The Empty Mirror

July is looking like the cruelest month.

On July 4, Thomas M. Disch, the under-recognized author of the visionary science fiction classics Camp Concentration and 334, committed suicide in his Manhattan apartment. He was 68. Book Review contributor Edward Champion -- or his alter ego Bat Segundo -- did the last in person interview with Disch. You can link to a podcast here. In this Sunday's Book Review, James Sallis, an old friend of Disch's, remembers both the writer and the human being.

Yet Disch wasn't the only writer to die on July 4: Janwillem Van de Wetering died at age 77 at his home in Maine. Van de Wetering is known primarily as a mystery novelist, but I remember him for two nonfiction books he wrote in the 1970s, The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery and A Glimpse of Nothingness: Experiences in an American Zen Community.

I read those books back-to-back the summer after my freshman year in college, along with a lot of other stuff -- Black Elk Speaks, The Teachings of Don Juan -- that, I hoped, would give me some kind of mystical insight. Mostly, it didn't -- or perhaps it's more accurate to say that I was looking for answers that no book can provide. But Van de Wetering's two memoirs opened up another kind of insight, making accessible the notion of Zen-like acceptance, an ideal to which I continue (in my better moments) to aspire.

I never read Van de Wetering's mysteries, never wanted to, never felt the need.

But I still carry around my copies of "The Empty Mirror" and "A Glimpse of Nothingness," to remind me of who I once was and who I may yet someday be.

David L. Ulin

We asked a Mexican: Gustavo Arellano

It started out as a joke: OC Weekly reporter Gustavo Arellano's editor thought it might be funny if he wrote a one-time satiric advice column, and ¡Ask a Mexican! was born. Readers loved the way he played with stereotypes, and Arellano's been doing the column ever since (lately, also on video). Last year saw the publication of the "¡Ask a Mexican!" book, which is now out in paperback. Arellano's second book, a personal history titled "Orange County," is due in September. We e-mailed the man who has all the answers for a few more.

Jacket Copy: You've been doing the "¡Ask a Mexican!" column for more than three years. Do people ask you questions all the time, even when you're not working? And what's the most common question you get (other than "what's the most common question you get?")?

Gustavo Arellano: When people find out I write the column, most of the time they just shower accolades on me rather than ask questions. I'm just grateful 80% of the people I meet whom a friend introduces me to them as "He writes '¡Ask a Mexican!' " knows about the column. As for the most-asked question besides yours: "Why do Mexicans like to swim in the ocean with their clothes on?" Whether the reader is from Hermosa Beach or Michigan, I always get this question — so strange. ...

JC: What was the biggest challenge in putting together the "¡Ask a Mexican!" book? Would you do it again?

GA: Making it work for a national audience. Since I'm based in Orange County, many of the punch lines in my column make reference to Orange County — the anti-immigrant idiots at the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, corrupt politicians and the like. People in Nebraska don't give a damn about such jokes or zings. So I needed to rework some of the questions I previously answered (the book is 50% old, 50% new) to make it work. Of course I would do it again — any author who doesn't jump at the chance to do a nationally published book deserves their PR day job.

JC: You often use Spanish words, sometimes to describe parts of female anatomy. Can you use dirtier words if you use Spanish? Do your editors have any idea what you're saying? (See answer after the jump.)

Authors talk, one finally

Nam Le's "The Boat" was described this weekend by Antoine Wilson in our Book Review as "a refreshingly diverse and panoramic debut."  The newspaper interviewed Le way back at the beginning of June. "I think that the reason I travel is similar to the reason I read and write fiction: to experience other places," Le said.

Also reviewed this weekend in The Times' Book Review: Joan Silber's "The Size of the World." The novel, Susan Salter Reynolds wrote, "is a wild ride. Following Silber's threads as they reach across time and space can feel somewhat precarious. But it's worth it." In a guest post on The Millions late last month, Silber offered her thoughts on reading about —and in — Southeast Asia.

And on a final note, science fiction author Thomas M. Disch died July 4. Edward Champion recently interviewed Disch for "The Bat Segundo" show; that podcast, Disch's last in-person interview, is available now. Champion also wrote a memorial about the author for New York magazine and posted a long list of other writers commenting on the loss, including William Gibson.

Carolyn Kellogg

Photo of Thomas M. Disch via Flickr's Houari B

Dick Cavett and his literary lions

Dick Cavett's talk shows ran on TV when I was too young to catch them, so I'm coming to them through his DVD sets. In the last of the "Rock Icons" DVDs -- the one in which he talks (separately) to Stevie Wonder, George Harrison and Paul Simon -- he gets literary.

