for Reegan's passages, however, for some reason one paragraph of Elizabeth's has really stuck with me, weeks after first reading it. To put the following in context, Elizabeth had lived in London for twenty years, where she worked as a nurse before returning to her home village to care for her dying mother, the same village where she met Reegan (who was stationed there) and where most of the novel takes place.

Elizabeth knew it would suit them if she stayed, stayed to nurse her mother as she crippled, the mother who had seemed so old when she died three months ago that not even her children wept at the funeral, she meant as little as a flower that has withered in a vase behind curtains through the winter when it's discovered and lifted out a day in spring.

A vased flower forgotten behind curtains and withering to nothingness - what a magnificent image and devastating metaphor that is, all economically delivered with an minimum of words. Maybe the reason I like that paragraph so much is that it hints at how much more powerful this book might have been had all of Elizabeth's passages been written with such economy and restraint.

Overall, as I said earlier, The Barracks is a very good first novel. Anyone reading the book back in 1963 would have clearly recognized the young McGahern as a writer of considerable talent who had a bright future ahead of him, an assessment which would be borne out by the acclaim with which his later novels were received. I know I'll be reading more McGahern in the future - I've already set my sights on Amongst Women.

Literary Festivals: Good News, Bad News

First, the bad:

The Midwest Literary Festival, which for five years had drawn famous authors and lovers of literature to Aurora, is ending.

City officials cited low income and feeble attendance for ending the two-day festival. In its place, they will host a literary series that will bring in authors one at a time throughout the year.

Fortunately, on the good side, Columbia College Chicago's Story Week is still going strong and kicks off next Sunday.

But then a funny thing happened. Columbia's cute little festival, which drew a handful of people over three days that first year, hung in there. And it expanded. Each year, the crowds increased - those 300 or so people in 1996 had, by 2007, multiplied to more than 5,000 - and the names on the marquee got bigger and bigger, including writers such as Salman Rushdie, Studs Terkel and Dave Eggers. Readings in lecture halls often were transformed into performance art in bars and nightclubs, complete with bands, and lively panel discussions, with a heavy emphasis on the interaction between the audience and the speakers.

If my workload at the office somehow slackens next Wednesday (March 19), I'd absolutely love to sneak off to this event:

11:00 AM
Panel: Beyond the Bookstore Tour, A Look at Guerrilla Marketing for Authors
with Jonathan Messinger, books editor, TimeOut Chicago, publisher, Featherproof Books, and author, Hiding Out; Hillary Carlip, publisher, FreshYarn.com, performance artist, and author, A la Cart: The Secret Lives of Grocery Shoppers; Eric Kirsammer, owner, Chicago Comics and Quimby's Bookstore; Shawn Shiflett, author, Hidden Place; Johnny Temple, publisher, Akashic Books
Host: Sam Weller, The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury
Columbia College Chicago
Film Row Cinema, 8th Floor
1104 S. Wabash, Chicago

Unfortunately, given the hellish pace of my office during the past few weeks, I'm not optimistic I'll be able to attend. Which is a shame, as I'd particularly enjoy the chance to meet Johnny Temple, whose Akashic Books is doing fantastic work these days. I've absolutely loved the last three books of theirs I've read - Chicago Noir, Aaron Patrovich's The Session, and Chris Abani's Song For Night.

Ring Lardner

Happy birthday to Ring Lardner, another of my literary heroes. My ancient copy of The Portable Ring Lardner is one of the most cherished volumes in my library.

It's the birthday of humorist and fiction writer Ring Lardner, born Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, in Niles, Michigan (1885). He was famous for his sports writing and the way he captured the way baseball players spoke in his writing.

When games were boring, Lardner would fill his articles with jokes and stories about the personal lives of players. He wrote for several Chicago newspapers, covering the Cubs and the White Sox. He wrote more than 4,500 articles and columns for newspapers throughout his life, as well as several other longer works of fiction. His first book was called You Know Me, Al (1916), about a made-up baseball player named Jack Keefe. It was supposedly a collection of letters Keefe had written.

One of Ring Lardner's good friends and drinking buddies was F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald encouraged Lardner to publish a collection of short stories, and he did with the book How to Write Short Stories (1924). Lardner wrote a lot of satire, and he once wrote of Fitzgerald, "Mr. Fitzgerald sprung into fame with his novel This Side of Paradise which he turned out when only three years old and wrote the entire book with one hand. Mr. Fitzgerald never shaves while at work on his novels and looks very funny along towards the last five or six chapters." Some of Lardner's other fans included Dorothy Parker, H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, and Virginia Woolf.

Ring Lardner said, "Where do they get that stuff about me being a satirist? I just listen."

W.C. Heinz

The writer W.C. Heinz has passed away, at age 93. Actually, I'm a bit surprised that he was still alive. Having read his best-known novel, The Professional, years ago, I remembered the prose as being so old-school that I just figured he had been gone for decades. I checked back in my reading list, and found it was 2001 when I read The Professional. Here's what I had to say back then:

Heinz is a contemporary of Algren's (both were highly regarded by Hemingway), and this book's themes are vaguely reminiscent of Algren: a boxer pulls himself out of society's lower class, gets a title shot and loses everything on one tiny, impulsive mistake. The narrative portions of this novel are extremely well-written, but ultimately the book bogs down from unnecessary or misplaced dialogue.

