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September 02, 2010

The Associated Press profiles Tao Lin, thus confusing the hell out of The New York Observer.

And hey, Portlanders! Remember that Bookslut is sponsoring our first ever reading in Portland, with Tao himself, on September 28, 7 p.m., at Reading Frenzy. I need to write a long-overdue post about Reading Frenzy, which is one of the coolest places in Portland. Just walking inside feels kind of like falling in love. Anyway, if you are in Portland, please come! There will be free beer. And if that doesn't entice you, you don't belong in this city.

Someone just realized that there have been no authors on Dancing with the Stars. (Actual authors, not random famous assholes with book deals.) This show is the reason I have the worst image ever constantly in my head -- that of Tom DeLay badly playing air guitar and shaking his corrupt ass to "Wild Thing," it's here, and you've been warned) -- so I can't say I'm too excited about that idea. On the other hand, seeing Joyce Carol Oates do the cancan would fulfill one of my oldest, weirdest fantasies, so...

At The Smart Set, Rock Chalk Jessa Crispin discusses the new Radical Homemakers and The Urban Homestead. You can take the girl out of Kansas, but...

Then about 50 pages into Radical Homemakers it came screaming out, my crazy Kansas genes. Kansas breeds eccentrics, like the guy who asked that after his death his corpse be displayed in his backyard in a glass-fronted case (it is.) Or native son John Brown, whose wild-eyed portrait is lovingly painted in the Topeka capitol. Or the other guy who built massive tunnels from his house out to his fields so that he could check on his cows without stepping outside, where he might accidentally run into someone. The tunnels, by the way, were wide enough to run cows through. This is what runs in my blood. "It's the wind," my friend Ron used to say to me. "There's nothing to stop it, and it just runs straight through your brain." This is my destiny.

After Radical Homemakers stirred my crazy impulses, I decided I would need to move out onto a farm. I would raise goats and chickens and crops. I would have a massive garden. I would have a kid or two and homeschool those things. Make jam. After the kids are gone I'll start in on the tunnels.

I know the impulse. Kind of. I was born and raised in San Antonio, and sometimes I just feel the urge to listen to "Hey Baby, Que Paso" while getting high, eating breakfast tacos, and building a large shopping mall on a river by an old mission. Such is the city mouse-country mouse dynamic that makes Bookslut what it is. (Jessa, I love you, but give me Park Avenue.)

September 01, 2010

We still have a lot of work to do, but I can promise that the Portland Bookslut Reading Series will be held in one of these bars.

The great Lizzie Skurnick:

Make of it what you will, but the Twitter-born fracas over Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom proves one thing without a doubt: The American literary establishment are size queens.

And Ron Charles has a hilarious video review of the book. See, Grey Lady? Book reviewing can be fun! It doesn't have to be as joyless as the funeral of a homeless orphan!

August 31, 2010

If you complain about your favorite bookstore closing, but you haven't actually bought books there, please come to Portland so I can run you over with my car, repeatedly.

I still owe Jessa for recommending Kathryn Davis's The Thin Place to me; it's one of my favorite books ever. Check out excerpts from Davis's story "Body-without-Soul," now at Little Star.

The New York Times:

The award-winning literary journal The Virginia Quarterly Review has canceled its winter issue and closed its offices in the aftermath of the suicide last month of its managing editor and a subsequent investigation by the University of Virginia, which operates the journal.

At The New York Observer, Tom Bissell offers a defense of his friend Ted Genoways, the VQR editor who's been getting some brutal treatment in the media after the suicide of managing editor Kevin Morrissey, who some claim had been bullied by Genoways.

Happy F-Day! Today marks the official release of Freedom! '90, the new novel from...God, it's on the tip of my tongue. You know who I'm talking about. Cover Boy! El Zorro Blanco! So get ready to see people ostentatiously reading this one in coffee shops, hoping it will result in pasty, bespectacled intercourse from other people who have bookmarked Salon in their browsers. If you're looking for reviews, just go, like, anywhere. I think even Tiger Beat has a feature on the dude.

