Jhumpa Lahiri's new story collection, "Unaccustomed Earth," was reviewed Sunday in our pages. Reviewer Lisa Fugard calls the book "a howl from the heart of a writer working at the height of her powers."
Lahiri, 40, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for fiction with her debut collection, "Interpreter of Maladies," and followed it up with the bestselling book-turned-movie, "The Namesake." Her new collection includes the story "Hell-Heaven," which ran in the New Yorker in 2004. That same year she appeared at the NewYorker Festival; in this film clip, she reads from her story and answers audience questions.
Classics scholar Robert Fagles' bestselling translations from the Greek and Latin reminded us, as Seamus Heaney did with his "Beowulf," of the continuing power and appeal of epic poems. We may feel sorry to lose so important a translator as Fagles, who died March 26 at age 74. Yet one can't help but see his passing in the context of his career-long preoccupation, in "The Odyssey" and "The Aeneid," with the necessity of journeys.
Good wishes and safe passage on your new travels, Mr. Fagles. Below are some words from a fellow student of Virgil that I think you'd appreciate.
The days that are past And the others to come Gathered, in the present.
For years and through the centuries A surprise at every moment In the knowledge we are still in life, That living ever flows, always flowing, Unexpected gift and pain In the continuous whirl of empty change.
Such in keeping with our fate Is this journey I continue, In the flash of an instant Unearthing and inventing Time from first to last, Refugee like all the others Who have been, who are, who are to come.
Giuseppe Ungaretti (translated by Andrew Frisardi)
People who might be tempted to think of L.A. as a not-all-that-literary city just don't know it well enough; literary landmarks are everywhere.
Between Silver Lake and Los Feliz, for example, the useful -- and lovely -- Shakespeare Bridge connects Franklin Avenue to St. George Street. But it's not just a bridge -- it's also Los Angeles' Cultural and Historical Monument No. 126.
Pseudonymous blogger Floyd B. Bariscale (who took the photo above as part of his project profiling all of L.A.'s landmarks, one by one) writes of the Shakespeare Bridge:
Completed in 1926, it stands thirty-feet wide and 230-feet long. It features Gothic arches and, at either end, two pair of what Gebhard and Winter, in "Los Angeles: An Architectural Guide," call “aedicules.”
The "aedicules" are the pretty pointy things; the gothic arches are here and here and here. As for its gothicness, the bridge appeared in the underrated 1991 film "Dead Again," a gothic thriller starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson. One (unsubstantiated) rumor also places it in "The Wizard of Oz"; surely it's appeared in other films too.
But this is about its literariness: It's called the Shakespeare Bridge because ... well, that's actually a mystery. It just IS the Shakespeare Bridge, without any slips of prolixity or crossing the plain highway of talk. (That's from "The Merchant of Venice"; Shakespeare quotes make the Shakespeare Bridge that much more fun.)
By his own count, the late Ryszard Kapuściński covered 27 incidents of revolution, war and upheaval around the world -- and recorded much of it in such books as "The Soccer War," "The Shadow of the Sun" and "Imperium"before he died on Jan. 23, 2007. Many of his fans may be surprised to learn that the Polish journalist also wrote poetry -- although one might wonder when he possibly found the time.
Although there was much fanfare around the appearance of Kapuściński's final book, "Travels With Herodotus," which was published not long after his death, it's disappointing that "I Wrote Stone," now published in English for the first time by Biblioasis, has come out with not so much as a single trumpet sounding.
Translated by Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba, this slim volume gathers poetry Kapuściński wrote over 40 years. Slim, yes, but hardly insubstantial.
Big events -- such as the murder of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba -- may have been treated lyrically in his prose, but Kapuściński's translators note that he believed poetry could "illuminate dimensions of human experience that otherwise would remain unknowable." These poems capture the moments between crises, impressions that carry a book-length argument in a few lines. "Magellan Reaches Tierra Del Fuego," for example, ends on this note of despair:
They stand gazing — they hope for paradise and the caravel reaches the shore and they see sand, stone and cliffs
The University of Iowa caused a bit of a dust-up recently by changing the terms for graduate theses -- to make them “open access,” available online, for free, to anyone. Students in the writing program, one of the country’s most prestigious, balked.
Eventually, the issue was resolved: The Chronicle of Higher Education reports (sorry, registration is required for the article) that the university will not publish theses from students in the writing programs as open-access documents.
Not all college students are so lucky. Many top film schools -- including USC's -- hold the rights to their students’ final projects. George Lucas is rumored to have resorted to stealing the negative to his short film “Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB” from the school. That worked out OK for him -– it became the basis for his first feature, “THX 1138,” starring Robert Duvall. But the university now makes sure to keep closer tabs on its students' work.
Early next month, Philip Pullman will publish "Once Upon a Time in the North" -- a sort of prequel to the trilogy "His Dark Materials." The Guardian has an exclusive excerpt of the new book, which presents a young Lee Scoresby, the trilogy's heroic aeronaut, seeking work in the Arctic town of Novy Odense. Scoresby sees polar bears scavenging the streets: That's a far cry from the once-great bear-kings of Svalbard, someone tells him. He also learns of their armor and of the possiblity of an anti-bear campaign taking place in the region. Pullman's narrative ease is fully on display as Scoresby settles himself among the town's denizens.