I more or less stand by that assessment today. Though I remember him as not having a great ear for dialogue (despite what Elmore Leonard says in that obit), Heinz knew boxing exceptionally well, and the book's fight scenes are outstanding. If you're a boxing fan or (like me) you have a perverse but detached interest in the sport, I strongly suggest you track the book down.

Quote

"I always like to hang out because, one, it’s a way of avoiding really writing; and, two, sometimes God is a crackerjack novelist and you can plagiarize the hell out of him."
- Richard Price, on doing street-level research for his latest novel, Lush Life

Sounds Quite Super

A recent Utne article introduced me to Superman Stories, a zine by Mark Russell which re-imagines the Man of Steel as an everyday guy. An everyday guy who can leap tall buildings at a single bound, of course, but one that's also wracked by doubt, relationship problems and other human foibles. Russell even goes so far as to dispense with the whole Clark Kent alter-ego thing altogether, as he quite sensibly explains in an interview at Every Day Is Like Wednesday:

One difference which was entirely intentional was the lack of a Clark Kent alter ego, which never made much sense to me. Britney Spears could put on a beekeepers’ outfit and she’d still get mobbed by fans the second she stepped out the door. The notion that a world famous and damn near omnipotent guy like Superman could put on a pair of glasses and a bad gray suit and simply melt into the crowd just struck me as ridiculous.

Sounds terrific. I'm working on obtaining a copy right now.

On Leonard Michaels

In the latest Poets & Writers, Dan Barden becomes the latest voice in the MFA yes-or-no debate [1]. In the midst of his self-described rant, Barden pens a fine remembrance of his former writing instructor, Leonard Michaels:

I’m a bastard, actually, from a tradition of bastards. I never had a better creative writing teacher than Leonard Michaels. He was a bastard because he (a) never prepared for class, (b) didn’t apparently care much for his students, and (c) used no filter whatsoever on his opinions. What I learned from Michaels—what, apparently, many people learned from Michaels—was to jealously love literature itself. He cared so deeply about what he read, even that miserable story of yours, that he could not be moved to lie about it. He could not be moved to blunt the force of his delight that you had delighted him or his anger that you had failed him. Nothing personal: He just cared more about the writing than anything else.

I don’t teach like Michaels. It would be hard to keep a job if I did. He read our stories aloud until the moment he didn’t care anymore. Then he would stop reading and ask us why he didn’t care anymore. Sometimes this took only two sentences.

I've been meaning to read Michaels for several years now, ever since hearing Shalom Auslander's appreciation of Michaels at Nextbook. (Sadly, it appears that Auslander's full reading of Michaels' wonderful story "Murderers" is no longer available on the site in mp3.) Until recently, I could blame my inaction on most if not all of his work being out of print, and also not on the shelves of my otherwise well-stocked local library. But now that he's back in print again, mostly notably with The Collected Stories, I no longer have any excuse. I'll finally read Michaels this year - I promise.

[1] Despite the passage on Michaels, I really don't recommend reading the rest of the article, having grown throughly tired of the whole MFA debate. If you want an MFA, go get one. If not, then don't. Either way, don't bother telling me about it. I won't be listening.

Quote

"Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock."
- Ben Hecht, who was born on this day in 1893

Bear in mind that Hecht must have said this during the heyday of newspapers. I'd love to hear what he'd have to say about newspapers now.

Ade and Deutch, Noted Chicagoans

Last Saturday's mail brought my latest book acquisitions, two rare and quite lovely titles from Powell's. The first:

This is a first edition of In Babel, a 1903 collection of pieces by George Ade, the renowned Chicago journalist. This volume is quite nice, with an imprinted cover so typical of the era, and other than a slight split in the front endpaper is in mint condition. I'm a huge fan of Ade (largely due to the tireless efforts of Ron Evry, who has been podcasting readings of Ade's works for quite some time) and I'm really looking forward to diving into this one. Here's Ade's wry preface to the book:

These little stories and sketches have been rewritten from certain daily contributions to the Chicago Record, now the Chicago Record-Herald. They have been assembled into this volume in the faint hope that they may serve as an antidote for the slang which has been administered to the public in such frequent doses of late. They are supposed to deal, more or less truthfully, with every-day life in Chicago.

The second is a first edition of Stephen Deutch, Photographer: From Paris to Chicago, 1932-1989, a 1989 monograph of the unappreciated photographer.

Viewing this rather hideous cover, you might take issue with my calling this a "lovely title" above. True, that cover does look like a cheap elementary school workbook from 1973, but the photographs collected inside convincingly negate the editors' dubious design preferences. Deutch was fairly unique in that he was simultaneously renowned for his commercial work, such as this 1950 image commissioned by Evans Furs...

...as well as for his documentary and street photography work, including this image taken on Clybourn Avenue near Division Street, also from 1950:

The book also includes numerous wonderful portraits of celebrities, including Nelson Algren (who was best of friends with Deutch), Joe Louis, Mahalia Jackson and Dave Garroway. Deutch got his start in photography in Paris in the 1930s, after marrying his wife Helene who was already running a studio at the time and subsequently taught him the art. Although the Deutches found themselves in one of the world's great artistic cities during its creative heyday, they didn't at all run with the in crowd. Deutch is quite tellingly quoted in the introduction:

"We didn't get invited to Gertrude Stein's salons. Jean-Paul Sartre didn't ask us to have coffee with him. We were just proletarians of the business. We had name recognition in a certain circle but certainly not in the literary or artistic ones. Life was the same way as it is for any working person. We had to be very diligent, put in lots of hours, and we enjoyed being successful. Bohemians we were not."

