Afterwords

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  1. I just finished reading Kudos a couple weeks ago. I still think about the ending and think perhaps as a Londoner (ad hominem, I know), Cusk is taking the piss out of us, the readers. Earlier, she suggests that inspiration for writing might come to the author from banal sources; she gives a hamster as an example. I feel in sum the book suggests that we need to find our meanings elsewhere.

  4. Not the main theme here, but Jake Sully didn’t fight for Neytiri only, nor he became one of them overnight. He’s not the typical guy whose only force source is a pretty girl. If you actually paid attention to the story, you would know he had to gain a place in the tribe, learning about their rules, their costumes and what’s important to them. He fell in love with Pandora and the Na’vi after living in a world where nature and spiritual connections don’t exist anymore, he even describes it in his recordings, how amazed he is by this planet and everything that lives in it. He didn’t strugle for years yeah, maybe because he found his place there, so he adapted sooner, but one thing is sure, he knew he was on the right side because he was fighting for life.

  7. you are writing mistakenly “The Third Reich, a board game simulating World War II battles, loosely reminiscent of Axis & Allies” because Rise and decline of THIRD REICH 1st edition was made in 1974 and Axis & Allies in 1981 for the 1st ed. More than that Axis & allies is made for the the big audience and is simple versus Third reich wich is much more complex. Give a look at the site Board Game Geek.

  8. I can’t help but wonder how much of Wallace’s commentary would have held true today. Instead of Television in the 90s, we have now, Instagram and TikTok and all the internet as a whole that is, truly, a source of Infinite Jest. It is designed to be so – the “Feed” a constant flood of new content is a concept I don’t think Wallace ever got the chance to fully conceptualize.*

  10. Very thoughtful. I think DFW’s and the book’s warnings about our culture’s addiction to entertainment have only become more fully realized each year since IJ was published. Sadly too, I have yet to see the rise of a new generation of earnest fiction writers emerge as an antidote to this.

  15. Hanging out with two and three year olds is an immersion in metaphor. They’re domesticating the world through language, matching the known and unknown in beautiful ways. As a toddler, my son announced, The moon is not a child anymore.

  18. I loved this interview! Peg is so forthcoming and so illuiminating. CONGRATS to both interviewer and interviewee!

  19. “Collapsing into fiction”, really? How real are you or your family? You should consider yourself (and your family) to be fortunate to exist in the same universe as Nabokov.

  20. I have written a 68,754 word book entitled, “Crazy Loves, A.D. 2130.”

    Is it OK to query?

  21. “No one will ever like or understand a victim. That’s mother. A good mother is a good victim.” If Shalmiyev, or other women, really believe this, then why do women continue to posture as archetypal victims? Don’t they want to be liked and understood? To her and her ilk, I would say, she hasn’t met the right mothers. I was a single parent from 18-21, 23-25, and from 31-on to 72. What I learned is that ‘motherhood’ must change as the kids grow up. I was a great “new-mom” but a terrible mom when my kids were in elementary school, according to the motherly canon. I was better the older they got until now (they’re 53 & 48), I get their sincere thanks for being kind of mom they needed at the time. I learned my lines and knew my role at each stage, including the “tough love” when they were in their drug experimentation phase. I also learned that ‘liberated’ women were a pain in the butt. Affluent/white women could afford to pshaw traditional marriage & family, while most women I knew would have given their left tit for man who liked to work and felt he should stick around and support his family. When I see how happy my kids are in their traditional marriages (they and their spouses are all well-educated & conservative), none of us feel like victims. Especially not me! I have to MA degrees (I was un-victim enough to write 2 MA theses), and taught college-level classes in sociology & poli sci for 27 years. I write full time now, but interspersed my academic papers with newspaper articles, columns, and feature writing. And no, I didn’t have a husband/friends to support my writing. People write because they cannot do otherwise. there are no victims when it comes to writing. There’s only finding excuses.

  24. I hate comics, I do. But you’re an idiot. You’re throwing around psychological terms you don’t understand and you stink of authoritarian bullshit. They mindlessly consume this bullshit because of cynical, selfish, dare I say narcissistic, way of going about explaining your issues with this sort of thing. No true ill will intended. I know people like you in person. The pompous, pretentious cynical asshole who picks on people who are having a hard time to make themselves feel better about that gaping hole in your “soul.”

  27. Hi Lulu. The author of this piece is Nina Schuyler. Her bio is listed at the bottom of the page.

  28. I wish you guys would put an author for this review because I want to use it in my essay, but I can’t cause it AIN”T RELIABLE without an author!!….according to my professors.

  32. Hi there – I can’t remember the pathway that got me to your site, but this interview is great. There are plenty of articles and Q&As about the nuts and bolts of writing, but yours feels different: refreshing and inspiring (colon not semi-colon ;).

  33. Gosh, I love this site. I find so many awesome books to read on here for healing and escape, and now this book by Altman speaks to me as a mom in need of a laugh. Awesome post!

  41. […] Reading Infinite Jest, and thinking about Wallace’s stance on irony and entertainment, and knowledge of tennis and other subjects, I eventually thought of Richie Tenenbaum from Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. I immediately had to wonder which came first, and discovered IJ preceded RT by about six years. The connection between the two pieces had already been made upon the release of RT. See here. A 2009 article featured a similar look at the two works. Also noted here. […]

  43. Ok, you’re right, I was simplifying to get people interested. So I revised the first sentence.

  44. Just finished reading the book. He repeatedly and explicitly denies that poetry and pop music are the same thing.

  46. Dear Jessa Lingel, I agree with each word of you about Jean Rhys and I love her as well but am only sorry that my English isn’t good enough as I would have liked to write some more. I was at David Plante’s book presentation by Deutsch a year or two after Jean died, and he repeated on stage all the story about when she fell in the toilets, etc… and then I stood and asked: how come she accepted to work with you when she certainly felt how you judge her? Crazy applauds of he whole audience… I am a writer myself and I speak of Jean in nearly every book. The way you read, Miss Lingel, is great, and very rare. I wish you could read one of my books but they are all in french – some are translated in german. Wishing you much luck and many books that will make you happy. Gemma

  47. Thanks!
    A great article and some thought provoking questions.
    Will we learn from history?

  49. M.H.,An Uncle
    A great roadmap to the pensive joy of the mundane! Keep thinking and writing so well.

  50. It builds upon Wallace’s Consider the Lobster, yet it reminds me of Brent Edwards & his “fugue style” of composition. Different pieces in this article fit together just amazingly. The final section arrives at the tonic of this entire work! Nice one, Hal!

  52. As a veteran who was part of the carnage, all I can do is apologize and let you know that this participation left behind a lifetime of sadness inside and the knowledge of my lack of courage to refuse orders.

    Friends who have since visited said they have been treated beyond well … with real warmth and interest. Remarkable to me beyond measure. For that all that can be said is we should be humbled at the maturity of your 2,000 year old civilization.

  57. I finally got around to watching The Invitation (2015). I really enjoyed it, especially the cool reveal at the end.

  60. On the subject of understanding Trump’s appeal, I found this article on Jean-Jacques Rousseau to be… wait for it… enlightening.

    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/01/how-rousseau-predicted-trump

    “In Rousseau’s view, the newly emergent intellectual and technocratic class did little more than provide literary and moral cover for the powerful and the unjust.”

    “Rousseau seems to have grasped, and embodied, better than anyone the incendiary appeal of victimhood in societies built around the pursuit of wealth and power.”

  61. “the bigger the piles, the thinner the door.” – this really made me shudder!

  62. Hi Jessa Lingel, this is to say that since 1980 I also want Jean Rhys All to Myself. Good title, bravo. In 1984, I went to London (from Paris) for a conference about her with Diana Athill and this awful guy called David Plante, and after the speech I stood to ask WHY Jean did admit such a guy to be helping her, knowing how much she hated judges and “morale”. Many applaus from the audience and this little scandal was reported in the newspapers articles that appeared next day, all about the book of Plante: Difficult Women.
    I am a writer myself, now living (happily) in Vienna after about 35 years of Paris. My books are in french, not translated in English, alas, but in German, Russian and… Hebrew!
    Wish you all the best and many happy returns about Jean and everything.
    Gemma

  65. Its clear she is over 18 – the scene where she goes to the brothel. The nurse and Rob in’s relationship ended two yrs ago and they are stuck in the limbo of the aftermath. Which Helen sees and plays with before realizing she likes him. The memory is pivotal to her letting go of trying to get her parents back together. She lets go of her childlike view of their relationship and grows up a little. She only goes with Robin to get away from living with either of her fucked up parents. Being 18 with a bf in his twenties would be so incredibly unremarkable that its laughable. I found this post trying to find out what the hell the traumatic memory was. I dont know how anyone could make out what was happening in that shot of the baby and the mother. I rewound it like 5 times. Otherwise I thought of Amelie also. And loved the lighthearted depiction of her free spiritedness.

  68. Matt: the Necronomicon will let your tardiness slide this once, mortal. It detects a love of indie horror and unconventional romances and recommends The One I Love (2014), which has elements of both. Klaatu barada nikto!

  69. Elyse G: the Necronomicon senses an enjoyment of romantic dramas with an interesting twist and predicts that you will enjoy the divinely charming Waitress (2007). The Necronomicon hears the Broadway version is very good too. Klaatu barada nikto!

  70. Adam Lowber: the Necronomicon is starting to think you mortals liked that Mad Max movie. It agrees with you and recommends the briskly plotted thriller Cold in July (2014). Klaatu barada nikto!

  71. Celia: the Necronomicon agrees with your assessment of your viewing proclivities. Very perceptive, mortal. It recommends the Mike Leigh comedy Happy Go Lucky (2008). Klaatu barada nikto!

  72. Joe Gregov: the Necronomicon senses an enjoyment of well-written dialogue and creative world-building. It recommends the wonderful indie sci-fi film Under the Skin (2013). Klaatu barada nikto!

  73. Vladkin: the Necronomicon detects a love for intelligent sci-fi and horror and recommends Adam Wingard’s indie horror/thriller The Guest (2014). You will thank the Necronomicon later. Klaatu barada nikto!

  74. Deborah: the Necronomicon senses an affinity for historical dramas and recommends the lush Danish costume drama A Royal Affair (2012). Klaatu barada nikto!

  75. Zack: the Necronomicon detects a love of indie comedies and recommends David Gordon Green’s gently absurdist film Prince Avalanche (2013). Klaatu barada nikto!

  76. Joanna: the Necronomicon senses a love of period-piece coming-of-age films and recommends the delightful post-Cold War comedy Good Bye, Lenin! (2003). The Necronomicon particularly likes Daniel Brühl’s performance. Klaatu barada nikto!

  77. Roy McSween: the Necronomicon senses an appreciation for satirical dialogue and expertly filmed action. It predicts you will enjoy the resplendent Norwegian mockumentary Troll Hunter (2010). Klaatu barada nikto!

  78. Mitchell: the Necronomicon detects an enjoyment of intelligent horror and action films. It recommends the twisty thriller The Invitation (2015). Klaatu barada nikto!

  79. Samx3: the Necronomicon detects a healthy appreciation for the absurd and thinks you will enjoy the insane Japanese horror classic House (1977). Follow, if you dare, with the American film House (1986, no relation). Klaatu barada nikto!

  80. Staci M.W.: the Necronomicon detects an affinity for sophisticated comedies and recommends the excellent indie The Skeleton Twins (2014). Klaatu barada nikto!

  81. Gina: the Necronomicon senses a deep love of that holiest of movie genres, the horror comedy. Well done, mortal. It recommends that you watch What We Do In the Shadows (2014) with its blessing. Klaatu barada nikto!

  82. I’ve never even HEARD of Happy Accidents but it looks fantastic. Makalaka hi meka hiney ho!

  84. Interloper: the Necronomicon senses an enjoyment of high-concept romances and assumes you have already seen Defending Your Life, so it predicts that you will enjoy the comedic drama Happy Accidents (2000). Klaatu barada nikto!

  85. Rrepino: the Necronomicon senses that you have a talented and attractive girlfriend you would like to buy dinner for. It heartily recommends you the suspense thriller Cop Car (2015). Klaatu barada nikto!

  86. M. Snowe: the Necronomicon detects a kindred spirit who likes visually appealing movies about female friendships. It predicts that you will enjoy Heavenly Creatures (1994). Klaatu barada nikto!

  87. Daniel Gurzi: The Necronomicon detects an affinity for teen movies with strong female protagonists and sprightly physical activity. It foresees you enjoying Save the Last Dance (2001). Klaatu barada nikto!

  88. Kirk Michael: The Necronomicon detects a willingness to read subtitles and decipher complicated plots. It likes your style and foretells that you will enjoy the exceedingly weird Post Tenebras Lux (2012). Klaatu barada nikto!

  89. Hannah: Ashley greets you in return and applauds your willingness to go first, mortal. The Necronomicon foretells that you will enjoy Hush (2016), a psychological thriller costarring John Gallagher Jr. from 10 Cloverfield Lane. Klaatu baradu nikto!

  92. Sisters, Wetlands, Celeste and Jesse Forever. Clearly a strong female lead trend happening here!

  95. I could fill this with movies I enjoyed from last year, but where is the fun in that? so here we go:
    1) Cinema Paradiso
    2) The Departed
    3) Marie Antoinette
    4) Eddie Murphy RAW
    5) Trainspotting

  98. Pop Star, Captain America: Civil War, The Big Short.

    I thought to include Army of Darkness, but I don’t want your Necronomicon to explode.

  99. These are the last movies I “loved” or really like cause, loving movies is hard for all us jaded movie folk, (I’m blaming you, Jurassic World).

    Dredd, The One I love, and The Thing (Carpenter). Always and forever, John Carpenter’s The Thing.

  106. Bring it on, bring it on again, bring it on: in it to win it. All or nothing and fight to the finish were terrible.

  110. Thank you for your revealing analysis of the end of Infinite Jest. I’ve just finished my first read and you have convinced me to reread the entire novel. I also watched a few youtube videos about DFW and in one of them the commentator mentioned how David always made him feel as if he could talk to him about anything, and he would be able to help him understand it. It seems as if David was able to bring this to his writing because it seems to have something for everyone with its many themes. For me, I think this is mostly a novel about depression, loneliness, and addiction, and because of David, I feel someone else is out there, and they get it, and ultimately, I feel that when I am reading IJ, I’m less alone.

  112. I too, tend to write long sentences. A few I edit down, but there are some that to me wouldn’t have the same impact shorter. Thank you for sharing that long sentences can be eloquent and part of a story. Your last, long sentence was magnificent. @sheilamgood at Cow Pasture Chronicles

  114. Thank you for such a wonderful post. I am a huge Patti Smith fan and have recently read M Train myself but it’s wonderful to get further inside the book by looking more closely at the places that she visited and their possible symbolism. I feel there is so much hidden meaning in M Train, so many references, one cannot help but want to follow in her footsteps, read the books, watch the TV shows, and use these to look further into her life and ideas.

  120. I think it’s a “cubist” autobiography. Unreplicatible. Which is why DFW ran into a brick wall with The Pale King.

  124. Ermm, hate to be a total pessimist, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the people buying this weren’t totally against it. I doubt many people would buy this out of intellectual curiosity. And considering there are an estimated 26000 right wing extremists in Germany alone, not to mention other groups of people who would be interested in reading this book for the wrong reasons, I wouldn’t be surprised if this book had an audience of people who were in tune with Hitler’s way of thinking.
    That’s not to say I’m in favour of censorship- I just think it’s a little ominous.
    Sorry, got a bit sidetracked- it’s a great post and I love your picks- particularly the last one.
    One last thing, out of interest, do you have any idea where the proceeds for this book going?

  126. I’m surprised by the type treatment. It’s so… plain. The image and the spareness and the whiteness seem well thought out, but then the type is like something from MS Paint.

  127. I just finished IJ. I don’t see any comments on your blog suggesting that Gately was dying in the last scene (on the beach with the tide going out)– this is wonderful, bc I love Gately, and I don’t want him to die! Could you please tell me why I am wrong, why this experience of feeling that he is on the beach, and the tide is going out, is not him dying?

  129. Sasha, I could be wrong or you might be referring to something even earlier but I think part of the Andreas section was excerpted in the New Yorker. Was it that?

  142. The entire section where Andreas kills Annagret’s stepfather is taken from another story by someone else. The story is identical and I read it not too long ago, but I can’t remember for the life of me what the name is. However, the original story ends after their re-connection at the rally.

  144. “The sky lightened so imperceptibly it was the first time in her life she understood that the stars were always there, and it was only the brightness of the sun that blinded her to the other luminous bodies scattered throughout space.” –Yes, I kept rereading this passage for the pleasure it evokes, reminding me as it does of when I was a kid and would sneak out at night to go hiking with my buddies in the wilds at the end of a nearby dead-end street and be fascinated by the star smoke of the Milky Way. We’d stay out until the eastern sky began to bleed grey.

  146. This is such a wonderful, evocative and inspiring conversation between two brilliant writers!

  152. Far from well-read in Zweig, and having never read Roth, when watching The Grand Budapest Hotel the middle-European writer that kept being cast to mind was Bohumil Hrabal. The half-cocked zaniness, interest in uniforms and functionality as things fall apart, the political undercurrents. I didn’t see any of the Zweig I’ve read in it at all, apart from there being hotels.

  160. This is gorgeous, Nina — a great gift! I’m inspired both by the care with which you read, and the encouragement to let images rise up with all their beauty and meaning. Thank you too for the mention of Catherine Brady’s book — I have been wishing to read this for a long time, and now I will!!

  161. D Scarlett, I think you make some very good points about how we shouldn’t judge people too quickly. And I think you’re judging Magin too quickly.

  162. I actually expected an aricle on mulilingual writers, or writers writing in their second language.

    Thanks anyway,
    Àda

  163. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make it through the first paragraph of your review without finding something with which to take issue. Your use of “proto-Tea Party Atticus” in describing his Klan activities is beyond offensive and totally inaccurate. Was that cheap-shot verbiage based on your many personal observations at Tea Party events? I’m guessing not. Had you gone to any, you would’ve seen people of all races united by a desire to be taxed less, have less government control of our lives and return to using the Constitution as something more than a coaster for Congressional iced tea. You likely would’ve seen them sing the national anthem and say the Pledge of Allegiance and maybe offer a prayer (how awful!). And they would’ve left the venue cleaner than when they got there. But, really, why should you bother to go and see for yourself what people who might disagree with you on big issues are like? It’s so much easier to just dismiss their legitimate, heart-felt issues and take the easy, lazy way out and simply call them racists.

  164. That is what this novel expresses. No, it is not in one byte; it is by reading this work of art that one is allowed to absorb this idea.

  165. Very eloquent and reasonably argued. (Lawyer Atticus would be proud!) I’m glad you read this and wrote about it, so now I don’t have to read it. Although I might, if this is how it really ends: “She embraces, rather than rejects, the complexity of her own inescapable heritage. She becomes conscious of what her history means and has meant. She takes the wheel and drives, leaving Atticus to sit, humbled and hunched, in her shadow.”

  168. […] The movie is really good. It’s especially good if you’re part of the group it was written for — a fan of Wallace who has read Infinite Jest — but I think it works even if you’ve never heard of Wallace or just have a vague sense of him and his writing. I will caution that if you are moved by the film to pick up Infinite Jest for the first time, then you absolutely should, but with awareness of what you will find. The novel’s premises, which get extensive and generally clear explanation in the movie, are buried in the book under 1000 pages of tennis school, AA meetings and wheelchair assassins. If you need help, we’re here for you. […]

  175. When asked during a Q&A if any members of Wallace’s family had seen the film, the filmmakers replied that members of his immediate family had given them their blessing since the beginning and since have seen the film and loved it. Not sure why that’s not being reported.

  176. Lester Bangs’ advice to William Miller for the piece he’s writing about a band in Almost Famous goes, “You wanna be a true friend to them? Be honest, and unmerciful.” In a similar spirit, Lipsky winds up being a true friend to Wallace by sharing this interview which is a tremendous portrait of DFW and an excellent thematic roadmap to IJ as well. I sympathize deeply with the Wallace family and estate, but I’m glad the book was written and the movie made.

  178. There’s a HUGE difference between The End of the Tour and Montage of Heck. Difference number one is that Cobain is a massive youth icon. Nirvana is still incredibly popular with teenagers. The audience for DFW is, in your words, nerds. (as much as I take immense offense with the term. Everyone claims to be a nerd these days. I heard someone claim to be a nerd for watching the Tonys. Wallace fans are not nerds.) Secondly, Montage of Heck attempts to elevate Cobain’s importance from rock star to capped R Rock Star.The End attempted to miniaturize Wallace. Three is the participation of the family. Courtney and Frances, along with Cobain’s mother, actively participated in the making of Montage. Wallace’s family is against it. Four, one is a documentary, the other a fictionalized account of a brief moment in time.

    I could go on, but there’s no point.

  181. Shards is a phenomenal read, and this interview is very thought-provoking. “Story is the only truth we can have.” Damn, that’s going in my next book.

  183. Well said, Kevin, thank you.

    I haven’t read much of Mailer’s best work, and I think that’s because the myths about him always get in my way — it’s hard to quiet my mind and pay attention to his texts when rumors and controversies and anecdotes about him are foremost on everyone’s tongues. I wish I could un-know what I’ve heard about him as a person and read his books fresh.

  184. Hey Brian, thanks for the reply.

    First I would say Menand’s treatment of Mailer is too comprehensive to be called an attempted dismissal. Or certainly not that alone. Actually his essay seeks to be a mini-biography in itself. Menand obviously brought a comprehensive set of judgments about Mailer and his work, crafting his piece to support them. And for sure, with that I take no issue – that’s criticism, rhetoric, in other words, the game.

    Something worth noting, however, is that though Menand’s judgments are weighted toward shrink-wrapping Mailer’s significance and exposing him to ridicule (to which he is wildly vulnerable), they’re not completely one-sided. From Menand’s closing two paragraphs:

    “Mailer took chances. He was sometimes ridiculously wrong; he was sometimes refreshingly right; he was never uninteresting.

    “…still, in spite of the vulnerability, and in spite of the botched projects and the preposterous and occasionally offensive theories and the personal misadventures, miscalculations that would have upended the careers of most writers, he produced some remarkable and original books.”

    As for my thoughts on Mailer, well, I like him. I’m in the Joan Didion camp, who considers him one of the best and most important writers of his times. And I also like what he was ultimately about as a public figure. Not all of it, and I certainly don’t condone his violence toward his second wife. But in the end he emerged as someone who’s sixty plus years of artistic pursuit seemingly made more and more whole, knowing, empathetic, human. Someone who puts me in mind of what Napoleon was alleged to have said upon first meeting Goethe. “Voilà, Un homme!”

  185. Hi Kevin. I didn’t mean to try and dismiss Mailer, just to summarize the outrageous and entertaining coverage at The New Yorker, where Louis Menand is trying to dismiss him. (The title of this post is a quote from the article, if I recall correctly.)

    What would you say is a better approach to Mailer? I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on him.

  186. The link in this piece is to a review of the biography in the signature New Yorker style, not to the “Highlights”.

    While this piece itself is merely a facile attempted dismissal of the writer. An attempt whose underpinning seems for the most part moralistic. Ugh.

  187. Great point, infinite8tome. I love that Aaron trusted his instinct and went with “tournament.” He reminds me to stretch, take a risk in writing!

  189. thanks so much kirk! that’s just what my fellow reader said she was committed to do! just re-read asap. I don’t think the paperback copy of hers I have had hostage for all this time will make it through another reading, so I shall get her another. I had an hour long conversation with her today about IJ, its events, and mysteries, and maybe that was what makes this such a marvelous thing. getting people talking to each other again rather than getting glued to a tv. btw, I think it no accident that the tv is called TP (toilet paper) in IJ.

  190. Margaret, I think you know what comes next: a re-reading! Hopefully it doesn’t take another three years. Seriously, though, I drew so much more from an immediate second reading (coupled with the wealth of intelligent blog discussions here and elsewhere, to which I will happily link you if requested).

  191. i have used all my spare time for the past 3 years of my life, precious little that that is, what with all my jobs, responsibilities, ordinary every day chores, and whatnot, during time spent in traffic, waiting in the doctors’ offices, the hairdresser’s, 10 minutes prior to lights out, and so forth, reading this highly confusing, yet compelling, thing. my paperback book is secured together with duct tape. the cover is barely recognizable from exposure to sweat, rain, sun, and otherwise general abuse. it has traveled all over the southeast, been on beaches, taken to work, left outside in scorching heat, been at tennis matches (rain delays are prime reading times), meetings (hard to conceal in a lap, but doable if clever with the proper clothing), and waiting rooms of all kinds. is it a novel, a hidden biography, a metaphor for something, a prophesy of what is to become of our ‘reality-celebrity-obsessed-entertainment culture’ we are a part of? I finished the last 20 pages last night with ear plugs in, no intrusive tv in the background, and with full attention to pay. almost a spiritual significance. I’m fairly well stunned. speechless. still confused, and frantically searching www. advice, interpretation, and help. I only know of one other up-close-and-personal person who has read this work, and it only took her 3 months of intense reading. she’s way brillianter than me. than i. (nod to avril’s love of correct grammar.) this blog reading tonight has helped settle me somewhat. I plan to re-read the first 100 pages or so, while asking lots of questions and discussing thoughts with my one known fellow reader. next, head to the public library and get more of DFW’s collection.

  192. […] probably know Jess Row for his fiction—The Train to Lo Wu and Your Face in Mine—or maybe for the beautiful little piece he wrote for Fiction Advocate not long ago. But over at The Boston Review, Row has been publishing a series of critical essays […]

  197. good point Jacqueline – I often wonder if everyone else’s strange personalities would lead to the same bizarre behavior of our mega-celebrities under the right circumstances… something about the combination of unfettered wealth plus intense scrutiny on your every move would likely make us all want to own the Elephant Mans bones!

  201. He is one of the greatest! I study Music Production and I must say that his talent is amazing. When listening to all his records you can really hear and feel all the talent and hard work behind it!

    Love your blog btw, I’m just starting mine, but I’m planning on doing some music posts as well :)

  202. The funny thing is that the word he questioned (“tournament”) is part of one of the most beautiful clauses in the sentence. They say trust your instincts. Go figure. : P

  205. This is such a well written piece. I adored the last selection in your thoughtful review (excerpted from “Requiem”). The line that begin with, “knows repentance not as the hour of remorse,” is so lovely. ‘The choice,’ in which you had great taste! Thanks for sharing.

  211. thanks for this…I will definitely get it when it becomes available…very interesting premise which you stated very nicely…thanks again

  212. Yessss! I had no idea it was being translated into English- such good news. I’ve been meaning to read it for ages, have borrowed it from my local library in French and will read it soon.

  213. I’d read the two books you mention above but I knew very little about the man behind them. This comes as a bit of an eye-opener – but I suppose none us can guarantee we would have been noble, high-minded and good in a situation like that.

  214. In an uncharitable mood, I would say that this trailer is telling us that brilliant white dudes have had a lot of brilliant thoughts throughout history, and all of those brilliant white dudes from history with their brilliant thoughts tend to add up and weigh heavily on the brilliant white dudes of today, but if we’re lucky, the brilliant white dudes of today will find a way to rise above their crushing fear of not being as brilliant as the brilliant white dudes from history, and they will become truly brilliant white dudes in their own right, and the way we will know that they have become truly brilliant white dudes is not because they will actually do or say anything brilliant, but because they will smile knowingly at each other, in that special brilliant white dude way, as the music swells.

    In a charitable mood, I would say that Jason Segal is trying really hard with that accent and doing a pretty good job.

  216. Thanks so much for posting this. I read “The Left Hand of Darkness” for the first time in college and loved it, even though I am not typically a science fiction person. I get where you’re coming from with the location being important. I’m from Minnesota and I feel like reading this when you are legitimately freezing every time you step outside really adds to the experience.

  217. I’m not a fellow writer, so I, for my part, have no reason (and no desire!) to “tear you a new asshole”, Nell. I just think your books aren’t very good. Although well written (as far as your command of the English language goes), they lack a certain quality and depth, but I guess that’s just normal in times when almost everything is hyped up exclusively for profit purposes. It’s just sad that so many people fall for it.

    To sum up my feelings about your shaggy dog morality tale: Mispaid. Mislaid. (Most likely in the analog trash can – permanently deleted by the garbage truck).

  219. Walter White, NAACP chairman 1931-1955: “‘I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.’ Of his 32 3xgreat-grandparents, five were black and the other 27 were white. All members of his immediate family had fair skin, and his mother Madeline was also blue-eyed and blonde.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Francis_White)
    There are plenty of good reasons fellow writers might want to tear me a new asshole (I wrote another book in March and sold it already!), but the forgotten reality of “race” in the South isn’t one of them.
    n

  225. I’ve always felt like Virginia Woolf was throwing down a vacation/beach read vibe.

  230. Beautiful story and teachings! I just bought the book! Thank you, Nina!!

  231. Great interview with thoughtful comments from Patty. I like the change from “I’m right and you’re wrong” kind of person. I can identify. “If you’re honest and open-minded as you go about your work, it’s bound to make you a more sympathetic, and engaged human being.” So true. From another way up in Michigan hometowner.