Like Pullman's 2003 book, "Lyra’s Oxford," set two years after the trilogy ends, "Once Upon a Time in the North" isn't the follow-up novel that so many of Pullman's trilogy fans are expecting. (That one, Pullman has said, will be called "The Book of Dust.") This is a short story -- complete with a board game, the publisher says. However rich in meaning and implications, "Once Upon a Time in the North" will only make readers eager for what is yet to come. It will be published by Random House on April 8.
Naomi Klein's newest book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," has received lots of attention, including a nomination for this year's L.A. Times Book Prize for current interest. Check out this video made (by Alfonso Cuarón) for "The Shock Doctrine."
In the six months that it has been on the Internet, Cuarón's video has made the rounds, garnering nearly 1,200 comments on YouTube.
Klein explains that she sent her finished manuscript to Cuarón "because I adore his films" and that the future world he created in his film "Children of Men" captured the present-day she was seeing in disaster zones in New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast after hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
"I was hoping he would send me a quote for the book jacket and instead he pulled together this amazing team of artists -- including Jonás Cuarón who directed and edited -- to make 'The Shock Doctrine' short film. It was one of those blessed projects where everything felt fated."
One of the perks of grad school is that I wind up rereading books I first encountered, say, 20 years ago. You know, the ones that have gone into into the fuzzy "Oh, I read that" file in your head. My latest rediscovery is "Dracula."
Sure, I read it way back when. Sure, I've since seen many movie versions, including "Nosferatu" (pictured), "Andy Warhol's Dracula," "Love at First Bite," "Blackula" and who knows what else. Creepy guy, pointy teeth, he vants to suck your blood, yadda yadda.
But that Bram Stoker was some writer. And his "Dracula" is one delicious book.
The entire premise plays out in 50 pages, which ends with the narrator left for dead. Horror! Tension! What on earth can happen next? Where is there to go? Suddenly, a new narrator, and several epistolary/journaling voices come into play. There is more horror. And more! Creepy bug-eating Renfield! A head gets sliced off! Where to go after that? Fingernail-chewing tension! More horror! A chase!
I had thought Truman Capote a genius for playing out all the horror and evil of "In Cold Blood" in its first 50 pages yet still maintaining a terrible tension throughout the rest of the book. If you tell me that Capote had read "Dracula" circa 1964, I wouldn't be surprised. Bram Stoker did it first.
So please, I beg you: Don't stop at the the Gary Oldman/Winona Ryder/Francis Ford Coppola version, or even the Mexican "Dracula Saga" out today in special-edition DVD -- the true and magnificent "Dracula," as written by Bram Stoker, must be read to be believed appreciated.
Do you have a book in you? Imagine: Late nights pecking furiously on the keyboard with a glass of red wine by your side, animated conversations with your editor and agent and, eventually, the final, beautiful product: a hardcover book with your name on the cover. Then your publisher sends you on a book tour where you sign books, do readings, hobnob with literary types and generally feel very writerly. Dream on, baby!
When my non-fiction book "My Start-Up Life" was published last year, I became the latest first-time author mugged by reality. Here’s how it works for most. Before you begin writing, your idea is massaged to be as commercially viable as possible even at the cost of artistic merit. After it comes out, you’re expected to get in your car and flog the heck of out your book on your own nickel. At every stage in-between, a gritty reality demolishes the romantic conception of what it means to be an author.
New uncertainties and financial strains are partly to blame for the dog-eat-dog attitude that’s become the status quo. Technologies like Google Books and the Amazon Kindle are causing heartburn in publishers. Government studies showing plunging reading rates raise the question whether the younger generation--my generation--will still be reading print books when they’re adults. These points of stress create an understandably tumultuous situation for all involved.
Yet, even after all the ups-and-downs, I’m still happy I wrote a book. There are indeed good reasons to write upon dead trees, even if the process is not as it’s been mythologized. Americans still buy and read books. Millions of ‘em. There’s probably no more intimate exchange of ideas than someone quietly sitting and reading your prose for several hours. There’s also probably no more credible way to establish authority on a topic (non-fiction) or demonstrate legitimate creative ability (fiction). And, if you love to read and buy books, there’s no feeling quite like seeing your own book in a bookstore for the first time.
So if you’re one of the 81% of Americans who’d answer "yes" to my opening question--do you have a book in you?--go ahead, take the plunge. But feel no shame in bailing once you see what you’re up against. The smartest writers in the world, in my opinion, are snuggled in their bedrooms, wearing pajamas, with a glass of red wine by their side, writing a blog.
Ben Casnocha
Ben Casnocha is a student at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of "My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley" published by Jossey-Bass.
I believe that I have grounds to revise Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick" to more accurately represent what the author originally intended.
Based on research into various documents previously unknown, I have made the startling discovery that Melville intended the book to be told almost entirely from the point of view of the whale. It stands to reason that, had the modern concept of memoir been available in his era, Melville would have certainly changed the title of the book from “Moby-Dick, or The Whale” to “Moby-Dick: A Memoir.” Animals are wonderful storytellers, as has been pointed out about Matt Haig recently in the pages of Book Review.
When we meet, I can give you the rich amount of material upon which I support this drastic (I know) change to an undeniable literary classic. But I don’t believe it will lose its position as a result; in fact, it will be enhanced as such a restoration will give the world a better version of what Melville had wanted.
I count myself among a worthy line of editors—among them Matthew Bruccoli on Thomas Wolfe, Noel Polk on Robert Penn Warren and Michael A. Lofaro on James Agee (nevermind what Nina Revoyrsays about him in this Sunday’s Los Angeles Times Book Review)—who have helped artists to realize what they were trying to say. Writers, in truth, are often so swept up in the "artist thing" that they forget what they're doing. Editors' feet, however, are firmly grounded.