And though the Powell's listing didn't indicate as such when I made my purchase, the title page bears what very much appears to be Deutch's handwritten signature. Deutch was still alive at the time of the book's release, so it seems very plausible that this is indeed his signature. If so, it's a pleasant surprise which makes me treasure this find even more.

Jim Thompson, The Kill-Off

By sheer coincidence, today's Merriam-Webster "Word of the Day" is whodunit ("a detective story or mystery story"). Coincidence, because just yesterday I finished reading Jim Thompson's The Kill-Off, from 1957. Thompson's novels rarely, if ever, traffic in "who done it" - instead, many of his protagonists are psychopathic killers who leave behind multiple victims in their remorseless wakes. There is little doubt over who the murderer is. And when the protagonist isn't a cold-blooded murderer, it's a con man or some other two-bit hood perpetrating petty crimes. What little mystery there is to Thompson's stories is limited to the sane and socially well-adjusted reader's wonderment over how people like those protagonists could behave so unspeakably.

Which made The Kill-Off a very unexpected and pleasant surprise. Set in an unnamed, dying resort town on the Jersey shore, the story centers on Luane Devore, a middle-aged woman of the fading gentry who spends her days as a self-imposed invalid in her big house on the edge of town, endlessly gossiping on the phone and spreading vicious rumors about pretty much everyone in town. And, in doing so, giving all of them a compelling motive to murder her. Thompson makes it clear, from the very first chapter, that Luane will ultimately be murdered, but he takes his own sweet time getting around to killing her off. Instead, he slowly builds to that climax by presenting each chapter in a different character's voice, establishing each person's place in the town's rather deplorable social milieu. It's very quickly made clear that most of these people had reasons, many of them seemingly justifiable, for doing Luane in. So in introducing each of the characters in such a detailed manner, and clearly signaling Luane's impending demise, the book isn't a "whodunit" so much as a "whowilldoit." The narrative is a very interesting twist on the conventions of crime fiction, one which shows why Thompson was one of the true giants of the art.

New novel from James Meek

British author James Meek has a new novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, out in the UK. The Guardian thinks highly enough of the book to review it twice, here and here. (The Independent also ran a great profile of Meek this week.) Having thoroughly enjoyed his last book, The People's Act of Love (one of the very best books I've read this century), I can't wait for the new one to come out in the U.S.

(Independent link via Bookslut.)

Chris Abani, Song For Night

I was very impressed and quite moved by Chris Abani's Song For Night, a powerful and often harrowing novella of war and remembrance. The story is told through the inner voice of My Luck, a 15-year-old boy soldier in an ethnic civil war in Nigeria, Abani's native country. My Luck has the unenviable role of leader of a platoon of landmine diffusers - small, nimble youths who incapacitate mines ahead of the advancing infantry. Separated from his unit after being rendered unconscious by a mine blast, My Luck wanders the ravaged countryside. While his expressed intent is to find his way back to the platoon, he is strangely reticent, seeming to hold back and not push forward as aggressively as he should. His meandering journey provides him plenty of time to reflect on his past: his family life before the conflict, his basic training and his comrades, but, most graphically, the horrific scenes of battle, pillaging and deprivation which torment his dreams by night and conjure disturbing visions by day. Abani, who is also a poet with several published collections to his name, writes in brisk, vivid and lyrical prose which somehow lends beauty to an otherwise grim narrative. Abani provides yet another portrait of the horror and senselessness of war, but instead of a simple polemic delivers a compelling story and a protagonist whom, as he searches for inner peace, that the reader can't help feel compassion for.

Song For Night is a rather remarkable book, one which will stay with me for quite some time.

Special thanks to Akashic Books for providing me with a review copy.

Mountain Goats, "Sax Rohmer #1"

Behold the latest video from the Mountain Goats, of "Sax Rohmer #1", from the forthcoming album Heretic Pride. What fascinating images those are, even though all those scrolling lyrics did have me a bit woozy. If there's a smarter artist working in popular music today than John Darnielle, it would be news to me.

Darnielle, by the way, has penned a book for the great 33 1/3 series, on Black Sabbath's Master of Reality, which is coming out in April. Reading Darnielle's blog over the years, I've always been fascinated that a folkie like him could be so deeply into heavy metal, so I'm not at all surprised to see him writing about Sabbath. If you're as intrigued about this as I am, follow this link for directions on obtaining a free .pdf sampler of the book.

Kevin Brockmeier, "A Fable Containing a Reflection the Size of a Match Head in Its Pupil"

My first review at The Short Story Reading Challenge, of Kevin Brockmeier's "A Fable Containing a Reflection the Size of a Match Head in Its Pupil", is now online. Please check it out if you have a few moments.

Tom Swifty

Here's a fun contest over at Mental Floss: come up with your own Tom Swifty. Here's my entry:

"I am finished," Tom said conclusively.

I'm passing along news of this contest at no risk to my own candidacy, because I undoubtedly already have the winner anyway.