I haven't read it yet. I love the guy; I'm convinced he deserves the recognition he's getting. For an opposing viewpoint, again, just go, like, anywhere, and you'll read about chick-lit author Jennifer Weiner's increasingly weird crusade against perceived sexism in literary criticism, which is apparently somehow proven by the fact that people are congratulating a man for writing a good book. Here's Weiner:

"Schadenfreude is taking pleasure in the pain of others," Weiner says. "Franzenfreude is taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen."

Weiner probably does have a rough life, what with her bestsellers and the popular film adaptation of one of her novels a few years back. And I'm sure she's talented, but for fuck's sake, if you're trying to convince people to read your books, maybe coming up with the word "Franzenfreude" (which is literally "Franzen joy," and thus the fucking opposite of what she's trying to say) isn't your best sales pitch.

Of course she's jealous of Franzen. I'm jealous of Franzen. My dogs are jealous of Franzen. Maybe we should all just admit it, get on with our lives, and get back to work. Deal?

August 30, 2010

"If you read up on strings, you will learn that there are two different types, closed and open-ended. The closed strings are O-shaped loops that float about like angels, insouciant of spacetime's demands and playing no part in our reality. It is the open-ended strings, the forlorn, incomplete U-shaped strings, whose desperate ends cling to the sticky stuff of the universe; it is they that become reality's building blocks, its particles, its exchangers of energy, the teeming producers of all that complication. Our universe, one could almost say, is actually built out of loneliness; and that foundational loneliness persists upwards to haunt every one of its residents."

-Paul Murray, Skippy Dies

Edgar Allan Poe doesn't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. He doesn't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career. He doesn't want to do that.

Estimated number of combs in Harold Bloom's possession.

John le Carré admits that the British intelligence services for whom he worked during the Cold War carried out assassinations.

August 27, 2010

How did I miss (NSFW) "Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury"? Thanks to Brando at Circle Jerk at the Square Dance (still my favorite blog name ever) for the tip.

There's some fascinating discussion about William James going on at The Second Pass this week. Like Jessa, I'm looking forward to reading The Heart of William James soon; unlike her, I imagine, I can't even look at the cover without imagining Huey Lewis singing "The heart of William James! The heart of William James is still beating!" Ah, la vie intellectuelle.

“Sir,” said Samuel Johnson, “a man who has not seen Italy is always conscious of an inferiority from not having seen what it is expected a man should see.”

I'm really liking Zinsser's story about the old tradition of the Grand Tour of Europe, mostly Italy -- necessary to the development of any young aristocrat. I am not hitting any Grand Tour stop, more of a faded, post-Soviet seashore retreat. I will "take waters." (They still do that, yes?)

I leave you in the more than capable hands of Mr. Michael Schaub, although I will try to pop in every once and a while. Here, or on Twitter.

Because someone asked! The list of books (besides the books for work) I am bringing with me on a three week, many trained, many planes adventure.

The Heart of William James
Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde
The School of Femininity by Margaret Lawrence Greene
God on the Rocks by Jane Gardam
Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds by Marina Warner
Five Women by Robert Musil

I know. But I am having a hell of a time trying to get into any fiction lately. Looking at my shelves, hardly any of it even looks tempting. We'll see how this goes.

A Jim Behrle Production

Click for the full comic!

August 26, 2010

"Citizen Kane your dad's a booze-a-reeno and I'm Edith Wharton so you got to go live with a lawyer."

"I don't believe in God. I believe in Wallace Stevens." This is amazing. (Via.)

Tomorrow I am boarding a train for 35 hours, if all goes well in the next 24 I guess. I am still stacking my reading material, but one book that is already in the suitcase is Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes the World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. Reinforcing my decision is Mr. Michael Schaub, with whom I am psychically linked thank god, reviewing the new Hyde at NPR, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership. He thinks it is brilliant.

August 25, 2010

Vol. 1 Brooklyn has a pretty great list of ten musicians who would probably write good books, including, happily, Will Sheff of Okkervil River, one of my personal favorites. Now someone should make a list of authors who would probably record good albums. It's been done before, you know. And if you're not moved by Nicholas Sparks's debut record Guuuuuuuuhhhhh, well, friend, you just don't like music.