As I said, I am near to completing my restoration of the text. I have also suggested cutting several sections of material, for example:
The section on cetology -– almost certainly these were notes which the writer used for research, not as part of the narrative.
The brief early section about the mariner Bulkington -– clearly a false start.
I have also fixed language in several places where the author unaccountably slips into dialects that muddle the passages’ meaning.
I look forward to hearing from you at your soonest opportunity. Until then, call me
Stalin was "A very, very exceptional man, in every sense. That may not be comfortable news for us, but the fact is he was a gifted politician." Author Simon Sebag Montefiore talks about his biography "Young Stalin."
In the mid-1990s, a friend and I sent Arthur C. Clarke a letter soliciting his work for a small literary journal we co-edited. We didn’t expect to hear back from him -- but hear from him we did, in the form of what he called EGOgrams, chatty communiqués about his doings, sort of like the holiday letters people send out at the end of the year. He couldn’t submit a story, Clarke informed us, but we were welcome to publish selections from his correspondence, which is precisely what we did.
Here’s a link to what Clarke sent us -- charming, erudite and surprising, just like the man himself.
I couldn’t help thinking about this last night when I came across a video clip on YouTube that Clarke made in December, to mark his 90th birthday.
The themes are the same, but he was always adapting, using new media and technologies to let us know what he was thinking, to share with us his ongoing wonder at being alive.
I waited to watch the new literary coffee klatch Titlepage until the second episode was live, in hopes that it would begin to find its footing. As the first major Internet talk show about books -- whose host, Daniel Menaker, has serious editorial credentials -- it's a welcome, perhaps overdue, Internet venture.
After two episodes, it's clear that the show still has some kinks to work out. I was hoping for a show reminiscent of Dick Cavett's, all momentum and jittery intelligence, but it's more Charlie Rose-esque (plodding, people sitting in a circle).
The biggest challenge is the structure: All the authors sit on set as Menaker speaks to one after another, for about 10 minutes each. So in the first episode (pictured), Richard Price, Susan Choi, Colin Harrison and Charles Bock each spent 30-plus minutes in silence, waiting to be addressed, looking like uncomfortable schoolchildren. Why not take a cue from Rose and film the episodes discreetly? Or from Letterman and Leno and bring out one writer at a time, leading up to a hilarious multi-author conclusion? And how about a nice cushiony couch? I'm not the first person to notice that those chairs look awfully uncomfortable.
Although the first episode had a little author-on-author discussion (more! more!), the second, which was apparently filmed first, never let the authors talk to one another. What memoirists Sloane Crosley and Julie Klam might have discussed with Ceridwen Dovey, who's written a fable of violence, and Keith Gessen, who says that the character closest to him in his novel isn't the one named Keith, will remain a mystery.
Also, Menaker, who looks great, doesn't yet have the hang of reading off TV prompters. And while his elegantly scripted transitions from author to author give the show a nice flow, the pre-planning means that he's often veering away from the conversation thread. Although he seems to wane over the course of these 45- to 60-minute shows, it would still be nice to see him ask a natural follow-up question rather than shuffling to the next index card.
Despite the show's shortfalls, it contains a few surprise gems. Dovey, despite speaking last, was fantastically articulate, pithy and thoughtful. Bock's eager and candid discussion of craft was inspiring. And Price's admission of the extent to which he outlines, just to forestall doing his real writing, will be a comfort to procrastinators everywhere.
It's one of the most famous murders in American history, the killing of 28-year-old Catherine (Kitty) Genovese, in the early hours of March 13, 1964, on Austin Street, in the borough of Queens, New York, around the corner from where she lived. While 38 people watched or listened without calling the police, Genovese was stabbed repeatedly, in three separate attacks over the course of half an hour, then sexually assaulted and left for dead. (She died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.) Two weeks later, the New York Times detailed all this in a Page One piece, and the Kitty Genovese story became a metaphor for contemporary urban apathy.
The Genovese murder forms the center of “Thirty-Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case” (Melville House: 112 pp., $14.95 paper) by A. M. Rosenthal, who was the paper’s metropolitan editor at the time. But this little book is more a look at our collective guilt for Genovese’s murder, the way we are all complicit when the rules of society start breaking down.
Prior to taking over the metropolitan desk, Rosenthal — who later went on to be the Times’ executive editor and an op-ed columnist — was a foreign correspondent, stationed in India and Poland. There, he saw all sorts of things he looked away from: “Cripples crawling in New Delhi’s Connaught Place, the capital’s shopping center then, wretched mishapen babies held out by filthy mothers in Calcutta — I turned away not in fear but in disgust and annoyance.” Where, then, he wants us to consider, is our moral authority to judge the Genovese witnesses when we all do similar things every day?
It’s a vivid argument, and 44 years later, it has more to tell us than some moralistic tale of apathy. “There are, it seems to me,” Rosenthal ends the book, “only two logical ways to look at the story of the murder of Catherine Genovese. One is the way of the neighbor on Austin Street — ‘Let’s forget the whole thing.’
“The other is to recognize that the bell tolls even on each man’s individual island, to recognize that every man must fear the witness in himself who whispers to close the window.”
Arthur C. Clarke, a giant of modern science fiction, has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90. An aide told the Associated Press that Clarke had been suffering from breathing problems and had been in and out of the hospital.