  239. I dnt know much about Feminine writers and the issues they have to sort out to keep them on track of writing!!
    Children add responsibility ,its nt just because they are new to this earth that you have to guide them but responsibility is unconditional just because you have given birth !!
    Writers almost wants 100% freedom and even more to spend all their time to think and then to express their ideas they way they wish to express!!
    So Added responsibilities may cut short their freedom to spend time!!
    May be a reason !! May nt be completly agreeable!!

  245. A great movie! You might like another film by the same director (Majid Majidi), called The Color of Paradise. It, too, deals with a brother/sister duo and the theme of innocence, but its cinematography is much more striking.

  246. […] Frank Kermode (the British literary critic whose The Sense of an Ending I’m obsessed with) might say, imagining the suffering that our petty enemies will face in the afterlife is really […]

  247. […] Us Conductors is probably the bookie’s favourite as it was the winner of this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize but my money is on Emma Hooper’s excellent Etta and Otto and Russell and James. It stands the trope of ladies wandering for miles in order to find themselves on its head. To read more, check out my recent review of the book in the Fiction Advocate. […]

  249. my favorite is Leavin’ Trunk, from Giant Step, the first Taj Mahal song I ever heard. what a great album from a totally unique musician!

  251. OUTSTANDING! You made me want to read her; my MIL is a big fan so all her books are at her house. My inclination is the opposite: I like to spread the news when I discover a new writer although I know ahead of time its going to fall on deaf ears. Interestingly. Thomas Bernhard, one of my favorite writers, because his works caused so much controversy, in his will disallowed all publication and stagings of his work within Austria’s borders. In a similar vein, Thomas Hardy, for the same reason as Bernhard, never wrote another novel again after Jude the Obscure, devoting the rest of life to poetry.

  253. Thanks for that review, this book seems interesting, even though those kind of conflicts in a story must be sustained with incredible prose.

  257. I hear you. And I’m not exactly sure why I love this book. I definitely kind of hate Family Guy. Maybe this book feels different to me because it’s coming from a different place? With the humor in The Sellout, I feel like it’s coming from a deep, collective social wound — something real that we need to be able to talk about, and laugh about. Whereas with Family Guy the humor is coming from… I don’t know, Seth McFarlane’s farts?

  264. […] In case the praise from Francisco Goldman on the front cover isn’t enough (“Yuri Herrera is Mexico’s greatest novelist.”), Signs Preceding the End of the World has what is possibly the best blurb of all time, and it comes from the brilliant Valeria Luiselli: […]

  290. Mike – As usual, even when you feel you feel your aim is off (what with the newborn and all) you hit the mark with this sincere and thorough list. Thanks. You are awesome. That is all.

  297. No books on what to expect in the first year of your baby’s life? Maybe Pynchon provided you enough insight into the art of raising a child. Uhh… Men!

  298. As a teacher (day job) and a writer, I have problems with any sort of encounter between a person who has power due to age, position, or power and a youth who has none. Such relationships are abusive by nature. And I agree with williameck when he says the gender doesn’t matter. Females can be abusive, too.

  300. Right on, Wayne! I hope you enjoy the read.

    Amazon is great but if you order directly from us the author and publisher will receive about 4x more money.

  301. This vivid and personal review intrigued me so much that I went straight to Amazon a bought a copy.

    For anybody wanting to get a first-hand account of live behind the Iron Curtain, this is a great resource.

  302. Mike, your comments about THE BONE CLOCKS could just as easily be about THE GOLDFINCH, word for word. And I believe James Wood made the prevailing complaints against both books. This is becoming an interesting sport. Let’s try and guess what big novel will released in fall 2015 that James Wood will say is too plot-driven.

  303. […] The Luminaries by Elanor Catton. This is another good, confusing one. Well written, complicated, a gripping read. A confusing ending. Elanor Catton was only 28 when she won the 2013 Booker Prize for this one. I think there is a lot to look forward to from her in the years ahead. Read the full review “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena?“ […]

  304. […] Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon. “Bleeding Edge is best understood not as the account of a master of ironized paranoia coming to grips with the cultural paradigm he helped to define but as something much braver and riskier: an attempt to acknowledge, even at the risk of a melodramatic organ chord, that paradigm’s most painful limitation.” Those are Michael Chabon’s words, which I feel best capture what’s going on in this book, which I enjoyed very much because it’s classic silly, sexual, strange and sentimental Pynchon, but dedicated to what feels like a new enterprise: “Bleeding Edge is about September 11, 2001 as a serious and traumatic event that transcends conspiracies and paranoia… Pynchon is chronicling the point at which the current of irony that propelled the culture in the 1990s shifted from being a product of boredom and hipness to being a product of overwhelming fear.” Those are my words. Read the full review “Hard Refresh.” […]

  305. […] My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman. A beautiful antidote to the uncomplicated and often crude perceptions, and presentations, we tend to have of what it means to be a Christian, or even a religious or spiritual person these days. I read it at a, well, providential moment, when my wife was experiencing significant health issues during the closing months of the pregnancy, and I needed to find ways to balance burdens and fear and hardships with gratitude and wonder and faith. I loved this book, and will read it again in less trying times, and expect to feel just as much. Read the full review “God Help is Hard to Find.” […]

  311. Looks like an interesting book, but not my favorite topic. Personally I don’t think a twenty-six year-old should sleep with a fourteen year-old, whatever their respective sexes.

  329. Thanks for replying to my little comments John. Since you addressed me personally, I will just add to your final words above. If you don’t read people at face value, and even favorably, say in a comment on a blog, then you will inevitably get yourself worked up over phantoms of your own imagining, or worse get others worked up. Julian faces these kinds of self inflating highly inventive and imaginative mobs all of the time. Just imagine if you are looking for a visual metaphor and you come with one that is quite well known and very clear, like the mountain came to Mohammed, and then you deploy it, and then all of a sudden you have mobs of people saying they’re offended that you said Mohammed, or conjured an image of Mohammed, or are comparing yourself to Mohammed, just all of these baseless things. Clearly you’ve done nothing wrong by deploying a visual metaphor, intellectually you can’t be expected to way the reaction of everyone in the world before writing or saying anything. Even if you are omniscient/psychic or whatever this is too much of a burden to place on anyone. So when someone tries to communicate an idea, it’s not like a work of fiction where the audience is able to draw what ever conclusion they prefer, whatever spins their wheels for their own intellectual enjoyment, instead we have to be respectful and mindful that we do not do undo harm to anyone or anyone’s reputation, so that we can have free discourse in the future. A future where everyone has been on the other end of this form of mistreatment and realizes that if we can all communicate, we first have to be able to separate the signal from the noise, and that begins with mutual respect, and benefit of doubt, and checking our wildest imaginations at the door.

  331. Nice job Princess. We’ll share a bottle or two of the good Rioja when we meet again and listen to old Dave, and Bob and Joe Purdy too all night on the veranda

  332. Hi Mick.Thanks for your response. A couple of points.First, like you, I was rather surprised by the lack of coverage given by various media to this book. I have been especially frustrated by the lack of interest shown to my pitches in Australia. No one here seems to give a shit, frankly, even lefty publications, which I found rather shocking, His attack on Schmidt-Cohen i not by any means merely revenge at work; it’s an engagement of the Monster itself. Second, as for the ‘megalomaniac’ bit, I certainly don’t see Assange that way. I just felt that at the beginning of the book he intentionally built up a battle of two egos, which struck me as unnecessary. As for the mohammed-mountain expression; I honestly don’t see a ‘face value’ to it, as you do. There’s a kind of Islamic flavour added to it, and a sense that the saying appeared in the Koran, which it doesn;t. I have no problem with your interpretation; it seems fair enough to a degree; it’s just that I don’t read things just at face value anymore.

  334. You call yourself a coward, but it takes a certain amount of bravery to add a nearly 900-word post on D&D to your litblog. No matter who buys the book.

  337. PS: In defense of Julian. You do read too deep into some of the things he says. He isn’t megalomaniacal anymore than he’d have to be. When he says the mountain came to Mohammad, he just means that he is a mere man, and Schmidt/Google is a mountain. He is evoking the surreal quality of the affair, nothing more. If the internet teaches us anything it should teach us the virtue of taking words at their face value. Benefit of doubt.

  338. Good read. No one is reviewing Assange’s book. There is some cover of events surrounding the press campaign, but it’s as if the book doesn’t exist. This book is everything I wanted the first book (Cypherpunks) to be.

    Could be just that everything in the book was already published, as with Cypherpunks. But it would be nice to here the establishment say, yes there is something interesting, or good, or even bad here. It’s not as if these are not important figures.

  339. FIFTY DOLLARS! I know, I know. I had been planning to buy this book for a long time, and when I finally picked it up in the store and looked at the price, I balked. Michelle took it out of my hands and paid for it herself, as a gift, because I am a coward with no money.

  340. I love this post. Especially the Axe body spray shout out. I enjoyed the one 4E campaign I played as well, though I think it was mostly the novelty of a totally new (to me) style of D&D. Having cut my teeth on AD&D and 3E, I had never used miniatures, a mat, published adventures run by the DM or any of that, and the enormously engineered experience was fun in a very comfortable kind of way. 3E is my favorite, and I badly want to play 5E, but I’m pretty pissed at their three-month roll-out of the three core rulebooks, and the $50 Player’s price tag (FIFTY DOLLARS FOR 1/3 OF D&D) that makes WotC’s money-grabbing efforts Elfishly bald-faced.

  341. […] passionate love of life, and the poetry, wine, history and debate with which he filled his own. More on that here. Finally, the best book I didn’t read from 2011 was either “Pulphead” by John […]

  342. […] “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive” by Christopher Boucher — This book is a story and a game. The story is about a single father in rural Massachusetts hitting rock bottom after the death of his own father. The game is making sense of his metaphors, which are so cracked out that you fear for his sanity. He talks about his son and his Volkswagen Beetle as if they’re the same entity. He explains his father’s death by saying a Heart Attack Tree came along while his father was sitting inside an Invisible Pickup Truck and ripped all the stories out of his father’s chest. The metaphors end up making an eerie kind of sense, and you realize that the book is re-wiring the way look at the world. […]

  343. One of the interesting potential repercussions of this theory (of which I am a huge fan) is what it suggests about Hal’s state in the Year of Glad. Specifially: what if Hal isn’t crazy? What if he is actually functioning normally but the U of Arizona deans are incapable of communicating with someone who is actually thinking and feeling like a human should?

  347. Esme,
    Thank you very much for your comment and for bringing up Miklós Bánnfy. This is a sustained look at the Nyugat generation, not (yet) an exhaustive survey. For instance, I decided to leave poetry for another essay – it’s a universe in itself. In terms of fiction, several other authors from the Nyugat generation not mentioned in this essay but available English are: Gyula Illyés, People of the Puszta (Corvina, 1965); Margit Kaffka, Colours and Years (Corvina, 1992); László Németh, Revulsion (Grove Press, 1965), and Guilt (Owen, 1966). Happy reading, LK

  348. What about Miklos Banffy? Is he not considered to be one of Hungary’s best? I am reading the first book (“They Were Counted”) in his Transylvanian Trilogy and it’s very good, a sort of Hungarian Downton Abbey/Radetzky March (Joseph Roth).

  350. Great article! I’ve always enjoyed Dyer’s non-fiction but haven’t been as enamored with his more recent fiction – but The Colour of Memory sounds like a fine read.

  351. It’s going to be like Hollywood, Jane, where every busboy has a script to pitch you. You’ll order shaved ice from a guy who’s pushing a handcart and he’ll give it to you with a copy of his unpublished novel manuscript.

  352. Hey! That friend is only able to move because she’s a public schoolteacher who finally got a raise for the first time since 2008! But yeah, I get it.

  356. How did I not know about Rebecca Curtis? Actually I did. I’d read three of her stories before I realized why these three particular stories were so great. I went back, looked, and they were all by the same writer.

    Christmas Miracle was a miasmic, freak-fest of Lyme patients that was so creative it’s unforgettable. The darkness of The Toast is something I’ve carried with me since I read it months ago. Now the Pink House expels literary madness, and shrugs itself off as not being a very good story, but really another testament to her technique and again with humour. So good.

    No doubt Curtis is the best story writer in the English language today.

  359. Hurrah, that’s what I was searching for, what a material!
    existing here at this website, thanks admin of this web page.

  364. Just finished the book this past Saturday and agree largely with the preceding post, but, for anybody who maintains interest in any of this, wanted to add a few other points:
    1) Avril knew that Hal knew that she and Wayne were entangled, but she also knew that Hal was getting high in the tunnels. Thus, she let Pemulis’ threat of exposing her liaison with Wayne stand as a pretense for delaying the drug testing, but he was sorely mistaken if he thought he could leverage his knowledge to extract further concessions from her.
    2) Luria P and Avril are indeed different people, but if you look at Luria P through tinted, curved glass, she might look significantly taller and older, which would reveal her, and all “subjects” as surrogates for Avril to Orin.
    3) Orin’s “attraction” to Hugh Steepley seems buffoonish on the surface, but is actually a sign that he knows perfectly well that Steepley is part of the disjointed surveillance network that suspects him of disseminating the Entertainment.
    4) I disagree with the general opinion that ingesting mold did such lasting damage to Hal. Rather I think his mother’s hysterical refusal to help Hal directly was the real injury dealt by that childhood incident.
    5) However the DMZ hits Hal is interesting to speculate about, but ultimately, as asserted above, it’s a lot more about his busting through his own erudition and finding his, guess what, Inner Infant. Remember that while the University of Arizona’s Sultans of Stodge are aghast by what they see, the good folks at ETA (another obtuse separatist nod, btw) have been protecting him and getting him out on the court for quite some time now. So his communication difficulties have not rendered him a complete outcast.
    6) I’d like to think that watching the Entertainment while on DMZ would solve all the problems of the universe.

  371. My favorite piece was Diana Wagman’s “Application,” with this, she said: “I chanted silently the names of my three published novels. I had no reason to be intimidated, but probably my desperation was obvious….” Three novels and still she suffers from a sense of the threat of failure? It’s like the baseball coach who said it’s not about what you did for me yesterday. And the batting slump is the writer’s block. But she’s very funny about it all at the same time. I liked the arrangement of the chapters, the juxtaposition of cynicism followed by something a bit more sincere undermined in the next, etc., how each chapter works as comment and set up, and also the between chapter notes which enabled a few more speakers in was good, but the resolution of the whole seems to say something about the insatiability with good humor of hopelessness.

  373. I really like the appeal of sharing stories so fast, but I’m still having trouble blending technology and storytelling together in my mind.

    Like Mike, I saw that there are a ton of vampire and fanfiction-perfect stories on Wattpad. It seems like their primary genre. The app reminds me of a New Yorker article on Chinese literature that I read last year. There’s a growing trend (actually a demand) in China for authors to write novels about businessmen and woman that all end the same way – the protagonist gets a big promotion or raise at his or her job. It sounds like a simple ending, but the fast pace of life in cities like Beijng, along with the fact that the US outsources so much labor to Asia, make these stories incredibly popular in Asia.

    I think the source for so many supernatural stories, romances, or combinations of the two in American literature is something embedded in the national psyche. Americans are certainly attracted to the speed and social recognition that technology like Wattpad promises. But the monotony of the vampire and romance novels on Wattpad says a lot about the other things Americans are preoccupied with – clearly the perfect romance, for one, and two, the impossible, almost supernatural perfection we seek in our own jobs and personal lives.

  377. Just like athletes attend training camps, authors should continuously work to hone their craft. Rowling uses her understanding of places she has encountered to generate something fictional.

  383. Oh most definitely. Two things in a row makes a trend, and we called it first. Sleeplessness is the new vampires!

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  390. I finished the book last night. I embarked on the endeavor before Christmas with literally no expectations or forward knowledge of what lie ahead. It was a random Kindle purchase to try and find something philosophically interesting, and I’ll readily admit I am not a big literary fan, I just tend to pick up things that look thought-provoking and read them.

    After the shockingly abrupt ending, and the realization that re-reading chapter 1 might be wise, and the subsequent realization of impending, personal, Infinite Jest, I found it very hard to concentrate on work today!

    After scouring more online essays than I probably should have today, I found yours the most resonant with my own take.

    If I had to answer the, “what is it about?” question, I have settled on: it is a comedic, yet dire warning about the perils of passivity.

    I will suggest that the staggering amount of substance abuse stories are only here to paint a backdrop of the horrors of actual addiction. There is no escape, no real recovery, and most often death without dignity. But the novel is not about these things – they are only tableaux.

    Passivity, depicted here as expecting a painless route to gratification, is the pathway to an addiction-like existence. Once you go down that road, willfully disable your intellectual facilities in exchange for the only-too-available easy fix, you are hooked, like in Gately’s own symbolism.

    The tennis players, living in a temple to the pursuit of perfection, on top of a hill, all crave these quick fixes to escape that same pursuit. They invent games to pretend their courts have a more serious meaning, ie, to give some artificial value to their dogged pursuit. They are all one easy fall to Ennet House below.

    Only James seems to understand this, and spends his film career battling against it: constantly trying new ways to re-define audience / entertainment relationships, combining his various scientific pursuits to create more of an experience than an amusement, and eschewing beauty in any traditional sense. Finally, only James perceived the imminent danger to Hal.

    While there are many writers theorizing that James’ wraith dosed Hal with the DMZ, I prefer the version where the long-term effects of the mold, coupled with Hal’s substance abuse, created DMZ-like effects in Hal organically. James predicted this when he suspected Hal of substance experimentation (ie, looking for the quick fix, the passive approach to solving his depression) and set to work on new kind of mental stimulus to divert him, offer him something, anything, interesting enough to wrap his brain around.

    In the hospital, Jim’s wraith finds a champion in Gately – a recovering addict who fights against reverting to the quick fix, in the direst of times. We are not told how Gately partners with Hal (perhaps via Joelle post her Steeply session, perhaps with mental nudging from James), but we know that Gately’s fighting spirit is paired with Hal’s remaining intellect in the metaphorical mission to save the country.

    Your analysis was excellent and helped me as my mind attempts to process what I’ve just completed reading. Thank you.

  408. […] the Atocha Station, and I think a case can be made for including Alexander Maksik’s novels, You Deserve Nothing and A Marker to Measure Drift. All are written in brisk, unflashy language that suggests emotional […]

  409. […] J. M. Ledgard’s Submergence is one of these novels, as is Ben Lerner’s outstanding example, Leaving the Atocha Station, and I think a case can be made for including Alexander Maksik’s novels, You Deserve Nothing and […]

  410. […] war is sublimated in an anxious discussion of world history and art masterpieces. J. M. Ledgard’s Submergence is one of these novels, as is Ben Lerner’s outstanding example, Leaving the Atocha Station, and I […]

  413. […] our selected song, contributor @david_rochefort — last time he posted here he started a flame war with New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum) explains why he thinks the songs of Fiona Apple — including […]

  414. A friend who is a practitioner of Buddhism (Tibetan; I’m not sure of the specific tradition) once told me that part of his practice is to say very little about it to non-initiates, for fear that his personal faults might reflect poorly on the tradition, and so as not to distort (for himself or his interlocutor) the wisdom he has received in the attempt to transmit it. I don’t know if this stance is prescribed, but maybe Saunders shares it.

  417. Of course a punter doesn’t only “make the most of a failure,” but also avoids uncomfortable subjects….

  420. You’re right, Matt, I see this a question of how we (the big “we”) spend our resources and promote certain values, not a question of whether a charity succeeded. Partly that’s because I’m a taxpaying citizen of San Francisco, so it was literally my government — my mayor, my police force, my streets — that was donated to this event. And partly that’s because Batkid became more than a charity event. It was an Internet sensation.

    I don’t know if human beings have free will, but I’m pretty sure 5-year-olds have less free will than most. Given the pervasive popularity of Batman as a commercial franchise (worldwide The Dark Knight Rises grossed over $1 billion) and the deterministic role of parents in choosing what their kids consume (nobody is born with an innate desire to throw a batarang) I’d say Miles’s choice to play Batman for a day was very much imposed on him.

    Honestly, would anyone be celebrating this spectacle if Miles was in love with Pine-Sol instead of Batman? If his “wish” was something bizarre or distasteful, instead of an opportunity for all of us to watch a live-action version of a hugely successful movie franchise?

  421. I get your point, Brian, but it seems to me that your beef is with the SF city government for taking part in the event. Obviously, cherry-picking projects that evoke pathos at the expense of projects that could positively affect more people isn’t one of the hallmarks of good governance, but a charity is not a government.

    That said, I’m not sure what sort of new experience you have in mind, but I’m also not sure that this is a situation in which imposing an experience is warranted. Having unwanted events (pleasant or unpleasant) imposed on them by adults is the everyday experience of children everywhere, which to me just underscores how the Make-a-Wish projects are acts of grace. Those projects are supposed to be reprieves from the everyday.

    Unexpected and awesome events are very rare indeed, but how can you know what a child will enjoy? Moreover, how do we even know that that’s what would give any particular child the most enjoyment?

  422. Thank you, Nancy, for making the distinction. I guess you’re referring to my remark that “many Make-a-Wish kids don’t have much longer to live,” and you’re right, that needs clarification. But wow, do I really have no basis in reality? That’s kind of a mind-blower.

  423. You should research your writing. Wish kids have life-threatening medical conditions, not terminal. Sure, some don’t make it. But most do. You have no basis in reality and should really research what you write about.

  424. Matt, it’s not the kid’s wish that I find disturbing, but the huge crowd, the Internet going gaga, and the special bureaucratic considerations (streets closed off, the mayor and police chief donating their time, Obama delivering a Vine message) all in promotion of a corporately-owned character.

    When was the last time you got exactly what you wanted? And when was the last time something totally unexpected and awesome happened to you? For me the latter usually ends up being more exciting and fulfilling. That’s why I question the logic of building this one transcendent day around what the kid has already asked for. I would think that Make-a-Wish, with all its imagination and money and adult know-how, could arrange something that surpasses the kid’s wildest dreams, rather than simply meeting them.

    If the goal of Make-a-Wish is to make us, the spectators, feel happy, then I guess it makes sense to give the kid exactly what he wants, because we all love to feel like we have provided for a child’s happiness. But if the goal is to blow this kid’s mind, then I think it can be blown bigger.

    Giving the kid exactly what he wants has a morbid aspect, too. Since the child is never going to grow up (many Make-a-Wish kids don’t have much longer to live, although I realize that’s not exactly the case with Miles Scott) we commemorate the end of his life with something childish (pretending to be a superhero). I’m not criticizing that, just saying that for us spectators, the happiness of this moment is inseparable from a funereal sadness. If I were designing these events (and thank God I’m not) I would want the kid to emerge into some kind of new experience on his last days, rather than doubling back into his tragically foreshortened childhood.

  425. I’m a little unclear what was disturbing—that the kid’s wish involved a character owned by a corporation? Can we expect a kid or the people tasked with making him happy for a day to concern themselves with vague, highly disputed cultural issues, the effects of which can be estimated at almost nil but which the child won’t live to see regardless? Let the kid have one day. Whatever the cost, I’m sure the culture can absorb it. Besides, the underlying problem is neither the kid’s nor the Make-a-Wish Foundation’s fault. It’s Sonny Bono’s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

  427. Time Warner had nothing to do with the wish, this was all Make-A-Wish. And the mission of Make-A-Wish is to grant the wish of a child with a life-threatening medical condition to enrich the human experience with hope, strength and joy. The first wish kid wished to be a police officer and had a similar experience on a smaller scale. Some wish to go to Disney, some wish to have a computer or shopping spree, some even wish to give their wish away, like a boy did to a local food pantry (knowing his time was limited and he wanted to do something that left a lasting legacy). I think to judge someone’s wish or to say a child can’t decide what will make him happy is ridiculous! That is the entire mission of this wonderful organization and the fact that thousands of people were following, involved, and impacted by this wish, just shows the power of it. Maybe we can all suspend our cynicism for a day and enjoy the fact that this wish (and the wishes granted every day on a less public scale) make these kids going through a terribly time have some happiness.

  429. I think one problem is viewing charity as a zero-sum game. Sure, the cost of the Batkid event could have paid for foodstamps, or another good cause. But would people have donated to those causes instead of the Batkid event, if that event never existed? Would people donate to both causes? There is always going to be a more “worthy” cause; why donate money to Make A Wish when the people of the Philippines have a more urgent need? That kind of thinking inevitably leads to “… Fuck it, I’m not donating to anyone.” I’d rather encourage charitable behavior, even with a less “worthy” cause, in the hopes that it will make future giving more likely.

  432. Wow, nice job of putting all of these pieces together and drawing the parallels between his writing and reality. It makes me sad that he’s gone; not just because I love his writings, but because he was onto something about “what it is to be a fucking human being,” and not enough people want to hear it. Great piece you’ve written here.

  434. To Build a Fire remains one of the finest little short stories written, and it inevitably put a fire under the butts of many a young lad to go out and try something crazy and take chances. And, of course, I ended up in Alaska twice and can appreciate all the better the material he shared so well.

  438. “By age twenty-one Jack London had led a life that would make Huck Finn shit himself with envy.” The publisher missed a huge opportunity if they didn’t include that line on the book jacket.

    Very entertainingly written review, Brian!

  439. The 1% are the government connected. If you think the laissez faire Rand was preaching has given us our current situation, then you are ignoring the fact the government controls 80% of the economy, and distorts 100% of it. Food, money, energy, education, medicine, banking, investment, retirement, marriage; everything is controlled by the government. Monopoly and mass poverty is created by government intervention, not prevented by it. Wake up. The rich people who are going to watch everyone die live in D.C.

  442. […] The trick only seems to work with literary fiction. According to one of the researchers, when reading popular fiction “the author is in control, and the reader has a more passive role,” which sounds familiar. […]

  443. I can’t imagine that Diaz would feel comfortable in a room with Vargas Llosa, Javier Marias,Garcia Marquez or Jorge Franco. (And if Bolano were alive?! Please.)
    Hopefully he’d have the decency to blush. Hopefully.

  448. “In my own little corner of the world, which is to say American fiction” I stopped there and had to wash my hands of the pretentiousness.

  449. She certainly had foresight about how easily people will join into unthinking herds around terrible ideas…

    I’ll get back to your question on the terrors of economic fairness once I finish reading these articles:

    In New York, Having a Job, or 2, Doesn’t Mean Having a Home

    “The income share of the top 1 percent of earners in 2012 returned to the same level as before both the Great Recession and the Great Depression: just above 20 percent, jumping to about 22.5 percent in 2012 from 19.7 percent in 2011.”

    Household Incomes Remain Flat Despite Improving Economy

    “Before income inequality took off, the poverty rate fell more rapidly with G.D.P. growth. But while the economy grew by 2.8 percent in 2012 and corporate profits went up as a share of national income, the earnings of full-time workers, median household income and the poverty rate barely changed.”

  450. I think Ayn Rand had great foresight , remember the minister of economic fairness? How long do you think it will be before they try to make cabinet position for one of those?.

  453. […] takes his cues from Paul Alexander, a previous biographer who indulged the most lurid speculation about Salinger’s exile. As with the worst fiction, Shields can’t seem to assess Salinger’s actions or writings […]

  466. Also:

    – I suspect but cannot confirm that the drummer is Jimmy Chamberlin of The Smashing Pumpkins.

    – Some of this looks like the b-roll from an ad for an ED pill.

  468. Ted — no, unfortunately I wasn’t able to find anyone in history or literature with a Trader name who predated these businesses, either. Which is interesting in its own way — if we assume there were real traders who trafficked around the Pacific Ocean, then their name and occupation sort of slipped into mainstream businesses before any of them got famous as an individual.

  469. Just came across this article. Being from San Francisco, the Trader [first name] thing has always bugged me. Prior to Trader Vic’s (and it’s numerous copycats) I can’t find any references to historical figures, literary characters, etc., who actually used Trader as a title. Any update??

  470. P.S. I enjoyed the West Wing at the time but I also don’t think it holds up all that well.

    P.P.S. I described in the piece what I meant by stylized archetypes—the fact that they fell along three continuums, which colored their debates. Romantic/Cynic. Slut/Prude. 2nd Wave/3rd Wave. These are symbolic stances, which meant that every time they talked about something—like whether it was a mistake to own property as a single woman, or whether you could be friends with an ex—they did it from that perspective. Char: Romantic Prude 3rd Wave Rules Girl. Miranda: Cynic Prude 2nd Wave Egalitarian Feminism.