I've become insanely addicted to Need to Know on PBS, and not just because it combines my two best friends, Jessa Crispin and state-sponsored media. (Love you guys! Hugs!) Here's a Need to Know interview with Gary Shteyngart, in which dachshunds come up, and Facebook is blamed for various ills. (On a related note, I need your help to win Mafia Wars! Not the game. I made some bad gambling decisions. Who'd have thought the Mariners weren't going to go undefeated this year?)

While Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, argues with the Chancellor, George Osborne, over the costs of welfare reform, Amanda Craig has come up with a suggestion likely to ignite another row.

The novelist says "poor people" should be banned from having more than two children because of "the ecological need to limit families".

Awesome.

August 24, 2010

I have had a rough week, and let me tell you, in the morning, I would open my eyes and think "It is GOAT FARM GO TIME." Fuck this shit. Etc. I will never have to brush my hair again, etc.

If I'm being honest, I can't even really blame this on Radical Homemakers, although it certainly did not help. I spoke with author Shannon Hayes about the danger of questioning the beliefs you have structured your life around, and a new way to work and live without being under the heel of your job. The Q&A is up at PBS Need to Know.

The Poetry Foundation features two great articles on Hurricane Katrina-inspired literature, witness, and poetic appropriation. In the first, Abe Louise Young strongly criticizes Raymond McDaniel for a poem in his book Saltwater Empire:

He decided to use the personal histories of six African American Katrina survivors as “found poetry”—stripped of names and context, and combined with one another—as the centerpiece poem of Saltwater Empire, without contacting the project or the survivors. ...

It’s highly unethical to use individual narratives in an anonymous and interchangeable way, especially given this context. To bring it down to concrete reality, when a person loses their loved ones, home, pets, and belongings as well as the city of their birth, control of their story may be all they have left.

In the second essay, McDaniel responds:

I could fuss and lament, and protest that what I wrote has been wrestled from my intent and transformed. But that would be a redundant and fundamentally inaccurate complaint. It would make it seem as if, once upon a time, the book belonged to me, and now it isn’t mine.

Of course it isn’t. It never was.

The Christian Science Monitor recommends five books to read after determining whether the eggs in your refrigerator are going to kill you. (I'd add to the list David Kirby's fascinating Animal Factory, which looks at the effects of huge factory farms on the environment and human health.)

The cover of Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean, a novel about Alexander the Great, featuring a picture of a naked dude on a horse, is too hot for British Columbia ferryboats. (The cover of the American version is considerably less sexy.)

Frank Miller is directing an ad for Gucci fragrance. Like high fashion isn't shitty enough to women as it is.

August 23, 2010

Ah, the '50s. Before we had rules that totally ruined everything. The scientists who were on Antarctica in 1959 did not exactly participate in acceptable behavior. A couple of the slides and stories in this excerpt from DeepFreeze! A Photographer’s Antarctic Odyssey in the Year 1959 are followed with: “Today that’s absolutely prohibited.” Mostly they seem to have fucked with penguins, and there are pictures of the men holding penguins in their arms, putting the penguins on their bar (no word if they got any of them drunk), and basically just harassing the poor things until, "From time to time he would struggle, but when we took him outside he just walked a couple of yards away and stood there, still puzzled, I suppose, by the antics of the Antarctic visitors." They also shot seals in the head and fed them to their dogs, but there are no pictures of that. Also, "strictly prohibited" today.

Chauncey Mabe challenges Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult, who accused the New York Times Book Review of ignoring writers who aren't white men.

Obviously the sexism charge is a smokescreen. What’s really at work here is what we might call “genre ressentiment” — a form of resentment so pathological philosophers and psychologists reach for a French word to contain it. “Ressentiment” is a word with complex connotations, but as used here means resentment toward those more successful or esteemed who have not directly harmed you.

Thus, it is not enough for a chick lit maven like Picoult to sell 14 million (and counting) copies of her novels, or Weiner to write bestsellers that are turned into movies starring the likes of Cameron Diaz. Money and devoted readers are not enough. They want critical esteem, too.