It didn't seem possible that we would ever hear such news: Didn't Clarke seem timeless? As unchanged as the monolith discovered on the moon in the story "The Sentinel"? That story was later expanded into the novel "2001: A Space Odyssey." He was as prolific (the A.P. estimates that he authored more than 100 books) as he was optimistic about science and technology. His name is everywhere.
In his characteristically sniffy manner, critic Thomas Disch once called Clarke's "2010," a followup of sorts to "2001," as representative of the science fiction genre's "meat-and-potatoes mid-range." He also grudgingly pointed out that Isaac Asimov and Clarke were "as close to household words as any writers in the field."
Clarke certainly reached the mainstream, but not only because of his speculations about the future. I think it was also because readers detected something else dominant in some of his work: the presence of religious questions, even though Clarke himself was opposed to organized religion. That's what has always drawn me to him, and that is what has always startled students in my writing classes when, near the semester's end, I ask them to read a brief story of Clarke's called "The Star." A starship's chief astrophysicist, who also happens to be a Jesuit priest, undergoes a religious crisis when he realizes that a star that went supernova 3,000 years ago, annihilating the peace-loving inhabitants of a nearby planet, was the same star that brought the magi to Bethlehem to witness the birth of Jesus. The priest's realization of this is moving and ironic: It never disappoints students.
If there's any legacy that Clarke has left us, it is that science doesn't solve the problems of the human condition. In fact, science forces us to wrestle even more deeply with our beliefs, choices and what we understand about ourselves. Clarke struck notes that were poignant and challenging, as with this final, anguished question which ends "The Star":
"There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last. Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?"
The website The Morning News is in the midst of its annual Tournament of Books, designed much like college basketball's March Madness (complete with sudden-death elimination and complex brackets). In the tournament, novels go head to head, and an author/critic/blogger judge declares a winner in each match. Two commentators -- Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner -- weigh in on the proceedings, just as those guys on ESPN do. It's not exactly scientific, but it is fun.
Take today's contest: "The Shadow Catcher," by Marianne Wiggins, faces off against Brock Clarke's "The Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England." Judge Helen DeWitt begins her assessment of the two books with a quote by Frederic Jameson on Theodore Adorno's use of Sigmund Freud ... an intellectual pile-on that might be a little daunting but for the commentators, who call DeWitt "one smart cookie" and themselves "mouth-breathing idiots." A little something in the analysis for everyone.
This matchup marks the end of the first round. Moving up in the competition are "Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson, "Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name" by Vendela Vida, "Then We Came to the End" by Joshua Ferris, "You Don't Love Me Yet" by Jonathan Lethem, "Shining at the Bottom of the Sea" by Stephen Marche, "Remainder" by Tom McCarthy, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz, and, yes, SoCal author Wiggins' "The Shadow Catcher."
The last two books on the list, by Diaz and Wiggins, are also nominated for the LA Times Book Prize in fiction.
If you collect books, you've probably noticed that they're made of paper, and that paper comes from trees. Raz Godelnik noticed -- he thinks green (not Irish, eco-ish) -- and he wanted to balance his books with new trees. So he started the website Eco-Libris; there, anyone can donate money to plant trees to offset book purchases.
It's not a direct replacement; the donations won't support new trees to be planted for pulp. Instead, Eco-Libris trees will be planted in Central America and Africa, in regions of deforestation, by one of three nonprofits: The Alliance for International Reforestation, Ripple Africa or Sustainable Harvest International. Of course, a donation to those nonprofits -- or any others involved in tree planting, like LA's Treepeople -- could be made by any booklover at any time.
But Eco-Libris makes the formula simple: for your X books, give to plant X trees. Easy.
It costs about a dollar per book (less, if you're talking hundreds). In return for your donation, you'll get a sticker that proclaims "one tree has been planted for this book."
Anne Enright’s breakthrough success with the novel "The Gathering," which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize, hasn’t changed her attitudes to the writing life. Talking to Declan Meade in the spring issue of the fine Dublin-based literary magazine, The Stinging Fly, Enright describes the demanding process of revision, Irish mothers, paying the bills, winning the Booker and much more.
(To learn how to get a copy of the entire interview, check out the subscriptions at the website. Go on, it’s plenty worth it.) Here are some excerpts:
Meade: I’ve read in another interview you did that your advice to new writers would be that it is the rewriting that is all important. When you rewrite, are you building up the work or paring it back?
Enright: If I’m talking to new writers one of the things I say is that what you have to do is manage your emotions about your work. I think the first impulse of writing is in a place of flow, a really very blessed place to be in, writing a first draft. Some writers find it very difficult to rewrite because of the disgust that they feel for that act of what psychoanalysts call extromission. Adam Philips gave this great talk in Dublin and he was saying how R.D. Laing had done this experiment on it. He made people spit into a glass of water and then drink it and then spit into the glass again, and nobody could do this more than four times; they couldn’t drink any more. And Philips himself, I asked him, does he do it, does he edit his work and he said no, I don’t drink the spit, I won’t drink the spit (laughs). I say that rewriting is where it’s at, and I say it because people write work that could be good if only they’d rewrite it. And their emotions about it are less than relevant (laughs).
I rewrite all the time. So when somebody says they do six drafts or something like that, I’m always amazed because I don’t know how they know. A book is never a stable object for me and it is never finished. I rewrite when I’m doing a reading! My early rewriting is a question of distillation and concentration; the challenge is to make it undiluted. And a lot of it is working on the rhythm....
