Pete Lit

"Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory."

In 1984, Winston has just had his first rendezvous with Julia, but he's not exactly in love. Hell, he's not even in lust. As she's standing naked before him, he's thinking not of any of the usual things, but how her licentiousness has the potential to undermine the Party. Later, after they've finished (Orwell having dispatched their act with the remarkably understated single line "This time there was no difficulty"), Winston further reflects on what his sleeping lover represents.

The young, strong body, now helpless in sleep, awoke in him a pitying, protecting feeling. But the mindless tenderness that he had felt under the hazel tree, while the thrush was singing, had not quite come back. He pulled the overalls aside and studied her smooth white flank. In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desirable, and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

What a hopeless romantic.

"Who controls the past...controls the future..."

Sharp passage here from 1984, as Winston Smith performs compulsory morning calisthetics under the watchful eye of the "telescreen" surveillance monitor.

The frightening thing, he reflected for the ten thousandth time as he forced his shoulders painfully backward (with hands on hips, they were gyrating their bodies from the waist, an exercise that was supposed to be good for the back muscles) - the frightening thing was that it might all be true. If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened - that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - if all records told the same tale - then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.

'Stand easy!' barked the instructress, a little more genially.

What is truth, exactly? Unfortunately, it's often nothing more than what official history says it is. Which is why I admire truth-tellers like Howard Zinn as much as I do.

"They were travelling for a dream/and could give all/and must go on in their searchings/and their unease..."

Nicely understated poem here by the Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas, as translated by Eric Dickens. I'm familiar with a few of Vesaas' novels, including The Birds, which I read during college and plan to revisit soon. Though well regarded, I'm not sure the book is classic enough to warrant inclusion in my Summer of Classics, so I'll probably wait until September or later.

"What a sorrowful act must that be - the covering up of wells!"

I really like this passage from Walden, in which Thoreau's forced winter solitude turns his thoughts to the people who once lived in the area but have long since vanished, along with almost all traces of their humble homes.

Now only a dent in the earth marks the site of these dwellings, with buried cellar stones, and strawberries, raspberries, thimble-berries, hazel-bushes, and sumachs growing in the sunny sward there; some pitch pine or gnarled oak occupies what was the chimney nook, and a sweet-scented black birch, perhaps, waves where the door-stone was. Sometimes the well dent is visible, where once a spring oozed; now dry and tearless grass; or it was covered deep - not to be discovered till some late day - with a flat stone under the sod, when the last of the race departed. What a sorrowful act must that be - the covering up of wells! coincident with the opening of wells of tears. These cellar dents, like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and "fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute," in some form and dialect or other were by turns discussed. But all I can learn of their conclusions amounts to just this, that "Cato and Brister pulled wool"; which is about as edifying as the history of more famous schools of philosophy.

Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children's hands, in front-yard plots - now standing by wallsides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests; - the last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family. Little did the dusky children think that the puny slip with its two eyes only, which they stuck in the ground in the shadow of the house and daily watered, would root itself so, and outlive them, and house itself in the rear that shaded it, and grown man's garden and orchard, and tell their story faintly to the lone wanderer a half-century after they had grown up and died - blossoming as fair, and smelling as sweet, as in that first spring. I mark its still tender, civil, cheerful lilac colors.

When Thoreau sticks to close descriptions of the natural and built environments like this, the writing is absolutely marvelous. Unfortunately, he's also often prone to ponderous philosophical abstractions, which I could easily do without.

Schaub-man Returns

It's great to have Michael Schaub blogging again at Bookslut, after a hiatus of several years. Here's just one of his great recent posts.

LA Weekly talks to James Wood, author of How Fiction Works and "the most vilified literary critic alive." Oh, and he hates you:

My true enemies skulk in a deep Dostoevskian Underground called the Internet, and never see the light of day — that is their punishment for hating me so much; it matches the sin, as in Dante.

Ha ha ha! That's good stuff, James. Good stuff. This might explain why Walter Kirn ended his now famous review of Wood's book with the sentence "But there is one question this volume answers conclusively: Why Readers Nap." And why Colson Whitehead parodied Wood thus:

When we see a word, we must ask ourselves foremost, What does it mean? This is the first step in comprehension. When we have accomplished this, we can proceed to the next, and so on. In due course, we have read the sentence in toto. By returning to the beginning of the sentence to perform a close reading, we unlock its essence. I learned this skill at university.

I'm rather puzzled at why Wood continues to garner so much attention from the literary community. He's just a commentator who makes a living waxing either rhapsodic or vitriolic on other people's works of fiction, and who justifies the aphorism "Opinions are like assholes; everybody's got one." Yes, his opinions may use fancier words than yours or mine, but they're still just opinions. And the condescension that oozes out of that Dostoevskian Underground comment leads me to believe you can't have an honest argument with him, and probably don't even want to be in the same room with him. 

Quote

"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."
- Ernest Hemingway

Book recycling 2009

Though I once praised my restraint at last year's Will County Book Recycling Event, having only taken home nine books, yesterday my self-control showed signs of strain. My take is most of the left-hand pile: Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Nevil Shute's On the Beach, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Richard Condon's Death of a Politician, Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, William Leuchtenberg's Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, Frank Norris' The Octopus, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Andre Dubus III's House of Sand and Fog, John Cheever's Falconer, Calvin Trillin's Runestruck, and Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?

Random thoughts:
+ Whitman, Amis, O'Neill, Norris and Flaubert were absolute no-brainers.
+ Shute's book has been recommended repeatedly around the web as a post-apocalyptic classic, a genre which I find myself compulsively drawn to.
+ Condon wrote The Manchurian Candidate, which I absolutely loved.
+ Obama's neo-New Deal policies have me thinking I don't know nearly enough about the original New Deal, and Leuchtenberg's book is supposedly one of the better single-volume studies of the subject.
+ Trillin is one of my favorite writers, and I think this is one of only two novels he's written (the other being the wonderful Tepper Isn't Going Out).
+ Falconer gives me one less excuse for never having read Cheever.
+ I already read and loved What Makes Sammy Run? in a cheap paperback edition, but this one is the 50th anniversary edition in hardcover, which includes Schulberg's magazine short stories that were the genesis of the novel.