(Via Stephany Aulenback.)

E.M. Forster, Howards End

Just finished reading E.M. Forster's Howards End, and I can reservedly say that it's a great book. The story itself is marvelous - a sharp study about social classes in early-20th Century England, how members of those classes interact and what responsibility, if any, they have toward each other. Forster's characters are wonderful, especially the caught-between-classes Margaret Schlegel and her bourgeois husband Henry, a callously insensitive man whose interest in others is limited to how they reflect on him and affect his standing in society. The story's settings are also particularly strong; I can easily envision Howards End, Oniton Grange and Wickham Square, and Forster's lush and vivid descriptions really point to his fascination and love for his country.

The reason I qualify my overall assessment with that term "reservedly" is Forster's penchant for digressive asides, in which he regularly halts the narrative flow to pontificate on abstractions, elaborating on the narrative in vague and high-flown language. He chooses to drive home thematic points in this manner rather than just letting the story deliver the theme - which is somewhat puzzling, considering that the story already expresses his themes very effectively, thus making all those asides unnecessary. My guess is that eliminating these passages could have cut as many as 50 or 75 pages from the book, significantly tigthtening the narrative to its essentials and creating a much greater book. As it is, Howards End is already a great book, but it could have been even better.

"A young man’s book, an old man’s book..."

Sven Birkerts on Knut Hamsun. I've been toying with the idea of subscribing to Bookforum, and this finally clinches it for me. Count me in.

RAGAD reading at Book Cellar: no bruises, no frostbite

The RAGAD reading at Book Cellar went very well. Turnout was much better than I expected on such a bitterly cold night, the atmosphere was warm and inviting and despite the added pressure of being the "featured" reader (since issue #5 is devoted entirely to my story "Mercy Day", which I read) I didn't perform too horribly. Despite what Nick Ostdick says, however, I wouldn't describe the audience as being "riveted" by my story, but they did seem to enjoy it - and not a single one of them dozed off. My sincerest thanks to Nick for publishing the story and hosting the event, and I'd also like to give a shout-out to my fellow readers Spencer Dew, Jill Summers and the irrepressible Ben Tanzer.

Incidentally, Ben, Nick, Jason Pettus (CCLaP) and Jason Behrends (What to Wear During an Orange Alert?) convened after the reading to record a podcast on all things locally literary, which can be enjoyed here. I was kindly asked to participate, but had to decline - after Julie was cheerfully willing to be dragged all the way up to the city on such a forbidding night, I thought she deserved a nice dinner afterward. Which we had - after a few unsuccessful stops at other places, we had an excellent meal at Tilli's, in Lincoln Park.

Update: Jason Pettus has posted several photos from the reading. In the third photo down, I'm the follically-challenged guy in the plaid shirt. Julie is to my right, and the bearded Nick Ostdick is at the far left. The hands grasping the beer bottle and glass in the foreground, I believe, belong to Ben Tanzer.

Where books go to die...

Check out this compelling, beautiful and (to a book lover such as myself) horrific slide show of an abandoned, rotting schoolbook depository in Detroit. What all of this says about urban spaces, the educational system and the environment is almost too awful to contemplate.

Update: The photographer has a long and thoughtful post on this subject here.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Quote

"The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken."
- E.M. Forster, Howards End

Let us now read James Agee, already

At the Guardian blog, Chris Routledge writes a fine appreciation for James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The book has been on my shelf, still unread, for more than ten years. (I have, however, thumbed through it several times for Walker Evans' classic photographs which accompany the text.) I started reading it once, a few years ago, but gave up after only about ten pages. One of my goals for this year is to finally sit down and read the book. I've heard from others that the text is a bit impenetrable (I also remember, vaguely, those first ten pages being as such) but I get the feeling that the effort, no matter how considerable, will be very much worth it.

And if that proves successful, I suppose I'll next be checking out Dale Maharidge's And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which I just stumbled across for the first time. It's published by the esteemed Seven Stories Press, and described by none other than Studs Terkel as "at times astonishing, at all times deeply moving", so I really can't see how I could go wrong with this one.

Quote

"In a curious way, I'm not much interested in language. In my ideal poem, no words are noticed. You look through them into a vision of... just see the people, the place."
-Philip Levine, who turns 80 today

Words that don't call attention to themselves - or, by extension, to the writer - but instead to the people and the place those words are describing. I really admire that.

Same old New Yorker

From The Millions: over the past five years, 32% of the short stories published in The New Yorker have been written by just 14 authors: William Trevor, Alice Munro, Tessa Hadley, Haruki Murakami, Thomas McGuane, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Roddy Doyle, Louise Erdrich, Lara Vapnyar, John Updike, George Saunders, Edward P. Jones, Charles D'Ambrosio and Antonya Nelson. Fine writers all, of course, but their predominance in that magazine's pages all but screams out for more variety.

Which also screams out for the submission of quirky stories to that literary bastion by low-profile writers everywhere, as originally clarion-called for by J. Robert Lennon and dutifully passed along here. Fellow peons, get writing!

Dos Passos novella now online

For those of you who are more inclined to reading book-length works of fiction online than I am, John Dos Passos' 1922 novella One Man's Initiation - 1917 is now online at Project Gutenberg. I thoroughly enjoyed reading his Manhattan Transfer several years ago, and have been wanting to read another work of his. This novella, however, probably won't be it, at least not online in this form. (Memo to the good folks at DailyLit: I'd love to read this in daily, spoon-fed installments.)