Yup, amid a steady drumbeat of news about Southland bookstores closing their doors due to rising rents and declining sales comes word that a Los Feliz landmark will nearly double in size.
Come May — give or take a few weeks — Skylight Books will open a second space right next door in the 1934 building at the corner of Vermont and Melbourne avenues, promises general manager and co-owner Kerry Slattery.
"It's all so exciting," Slattery writes in a March newsletter to Skylight's faithful. "It will be at least a few months before all is ready, but we plan to move our art, film, music, theater and a few other sections to the new space, which will allow us to also expand a few sections."
Why now, as Dutton's Brentwood Books prepares to close its doors at the end of the month and Book Soup shutters its Costa Mesa satellite store?
Two reasons, Slattery tells Jacket Copy:
Unlike the development pressures facing Doug Dutton's store and the high-end retail rent at South Coast Plaza, Skylight has "a supportive landlord who is offering us the space for a fair rent," she says. "He could have rented this space for a lot more money to some chain operation. He thinks that the bookstore is an important thing."
In 1960, "Little Toot," a Los Angeles Public Library bookmobile, was retired in favor of a new, larger book van. From the looks of things, officials declined to call the new touring library Big Toot.
Here in this sprawling Turkish city on the Bosphorus Strait is a wide hilltop boulevard full of pedestrians and trams and lined with bright shops, both local and international. Between the fashion and the food found along this street, Istiklal Caddesi, there are also many bookstores. They sell Turkish- and English-language books, and even Turkish translations of literary classics.
Turkey doesn't have a tradition of public libraries, so bookstores have a greater social role to fill. A wonderful example of such an oasis of erudition is Homer Kitabevi ("kitabevi" means "bookstore" in Turkish), just off Istiklal on Yeni Çarşi Cadessi, a steep, narrow street often crammed with taxis heading uphill.
Homer's owner, Ayşen Boylu, is a former urban archeologist who opened the bookstore 13 years ago; she was working on her PhD and found a dearth of the kind of books she needed. Today, Homer is packed with smart books on history and criticism, architecture and art, literature and religion. Most popular, Boylu says, are books on archeology, history, philosophy and photography. The store's runaway hit? Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason." You can see Boylu in her store, and pics of more bookstores in Istanbul, after the jump.
The LA Times Book Prizes are coming; April 25 will be here sooner than you think. The nominated authors are busy people: in addition to writing books, many have been doing book tours and readings of their work. Take, for example, the nominees in Young Adult Fiction:
Reporters setting up this week at the state Capitol in Albany, N.Y. (Photo credit: Mary Altaffer/Associated Press)
Albany is at the top of national headlines now, and some pundits are talking about resigned New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s behavior and political corruption in Albany as if these are recent phenomena. Oh really? Here’s what William Kennedy wrote about the city and its political environment years ago in his 1983 nonfiction book “O Albany!”:
“Maligning Albany is a very old game. The early Dutchmen were targets of derision by visitors who found their city dismal, dingy and dirty. The English didn’t do much better with it. About 1876 the famed architect Stanford White had this to say: ‘Misery, wretchedness, ennui and the devil — I’ve got to spend another evening in Albany. Of all the miserable, wretched, second-class, one-horse towns, this is the most miserable.’
“In modern times the city grew to be a lascivious parlor of Satan, and also what John Gunther in his ‘Inside U.S.A.’ in 1947 described as ‘a kind of political cloaca maxima, beside which Kansas City seemed almost pure.’ ”
Kennedy goes on to call the city “a famed vortex of state politics” and “a pinnacle of porkhead bossism” — and then spends the rest of his book describing all the things he loves about that city, the parade of characters who have fed his novels.
Spitzer may be the figure of ridicule now, but I prefer thinking of other names associated with Albany and with Kennedy—a worthy list that includes, real and imaginary, the Gatsbyish gangster Legs Diamond, the heroic searcher Daniel Quinn and Dan O’Connell, the very real, powerful Irish political boss who inspired Kennedy’s imagination.
Even this otter, seen off the coast of Santa Barbara, seems delighted by the news about Vroman's. (Photograph by Ricardo DeAratanha /Los Angeles Times)
The disappointment and frustration that the L.A. reading community feels over the forthcoming closure of Brentwood Dutton's is hard to shake, but at least there's some other news about the area's indie booksellers that gives book lovers reason to celebrate.
Publishers Weekly has announced that Vroman's in Pasadena has won PW's "Bookseller of the Year" award. The store, which was founded in 1894, will receive the award at the upcoming Book Expo America convention that's being held this year in Los Angeles. Among the reason's for Vroman's selection, explains PW's Kevin Howell, are the store's profit-sharing with employees, staff scholarships and community outreach. The store's ability to maintain profit, handsell deserving titles and quickly respond to customer needs also were mentioned. What a welcome bit of news!
I'm staying in Istanbul with my American friend Gloria Fisk, a literature professor who is working on a book about the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk and his reception at home and abroad. Last year she explored the ways her college students read the Nobel Prize-winning novelist in an article for n+1 magazine. Here we talk about her perceptions so far:
Q: How has Orhan Pamuk’s work shaped your ideas about Turkey? Gloria Fisk: I read "The Black Book" years ago, and it created this really vivid image of the city that I always wanted to come visit. I started paying attention to Turkish culture and politics.... [Pamuk's 1994 novel] had these really beautiful images of the city and the characters were really lively. To me it was ... evocative and real. But now I realize that most Turkish readers hate that book and think that that was the beginning of his downfall, and consider readers like me who got sucked into it Orientalist dupes.