It was Sept. 5, 1974: The talk-show host, having just published his memoir "Cavett," puts himself in the TV interview seat. Writers Jerzy Kosinski, Anthony Burgess and Barbara Howar get to interview him. Poor Cavett barely gets a word in.

Burgess, best known for "A Clockwork Orange," seems to be nominally in charge, sitting next to Cavett and waving his cigarillo. Despite having the worst comb-over of the 20th century (had he just climbed off a yacht with a terrible tailwind?), the British author is quite charming, and he at least makes an effort to stick to the plan and ask Cavett some questions.

Burgess: I want to ask you a very fundamental question, and before I ask it I'm going to answer it myself, on my own terms. People have asked me, why do you write books. And my answer is I write books for a living, because there's no other job I can do successfully, or with any measure of expertise. Obviously, you have another kind of living. Therefore, why do you write this book?

[Cavett digresses briefly into the subject of money-making, then continues.]

Cavett: I seem to have evaded your question. . . . I guess I wanted the experience of knowing what it is like to get something down the way you want it, rather than the frustration of when you're on television, everything is sort of off the top of your head. It's ad-lib. . . . It's sometimes better than you thought, sometimes worse, never quite the way you planned. I somehow envied writers, the idea that you can get a thing and finish it the way you want it, then pass it on.

This idea, that a book is a perfect, finished form, might not sit well with all writers. But compared with taped television -- which, in the early 1970s, was broadcast and then (seemingly) disappeared -- books had a definite staying power. Now, with DVDs, perhaps it's the other way around. Cavett and Kosinski have an interesting conversation about this kind of permanence -- an excerpt is after the jump.

Burgess goes on to posit that Cavett might have been making a "shy attempt" to pursue literary ambitions, but before he can answer, Howar, a Washington socialite who wrote the bestselling memoir "Laughing All the Way" and little else, jumps in and answers for him. Cavett's literary ambitions did eventually include a second book -- 1983's "Eye on Cavett." These days -- what else? -- he blogs.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo of Dick Cavett and Anthony Burgess from the DVD "Dick Cavett: Rock Icons" from Shout Factory

John Muir, nature man of Yosemite

Naturalist John Muir is the focus of a feature in this month's Smithsonian magazine. The man who championed protecting natural spaces — especially in what is now Yosemite National Park — was born in Scotland, moved as a boy to Wisconsin and later hiked from Kentucky to south Florida; there, he got sick and headed to California to recuperate. Once he found the wilds of Northern California in 1868, he was smitten. He climbed rocks, cursed the sharp hooves of sheep that tore up wildflowers and even snuck President Teddy Roosevelt away from his handlers and into the backcountry for three nights of camping.

He also wrote like a fiend.

Most of Muir's writings — which appeared, predominantly, in magazines — are in the public domain. The Sierra Club has put many of them online, in HTML format, with the original illustrations (in other words, no PDF downloads). But if you prefer book form, there have been reprints, and in 1997 the Library of America published "John Muir: Nature Writings," a weighty 928 pages. Here's a taste from "The Yosemite," originally published in 1912:

But no temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite. Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic repose; others, absolutely sheer or nearly so for thousands of feet, advance beyond their companions in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike, seemingly aware, yet heedless, of everything going on about them. Awful in stern, immovable majesty, how softly these rocks are adorned, and how fine and reassuring the company they keep: their feet among beautiful groves and meadows, their brows in the sky, a thousand flowers leaning confidently against their feet, bathed in floods of water, floods of light....

If that's not to your taste, a selection of books about Muir are after the jump.

David Sedaris and the conundrum of popularity

The good thing about living in a big, wonderful city like Los Angeles is that you can be sure that big, wonderful writers like David Sedaris will come through town. The bad thing is that there's no guarantee you'll get to see them.

Sedaris is visiting Vroman's Bookstore this Sunday at 5 p.m. on his book tour to promote "When You Are Engulfed in Flames." I'd be tempted to whine about all the restrictions placed on attending — if I'd gotten one of the free tickets, that is. But what's the use? The Sedaris reading is "sold out."

How do bookstore appearances sell out? Do guys in yellow security jackets guard the door? (They just might.)

Vroman's, a big wonderful bookstore, has tried to make it up to the ticketless masses by allowing anybody who can't get into the reading to join the signing line (also ticketed) and by posting a podcast interview with the author. It's a bit salt-in-the-wound, but still, it's there and it's free.