The pleasant way to read James Patterson

Here's a truly inspired exercise - reading the latest James Patterson "thriller", but just the last line of each chapter.

Then we began reading just the last sentence of every chapter. They were all very--cue scary music--DUN DUN DUNNN!! And the more we read, the funnier they got.

Naturally, we decided that they needed to be collected.

So I typed up a list of the last line of every chapter in the book. And the amazing thing was that the story actually made sense this way.

I would like to personally thank Steph at Natural/Artificial for her exemplary and invaluable act of public service - thanks to her efforts, I will never bother reading even one of Patterson's books. I think I already have the gist of all of them, past and future.

(Via Judge a Book By Its Cover, where readers weigh in with their favorite of Patterson's last lines.)

Challenged by stories

My first post is now up at The Short Story Challenge. Many thanks to Kate for the invite.

2008 Literary Resolutions

1. Finish third draft of Wheatyard, send out to readers, incorporate revisions, finish fourth (and final?) draft, send to prospective publishers.
2. Resume work on This Land Was Made for You and Me, completing at least five new stories.
3. Write fiction every day - 500 word minimum.
4. Officially launch Hawker Press.
5. Read one play each month, starting with Aristophanes' "Lysistrata" in January.
6. Read ten short stories by ten writers I haven't previously read; blog about impressions at The Short Story Reading Challenge.
7. Continue 2007 reading themes: March Irish Novel (John McGahern's The Barracks), Summer of Classics, Short Story September.
8. Perpetuate the posting of pithy commentary, right here.

Good Reading 2007

Once again, here's my year-end best-of list. As always, these are all books that I read during 2007, not that were published in 2007, with the latter being prohibited by my chronic sloth in checking out new releases. The envelope, please...

1. Ward Just: Forgetfulness (review)
2. Ian McEwan: Atonement (review)
3. Laila Lalami: Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (review)
4. Bayo Ojikutu: Free Burning (review)
5. Cormac McCarthy: The Road (review)
6. Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio (review)
7. William Trevor: The Hill Bachelors
8. Kurt Vonnegut: A Man Without a Country (review)
9. Aaron Petrovich: The Session (review)
10. Ben Tanzer: Lucky Man

Honorable Mentions: Jon Krakauer: Under the Banner of Heaven; Calvin Trillin: Travels With Alice; Nathanael West: The Day of the Locust; James M. Cain: The Postman Always Rings Twice; Edward Gorey: Amphigorey Again

Re-readings: Samuel Beckett: Waiting For Godot; Herman Melville: Bartleby the Scrivener; Sinclair Lewis: Babbitt; Knut Hamsun: Hunger

Friends and Acquaintances: Steven J. McDermott: Winter of Different Directions; Rick Kogan: A Chicago Tavern: A Goat, a Curse, and the American Dream; Various Writers: All Hands On: THE2NDHAND Reader

2006 List
2005 List
2004 List
2003 List
2002 List

BibliOdyssey, the book

One of the books that I was particularly pleased to get for Christmas was BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images From the Internet. (The gift was from my wife Julie, who was paying sharp attention to my mention of the book in November.) Like the website of the same name, the book is absolutely gorgeous, and promises many hours of slow, sumptuous study. The image above is from one of my favorite recent posts, "Dutch Advertising Graphics"; as much as I enjoy the older, more academic/scientific images that BibliOdyssey specializes in, I'm even more of a sucker for more recent (relatively speaking) advertising images such as these.

Books given, 2007

This year, continuing a protracted trend, the Christmas gifts I've given to my family have been almost exclusively books. (With the exception of my wife, with whom I have considerably more imagination in my gift giving.) Here's what my undoubtedly grateful family is thanking their lucky stars for having received this year.

19-year-old nephew
(College freshman who is still finding his place in the world and likely in need of examples of roads not to take)
Joe Meno - Hairstyles of the Damned
Knut Hamsun - Hunger
Ben Tanzer - Lucky Man

23-year-old niece
(Recent college graduate and fledgling writer who has already seen more of the world than I will likely see in my entire life)
Laila Lalami - Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits
Ian McEwan - Atonement
Various Writers - Literature from the Axis of Evil

30-something wife
(Voracious reader and English major who can recite Beowulf in the original Middle English yet still loves Harry Potter)
Simon Armitage (translator) - Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

40-something sister
(Casual reader who is not too bold in her reading choices and owns far too many Stephen King hardcovers)
Gregory Maguire - Wicked
Elizabeth Kostova - The Historian

Never-mind-how-old mother
(Another voracious reader who is forever interested in her Scandinavian heritage)
Per Petterson - Out Stealing Horses
Barbara Sjoholm - Palace of the Snow Queen

Algren's Long-Ago Cons

It's the holiday season, a time of peace and goodwill to men (and women), of nostalgic remembrances of the past. What better time to read about my patron saint Nelson Algren reflecting on some of the finest con jobs he pulled during his boyhood? I find it utterly impossible to resist, especially this Christmas-themed one...

Around Christmastime the paper guys had cards printed and sold them to us little paper guys for a nickel apiece. They read something like this:

Christmas comes but once a year
When it comes it brings good cheer
So open your heart without a tear
And remember the newsie standing here.