Julie picked up a few sci-fi titles, and the entire right-hand pile is Maddie's. And that is her, of course, doing some sort of book recycling interpretive dance.

Oh, and if picking up fourteen books in one day wasn't enough, we're going back today. But only to drop off six more boxes of old books that have been sitting in our basement for six years. Really, I swear.

Tidal wave ahoy!

This weekend marks the return of the Will County Book Recycling Event, to be held Friday through Sunday at Pilcher Park Nature Center, 2501 Highland Park Drive, Joliet. Very simple: arrive with your old and unwanted books, leave them, and depart with as many old and wanted books as you like. Any books remaining at the end of the event will be responsibly recycled. We attended last year, and it's a mesmerizing experience - walking around and around the long tables, neck oddly craned to read the book spines, knowing you can grab any book that strikes your fancy for free while trying to restrain yourself from claiming too many books that you know you might never end up reading.

I'm pleased to report that of the nine books I picked up last September, I've already read three: Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Studs Terkel's Working, and Michael Harrington's The Other America: Poverty in the United States, which might sound like a small proportion but is certainly better than my previous book sale hauls. If you live anywhere near Joliet, I encourage you to attend. Look for us - we'll be the skinny bald guy, lovely auburn-haired woman and cute blond eight-year-old girl who are walking in circles and pretending to have willpower.

Short Stories 2009

Randa Jarrar, "The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Zelwa the Halfie"
Having followed the author online for several years, I wanted to like this story much more than I did. And there's plenty here to like - the concept of half-human/half-beasts living in the everyday world (rendered very matter-of-factly, just enough for suspension of disbelief), the "halfie" narrator's use of the movie Splash as a litmus test to see how her dates really think of her and her kind, the tense relationship with her father. But the delivery just seems a bit off. There is too much explanation of the narrator's life, instead of illustration; I would have preferred to see that life shown in a few more vivid scenes rather than having the narrator tell everything. A little more left unsaid, and a lot less explanation. (Source: Oxford American, February 2009) (Posted 6/9/09)

Ambrose Bierce, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
Kind of an odd story - the first two sections are straight, realistic narrative, the first showing the impending hanging of a Southerner during the Civil War, the second showing some of the protagonist's backstory which lead him to his fate, with both sections being fairly static and heavy on physical description. Then the third section continues in the same realistic vein but ramps up the action as the protagonist suddenly makes his escape from the Northern troops. Or so it seems, as the very last line delivers a devastating twist which abruptly proves the preceding action to be false, and the mere fantasy of a doomed man. Extremely well done, and a story very much ahead of its time. (Source: Project Gutenberg) (Posted 4/29/09)

Nelson Algren, "Entrapment"
I'm not sure "Entrapment" fully works as a short story, but it certainly does so better than its original intended form - a novel, for which Algren wrote 300-something pages but never completed. A full-length novel like this would have been unbearable to read - not because of the writing, which is typically wonderful Algren, often at his very best, but instead the tone. While Algren leavened his grim fiction with black humor and glimmers of slim hope, there is none of that in "Entrapment", just bitterness and regret, as the utterly disconsolate narrator talks in circles as he punishes himself for pushing away the only woman he would ever love. This is a touching and emotionally devastating sketch of a man's life, drawn heavily from Algren's own experience, that gives an intriguing glimpse into the writer's inner self. (Source: Nelson Algren, Entrapment and Other Writings) (Posted 4/5/09)

Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Joy"
"Joy" is the lovely story of Bainish, a revered and beloved rabbi in a small European town who has a crisis of faith after four of his children die of an unnamed disease. The rabbi abandons his leadership of the local synagogue and privately renounces his faith, completely retreating from the world in his stricken grief. But one day he has a vision of his recently-deceased daughter, who admonishes him to return to his religious duties and tells him that she will come back for him (clearly, to lead him to death and the afterlife) after the high holidays. Her appearance (or his hallucination, if you prefer) revives him from his torpor and doubt, and he resumes his duties with an enthusiasm and vigor not seen before, his religious faith restored just before his daughter's return. It's not entirely clear what makes the rabbi suddenly recover his faith - the shock of the vision of his daughter, perhaps, or his realization that a state of doubt at the time of his death will doom him to eternal damnation. Maybe seeing truly is believing - though the rabbi didn't actually see God, he did see a manifestation (or delusion) of deity, and that was enough for him. Faith is a tricky and delicate thing - sometimes, Singer seems to be saying, simply wanting to believe is enough to foster belief - and the rabbi clearly wanted to believe, never abandoning the personal pious rituals even during his time of doubt. Though this is a very religious story (as are all the other stories in this collection), even the non-religious can be heartened by it: for the rabbi's vision of his daughter, as a reminder to him of what was lost, makes him realize what is truly important, and gives him the strength to celebrate life again with the time he still has left. (Source: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories) (Posted 3/3/09)

Colum McCann, "Phreak"
McCann's story revolves around the Philippe Petit's 1974 tightrope walk between the towers of the World Trade Center. The first section is absolutely wonderful in its depiction of the bustling street milieu of Lower Manhattan, as some people congregate on street corners, craning the necks upward in wonderment at the tiny blot in the sky between the towers, while just as many hurry past, intent on reaching their destinations. But the second section falls completely flat as the writer attempts to introduce a bored computer hacker in California who dials in to payphones near the WTC, hoping for a firsthand account of the event. The vivid street scenes of the first section are abandoned for a long and unsatisfying series of choppy, back-and-forth phone dialogue. The third section reverts to the style of the first as it tells of the aerialist's arrest, completing the story but mostly failing to connect with the second section - which, quite unintentionally, drives home the point that the second section is mostly irrelevant. The first section would have made a great short story on its own, but the writer simply took it too far. (Source: The Paris Review, Fall 2008) (Posted 1/19/09)

Franz Kafka, "The Judgment"
Starts slowly (too slowly, I think) but ends swiftly and with a bang. Plenty of father-son dynamic tension, from an aging father who feels shoved aside and a son who may not have been aware that he was the one who shoved. Interesting story, though not the true classic I had been lead to believe it is. (Source: Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories) (Posted 1/18/09)

Thoreau, on the city and country

Charming passage here from Walden, as Thoreau comments on the symbiosis between the city and the country. That final phrase actually made me laugh, which is remarkable in that thus far I've found Thoreau to be anything but humorous.