  471. Hi there. I think you’re misunderstanding what I said about the ending. I didn’t hate it because it wrecked the show’s legacy, or because I didn’t *relate* to it. My entire point is that the show was designed to push back against easy identification. I hated the ending because up until that moment, the show had upended and interrogated and played with the modes of romantic-comedy, much the way Deadwood did with the cowboy genre and Sopranos with the mob drama. When Carrie ended up with Big, it show knuckled to the audience’s wish-fulfillment desires, because it couldn’t solve the narrative puzzle of what it would mean for Carrie to be older & single. (And they’d already had a natural ending for that story about Big, in the great episode where he has a heart attack.)

    As for the design of the characters, I meant exactly what I said in the piece: that they are BOTH emotionally layered characters AND archetypal/allegorical figures. It’s not one or the other. This is a style that is extremely rare on television, although it happens more in theater: the only current show I can think of that does anything like that is Community. The four women are emotionally layered in that they are complex human beings, and they grow and change significantly over the course of the series (Miranda and Charlotte especially, but Carrie too. Samantha changes, but she’s a different kind of character, something I didn’t have space to get into in the piece. Here’s an older piece where I did get into it: http://nymag.com/arts/tv/features/61733/.)

    Yet even though they are emotionally resonant characters, they are also symbolic. Every time the four friends have brunch, they are having an abstract debate about the nature and value of single women’s lives, through the scrim of their own experiences; because they represent varied POVs, they disagree a lot. (On tactics, on ethics, on desires, on values—I could name a million examples.) These were breakthrough, funny, arch Socratic dialogues about female experience, within a culture in which their concerns, particularly about love and sex, are sneered at as trivial. As they know very well, single women in general are targets for widespread pity and mockery: in the show’s Manhattan, they are seen as stocks dropping in a bad market. Even when the characters are unhappy or fail or are humiliated or change their path (which happens regularly), their debating group resist the toxic condescension of the culture’s view of female lives, because it views those lives as interesting and valuable.

    On another point: of course “warm” shows and “stylized” shows and “shows about sex rather than violence” are gendered female. They’re not *actually* female (men have relationships, there are warm comedies about men), but anything associated with femininity is smeared as weaker, lesser, unworthy of serious appreciation. That’s why a show like Enlightened is so important, as are all shows that are smart AND warm, because they upend the notion that there’s only one kind of TV ambition.

    I don’t think you understand what the Bechdel Test is. It’s not about whether female characters care about love or sex. Bechdel’s point is that most movies are ABOUT male characters—and if there are women in them at all, there are rarely two of them who have actual names and have a conversation that’s not about the central male character. Obviously, Sex and the City was primarily concerned with sex and love. But sex and love (and marriage and children and independence and abortion and orgasms and adultery and friendship and ambition) are not trivial concerns. They are *important* concerns, ones that are at the center of many people’s lives. The characters on the show are not minor figures within someone else’s narrative—the show is ABOUT them. As the commenter above points out, the SATC women’s desires are no more about “happiness” than Tony Soprano’s desire is for “happiness,” which it is—he wants his children to be better off than he is, and he wants to be capable of success at his job without being destabilized by panic attacks. And what on earth is wrong with wanting happiness, anyway?

    When the show was on, a lot of men I knew talked about how cute Charlotte was. (Which she was: she’s adorable and feminine.) There were whole trend-pieces on the subject. But mainly, my point is that it was the other women were the ones who attracted abuse, consistently called ugly, man-hating, sluts, and all kinds of names, and still are. Charlotte was less threatening in that sense. Obviously, you differ on the subject, but personally, I love Charlotte: she’s probably the character who changed the most fully, without abandoning her essential self. She dropped her whole Rules Girl philosophy, she went through a divorce, she became more sexual, she stopped being focused on surfaces and perfectionism, and she ended up with something different from what she expected, but way more satisfying, in the end. It was a beautiful story.

    Finally, no, the comment about ranting drunkenly at cocktail parties wasn’t a way of downgrading my own ideas. It was a playful joke indicating how passionate I am about this subject.

  472. Hi Emily,

    Thanks for your prompt and thorough response. I didn’t anticipate that you’d read this, let alone respond, so that’s pretty cool already.

    I guess I still don’t understand how you are defining “type” and “allegorical figure” (a distinction I guess you refine where you say they are “simultaneously emotionally layered and archly stylized/symbolic”). Are my definitions incorrect? Is your note that you often make this argument while under the influence (AWI?) meant to operate as a sort of disclaimer, suggesting that you don’t really mean this? If not, of what are the characters “symbols” or “allegories,” if not simply the women and men in the audience who identify with them? And how is that different from being a “type”? Or “archetype,” maybe?

    You’re right to call me out for my sympathy for a Ray-style, “Death is the most fucking real issue” argument, which, ok, Ray is ridiculous. Sure, death is not the only topic that a work of art must engage to earn its bona fides. But, come on, give me something. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that SATC was, more often than not (occasional Bechdel examples to the contrary), preoccupied with its characters’ happiness and little else. I just don’t see where the claim to greatness rests if that’s the highest you aim. (Not that being about something is a guarantee of greatness, either — I don’t think the West Wing holds up very well, for example.)

    I take your point that you’re getting at something larger, that this isn’t just about boy shows vs. girl shows but a challenge to the Auteur Theory of Cable Dramas, though I think your list of anti-auteur characteristics is more gendered than you’ll admit. In the hypothetical which ends your piece, you suggest that SATC could have become a tragedy in the end and guaranteed its critical legacy (though likely undermining those movies in the process) but it shouldn’t have had to. I mean, I get that. But I guess I’m at a loss for the criteria you then use to decide what makes a show “great” or part of the golden age or whatever. In particular, it seems prone to become a preference for stories in which the characters most resemble the viewer or are models to which the viewer aspires. And there must be something higher than identifying with a character, right?

    One last question: what’s your basis for the claim that male viewers find Charlotte likable? Because I just, I can’t, ugh, Charlotte.

  473. Well, I would hope there is one thing we can all agree on: people who haven’t watched a show (or seen a movie or read a book or heard more than one track by a musician) probably aren’t the best judges of whether a critical essay, or a critique of that essay, for that matter, makes its case.

    This is one of the biggest problems with the critical reputation of SATC, and with TV in general—the idea that people who haven’t seen the shows under discussion feel free to weigh in on them. I assume David’s seen all of SATC, which is part of why I found some of his arguments (like the idea that there are no repercussions for the characters, or that it’s a show devoted to “zipless fucks”) fairly strange.

  474. Hi David! Thank you for this excellent rebuttal to Nussbaum’s piece. Her argument seems a lot more shaky now that I’ve read yours. But I wasn’t with you on this point:

    “In all its seasons, SATC hardly ever engaged with race or class or white flight or reverse white flight or global warming or saving the whales… anything outside the characters’ own drives and desires and dissatisfactions. The only idea with which the characters consistently and thoroughly engaged was how to be as happy as possible—how to pick which type of woman to be and then be the most possible that.”

    I think this might be a false distinction. On a show that engages with “big issues” – The Wire, for instance – we’re only exposed to those issues THROUGH specific characters and their quest for (to put it broadly) happiness. Jimmy McNulty WANTS to make his city a safer place. He is picking which type of man/cop/citizen to be and then being the most possible that. That would be his happiness, and his happiness is a big reason why the issues matter to us. (Honestly, Baltimore’s troubles were not even on my map until McNulty and the rest of the characters made them personal for me.) And it’s not like the happiness that SATC’s characters are seeking is any less indicative of complex systems and social issues (of a very different kind). I don’t disagree with your overall assessment of the shows. In fact I haven’t watched much SATC. But I don’t see how we can claim that one show is about its issues, and another show is about its characters’ happiness, when all of these shows are necessarily about both, at the same time, always.

  475. Thanks for your response, David, but you misrepresent much of my argument. The larger point I’m making about television is not directed at men, per se, and I never argue that SATC is the “equal” of The Sopranos. I never make any grand argument against male critics, either, other than my critique of the Sex And The City summary in Brett Martin’s otherwise solid book. As the people say, some of my best friends are male TV critics (and some of the them like Sex and the City.)

    As I’ve written in the past, I’m not interested in Top 10 lists or mathematical equivalences. The specific comparison I’m making to the The Sopranos has to do with the anti-hero role on television: like Tony, Carrie challenged the older habits of TV, which historically relied on “likable” characters, ones that viewers could cheer for. In all her flaws, Carrie was specifically designed to make the audience feel anxious in their identification, not simply empowered, the way Mary Tyler Moore and earlier breakthrough female characters did. In my opinion, it’s part of what makes the show so misunderstood: people often criticize Carrie’s bad behavior (like her affair with Aidan) as if it were accidental and the writers had meant to make her do something plucky and good, but failed, and so it should make us angry at her. I certainly don’t find the characters anywhere near as dislikable as you do, and in fact I find it refreshing to see flawed women on television, rather than kickass heroines or helpmeets. (Since SATC, there have been a flood of such characters, many in the last two years.) As for the rest of my argument, about how the characters are designed to be simultaneously emotionally layered and archly stylized/symbolic—a rare approach for television—and how the show played with the genre of the rom-com, the way other shows did with the mob show or cowboy show genres, people can consult my essay and see if they find it more convincing that you did.

    But as to my larger point about television, I’m not sure why you’re limiting this to female subject matter. What I describe is a false hierarchy that applies to a whole *set* of qualities that are undervalued and placed low on a hierarchy, only one of which is specifically female. Half-hour comedies, warm shows, stylized shows, shows made collaboratively, shows that emphasize sex/love over violence: ALL of these are undervalued. Shows that emphasize women’s lives are also undervalued, and since SATC is basically the Venn diagram where these qualities meet, it’s a natural series for people to condescend to and underrate. But my aim is a larger one: I’d like people to think about why gritty, grim, masculinity-focused hour-long auteurist dramas about crime are automatically valued over even the most ambitious sitcoms, why relationship-centered shows like Once & Again are written out of “important TV history,” why archly heightened shows like American Horror Story are falsely pegged as fun junk. None of this is a slam on The Sopranos (or The Wire and Breaking Bad): I’ve written in praise of all of them. What I’m trying to do here, and in other essays I’ve written, is open the doors to appreciating varied forms of television ambition and to raise questions about what we consider artistically significant.

    And of course SATC passes the Bechdel test, multiple times (how is a conversation about Miranda’s mother’s death, or abortion, or Carrie’s level of financial debt, or the benefits of the Pink Rabbit, for that matter, a conversation about a male character?) The subject of the show is sex and relationships, and it’s about female friendship, as well—topics that are as legitimate as anything Ray from Girls might suggest are the only things that count. (“Death is the most fucking real issue. You should write about death. That’s what you should write about. Explore that. Death.”)

    In any case, thanks again for reading the piece. And cheers. (Lifting Cosmopolitan and taking a deep slug of it.)

  481. I enjoyed the speech immensely. He’s right: facile, but difficult to implement, especially with honesty.

    Side note – I don’t like your post title because his point is that it’s a commandment without necessary reasoning. You’re not kind because of some future concern. You’re kind just because that’s the right thing.

  484. I find this article refreshing. I just read “This is how you lose her” and, while it is in the and a nice and good book, I could not understand at all the enormous hype.

  485. I was confused by this book, maybe because I recently read The Cat’s Table, which, for me, worked much better as a remembrance of childhood. I wasn’t sure what to make of this one. But I think you’re bang on: “The ultimate tragedy — that the kids just won’t get — is that the years between the memory and the present are re-told in a few short pages. No monsters, but no magic either.”

  490. If you scroll through the photos of #1-6 quickly you can see that they’re all exactly the same length, with exactly the same back cover design.

  493. I’ve actually heard of The Master and Margarita, and I want to read it, so I’m going to pretend your WTF in this instance means “Where the fuck,” as in, “Where the fuck is a copy of this book that I can give to Brian?”

  494. I was just pleasantly surprised that 23/50 authors are female. These lists are usually a litany of dead white dudes. Good job, Flavorwire!

  500. “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon.” ALL MY AUTHOR FRIENDS ARE DEMONS!

  505. Have to agree. Half way through the book am still waiting for the pulitzer level quality to materialize. I think he can spin a good yarn, but pulitzer? So many brilliant works out there, and this was a winner??? No offense, but recounting the history of a dictatorship through the fleshy folds of tits and ass does not a literary masterpiece make. Thanks.

  506. […] the contributors are excellent (Salman Rushdie, Téa Obreht, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, John Wray, Ian McEwan…) and your $5 is well spent on Ben Fountain’s story alone. Fountain, the author of Billy […]

  507. […] 106 very short stories from established writers (and Fiction Advocate favorites) like Geoff Dyer, Mohsin Hamid, Aleksandar Hemon, and Jess Walter. Their assignment? Write a story whose title is “How to Be a […]

  508. […] commissioned 106 very short stories from established writers (and Fiction Advocate favorites) like Geoff Dyer, Mohsin Hamid, Aleksandar Hemon, and Jess Walter. Their assignment? Write a story whose title is […]

  510. Huh. The Egyptologist was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed Arthur very much. But then I’m not a book critic.

  514. Hi all, for more surf fiction have a look at Into the Sea by Jay Laurie. It’s a new novel with surfing as a central thread, out of Western Australia this year and is getting some good reader reviews. It’s written well and although about surfing, is more than a surfing novel.

    You can check it out at http://www.intothesea-novel.com, there’s a bit of info about the author and a few chapters of the book as well.

    It begins with two boys meeting on the first day of high school and follows their friendship as they roam their beach, touching on first freedoms, the transition from innocence to adolescence and the impact of sudden loss. Later, in their mid twenties, they reconnect driving across the desert and camp in the heat and dust, amongst passing travellers and violent locals. Then one leaves everything and heads for the tropical islands of Indonesia and disappears for years.The other sets out to try to track him down, heading deep into the islands.

    The cover describes it as a novel about growing up behind the dunes, friendship, travelling into the unknown and living to the rhythm of the sea.

  515. When I despise something I want to avoid it. Schulz seems to despise Gatsby the way main characters in a romantic comedy despise each other: by getting frustrated and indignant and obsessive and eventually making out.

  517. McNally Jackson is awesome. And now I want to read Gatsby again (of course in one of my copies with the old cover). ;)

  519. Mike..good post above but re ”Unlike climate change, the existence of “cli-fi” as a legitimate genre remains [debatable], and it [remains to be seen] if NPR’s predictions will ultimately prove true. ” You make a good point, cli fi might not stick as a literary term, we will have to wait and see. But even sci fi was meant with derision when the term was first coined. And also: CLI FI does not have to be pro global warming, it can also be against global warming ideas. So cli fi goes two ways, for both skeptics and believers. We shall see. Keeping an open mind is vital. sign me, danny bloom, 1949-2032

  521. Mike, i am danny bloom in Taiwan and i coined the term CLI FI a few years ago for a cli fi novel i was producing titled POLAR CITY RED. MARGRET ATWOOD tweeted the term cli in a tweet in 2011 that said “danny bloom has coined a new sci fi term called cli fi” google me and the term, interview me? danbloom AT gmail DOT com, i am a climate activist in taiwan, Tufts 1971

    The Next Big Genre: ‘Cli-Fi’ — Climate Fiction, in Which ‘Mad Max’ Meets ‘The Road’

    Forget missions to Mars and start thinking about mass migrations of ”climate refugees” north to Alaska.

    Published: January 26, 2012 @ 11:34 am

  524. “Which, for me, was like [working on a book about J.D. Salinger], and then watching in horror as David Shields [announces that he is co-authoring a book about J.D. Salinger].”

  529. I question whether the new world is more accurate in attributing value than the old one. In any case, welcome, authors, to the world of people in the other arts – it’s not designed to be commercially viable, but if you want to sell junk you’ll always be able to do that, the way Mr. Turow does.

  534. It’s a great piece and a revealing (if unflattering) look into the life of many a writer. That said, it’s hard to read a sentence like: “More books are the last thing that people are demanding.”

  538. […] I never took much interest in the shots at religion that occupied his later years, the collection Arguably was my favorite book of 2011, and I thought his short pieces on cancer were extraordinary. My […]

  539. […] decade. The Mötley Crüe of contributors includes Fiction Advocate favorites Lindsay Hunter and Shawn Andrew Mitchell, along with Roxane Gay, Chip Cheek, Steve Himmer, and a bunch of people who absolutely […]

  544. I’m not finished yet, but the reviews seem overlown to me. A couple stories were great. A couple of them seemed like trash, but I’ll forge on.

  547. My take on Wallace is a bit different than most. I grew up forty miles south, in a town where very few people would have ever heard of him. I do not espouse hip language like ending superlative “most ______” sentences with the word “ever.” As a matter of fact, when I see that, I damn near vomit.

    David Wallace to me was a fellow Midwesterner who was extraordinarily sensitive and smart. Most of his fans I would say are as much attracted to this Midwesternness as they are to the hyper genius. I mostly feel sorry for him having been thrown into a world of such sharks. But, I feel sorry for most of us.

    My life intersected with David’s in eerie ways. For example, we both lived in the same Boston neighborhood at the same time; I was born where he went to graduate school; I went to graduate school where he arrived to teach shortly after. The coincidences continue. I just kept missing him, just. He wasn’t on my radar until I read Infinite Jest and realized he was one of the great literary figures of all time.

    He was surrounded by so many wannabes (I knew a few of them) who leached off him (A guy who claimed to be his mentor at Illinois State, for instance, didn’t have the talent to fill the space under one of Wallace’s fingernails.) that I just wish I would have been able to hang out with him for a while, one Midwesterner to another. Anyway, like a lot of other people, I get to hang out with the words in his books. Thank God he existed, at least so other Midwesterners who feel very alienated from that condition don’t feel so alone.

  548. I agree with the first comment. I loved the poem and was moved by its imagery. I too watched as the cameras panned the audience on the mall, and I saw far more people listening to Blanco’s words. I thought how wonderful that so many people are actually listening to a poem. It was accessible. I have been dismayed by some of the nasty comments I’ve read, so I thank you for providing a different perspective.

  549. Thank for writing this–for expressing better than I could the impact this poem had on some of us.

  555. Really would appreciate titles for all the people interviewed, as I can’t recognize who they are. Except Margaret Atwood, of course, but she was identified.

  557. We visited Jack London park while I was recording an audiobook of his The Cruise of the Snark. We visited his grade and saw wolf house and felt a kind of spirit to the place. Laster when I was writing an Afterward for the audiobook, I came across his feelings about the ranch:
    “The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame. Across Sonoma Mountain wisps of sea fog are stealing. The Afternoon sun smolders in the drowsy sky. I have everything to make me glad I am alive. I am filled with dreams and mysteries. I am all sun and air and sparkle. I am vitalized, organic.

  559. Thanks for your help, CT. As you can see, my expertise peaked around age 12. I haven’t changed the reference to London’s wealth because I think we agree that he became rich after the publication of The Call of the Wild AND The Sea-Wolf. I’ve deleted the reference to rugged individualism. And I’ve made the date of the Wolf House disaster more vague.

    I look forward to seeing your documentary. Hey everybody! Check out this documentary.

    http://www.jacklondonfilm.com/index.html

  561. […] Now that it’s been pointed out by Michael Moats at Fiction Advocate, I’m realizing the gaggle of David Foster Wallace-related stuff that happened in 2012. The great deal of material that has appeared this year that is in some way connected to DFW has inspired Moats to title his (incomplete . . .) encyclopedic recounting of all this stuff, the “Year of David Foster Wallace” (part 2 is here). […]

  563. Thanks for reading, everyone! I really do love Christopher Cross; apologies for saying he looked like a bus driver. I meant that he didn’t fit the standard definition of a pop star, or what a pop star should look like, (and like DFW, he was on top of the world with Arthur’s Theme), but that mattered less in the early 80s when radio and record sales played a larger role than TV, MTV, blogs, etc. And I totally get the link to Earl Campbell as well – I went to the same high school as Earl!

  565. Since reading a writer’s blog on his near suicide with aspertame I have wondered bout this combination with depressive meds concerning DFW. Evidently it is a dangerous combination spiraling the person down and down into suicide. Is it true that he hung himself as his wife was hanging her art show at the gallery for her opening? I find that horribly chilling. I love him everyday and every time I think about him.

  566. A couple of factual points: London actually did not become rich from The Call of the Wild; he accepted a flat $2000 instead of royalties that would have made him a millionaire many times over. It was really the success of The Sea Wolf and lucrative journalism assignments that gave him the money to start buying land in Sonoma. And Wolf House burned down several weeks before its completion, rather than the night before the Londons were to move in, although that is a popular misconception.

    It is another common misconception that London wrote about “rugged individualism.” A committed Socialist, he often protested that critics and the public misread his intentions in books like Martin Eden and The Sea Wolf, where characters who clung to rugged individualism destroyed themselves by rejecting society. Even in his most famous short story, the second version of To Build a Fire, the protagonist dies because he fails to heed the advice of others in his camp more knowledgeable than him.

  567. Thanks for this post, Matt. I love the Christopher Cross comparison, especially since there is a lot of subtext to that jersey, which is not a generic “Oilers” jersey, but an Earl Campbell jersey. Like a lot of Austinites in the late ’70s / early ’80s, I was obsessed with Earl, as was Chris. And the comparison you are making to DFW is apt on a number of levels, b/c in fact he had a very lukewarm reception in Austin, his hometown, with its music scene built on the blues and the “authenticity” effect that creates. While he attained untold riches and had an incredible recording career, he was, at heart, just this dude from Austin (where he returned recently), who was not quite up to snuff for the blues afficianados that dominate down there.

  569. Yeah, that’s why I refuse to become so famous that the state takes an interest in my grave.

  571. Seeing “Jack London’s Grave” in that sad woodcut California State Park relief just makes me sad. They use the same font for restrooms and vending machines. -KB

  572. How lucky we are that you’ve shared this, Matt (and you, Fictionaut, for publishing). Being so rapt in the inner workings of the Max bio must have been invigorating, and I too indulge in the occasional daydream of DWF ageing. Bravo.

  573. […] so it’s not entirely out of the blue. But it’s certainly true—as Mike shows in his epic Year of David Foster Wallace—that everyone wants a piece of Wallace these days. Dropping his name has become an easy (and not […]

  575. […] Ed. Note: By any measure, Matt Bucher is an important contributor to the ongoing conversation about David Foster Wallace. For the last 10 years, he has administered the wallace-l listserv, which brings together enthusiasts, journalists, authors and scholars to discuss and debate the author. Recently, he offered research and review assistance to help shape D.T. Max’s 2012 biography, Every Love Story is Ghost Story, and is thanked in the book’s acknowledgements section for offering “top-level knowledge of DFW.” Fiction Advocate is glad to publish his thoughts on the biography and YEAR OF DAVID FOSTER WALLACE. […]

  578. This has been a YODFW for me, too. Last year I barely knew who he was and thought he was still alive. This year, I entered a give away for Ghost Story in a whim, and won. I read it, and Consider the Lobster to warm up for Infinite Jest, which I just finished and an stool trying to process.

    I’m ashamed that I didn’t know about DFW before this year!

  579. Wow,a lot of really interesting links!
    I’ve read Infinite Jest in 2010 and yeah, all the events surrounding DFW this year have made me want to read it again, especially after the great liveblog you’ve done here. I’m still sad to see that even in my little corner of France, the mention of Infinite Jest (still not translated but “it’s coming”…) is sure to make eyebrows raise with cries of “how pretentious/hipster of you”. I’m not sure whether it’s simply because it’s a huge book or because there’s been so many articles written about it and DFW without anyone mentioning how fun it actually is but I hope 2013 will not be the year of let’s all talk about DFW but rather let’s all read his books and talk about it.

  581. Totally! The trailer is like a warning for people who won’t “get it” to stay the hell away. Which is an interesting use of a book trailer.

  586. Hi Briny! This is one of the most fun (cleverest?) things I have read in a long, long while. I need to look at your FB site more regularly. And, I will.
    Aunt E

  587. […] Tooth keeps on detonating until the end. It’s astonishing how fully McEwan has mastered his particular set of skills, even if his confection tastes […]

  594. And the winner is…
    Capngingersnap! With “Dogslaw: The Side Dishes of Hell.”
    But we’re going to send everyone a free gift for playing.
    Capngingersnap, send your shipping address to fictionadvocate@gmail.com and we’ll give you the two free books from West Pigeon Press.
    Everyone else, send your email address to fictionadvocate@gmail.com and we’ll give you a free e-book of a novel we published, “Brothel” by J. Boyett.

  595. Sorry to be such a pain but I have tried to find the sweet pea site using what you gave me but I cant figure out what that sign is that is betewen the e in Page and the U in userid? I havent seen that symbol before and just simply cant find it…sorry for the trouble

  601. […] blood and leaves you unsure whether you should pick up a shotgun or call a psychiatrist. Our boy Brian Evenson is a master of it, but there’s a whole community of dark fiction writers out there, and West […]

  602. It’s true that these criminals got away with basically printing money, but greedy people are no less at fault simply because they are ignorant. All those who took risk should have lost but the suggestion here is that only those who started the ponzi scheme should pay the price. No, money is not the root of all evil, THE LOVE OF MONEY is. The reviewer seems completely ignorant of what really happened and clings hopelessly to what appear to be mindless, ignorant-of-financial-history talking points. Next time, think for yourself.

  604. […] to Matt Tanner and Danielle Stockley! They were married a short while ago. Matt is the award-winning Art Director here at Fiction Advocate, and Danielle has too many talents to […]

  605. First read Slaughter House 5 at 57. It took my 19 yr old daughter to introduce me to Vonnegut.
    Talking to the porter post napping on the train “Man” porter says,”you sure had a hard on!” Pure genius,best set up to a laugh that has ever been uttered!!!My take; Billy and Vonnegut are the same man trying to explain the horrors, that can’t have description, with the only tool available, humor.
    I can’t wait to read his other works.

  611. […] Full of Women or Texts From Hillary, but it seems like Brian started something like a meme with his reflections on bookshelves a few weeks back. How else to interpret the recent groundswell (relatively speaking) of articles […]

  612. Yes. I’m not here to resolve that particular debate for you, Karl. Lehrer took a position on it that is so simple and extreme it’s self-evidently wrong, which is why I mock him. The point is he’s a terrible writer. You seem determined to choose a different context for my remarks. Sort of like a concerned citizen who shows up at a local school board meeting and demands to know what the teachers are planning to do about North Korea’s nuclear program.

  613. “I haven’t articulated a position on mind-brain dualism.”
    Really? You really think that “I haven’t articulated a position on…” is a non-laughable response? To anything? Ever?

  616. Loved this. Am sending you something re: loaning books that you never get back. My favorites tend to be glaringly absent from my shelves, as well. (And I’m sure I’ve got more than one of yours…) My books are sorted by genre (between three rooms) and then organized by author in the order of affection.

    I culled my collection twice after moving to New York, getting rid of around 400 books the first time and about 200 the second. It was incredibly painful at first, but I can’t tell you what I gave away at this point, and I like to think I chose to keep quality over sheer quantity. I drank coffee and watched from the upstairs window as people picked through my street donations for the better part of a Sunday afternoon. There wasn’t a single volume left by the time night fell. Most of the books I’ve acquired since are stoop finds. I think it’s what I’ll miss most if I ever leave New York.

    Congratulations on the move. Hope I’ll see you in your natural habitat sooner rather than later. I tend to see my California friends more there than in New York, especially the ones who LIVE in New York…

  617. Interesting. Books say a lot about the person who owns them, but visitors to my home won’t catch of glimpse of my personality from my past and present reading lists (unless they see my blog). Except for children’s books, most of my collection is digital these days. I miss my huge bookshelves, though. We ended up leaving most of our books in storage when we moved.

  623. […] Fiction Advocate has just published my girthy review-essay of Geoff Dyer’s Zona. I set out to write a short review and something went horribly wrong (or right?), and after three or nine months the result is GIFs, memes, put-downs, praises, and loads of self-doubt. It’s available online or in EPUB or MOBI formats. Go here to read. […]

  624. Award-winning author J.L. Morin’s humorous Occupy novel, TRADING DREAMS, got great reviews:

    “…exposing enough greed, hypocrisy, and blatant illegality to make even the least informed reader deliciously angry.”
    — Harvard Independent http://bit.ly/OOIcng

    “An ideal read for suspense lovers interested in the current financial
    crisis.”
    — Booklist http://bit.ly/Q6Z9v5

  626. Okay, I’m correcting this to say “feminist novelists.” There are plenty of people smarter than me who have treated Lispector as a feminist writer, according to the Interwebs. Thanks for calling this out, m.snowe.

  628. Without having read a lick of Lispector, I take issue with part of your penultimate sentence. Let’s keep the grouping of “women novelists” out of this, and just say “novelists.”