That got them, every time. Especially if there was a light fall of snow. And the swindle in the card routine was this: After he'd paid for the verse and would be thinking he owned it, you'd have to tell him no, it was your only card, you just wanted him to see the sentiment on it, it had cost you a nickel, so please mister could you have it back?

I've been meaning to pick up the reissue of The Last Carousel for a while now. Reading priceless reminiscences like this piece just might clinch my purchase.

(Via Destinyland.)

Merry Christmas from Old Scrooge

It suddenly occurred to me that an annual reading of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol might be a nice family tradition to adopt. I could have sworn we had a small hardcover copy (the kind you see, in large undisturbed stacks, on the gift tables at B&N this time of year) somewhere, which I haven't found, nor is it in any of the numerous Norton Anthologies that my English major wife and I have around the house. (Not serious enough literature for the Nortons, I guess.) Sure, the story is available online, but I find it less than warm and cozy to gather the family and curl up around my Dell laptop. I'll probably check the after-Christmas sales at the bookstores and start the tradition next year.

For those of you who are indeed comfortable with curling up around the laptop, I direct you to this nice clean copy of Dickens' classic seasonal tale. I'm often called a Scrooge myself, though I like to pretend it's in reference to the Christmas morning, buying the fattest goose, dinner at the Cratchits version. So in a way I identify with the old guy.

Merry Christmas to you and yours (or Happy Holidays or whatever greeting you prefer) from this old Scrooge. Bless us every one.

J. Robert Lennon has had enough!

Fellow writer and blogger J. Robert Lennon was deeply disappointed by the most recent fiction issue of The New Yorker, decrying the been-there-done-that of the stories therein.

Maybe it's the weather, but I feel a terrible drear hanging over this issue. Every story's about the same damn stuff--love, marriage, boyfriends, girlfriends. They aren't dead topics, for sure, but can we have maybe one weird story? Just one that conforms to nothing whatsoever?

Even without ever reading The New Yorker, I know exactly what he's talking about. (As much as I love William Trevor, I often wonder why they publish him so damned much. And I know the magazine has several other "pets" in their writer stable.) So Lennon has a great idea - pick one of the topics in the list below, crank out a story and send it to The New Yorker in time for their summer fiction issue.

1) An astronaut on a voyage to Mars ends up someplace entirely unexpected.
2) A day in the life of a five-year-old mind reader.
3) The zoo employees go on strike.
4) Some townspeople are protesting the building of a new bridge, and one goes missing.
5) A woman loses the mayoral election by five votes.
6) A breakfast cereal designer runs out of ideas.
7) A solider in Iraq goes AWOL and is taken in by a cadre of disillusioned reporters.
8) A man tries to commit suicide by walking into the sea, but he can't get it to work.
9) An agricultural scientist is angry at the college where he works because they claimed ownership of his many potato hybrids, and so he plans revenge.
10) An adolescent girl, discovering she is adopted, decides to start a rock band.

So I'm climbing up on my soapbox and cajoling, imploring, exhorting all of you writers who read this blog - Nick, Ben, Ann, Donavan, Kevin, Richard, Josh, Drew, and the rest - to try exactly what Lennon suggests. (At the moment, I'm leaning toward "The zoo employees go on strike" - I promise not to be overly derivative of Madagascar.) Once you have the story written and submitted, please report back to me. I won't even claim an agent's fee. As for Lennon's 10%, well, you'll just have to work that out with him on your own.

Now get to work!

Hello, Goodbye Green Day

Heartiest congratulations to my friend Donavan Hall, who just completed his first novel Goodbye Green Day. Now comes the fun part - finding a publisher. Donavan, I wish you all the best.

Quote

"You can have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power."
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, born on this day in 1918

The dark side of writing

And by dark side, I don't mean writer's block, or ceaseless editing in pursuit of ever-elusive perfection, or hundreds of rejected submissions, or countless phone calls unreturned by agents or editors, or critical and commercial indifference to one's craft. Instead, witness this stirring bit of domestic horror.

Writing has become the focus of his life over the past five years. All of these books eventually get self-published.

As an author, you may think this a marvelous way to spend retirement. I am introverted enough to see its attraction, too. But here is the thing -- my father is not a good writer. He is not even a reader -- he prefers TV and movies to novels. He is a dabbler. He is a dabbler who wants to be rich and famous, but he always chooses arts in which he has no skill or training. His various projects, intended to earn him millions, have included writing music, writing screenplays and scripts for Hollywood, writing novels and nonfiction, and oil painting.

All of the output of these endeavors have been pretty terrible.

Dabbling at writing when you have absolutely no talent isn't bad in itself - after all, it's important to keep busy during retirement. But if you do, keep your writing to yourself, but by no means should you ever cross the line of human decency by inflicting your dubious artistic efforts on your family and, even worse, demanding that they give you feedback. Positive feedback only, that is.

As fathers go, this guy makes John Cheever look like Ward Cleaver. His poor, poor family. They have my deepest condolences.

Gin + Greyhound = No More Writer's Block

The inspiration-challenged writer in me couldn't help admiring this above item from Core77's "77 Design Gifts Under $77" holiday gift spectacular. (Click on image for full-sized version.)

Please Don't? Please Do!