The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side. As they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard sometimes through the circles of two towns. Here come your groceries, country; your rations, countrymen! Nor is there any man so independent on his farm that he can say them nay. And here's your pay for them! screams the countryman's whistle; timber like long battering-rams going twenty miles an hour against the city's walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy-laden that dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woollen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them.

Can you name the 100 best novels according to Modern Library (1900 to 1998)?

I named 60, in 14 minutes. And I'm only kicking myself over one that I missed - E.M. Forster's Howards End, which I've already read but blanked on the title.

More thoughts on Cheever

In a recent issue of Bookforum, Matthew Price's essay/review on three new John Cheever volumes (Blake Bailey's bio and two Library of America collections) includes the following excerpts from Cheever's stories.

“...the shoestring aristocrats of the upper East Side—the elegant, charming, and shabby men who work for brokerage houses, and their high-flown wives, with their thrift-shop minks and their ash-can fur pieces, their alligator shoes and their snotty ways with doormen and with the cashiers in supermarkets.”

...

“We both come from that enormous stratum of the middle class that is distinguished by its ability to recall better times...Lost money is so much a part of our lives that I am sometimes reminded of expatriates, of a group who have adapted themselves energetically to some alien soil but who are reminded, now and then, of the escarpments of their native coast.”

...

“She had known a man like that. He had worked day and night making money. He ruined his partners and betrayed his friends and broke the hearts of his sweet wife and adorable children, and then, after making millions and millions of dollars, he went down to his office one Sunday afternoon and jumped out of the window.”

To me, these are barely fiction at all, but instead editorializing or - even worse - pontificating. As I mentioned earlier, I've never read any Cheever, and it may well be the case that he gracefully and seamlessly weaved asides like these into genuine narrative. Still, though, reading passages like these gives me very little impetus to finally delve into Cheever's work.

"...mere smoke of opinion..."

"It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields."
- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Summer of Classics begins!

Today marks the start of my third annual Summer of Classics. During the next three months I'll read classic works which, for whatever reason, I've never gotten around to. My first book is Henry David Thoreau's Walden, which I started reading more than twenty years ago during a tedious job assignment (don't ask) but never finished. I can already tell it's going to be a slow read, but hopefully will be rewarding if I stay with it. Though I typically stick to fiction during this summers, starting with Walden dovetails nicely with both the nonfiction kick I've been on for the past few months as well as the book I just finished, Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, as they both address self-sufficiency, simplicity and getting back to nature.

After that, it will be on to fiction. Julie is always asking me "You've read this, right?" in reference to any number of beloved classics which I then abashedly have to fess up to never having read, so this year I'll be tackling some novels that she questions my literary sanity and/or scholastic rigor for never getting around to: 1984, Brave New World, Catcher in the Rye, The Stranger, and several others I'm forgetting at the moment. Hard to believe that I never even had these as required reading in high school, I know - in fact, I can remember most of the great films that our English department screened every quarter, but almost none of the novels I read, none of which were any of these that are part of the high school canon.

In case you wondering, here's what I read during the last two summers.

2008
William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow
James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor
Nikolai Gogol, The Overcoat
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

2007
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice
Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology
Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
Knut Hamsun, Hunger
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

The verdict thus far? Classics: So Long, See You Tomorrow, The Long Goodbye, The Overcoat, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Babbitt, Hunger, Bartleby the Scrivener and Winesburg, Ohio. The others, eh, not so much.

Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

Just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, and what a wonderful book it is. Her account of going back to the land, raising her own food on a farm in the mountains of western Virginia, is entertaining, informative and most of all inspiring. Though I must admit that I'll likely never go as far as Kingsolver and her family did, instead the inspiration for me is greater awareness of what I eat, where it comes from, and what cost it imposes on the natural world and our economic system. Thanks to this book, though I'll never become completely self-sustaining, I'll grow some of my own food (we've already started this year, with our first vegetable garden and berry patch), frequent local farmer's markets more often and with greater enthusiasm, question the wisdom of eating food imported from the other side of the world, and in general always think about how my own seemingly minor actions impact our fragile planet.

Working: President, Lordstown Local, UAW

Reading Working last night, I was struck by this passage from the UAW local boss in Lordstown, Ohio, which is timely today even though it was said back in 1972. He's talking about the onset of robotic automation at General Motors, which sped up output but also resulted in extensive layoffs.

When they took the unimates on, we were building sixty an hour. When we came back to work with the unimates, we were building a hundred cars an hour. A unimate is a welding robot. It looks just like a preying mantis. It goes from spot to spot to spot. It releases that thing and it jumps back into position, ready for the next car. They go by them about 110 an hour. They never tire, they never sweat, they never complain, they never miss work. Of course, they don't buy cars. I guess General Motors doesn't understand that argument.

There's twenty two, eleven on each side of the line. They do the work of about two hundred men - so there was a reduction of men.

You always hear economists and business commentators sing the praises of "productivity", which is just a fancy way of saying "producing more with fewer workers." What they never say is that fewer workers also means layoffs, and reduced consumer spending, and lower quality of life in the towns that rely so heavily on the auto industry. Sure, robotics increase production, but at a human cost that is rarely mentioned. Or an economic cost, even to GM - as the union boss points out, robots don't buy cars. Imagine how many more cars GM could have sold all these years if they were still paying the paychecks of several hundred thousand more autoworkers whom were cast aside in the quest for "efficiency."

Tiger, Tiger

It appears I'm not the only person who's puzzled by the undercurrents of Judith Kerr's The Tiger Who Came To Tea.