There is another way to see David Sedaris ... after the jump.

A Jane Austen memento. Pricey? Creepy?

This is more than just a lovely piece of 19th century jewelry. It's a memorial to Jane Austen — look closely to see the faint outline of a grave with her name on it at the lower right. And it's (probably) crafted (probably) of Jane Austen's own hair.

At an auction last week, the locket was bought by an anonymous bidder for $9,478.

The buyer could have been almost anyone — 191 years after her death, Austen has plenty of enthusiastic fans. The Jane Austen Society of North America counts 4,000 members; maybe it was one of them. Or perhaps it was someone with a high profile. An Austen blogger posits it might have been J.K. Rowling, who once said that Austen was her favorite writer. The author of the "Harry Potter" series certainly could drop 4,800 pounds on a trinket without denting her budget.

According to most accounts, hair jewelry was popularized during Queen Victoria's extended period of mourning. But the practice of weaving or twisting the hair of a loved one into complex designs, like the one above, goes back several hundred years (the 2004 book "Mourning and Art Jewelry" has all the details). It was not considered creepy to trim the hair from a corpse — as was done in Austen's case — in order to wear it close to one's heart.

At the same auction, a first edition of Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" sold for 30,000 pounds (almost $60,000). Six years ago, a "Pride and Prejudice" first edition sold for $62,000. The hair jewelry might have been a bargain after all.

Carolyn Kellogg

Nobody Move: stay tuned for next month

Richard's comments about the next installment of "Nobody Move" seem like a perfect place to wrap up phase one of our conversation, and look ahead to phase two.

So nobody move -- we'll be back next month to discuss the second part of Denis Johnson's serial novel, and to see where the story goes from here.

David L. Ulin

The medium and the message?

I first read Denis Johnson's "Angels" when I was in graduate school in Amherst, Mass., the novel having been loaned to me by someone housesitting for an older professor. I was only 23 and blown away. I knew all those people in "Angels," though I wished I hadn't grown up with them, and I was stunned that someone had written a novel so deeply immersed inside their heads.

So reading this first installment of "Nobody Move" is strange because, once again, we're completely immersed, and it's a good thing. Since I've been reading a lot of noir lately — my favorite being that of Ross Macdonald, Walter Mosley and now Raymond Chandler, because of Judith Freeman's fine nonfiction book about him — this was perfect.

And it's so damn funny. The dialogue is funny, perfect just like Chandler's. The details are hilarious — the log motel and the restaurants and the river.

But I agree with several things Carolyn and David have pointed out. First, why can't we see the scene where Luntz shoots Gambol? Why would Gambol have been on that kind of ride and let him put the gun in the glove compartment in the first place? (Again, I wish I didn't know people like this, or rides like this.) If Gambol's supposed to be too tired to do it right, I'd like to know.

Second, the whole serialization thing is strange. I love the way the headline trumpets On Deadline!  Publishing History Begins Now.

But not really, given Dickens and Hardy and so many others, including the recent novels serialized in the New York Times Magazine.

Anyway, a month will pass, and I'll read again passionately, because I love Johnson and his style and his inimitable humor, which is beyond black and into some other netherworldly shade. But I probably will have to keep this story around.

Which brings me to Richard's comment about his son wanting the magazine. Yeah, only I live in a house with three feminist teenage girls, all of whom are taller than me. All very beautiful. All of whom gave me the most dubious, deadly looks when I mentioned that inside the FedEx envelope was Playboy. "I tell my grad students some of the best fiction in history has been published in Playboy," I said. "We just read a T.C. Boyle story in class that was originally in here."

They gave me the classic teenage answer. "Why?" Deadpan.

When I showed the cover to them (one is a college girl who reads Details, Esquire and about 10 other magazines and whose favorite magazine in the world is GQ), they all said quizzically, "People still read that?"   

I cut the story out and threw the rest of the pages away, mostly because the  cartoons were so bad. But I can't wait to see what happens with Anita. She's way better than a cartoon.

Susan Straight

A man in a barbershop vest walks into a bar

I wasn't sure what to expect of a serial hard-boiled noir in Playboy from Denis Johnson, but it wasn't a guy in a checkered vest singing barbershop. Lutz starts out as an anti-noir character, the kind of nebbish Bogart played at so well in the bookstore in "The Big Sleep." But of course, Bogart was still Philip Marlowe behind the facade, and similarly, Luntz isn't a putz underneath, at least not a wimpy one. We don't see the scene where he shoots the much-bigger Gambol — an interesting omission, evoked only by the wonderful passage Richard cites — but we wind up convinced that he's got the guts to take action.