The debut issue of Chicago-based litzine Please Don't is now live, with writings by Jonathan Messinger, Patrick Somerville, J.D. Greene, Sarah A. Strickley and Kevin Clouther, plus the intriguing first chapter of the serialized story "The Axl Watch", which will be written by a succession of writers.

"Did you just kill Axl Rose?"

The large Asian man raised one hand to rub the sweat from the back of his chubby neck. Then he sighed.

"Not exactly," he said.

More, I say! Give us more!

Happy Birthday, Mr. Trillin

Calvin Trillin turns 72 today...

It's the birthday of the essayist and humorist Calvin Trillin, born in Kansas City, Missouri (1935), who started out working for the religion section of Time magazine, which he did not like. He said, "I finally got out of that by prefixing everything with 'alleged.' I'd write about 'the alleged parting of the Red Sea,' even 'the alleged Crucifixion,' and eventually they let me go."

In 1967, Trillin began writing a regular column for The New Yorker magazine called "U.S. Journal," which he saw as a chance to write about ordinary people who didn't usually get covered in the national press. As a result of traveling so much Trillin began eating in a variety of local restaurants, and at a time when most food writers focused on gourmet food from France, Trillin wrote about barbecue ribs in the Midwest. His first collection of food writing was American Fried: Adventures of a Happy Eater (1974), in which he declared that the top four or five restaurants in the world are in Kansas City. His most recent book is his memoir About Alice (2006).

...and by sheerest coincidence I just started reading Travels With Alice this morning, and I'm really enjoying it so far. Damn, that man can write.

Weekend Multimedia...sort of...

I was first struck by the wonderfully vivid cover art of this Efterklang album, but after clicking through to the post on Sleevage I became utterly charmed by the demonstration video, which shows how the cover is actually a puzzle that can be arranged in numerous configurations. Beautiful and ingenious!

Incidentally, Sleevage is one of my favorite recent finds, a blog devoted entirely to innovative album cover art. Do check it out. It may not change your life, but will make your life more pleasant for a while.

Ads Nauseum

"A large gleaming machine with an opening at one end was wheeled in, and once again the cycle ran its Micronite Filter. Mild, Smooth Taste. For All the Right Reasons. Kent. America’s Quality Cigarette. King Size or Deluxe 100s."

Paul Collins has a typically smart and fascinating column in the NYT this week about the (mercifully past) era of advertisements bound directly into paperback books. Though the heyday was in the 1960s and 1970s, even Charles Dickens wasn't immune, over a hundred years earlier.

Support an independent press this holiday season!

For the most part, independent presses are the lifeblood of literature. They value art instead of profit, taking chances instead of playing it safe, developing writers over time instead of throwing huge advances over a hot debut author and then cutting that author loose after the book fails to sell in the millions. Sadly, due to the very small audience for literary fiction, indie presses mostly operate on the slenderest of shoestrings, living from one foundation grant to the next and praying the distributor pays on time.

Indie presses need and deserve our help. If you're like me, much of your holiday gift-giving involves books. (Much of? Hell, last year I gave my family NOTHING BUT books.) If that's the case, why not specifically seek out books from indie presses? I've already done so this year, buying my mom [1] Out Stealing Horses, the critically acclaimed novel by Norwegian writer Per Petterson which was published by Graywolf Press. Besides Graywolf, some other top indies worth checking into are Coffee House Press, Akashic, Sarabande, Dzanc, Dalkey Archive, Soft Skull and Melville House.

So you clicked on a few of those publisher links and still can't figure out what to buy? Never fear. Here are some of my very favorite indie press releases of the past several years:

Ander Monson, Other Electricities (Sarabande)
Kirby Gann, Our Napoleon in Rags (Ig Publishing)
Aaron Petrovich, The Session (Hotel St. George/Akashic)
Various, Chicago Noir (Akashic)
Ben Tanzer, Lucky Man (Manx Media)
Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree (McSweeney's)
Carolyn Eastwood: Near West Side Stories: Struggles for Community in Chicago's Maxwell Street Neighborhood (Lake Claremont Press)
Brian Costello: The Enchanters vs. Sprawlburg Springs (Featherproof)
Stuart Dybek: Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (University of Chicago)

You may have noticed that for each of those books I linked directly to the publisher's site, and not to an online store. To help out the publisher even more, wherever possible you might consider buying directly from the publisher and let them keep the cut they'd otherwise have to give to the distributor and retailer. Sure, you won't get supersaver shipping, but who are we kidding? You can easily afford the UPS charges.

So go ahead, buy an indie book for a friend or loved one. Good karma is just one of the benefits. And do me a favor - if you do indeed buy an indie book as a holiday gift, I'd love to hear about it, so please leave the author's name, title and publisher in the comments section below. Thanks in advance!

[1] No, I'm not ruining her surprise. She avoids the Internet as if it's radioactive. And in the unlikely event that you know my mom, please keep this a secret.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

As I've mentioned before, I'm on the partner program at Powell's. I'm not used to seeing much sales activity there - maybe one or two books every quarter - so I was quite pleasantly surprised to open up my statement and see that, just yesterday, someone strolled over there and bought four eBooks, and stellar titles all: Amsterdam, The Emperor's Children, The Ruins and The Book of Air and Shadows. And last week, somebody bought the new Elliott Smith bio I recently salivated over. With all such purchases, as a partner I get a small commission to use as credit for future purchases of my own. To all of you who have ever bought a book at Powell's through my partner link, thanks!