But how polysemous is The Tiger Who Came to Tea, a picture book about a tiger that turns up one afternoon on a little girl called Sophie’s doorstep and consumes all the food and drink in the house? Maybe not enough to justify the theory that the mother is an alcoholic who dreams up the tiger’s visit in order to explain the vanishing of ‘all Daddy’s beer’.

If anyone’s an alcoholic or problem drinker in The Tiger Who Came to Tea, it’s the father.

I've read the book to my daughter numerous times, and I always find it to be somewhat unnerving. (Admittedly, though, not as all-out creepy as Love You Forever. Yikes.) The mother's strangely impassive docility as a large carnivorous animal eats every speck of food in the house. The daughter's cloying affection for the ravenous beast. The impossibility of the tiger drinking every last drop of water out of the tap, which implies that it completely drained the well or the municipal water supply. The implausibility of the tiger, having scoured the larder bare, refraining from then turning his gastronomic sights on the mother and daughter. And perhaps most troubling, the father's flippant and unconcerned response, which falls somewhere along the lines of "Eh, no big deal. Let's go out for dinner instead."

It's by no means a stretch for readers to find an alternate, psychological interpretation to this one.

Heroes of Democracy, Part 1

This is wonderful: a high school kid who operates a lending library of banned books - out of his school locker.

I would be in so much trouble if I got caught, but I think it's the right thing to do because before I started, almost no kid at school but myself took an active interest in reading! Now not only are all the kids reading the banned books, but go out of their way to read anything they can get their hands on. So I'm doing a good thing, right?

A kid who loves both literature and free speech. Maybe the future of our country is in good hands after all.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Fascinating

This looks great: Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City by Eric W. Sanderson, and the Mannahatta Project website.

“Mannahatta” is more art book than typical natural history tome, and it’s all about envisioning: see the salt marsh that is now Delancey Street, the grassy plains of Harlem, the water moving slowly through what is now Times Square to the forests along the banks of the Upper West Side, which may have been untouched even by the Lenape Indians who used to live there. The computer-generated illustrations, by Markley Boyer, are aptly called “visualizations,” and are paired with photos of the contemporary real thing: for example, to portray the red-maple swamp postulated to have been where the ESPN Zone stands in Times Square today, Sanderson photographed a red-maple swamp in Orange County, some 40 miles north.

I often find myself envisioning Chicago "then and now", but my "then" usually only goes back 100 or 150 years, and rarely to pre-settlement times. Though I've never even been in Manhattan, I think I would love this book, which makes me think that similarly sympathetic Gothamites might really love it.

The Parlor Emerging Writer's Festival

I've been keeping the news under wraps for the last few weeks, but now that it's official I can finally pass it along: I'm very pleased to be invited to read at The Parlor Emerging Writer's Festival. It takes place on Saturday, May 23rd from 4:00-6:30 PM at Green Lantern Gallery, 1511 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago.

It’s awesome - we’ve got a great line-up ahead for our Emerging Writer’s Festival on Saturday May 23rd - coincident, as it so happens, with the Pilcrow Lit Fest. Here is the roster - you should come out, it’s free and there’s a BBQ to follow on the back porch.

4:00 pm Sarah Terez Rosenblum - Where She Is
4:30 pm Jeanie Chung – Cuts and Folds
5:00 pm Peter Anderson – One Son Resists
5:30 – 5:45 BREAK
5: 45 pm J.D.K. Goodman – Another Place, Another Time
6:15 pm Jessie Morrison – The Queens of the Northwest Side
6:45 pm BBQ

I'll be reading my story "One Son Resists" which I first wrote several years ago and have put through several heavy-duty revisions since. If you live in the city or happen to be in town for Pilcrow, please thinking about swinging by Green Lantern for some great readings and to say hello.

Spring Book Giveaway! Spring Book Giveaway!

I'm trying to keep some semblance of equilibrium to my personal library, and after picking up three books over the weekend I've decided to cull a few others from my shelves. The books listed below were all received (unsolicited) from various publishers as review copies, but given the present state of my To Be Read pile I doubt if I'll ever get around to reading any of them, let alone reviewing. So I'm offering any and all of them for free (I'll even pay for shipping!) to a good home - simply leave your name and which book(s) you want in the comments below, and I'll follow up for your mailing address.

Peter Ho Davies: The Welsh Girl
Kelly Braffet: Last Seen Leaving
Charlotte Mendelson: When We Were Bad (advance reading copy)
Shari Goldhagen: Family and Other Accidents (bound galley)

Please note that the Mendelson and Goldhagen books are not their final published versions, so approach those accordingly. I thank you, as does my family and the structural integrity of my house.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, I will ship to U.S. addresses only. My apologies if you live elsewhere.

Ander Monson, Neck Deep and Other Predicaments

Just finished Ander Monson's essay collection Neck Deep and Other Predicaments, in which the writer thoughtfully examines his intriguing past and the mundane commonalities of his everyday life - car washes, disc golf, Lake Michigan ferry boats, card catalogs. And snow - not the gentle, powdery flakes that grace Christmas cards or bring multimillions of tourist dollars to ski resorts, but the heavy, punishing blankets that bury Michigan's Upper Peninsula under 250 inches every winter, bringing isolation and claustrophobia and making snowmobiles as common as (and more essential than) automobiles. Anyone who enjoyed the inventive structure and quiet depth of feeling of Monson's wonderful fiction debut Other Electricities are strongly encouraged to check out this essay collection. And if Neck Deep happens to be your first exposure to Monson and you found yourself moved by it (and particularly by "I Am Thinking Of Snow"), then you will definitely love Other Electricities as well.

Cheever and the Suburbs

Interesting story on John Cheever, through the lens of his widow Mary (apparently still quite sharp, at 90), son and biographer. As it turns out, despite conventional opinion Cheever wasn't a chronicler of suburban angst, frustration and boredom - yes, he wrote about those characteristics, but didn't feel the suburbs were to blame, and in fact even loved living there. The suburbs were simply the locale he knew best, and so that's where he set his sad stories.