  630. I haven’t articulated a position on mind-brain dualism. All I meant to say is that Lehrer’s work is misguided and frustrating. I invented a passage from Borges to suggest that A) literature is one of the frameworks missing from Lehrer’s narrow approach to these big questions, and B) if we’re just going to make stuff up, as Lehrer seems to do with his popular science writing, we might as well go all the way. This post appeared long before the allegations about his self-plagiarizing and false quotations.

  631. I don’t think I want to get into an offline discussion. But your latest response still leaves me unclear as to whether I’ve misunderstood your position with regard to mind-brain dualism, and I’m a little curious about that.

  633. Hi Brian,
    Perhaps I am mistaken. I was referring to statements such as:
    “to anyone who actually believes that brain activity is the root cause of human behavior […]”
    “to anyone who can stifle a condescending snort at the mention of the word ‘neuroscience, […]”
    and the Borges excerpt, the purpose of which is unclear to me, but which is _apparently_ meant to mock neuroscience as a whole.

    From these statements I assumed that you’re advocating some brand of mind-brain dualism, which is inarguably* a belief in magic and a refusal to see or hear plain scientific facts.

    But perhaps I’m wrong, as I said. Perhaps you’re only guilty of unclear writing. (A theory that’s supported by your misuse of “touché” above.) If that’s the case, I apologize; unclear writing doesn’t make me want to puke at all.

    *”Inarguably” meaning “I’m certainly not going to waste my time arguing about it with you, so please don’t bother going there.

  634. Wow. Touché, Karl Bunker. I’m sorry you got the impression that I believe in magic and ear-plugging, because I didn’t say that, and I don’t. If you find any of those straw men you’re attacking, let me know and we’ll take them down together.

  635. I totally agree with you that oversimplifying drivel like Lehrer’s book is, well, oversimplifying drivel. But your counter-position appears to be that the mind will never be understood because it’s magic — period, end of story.

    Writers like Lehrer oversimplify the science to make it glib and marketable. People like you close your eyes and cover your ears and go “LA LA LA” and refuse to think because you don’t like the science.

    Lehrer’s type of stuff annoys me. Your type of stuff makes me want to puke.

  636. […] Matchbook helps you match your beach wear to your beach book — whether you need a confusing strappy thing for considering Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or are looking for the perfect one-piece to fall asleep in a few pages into David McCullough’s 1776. There are other suit-book combos for Agatha Christie, Brian Greene, Kurt Vonnegut and more, including that guy who said Bob Dylan told him things he didn’t. […]

  639. I posted this on the “old” site, too:

    Michael,
    Thanks for doing this. I actually just finished IJ in the wee small hours of the morning (about 9 hours ago), and I’ve already been scouring the internet trying to see what everyone else thought about it. The Infinite Summer stuff has helped, and I’d already found some of the sites with theories that you’d linked to. A few questions.
    1. I don’t get the Avril=Luria thing at all. Not only do I think it is meaningless, but it’s pretty nonsensical as well. You’re right that Avril is way too neurotic for such a thing–flying to Arizona? Not to mention, the characters’ descriptions just don’t line up. This theory just doesn’t do anything for me.
    2. Re: the cartridge in Himself’s head. I find this all confusing. Is said cartridge the Master, which would make sense with Orin’s finding it and sending it out to JOI’s enemies, etc? For that matter, how does all this Orin/Entertainment mailing stuff/AFR line up chronologically?
    Have the AFR long had the idea to use the Entertainment as an anti-US weapon, or did that only come about when it started popping up in random places? Surely it must have been the former…how else would John Wayne have been a plant by the AFR? He’s been at ETA for at least a year or so, right? I’m not seeing Wayne’s role in all of this, honestly. I can’t wrap my mind around the timeline of the Entertainment’s “new life” in the first place.
    Or is the cartridge in Himself’s head some sort of antidote? In which case…who would have already found it for Hal and Gately to have been “too late?”
    If the AFR DOES get the Master from Orin, they apparently do use it. But what are the effects of this.
    3. One oddity that just popped into my head. When Joelle is first introduced, doesn’t she see some storefront display that depicts the Entertainment, or at the very least something like it? What is this?
    4. Where do people get the idea that OBVIOUSLY Hal ends up next to Gately and everyone teams up and goes onto this adventure? I mean it’s obvious they meet up at some point, but…

  640. Lehrer simplistically digests and over-sells the beliefs and results of hard-working and relatively unknown neuroscientists around the world for his own gain. The culprit is not this field of honest study.

  647. […] We also get to see the childish J R make some very adult, capitalist decisions. As I said before, J R seems innocent, or at least lacks the anxiety that seems to trouble every other character in […]

  649. I’ll highlight anyone’s copy of The Sound and the Fury for a bargain basement price of $100.

  652. 45 year tolkein reader heard long ships is compareable.cant wait 2 read.Found brief reading on google.GUess its time for books

  653. I think you are right–the dialogue, rather than being more intimate, acts as a screen. We have to decipher what the characters internal states are from their words and actions, which can be dicey.

  656. […] No word on whether Offerman is using the Infinite Jest liveblog, but you can watch video of The Pale King reading here. Mike Schur is also responsible for the recent Decemberists video that uses a key scene from Infinite Jest. […]

  657. […] Offerman is using the Infinite Jest liveblog, but you can watch video of The Pale King reading here. Mike Schur is also responsible for the recent Decemberists video that uses a key scene from […]

  658. […] and personal failure—her final leap at once atonement and rebellion. Last week, the internet was abuzz with the inevitability of an Occupy Wall Street novel. While I think trying to write THE novel of […]

  659. Translation of that last bit: In 2012, multiple celebrated [people who give advice and counsel on subjects they’re not experts in] will follow the [romantic mood brought on by Spring] with a great [jumble] of [wide-ranging, possibly over hills and mountains] stories, replete with incidents both [too odious to mention] and based on [the science of putting people to death], where the [flaw that leads to the downfall] of their characters, so often engaged in [traveling as a stranger], results in more than one [situation in which any decision or move will result in problems] to [mesmerize and petrify] readers until the final [changing of something into its opposite, i.e. switcheroo]. Absent an unfortunate [ceremonial destruction of books], we can expect quite the [knock-out blow] to the year, with more than enough [production of knowledge] to warm us in the [badly omened] days ahead.

  661. […] incompetence.” So there’s that. Here at Fiction Advocate, Brian Hurley batted around his own thoughts on the presence of an Occupy Wall Street novel, and offered a reading list of books that — if not classic OWS novels — may help […]

  662. […] down. Michael Lewis deftly captured the tumble and fall period in The Big Short (our thoughts here). More recently over at Bookforum, Christian Lorentzen speculated on “a novel about Occupy […]

  665. They’re not real, unfortunately! But they seem to be similar to a lot of classic YA books.

  667. McKittrick! There’s an exit sign on Interstate 5 in CA for “Buttonwillow McKittrick.” Two separate towns, but the sign doesn’t make that clear. I always wanted to name a character Buttonwillow McKittrick.

  672. For Mr Clancy to award a penalty after a dicret drop kick to touch, he would have had to be sure that the kick out was intentional very difficult to prove, but probably not beyond Mr Clancy! Given that the clock we saw on the screen was the official time from the TMO, the kick-off should never have taken place as time was up.At a referees meeting last night, we viewed some footage of the Wales-Scotland match and Murray was twice (at least) penalised because he did not put his hand on top of the loose-head’s back as Mr Clancy told him to do, but that is not required under law gripping on the side is OK. Mr Clancy’s performance overall was not considered of the highest class in (biased) Scottish rugby refereeing circles.

  673. KyderWaaaa! You humorless wigunnt. How freaking old and senile are you anyway? You’re representing the people’s police now? That’s PP for short by the way.However though, back to our very limited and unimaginative shared realty. I believe that you are the only one admitting to anything here and then some. Forgive please if I’m not here enough to realize that this has been your calling and affliction all along. I certainly could smell it that day in the one about the young guy doing the soapbox at OWS. My point certainly appreciated bouncing off your dim-witted knee-jerk reaction that day. Maybe that’s what happens to a brain when it buys an ideology for a PERFECT solution. Again though, I’m not here enough to realize entirely how deep the lunacy resides in certain regulars and I don’t want to be one to take advantage of a fool too often. No one listens to that person either. The only truth you or your ilk needs to know about me is that I will ride out this revolution the same way most of my ancestors have survive all the others, intact comrade. Well it’s late Al, they’re probably just getting up in Europe, so chances are it’s just me and you in this day old thread anyway. Rest easy, dream big, and tomorrow try not to perish with a flag pole up your ass.

  676. UPDATE: “Monstro,” the latest Junot Diaz story in the New Yorker, is pretty damn good. His outlandish creole sounds a lot better in the context of science fiction. If you can get your hands on “Monstro,” give it a shot.

  677. Maybe he’s going mega-meta, deliberately making a movie that suffers from its excess in order to reinforce the novel’s original idea.

    More likely, all of this will be true except the part about it happening deliberately.

  678. Maybe Lurhmann will surprise us all, but like Brian says, much of the novel’s essence is rooted in the lyricism of Caraway’s narration, whereas the trailer is loudly, bombastically prosaic. Gatsby is nothing if not a novel about the failed promise of the American Dream, and the movie, from what little we have to go on, appears to be merely a lavish spectacle of rich people partying until the music stops, disregarding that the party was metaphor in the first place.

  680. Perhaps I’m being unfair after only seeing a trailer but it seems like they took all the dramatic subtlety and gorgeous minimalism of the novel and turned it into some kind of flashy melodrama. I will not watch, at least not in the theatres.

  681. It strikes me as tawdry. Not in its visualization of the story, which actually looks quite beautiful and exciting (as you’d suspect). But in the way it externalizes a story that I always felt was very internal. Maybe this is indicative of the different roles that books and movies play in general. The best parts of the novel are inside Nick’s head, in his language, and in the mystery of Gatsby’s perspective. This movie appears to beat all of that nuance out. It’s all speeding cars and sensuous kisses and roaring DiCaprios.

  693. If you need more women on your list try: The Constant Nymph, by Margaret Kennedy, The New Meaning of Treason, by Rebecca West, any short stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen, Near to the Wild Heart, by Clarice Lispector, anything by Natalie Saurrote, and some Iris Murdoch — any one of them since they’re all the same. Oh and The Man Who Loved Children, by Christina Stead.

    CNH

  694. This took some thinking, something outside my comfort zone. I fear these books may be a bit predictable and I know once I get home and actually look at my shelves I’ll have a completely different list. But here you go Mr. Mike:

    1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald–I don’t care if you didn’t like it in High School, you need to read it again or suffer a life filled with subpar writing, unaware of how beautiful a sentence can actually be.
    2. Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin–A collection of essays by the greatest American essayist.
    3. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood–So good! Infuriatingly good!
    4. Where I’m Calling From by Raymond Carver–This book would come with a warning: after reading these stories, you will think you could write like this. But you can’t. No one can.
    5. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy–Because so few of us have the patience to read Dante anymore and this book is amazing. Though, if you’re looking for a happy ending this is not the book.
    6. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien–A personal favorite. Came to me right at the time I was most curious about the art of fiction and the military history my father would not discuss.
    7. Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson–The stories are quick, funny, and often beautiful. Besides, the book fits in your back pocket. Great for travel.
    8. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. I love poetry and this is the great American classic that too few people read. The poems are long and not for those with short attention spans but read them out loud and feel the joy.
    9. The Collected Fictions by Borges–Like nothing else in literature. A book to pick up and put down throughout your adult life. Also, I wanted to get in a latin writer but the Oprah sticker disqualified One Hundred Years of Solitude.
    10. Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Duma–A fun revenge story and a book I read as a teenager. When it was over, I remember the sadness of not being able to carry on with the characters for 500 more pages.
    11. The Lover by Marguerite Duras–A great novel that flies by but lingers with you. And, let’s be honest, I need more women on this list.
    12. Hamlet by William Shakespeare–Because fuck you, that’s why.

  696. 1. Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson — A great collection of short stories that is somewhere on the spectrum between Invisible Man and Nine Stories.

    2. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson — It turns 50 years old this year, and may still be the best illustration of what the environment means in our lives.

    3. Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow — Hamilton has an incredible story, and far more influence as a founder than is commonly known. It’s a great book.

    4. The Real Holden Caulfield by me — Because what the hell.

    5. How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen — A great collection of essays that I liked better than Freedom or The Corrections or Strong Motion.

    6. The Death of Adam by Marilynne Robinson — Another great collection of essays that surpasses the author’s better known fiction.

    7. Our Kind by Kate Walbert — A book everyone should read.

    8. Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris — Another book everyone should read, about the history of science and the crazy geniuses who made it all happen.

    9. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell — The more I think back on this book, the more I realize how amazing it is.

    10. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis, paperback Penguin Classics Edition — This is one of the most beautifully designed books I’ve ever encountered, so even if you don’t read it, it’s still great to look at. But you should read it.

    11. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, 50th Anniversary Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition — Another beautifully designed book. And you should read it because reading should be fun.

    12. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace — I couldn’t resist.

  697. […] this scenario sounds familiar, you’re probably Jennifer Egan, author of “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” and chosen “book bag” curator for the PEN World Voices Festival of International […]

  698. I wasn’t familiar with the four books above, but you made me want to put off working in favor of reading at least one of them today. Thanks for the thoughtful and compelling post.

  699. Thanks Claire. We’ve published a few original books, both e- and otherwise, have one on the way, and ideas about a few more. They’re all in the Fiction Advocate store, where you’ll also find my explanation for why everyone should love Holden Caulfield: http://fictionadvocate.com/store/

    Thanks for reading, and for teaching. Great piece!

    – Mike

  704. […] not like Michael Chabon is offering a critical exegesis. In his introduction to the other book—The Long Ships by Frans Gunnar Bengtsson—he reflects on how a dear aunt gave him the book once, and he’s loved […]

  705. With the exception of Franzen, all the books I mentioned are published by New York Review Books. Other famous authors who’ve supplied introductions for obscure NYRB books include Dave Eggers, Joyce Carol Oats, Colm Tóibín, Ursula K. Le Guin, Toni Morrison, Michael Cunningham, Rick Moody, Jane Smiley, Jhumpa Lahiri, George Pelecanos, and Benjamin Kunkel. But NYRB isn’t the only one turning a traditionally academic feature into a publicity tool. The Best American series uses a similar cast of celebrities (including Michael Chabon, again) to fill the guest editor spot at each of their volumes. The book benefits from an association with a famous name, and the famous author gets to leave their mark on the work of up-and-coming writers. Branding!

  710. […] Gately’s relationship to his head, at least in his younger days, is far different from the way Wallace usually deals with heads. Gately’s is a tool, a physical object so large and indestructible that it serves as a net positive in his social interactions and overall happiness. Most of the other heads in this book are portrayed as something along the lines of locked cages and/or torture instruments.  The “here” from Hal’s “I am in here.” on the first page of the book is reasonably interpreted as inside his head. It’s the first of many times when someone is basically trapped by their head — but not the young Don Gately, who uses his head to get laughs, get beers and get touchdowns. For more on how Wallace felt about heads, check his Kenyon University remarks. […]

  718. I feel like I should mention that Audrey Schulman is a former professor of mine.

    And she would be happy to call or Skype with any book club that reads Three Weeks in December. You can reach her at AudreySchulman@gmail.com.

  721. Thank you, Ken, for clarifying which of the countless men with crushes on me you are. If you still lived in Orlando I’d have insisted that you guide me around.

  722. Whoops. Mancrush from Ken Baker. Sorry for not signing this ridiculous form at the bottom of your page.

  726. Sorry I thought maybe it was some thing to cast subtle doubt on your authority, but I didn’t want to do that right off the bat so I corrected it. It was too early in the morning to think of a better way.

  730. Page numbers refer to the 1989 Vintage edition of Pale Fire. None of the family stuff is true, though.

  731. I remember this being one of my favorite and most frustrating parts of the book. Favorite, because the physical discomfort of Gately and the psychological unloading of the ghost and Ennet House residents, as you put it, was really well written. Frustrating, because after looking for Hamlet sightings throughout the entire novel I began to realize that the bulk of this book was more of a reimagined prequel of the Shakespeare play.

    The novel, as far as I can tell, does not really start to correspond with the plot of Hamlet until after this moment, with the strange night at the Enfield Tennis Academy and the boy’s (I forget his name) head glued to the window staring out into the night like a night watchman. From there, the story, which is left mostly off the page, begins to line up with play pretty well–Hal slipping into a kind of madness (with method in it, as he explains in the first chapter), his uncle trying to dump him off in a far away land in the first chapter (as Hamlet’s uncle Claudius tried to dump him off to England), the grave digging with Gately.

    It would be interesting to think how much we can surmise about the destinies of Hal and Gately after the conclusion of this novel based upon the play’s plot. Thoughts?

  735. That introduction strikes me as styled after a Balzac novel – with an influx of detail moving out from ‘Ellen’ to include the district as a whole. I find the use colloquialisms such as ‘hodgepodge’ rather striking as it suggests that Auster is trying to use free-indirect-style, which I suppose we can’t fail to associate with Wood. Despite this, it seems that Auster has somewhat failed, as an introduction it does little to captivate imagination – at least Balzac always did that. It feels decidedly 18th Century as an opening, albeit complete with modern jargon, and lacking the fetished sentence. What on earth is going on with the assyndeton?!

  744. On the sidewalk yesterday, a peddler for Children International tried to stop me by saying, “Excuse me, sir, do you have a moment to save a child’s life?” (!!!)

  755. […] Read all of the reasons in the Fiction Advocate review of “The Long Ships.” Advertisement GA_googleAddAttr("AdOpt", "1"); GA_googleAddAttr("Origin", "other"); GA_googleAddAttr("theme_bg", "ffffff"); GA_googleAddAttr("theme_text", "333333"); GA_googleAddAttr("theme_link", "772124"); GA_googleAddAttr("theme_border", "eeeeee"); GA_googleAddAttr("theme_url", "58181b"); GA_googleAddAttr("LangId", "1"); GA_googleAddAttr("Autotag", "books"); GA_googleAddAttr("Autotag", "football"); GA_googleAddAttr("Tag", "other-peoples-stuff"); GA_googleAddAttr("Tag", "brian-hurley"); GA_googleAddAttr("Tag", "fiction-advocate"); GA_googleAddAttr("Tag", "gunnar-bengtsson"); GA_googleAddAttr("Tag", "the-long-ships"); GA_googleAddAttr("Tag", "vikings"); GA_googleFillSlot("wpcom_sharethrough"); Share this:Like this:LikeBe the first to like this post. from → Other People's Stuff ← The Infinite Jest Liveblog: Cult Classics No comments yet […]

  762. I also grew up in a golden football era — 1970s Steelers — but really only retired from watching professional sports in the wake of the Pittsburgh Penguin Stanley Cups in 1991-92. When you’ve reached heaven, there’s really no reason to go back, is what I tell people, which also happens to dovetail nicely with my smug superiority about not rooting for corporations/brands (which I try to tone down because we’re all susceptible, although it does seem worse now that it used to, or maybe it’s just me getting older…).

  766. Thanks for this review. On the one hand it’s hard to believe you actually read the book. The team isn’t the Whalers but the Harpooners, for example–kind of a big mistake on your part. But I finished the book and felt the exact lack of emotional connection you allude to. And the cute name thing…how is it at a college with so many well-read people and a gay president with a specific hard-on for Herman Melville, not one person (in the novel) seems to think it a remarkable coincidence that the shortstop’s name is straight out of the scene in Moby Dick (page 11) where the narrator is discussing the necessity of sharing his bed with another man? http://books.google.ca/books?id=PRcS6F9cvngC&dq=skrimshander%2C+moby+dick&q=skrimshander#v=snippet&q=skrimshander&f=false I mean it’s not like Skrimshander is that common a name, right?

  769. […] “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive” by Christopher Boucher — This book is a story and a game. The story is about a single father in rural Massachusetts hitting rock bottom after the death of his own father. The game is making sense of his metaphors, which are so cracked out that you fear for his sanity. He talks about his son and his Volkswagen Beetle as if they’re the same entity. He explains his father’s death by saying a Heart Attack Tree came along while his father was sitting inside an Invisible Pickup Truck and ripped all the stories out of his father’s chest. The metaphors end up making an eerie kind of sense, and you realize that the book is re-wiring the way look at the world. […]

  770. […] passionate love of life, and the poetry, wine, history and debate with which he filled his own. More on that here. Finally, the best book I didn’t read from 2011 was either Pulphead by John Jeremiah […]

  771. […] I think it’s one of the best books you can read, and I happened to read it this year. More on that here. But the best book I read from 2011 was Arguably by Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens was known for […]

  774. “but also in God’s sense of humor ” what’s that HE laughs while HIS priests bugger little boys

  782. I say go for it. Happy to have a discussion in the comments, or possibly add a guest post to the main page.

  783. A more complete version of this “kids today are writing defensively” theory would add some context, which is that the writing and publishing industry finds itself in a crisis (again? always?) of diminished readership, diminished cultural influence, etc., even though more people are getting MFAs and self-publishing. While other “generations” of writers have responded to this ongoing crisis in different ways, “kids today” are defiantly myopic. Rather than imitating or one-upping the broader culture, or even hearkening back to some kind of baroque, idealized writing of the past, they’re keeping their heads down and tunneling through to something personal and boldly artsy and a bit mystical. Mystical because they seem to believe that no matter how small the readership or how muddy their writing or how irrelevant their influence, they’re still making art, and that in itself is important. That’s the last line of defense.

  786. I don’t see a thread on the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts. I’d like to engage on that and link it to DFW’s essay on “Authority and American Usage”

    Anyone interested?

  789. […] Read the full review at Fiction Advocate. GA_googleAddAttr("AdOpt", "1"); GA_googleAddAttr("Origin", "other"); GA_googleAddAttr("theme_bg", "ffffff"); GA_googleAddAttr("theme_text", "333333"); GA_googleAddAttr("theme_link", "772124"); GA_googleAddAttr("theme_border", "eeeeee"); GA_googleAddAttr("theme_url", "58181b"); GA_googleAddAttr("LangId", "1"); GA_googleAddAttr("Autotag", "books"); GA_googleAddAttr("Tag", "other-peoples-stuff"); GA_googleAddAttr("Tag", "don-delillo"); GA_googleAddAttr("Tag", "fiction-advocate"); GA_googleAddAttr("Tag", "matthew-thomas"); GA_googleAddAttr("Tag", "the-angel-esmerelda"); GA_googleFillSlot("wpcom_sharethrough"); Share this:Like this:LikeBe the first to like this post. from → Other People's Stuff ← The Infinite Jest Liveblog: Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed No comments yet […]

  790. Thanks for writing this, Brian. And, just generally, for writing. I finally signed up as a follower so that I have no further excuses. This weekend made me miss the hell out of being capable of bandying about polysyllabic words and exchanging thoughts with all the good people of my undergrad years. More words, I say, more words!

    *Also, I’m not sure that all of the partying we talked about on Sunday happened in one location/night. But, as you said, it sure feels true.

  796. The other day, when I first read the Jezebel article, I blogged about the implications of the story being founded in truth. I wondered if it made the story less compelling, all potential ickiness aside. I’m not sure if alters the story at all, if we’re just examining the text. In reading and studying literature, there’s an emphasis placed on the text is paramount. Without the words on the page, there is no meaning etc. There’s Barthes theory of the death of the author. Having been a lit major, one is always warned not to confuse the text with the author, that there needs to be a separation of vision. That said, personal experiences can inform writing (interestingly, Maksik’s editor was Sebold, whose personal experiences did inform The Lovely Bones). I’ve been wrestling with these possible revelations about Maksik, trying to figure out of it should (from a storytelling perspective) influence the reading of the text. I’m not sure I have a clear answer, or that there is one. (My personal reaction and feelings toward the accusations is another matter entirely.)

    Since I posted about this, two people personally connected to the issue commented on my blog (a former student and the mother of a former student). The insight is profoundly enlightening, and I admire their candor. What strikes me, too, from a personal statement is that no one seems to be coming forward to defend Maksik. Not even Maksik (to my knowledge) has spoken out about this. There have been no former students denouncing these claims. I find that…curious.

    Anyway, this was an excellent post; thank you for positing the thoughts you did and for opening up a dialogue. It’s given me more to think about, certainly.

  797. I keep wondering if Maksik can’t be assessed damages from his royalties. There were a lot of victims of his enormous ego at ASP. And what about him being a “fiction” fellow at Iowa? Fiction? I don’t think so. The female voice for which he has received such praise seems to be that of a very real person. But, she didn’t matter, did she?

  800. Is it romantic? Marie is clearly in love with Silver, but he never really responds in kind. Even if they weren’t found out, the relationship is doomed. Will wants out. He’s attentive and yet withdrawing after the abortion. When Silver leaves Marie the message that the end will be a “relief,” I always got the sense that it was probably true on his part.

    A comparison could be made to Abelard and Heloise — an older teacher with a much younger student have an illicit affair, but Abelard and Heloise strugge to be together. It took castration to end their relationship. Abelard at least believed himself to be in love. Never got that sense on Silver’s part. Never got the sense that Siver was feeling overwhelmed by passion.

    And there were other things that bugged about the book — yes things that gave the sense that he’s trying to rewrite the past and make it better. In the ARC copy I have, at the start of the novel one of the chapter headings is Marie 22 (the same age as the real-life person the character was based on). The fact that he has Marie describe him as almost an ideal lover in one of the chapters — patient, and asking her what she want. (Not so ideal considering the fact that they don’t really discuss birth control. The only thing that jumped out at me was the condom he used the first time they end up in bed.)

    Then there’s the ending. Ms. Carver presses her on whether Marie’s angry, and she says she’s not. (The article in Jezebel says that she had to work off the shame and guilt, and shes clearly annoyed about the novel). The fact that in his final message that he tells her “to be brave” and –surprise– she is (she doesn’t fall apart as much as everyone else does around her). Add to the annoying note that she ends up dreaming and wondering about him in her final chapter, but his ending is all about himself heading off into the world.

    Anyway, this was my take on it. I don’t doubt others had their own.

  802. I don’t exactly know what it means either, but I’m glad you’re opening up a dialogue and asking the questions!
    One note, though, on Son of Sam laws: the law you’re referring to (from the Wikipedia site) was struck down because the Supreme Court felt it’s application was too broad. That’s because in NY’s version of the law, there was no distinction between books specifically about a certain crime, and books that mention them in passing. The three books you cite would fall into that latter category, and rightly the justices thought this was unenforceable.
    New narrower versions of the Son of Sam law have been enacted in many US states since that case. It’s also important to remember that the Son of Sam law does not prevent a convicted felon from writing creatively about their crimes (“Warden, remove that inmate’s pen and paper!”), the law is written to ensure criminals are not allowed to *financially profit* from that creative work. It’s basically a tax on the criminal to forgo any profits he might receive from his crime. Many states also usually give those seized profits to victims.

  804. Yes, it should affect one’s reading of the book and trust in the author, especially when he’s made absolutely no mention in any of his interviews that he ever taught at ASP, and has gone to great lengths to portray his depiction of Marie as fiction of his own invention. I’m quoting from memory here but check out the Q+A on his website where he says he was able to do so out of “distance and a deep sense of empathy” and it was a female friend who spurred him on to make her sexuality more overt. He’s a pathological narcissist of the highest order, and I’d be willing to bet he has no remorse over any of his actions. In his mind it’s everyone else’s failure to understand his artistic genius and license. You could call him a “Method” writer – this was research to him and the end justified the means.

    I think Kate, other ASP students, and faculty members should get in touch with U Iowa administration and make sure he’s allowed nowhere near teenage girls again.

  807. Yes. It should change the reading, in my opinion, because the intent is distorted.

    Why would he write this story and release it as a novel if so much of it was true? Why wouldn’t he own up to his actions and acknowledge his real role in it. Instead, it seems he is reaping the benefits of being a new upcoming fiction author while masquerading as having spent all his time in Paris just writing.

    I was a student of his and I’m still shocked from when I read it in September. I can say that it felt like reading something he kept as a diary during that time I knew him. Most of the situations, characters, and places are true, aside from the admiring male student that only has good thoughts for “Mr. Silver.”

    “Marie” is a human being, a girl with real feelings, who has recently had a en even worse shock than the rest of us, discovering that her unfortunate high school relationship and abortion have been recorded in a book. A book that gives her an imaginary voice and has her yearning for her captor. A book that her former lover has been receiving praise, numerous awards, and money for.

    An unfortunate relationship that should never have happened in the first place.

    Now, do you think he could’ve written this book quite as well if it hadn’t happened?