Q: In Turkey, Pamuk is not universally adored? GF: He’s universally hated.
Q: Really? GF: I’m being a little flip. That’s an exaggeration, but he alienates most Turkish readers, for one reason or another.
Q: Pamuk made people angry by making public comments about the Armenian genocide of 1915-1918, right? GF: He alienated the ultra-nationalists with that. What didn’t happen was the sort of rallying around him that you might expect from intellectuals and progressives.
Q: Or the secularists? GF: Definitely not. Many of the most extreme nationalists are also secularists. Because the Turkish republic has secularist foundations, any threat to the nation is perceived as a threat to secularism, too. And any recognition of the Armenian genocide can be understood as a threat to the nation. Pamuk alienated hardline secularists by speaking to a foreign journalist about this shameful event that happened during the formative years of the republic.
Public Illumination Magazine (a.k.a. PIM) is entering its 28th year of publication. PIM is a little magazine (2 3/4 by 4 1/4 inches on slick paper) devoted to art and writing (never more than 250 words per contribution). Each issue has a theme. The first issue in December 1979 was devoted to telephones, followed by others on virulence, mass transit, little girls and on to hair, climate and miracles.
Contributors are being sought for the forthcoming issue on space.
Originally published in New York City, PIM is now based in Italy. The editor is "Prof. Dr. Dr. Zagreus Bowery," who is ably assisted by one Miss Davenport. At first it was issued "non-weekly," later "non-monthly," then "non-biannual." Now it comes out non-occasionally and still contains work by some of the most creative writers and artists in the United States and Europe. The current issue, No. 51 on passion, is graced by such contributors as Leadbilly, short red, S.S. Vortex, Robert von Thomas, sudie, Sophie D. Lux Fitty Sense, Rank Cologne, mr Basho, the King of France. (The latter four have been longtime fixtures in PIM. Others include Jerzy Plates, Jackson Scrubber, L. Majority, Vladimir Voorhees and E.Z. Street.)
If these names are unfamiliar, it should be noted that all of PIM’s artists and writers have been required to appear under pseudonyms--a wonderful glancing blow against the contemporary obsession with celebrity. PIM is the only magazine in which the pieces and the contributors’ names are works of art.
Second, here's a tidbit from the Q&A that Penguin Books did with Jones (who admitted last week that her real name is Margaret "Peggy" SeltzerÖ) about a scene that always made her -- and her editor -- cry:
Q: What was the scene that affected both of you so much?
A: It was the scene in which my little sisters and I were walking home from the Korean grocery store and Nishia dropped a carton of milk. It burst open and the milk streamed into the gutter. She burst into tears, begging me not to be mad as she stooped down trying to scrape it all back into the broken carton. I told her I wasn’t mad. But I was. That was a half-gallon of milk wasted and two dollars gone. Even now, as an adult, just thinking about that—thinking about the choices you were given as a child that weren’t kid choices—makes me want to cry.
Crying over spilled milk? Did no one noticed that at its heart, this weeper is nothing more than an overworked cliché? Really?
Third, lit blogger Ron Hogan, who has been nobly anti-pile-on, writes that Jones/Seltzer's editor, Sarah McGrath, was doing her job, picking up a story that was apparently so compelling that it also fooled a Pulitzer-grade book critic like the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani, who said on Feb. 28,"Ms. Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood," thanks to "a novelist's eye for the psychological detail and an anthropologist's eye for social rituals and routines."
To which I would respond (heck, I am responding) that part of the problem is that Kakutani's feel for the truth of South L.A.'s "social rituals and routines" seems inevitably formed by the same pop culture hand-me-downs from which Jones/Seltzer seems to have crafted her book.
Finally, if you want to get with Madd Ronald, the gang member whose message about Peggy appeared on the now-defunct International Brother/SisterHood website, he's on MySpace.
(books at Habbaniya base: photo courtesy of Tony Perry)
Foreign policy differences aside, the American public supports our troops in Iraq. One way to show it is by sending them books, lots of books. Marines are readers; the corps even has an official reading list, heavy on military history and doctrine.
As I jump from base to base in Anbar province where the Marines are stationed, I always prowl the book collection. Some are nicely organized shelves tended by civilian employees; other collections are in boxes or spread on tables.
Dean Koontz, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Scott Turow and Louis L’Amour are everywhere. But I always find something unique: a well-thumbed copy of Henry James’ 1909 book "The Ambassadors" in a plywood shack at Camp Fallouja’s helicopter landing zone and John Hersey’s 1956 novel "A Single Pebble" in a recreation room at the Al Asad airfield, among them.
My most surprising find was at a base in Ramadi: a hardback copy of Jean Bowie Shor’s 1955 book "After You, Marco Polo," the tale of a young couple retracing the explorer’s trek from Venice to Beijing. I can’t remember which base it was, but two years ago I found Leon Uris’ "The Haj" (1984), his take on the modern Arab experience.
My favorite book collection this trip is at the Habbaniya base, two shelves beneath a poster of the venomous snakes found in southwest Asia. Maybe it’s the setting: an abandoned British hotel. You half expect to see Evelyn Waugh sipping gin and grousing about the locals. There, along with the predictable current titles, were two Edna Ferbers, a couple of Cornelius Ryans and a collection of essays by James Jones about World War II.