Think Globally, Gorge Locally

As you gorge yourself on turkey and trimmings today, it's worthwhile to pause and think about where that food is coming from. Heifer International - an amazingly worthwhile organization that you should strongly consider supporting - has a thoughtful interview with Barbara Kingsolver about sustainability and eating locally. My wife Julie just read, and loved, Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life and is demanding that I read it as well. This year we've both become much more aware of what we eat, and I think next spring we're finally going to plant the vegetable garden that we've been vowing to plant for years and years.

In the Context of No Coherence

With rare exceptions, I have limited my literary commentary here to books that I thoroughly enjoyed, that emotionally moved me, that engaged my intellect, that established a bond between the writer and myself.

The following commentary, then, is one of those rare exceptions.

I recently read, or tried to read anyway, George W.S. Trow's In the Context of No Context, and I'm not at all embarrassed or ashamed to admit that I have absolutely no idea what the hell Trow was talking about in this slim volume. (I won't even link to the book, lest someone think I'm at all recommending it, which I most assuredly am not.) I consider myself to be a fairly intelligent person, and well-educated (admittedly not in the humanities, but in fields that require considerable analytical reasoning, interpretation and sound judgment), but whatever concepts Trow was trying to get across were completely lost on me. Trow undoubtedly felt he was being profound and deeply philosophical here, but wrote almost entirely in blandly vague generalities and obscure and unexplained metaphors. (If somebody can explain his baffling and repeated invocation of Nathanael West's "goat and adding machine ritual", which West apparently used as a quirky plot device but which Trow conflates into something Staggeringly Important, I'm all ears.) And while I'm sure he felt clever and innovative, starting off with all of those one-paragraph-long sections, each set apart with its own title, that questionable structure disrupted whatever steady reading flow the reader might have otherwise developed, a flow which could have considerably aided the comprehension of Trow's uncompelling prose. And then those short, terse sections were followed, suddenly and abruptly, by long paragraphs filled with florid, gushing but ultimately empty prose, at which point, seventy pages in, I abandoned the book for good.

Life's just too short to muddle through such muddled, impenetrable texts. This book sat on my shelf for ten years, awaiting my reading. I should have just left it there.

Nicked!

My friend and publisher Nick Ostdick has two new stories published, "Catching the Old Man's Cure" (at Pindeldyboz) and "For Better Future Viewing" (at Word Riot). Fine stories both - I particularly like the former, and how he neatly wrapped up so many disparate threads in very short order - and, having had several of my own stories rejected by those two fine journals, I can personally attest to the accomplishment of being published therein. Fine work.

I feel so edumacated!

Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

I've decided to read nothing but nonfiction books for the rest of this year, and with many of the nonfiction titles on my shelf being fairly short in length, I'll probably be commenting on books here with greater frequency than I have in the past.

I've just had the great pleasure of reading Kurt Vonnegut's final book, A Man Without a Country, a collection of essays. Like the author, the book is funny, angry, passionate, sympathetic and most of all humane. Many of the pieces are rants against our political leadership and the misguided direction our country is headed - most notably the degraded environment and the precarious future of the planet itself - but others are warm anecdotes from Vonnegut's personal life. (The piece about his ill-fated ownership of a Saab dealership is simply priceless.) This is a terrific book that I know I'll return to again and again over the coming years. What an absolute pleasure it must have been to personally know this great man. His sensible voice will be sorely missed in this nonsensical world of ours.

The more things change...

Undoubtedly prompted by the Hollywood writers' strike, MovieMaker has republished, online, David Geffner's excellent piece on Jim Thompson's lost years as a Hollywood screenwriter, which originally appeared in the magazine's December 1996 issue. Clearly, writers getting screwed over by the studios is nothing new, and likely even predated Thompson, and will undoubtedly continue indefinitely - unless writers fight back for what they deserve.

Support the WGA!

John Brown, Righteous Anarchist

Just finished reading John Brown: Great Lives Observed, a concise, balanced and non-partisan collection of writings, drawn from both contemporary and modern sources, about the legendary abolitionist John Brown - his formative years, the Kansas Free State crusade, and most importantly his raid on Harper's Ferry and its aftermath. (The book is long out of print, although still available here.) Like many abolitionists of Brown's era, I object to his violent means of bringing about change, even as I wholeheartedly agree with the moral rightness of his goal. In the concluding paragraphs, editors Richard Warch and Jonathan Fanton succinctly summarize Brown's impact on American history:

John Brown embodies, then, the actual despair of his own time and the potential despair of all times. He is a watchword and a warning that when a nation fails to resolve its problems and allows them to reach crisis proportions - particularly those that threaten human rights and liberties - the response of a John Brown is possible and often inevitable.

There is, however, a further legacy of John Brown. He was, in his last years especially, a man of purpose who translated thought to action, who attempted what others only contemplated, and who was faithful to the dictates of his conscience. John Brown believed in the promise of the Declaration of Independence and anguished over its unfulfillment. However one may judge his means, he sought to realize that promise for black Americans. He dreamed of the more perfect Union that would not come until, as he predicted, the crimes of this guilty land were purged away with blood.

Literature Mapping

Interesting concept - the lite