  813. […] November 29, 2011, pgs 508-530/1034-1036.  The importance of “The following things in the room were blue” eludes me, except as some indication that Hal is beginning to see things with slightly heightened senses. He is focusing strictly on a single color, and he is also troubled by “a kind of rodential squeaking that gave Hal Incandenza the howling fantods,” an affliction he shares with his grandfather from a few chapters back. The walls outside C.T.’s office are covered in “the overenhanced blue of the wallpaper’s sky, which the wallpaper scheme was fluffy cumuli arrayed patternlessly against an overenhancedly blue sky.”  This is the same wallpaper in the dentist’s office that Hal has just returned from and is, of course, similar if not identical to the (most popular) cover of the book itself. Thus it seems somehow relevant. […]

  819. It’s worth pointing out that the term ‘onaninsm’ also means ‘masturbation’. I suspect this was intentional on the part of the author, especially since he once used the phrase “the tumescence of ONANism” (tumescence, of course, referring to an erection). I, personally, couldn’t stop laughing when I read it. Sorry to spoil your thoughtful post with my nasty mind. (:

  840. About a third of the way through the reviewed novel and loosing interest. Not seeing the bright and ebullient aspects of narrative that you noted. Will try again. Just started Studs Lonigan and immediately appreciate the difference in style and story-telling technique. Also, characters seem actual and not just types in search of way to fit into the story-line.

  848. “By now, dystopian fiction has been served up just about every way possible. To my knowledge, one of the few ways it hasn’t been attempted — or, at least, well executed — is in the realm of minimalism.”

    So what about The Road? Does that count?

  853. Great review, sir. I can’t find an email so I figured it’s okay to post here; I’ve written a review myself.

    http://cthez.blogspot.com/2011/09/christopher-hitchens-not-arguable_29.html

    I did find it funny when you said, “The 100-plus essays spanning almost 750 pages offer a much wider, and more measured, survey of his intellectual exploits from the last decade or so.” I happened to write almost the exact same sentence completely by coincidence, you’ll see it, it’s included in there.

    Happy day!
    C. Zimny

  854. […] Read the full review. LD_AddCustomAttr("AdOpt", "1"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Origin", "other"); LD_AddCustomAttr("theme_bg", "ffffff"); LD_AddCustomAttr("theme_text", "333333"); LD_AddCustomAttr("theme_link", "772124"); LD_AddCustomAttr("theme_border", "eeeeee"); LD_AddCustomAttr("theme_url", "58181b"); LD_AddCustomAttr("LangId", "1"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Autotag", "baseball"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Tag", "crosspost"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Tag", "other-peoples-stuff"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Tag", "chad-harbach"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Tag", "fiction-advocate"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Tag", "n1"); LD_AddCustomAttr("Tag", "the-art-of-fielding"); LD_AddSlot("LD_ROS_300-WEB"); LD_GetBids(); Share this:Like this:LikeBe the first to like this post. from → Crosspost, Other People's Stuff ← The Infinite Jest Liveblog: The Story of O No comments yet […]

  860. Apparently Kanye West likes Roald Dahl. Here is the beginning of one of Dahl’s poems, “Cinderella” from Revolting Rhymes:
    “I guess you think you know this story.
    You don’t. The real one’s much more gory.
    The phoney one, the one you know,
    Was cooked up years and years ago,
    And made to sound all soft and sappy
    Just to keep the children happy.”

    Sound familiar? If not, listen to the intro to Kanye’s “Dark Fantasy”

  862. Doesn’t really matter what else the artists are doing. We’re past the album production of the 90s and back to the 50s style single wars. My single is louder than anyone else’s. Who cares what else is on the album? (talking strictly pop here) Then you have to beg the question…are the adolescents choosing the singles that satisfy their need to connect with self esteem issues? or have producers figured out that buy playing to adolescents self-esteem issues they make more money and so they force the issue? Has it really taken 20 years for the music industry to figure out how to make money on the punk rock scene=sell it to teenagers before they have the need to discover it!

  867. Beautiful music! Very spacious composition, performed with real sincerity. I wonder what Salinger would say if he heard this, I like to think it would make him smile.

  868. Yeah, I guess it’s also worth mentioning that these songs about self-esteem seem to be one-offs for these artists. Nobody makes a whole album like this. At the same time, the big contemporary female stars seem obligated to do at least one song like this. (Trying to think of Beyonce’s version – Single Ladies?) Almost like they’re doing this one “for the fans.”

  869. So much to consider…like how does this stack up against hip hop — which is largely focused on boasting — and it’s dominance of the pop charts? What’s the connection to the fact that all of the examples you cite wear outfits that none of their self-esteem targets should even consider? How are these distinguished from their predecessors like The Touch (http://youtu.be/jkYuK3AKrxc), The Best Around (http://youtu.be/2GHYWXAV3po) and Eye of the Tiger?

    But if I had to isolate any one thing, I’d have to blame recent period in which various high profile people evaded consequences of their failings by replacing reality with banality (e.g. the number of Mission Accomplished banners people stood in front of on TV vs. the number of fallen soldiers they acknowledged the reality of on TV). That embrace of ignorance combined with hard times has — I’d wager — created some kind of drippy self-help-language reflex where we can almost ride out a problem on the fumes of some uncomplicated, forward-looking platitude. Anyway I’m gonna stop before I say “culture of victimhood.”

    I do know for sure though that it’s NOT that sex is too problematic for pop music. Take for instance any other songs by the artists you reference.

  870. As far as A) goes, pop music has always been for teenagers, so I don’t really get the assertion that it’s getting more adolescent. You can’t get more adolescent than adolescents.

    Nor has pop music really ever taken on sex in any sort of serious or nuanced way. It’s always been vague and coded, as it is now–albeit not within the same kind of song you’re talking about.

    As for c), again, I think it was ever thus.

    What I think is interesting about the type of song you’re talking about is how some of the pro-gay messages dovetail with issues of class that aren’t really addressed outside of pop music. My reading are that these are essentially working class anthems, but whereas they used to be pretty straight forward (e.g., “Bastards of Young”), it’s much more complicated now. Working class identity has been almost completely co-opted by affluent Tea Partiers who have nothing but contempt for the actual working class. On the other side you have urban liberals and their cultural prejudices toward anything that might call into question their affectations or style. (Not to sound like David Brooks, but this is, you know, true.) So it makes sense to me that, with gay issues rising in the popular consciousness, a kind of song that was previously about group empowerment would morph into a kind of song about personal empowerment.

  873. Get Tim Burton and Johnny Depp to build a creepy and awful remake of Dahl’s cottage, so people will be reminded of how awesome the original is and want to save it.

  874. Perhaps you could place a dead rat in someone’s candy jar and frighten them into helping with the move?

  881. Let’s see. They’re charging $45 for 3 issues and the Harbach book, or $60 for 6 issues and the Harbach book. So they’re valuing the additional 3 issues at $15. If 3 issues are worth $15, then they value the Harbach at $30. If we use our $12.57 valuation of Issue 12 as an estimate of the value of all other issues, then the $45 package is a savings of $7.57 per issue, or $22.71 overall. But the list price of the Harbach is actually $25.99, so (if we take that as the true value of the Harbach) the overall savings goes down to $18.70. With the $60 package the overall savings is $41.41. Does that look right?

  885. For what it’s worth, I very much agree that the piece is “not fully cooked.” In fact, all of the reviews in this issue are pretty dead on. I might have added a quarter to Solution From He’ll and maybe fifteen cents to the Dombek piece.

  886. Hi,

    “California Love Story” is a perfect memoir – universal moments shared by us all, even if we’re not gay, male, young, whatever. your reviewer is dead wrong! Literally just noticed this is a WordPress site, so I guess, your referral hits speak for themselves on your non-influence. Just to let you know, as a librarian, I will counteract your lies.

  891. I can’t wait for Travels with Travels with Herodotus by Ryszard Kapuscinski by Ben Keene!

  894. You’re first on the list. It’s what you might call ‘gently used’ just FYI.

    No comment on what you’re doing to Karl’s Freedom.

  895. I’m burning through Karl’s copy of “Freedom” and would like to get my name on the list for Strong Motion,” please!

  898. “According to Mickey Kaus, the Obama list is ‘heavy on the wrenching stories of immigrant experiences, something the President already knows quite a bit about.’ For this reason, Kaus feels that the list reveals an intellectually incurious president. ”

    …Having read (and enjoyed) “Cutting for Stone,” I have to say President Obama could find little to identify with.

  902. I feel compelled to add that despite the morose impression I may give above, I really loved this book, and it’s a fun and fast read … dark self-examinations aside.

  906. Nice. I’m guessing the spine widths are not to scale. If only Freedom were as slim as Tinkers!

  911. I think that you missd the point of Vonnegut. He isn’t an author that will stick to one style and always be poetic or descriptive or even based in one world. The passage that you described it very typical Vonnegut, a poetic description with a point. Have you ever looked at people from a balcony high above? I, personally as a people watcher, find that they are alot of fun to watch. I think you’re reading too much into a poetic description.

    Slaughterhouse five isn’t my favoright Vonnegut, if you want a Vonnegut that is more in the style for every reader go with “Cat’s Cradle.” If you want a really jerky, in your face Vonnegut go with “Breakfast of Champions.”

  912. One must *never* feel guilty for ignoring any David Mamet film/play/book … with, of course, the exception of Glengarry Glen Ross. This goes doubly true if Lindsay Crouse is in the movie.

  914. This is truly a wonderful tribute to the author and character. Happy birthday, Holden!

  916. Not sure, man. Haven’t read it, but by the quotes, Butler seems more experimental than skilled.

    Random thoughts thrown together are always going to be a bit mysterious, but that doesn’t make them brilliant…

    Maybe I should read the book before I say any more…

    Nah.

    ANY MORE!

  917. As a music teacher, I like to emphasize to my students an idea that I got from Kenny Werner’s book “Effortless Mastery”. The idea is that things shouldn’t be viewed as being difficult or easy, but rather as being familiar or unfamiliar. Seeing something as being difficult can make it daunting from the get-go, and can install permanent fears in your approach that lead to stumbles, slip-ups, and the ever-present idea that maybe you should just give up. (On the flip-flop, seeing something as easy can over-simplify your approach causing you to gloss over details and develop an over-confidence that hides the beauty of simplicity, and less of an appreciation for that beauty and simplicity.) If something is viewed as unfamiliar, the possibilities are endless because you can’t lump this new experience in with your previous ones. You are then on a journey of discovery and acceptance of the previously-unknown, instead of a struggle against your expectations of yourself while you try to cram new things (which are circular) into all your old brain boxes (which are rectangular). In other words, you create your own difficulties.

  918. One more thing — the book is easily scuffed. The ink from the French flaps rubs off easily on the nearby pages. And it’s rather large, so I banged it up by carrying it around. Butler probably loves this, since he celebrated the publication of his last book by physically destroying it.

  921. Actually, I can imagine a Dominican-American with Diaz’s background speaking like this. Drown depressed me after a while with the misery, dysfunction and sense of going nowhere.
    I liked Oscar Wao, though the ending was a bit thin, and the characters would have gained from being more 3-d and complex.
    It did not deserve a Pulitzer Prize at all. I’m afraid the committee is overly impressed by creative multiculturalism. Diaz is a good writer, but this can’t hold a candle next to other Pulitzer winning novels, and if I were Diaz I’d really be embarrassed about winning simply because of having a unique Latino voice.That smacks of exoticism, and there’s simply no dignity or respect in that.When Diaz merely glances at Vargas Llosa, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Hemingway, or Umberto Eco novlel he must blush for shame. Oscar Wao is just not in the same category as these novelists’ best work. Maybe in the future Diaz will get there, but Oscar Wao is not the book. Hopefully in time he will produce a truly Pulitzer Prize worthy novel.

  922. I don’t know, but to me “spare” sounds like a deliberate emptiness, the result of careful restraint, whereas “sparse” sounds slightly negative, like a forest that’s been logged too much.

  923. What’s the difference between “spare” and “sparse” in terms of writing style?

    This is a serious question.

    Sort of.

  925. Great essay — congrats! — I don’t have a Kindle but I will always love Moby Dick, which for whatever reason I will always pair with Wuthering Heights as the twin pillars on which so much of modern literature has been built. #team_emily

  926. Brian spent that 10.10 in the best way possible! He donated to the Multiple Sclerosis Society event I am riding in to honor his Aunt Susan (My Mother) Thank you Brian :)

  928. Brian, I’m sorry, I didn’t read this one. I’ve seen it too many times before. Please stop boring us with your poop fetish. That’s what eschatology means, right?

  933. This is cool — video of the author reading “Not Hearing the Jingle,” so you can read along with him.

  936. Congrats on your windfall. What about giving $0.61 to other hard working authors that have lost hundreds of dollars in PayPal transfer fees?

  937. Create a reparations fund for the readers who did not enjoy your piece. Invest the money in a notoriously volatile stock, so that it fluctuates wildly. Every day, the fluctuations of public opinion in the financial world will remind these people how their public opinion of the literary world causes your stock to fluctuate as well. This is what is known as a “stupid metaphor.”

  938. the best way to spend small sums of money is to spend much more than you ordinarily would on mundane things. Like a $10 pen, or $10 for someone else’s bad fiction. ;)

  943. Television has no hidden agenda and it has served to create community and shared experiences from its inception. I hate when a thesis/ concept is explained by its impact on Joe Briefcase or Joe six pack or Joe anything. My dad’s name was Joe what would he think? Make your arguments specific to yourself How do you feel about things? So DFW didn’t have any favorite television shows and maybe felt threatened that audience for his books would be impacted by a zombied out drooling media obsessed populace unable to sit and concentrate long enough to relate to his ideas? We’ll never know

  947. Junot Diaz is the most overrated writer in American. Substitutes substance for Dominicanisms. Doesn’t even have a true mastery of street lingo, just enough to fool the Pulitzer committee, and most critics, who have never stepped foot in the inner city.

  949. Can we start a movement to re-brand ‘hogwash’ coming out of the liberal biased machine? I’m voting for ‘pancetta.’ There is a whole world of meat references here, just below the topsoil…

    Love the Jurassic park reference.

  953. I prefer the inverse plot arc in which a California surfer moves inland and takes up with a wholesome group of kids from the community — especially when it relates the entirely effable thrills of rollerblading through the suburbs.

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYRes66gtkA&w=480&h=390]

    Bonus points for early Jack Black and Seth Green roles.

  955. Hypocritical to write this immediately after a post about Weekend at Bernie’s?

  958. Fascinating. I’m looking for solid arguments against and for Reality Hunger, haven’t read Freedom yet, but yeah, I don’t see why there can’t be room in the head for both.

  959. Ha!

    http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/books/22book.html?ref=books

    “Negative reviews of poetry books are famously rare; takedowns of graphic novels and book-length comics are scarcer still. The graphic-novel genre is no longer young, but it retains, like Drew Barrymore and certain indie bands, a quirky and semi-adorable glow. Its fragile vibe is Etsy, not Best Buy. Attacking a pile of graphic novels is not unlike chucking a sackful of baby pandas into a river. If many graphic novels are, as Barack Obama put it about Hillary Rodham Clinton, likable enough, few are knotty works of art, things you’d eagerly give to both the sulky teenager in your life and your grandmother who reads serious nonfiction and thinks comics are infra-dig. Few zigzag toward the earth like mid-August lightning.”

  961. I lied about one thing: the Lydia Davis collection includes 4 of her previous books, not 5.

    HERE COMES ANOTHER LESSON

    http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Another-Lesson-Stories/dp/1439181993/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1291735135&sr=1-1

    THE COLLECTED STORIES OF LYDIA DAVIS

    http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Stories-Lydia-Davis/dp/0312655398/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1291735166&sr=1-1

    INFERNO

    http://www.orbooks.com/our-books/inferno-a-poets-novel/

  966. This is the [sexually vivacious male actor] of [funny internet meme your dowdy aunt will accidentally forward you three months too late].

  967. A New Chapter in Macy’s Booksgiving Parade

    This year, Macy’s annual city-wide celebration of Booksgiving will feature a new Jonathan Franzen float. New balloons added to the parade include: Huck Finn, Pilot the dog from Jane Eyre, and Antigone.
    And don’t forget to stay for the glorious finale, which, per tradition, features Shakespeare and his sonneteers carrying bags of folio poems for all the good little boys and girls.

  968. “I hope this part of hipsterism is dead.”

    So do I, but I’m not holding my breath. I think it’s important to realize that it’s not just that hipsters are producing and consuming “art” that’s made for children, but they are fetishizing nostalgia for their own childhood pop art and culture. A lot of what we see is just a rehash of what kids liked in the ‘80s. Of course there’s a million examples of this, and we saw Hot Topic offering Duck Hunt T-shirts years ago. But look also at the insane popularity of Roller Derby among hip young crowds in New York (I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it, but it’s certainly part of that vein of nostalgia that also explains the ugly ‘80s-style sweaters and high-top sneakers that are replacing the faux-nature fashion that Greif described. Oh and p.s. I’ve been bitching about those “Elk,” “Deer,” “Bear”-monikered bands for months. Though of course that style extends beyond band names to music with chirping birds in the background such as The Elected. Oops.)

    I think this cloying, slightly disturbing (but somehow inviting) trend is exemplified by an ongoing event I just found out about yesterday: The Knitting Factory hosts a Saturday afternoon “Spoons, Toons & Booze” event where they play Saturday morning cartoons (only those we remember from our own childhoods, of course) and serve sugar cereals … but you can buy drinks almost like you’re a real adult. What a confused generation we are.

    http://bk.knittingfactory.com/event-details/?tfly_event_id=16057

  971. Absolutely! It’s not like reading anything else. Or at least, it’s not like reading anything else that calls itself a book. It’s like reading the world’s best Twitter feed. Or the world’s best magazine quiz. Really good for a short attention span. And somehow highbrow because it’s subtitled “A Novel?”

  972. Did you find the actual experience of reading this book to be different from reading other books? I remember reading it in THE PARIS REVIEW (actually, I remember quite clearly where and when I was reading this book, somewhat unusually) and reading it really felt different, more exhausting, but perhaps in a good way.

  973. Near the end of a relationship, I once told my soon-to-be-ex, “You never ask me anything anymore.” I almost followed this with, “Why don’t you just leave?” but out of spite, I didn’t.

  976. Brian, it looks like all of your books are upside down, even the ones that aren’t. You should call the printer, tell them there’s a production problem, and demand all your money back.

  980. Poor Pynchon, Rushdie, DeLillo, Zadie Smith, Updike (R.I.P.), Harold Bloom, Steiner, Gaddis (R.I.P.), and many others, viciously snubbed by the new preacher of the American letters, for whom there is an unique “good way” of making art. Those kind of people and places descriptions are always present in their books.
    For instance, read these words from the British playwright David Hare:
    «How can there be a wrong way to make good art? And, indeed, what point does criticism serve when it asserts only “This is not the sort of thing of which I approve”? When a literary critic such as James Wood twists himself into a pretzel explaining exactly why the novel he has under review is the wrong kind of good novel, he sounds like nothing so much as a Railtrack official railing against the wrong kind of snow.»
    Or these words from the greatest erudite alive, Harold Bloom, about the irrelevancy of the reactionary reviewer of The New Yorker magazine:
    [Excerpt of an interview] «Harold Bloom: Oh, don’t even mention him [James Wood]. He doesn’t exist. He just does not exist at all. […] My dear, phenomena are always being bubbled up. There are period pieces in criticism as there are period pieces in the novel and in poetry. The wind blows and they will go away.»
    Read a little bit more about writers punched by wood, read other critics’ opinions and points of view, dig a little deep on the world of literature, and then make up your opinion. Read, for example, Justin Jamail’s piece of work about Wood on Auster.
    «Unsurprisingly, Wood’s preferred fiction is realist, and bourgeois, and 99.9% dead, white, and male.» A.D. Jameson on the Wood’s dreadful pamphlet, How Fiction Works.

  981. Awesome! I’m not the only one who pretty much hated this movie.

    http://nplusonemag.com/we-all-die-there-now

    “As the credits rolled, I told myself: You must change your life.”

    “One of the major differences between Kill Bill and Kick-Ass […] is that Kill Bill is good and Kick-Ass is bad.”

    “Kick-Ass claims to be controversial, but is in fact conservative.”

  983. Wow, you’re right, that passage about the neighborhood sounds like it comes straight off Wikipedia. That does not bode well.

    I just finished reading Auster’s most recent novel, “Invisible,” and it was pretty damn terrible. I think he misplaced his talent somewhere round about the year 2000. Too bad.

  984. I too, was struck by the Woods review, and as a former Sunset Parker, was intrigued by the setting of Auster’s new novel. I’m not sure that encyclopedia entry of a description is going to sell me on the book however…

  985. I have always been a fan of tacking “plus” onto things. “e-book plus” “Pert Plus” “drunk plus”

  986. Disagree! I think Facebook is all about mimesis. But I only think that because I’m persuaded (mimetically?) by this blog post: http://mediastudies2point0.blogspot.com/2007/09/myspace-and-legendary-psychasthenia.html.
    Facebook users are like caterpillars eating each other because they are so impossible to distinguish from each other and mud. Thus the demise of your hopes of having others as some sort of contrast to your own (FB-induced, of course) banality.

  987. Excellent stuff, ‘The Cedar Fire.’ Please contribute to our literary journal (print only), Transformation, founded Berkeley 1979.

    Also, would be honored to have you at the reading signing for my new book of short stories, ‘Kicking In,’ at the Marina store of Books Inc. at 7:00 p.m. Tuesday June 15th

    Rick Wirick (Google Richard Wirick & Kicking In)

  988. You raise some interesting points, FA. However, I will point out that the form (particularly the graphic novel, which isn’t exactly the same as a comic book) has come a long way in recent years. To that end, I think a more apt comparison would be between “serious” comics and other stories of depth or complexity. Which is to say I’m not convinced that the other types of mass-marketed, over-publicized stories out there can always claim a moral high ground. Something with quality can (and should) stand up to criticism, but if you’re going to talk about crap comics, you should compare them to crap novels.

  990. Certainly there are different forces operating on these stories depending on the medium. But I don’t mean to criticize comic books or movies as a medium. I mean to criticize the genre of the crime-fighting superhero, whether it appears in comic or movie form.

    Watchmen is a rare example, since it exists almost exclusively as a single graphic novel and a single movie. For most crime-fighting superhero franchises, it’s hard to pinpoint a “true” or entirely canonical version of the story. To say, for example, that the recent Superman movie doesn’t do justice to the real Superman story is beside the point, since the Superman story exists in thousands of forms, and is beloved by millions of different people. Since we’re talking about a form of popular entertainment, the best measure of the “truth” of any given version is its popularity, and blockbuster movies are undoubtedly the most popular instance of these stories.

    Regardless, I agree with intereloper that comic book stories are, in a sense, contemporary myths, and it’s the myths I mean to criticize, not the media.

  991. I agree with ApathyClub in that we should be careful not to conflate film adaptations with their original forms. What you’re dealing with are different mediums and, consequently, different constraints on content.

    On a related note, there was recently a piece in PW about how traditional publishing houses have begun hiring artists and writers to collaborate with bestselling authors to create graphic novel adaptations. What I found most interesting was that the editor for Del Rey claimed that straight adaptations generally don’t do as well as original side stories–that readers seeking out the graphic adaptation don’t necessarily want the same experience they got from the novel, but a different experience. The graphic adaptation is expected to do something the novel can’t. I suppose it’s a form-dictates-content scenario, but that in no way implies the form shouldn’t be of equally high quality.

    The link is here: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/book-news/comics/article/42699-novel-to-graphic-novel-turning-popular-prose-into-comics.html

  992. “I’m scared to contemplate how that reflects on, say, the $1 billion haul for Batman.” Well, I’m very comfortable saying that Dark Knight exceeded its source material in every way, also very comfortable in saying that it was a much better film, by nearly any measure, than any of the Best Picture nominees. (This is all ignoring, of course, that the fact that anyone who ever gets upset over Oscar nominations is a very silly person, and one with opinions probably not worth considering.)

    I think your point, though, is that if one was to use the characters/scenario of Dark Knight as a basis for a novel, the results would be poor. This is undoubtedly true, but I believe it largely speaks to the huge gaps in the different media being discussed. Dark Knight would surely make a poor novel, the nigh-universally adored Watchmen gave way to a film that garnered extraordinarily mixed reviews, and Joyce’s Ulysses makes for a lousy comic: http://ulyssesseen.com/comic/us_comic_tel_iii.html When considering the difficulty of creating an effective adaptation of any of these media, the fact that comics, prose, and films all have characters and dialog is almost kind of a fluke. The thought of adapting a novel into a film (or vice versa) and expecting it to be capable of drawing the same response from its audience is absurd; you might as well make a musical adaptation of Picasso’s Guernica, or a prose adaptation of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, and expect an equivalent reaction.

    All this said, I do agree that none of these things should be exempt from serious criticism. Comics in particular are not a young art form. They predate television, rock and roll, and the talkies, all of which we’ve subjected to intense critical scrutiny. Shame on us for accepting anything other than brilliant successes and interesting failures.

    Regarding Superman, “…his planet blew up and his family died…” Correct, obviously, but neither motivates him into action. Regarding kryptonite, yes, it makes him physically ill, but the reaction is purely physical, not psychological. So far as I know, seeing of a picture of kryptonite doesn’t bum Superman out or anything. So, I think my point stands. But if you want something to chew on, dig this: Superman has two primary weaknesses, in established canon. One is kryptonite, obviously. But the other? Fucking MAGIC.

  993. One of the biggest problems here is the conflation of comic books and their movie adaptations, which are very different creatures. Sometimes they translate, and sometimes they don’t. Regardless, it’s not fair to criticize the book Watchmen because you didn’t like the move Watchmen, which practically no one felt did justice to the original.

  994. I don’t think comics *necessarily* set out to be highbrow, but I do think that they have the capacity for such depth. The best comics, the ones that I find to be incredible works of art, are indeed the ones that live up to what you might refer to as the high standards attributed to good prose storytelling. The problem with trying to generalize is that the quality of comics is so vast. But if you’re willing to seek out those that go above and beyond, the ones I suppose I’d liken to poetry, you’ll be quite satisfied.

  995. Please don’t misquote me and be purposefully obtuse to further your own ends. It’s really quite annoying.

    I’ve nothing more to say to someone who willfully continues to be nonsensical just to try and stick to a point that hardly made sense to begin with.

  996. Thanks for the comments.

    Vladkin points out that comics aren’t intended to be highbrow, and Phlegmbot seems to think I’m wrong in saying that comics are taken seriously. I should give some context to my remarks. Last year there was a popular uproar when The Dark Knight, which earned over $1 billion dollars in gross revenue, wasn’t nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture. Watchmen was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present. (That’s novels, not graphic novels.) In this week’s issue of the highbrow New Yorker, Anthony Lane seems to be plugging his nose as he writes an obligatory review of the soon-to-be blockbuster Iron Man 2. We’re throwing serious money at these stories, and we’re giving them serious accolades and attention. To say they’re immune from serious criticism because they’re “lighthearted” is either cowardly or delusional.

    http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/herocomplex/2009/01/the-dark-knight.html

    http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1951793_1951946_1952878,00.html

    I agree with interloper and Vladkin that comics are mythological, or a different kind of storytelling experience. The reason I compare them to prose stories (and expect their big franchises to live up to the standards of good prose storytelling) is because they compete directly with those stories in the marketplace, as books and as movie adaptations.

    interloper says “NO ONE thinks they’re very good.” Damn. Part of me feels like that’s true – that we enjoy the trashy feel of comics – and I’m scared to contemplate how that reflects on, say, the $1 billion haul for Batman.

    interloper and Phlegmbot take issue with my suggestion that Superman is motivated by personal trauma. Well, his planet blew up and his family died and he becomes physically ill when he comes in contact with any of its shards.

    As for “suspension of disbelief,” that’s a nuclear option for people who have run out of reasonable things to say. Yes, there’s a whole dynamic between the reader and the text that requires us to “give in” and let the story work its magic. That’s why I can buy into the idea of a world where the bite of a radioactive spider will give you superpowers. But you can’t say that a fictional depiction of things we all intuitively understand—like personal trauma—is beyond scrutiny, especially when the depiction rings false, and ESPECIALLY when billions of dollars are at stake.

  997. F.A,

    While I especially enjoyed your poke at the overrated “Blankets” (which, btw, came out about 10 years ago — the medium has produced many finer dramatic stories since [and before]), I find you to be terribly uninformed about your subject-matter and even confused about what your own premise is.

    Your complaints about Kick-Ass are specific, yet you use them to skewer the genre of superhero comics. The examples about the character of Hit Girl and the crime-fighting Kick-Ass’s attempt to stop an “unfair” fight sound like nothing more than bad writing for a bad movie (which, it should be said, might very well directly reflect the bad writing of the comic book [I’d read the first issue and was sad for the world of comics], but you clearly didn’t have enough interest in your own post to find out).

    The thing you don’t touch upon at all, which comes up in a nearly all fiction, is something we all learn about in junior-high English: suspension of disbelief. I believe Bruce, Peter, Clark, et. al. will continue to fight crime, even if they face that ghost of their past (Oh, FYI: comic book Clark, classically, has had no ghost of his past — another point on which you’ve clearly no knowledge), b/c I am reading a monthly comic book about a guy dressing in tights saving the city/world/universe/girlfriend who may or may not know his secret identity.