I try to add to the collections. Among the books I’m leaving behind this year is one about Vasily Grossman. He was an "embedded" reporter with the Red Army during WWII, a sort of Soviet Ernie Pyle, so I claim him as a spiritual godfather.
Tony Perry
Tony Pery covers the military for the L.A. Times and has been to Iraq as an embedded reporter on several occasions.
The Beijing Summer Olympics are coming soon. Brace yourselves for mindless television coverage of Panda bears, authentic cuisine and acrobats. Yes, let's not forget the acrobats.
That's exactly what the Chinese government wants.
"The Olympics are meant to show the legitimacy of this regime," says Chinese journalist and activist Dai Qing (photo above). "They have lost every other form of legitimacy, but now they want to show the world that our society is rich, open, and the people are happy. That is what the Olympics there will mean."
Dai Qing's comments were made in a short interview with me at the close of "China and Human Rights," a two-day symposium that ended yesterday at Claremont McKenna College. This extraordinary event drew several prominent Chinese dissident intellectuals as well as many high-profile experts on China such as Orville Schell and Roderick MacFarquhar. Thursday night, Schell gave a keynote speech, in which he discussed the impact on the environment of China's industrial development. Yesterday night, MacFarquhar looked at the complex issue of reform in the country.
For me, however, the best thing about the symposium was getting to listen to people like Dai Qing: The facts on the ground are even more poignant when they come from people living the reality of a totalitarian regime every day.
So let's hear a few more of their voices:
Han Dongfang (workers' rights activist; photo right): "It isn't a question of asking whether or not a civil society can be built there. We must do it."
Wang Chaohua (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences): "[W]ithout political space for civic activism, a society is ill-prepared to take effective actions against human rights abuses."
Gao ErTai (writer/painter): "Don't say these conditions only existed during Mao Zedong's era. Don't say peoples' lives have changed. ...The persistence of the ruthless Party's Central Committee Propaganda Ministry is the most conspicuous signpost that yesterday's China still exists today."
Dai Qing: "I'm almost 70 and I am among the youngest of the activists. Who will continue to work? There may be more openness, but this doesn't mean there is victory. There are still the same political and economic systems in place."
Although you wouldn't know it by the freezing temperatures, it's spring break in Pittsburgh. I left town earlier today -- packing at the last minute, leaving the house a mess -- and now am mid-journey. (There are sparrows living inside Terminal One at JFK, in case you were wondering).
Tomorrow I'll land in Istanbul, where I'll be for the week. With all the travel time, the question of what to bring to read was, not surprisingly, at the top of my mind. I'm nagged by the fear that I won't have enough to read, and the number of books that I brought was limited only by the space in my bag.
What I brought: "Snow" by Orhan Pamuk, because it's only right to read the work of a city's living Nobel Laureate in Literature. A book that I'm reading for an upcoming review. Steve Erickson's "Zeroville" (no, I haven't read it yet, but soon, soon!). "Smonk" by Tom Franklin. The advance of a friend's novel. That's five novels. And copies of The New Yorker, of course -- five of them, too.
But that's the everlasting tension for booklovers on holiday. The impulse to just hole up and read -- this is all I want to do! But after traveling all that way, I think I'm supposed to go out and experience Istanbul. Maybe, with any luck, there will be a cafe or two that'll serve both purposes.
Why is it that I feel compelled to pack at least one book per day of vacation? How many do you bring?
British website the Bookseller has announced its shortlist for the Diagram Prize for oddest book title. Last year's winner, "The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification," will be moved aside for one of these:
"Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues" by Catharine MacKinnon "Cheese Problems Solved" by P L H McSweeney "How to Write a How to Write Book" by Brian Piddock "I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen" by Jasper McCutcheon "If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs" by Big Boom "People Who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Dr Feelgood" by Dee Gordon
A few bloggers seem inclined to vote for cheese. But the relationship book by ex-pimp Big Boom, a "celebrated speaker, author and celebrity bodyguard" who calls himself "the bodyguard of hearts," is in the lead so far. (I, for one, would love to see Boom and feminist MacKinnon on a panel together.) The winner will be determined by an online public vote, going on now.
Faye Bender, Margaret Seltzer's agent, had this to say in a brief phone conversation about her role in registering the website for International Brother/SisterHood, the supposed nonprofit with which Seltzer claimed to be involved.
"Peggy," Bender says, "portrayed Brother/SisterHood as a budding new organization designed to mentor young gang members. She said she didn't have the financial means to host a website, so I did a favor for a client, and registered and hosted it. The information up on the website was information that she provided."
Margaret B Jones Seltzer, the fake memoirist du jour, has included, in her stories of growing up in gangland, the fact that she's stayed involved with the community via a nonprofit called International Brother/SisterHood. The extent of that involvement -- and what that nonprofit is, exactly -- is unclear.
The New York Times Home section profile, which ran on Feb. 28 (and prompted her sister to call the paper with the news that the memoir was untrue), tells it this way:
Recently, she started a gang truce organization called International Brother/SisterHood to help youths move away from gang life.
But ... a library record of the book says that she was only:
an active member of International Brother/SisterHood, which works to reduce gang violence and mentor urban teens.
According to her Penguin author's interview (recently removed from the publisher's website but archived here), she is definitely involved, although the issue of who founded the organization remains murky:
I work with International Brother/SisterHood. The idea for the organization came from two homies who have been on death row for twenty years and who felt something needed to be done. ... We're gang members trying to use mentoring and positive contacts with youth, educators, parents and community mentors to elevate the community one person at a time. ... If you're a teacher or a parent and want someone to talk to, hit us up. If you are in the hood and looking for a way out and we have $25 and you need it to pay for submitting a college application, we'll pay it. We go out and talk to these little kids because they look up to us.