I'm not sure what purpose the barbershop bit serves, other than to give readers an early misimpression of Luntz, and to stick him in that goofy getup for the violent and seductive scenes that follow. At this point, I find it a little hard to believe that gambler Luntz would join a barbershop group, and I hope there's some narrative payoff. I don't want it just to provide a quirky, Tarantino-like juxtaposition; I want it to make some kind of twisted sense.

Maybe that kind of tension — how can this fit? — is what keeps a reader hooked between serial installments. Sure, we're curious about Gambol's fate, and what will happen between Luntz and Anita, but it's the question of whether the author will pull everything together that keeps us intrigued. Sometimes I wonder whether Dickens threw in a random character every now and then just to keep things interesting, challenging himself to make sense of everything in his allotted space (a mere 18 episodes — 900 pages).

David points out that the dialogue doesn't always work, but I disagree. I love Johnson's characters' crosstalk — often they seem to be in two entirely separate conversations. And it's not like the characters don't notice. "This is starting to sound like one of those messed-up conversations," Anita says to Luntz. As both David and Richard have pointed out, in moments like this, it seems as if Johnson is having some fun.

Carolyn Kellogg

Photo by Tammy Green via Flickr

Serial killer: Denis Johnson’s 'Nobody Move'

Editor's note: On Friday, Playboy published the first section of Denis Johnson’s “Nobody Move,” a serialized work of fiction that will come out in four parts. Jacket Copy will review “Nobody Move,” installment by installment; below, our take on Part 1.

My wife is appalled at Denis Johnson. “Why Playboy?” she wants to know. She’s referring, of course, to the venue for Johnson’s latest project, “Nobody Move,” a 40,000-word “novel” that the magazine is publishing as a serial in four installments; the first, in the July issue, has just come out.

As for me, I’m more interested in the way “Nobody Move” might help further eclipse the line between mass culture and literature, between the throwaway nature of periodicals and the lasting weight of art. Although serials are not as uncommon as they once were — see Armistead Maupin’s “Tales of the City,” Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” Stephen King’s “The Green Mile” and Michael Chabon’s “Gentlemen of the Road” — they require novelists who can think like journalists, who can write on deadline, who aren’t afraid to make a mess.

This is cool, exhilarating even, especially in a world in which literary culture is often far too insular, like a form of trivial pursuit. Johnson is one of those rare writers who wants to walk both sides of the line here, to go after a mass readership with work that challenges at every turn. That’s one of the things that attracts me to “Nobody Move,” the idea of Johnson’s bleakly existential vision woven in amid the naked women and advice columns on how to live the good life, as if he were the voice of the collective unconscious — or, more accurately, of the collective id.

Not only that, but “Nobody Move” comes billed as a noir, that darkest of American genres, the literary equivalent of the blues.

AutoBondographically: Connery's new memoir

Actor Sean Connery will launch his autobiography "Being A Scot" in August at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Festival director Catherine Lockerbie told Canada's CBC that "this book has gone through more permutations than James Bond has had shaken-not-stirred martinis: different co-writers, different publishers."  The memoir, she continued, will include Connery's thoughts on "many aspects of Scottish culture and life, including sport, architecture and, of course, the gothic tendency in Scots literature."

While Connery is best remembered for his turn as the high-living super-spy James Bond, he's also been bookish on film. Notably, in "The Name of the Rose," the adaptation of Umberto Eco's novel, Connery played William of Baskerville, a literate monk who tries to save a precious library from burning.

But Connery has had a penchant for literary adaptations for his entire career. In 1961, he was in TV versions of both "Macbeth" and "Anna Karenina." Later Connery literary projects "The Hunt for Red October," "The Longest Day," "Marnie," "Murder on the Orient Express," "A Bridge Too Far," "A Fine Madness," "Shalako," "The Russia House," "The Molly Maguires," "The Anderson Tapes," "The First Great Train Robbery," "A Good Man in Africa," "Wrong is Right," "Family Business," "Just Cause," and "Rising Sun" were all adapted from books; "The Hill" and "The Offence," from plays; "The Man Who Would Be King" from a Rudyard Kipling story; and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" from a comic book. That's around 80% of his body of work, a hyper-literary run.

And James Bond, despite his filmic success, started out the hero of the novels by Ian Fleming.