    You also continually jump to conclusions about what is meant by superheroes or their motivations and the stories being told (by hundreds of writers of varying skill over the years): “The stories in comic books purport to be about the effects of personal trauma, or saving the innocent and restoring a fallen society, but at bottom they’re about one man’s desire to become important and accepted by society.” This sentence is such a presumptive mess, I don’t have the time or room to tear it apart…but you seem bright enough that, should you read it over, you yourself can pick out then many problems therein. Although, maybe now I’m being presumptuous.

    You also continually refer to comic books but give examples from, and use (uninformed) terms for, films. So what is it you’re complaining about — superhero comic books or superhero movies?

    If the answer is both, b/c your issue is simply with the idea of the superhero, you need to better educate yourself on both the arts of film and comics, so that your problems with both can, a, be separated out so that you’re not making nonsensical generalizations, and, b, so that you can actually support your arguments — all of which seem to be guesses based on movies you’ve seen in the last 9 years (for example, X-Men comics more and more rarely deal with the metaphor for racism which gave them birth [there was a series called “Muties” (a derogatory term in the Marvel Comics world) sometime back which dealt with the racism issue sans tights, superteams, and Professor X.].

    In regard to your side-note: 1. You’re right about fawning critics and their stupidity. 2. You’re right about Watchmen, but wrong about it if you’d, a, read the comic series and, b, read it when it first came out before a ton of comics and movies began deconstructing superheroes based on Watchmen’s take. 3. If you can’t “spot the difference,” the writer or director (or both) have NOT correctly done their jobs.

    And, again, your sum-up seems to indicate a reason to take very seriously something you’ve simply decided MUST be taken seriously only because YOU say so. Spider-Man is, and almost always has been, lighthearted. Batman was just an extension of the pulp books of the time and the initial tone of it was exactly that — he had no traumatic past. Superman was a completely new idea and one that took a long time to form into the, er, form that you hate today. But, again, he merely cracked jokes and wore a circus strong-man’s uniform for no other reason than that it seemed fun.

    You don’t have to love comic books, of any genre, and you don’t have to like superheroes. I find most superhero comics derivative and uninteresting, but I DO like the premise. To me, many of them are simply about how we should all always try to be the best we can be…against whatever odds there are. In the real world, you won’t be a superhero who jumps over buildings and stops a mugging with a Batarang, but you might stop and help someone on the side of the road, or get in the way when a drunk guy at a club is getting too close to a woman who clearly isn’t interested, or, you know, maybe just help out a new dad wheeling an unwieldy stroller in through an uncooperative door.

    Oh, and please stop trying to sound cool by saying “bag” and “hating on.” You just come off like a total pinhead.

    Heylookmail at hotmail

  998. [jumps on high horse]

    I take issue with the idea that comics/graphic novels/manga ever set out to be more or less highbrow than prose, specifically literary fiction. These are simply different ways of telling and experiencing a story. Rather than compare the graphic format to traditional prose, I prefer to liken it to poetry, in that, ideally, both work in a very concise and deliberate manner to create a narrative in which each part—be it word or image—is worth its weight in gold. In terms of comics/graphic novels/manga, neither the art nor the text is in competition, but rather each performs a task the other cannot, or at least cannot perform as effectively. Nothing is unintentional and nothing is superfluous. Ideally speaking, anyway. And I’d also argue that if the graphic format doesn’t inspire-if it comes across as crap-it’s less the fault of the format than the creative minds shaping it.

    [jumps off high horse, lands on tailbone b/c it’s a fucking high horse, brushes self off and hopes no one saw that]

    I’ve recently begun reading The Boys, a comic by Garth Ennis, in which the entire nature of heroism is challenged—in which the reverence and nostalgia attached to traditional superheroes is in sharp contrast to the reality of what happens when society fails—or simply isn’t able—to hold them accountable. Additionally, a number of people are born super-powered—there isn’t necessarily a personal tragedy, teenage angst, or sense of righteousness that inspires or eggs them on. And in this society, traditional superheroes have begun wreaking havoc on the planet out of sheer disregard for those they originally served to protect. There is a lot of disillusionment to be had in this world, and from the perspective of our anti-heroes (the super-powered CIA squad enforced with keeping the superheroes in line), nothing about any superhero, no matter how revered, is sacred. If there was a personal tragedy that originally motivated them, it’s simply not an excuse for current misbehavior. The very nature of the series is to call everything and everyone into question—at least this is my impression thus far…

  999. (Forgive this hastily written, grammatically suspect, nearly totally unproofread comment…)

    About five years ago, I became interested (nay, obsessed) with superheroes for the first time since childhood. Since that time, I’ve immersed myself in all manner of superhero lore and ephemera, and without reading any more than a handful “necessary evil” of superhero comics. This is because superhero comics are REAL dumb. I knew it as a child, and I know it now. That’s the dirty secret about superhero comics: NO ONE thinks they’re very good. Not even people who read superhero comics. There are about a dozen trades/graphic novels/story arcs/what-have-you that receive a lot of attention (a few of which you namechecked above) and so far as I can tell, those are generally perceived to be overrated. I can honestly say that I’ve never met an adult who’s said “I read Batman, and I think it’s totally worth my time.”

    This is all to say that I fear that maybe you’ve misjudged the point of entry when it comes to the public’s latter-day general fascination with superheroes, and in doing so, have missed the root of their appeal. The storytelling in the books themselves is obviously, undeniably terrible. How could they not be? The books, especially in the early days (but even as late as the 1960s), were often written by inner-city teenagers. But when considering superheroes as a cultural convention, they carry an enormous amount of baggage, entirely regardless of their source material. The mythology is rich, friend. Not so much in the discussed-to-death “these are the gods and demons of our times” sense, but in the sense that superheroes are a very immediate cultural connection to America’s past. I see Superman, and I see a walking representation of twentieth century America. From Superman, I can draw from a well of memories and images that give me a connection to nearly any period of the last eighty years of American history. That shit’s potent.

    A very strong parallel can be drawn with baseball. I know a lot of dudes, myself included, who LOVE baseball without really actually exposing ourselves to the game (either as players, or spectators). It’s very possible to have an enormous reverence for the game’s history, and hold a fascination for its mythology, while thinking that the game itself is kind of a drag. Perhaps because there’s a bit of a stigma attached to liking superheroes (and, for that matter, disliking baseball), the parallel is rarely discussed, but it’s definitely there.

    All this said, I almost entirely agree with your assessment. I do have one MAJOR correction though, which is that Clark Kent’s name should not be lumped in with Peter Parker, Bruce Wayne, and so on. Superman’s motivation is not guilt or grief, but simple altruism. He insists on being a benevolent force in the world, solely because he knows it is the right thing to do. And I might be a sap for saying so, but I think that’s wonderful.

  1000. Dear Fiction Advocate:

    I’m right there with you on your overarching assessment of the comic book/crime-fighting super-hero genre (as in “They suck.”). You’ve focused in on many of the laughably unconscionable aspects of the genre. But I think your argument gets dangerously close to criticizing a widely-used fictional device that could be said to characterize many classic and modern novels.

    Your assessment:
    “If the hero is a youngster (like Hit Girl in Kick-Ass) then her exploits, no matter how gratifying, are a distraction from the real problems she should be dealing with—namely, for Hit Girl, the absence of a mother figure. On the flip side, if the hero is a grizzled veteran (as every teenage boy hopes he’ll one day be) then his trauma has an unbelievable capacity to linger through his entire life, as if by photographic memory, and to burn with an intensity that never subsides. The adult crime-fighting superhero is necessarily a psychopath…”

    Almost necessarily, anyone who is categorized as “super” anything will have to prove their extreme chops. So it seems plausible that for a superhero, a super-psychosis fits the bill. But even if that weren’t the case, there are many examples within classic or current literature of protagonists, or antagonists, who are distracting themselves (Tom McCarthy’s subject in Remainder) or who radiate lingering trauma or mental disease or defect (Humbert Humbert in Lolita). Does showing these characters to be irrevocably and obsessively flawed take anything away from the power of the story? Even though they, like comic-book heroes, never really address their trauma/obsession? Granted, these are awesome books that should not even be mentioned in the same blog response with comic-book superheroes, but personal trauma can and will influence genres outside that of graphic novels. And to characterize its use as a red herring in one genre but laud it in another seems a bit unfair.

    I think (for me), comic books fall short of more “serious,” fiction not because of flawed story-telling (although there is a lot of that happening), but because of the genre’s very definition: something childish, graphic, with more than a touch of the ridiculous. The genre does not let your imagination run as wild as it does when you’re reading a straight-prose book, because it has run away with its own and your imagination. While marketers and the media might want us to consume this stuff like it’s the most addictive, sugary candy we could buy, I have never gotten the sense I was supposed to think of comic superheroes as serious. I don’t think any movie blurb has even come close to calling Kick-Ass “Dickens on Steroids” or some such nonsense. When they start doing that, then yes, we should all run, or perhaps fly, for those hills.

  1001. Man, you totally took a piss in Nick Wong’s face with this, but I love reading your thoughts.
    x

  1002. On the one hand, I feel like I shouldn’t complain because I , myself, didn’t define what I meant as “real,” and that’s because I think it’s a problematic term. On the other hand, I think you’re playing a semantic game that equates “real” with “popular” and elevates it to the existential level. By this definition, I hardly exist, so it’s obvious that I’m not thrilled by that framing.

    That said, I think you get at something essential about the ways we use the two terms: in common parlance “real” always refers to what has been presented as “real.” That is, if it claims to be, it is. With authenticity, however, the opposite is true. If someone claims something is “authentic,” our first reaction is to doubt them because authenticity is always in question.

    But I think this also reveals something particular about what is “real” because we accept that it’s “real,” but we don’t accept that it’s true in any meaningful sense. The real turns out to be kind of test of empiricism. A reality show is presented to us as documentation that something happened, and we accept that it did, but no one with half a brain would agree that the show gives the whole story or even the essential story. The idea that it’s manipulated is a given. We don’t even bother to ask because to ask would be to wonder something beyond banal. And for all its banality, it may be that this is the realest thought one can have in contemporary life.

  1005. I was just about to complain that we don’t have a massive, government-funded, mad scientist initiative to wipe the scourge of allergies off the face of the planet, and then I saw that, holy shit, this exists: http://www.aafa.org/

  1007. Dude, here’s a heartbreaking allergy story.

    It was the super-precious cherry blossom festival in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, and Jess and I go for the obvious benefits of watching her look at flowers.

    Or, that’s how I imagined it all in my head. Whatever combination of rare plants in full bloom sent my allergies in hyperdrive. I easily sneezed fifty times straight. I was popping benadryl like M&Ms, with the only effect that I was barely able to walk straight while having this epileptic sneezing attack.

    Allergies, they alienate you from the very air you breathe. They sully the otherwise like-affirming emergence of Spring.

    People should hate allergies way more than they do.

  1008. I am torn. Because I would actually rather talk about how I can’t help thinking of allergies as a character flaw than talk about “my” PhD, but it’s by the smallest of margins.
    It’s interesting though at what point possessive pronouns are assigned to medical incidents. As in, “she had a stroke” versus “his cancer came back.” Perhaps its a question of longevity.

  1010. Yes, trains are magical and slightly overpowering and quite romantic. It’s fun to dream about going on the classic ones like the Orient Express, the PanAmerican, the Ghan train from Adelaide to Ayers Rock, the Trans-Siberian from Moscow to Vladivostok. Ah, so many adventures, so little time . . .

  1011. Travel literature. Think: The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux, Rolling Nowhere by Ted Conover, In A Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson, or The Lunatic Express by Carl Hoffman.

  1012. Don’t forget that trains often serves as the scenes of murder and intrigue, a la “Murder on the Orient Express,” at least two Hitchcock films, and a slew of other books and movies.

    Plus they make for delightful action sequences. How many times have you seen Good Guy running and leaping along the top of train cars, pursued by Bad Guy(s)? (Brian, I hope this immediately brings to mind a young River Phoenix, if nothing else.)

    Trains also often provide the vehicle for dramatic departures, lovers and families being separated or reunited—a lone figure on a platform tearfully waving a handkerchief at her departing lover.

    And trains frequently afford an opportunity for characters to take on new or false identities, as trains are sort of a netherworld, a neither here nor there, a break from real, mundane life.

    See also: http://www.goletadepot.org/trains_movies.php#first

  1013. Tolstoy often placed significant events on trains. For instance, the final scene of Anna Karenina, and the “Kreutzer Sonata.”

    At least in the 19th century, wasn’t the train a symbol of modernity and progress?

    Great blog here!

  1014. I don’t think the question is whether or not the “hokey stuff” (which I never found hokey but hilarious and interesting) is supposed to be bad but whether it’s supposed to be believed. I think this is a book that relies heavily on its introduction, the chapter where Vonnegut speaks of how long its taken him to write a book about his personal experience in the fire bombing of Dresden. Then we go into a novel where we’ve fallen out of time, where we get flashes of Dresden but are unable to stay there for more than a few pages. One reading could be that this is Vonnegut still, after all these years and books, being unable to look directly at this tragedy for too long. This may explain why the aliens seem straight from a movie and why the main character gets to jump out of tragedy and into a glass dome where he has sex with a movie star. Of course, I may be reaching.

    Also, Billy Pilgrim is not a stand in for Vonnegut. In this novel, Vonnegut is a stand in for Vonnegut. He is a pathetic character but makes sense in this novel as an antithesis to the macho characters usually found in war movies placed in a moment in history that has no real space for heroics.

    In conclusion, Vonnegut is great. Brian is crazy.

  1015. for what it’s worth i’m really sick of the way you pick on Junot Diaz all the time.

  1016. Yep. I felt like any sincerity was choked out by his self-conscious fussing and his narrative hijinks. Are you saying the hijinks are a reflection of the absurd historical moment? I hear that. But I don’t know why that would lead us directly to scatalogical humor and dime-store wisdom. Are you saying the hokey stuff is *supposed* to be bad, and that’s why it’s good? This may come down to a difference in “taste.” Also, when did you first read Vonnegut? I wonder if he wears thin as we get older.

  1017. Really? Your objection is a lack of sincerity? I see Vonnegut’s texts as almost painfully sincere, something like an anguished refusal to be resigned even as one is all but inured by absurdity, all whipped up into tropes that we would dismiss as hokey if it weren’t for the fact that he’s just so damn earnest about it all.

  1021. There is a great essay in Robert Boswell’s The Half-Known World called “Urban Legends, Pornography, and Literary Fiction,” in which he make a convincing argument that the strength of literary fiction is that it can challenge the reader, whereas urban legends serve to confirm the listener’s beliefs by convincing him that the story is real (“I heard this from Margaret, who said this happens to her husband’s aunt”). The same, I think, could be said of the constructive narratives of memoir and reality television.

  1022. Whether you’re in Coyoacán, Mexico or Chushing, Maine, I agree that there’s something truly remarkable about standing in the same place an artist transformed brush strokes into an iconic image. Thanks for sharing.

  1023. The following quotes from his review are just further proof of Wood’s eloquent, critical genius:

    “Perhaps it is as absurd to talk about progress in literature as it is to talk about progress in electricity—both are natural resources awaiting different forms of activation.”

    “All this silly machinery of plotting and pacing, this corsetry of chapters and paragraphs, this doxology of dialogue and characterization!”

    Damn.

    “Probably there are more coincidences in real life than in fiction. To say ‘I love you’ is to say something at millionth hand, but it is not, then, necessarily to lie.”

  1024. It’s interesting (maybe?) to think of the professions that get turned into signifiers of address. Doctors, nurses, teachers – yes. Artists, bakers, athletes – no. The other day someone (who knew my name) tried to get my attention by yelling, “Hey, librarian!” I’d say it has something to do with cognitive authority, except that dentists and pharmacists aren’t usually addressed as such in common speech, so I suppose it remains a riddle.

  1025. You know – I was listening to Buju Banton’s ‘Til Shiloh album the other day. There’s a song called “Champion” – upon first, second, and third listenings the only lyrics I would discern were, “Walk Like a Champion, Talk Like a Champion…”

    At first I was kind of juiced. I thought, “What an interesting departure for Buju. A positive anthem! Most of his lyrics are about getting laid.” So then I looked up the lyrics:

    “Buju Banton wanna walk like a champion
    Talk like a champion
    What a piece of body gal
    Tell me where you get it from
    Knock ‘pon your entrance
    Ram pa pa pam pam
    Gal let me in
    Me have a thing that you are waiting”

    And it makes me like Buju even more.

  1026. This etymological exploration deserves to have been undertaken while sharing a scorpion bowl at Trad’r Sam. And do you have an explanation for the wonderful watering hole’s missing “e”? Perhaps a pirate stole it?

  1027. And the UM’s ideas are just the logical endpoint of Enlightenment/Modernist rational thinking, which implied a determined world. So, it follows, according to the UM, that you can’t really become anything unless it’s rationally determined and really out of your control. It gives him an excuse to sit out life in his little corner. I like how you put it: Dostoevsky’s revolutionary is our day-to-day.

    With Americans, it’s a combination of things that leads to general apathy or justifiable (even celebrated) ignorance. I agree with what you’ve pointed out, and would also add the demonization of the “intelligentsia” (witness Sarah Palin) and educated culture in general.

  1028. Two things. First, Larry the Cable guy is a character of Daniel Whitney, who doesn’t sound anything like Larry. Second, it’s worth unpacking what defines a redneck. The fact that Darin Stevens took Poli-Sci suggests he went to college and, presumably, has a typical middle-class job. Is a redneck just someone with poor taste in culture and political views? I think your point about people who take pride in their own ignorance is a good one, but I’m not sure “redneck” is a useful term, even aside from being an epithet.

  1029. Good quote. (And good book!)

    Maybe this is old news, but I was surprised to realize how similar these two attitudes are. “I’m [just a simple American / a hopeless geek], and I’m never going to fit in your society, so why try?”

    For Dostoevsky this would have been a misanthropic, and therefore taboo and revolutionary idea. But for us, in a society that’s broken into so nany niches, this kind of carefully cultivated misanthropy is a badge of honor. Doestoevsky’s revolutionary idea is our day-to-day.

  1030. Or, on the other hand:

    (From Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground)

    “And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something.”

  1034. I love Pelevin too! He’s always writing these incredibly crackpot fictions that underscore how nothing, or silence, is the essence of being. Thanks for your review!

  1040. Alex Trebek is an Oregon trail blazer of language mashup. It’s called the Double Jeopardy category “Before and After.”

    Jay Z also contributes to this kind of wordplay, with “Empire State of Mind.”

  1041. Rule #9 of 41: The reversal of size, expectation, etc.

    Example: “Ready-Made Bouquet” by Dean Young

    “The despair
    of loving may lead to long plane rides with
    little leg room, may lead to a penis full
    of fish, a burning chicken, a room filled
    with a single, pink rose. Funny, how
    we think of it as a giant rose,
    not a tiny room.”

    A penis full of fish?

  1042. Right, Ben. I guess it’s a gut feeling based on A) what I’ve paid for short story collections in the past, divided by the number of stories in a typical collection, and B) what individual short stories cost, now that you can buy them separately from places like The Atlantic (via Kindle). Adjusted upward or downward according to how much I got out of them, of course.

  1044. Funny, I always thought of the Fiction Advocate as more of a Communist blog, but it’s good to see a dutiful foot soldier like Klaus (Eric) representing, regardless.

  1045. A few months ago, Harper’s published this piece on usury in America that also used an It’s a Wonderful Life analogy, but in a slightly more helpful way:

    ***

    I like to tell people that to find out what deregulation of usury did to us, they should check out the next Christmas showing of It’s a Wonderful Life. Remember, Mr. Potter the bad banker would not make loans, while the tender-hearted George Bailey always would. Mr. Potter wanted references. He wanted character. Mr. Potter was the bad guy because the loan must be repaid!

    But Mr. Potter was lending at an interest rate of something like 2 percent. At those rates, he wanted to be repaid. But now Mr. Potter would have more choices. If he could charge 35 percent, he might not necessarily think, “The loan must be repaid”—at least not right away. And if he can charge 200 percent, he actually may not want the loan ever to be repaid. I had a retired schoolteacher in my office the other day whose husband is deep into Alzheimer’s. The two had taken a loan for $1,700, somehow managed to pay back $3,000, and still they had not even begun to pay off the principal. That’s not uncommon in our post–Mr. Potter world.

  1047. How do you feel about such a classic story (with themes and implications that touch on all many different aspects of the human condition) being used for such a pointed political argument?

  1050. Well, newspaper and magazines are also designed to increase advertising revenues, or at least, their business models function that way. And they provide important, challenging content. Sometimes even good fiction. Of course, you can argue that the quality of journalism has decreased in the last few decades (I was just reading a column about this in the LA Times. I think it’s more that TV, both as a medium and because of its commerciality, lends itself to rituals of engagement that are ultimately debasing.

  1051. I think DFW would say that TV can’t be as useful as fiction — not because it’s inferior as a medium, but because TV is designed to increase advertising revenue, so it necessarily abases itself and tries to grab your attention by whatever means available. It would also be interesting to hear what DFW thinks of the new dramas that have come out recently, like The Sopranos and The Wire and Mad Men, etc., where the goal is (counter-intuitively, for TV as a medium) long-term investment in character and story.

  1052. Weird that he felt that way when Reality TV was just getting started. Or when TV watching could be omni-present through PDAs. I wonder how he’d feel about that. My question is whether or not there’s something inherent to TV as a medium that makes it necessarily incapable of being as socially/culturally/intellectually/artistically useful as fiction. If TV imagines narrative for you, is it possible for it to be as personally significant as a book, where you imagine narrative for yourself?

  1055. Love it.

    But too late! I already made my reading list for 2010!

    (See The Literary Brothel for more deets.)

    (Yes, we use words like “deets” on the site.)

    (But not as often as parenthetical addendums.)

    Thanks though.

    Seriously.

    -Klaus

  1060. This assumes people will continue reading books…

    Now, Choose Your Own Adventure movies…who’s with me?

    -KV

    (Btw, I believe I’ve read every CYOA book and as I recall, Cave of Time was a solid effort.)

    (Btw2 – Thing to keep in mind when you peruse CYOA books and find them simple and predictable – I was in 4th grade when I read those books.)

  1061. I hear you. She’s supposed to be our double agent, spying on behalf of the regular guys, but she’s good friends with half the celebrities she writes about. All I can say is, in 2009 Joan Didion seems like a celebrity herself, but in the 1970s, when she was writing this book, she was probably a bit more of a scrapper. I guess we’ll always need a new Joan Didion. The new one comes along to expose the complicity of the old one. I think the real Joan would welcome that.

  1062. Nice review. Her work is fantastic, yet one aspect keeps bothering me about Didion the essayist–is there a point at which Didion herself is absorbed into the tyranny and over-indulgence of the age she is simultaneously critiquing? Can she admonish the corrupt wastefulness of the Reagan mansion as she writes from her suite in a posh and renowned Hawaiian resort? http://www.kahalaresort.com/resort-history.cfm

    The Year of Magical Thinking is probably a better example of what I’m talking about. But maybe if pointing out absurdities/hypocrisy is Didion’s thing, it’s only fair that she exposes herself to the same judgment.

  1063. PS. I linked the wrong website to my name above. Don’t click that link!

    Or do, now that you’re probably intrigued, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

    -Klaus

  1064. “Keeps it classy” is always a great turn of phrase.

    “Turn of phrase” is not so great. My bad.

    To answer your question(s): No, kinda, no, I’m rooting for an FA Zine.

    -KV

  1066. In re #1 – This makes me think of Suetonius when he describes how Roman generals would slaughter chickens before major battles and make decisions based on how the blood splattered. When I read that, I told my dad how funny I thought it was that we lionize this civilization that was run by people who decided what to do because of poultry fluids. And he said that it wasn’t any stranger than people making decisions in their lives based on poll numbers, chart rankings and number crunching. So at least there’s the comfort of knowing that we will seem as silly as the Romans in another millennium or two.

  1068. Damn you and your culture wars! This country was founded on Norse principles, and what’s good enough for the Founding Fathers (Benjamin Freyanklin, John Quincy Odins, Alokixander Hamilton) is good enough for me!

  1070. Dannybayridge, those are good questions. They make me realize I should put together a mission statement for this blog, since I have some axioms in mind, but I haven’t really shared them.

    The premises I’m operating on here are that A) everything is, as you say, a narrative, B) there is great value in recognizing and understanding the narratives that operate in our daily lives, be they personal, political, artistic, or what-have-you, C) the best way to make and share narratives is through language, which is our most powerful narrative-making tool, and narratives that use language are called “fiction,” D) non-fiction doesn’t exist E) what the Fiction Advocate should do is promote the enjoyment and understanding of good fiction as a means of understanding the rest of the world. I want to make literary fiction a laboratory that shows how everything else works. Calling things “fiction” instead of “narrative” is a step in that direction. I hope this also explain why there are no recipes on the blog (yet): recipes fall under the purview, but books are closer to the heart of the matter.

    I don’t know about the relative truthfulness of those two statements. I guess I set myself an impossible task here, since I believe everything is actually a created, fallible, fictional narrative. I’m being disingenuous when I try to compare them objectively. Sorry about that.

  1072. I don’t think you would really stick to your own definition of fiction if you were pressed. Your blog is called fiction advocate. I don’t see any recipes, higway signs, or sacred texts on your blog.

    I humbly suggest you’ve got the wagon before the horse. I’d argue that narrative is the broader category, where fiction and nonfiction are subsets. Unless you’re Derrida, but you’re not.

    So how do we collectively and individually perceive and navigate the line between fiction and nonfiction, or between fallible and infallible?

    What makes your statement that “the more I read—and the more widely I read—the more I realize how utterly mortal and fallible narratives are” somehow more Truthful than “I read one thing and that thing is immortal and infallible?”

    And I ask because I’m curious how you’ve arrived at that decision, not because I think you’re inherently right or wrong.

  1074. Klaus, I don’t know if I recognize a difference anymore. But I really did walk into a Veterans Day parade yesterday and see the things I described.

  1077. Haul, indeed. That 103 mile straight-shot on an eight-lane freeway has been known to take anywhere from 1.5 to 4.37 hours. Urban legend has it that the more of a hurry you’re in to get to SD, the longer it will take you. (4.37 hours? WTF!!?!)

    Not to get all information sciency on you, but rather than tempting the fates with a sojourn to Dr. Seuss’s library, I’ll utilize the interlibrary loan system here on campus, request it from the comfort of my office/living room, and pick it up when I’m there to poison the minds of the XYZ generation.

    And by “poison” I mean “punch.”

    Seriously.

    -Klaus

  1078. I did not mean to write cut-ups.
    Not to get all librarian-ish on you, Klaus, but all the information you needed to resolve your anomalous state of knowledge was contained in my post! To get all librarian-ish on you, according to WorldCat, the nearest copy of Bellamy’s Cunt-Ups (LCSH PS3552.E5319 C86 2001 – you’ll want to jot that down before you peruse the stacks!), in which the author augmented William Burroughs incorrigible cut-ups, is at UCSD’s Geisel library, which is apparently a 103 mile haul from Culver City.

  1079. Nice words about the Russian book.

    Did Jessa mean to write “cut-ups?”

    We’ll never know.

    Sincerely,

    Confused in Culver City

  1080. Oooh, fiction advocate goes political. In the next installment, I demand a series of Dodie Bellamy-esque cunt-ups of congress-people’s Twitter posts.

  1082. When I looked at photos of American democracy in action as people swarmed to DC to hold up pictures of the President as the Joker and various other pieces of political commentary, I kept hearing Sun Ra and his Arkestra in my head chanting, over and over again, “It’s after the end of the world . . . don’t you know that yet?!” My favorite was a girl holding up a poster that said “Nazi stood for National SOCIALISTS.” Why not just hold up a poster that says “I have never read a book, essay, or article about the Nazi party?” Sweetie–I would say to her–Nazis _killed_ Communists. I know what the word stands for; but Nazis did lie sometimes, shocking as it is. . . . I suppose this is all slightly off-topic, but what can I say? I’m typing this at the office while my boss is sitting right next to me; it’s distracting. . . .

  1083. You know, it’s really hard to ignore the depressingly obstinate and out-to-lunch elements of that Roth interview when people keep insisting on bringing them up. Just kind of inconsiderate, that’s all I’m saying.

  1085. Philip Roth is so old, they didn’t even have douchebags in his day. They had sheep bladders, soaked overnight in lye, that squirted water through a hollow reed.

  1087. “Modern English is more efficient, more economical, more effective, plainer — in a good way — than it used to be, all of which makes it better suited to its ultimate purpose: getting what’s inside us out. There’s less need for translation. Especially between men. Men understand other men more clearly than at any other time in our shared history, because we’ve become exceptionally good at smashing the bottles that once trapped our messages.”