(Mary Cheever) rejects those who attribute her husband’s inner loneliness to his life in the suburbs.

“His was the loneliness of a writer, when he would sit by himself working alone,” she said. “They all complain about it. It’s not a social craft.”

All of the Cheever exposure of late (largely due to Blake Bailey's well-received biography) has me thinking I really need to read his work. I've never read anything of his. I think I have one or two of the Wapshot novels in an old box in the basement, but I'm not sure whether to start there or with his short stories. Any suggestions?

We. Are. Going. To. The. Library. Sale.

(Deep breath). Will. Remain. Calm. (Deep breath.) Will. Not. Lose. Control. (Deep breath.) Must. Show. Restraint.

Sure. Just like last time.

Update: We actually showed great restraint, nay, superhuman restraint. Though tempted by many more, I walked away with just three books: William Maxwell, All the Days and Nights: The Collected Stories, George Ade, Artie and Pink Marsh, and Aharon Appelfeld, The Iron Tracks. Part of that restraint is due to a change in the pricing setup - before it was $5 per bag (which made it easy to toss "just one more" book into the bag), but this time it was a fixed price per book. And it was also due to realization that most of the books I picked up last time (including Eric Bogosian, Ward Just and Morgan Llywelyn) remain unread three years later, and even though I'm still interested in reading all of them they're not terribly high up in the queue. So I took it easy this time around.

Quote

"Already the writers are complaining there is too much freedom. They need some pressure. The worse your daily life, the better your art. If you have to be careful because of oppression and censorship, this pressure produces diamonds."
-Tatyana Tolstaya, Russian writer

(Via Daily Literary Quote.)

Ron Evry needs your help!

Literary podcaster Ron Evry (Mister Ron's Basement) maintains a huge archive of his wonderful readings of old public domain short works, most of them in a humorous vein from the likes of Mark Twain, George Ade, Bill Nye, Stanley Huntley and others. The downside of that huge archive is, not surprisingly, bandwidth, and Ron is unfortunately losing his current and very generous host, Slapcast. While he apparently has found a new host, the cost of the new service is considerably higher than the old. To keep Mister Ron's Basement afloat, Ron is currently soliciting any and all contributions. Anything you can donate would be a huge help.

Ron does yeoman work on his site, and his love for the impeccable writings of George Ade is directly responsible for my own love for that writer. When I got my first iPod several years ago, Ron's site was the first literary podcasting site I discovered, and I was particularly thrilled to discover Ade's short "fable" works; I had previously known Ade only through his novel Artie, which I liked but was only moderately impressed with. But the fables really grabbed me - all of them with a wicked point to make, and all extremely funny, especially with Ron's spirited vocal delivery. (I was even inspired to start writing an Ade-ish piece, "The Fable of the Small 'Suburb' Which Aspired to Be More Than It Was", which sadly remains unfinished.) Though I don't listen nearly as much as I used to - at my previous job I could download media files to my heart's content, but network security at my current job prohibits any downloading - I'll always appreciate Ron's tireless work at Mister Ron's Basement. I encourage you to check out his site, and to toss a few bucks his way if you can.

Bringing literature to the streets

Two interesting related developments - Project Bookmark Canada, which places permanent markers containing fiction and poetry on the site where those works transpire, and the considerably more ephemeral Is Reads, Adam Robinson's public poetry project in which poems are temporarily affixed (often with just Scotch tape) to lampposts and walls in Baltimore and Nashville. Although the projects vary in terms of permanence and official imprimatur, each is a wonderfully innovative means of incorporating literature further into everyday life and exposing it to people who might rarely set foot inside a library or bookstore. If projects like these make just a few more such people realize what they're missing, then they are very much worthwhile.

Philip Levine

Continuing the theme of my J.G. Ballard post, Philip Levine (my favorite poet) talks to NPR's Marketplace about how working on an assembly line prepared him for his long career in poetry.

At the time that I was doing it, I thought this will prevent me from becoming a poet. I will never have the time or the energy to write poetry because it was sapping to me to such a degree. And later on, when I was in my 40s, I realized, no Phil, that was the school you went to. And my whole attitude toward those years changed, so there was a way in which I realized that I had had an irreplaceable experience of brotherhood and sisterhood in those years that I was an industrial worker. And I wouldn't give them up for anything.

Levine also reads his poem "What Work Is." Quite good.

Graphic noir

If the narrative of this book is even half as good as the artwork, this one looks like a real keeper.

(Via Flavorpill.)

Write, but live a little first

In a tribute to the recently departed J.G. Ballard, who apparently saw quite a bit of the real world before settling down to the relative unreality of fiction writing, John Crace contrasts Ballard's life to that of the typical literary hotshot:

To generalise wildly, the career path of most young (successful) writers goes something like this. Go to university – preferably Oxford or Cambridge – and read English. While there, start writing novel and get a few pieces published in the university magazine. Move to London after graduation, start a creative writing postgraduate degree and pick up some work reviewing books for the literary supplements while tidying up the fourth draft of your novel. You then get your novel published, which gets a few kind reviews thanks to the contacts you've made and sells precisely 317 copies.

But someone, somewhere offers you a contract to write a second novel and your career is up and running. From then on you have a meta life. You write because you write, not because you necessarily have anything interesting to say. You probably actually write quite well, but you are trading on style, not substance, because you've never actually done anything much beyond writing.

Beautiful, especially the bit about "317 copies."

"They need an American Dickens..."

Michael Harrington, from his introduction to The Other America: Poverty in the United States:

The poor can be described statistically; they can be analyzed as a group. But they need a novelist as well as a sociologist if we are to see them. They need an American Dickens to record the smell and texture and quality of their lives. The cycles and trends, the massive forces, must be seen as affecting persons who talk and think differently.

I am not that novelist. Yet in this book I have attempted to describe the faces behind the statistics, to tell a little of the "thickness" of personal life in the other America.

It's been asked before, but it's worth asking again: who is our 21st Century Dickens?

Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1929

The Progressive is celebrating its 100th anniversary, and given our current economic doldrums the magazine rightly thought it would be appropriate to re-run a series of articles which it originally published during the Great Depression. (This happens to be quite timely for me, as I just started reading Michael Harrington's 1962 study The Other America: Poverty in the United States, in which the author argues that the welfare state created in response to the Depression mostly benefitted the middle and upper classes, and not the poor.) Here are the articles that have run so far:

Wagner Urges Unemployment Relief Action, by Senator Robert Wagner (June 14, 1930)

“Individualism” Seen in Destructive Phase, by Theodore Dreiser (January 9, 1932)

Human Wreckage: A Plea for Federal Relief, by William Green (February 20, 1932)

The Long Plan for Recovery, by Senator Huey P. Long (April 1, 1933)

And even more Algren

On second thought, maybe Algren is getting recognition after all. Still not from the city, of course, but from the grassroots. A few recent welcomed developments:

An unpublished story, "Entrapment", is up at the Chicago Reader. The story is distilled from a 300-page novel manuscript that Algren never completed. (Reading the story and its backstory, it's hardly surprising that Algren never finished it. The subject matter was surely too painful for him to fully deal with.) My thoughts on the story are here.

Seven Stories Press, which championed Algren long before most of the world even cared, and was instrumental in bringing about whatever measure of revival he now enjoys, has released a new collection of unpublished Algren material, Entrapment and Other Writings.

That Chicago Reader posting of "Entrapment" also linked to a trailer for Algren, a full-length documentary which is coming out in 2010 from Montrose Pictures. Looks fascinating. Though the trailer focuses on Art Shay's photographs of Algren, I'm hoping the filmmakers have also been able to unearth contemporary film footage of Algren as well, which would bring the film more alive than just using still photos.

Morrison and Matheson, opposite sides of the same coin

At Harper's, Wyatt Mason points to an anachronism in Toni Morrison's A Mercy: the presence of starlings in America circa 1680, although the birds weren't introduced to America until the 1890s. One pitfall of writing historical fiction is not researching quite enough to get all the facts just right, which will undoubtedly be noticed by experts (such as the one Mason mentions) and will often ruin the reading experience for them.

On a related note, I recently came across the inverse of Morrison's error in Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. Matheson's book was published in 1954 but the narrative begins in 1976, and his protagonist not only drives a Willys wagon (presumably a Jeep) but also scavenges an extant Willys dealership for a new model after his first was destroyed. Trouble is, Willys no longer existed by then, the brand name having disappeared in 1963 when the company changed its name to Kaiser-Jeep, which in turn was acquired by American Motors in 1970, thus making it impossible for Matheson's protagonist to find a Willys dealership in 1976. Of course, in the 1950s Matheson had no way of knowing that Willys wouldn't be around when the future time frame of his book became the present day. But picking Willys as his protagonist's vehicle was a risk, one that backfired on him. Not that it ruined the reading experience for me - I had plenty of other, much bigger problems with the book - but it still is an interesting aspect of writing fiction which is set in the future.

Algren at 100

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Nelson Algren, my hero and anti-hero, who was born in Detroit on March 28, 1909. Donna Seaman has a concise overview of the great man's career over at Booklist. For the initiate, I'd suggest you pick up his greatest novel, The Man With the Golden Arm, or his prose piece Chicago: City on the Make, which is the one book of his that I keep returning to again and again, and which I'm convinced is the best thing he ever wrote.

Algren would undoubtedly have a bemused chuckle at his centenary passing without a peep of official recognition from his home city, which right now is otherwise preoccupied with hastily filling the countless potholes and otherwise gussying things up for the arrival of Olympic committee muckamucks. The city, desperate as always to overcome its self-perceived secondary status, is throwing itself (and untold billions of dollars) at the world, as obsessed with its self-image as it was in the days when it ostracized Algren for daring to present Chicago as it really was.

Hoist a glass today to Chicago's greatest writer and one of America's most unappreciated literary talents. I'll be hoisting several.

Update: Jeff McMahon has an excellent Algren essay at Newcity. Very well done.

Quote

"I like all forms of writing, from articles to motion pictures, but of them all I prefer the novel. In a day of increasing taboos, I think it may represent the final redoubt of a truly free enterprise. I like the feeling that it is up to me, that make or break, it is all mine."
-Budd Schulberg

Schulberg turns a sprightly 95 years old today. I thoroughly enjoyed What Makes Sammy Run? (which will definitely make my top ten list for this year) and will probably read The Harder They Fall soon, too.

Only in Chicago

Secondhand bookstore...as front for a bookie joint. ("Yeah, sure, buddy, we got yer Chaucer...sixth race at Hialeah.")

2009 Tournament of Books

One of my favorite literary events, The Tournament of Books at The Morning News, has now started up again. They're now through the first four matches (grouped as "The Susan Sontag Regional"[1]) and there have already been two upsets, with winners of the Booker Prize and PEN/Faulkner falling by the wayside. Though I rarely read any novels until several years after their publication, this year's ToB includes two books I've already read: Mark Sarvas' Harry, Revised (which upset Booker winner The White Tiger) and Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project (my favorite book of 2008). Do check it out - the judges' rationales are all thoughtful and well-reasoned, and the after-match commentary of John Warner and Kevin Guilfoile is always a joy.

[1] Though I have no idea how long ToB has been using this nomenclature for their brackets, I'm struck by its similarity to that of my own 2006 Tournament of Tunes, whose regionals were named after Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins. Though I admittedly copped the name and concept of my tourney from ToB, I'm wondering if they might not have borrowed from mine in naming their regionals. Guilfoile is a casual friend of mine whom I know followed the Tournament of Tunes back in the day, so it seems somewhat possible. If so, I'm very honored.

Writer vs. Editor, no gloves, not even a referee

Wow. I would gladly have passed along the following - editor violently lashes back at one of his writers, who had defamed him - strictly on its own caustic merits, but given that the writer is my hero Nelson Algren, doing so is truly a no-brainer. Algren's late-career editor, William Targ, completely unloads on Algren.