Carolyn Kellogg

Demagoguery and boleros with Roberto Bolaño

One of the few big buzz books at BEA was Roberto Bolaño's "2666." It is big -- more than 900 pages -- and it's a rapid follow-up to "The Savage Detectives," which won much praise last year. Although I did pick up an advance copy at Book Expo America, "2666" is not due in stores until November, so it doesn't make much sense to taunt you with its contents.

But I can point you to Triple Canopy, a Web-based art and literary magazine, which has a translation of a speech Bolaño gave in Caracas when he accepted the Rómulo Gallegos prize in 1999. In the speech, which meanders and digresses -- and discusses digression -- the novelist talks about writing and soccer, about Cervantes and the number 11, about arms and letters and of confusions of place and language.   

It's all the same to me if people say I'm Chilean, even though some Chilean colleagues prefer to see me as Mexican, or if they call me Mexican, though some Mexican colleagues prefer to call me Spanish, or even disappeared in combat. And in fact it's all the same to me if I'm considered a Spaniard, even if some Spanish colleagues hit the ceiling and start proclaiming I'm from Venezuela, born in Caracas or in Bogotá, which doesn’t bother me much, quite the contrary, in fact.

What's true is that I am Chilean, and I am also a lot of other things. And having arrived at this point, I must abandon Jarry and Bolivar and try to remember the writer who said that the homeland of a writer is his tongue. I don't remember his name. Perhaps it was a writer who wrote in Spanish. Perhaps it was a writer who wrote in English or French. A writer's homeland, he said, is his tongue. It sounds a little demagogic, but I agree with him completely, and I know that sometimes there is no recourse left us but to get a little demagogic, just like sometimes there is no recourse left us but to dance a bolero under the light of streetlamps or a red moon.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

A farewell letter to George Garrett

George Garrett died at home in Charlottesville, Va., in his sleep on May 25.  He was the author of 34 books.  I will remember him as the author of, among many others, "Death of the Fox," his re-creation of the life of Sir Walter Raleigh that easily stands comparison to Marguerite Yourcenar's "Memoirs of Hadrian"; for the short story "A Wreath for Garibaldi," which is one of the most successful re-creations of an intellectual milieu (Rome in the late 1950s); and for a poem, "Three Night Poems," whose second section, "U.S.A.," begins:

Say, they roll up the sidewalks all over town
by 11:30 p.m.  Lord, by midnight there's nothing
moving, doing.  Lone streetlights glare.

That section ends: 

Dancer, giants, heroes and dreamers,
where are you now?  It's a fact —
when a heart breaks it doesn't make a sound. 

George, who wrote on literary matters millions of critical words, would have appreciated the selectivity of my listing. I want also to mention the years in Hollywood writing movies or for his plays. He was a raconteur among raconteurs  but I cannot avoid talking about George's life as a teacher — year after  strenuous year, he taught at places like Iowa, Wesleyan, Michigan, Columbia, Hollins and finally returned to where he began that career, the University of Virginia. 

He was the best sort of teacher: worldly wise, widely read. He sought no disciples and only tried to help a student find his or her own voice. Happily, he leaves no school behind, no quirks or attitudes or themes that students will mimic.  I won't name any of his very famous students (and there are many, some of whom pay tribute to George at Virginia Quarterly blog) for a simple reason: He treated all of his students with equal dignity, seriousness and profound kindness.

Just after receiving the email explaining that Garrett was at home under hospice care, I wrote to him

Ben Ehrenreich's travel books

L.A.-based writer Ben Ehrenreich is a novelist and journalist. "The Suitors," his first novel, is loosely based on "The Odyssey," so we thought he might know something about journeys. With books.

Jacket Copy: Assuming you bring books with you when you travel, go on vacation, how do you determine how many? Is it a careful calculation or something less scientific?

Ben Ehrenreich: Mainly I cram books into every available space in my bags, take half of them out, then sneak half of those back in. I live under the hopeful illusion that I will have far more time to read than I ever end up having.

JC: Have you ever been stranded with nothing to read?

BE: Yes. Most memorably, I had been reporting in Afghanistan, had a stopover in Dubai on the way home. I realized as I stepped onto the plane back to Los Angeles that I had not only packed my sleeping pills in my checked bags, but all my books. I spent the next 20-some hours awake, staring at the seatback in front of me.   

Read Ben's reading list after the jump.

Carolyn Kellogg
 

Experience the literary roadtrip, in video

Why don't I go to William Faulkner's house?