    Uber Barf. Two things:
    1. “Especially between men”? So this implies women are somehow less direct or understandable? Believe me when I say directly and without hidden agenda: This is bull crap.
    2. Modern English’s main purpose is all about, according to this Mr. Jones, “getting what’s inside us out.” If that’s not the most male-centric, thinly veiled illusion to speech (and by extension language and writing) being a sex-act, I don’t know what is. Go jizz all over someone else’s magazine, Mr. Jones.

  1088. Oh my Lord. I followed some of those links, Jessa. The sight of this accident caused two spectators to have heart attacks, and three players to vomit on the ice.

    As they say in Ottawa (because it’s their airport code): YOW.

  1090. Haven’t you heard anything about NJ politics in the last 6 months –it’s corrupt and run by the mob –you are not going to get a trial –if you killed the wrong people they’ll whack you and then throw you in the Hudson with some cement shoes –and if you killed the right people –well they would probably be fine with that.

  1092. Sackpanther, you can always write some erotic fan fiction in which the main characters get it on.

  1093. I like how the character is inappropriate while he appropriates art. I like how he blunders, even while he castigates. I wish he and the girl in the jacket could have boned.

  1094. Now can you write another one about the NYPL Humanities and Social Sciences library? About how sometimes hoarse, mock-whispers are louder than low-tone talking? About crowding around the Gutenberg bible and consequently blocking the way to the main reading room? About spending less time taking pictures with the goddamn lion statues and more time (it only takes a second, I promise) figuring out what security needs from you *before* you get to the front of the line?

  1095. I think the grandmother was way more interesting than he was, although perhaps that was the point.

  1099. Is it uncouth of me to say I enjoyed this and not offer any criticism? I’m not terribly good at criticism…

  1100. I’m debating whether or not it would be okay to read similar selections during Man Night.*

    *women: there is no such thing as Man Night.

  1104. So, this post wasn’t prompted by my recent comment on your James Woods fill-in-the-blank was it. I apologize for not citing my source; I was cooking while the segment was running and only gleaned the gist without really understanding the meat or noticing the source. My most sincere apologies for not thouroughly researching my omments. I promise you I will follow Strunk and White rules for reference from here on.

  1106. The idea of a Perry cover-up in the Willingham case is idiotic.

    Perry’s replacement of the 3 board members was guaranteed to bring more outrage, more suspicion, more attention and, even more, negative political and media fallout.

    And Perry knew that, before he did it.

    Furthermore, the reports, highly critical of the Willingham trial forensics have long been in the public domain.

    There is zero opportunity for a cover up, but a 100% chance of negative political fallout, which is the last thing Perry needs.

    The question, then, is “Why DID Perry do this?”

    It’s a mystery. Maybe someone will try to solve it, instead of crying “cover up” when the case is, already, fully exposed.

    The comparison of Perry’s actions to Richard Nixon’s firing of Archiblad Cox are idiotic. Nixon fired Cox before the release of the tapes. Predictably, that is Barry Sheck’s analogy – simply stupid.

  1107. As an example of better science journalism, here’s a recent article that cites a study, describes the study, interviews the people who conducted the study, and draws its conclusions directly from the study — and never stoops to making the readers feel like this is a story about them, personally. Plus, the study is really cool. Bravo.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/health/06mind.html

  1109. Trottesque

    Did you mean: grottesque Top 2 results shown
    The golden age of grottesque – Club CDFreaks / MyCE – Knowledge is …
    2 posts – Last post: May 8, 2002
    ciao gente…. sapete per caso quando uscirà il nuovo album di marilyn manson? ho sentito che doveva uscire in autunno….. ma ancora non ho …

    And so on…

  1110. I recently saw some clip where some people in a position to issue forth on the matter were discussing the standard late-night formula for intro monologues; most of it was devoted to the practice of repeating anything that elicits a positive reaction to the point where it no longer provokes the desired effect. I guess I want you to know that I’m on to you, Hurley. I’m on to you, and the fiction of Richard Powers sometimes resembles a salacious pukwudgie.

  1112. “The fiction of Richard Powers sometimes resembles a knocked-up Easter Bunny.”

  1117. What if you spelled it “Barents Sonic?” There was something called the Barents Sonic Flight Test in 1967, where the Norwegian government tried to break the sound barrier by flying one of its Royal Air Force fighter planes at high speed over the Barents Sea. The Barents Sea is frozen most of the year, so the atmosphere above it is very smooth and offers little wind resistance.

  1118. Your search – Berentsonic – did not match any documents.

    Suggestions:

    Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
    Try different keywords.
    Try more general keywords.
    Get more cred.

  1121. Good call. Here are Google results for those.

    Tennysonian: 83,000
    Lockean: 240,000
    Emersonian: 128,000

    quixotic: 1,230,000
    faustian: 403,000
    falstaffian: 258,000

  1122. Tennysonian. Lockean. Emersonian.

    What about adjectives named after characters, like “quixotic,” “faustian,” “falstaffian,” etc.?

  1125. Oh man. These keep getting better. If you want me to print you a bookmark with your favorite one, just let me know.

  1126. HENRY JAMES won’t recommend your fiction to his friends, because he fears it will make them “pansies.”

  1140. So, do you think these would work well in my Video Game Enthusiasts magazine? I would like these Literary Aspersions cast in bronze. I shouldn’t eat 12″ of sub and comment for the meat pickles my wits!

  1142. O.HENRY deleted your last email without even reading it.

    HEMINGWAY says if you write one more tersely worded lame-o short story, he’s gonna pastiche all over your face.

  1144. I would like the Austen, Woolf and Plath bookmarks. “Henry James shat on your novella” would be a nice addition, too.

  1146. Sheer genius. I want them in every color.

    I smell a meme.

    NAIPAUL thinks your blog is inane.

    JOYCE wouldn’t kick it. Even if he was drunk.

  1149. Balzac wanted you to read n+1 as much as Fred Astaire wanted to you buy a Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner.

    It’s always disgusting when an advertiser/marketer co-opts a famous person’s identity, whether the family members authorized it or not.

    I’m putting a clause in my will forbidding my image to be used to hawk anything (well, except maybe Jameson—that’s a product I stand behind).

  1150. Yeah, this does seem to be a regular point of inquiry for you, the question of how to make continuous the inclusion of authors in literary conversations, which may or may not take place after they die (because not doing so would be doing them and their texts a disservice), while at the same time respecting their subjectivity as people. I think it bothers me less because I insist on a hard separation of authors and texts – piss poor analysis of a an author’s book offends me more than obnoxious coopting of an author’s personna.

  1152. Thanks for bringing it down to my level at the end, Jessa.

    As usual, I wrote this under the false impression that I was talking about books themselves, but it turns out I was really talking about how books are described, advertised, received, and evaluated.

    I like that paragraph from Lethem, and I like the whole plagiarism conceit of his article. But it seems like he’s beating a dead horse when he argues that all fiction is heavily indebted to other fiction. Like, duh. That’s been a truism forever. Only snobby people with a really short memory would fail to agree with that right away. It’s like when graphic novelists and genre fiction writers (including Lethem) complain that the oppressive hordes of highbrow readers just don’t understand what [comics/sci-fi] are all about. Who still needs to be convinced that comics and sci-fi are awesome? Who still needs to be convinced that we’re all a bunch of plagiarists?

    What I’m really interested in is how we invoke the spirits of our dear, departed “masters” to describe and sell books today. On some level, isn’t it kind of a desecration to say that Balzac would urge people to buy stuff from n+1? We can’t possibly know that, or check with Balzac, who was once a real person with a right to his own opinions. Lethem wears his “references” like badges of honor, but would all those authors willing bless his work by lending their names? Bloom thinks that genius writers are perpetually engaging with each other’s work across time and space, but the only way that makes any sense whatsoever is as an abstract critical apparatus for Bloom and his readers. It just seems strange to me that we’re so willing to make and accept claims about what famous dead authors would have endorsed… if they weren’t, you know, dead and gone and incapable of endorsing anything. This is how we fall into a trap like Rabassa did, where he defined Clarice Lispector in relation to someone she had never actually read. Invoking the name of a famous dead author reveals more about our need for readymade categories — and our tendency to think of authors as nodes of critical theory, rather than human beings — than it does about the work in question. I realize that authors ARE, in fact, nodes of critical theory, but aren’t they also humans? What’s to stop me from saying that Susan Sontag wanted children to smoke Camel cigarettes? Or that my use of a character named Baby Suggs makes me a direct literary descendant of Toni Morrison?

  1153. Jonathan Lethem wrote an article (http://harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387 – but you’ll probably have to be a subscriber. I’d attach a pdf but wordpress doesn’t truck with that) in HARPER’S about plagiarism and authorship and influence. I really liked it, but less because of anything it said about how authors treat each other and more because of this paragraph:
    “Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a YouTube rebroadcast of the Berlin Wall’s fall—i.e., when damn near everything presents itself as familiar—it’s not a surprise that some of today’s most ambitious art is going about trying to make the familiar strange. In so doing, in reimagining what human life might truly be like over there across the chasms of illusion, mediation, demographics, marketing, imago, and appearance, artists are paradoxically trying to restore what’s taken for ‘real’ to three whole dimensions, to reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights.”
    This is what concerns me about technology and art – not as far as using technology to make art, which is fine, but using technology to understand or archive or reference art.
    But this isn’t what the fiction advocate wants to know. So in response to that pressing question, hell yeah, Leon Trotsky is going to go all Chupacabra on n+1 editors, one by one, and coagulate their sucked blood into the shapes of a hammer and sickle.

  1154. From “Scouting for Boys,” the original 1908 edition by Robert Baden-Powell:

    “Remember that drink never yet cured a single trouble; it only makes troubles grow worse and worse the more you go on with it. It makes a man forget for a few hours what exactly his trouble is, but it also makes him forget everything else. If he has a wife and children it makes him forget that his duty is to work and help them out of the difficulties instead of making himself all the more unfit to work.

    “A man who drinks is generally a coward—and one used to see it very much among soldiers. Nowadays they are a better class and do not drink.

    “Some men drink because they like the feeling of getting half stupid, but they are fools, because once they take to drink no employer will trust them, and they soon become unemployed and easily get ill, and finally come to a miserable end. There is nothing manly about getting drunk. Once a man gives way to drink it ruins his health, his career, and his happiness, as well as that of his family.”

  1157. All of you fuckers are getting a bookmark. It’s going to be so awesome you’ll have to go out and buy some awesome new books just to keep it company.

  1160. The longer it takes to create the special bookmark from the Fiction Advocate OMG OMFG, the better the end result will be. Patience, dear readers.

  1162. I object to any binary that posits reality tv as equivalent to non-fiction, but if anything, this ad seems to be attempting to carve out a space in reality tv for men because reality tv shows tend to be geared towards women. I’m thinking of Bridezillas, home and people makeover shows, the Real Housewives franchise. I bet most of the talent shows (Dancing With the Stars, American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance?, Top Chef, Project Runway) have a stronger following among women than men. Unless you define the History Channel and National Geographic as reality tv (and you could probably make an effective argument for doing so) I think reality tv generally targets a female audience. If you wanted to bring genre and gender into the equation, I’d say the more salient stereotype would perhaps be about reality tv that’s blatantly about shocking viewers versus reality tv that’s driven by ploys for empathy.

  1163. Side question. I think we can agree that these commercials are targeted primarily at men. (The bachelor protagonists, the bro-like “whack,” the extreme sports clips, the typeface that’s reminiscent of Axe Body Spray ads.) Could this be an extension of the belief that men are more interested in “non-fiction” stories, while women are the primary audience for fiction?

  1164. I would guess either ‘Cancer,’ ‘Casserole,’ or ‘Bolweevil.’ I say this knowing full well the correct answer has already been given.

  1165. FA, I think you laser-targeted the argument for language as an intransitive medium by referencing grammar & syntax.

    I HATE to name drop in this sort of conversation but I took a course on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and am by no means an expert and I cannot give anything other than a fifteen word synopsis of it, but it was still really good for people who like to think about this thing.

    Please forgive the reference to an academic work everyone I promise you’re way smarter and way more educated than I am.

  1166. It’s funny that you use a bike as an example of something we can be convinced that we always longed for. Because there’s a British magician-type guy who used neuro-linguistic programming (which is a fancy term for hustling somebody) to convince Simon Pegg that the gift he always wanted was a red bike.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=befugtgikMg

    I think you’re right to imply that our nostalgia is easily manipulated, and emotional investment in something like Where the Wild Things Are can be bought, or drummed up, with a bit of marketing.

  1167. Okay. I like what you’re saying because I like language and texts and thus I like seeing it validated over movies, which I don’t so much like as a medium.
    There seems to me to be a psychological dishonesty going on in the remake of children’s books as movies over which 20 somethings can reminisce. Something about the professed fondness for WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE strikes me as profoundly false, a yearning for something we didn’t all-that-much cherish at the time. Not in the way as an adult I miss my Nana’s homemade jam, which I took for granted as a kid and spread liberally over giant chunks of sourdough bread. But in an overtly self-conscious, aren’t-we-so-in-touch-with-something-we-lost way; like coming across a hot wheels bike that we never actually had as a kid, but maybe would have liked to, to the extent that we start making up stories in our heads of having had the fastest hot wheels on the block and proving it more than once. In terms of media, we move it to a movie and thus preserve something of its original preciousness, allowing us to have a new relationship to the remake, even though we’re not all that honest with ourselves about relationships to the original.
    Am I over-analyzing? Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. But I would have liked to have seen your hot wheels in San Francisco.

  1169. I’m haunted forever by a romance I’m currently in.

    Hahaha!

    Okay, jokes aside, I read this Fronchy sparkling turd of a collection last night. And I’ve never been so continuously infuriated by a book I also found so readable. I know I shouldn’t, but the instant I read a male writer drawing a female protagonist, I put on my skeptical hat. But this is one writer who deserves it. How does this bastard presume to know what a woman sees when she looks at a male body or her own? And this happens in just about every story. Every woman in this book is shallow, empty, broken, rich, well-married, slightly daft, beautiful, powerless, sexy, and 35 (at least in their minds). Perhaps all French women are just like that. I don’t know.

    And each story ends with some little twist or punchline that’s supposed to be cute but each of which made me say right out loud “That’s ridiculous!” or “How stupid!” Yet, I kept reading. I am not completely befuddled as to why this is an “international bestseller” when you think of the writing of some of America’s bestsellers. I am curious about the thinking behind Europa’s decision to acquire it. Do they make acquisitions based on international sales or on the quality of the writing of a work in translation? Or both? I’ve found Europa’s books to be pretty hit or miss. Or perhaps they are just true windows into the crap the rest of the world is reading.

  1171. Hush. Just go up to the podium and accept your very special bookmark from the fiction advocate omg omfg.

  1174. Indeed. But I also want to give the eventual winner a SPECIAL BOOKMARK FROM THE FICTION ADVOCATE OMG OMFG!!!

  1176. I think we all choke on too much foot fetish, Carrie M. Right about when the ankle goes in.

  1177. Wouldn’t that ruin the fun? I thought you were looking for amusing answers rather than accurate ones.

  1179. Yeah, the James Bond in the new Casino Royale gets drunk on his special martini recipe. I didn’t bring it up because it’s a counter-example to my point. But I’m pretty sure it was intended as a trasngressive, you-didn’t-see-it-coming type of thing, and if that’s the only instance of James Bond getting tipsy in all of his 20-odd movies, then it might be the exception that proves the rule.

  1183. Didn’t James Bond get drunk on martinis in his newest film? I seem to recall.

    Also, thanks for bringing up Mad Dog 20/20, which really isn’t cited enough in literary and film criticism, I find. Plus, it gives me a chance to answer a recent burning question: Just what is it?

    Fortified wine, kids. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_20/20. Watch yourself.

  1186. For example, if I didn’t already know the answer, I might guess “carbon monoxide.” You can ponder it, relish it, and eventually choke on it. But that’s two words. So maybe I’d guess “ornithology.” Or “playa-hatin”. There is no limit to the number of guesses you can make.

  1187. “Are Gaiman and Eggers using every available platform because they’re afraid a single movie or book won’t sell enough?” I’d be curious to read a Fiction Advocate follow-up to this question exploring the ramifications of multi-platform storytelling

    “Do stories transcend their medium?” I would argue that they do not, and will intellectually duel to the death to prove it.

  1188. What exactly do you mean by “stories that were inherently connected to their medium”?
    At first I was totally opposed to a film version of WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE but then I saw trailers with the super persuasive Arcade Fire song and I came around a bit. Then I saw a longer trailer that include interviews with Maurice Sendak and my enthusiasm plummeted.
    On a tangent, you wouldn’t believe the number of tattoos realted to WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. I see them all the time.

  1189. I saw Edward Jones do a Q and A after The Known World, his novel about black slave-owners, came out, and the audience was scandalized to learn that he had done no actual research for the book; he had simply learned that blacks had owned slaves, spent a few years planning on doing research about it but couldn’t bring himself to face the drudgery, and finally wound up just writing the book. The audience couldn’t believe it. They would say, “What kind of research did you do?,” he would say, “I didn’t do any research,” and what everyone in the room seemed to hear was, “I did some extremely avant-garde form of research and I dare you to figure out what it was.” Other people seemed offended, as if he’d lied to them by writing this fictional novel. At last he said something along the lines that he found it troubling that no one seemed to have faith in the imagination of an author anymore, in the notion that the truth it tells is different from but (at least) equally valid to factual truth. In my more codgerish moods I feel like there’s something very insidious going on, as if our culture is engaged in an aggressive and hostile, albeit mindless and unplanned, campaign to paralyze us spiritually by training us to think that every thought and opinion we have has to be authorized. Compare a letter that Flaubert wrote once; I’m composing this in my office, natch, so I can’t check the source and I’m probably bungling it; but the drift was that he had at some previous point written a story in which he had described some particular type of scene that he’d never actually witnessed, and after the story was published he had the chance to observe such a scene in real life, whereupon he found that it matched up with his fictional description; the quote is something like, “Once it reaches a certain level of discipline, the soul doesn’t make mistakes.”

    By the way, if you want to read a novel about a wealthy white person giving away a fortune because of class guilt, but by a vastly superior writer (not that I _hate_ poor Eggers), check out The Needle’s Eye by Margaret Drabble. It’s also one of the few top-notch novels I’ve ever read that manages to describe life in the suburbs (albeit London suburbs) without being snooty, or sentimental, or ironic, or any of those other duck blinds behind which hacks such as myself hide.

  1191. Well, the family at the center of “Zeitoun” is Syrian-American. But yes, it’s strange. “You Shall Know Our Velocity” was about a couple of white American males who find a bunch of money, have an attack of conscience, and try to get rid of it in the most globally humane way possible. One day we might look back and say Dave Eggers was obsessed with apologizing for his race and class.

  1192. I’m undecided about my feelings towards Eggers being the voice of displaced black people. But it does seem a little strange. Doesn’t it?

  1193. Thanks to Ashley for mentioning two other full-sentence titles of newly released fiction: “This Is Where I Leave You,” by Jonathan Tropper, and “It Feels So Good When I Stop,” by Joe Pernice.

  1194. Thanks for the link, Dan.

    I’m adding the photo of Clinton and Kim Jong-Il, which should have occurred to me in the first place.

    Why doesn’t an article like this talk about US propaganda? The photo of Gates and the Cambridge policeman sharing a beer at the White House is at least as manipulative as Clinton’s photo in Korea. Barack Obama is still identified with that iconic Shepard Fairey poster that looks, to me, like a direct homage to Soviet and Chinese propaganda. A few months ago I blogged about an Austrian movie director who places “Air Force One” right alongside “Triumph of the Will” as a piece of political propaganda.

    http://fictionadvocate.com/2009/06/02/john-wray-has-a-dark-side-and-its-dark/

    If we’re going to scoff at Putin for taking his shirt off (and we should) we should also try to recognize when we’re being played.

  1195. I was teasing, but if you haven’t read the article it’s right up your alley:

    Totalitarian kitsch exists to glorify the state, foster a personality cult surrounding the dictator and celebrate ceaseless and irrevocable social and economic progress through images of churning factories and happy, exultant workers…

    …Vladimir Putin’s office released photographs of the Russian prime minister on vacation that are nothing if not totalitarian kitsch. One shows him bare-chested on horseback, another swimming butterfly in a river. “Putin’s action-man holiday album,” was the BBC’s snarky headline, and they were right. All political leaders try to project an image of vitality and vigor, but these photos went farther in their attempt to portray Mr. Putin as somehow superhuman. As such, they are of a piece with the propagandistic purposes of totalitarian kitsch in which the leader is turned into a larger-than-life icon.

    From “Why Dictators Love Kitsch, Wall Street Journal 8/10/09
    http://tiny.cc/zlQUM

  1196. No you didn’t, because I haven’t read anything from the Wall Street Journal in months, much less something that would pertain to this post, but perhaps you could share a relevant link.

  1199. Nobody’s going to ask, are they? I have to be the one who does it? Really?

    Fine.

    What’s up with that Robert Repino tweet?

  1200. Your excerpts from Mr. Ferris remind me why I’m not a fiction writer. Because they sound exactly like any story I’ve tried to write and then immediately torn up. (The “this happened and then this happened and then he said that and then this other thing happened” school of writing, otherwise known as “what I did on my summer vacation.”)

    But then, I am not a graduate of writing programs nor have I been featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. So one might expect a bit more from him.

  1201. You’re still revolutionary in my book.

    And by “book” I mean “comment.”

    This comment.

    Right here.

    Where I called you revolutionary.

    And emulated the play on words thing you did in your piece.

    And now have gone on too long.

    Bye.

  1202. Update: three people I know who’ve read advance copies of Joshua Ferris’s forthcoming book (Jan 2010) say it’s surprisingly bad. Which makes me feel a bit less revolutionary for accusing him of being boring. But we’ll see if any of the major reviewers are honest about “The Unnamed,” or if they give Ferris a “get out of jail free” card simply because his first book did so well.

  1205. I want dannybayridge to have a blog.

    But I like Mike Myers, so there’s no accounting for taste.

  1206. I could see Littell’s agent writing the following lead in his proposal:

    Nazis are evil. Hannibal Lecter is also evil. But what if Hannibal Lecter WAS A NAZI!?

    additional substitutes for evil subjects: tanning salon employees, people who are still Mike Myers fans, The Baltimore Ravens, violinists (but not fiddlers), ambidextrous people, lolcats.

  1207. If you find yourself writing about Nazis as a cheap ploy to elicit a sense of evil, consider substituting one of the following groups instead: Zaptistas, Dittoheads, the EPA, Mongols, residents of the state of Kentucky, werebears, Tories.

  1208. Personally, I think writing Nazis into fiction or film makes for lazy symbolism. Although I will probably go see the new Quentin Tarantino, any time I watch an action movie and the villain is a Nazi or someone with ties to Nazis or possesses qualities that are of or like Nazis, I’m annoyed. I’m not saying it’ll ever be time to stop studying the Holocaust or WWII, just that using them as a ploy to elicit a sense of evil is, I think, artistically and psychologically cheap.

  1212. Oh, it’s on.

    You want to see some “masculine” perception, strength, decisiveness and compassion? Wait for m.snowe’s blog post about this. (That’s not saying you’re wrong about anything, but m.snowe has some things to say that would be better in a post, not a measly comment.)

  1213. Hey broseph. I don’t have much to say about this, but just wanted to say I liked this series of posts. That essay kicks around at the back of my mind sometimes. I probably need to revisit Remainder. I didn’t appreciate it when I read it.

  1215. History evolves and events previously in the shadows discover the light; that’s why we revise non-fiction. Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel “The Last Tycoon”, actually, was revised by Matthew J. Bruccoli, working from Fitzgerald’s original notes, back in 1993 for Cambridge University Press. Also, Raymond Chandler’s last Philip Marlowe adventure, “Poodle Springs”, was finished by mystery writer Robert B. Parker.

  1217. How about this? One person, one book. Everyone is encouraged to write one book in their lifetime, and also forbidden to write more than one book in their lifetime. So there is a one-to-one correspondence between humans and books: each person is represented by a single book , and vice versa. This would force everyone to participate — and participate equally — in reading and writing.

  1218. I thought they were mocking academia, a world containing titles such as “Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England” and “A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in American,” and of course who can forget the classic work by Christine Leigh Heyrman, “Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750.”

  1223. Well I finally got around to picking up The Savage Detectives. Am a hundred pages in, but I think it’s great.

  1225. I think every blogger needs an arch-enemy.

    That’s not John Madden?

    What if we just take classic titles and McSweeney-ize them?

    E.g.:

    “War is a Bloody Pain in the Ass But Peace Is No Picnic Either”
    “Les Miserables Sont Seulement Miserables Jusqu’à Eux Meurent”
    “Emma Thinks Boys Are Dumb”
    “The Earth Isn’t Really That Good, and Living in China Kind of Sucks”
    “I’ll Wuther Your Heights”

  1226. Whew… “Arkansas” actually takes place in Arkansas. Remember “Prague” by Arthur Phillips, which takes place in Budapest?

  1228. He looks like something. “indie virtue of confessional sincerity” is probably a good term for it. It’s just the mainstreaming of that tendency, seeing books on the front page of the NYT Book Review with cutesy titles. There will be a backlash to this, won’t there? Just live through it.

  1229. Also, does anyone else think Gore Vidal looks like John Madden in this picture?

  1230. Peter Plogojowitz, alleged vampire
    George Mason, American patriot
    Percy Bysshe Shelley
    John Eberhard Faber (pencil manufacturer)
    Will Rogers
    Richard Brautigan
    Yo

  1232. Oh man, I’m pencilling that (fictional-yet-amazing) book party in my calendar right now.

  1233. Yes. I thought about making the comparison, but it’s complicated. In terms of timing, Remainder was first published in France in 2005. Synechdoche was released in 2008. So there could have been some overlap in the periods when they were first written. But I haven’t heard anyone claim that one influenced the other.

    Both are about solipsistic men who stage elaborate re-creations of obscure moments from their private lives. But Synechdoche deals with theater, is interested in human psychology, and turns the elaborate re-creations into a kind of echo chamber. Remainder, in contrast, is about NOT performing, NOT thinking, and NOT interacting with other people. The events cascade to a chilling, inevitable endpoint.

    It actually surprised me that two stories with such similar premises could be so different. I’ll try to think of a more succint way to explain this. A big difference is that Synechdoche uses the premise to explore the main character’s life, while Remainder invents a cypher protagonist to explore the premise.

  1235. Does that mean we’ve also developed the technology to destroy Quincy Jones?

  1237. I was browsing around in Elliot Bay Books yesterday, and I started thinking about Powell’s and what made it so great — other than, or because of, the millions of books, cafe, organizational style of colored rooms, thousands of people…

    And it’s this: Every time I’m at Powell’s, I get the feeling that a new best friend is also there.

  1238. I think there are a lot of music writers that would take issue with the assessment that music lends itself to a more casual criticism (at least all the time), and that there are people who give casual assessments of books.

    Also, not all music is better experienced live. Some bands are notorious for giving terrible shows, but their albums are amazing, and some people’s albums might be grating, but their live show mind-blowing.

    Also, playlists are just fun.

  1239. “Even the most heartless, coldly intellectual reader enjoys reading about ideas she recognizes, and she does so because she imagines some common understanding between herself and the writer…”

    I can assure you that I most sincerely have no interest in the histories or intentions of fiction writers.

    Frigidness, thy name is Danielle.

  1240. FSG is alphanumeric code for 6.19.7, or June 19, 1807, the date of the start of the Battle of Athos in the Russo-Turkish War, which I believe marks the exact moment when western civilization began its long, slow decline.

    FSG is also a book publisher.

  1242. Bands tour because music is something to be experienced, and it’s a better experience live.

    Literature is an experience as well, and the idea that music should be experienced live is on the wane. Some music just can’t be experienced live, and the now almost universal use of backing tracks underscores this point. And while I generally prefer music that can be and is performed live, there’s plenty of music I enjoy that simply can’t be reproduced outside of a studio.

    Reading is an exchange between a reader and a text.

    I’ve been thinking about Brian’s post, and I think it really highlights what is and has always been specious about his argument: while it may be technically true and useful for academic discussion, in practice, it’s a pointless distinction. Even the most heartless, coldly intellectual reader enjoys reading about ideas she recognizes, and she does so because she imagines some common understanding between herself and the writer (not between herself and the text). Moreover, making that distinction is a lot like pointing out that you can’t ever truly know another person. Are you engaging with your lover, or are you just interacting with his or her persona?

    It’s not that the argument’s untrue or invalid, but you can hardly live by it. You’d end up saying odd things like, “These words here–they really get me.”