I've long admired you as a writer; I won't deny your talents. But even if you were Tolstoy I woud say -- and shall do so publicly henceforth -- that you are a liar, an ingrate, a shithead.

Targ has some particularly pithy things to say about The Last Carousel, though it's not explained how Targ made a book of the "unspeakable mess of manuscript" while also "preserv(ing) everything (Algren) wanted included in the book." Seems to me an editor presented with such a manuscript would have no choice but to hack away huge chunks that the writer wanted included. But still...ouch.

Henry Kisor's comment that follows his original post is a timely reminder of the upcoming centenary of Algren, who was born on March 28, 1909. I'll certainly be hoisting a few strong ones in honor of the "inhuman turd." And I'll inevitably pick up Algren at Sea.

(Via Mark Athitakis.)

He's the king of the world!

A hearty congratulations goes out to my online writer friend Dave Schwartz, whose debut novel Superpowers has been shortlisted for the 2009 Nebula novel award. He's right up there with heavyweights like Ursula LeGuin, Terry Pratchett and Cory Doctorow, and I couldn't be happier for him. I also must confess considerable guilt over not having read the book yet (though I did see it at Borders once, and turned it cover-out to boost its sale potential), an oversight which I fully intend to correct very soon.

Seamus Heaney

Regular readers of this blog may be aware that I read one or two books of Irish fiction every March. I haven't settled on what to read this year yet - Beckett, Trevor, McGahern and Patrick McCabe have already crossed my mind - but now, after reading this glowing review of Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney, I'm thinking I might branch out from strictly reading Irish fiction and try some of Heaney's poetry. But since my knowledge of poetry is very limited, I need some help on what to read. If anyone can recommend which one of Heaney's collections I should read, please do so in the comments below.

Incidentally, we do own a copy of Heaney's celebrated translation of Beowulf, which I'm definitely going to read sometime this year. But that hardly qualifies as Irish writing, so I need something else of his to read this March.

Quote

"Finished this day — and I hope to God it's good."
- John Steinbeck (born this day in 1902), on completing the manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath

Acquisition: The Moviegoer and Their Eyes Were Watching God

Hi. My name is Pete, and I'm a bookaholic. (Hi, Pete!)

Though I've made only a small dent in my TBR pile lately and hardly needed any new books, today I succumbed again. I took the day off from work to help Julie celebrate her birthday, and one of our stops was the local Goodwill store. I made my usual beeline to the book section, not looking for anything in particular of course, and I walked away with a hardcover of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer and a paperback of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, for the grand total of $2.67 plus tax. Having read neither author, I wasn't exactly in the market for either book, so I guess I was compelled by the stellar reputation each book enjoys - The Moviegoer seems particularly well-loved. And I actually have a tenuous relationship to Hurston's book - I worked at University of Illinois Press for a semester during undergrad, helping to key their catalog into a PC database for the first time. The book was out of print for almost thirty years before UIP reissued it in 1978, and that book is the only record I can now remember typing in.

I'm really looking forward to reading both books, though I really have no idea when that will be. You know, like most of the books on my pile.

Yes, I am a weak, weak man.

Budd Schulberg, What Makes Sammy Run?

Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? is a devastating portrait of ambition and success, set against the glimmering backdrop of 1930s Hollywood. Sammy Glick is a screenwriter and then producer who has no artistic talent whatsoever, and yet becomes a great success due to both his own relentless, remorseless drive and the town's warped values. Though he has no artistic talent, he wantonly steals from and exploits those who do, and turns their creative work into his own personal success through his greatest strength - that of self-promotion. He tirelessly sells himself, hogging the spotlight wherever he goes, taking full credit when he deserves none.

And yet, Hollywood rewards his bad behavior (which also includes a complete lack of conscience) and by the end of the novel, having stomped on everyone in his path on his way up the ladder, he has reached the pinnacle of success - he is production head of a major studio, is married to the gorgeous daughter of the multimillionaire financier who backs the studio, and owns a vast estate in Bel Air. He has everything, for the moment at least.

Sammy is an infuriating character, and as act after appalling act piled up, I found myself hungering for his ultimate comeuppance, the karmic retribution he so fully deserved. Which made me smile when I read the narrator thinking along the same lines, on the second-to-last page:

I thought how, unconsciously, I had been waiting for justice to suddenly rise up and smite him in all its vengeance, secretly hoping to be around when Sammy got what was coming to him; only I had expected something conclusive and fatal and now I realized that what was coming to him was not a sudden pay-off but a process...

As the novel ends, Sammy is on top, a blustery and superficial fake in a town that celebrates and rewards bluster, superficiality and fakery. But his retribution - and there will be retribution - won't be immediate. Instead, Hollywood will slowly tire of him as he ages and becomes overly familiar, and he will gradually be nudged aside for someone fresh and new, and he will find himself working his way, quite unwillingly, back down the career ladder - working with steadily smaller budgets, middling scripts and then B and C actors until one day he will likely be without any work at all. The same qualities which fueled his Hollywood success will ensure his downfall. But Schulberg neatly leaves Sammy's downfall offscreen, as it were, showing the protagonist on top but with the seeds of his eventual demise already sown.

What Makes Sammy Run? is a terrific, entertaining and thought-provoking read, one which I highly recommend.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, "The Gentleman From Cracow"

I recently read "The Gentleman From Cracow", by Isaac Bashevis Singer (from Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories). In this passage from near the beginning of the story, the desperate town of Frampol is in the grip of famine and destitution when a mysterious and munificent stranger arrives.

From the poorhouse gate the beggars came, crowding about him as he distributed alms - three groszy, six groszy, half-gulden pieces. The stranger was clearly a gift from Heaven, and Frampol was not destined to vanish. The beggars hurried to the baker for bread, and the baker sent to Zamosc for a sack of flour.

"One sack?" the young doctor said. "Why that won't last a single day. I will order a wagonload, and not only flour, but cornmeal also."

"But we have no money," the village elders explained.

"God willing, you will repay me when times are good," and saying this, the stranger produced a purse crammed with golden ducats. Frampol rejoiced as he counted out the coins.