I'm guessing Mabe's inbox is going to be filled with people pissed off at his "Now, now, ladies" tone (though it's meant ironically, I assume), which is a shame, because he presents an interesting argument. It's just that most gals are sensitive about being called "ladies" these days.

(For the record, the Bookslut style guide forbids the use of "lady" except as an adjective referring to authors, as in "Author Nicholas Sparks is a national literary treasure, and lady writer Joyce Carol Oates is beloved by lady readers who enjoy lady books." This represents a change from the previous edition. I probably should have run this by my lady editor, Jessa.)

The James Tait Memorial Prize is Britain's oldest literary prize, and in appropriately curmudgeonly fashion this year's winner A.S. Byatt used it as a venue to moan about the Orange Prize, for recognising women's writing, and book critics, for not recognising women's writing. Or, as the url puts it: A.S. Byatt Intellectual Women Strange.

Byatt won the Tait award for her novel The Children's Book, while the non-fiction award was presented to John Carey for his biography of William Golding.

Oliver Sacks talks about face blindness, and how he personally copes with not being able to recognize a person by their face, usually relying on clothing, movement, or glasses instead, in this New Yorker podcast.

August 20, 2010

Rosecrans Baldwin, a founding editor of The Morning News, is interviewed at Writers on Process and Black Book about his debut novel, You Lost Me There. From the Writers on Process interview, on his inspiration for the novel:

The idea was a single image. I don’t know where it came from, but I had this image of a scientist, a little late in his life, sitting in his car in a parking lot. It’s a little after midnight on Mount Desert Island, and he sees this younger woman across the parking lot under a street light. And he has a very intense desire for her, but he can’t have her. He may not know why, but I knew that gap between the two was there.

This novel is stunning; it's the kind of novel that will make you cry, but isn't emotionally manipulative. It's just honest, painfully so, and the fact that it comes from a 33-year-old debut novelist is almost unbelievable. I reviewed You Lost Me There for NPR:

The 33-year-old writer — a magazine editor and former EMT and rock-climbing teacher — is uncannily perceptive when it comes to the complicated and fraught issues of marriage, death and sexual desire, and his dialogue is naturalistic and unforced. Perhaps most impressive, though, is the author's artistic and emotional maturity — You Lost Me There is, finally, a wise book, the kind that eludes many authors twice Baldwin's age. Words, of course, really can be lifelines, especially in the aftermath of loss. It's not always easy to find beauty in pain, but that's what Baldwin has done, and the result is affecting, profound and true.

OK, there's no fucking way I'm ending this on a downer, not this year. Go buy this book, then read this hilarious chart from The Morning News about whether you can date the gal or dude of your dreams.

Interesting interview with Günter Grass, about linguistics, his new book about the Grimm Brothers, e-books (he is surprisingly flexible in his view about e-books), and his own political history.

SPIEGEL: How did you feel when you were reading [your Stasi file]?

Grass: Bored, mostly. For a long time I refused to read the stuff at all, and I never filed a request. There are more than 2,000 pages. In the end, Ms. Birthler (editor's note: Marianne Birthler, the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Archives) handed them over to me, but I had asked that all the passages where informers are named be blacked out. I didn't want to know who had spied on me.

I am always happy to see a new Laura Kipnis book coming out, and her How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior looks really good. Slate has an excerpt.

A Jim Behrle Production

Click for the full comic!