But who talks to the little kids? The author lives in Oregon. The homies live on death row. What "we" goes into the community? Where is the International Brother/SisterHood office? Is there a phone number? Where do those college aspirants go, exactly, for that $25?
(Photo credit: University at Buffalo Office of News Services)
For a vivid overview of poet Robert Creeley's career, Stephen Burt's essay in the London Review of Books is a must. Creeley's work, Burt argues, can be divided into three stages: an early hard-to-handle period ("often drunk or stoned, a skirt-chaser [in the language of the time], with frequent, extreme ups and downs"), a middle phase marked by a minimalism so intense as to occasionally eschew meaning altogether and a final, elegiac stretch that was "solitary, melancholy and surprisingly reminiscent of childhood," in which we are defined less by who we are than what we’ve lost.
For Burt, Creeley is a quintessential New England poet, spare and taciturn, who "often seems to have thought not in lines or sentences so much as in quatrains, which he called 'both a semantic measure and a rhythmic measure.' " But more than anything, he sought to strip away all ornament, all metaphor, and to have words simply stand for themselves.
This was not always an effective strategy. Creeley titled one of his first minimalist poems "A Piece," and said that it was "central to all possibilities of statement." That poem reads: "One and / one, two, / three." "If you like that," Burt writes, "you'll love — well, almost anything."
But in his poem, "The Farm," Creeley also wrote: "Tips of celery / clouds of // grass — one / day I’ll go away." No other contemporary poet I can think of evoked so memorably and so starkly the evanescence of existence, the futility of being alive. The miracle of his writing is that somehow this did not make him hopeless, that in his melancholy he was able to find a measure of connection, even though he knew it couldn't last.
"[T]o listen to Creeley at his best," Burt writes, "is to listen, often uncomfortably, to men and women speaking behind closed doors, to hear what they say to themselves and to each other when they do not know what else to do. . . . Few writers have done more with fewer words."
Credit: Photo by Sol Neelman, as on book jacket for “Love and Consequences” published by Riverhead Books
Reading a book, like watching a movie, demands and inspires a certain willing suspension of disbelief. This has been said before. There’s no darkened theater, but a reader leaves his suspicious mind behind. We still, thank God, have some ability to fall into a story, someone else’s story.
I am a book critic. I reviewed "Love and Consequences," Margaret B. Jones’ (above) memoir of growing up in foster care in South-Central Los Angeles, in our Feb. 10 issue of Book Review. I liked the book. I admired the writer. I admired the publisher for taking a risk on an untested author. I worried about Margaret Jones. I agreed with her central point, as I said in my review: "Only by acknowledging the appeal of gangs and the needs of those who join will any hope of reducing gang violence be realized."
This morning, I got e-mails and phone calls about the book, an overnight literary scandal. "Just look at her face," one person says in reference to the book jacket photo. "She’s so obviously not a gang member."
"How could the publisher have worked on this book for three years and not figured out that she was lying?" says another.
Others find her gang lingo, in hindsight, unbelievable and even funny. There’s a general feeling of indignation but something else, a sort of smug implication that the speaker would have seen through it all.
There are three stories here:
1. The importance of authenticity in books--We don’t expect it in any other medium, but we still seem to think that print equals truth (no wonder print is in peril).
Time to rework the cover of Margaret B. Jones' "memoir."
In case you haven't heard, Margaret B. Jones is another faux memoirist. Exposed by the New York Times (with the help of her sister) just days before the release of "Love and Consequences," it turns out there is no Jones, purportedly a half-Native American, half-white foster child raised in South Los Angeles who fell in with the Crips. Instead, author Margaret Seltzer was raised in comfortable circumstances by her biological family in the Valley and went to an exclusive private school.
It takes a lot of work to write a book. Why on earth do people keep pouring so much effort into writing memoirs that aren't memoirs? There's a word for what you're doing, folks; we call it "fiction."
Sunday night, the penultimate episode of "The Wire." Bubbles goes to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting and, well-groomed and collected, speaks to the group. He was walking through a park, he says, and wanted to get high. So he called his sponsor but couldn't reach him. He called a bunch of people on the list they'd given out for just this purpose, to help him stay clean, but got no answer. He took the list out of a pocket, smoothing the rumpled paper. Wait, I thought, I've seen this before. Then, just as I remembered, a woman in the crowd says he could have called her -- she'd surely have answered, innuendo intended. Was "The Wire" repeating itself?
No -- I hadn't seen this before. I'd read it.
Inspired by the unparalleled writing on "The Wire," I've finally begun reading the books by the novelists who write for the show. Dennis Lehane and Richard Price have written recent episodes. I read a version of that flirtation-via-NA scene in "Drama City" by
When my non-fiction book 
Yet, even after all the ups-and-downs, I’m still happy I wrote a book. There are indeed good reasons to write upon dead trees, even if the process is not as it’s been mythologized. Americans still buy and read books. Millions of ‘em. There’s probably no more intimate exchange of ideas than someone quietly sitting and reading your prose for several hours. There’s also probably no more credible way to establish authority on a topic (non-fiction) or demonstrate legitimate creative ability (fiction). And, if you love to read and buy books, there’s no feeling quite like seeing your own book in a bookstore for the first time.