The next day, wagons filled with flour, buckwheat, barley, millet, and beans, drove into Frampol. News of the village's good fortune reached the ears of the peasants, and they came to the Jews, to buy goods, as the Egyptians had once come to Joseph. Being without money, they paid in kind; as a result, there was meat in town. Now the ovens burned once more; the pots were full. Smoke rose from the chimneys, sending the odors of roast chicken and goose, onion and garlic, fresh bread and pastry, into the evening air. The villagers returned to their occupations; shoemakers mended shoes; tailors picked up their rusted shears and irons.

What do you know? It's an Old World version of an economic stimulus package. But the conservatives would love how this story ends - in catastrophe, with the town literally in flames and the stanger revealed to be a devil, and the people escaping earthly ruin and eternal damnation only by the wise and benevolent leadership of a pious rabbi, the only citizen to refrain from the sinful festivities.

Who sez...

...Joliet ain't literary? This photo was taken on the east side of Joliet, at the corner of Little Dorrit St. and Dickens St. (Also nearby are Pickwick Rd. and Pickwick Ct.) And this isn't some chic new neighborhood that's striving for distinction by invoking the literary masters, but instead a rather humble cluster of 1920s frame houses that are adjacent to railroad tracks, a cemetery and a bridge overpass.



So dere.

Quote

"The dead are buried, as people say, and what the earth swallows is soon forgotten."
- Isaac Bashevis Singer (from "The Wife Killer")

Writer on Writer: Ben Tanzer

Ben Tanzer's This Tour Will Change Your Life rambles onward (I'm having this mental image of the Clampetts' old truck, from The Beverly Hillbillies, swaying side to side, weighted down will all of the family's worldly possessions, with Granny perched on top in a rocking chair) with the juggernaut stopping today at What To Wear During An Orange Alert?, which features none other than yours truly engaged in a typically long and unfocused conversation with Ben. Enjoy.

Reading update

Just finished reading Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run?, loved it (so much so that I want to write an old-fashioned letter of appreciation to the author, both for this and for On The Waterfront), and will post a review here over the weekend.

Next it's on to another Jewish writer, but a completely different kind than Schulberg: Isaac Bashevis Singer, and his story collection Gimpel the Fool. I read the title story this morning, and it's quite a lovely little tale.

Pure Prose Gold - the Ben Tanzer Repetition Patterns guest essay.

As I mentioned earlier, today is the first day of This Tour Will Change Your Life, Ben Tanzer's virtual book tour for his new short story collection, Repetition Patterns, published by the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. I am quite pleased to host the first stop on the tour, for which Ben has written, or "written", the essay below.


Pure Prose Gold - the Ben Tanzer Repetition Patterns guest essay.
By Ben Tanzer

February 8th – 11:15am
I receive a note from Pete Anderson that my Repetition Patterns guest essay is due on February 16th and that he is expecting “pure prose gold.” Not being entirely sure what that means I Google “pure prose gold” and find the Love is a Rose - Fine Gifts and Collectibles website. I learn that “Gold and Roses have always been symbols of love.” This is good to know, but really not so helpful.

February 8th – 11:15pm
I have been staring at the screen for twelve hours. Nothing. I got nothing. I am a loser, and not a Biggest Loser, which would be cool. I turn on the television and watch the latest episode of Confessions of a Teen Idol. I feel somewhat better about myself, but I am now terribly confused by the fact that “triple threat” Adrian Zmed is not an enormous star. The dude may have made some bad choices along the way, but if he couldn’t figure it out, what hope is there for me?

February 9th – 2:30am
I awake in a panic. Why has Pete put so much pressure on me? What is wrong with just conducting a by the numbers interview anyway? Seeking a distraction, I beg my wife to make love to me. She says fine as long she can pretend that I am Brad Pitt. I say that’s fine as long as I can pretend that she is Brad Pitt as well. Three minutes later I am asleep again.

February 9th – 6:30am
As I finish my fifth Bloody Mary I realize that I need to be sure to somehow hype my novels Lucky Man (Manx Media, 2007) and Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine (Orange Alert Press, 2008) in the Repetition Patterns essay assuming it ever gets written. To accomplish this though I will be need to be sneaky and not make it super obvious.

February 9th – 4:00pm
I know I can write this essay, I know I can write this essay. Instead I decide to twitter about my inability to write it and blog about my twitter update. I then decide to twitter about my blog post and update my Facebook status. I discover that dozens of people I went to high school with who never actually talked to me then would like to know “25 Things About Me.” I am incredibly touched by their interest and getting the list just right is now my sole focus.

February 10th – 12:00pm
I put the final edits on my “25 Things About Me” post. It feels good and I am so confident that this newfound sense of connection and kinship with my old classmates will only grow richer as a result that I begin to question why I ever thought I needed to go on this book tour in the first place.

February 11th – 10:30am
I have been reading Perez Hilton for two hours. The language is clean and slamming, and it is genius. Perez is the Updike of the gossip bloggers. I wish I could write like him, but I cannot, I have lost my way.

February 11th – 5:00pm
I can no longer remember why Pete has asked me to write an essay for his blog. I send him a note. I am super polite. He is not. He says he never wanted to be part of this project, but he thought it might get him laid. Now that he has discovered this most definitely is not the case he doesn’t care if I write an essay or not.

February 12th – 3:00am
I try to think about my motivation for writing the stories in Repetition Patterns and why this essay is important to me. I still got nothing. I try some writing exercises I learned about online on Media Bistro. They don’t work. I revisit the Love is a Rose website. I learn that their new handcrafted Heavenly Roses are “so perfect and lifelike, you would think they were lovingly made from the feathers of angel’s wings.” I wish I were handcrafted from the feathers of angel’s wings. But I am not. I am human. And I am flawed.

February 13th – Noon
I let Pete know that I will not be writing an essay. In fact, I have decided to stop writing entirely. He does not respond, but he does tag me in his “25 Things About Me” post.

(The next stop on the tour will be tomorrow, February 17, with Ben being interviewed renowned Chicago writer Elizabeth Crane. See you there.)