For those of you freaked out and outraged about the marketing tie-ins for Eat Pray Love (perfumes, body creams, bed sheets, crap jewelry, etc), a gentle reminder from William R. Everdell's fucking fantastic The First Moderns:

The best-selling book of 1900 was nothing so daunting, however. It was a new novel called Claudine at School, equally titillating but considerably more upbeat than its competition, Journal of a Chambermaid by the surviving Decadent Octave Mirbeau. Supposedly [Claudine] was by "Willy," Henri Gauthier-Villars, whose attacks on Dreyfus had just cost him his job as music critic on the Revue blanche. "Willy" used to say that the young wife he had imported from Burgundy in 1893 and kept carefully housebound in Paris had helped by telling him "the most delicious things about her school." In fact, it was precisely his wife, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, who had written the book, and to Willy's order in the first year of their marriage. For years, until Colette finally left him, they kept the secret: not an easy thing for Colette, since her creation became so famous in 1900 that people used to say Claudine was better known than anyone except God and Dreyfus. Claudine at School sold 40,000 copies in two months, and became one of the first successful media tie-ins in publishing history. Stores all over Paris were selling "Claudine" lotion, "Claudine" ice cream, "Claudine hats and collars, "Claudine" perfume, "Claudine" cigarettes. There were postcards with Colette's picture dressed as Claudine, and at the Samaritaine department store you could even get "Willy" rice-powder.

Did you know there's an honorary Bob Fosse street in Chicago? It is not nearly as fabulous as it should be. You should be able to get sparkly hot pants and wigs and glamorous cigarette holders there, and that divine dress (black with roses) from Cabaret. Instead I think there was a mini-mart.

Anyway, I used my latest column in the Smart Set, about the real life murders that inspired the play that would eventually become Fosse's Chicago, as an excuse to sit around one day just watching Fosse musicals. I had trouble sleeping after that, what with all the fucking jazz hands in my head. It turns out the book about those murders, The Girls of Murder City is incredibly disappointing. I explain why:

The musical and the movie already tell the story. It’s a great one, to be sure. But Perry is much less interested in what drove so many women to murder, other than a few jokey asides that, knowing men, they probably had it coming. And he doesn’t seem to understand Chicago or the era very well. His depiction is about as hollow as a contemporary take on a Weimar Berlin cabaret: all of the darkness, the pressure, the oh-so-close relationship to death, the chthonic rite aspect of it all stripped away. It becomes a city and time of good music and pretty costumes.

August 19, 2010

Darragh McManus at The Guardian:

But what about when someone presses a book on you, assuring you that you'll simply adore it ... and you don't? Worse – you hate the thing, and can't understand how anyone would think of it and then think of you.

There's a rule of thumb to this. The shittier the book someone recommends to you, the more aggressively they will follow up with you, asking every other day if you've read it, and what did you think of it, and wasn't it awesome the way the author has a hilariously tenuous grasp on even the most basic elements of punctuation? And then you have to try to be nice and mumble something about how you really can't wait to crack open The Wizards of Fluffyndore, but you've just been so busy working and writing and not reading complete crap that will make you want to twist out your own eyes with a wheel lock key.

You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two.

Americans are lonely, lonely, lonely. (I wrote an essay for B&N about this a while back, too.)

I used to recommend It's Perfectly Normal to every parent coming through the sexuality resource center where I worked, anyone needing help explaining super tricky questions coming out of the mouth of a 6-year-old. It's all body happy and smart and funny and it has pretty pictures. But maybe I also should have recommended it to the 22-year-old man who called saying, "I was with this girl who had the clap. But I only put it in a little bit. Should I come in and get tested?" Um, yes. Yes, sir, you should.

As this New Republic review of the 15th anniversary edition of It's Perfect Normal tells us, teenagers are stupid.

For even in the highly eroticized global culture of today, alarming numbers of young people do not know the basic biology of sex and human reproduction. (When teen pregnancy occurs, this is what we hear: but we only did it once; but we were standing up; but he pulled out.)

It is probably not their fault, we have idiotic ideas about abstinence education. But still, get these teenagers a book that shows how semen can miraculously defy gravity, please. (It is a good book. You should just sort of leave it lying around your kid's room.)

I was mostly reading W. Somerset Maugham's travel writing -- recently collected in The Skeptical Romancer -- with an eye for the seeds of his stories. The China of The Painted Veil. The islands of "Rain." The Russian intrigue of the Ashenden spy stories. But the people he met on his extensive travels are enough reason to dig in, even if you're not an obsessive like me. Take the missionary's wife, later portrayed not at all lovingly, in "Rain":

“She spoke of the depravity of the natives in a voice nothing could hush, but with a vehement, unctuous horror; she described their marriage customs as obscene beyond description. She said that when they first went to the Gilberts it was impossible to find a single “good” girl in any of the villages. She was very bitter about the dancing.”