  1243. “[R]eading is fundamentally an exchange between an author and a reader in private.”
    Lie! Or at least, mischaracterization. Reading is an exchange between a reader and a text. I know it pegs me as a stalwart believer in the whole “What Is an Author” vs. “The Death of the Author” showdown, but it’s just as much of a fiction to assume that you know the author through reading his/her text as it is to assume that you know the author after watching him/her on Oprah.

  1244. Bands tour because music is something to be experienced, and it’s a better experience live. But reading is fundamentally an exchange between an author and a reader in private.

  1245. “In the old days it was ‘Read John Updike’s new book.’ Now it’s ‘Meet John Updike’ or ‘Listen to John Updike on the audio version’ or ‘Watch John Updike give a reading.’”

    I think that’s an interesting point, but I think it’s untrue. Hemingway and Fitzgerald were celebrities in their day, and if anything, the importance of the author seems to have waned as other media have gained ground over writing. Galassi’s argument is a bit like asking why bands tour.

  1246. That’s why I stick to dead authors, usually those who lived before the invention of daguerreotypes. That way, there are no real photos, and you surely don’t want to know how they smell.

  1247. I just read something relevant in an interview with Jonathan Galassi.

    http://www.pw.org/print/521912?destination=content/agents_editors_qampa_jonathan_galassi

    “We need authors to be able to go on Charlie Rose and the Today show and All Things Considered. We’re dying for them to do those things. We’re selling authors, not books. We’re selling people the illusion of an experience with an author. They want to know what the author looks like, what he smells like. They want the full experience. In the old days it was ‘Read John Updike’s new book.’ Now it’s ‘Meet John Updike’ or ‘Listen to John Updike on the audio version’ or ‘Watch John Updike give a reading.’ All of that can be very distracting for writers. Certain writers aren’t any good at it. If you think about it, if a writer has forty good writing years, and he publishes a book every two years, does he want to spend a third year of that cycle on selling his book, in the United States and in Europe and everywhere else? That’s a big chunk out of his working life. Even though it can make things hard for us, I’m very sympathetic to authors who don’t want to do that. It’s not what they’re best at. Their real talent is writing.”

  1248. I agree with our Dan that this sort of thing is fun if you’re feeling gluttonous about a particular author or book. And in the right hands, the music/booze/food tie-in can serve as a jumping-off place for broader-reaching observations.

    On the other hand: god, Sloane Crosley is crap. A trampoline? Really?

  1249. Oh, man good call! I knew there was a Boston bookstore being left out. What’s great about the Globe (especially in its new location) is that it mingles travel guides, armchair travel books, and fiction of a particular place. Brilliant!

  1250. Good call, Ben.

    The Globe Corner Bookstore in Cambridge also makes travel books fun again.

  1251. Franco’s portrayal of Harvey Milk’s boyfriend in “Milk” didnt already turn you gay?

  1253. I do find these sorts of extraneous details interesting, but usually it’s after I already enjoyed the book. It can extend the pleasure of the reading experience to learn more about the “story behind the story.” Mmmm… extended pleasure…

    Don’t we have whole fields of academia dedicated to discovering such seemingly trivial details (what music an author liked, what she ate, etc) and making them less trivial? I can’t see how it’s okay with dusty library books and bad with shiny first printings. So what if publishers are tapping into our other interests and curiosities to get us to consider buying a book? Are you a communist?

    In short, I think we should all pay list price while shopping at BNN. But that’s just me.

  1254. One of these nights the Fiction Advocate is going to be staking out the city from his perch atop a gargoyle on the tallest skyscraper, just eavesdropping on all the conversations the good citizens are having about fiction, and out of nowhere the Grammar Proponent will swoop in. Only one of us is going to survive. I can’t wait!

    Fixed Franzen, and added Jackson.

  1255. Fiction Advocate, you added Strong Motion but followed it with “he makes the list on the strength of a single book.” Grammar proponent objects.
    As for Shelley Jackson, I’d say she’s part of an experimental literature movement that’s somehow really playful and somber at the same time. Like Patchwork Girl and The Skin Project, but also her collection Melancholy of Anatomy, which I re-read every six months or so. It’s like feminists finally got past reclaiming their bodies from Freud and just decided to be really weird and perverse, her work comes from that.
    Also, you should write a separate post on your thoughts about wedges and grant-access and race and America’s fascination with other people’s racial histories.

  1256. Good call(s), Andy. I’ll be the first to agree that the authors I’m using to define the Interaqnum are by and large white American males. I’ll also remind you that I don’t particularly love any of them. Part of the reason I wanted to try and define this as a literary era is so I can point to it and say, “We’re done with that stuff. Let’s shelve it and move on.”

    Ha Jin was in my first draft. But then I had an uncomfortable realization. I think there is (or was) a wedge between readers who want books to grant them access to different cultures, and readers who want books to grant them insight into their own culture. I used to work for a big literary agent in California whose most important clients were women novelists from East Asia and India. It was weird seeing the publicity those authors got. Their books were praised mostly for what they revealed about, like, royal life in ancient Japan, or family dynamics in modern India. They were very well written and could have stood alone as literary texts, but they were mostly valued as gateways to other cultures. One of the basic reasons novels are so great is because they reveal people and places and behaviors that we can’t imagine on our own. But I definitely think we market and review books by immigrants and minorities differently, as if their main value lies in showing us how compelling other cultures are, rather than showing us new ways to perceive ourselves. And it’s the latter kind that gets all the highest praise (and can potentially “define” an “era”) while the former can be, at best, a glimpse into other lives. Nobody talks about Ha Jin’s impact on our collective self-image.

    Or at least, there USED TO BE a wedge between those two types of books. If you look back at the four authors I’ve singled out as “crush objects” on this blog, one is British/Pakistani, one is a Bosnian immigrant, and one is a black guy. (The fourth one, Jane Berentson, is awesome for unique reasons.) Part of what I love about these authors is that they come from outside the Anglo/Jewish male tradition, but they most certainly aren’t exotic writers, and their work is so oblivious of the old distinctions, and so determined to succeed in its own right, that it blows right past that wedge.

    So I guess another thing we could say about the Interaqnum is that, for a while, readers were so fascinated with books from Iran, books from China, books from Africa, that they relegated them to a different place on the shelf. And now, if we can put the literature of the Interaqnum behind us, we’re ready to shuffle those two stacks of books together.

    Steven Millhauser is great. I’m reluctant to add him, though, because Edwin Mullhouse is from 1972, and it’s probably my favorite of his books.

  1257. I don’t really like Lahiri that much, but she sort of came to epitomize what I think happened during the time period of the Interaqnum, which was the death of the white (often Jewish) male literature.

    In fact, I would argue that the problem with how you’ve defined the Interaqnum period is that you’re trying to categorize these (mostly) white male writers and calling it the period’s literature.

    But I think the real literary gestalt of the era was the rise of minority/immigrant literature. Jhumpha Lahiri happens to be the one of the most visibly successful, commercially and critically, and I think even if her literature doesn’t end up enduring (who knows?), it would be difficult to look back and say she wasn’t a fairly significant figure of the time. Immigrant literature had been done before, of course, but not to the degree of her success which is at least a result of her prose-skills, and not some sort of exoticism. So I think Lahiri has plenty of “implied political relevance.” There are a more diverse group of readers and writer reading literature today because of her. And to the list of minority writers of significance, I would add Ha Jin.

    Now, that’s not to say the white male is dead. For that matter, any literary era is as much defined by market forces as anything else. And Interaqnum can be defined any way you wish, and to what seems to have been established, I might add Steven Millhauser to that list.

    Also, the list suffers from being mostly English language works, and a bit overtly American. But I guess we all only know what we’ve read, and can read…

  1258. I’d say that Lahiri’s stories, while excellent, lack neurotic element described above, as well as the implied political relevance.

  1259. I like these edits. Thanks, guys.

    I’m adding Strong Motion to the Franzen entry.

    Jonathan Safran Foer was in my original draft. I think his book (it’s only worth talking about his first one) was a crock of shit, much like Palahniuk’s. It was all fake guilt and chintzy magic. But it was widely read, and it does demonstrate a kind of anxiety about how we can view the atrocities of the past from our present, comfortable state. So it fits well in the Interaqnum. I’ll add an entry.

    Of Jhumpa Lahiri I haven’t read much, but my impression is that she has a very classic, realist take on the American immigrant experience. So while she was really successful during the Interaqnum, it doesn’t seem like she was speaking directly to the time period. More like she was executing some extremely well-crafted stories in a traditional literary vein. I might be totally wrong about that. Andy, care to stick up for her?

    And yeah, if anyone wants to make a case for Shelley Jackson (like give me a one-sentence blurb to justify her on the list), I would appreciate it, because I’ve only read a little bit of her, but she seems like someone who left a mark on the era. (And on the bodies of the people she tattooed. Zing!)

  1260. Also, this list is too male-dominated to possibly be correct. Unfortunately, I am not too familiar with female writers, so I can’t fix it. But I am also adding Jhumpa Lahiri.

  1261. Can we include Jonathan Safran Foer even though everyone (but not me) hates him and only Everything Is Illuminated is technically within that time period? I remember telling someone once that my best advice for white males wishing for literary success is to change their first name to Jonathan and move to Brooklyn.

    Shelley Jackson is amazing. When I first read Patchwork Girl, I remember thinking that one day it will be looked back upon as the first great fictional work of future. But then hyperfiction never took off. Maybe something like the Kindle will, ummm, rekindle, that sort of stuff. I don’t know why people aren’t making eBook-specific literature that is distinct from “old” books and taking advantage of the things that it can do differently.

  1262. I have to second Strong Motion. I know I keep blathering away about how everyone should read it, but that aside, it’s maybe the Interaqnum-iest of Interaqnum novels.

    If we’re talking about women, Jennifer Egan and Pat Barker’s themes seem to make them prime candidates for inclusion. Also, while it it doesn’t fit within the timeframe, Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country seems very Interaqnum-y. The fact that it came out in 2006 might explain its failure to catch fire saleswise.

  1263. Franzen’s Strong Motion doesn’t make the cut as an Interaqunum novel?
    Your list is a little dude-heavy, but the people I’d like to add are either Canadian (was there anyone serious about books who didn’t swoon for Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red?) or not main-stream enough to hang with the crowd you have listed (I’m thinking Shelley Jackson.). Maybe Barbara Kingsolver?
    Anyway, I really like this post.

  1264. I agree about Three Lives. Great, though small, selection, even though it does have that NY hoity-toityness.

    Oscar Wilde was great in its own area before it closed. RIP. :(

    I am pleased to have recently found McNally Jackson. It might be my favorite store now, even without a used section.

    There’s also obviously Community Bookstore in Park Slope, which has the same things going for it as the other NY bookstores that have been mentioned.

    And Andy, the Fiction Advocate was once spotted wearing a Strand messenger bag around Boston, but he looked very sheepish about it.

  1265. I would add a criterion for resisting the over-categorization of books; unless you’re the LoC, I really hate the overcategorization of books. To that end, one of my favorite NYC bookstores is Three Lives, although once again, it lacks in the second star category.

  1266. No love for Housing Works? Publishers and reviewers donate a lot of unread books, so there are a lot of brand new books on the shelves or tables. Great events, great identity. Good space for browsing, though limited on finding a specific book. Staff selections spotty I guess.

    And McNally Jackson? No used books but stars on the other criteria.

  1267. Oh I hate Strand so much, and I hate anyone who carries a Strand bag, especially someone who carries a Strand bag in a city other than NY. It is a complete person deal-breaker for me, and I had to stop being friends with someone because of this.

    I am not being very book-pure here, but a good immediately adjacent cafe is very important to me. The Booksmith has a Peets and Starbucks next door so that sort of counts, and there’s a bunch of stuff in Harvard Square. So that is a fifth criterion for me. A sixth is the interestingness/attractiveness of the other customers; when I need a break from the books, I want good people watching, preferably while having a pastry and coffee.

    All of which is to say, the union square barnes and noble is the best bookstore in new york city, Kim Jong Il be damned. Also, if you’ve never been, you should go check out the Printed Matter (http://printedmatter.org/). It’s really more an art gallery than a bookstore, and you probably won’t buy anything there, but it’s still a very cool place.

    I am tempted to move to Portland just because of Powells. You’d think the fact that it is the biggest bookstore would make it suck somehow, but it is still incredibly great, and probably one of my favorite places of all time.

    Elliot Bay Books here in Seattle is very nice, fits all six of my criteria, and probably the nicest bookstore I consistently go to. But it is no Powells. Not even close.

  1268. I have to agree. Book Court is a very good store but lacks the necessary selection of used and remaindered books. None of the stores in NY comes close to touching Harvard Bookstore or the Booksmith.

  1270. A black circle inside of which are sixty-seven small white triangles on a red field: We’ve been eaten by Mega Shark.

  1271. Frederick Barthelme is really not very good. Or at least Moon Deluxe isn’t. His brother is really a far more interesting writer, and more famous for a reason. So says this Lin. Speaking of which, I should change my last name to something more awesome and distinguishable. Like Magnus. And change my first name to Ultra.

  1272. More power to you, Bill. Feel free to just shrug and walk away if he asks you to elaborate.

  1274. Agh, sorry, I effed up that Dragnet quote. It should be “The story you’re about to see is true.” My bad!

  1275. I feel like the inclusion of “actual” presupposes the readers’ disbelief. Like, “what you’re about to see is real. The names have been changed but the story is real,” that sort of thing. So it really only works if you follow the “actual” with something totally unbelievable. In fact, these comments are so very believable that I think I may have said some of them verbatim, especially “you probably don’t need about half of what’s written here” and “bring back the violence!”

  1276. Digging through the slush pile at Open City and finding manuscript after manuscript from MFA graduates that were more or less interchangeable in content, and ubiquitously drenched in desperation to be published, made me suspicious of MFAs. I think there are two reasons to get an MFA – to make connections with other budding writers and to set aside space to write. Some people might need an MFA to do that, some people might not. But neither of those two things are addressed in workshops. One thing in particular I really, really dislike about workshops: I think they’ve displaced a part of the writing process that used to be really special, a really great space where an author interacts with his or her work and evaluates and edits things. And instead of that, you have a pool of insecure, self-indulgent critics looking to tear each other apart. Mostly.

  1277. dannybayridge, I’m wondering if you meant to write, “You’re so awesome and right about everything, Fiction Advocate, let’s go down to the river for a bacchanal,” and the beginning got cut off.

  1280. I wouldn’t say it validated my decision, but it didn’t really make me feel bad about it. I thought it was fairly objective, really, and didn’t fall 100% into the territory of “all writing programs should be abolished.” He actually made a somewhat tangential claim that writing programs can connect people with the world rather than taking them out of it, and concludes the piece by saying that for all the qualms he just stated, he’s glad he spent some time in college workshopping poetry. My favorite part was how each time he quoted someone saying how god awful writing programs are, the next sentence would say “X author went on to establish Y writing program.” It was a nice rimshot, and also made it clear that this is just one more thing writers and readers constantly debate about, like rather or not print is dying.

    I expect to find some comments helpful and some comments not so helpful in my workshops. I think that writing programs could probably mix up their pedagogical methods and go beyond workshops a bit more, but hey, I’ll take a free three years of writing. Hopefully I don’t get there and immediately start complaining about having to teach comp and how my workshops are awful. Please slap me electronically if I do.

    Long comment!

  1281. That’s interesting. Where’s Shawn? Shawn was saying he thought the New Yorker article kind of validated his decision to start an MFA right now.

  1282. But didn’t you just link to a New Yorker article about creative writing programs, which included some (rather valid, I thought) assessments of why all creative writing programs should be dismantled, immediately, partly because workshopping is so silly? There are plenty of things I miss about the UCSD writing program, but sitting through a wilted session of “no, what I’m saying is, I just thought the vampire would be a little more, you know, sophisticated in her diction” is not one of them. Because they’re pretty damn ridiculous, which is why the McSweeney’s post kind of works for me. Meh.

  1285. “He” can suck it because he wouldn’t know funny if it kicked him in the behind. Since “he” has rejected my last three submissions, I’ve come up with a new list.

    Ways McSweeney’s Can Suck It

    Perpetually
    Hard

  1286. For some reason I think of “Timothy McSweeney” as someone with really bad nasal congestion. Hence the category for this post. Do you also imagine “Timothy McSweeney” speaking in a nasal voice, or can “he” suck it for other reasons?

  1290. Jim, in some ways yes, the point of these things is to make jokes. But the reason this one stuck with me is because it wasn’t delivered as a joke, and it wasn’t received by the audience as a joke. It was an awkward comment that hung in the air, and it kind of ruined my night.

    However stupid it may be to hold a grudge against Greenman for a thing like this (and yeah, it’s pretty stupid) he’s a public figure when he judges those contests, and he’s a public figure when he gives a reading, and there’s no reason he should be spared from receiving a bit of what he gives out.

    Plus, you can make an easy $20, and that’s never stupid.

  1291. I agree that this is stupid. I have been to those live fiction things. isnt the point of them to make jokes?

  1292. I have hardcopies at home (so old school!) but getting to it digitally might require some work on JSTOR and other probably not free sites. Maybe it was in this article (?): Hanssen, Beatrice, 1996. “Elfriede Jelinek’s Language of Violence.” New German Critique, 68, pp. 79 – 112. I wrote a paper about smell in THE PIANO TEACHER, but can’t remember which paper has the comments I’m remembering. The thing that struck me was how matter of fact she was about it, she didn’t seem to be saying “maybe this caused that” so much as “this happened and as a result, we all do this.”

  1293. Is there a link to her comments about how WWII shook up people’s relationship to storytelling? I’m kind of interested in that right now.

  1294. “Do you ever get so protective of authors that you don’t actually want someone else to read them? Because you see your enthusiasm for an author as a singular characteristic of yourself as a reader?”

    Oh my goodness, YES, YES I DO. Not just authors, either – musicians, film-makers, whirly-gigs & bakers. If I found them before the Great Unwashed, they belong to ME.

  1295. Elfriede Jelinek, whose book THE PIANO TEACHER was made into a movie by Haneke, had some similar comments in a couple of journal articles about the tendency for post WWII German-speaking philosophers to engage in an analysis of storytelling and their own textual existence, although she throws in some additional lines about the place of feminism in these philosophies. And also porn.
    But there does seem to be a preponderance of self-inquiry in narratives offered up by your Eggers & Co. Is this trend simply less obnoxious when it’s rooted in a national wound like the Holocaust rather than an individual’s personal trauma? If there’s a pervasive sense that one needs trauma in order to write, which I think is a very real paradigm in modern American literature, is this just negated by real trauma, like, say genocide?

  1296. Cool.

    When you click the logo at Hipsterbookclub it should go back to the home page, but instead it does nothing.

    Fucking hipsters.

    I should probably post this on the Hipsterbookclub site.

    Oh well.

  1297. Back when m.snowe was a youth in Schenectady, she would frequent a convenient store that happened to have the best make-your-own sundaes this side of the Hudson. Well, this store handed out recycled, folded napkins with every sundae. These napkins had the name of the store in a large font at the top and in small letters at the bottom, towards the fold, were the words: “Please don’t look inside.” Of course, curiosity always prevailed, and m.snowe was bombarded with adverts for jiffy lube, the local funeral home, and occasionally the “Dream Machine,” a tiny arcade in Mohawk Mall. After that first time, she knew better than to flip the napkin open, but her hope and curiosity was renewed every time she topped another sundae with caramel and heath bar shavings.
    What m.snowe is trying to say is that as a blogger, fiction advocate, you should utilize the “edit post” feature of your blog, instead of leaving little napkins out, in the form of “comments.”

  1298. So, the Harper’s review about Jean Rhys that Jessa wrote about isn’t available online unless you’re a subscriber. But the same book is reviewed here, in Bookforum.

    http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_02/3833

    Just like Jessa said about the Harper’s review, this one draws more attention to a writer that Jessa would rather keep to herself, and it basically consists of a long biography followed by a brief paragraph that finally addresses the book that’s supposedly under review.

    Jessa, I don’t know if you’ll like this or hate this, but I’m starting to get interested in Jean Rhys.

  1300. It should be noted that three of us already missed one chance to tell Mr. Greenman what we think of him, when he sat a table behind us in a crappy, cheap-as-hell Mexican diner in Park Slope, Brooklyn. We were too nice to spoil his huevos rancheros with straight talk. I’m pretty certain we’ll find our chance again, though.

  1301. This is the awesome.

    If he came west of the Mississippi I would be $20 richer. It is now up to the East coasters to defend the honor of FA.

    Or perhaps the FA can wear a disguise and earn the $20 themselves?

  1302. Well then you’re going to hate the script I’m shopping around about a misanthropic anthropomorphic overweight slug named Hurley who wishes he were just a regular slug and not an anthropomorphic one–until a zany adventure through a salt factory with a local eleven year old teaches him to love (and lose the lovehandles).

  1303. I’m pretty sure the nickname for Jorge came from a vomiting or “hurling” incident, although I don’t remember now what exactly it entailed.

  1306. Whoa, dude, Matt: literary theory “is always about putting literature into some manner of false framework”? I object. Literary theory is a philosophy of storytelling, and while the frameworks employed to analyze storytelling may or may not strike you as sound, they are usually valid. I think the idea that theory is endangering literature as a study is just silly, mostly because (like poetry) the number of people who practice theory is pretty damn close to the number of people who read it. It’s a tiny, tiny world that is ever-less relevant (except when it’s not) and probably has very little effect on anything ever, let alone the demise of the study of literature. But I (double dog) dare you to find the literary theorist who does not also love books, particularly studying books. It’s too thankless an endeavor in which to engage for any other reason than a deep sense of love for reading. They may be self-important, and obnoxious and often wrong, and I agree that there is an over-categorization of theory that seems unnecessary at best and damaging at worst, but writing theory is always an act of engaging with and thus preserving, albeit occasionally pretentiously, literature.

  1307. Good questions, Danny Bayridge. The first one is kind of what Denis Dutton is talking about in the book linked above. He describes the success of different works of art in terms of how they appeal to our biological impulses. Your second question is more like what the evocritics or Literary Darwinists are talking about. Like, if you read “The Corrections” from their point of view, you’ll see that Franzen is basically exemplifying and reinforcing the most basic human decisions that we can make.

  1308. Fiction Advocate, do the proponents of evocriticism suggest that, from text to text, traits which are beneficial to a text’s survival will be more likely to be reproduced in other texts?

    Or is it merely that a certain method of analysis can reveal underlying, universal human needs?

    I have major beef with both of those ideas but could use some clarification, since you’ve clearly done your homework.

    Great post!

  1309. This just reminds me how much I hate literary theory, which is always about putting literature into some manner of false framework. Here, it’s Darwinism, which sounds really cool–art and science commingling, on my!–until you realized that the Freudians once thought they were doing something similar. Can one really justify what’s come from that? I’ll go so far as to say that theory is what is endangering the study of literature.

    That said, I do think there’s something to the idea that reading and writing are an escape from loneliness, though I’m not sure the claim that those are social activities holds water. After all, both are done in solitude. Jonathan Franzen has written very eloquently about this: http://www.harpers.org/archive/1996/04/0007955

  1310. P.S. When Colson Whitehead lands on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, they pick a black guy to review him, and the review is all about being black. But when Roberto Bolano lands on the cover of the NYTBR, they pick Jonathan Lethem, whose primary qualification is that everyone in Brooklyn has read his novel about gentrification and comic book superheroes. What’s the deal, Sam Tenehaus?

  1311. Danny Bayridge, instead of responding to your actual comment, or to the fact that your online handle makes it sound like you were the sixth member of NKOTB, I’m going to draw your attention to the photo at the top of this post. Bolano is the new Guevara. I’m sure you can picture Bolano, thin as a reed, his dark curls tousled, lifting a frail cigarette to his lips. He’s iconic now. He’s a measure of cool. Soon we’ll see his poster in college dorms. Bolano should fly off the shelves, but not because of his image.

    Your suggestion that I’m complicit in bringing about this state of affairs is impossible to prove, at best. But I can do my best to reverse the trend.

    I’ll put this in terms you can understand. Step by step, we’re reaching a point where Bolano still has the right stuff, but genuine appreciation of his work is hangin tough.

  1312. maybe you can stop patting yourself on the back for reading Bolaño way before everyone else in Brooklyn.

    maybe the “posers” were merely responding to the intense media hype that you mentioned, perpetrated jointly by snobby literary assholes and publishing assholes who wanted to make a fat buck off the last thing with his signature on it.

  1313. I’m suggesting that I can’t decide whether dying is the proper thing for him to do at this juncture. Once I figure it out, he’s free to take or leave my advice as he sees fit.

  1314. …and Lane waits until the last paragraph to talk about Spock, where he quite rightly praises him (“On the other hand, it does mean that we get more of Zachary Quinto, whose very name sounds like the sacred text of a superior race, and who, in his role as the youthful Spock, is the most commanding reason to see this film.”) The way the review reads, it’s as if young Spock’s role is minor, when it’s really at least half the storyline…Lane is intentionally downplaying the parts he finds enjoyable in order to craft a crotchety review. Damn critics.

  1319. Dude! Ben Keene wants to throw me off the softball team because I called the whole sport stupid. Hey, Ben: the reader in me thinks softball is stupid, but the crazy RBI-hitting machine that lives in my chest (and sometimes drops a fly ball in left field due to a programming error that will be fixed in subsequent software patches) thinks reading is stupid. I contain multitudes. Deal with it!

  1320. You should apparently give up on any remaining jockish aspirations and just give in to your word-nerd side. Or quit complaining about softball games preempting readings.

    Jk!

  1321. You’re right, it can’t be a totally new thing. But more stuff gets published these days than ever before, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s exponentially more of this crap now.

    Sounds like a good springboard for another post-graduate degree!

  1322. Weird. I almost *always* imagine the fiction advocate as a big, white sticker of Calvin, from the cartoon strip, on the back window of a Ford F150. I’d be interested, though, to know from a historical viewpoint how often this trend surfaces. Surely the early 2000s isn’t the first time a bunch of bored (and boring?) writers have rummaged through the literary cannon in order to mine sub-par plots involving their favorite authors (assuming that inclusion was begot by favoritism and not something more cynical, like mass cultural recognition). Was there a brief period in the 1600s, say, when young poets were not only aping Chaucer 200 years later but also incorporating him as a character into their newly minted Shakespearean sonnets? Was there a slough of Hawthorne lovers trotting him out onto the textual stage in detective novels or romance sundries right before the Great Depression? I need to build a library for mediocre and piss poor fiction, with subject headings to suit.

  1324. Luckily, my ancestors hired a new ghostwriter for my own story every 50 years, since 20 B.C.
    Beat that.

  1325. Way to thwart my whole rant with a salient point about “quality,” Jessa. Yeah, I’m not taking swipes at Susan Sontag. One of these days I’ll spend an hour at Barnes & Noble cataloging all the mediocre literary fiction where Charlotte Bronte arrives in Chapter 22, just in time to help the Victorian protagonist out of a jam.

  1326. Oh, I don’t know. I’ve noticed that lately I have a real admiration for and have taken a lot of pleasure in reading books that are, in fact, historical fiction. Like Susan Sontag’s THE VOLCANO LOVER, in which authors and painters and politicians are woven throughout her novel on the Napoleonic period of Europe. I think there’s a distinction between historical fiction in the vein of Harlequin romance novels in search of a background in which to place yet another staid plot and authors who resist the Modernist urge to simply write about themselves and instead delve into history, which has plenty of freaks and assholes and whores and lunatics to exploit for their own narrative needs. What if it’s not laziness so much as obsession? I’d rather read an author’s obsession with Emily Dickinson (ha!) manifest in a weird novel than stagger through yet another tome on addiction or divorce or middle age crises. It’s a tired point of argumentation, I know, but isn’t it really about quality of writing and the depth of insight? I think that if it’s done well and made clever and investigative, reanimating an author in text can be a worthwhile read.

  1327. I was at a commercial publishing house that shall remain nameless during the heart of the “steal Jane Austen’s name to sell a million books” phase (still going on, btw) and was there at meetings when we discussed which dead author would best to resurrect next. Edgar Allen Poe almost got co-opted. Others have since then.

    I think the whole thing is ridiculous, but like any fad in publishing on that line b/w literary and commercial, it will die out sooner or later. To be replaced by some other obnoxious gimmick by lazy fiction writers.

  1330. Man, who knows WHAT she’s been giving away for free to the audience.

  1332. I think it’s worth remembering that authors are not mortal like the rest of us. They are physical embodiments of the spirit of their work. Colson is not “present” in this photograph; he IS the photograph, and the dock and the water and the white bird shit on the wooden planks. All of it, together. His tie-and-vest combo says Victorian dandy; his cuffs and boots say punk rocker; his skin and dreadlocks say black and proud; the clouds and sea say heed our warming, for this man will write many great books in the years to come.

    But yeah, it’s silly.

  1333. So I believe you that he’s really cool, but that photo is redonk. Is he waiting alone on a dock for his yacht? Why are his jeans rolled up? I don’t understand.

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