I like a good strong crazy. Over at PBS Need to Know, I continue the other travel writing pieces I've done for them, with Maugham's tales of unfortunate travel companions.

August 18, 2010

As a free-born man of the USA, I usually react to people praising my country in the typical American way: by exclaiming "Goddamn right!" while listening to a country song, wearing a t-shirt depicting Osama bin Laden being sodomized by some sort of missile, eating a cow, and firing a gun into the air repeatedly. But I'm not sure about this (very thoughtful, very interesting) article by Imogen Russell-Williams, wondering if Americans are intrinsically better at the coming-of-age story. (Or, as Russell-Williams asks, "Do American writers absorb Bildungsroman aptitude alongside fluoridated water and Wonder Bread?")

I'm not totally convinced, maybe because my current favorite coming-of-age novel, The Go-Between, is British. There are art forms that I think Americans generally do better than others -- rock music, pornography, buffets -- but is this one of them? I don't know. But here in the States, we have a name for Americans who have the kind of sensitivity, dedication and intelligent introspection needed to write a good coming-of-age novel. We call them "Canadians."

Christian Lorentzen might be the only journalist in America who could have pulled this off: a profile of Tao Lin written in Tao's style.

Tao Lin showed The Observer his three tattoos, a kangaroo, a trio of fish and the phrase "fuck america" in small, sans-serif type, possibly Helvetica.

After the food arrived, Tao Lin stuck his fork in the egg on top of his salad and swirled it around. Then he ordered scallops.

Tao Lin said, "A lot of people think I'm a vegan. I'm not."

And remember, Tao will be the guest at Bookslut's first sponsored reading in Portland, on September 28 at 7 p.m., at Reading Frenzy. There will not be scallops. I am sorry.

The BBC program Case Study profiles the story of John/Joan, the boy who was surgically and socially converted and raised as a girl after a "botched circumcision." The case was initially touted as a success, proof that gender is completely socially constructed. Katrina Alicia Karkazis has a great chapter on John/Joan in her book Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience.

If you share your office with dogs, you'll appreciate this comic by Joe Sacco (Footnotes in Gaza) about trying to get work done with (what appears to be) a Pembroke Welsh corgi yipping for cookies and toys. The Bookslut office is also home to three dogs, and I'm pretty sure if it weren't for them, I'd be on the cover of Time looking all sultry and sensitive. (On a related note, if I'm late responding to your email, it's probably her fault.)

While the Chronicle's piece on the death of VQR managing editor Kevin Morrissey bordered on gossip, this article in the Hook gives a more even view, with more context. (Thanks to Drew for sending the article along.)

I have been reading and loving Radical Homemakers, even though most of it is just fantasy for me. I do fantasize about finding that odd Irish farmer who proposed marriage, volunteering the information that he had 250 head of sheep, and seeing if he is still available. I only think this on bad days, though. Eventually I remember there is no opera on the farm, and I come back to reality. Hayes's idea of sustainable living, working from home, reviving the role of the homemaker, living on much less money, while not being a feminist nightmare, is a good, complicated, and inspiring one.

But it turns out that telling people that they don't have to work themselves to death, live in the suburbs, or eat high fructose corn syrup, and that the basic tenets of contemporary American life are kind of bullshit does not always get a great response. In Yes Magazine, Hayes fights her biggest foe: the Internet commenter.

The vast majority of my life is lived off-line; thus, I didn’t fully understand that the Internet had become a 21st century high-speed public pillory. I have been e-decried for being naive, dangerous, anti-God, anti-public education, anti-feminist; for my reproductive choices, my food choices, my health care choices, my housing choices, furniture choices, livelihood choices. I thought the electronic world would be about debate and discussion. It is often more about judgment.

Frank Kermode, critic, writer, and London Review of Books contributor has died. The LRB has indexed his dozens of contributions on their website in his memory.