Carolyn Kellogg

Unexpected roadtrip finds

I never know what I'll find on the road — for example, I was driving through Georgia and whizzed past this enormous peach on a pole.

In a more literary vein, later on I heard Mississippi public radio promote its upcoming special on Eudora Welty (to broadcast Sunday, May 25, or online here). Recorded at Symphony Space in New York earlier this month as part of the Selected Shorts series, the special includes readings of three Welty stories, biographer Suzanne Marrs and, as emcee, writer Ann Patchett. Guided tours of Welty's home in Jackson, Miss., are available Wednesdays-Fridays with advance reservations.

Still further down the road — Interstate 10, to be exact — after crossing from Mississippi into Louisiana, I suddenly found myself on the Stephen E. Ambrose Memorial Parkway. Ambrose, who died of cancer five years ago, wrote the well-known WWII books "Band of Brothers" and "D-Day." To honor his work with the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, a segment of the I-10 was renamed for the famed historian in 2004. Which makes sense, but it certainly was a surprise.

Carolyn Kellogg

Writers who should be paid NOT to write

At his blog, ABC of Reading, Thomas McGonigle, one of our contributors, has posted an item about writers he'd like to see less from on forthcoming publisher catalog lists. What would they get in return? The post suggests having George Soros establish a fund to compensate these writers for their silence.

Provocative, yes. Among many big-name writers on the list (Ian McEwan, Seamus Heaney and Francine Prose), prominent near the top is John Updike, who has received his share of fairly lukewarm reviews for his novels in the past decade. In fact, he's received quite a few. I looked around. Of his 2006 novel, "Terrorist," for instance, James Wood wrote in the New Republic:

"It is the otherness of Islamicism that is missing in this book. Despite all the Koranic homework, there is a sense that what is alien in Islam to a Westerner remains alien to John Updike. What he has discovered, yet again, is merely the generalized fluid of God-plus-sex that has run throughout all his novels."

Adam Begley wrote in the New York Observer that Updike's 2004 book, "Villages," was too generic; the 2002 novel, "Seek My Face," was tedious to Ron Charles of the Christian Science Monitor. Los Angeles Times critic Susan Salter Reynolds wrote of Updike's 2000 book, "Licks of Love": "The stories are painstakingly written; effort shows on every page. There's too much detail, too much retelling of the characters' most ordinary thoughts. Most of the stories ... feel unfinished; summarily ended, as though Updike simply shrugged."

There are many who admire Updike's work, and I'm definitely among them, but the common thread in the criticisms is that he writes too often. This fall, in fact, he has a novel coming from Alfred A. Knopf, "The Widows of Eastwick," which picks up the story told in "The Witches of Eastwick." I wouldn't dare to tell a giant of American letters not to publish anymore, even if Soros said "yes" to the don't-write funding idea, but McGonigle's post made me think: If there were a little more time between Updike books — say, three years rather than two — perhaps there'd be more room at the bigger publishers for such writers as Gary Amdahl, who are doing exciting things.

Nick Owchar

The band, the bodyguards: the James Frey show

There were no Hells Angels at the Whisky a Go-Go on Thursday night, although a ripple of curiosity was circulating among the people waiting in line along Sunset Boulevard.

Would James Frey, whose newest offering is "Bright Shiny Morning," a novel set in Los Angeles, have the kind of bad karma on the West Coast the Rolling Stones had at Altamont when they used the motorcycle gang for security at the Bay Area speedway in 1969, which resulted in the death of one man and the symbolic death knell of the '60s?

Not at all.

Good behavior prevailed, discounting a little mosh pit action that briefly tore into a pair of tables near the stage. Frey’s self-proclaimed "Rock-and-Roll Book Tour" attracted not only the usual crowd of well-read graduates, but also a heady throng of about 100 high school kids who’d come just to see a popular band playing for free.

And what a band it was. Black Tide was its name, and the combined age of its four members couldn’t be more than 70. They played double bass-pedaled, flying V headbanger paeans. Their fans pumped their fists and shook their heads and managed to displace a handful of worried adults, most of them wearing glasses and clutching books.

How does one follow a set like that? With a book reading?

More ....

The Web habits of highly effective literary people

Sitting in a Paris cafe can be highly effective. That is, as far as journalist-author Andrew Hussey and Granta are concerned.

Granta magazine asked a bunch of literary types, from publishers to bloggers, how they make the web work for them. Hussey has, perhaps, the most enviable lifestyle: He throws a laptop into his rucksack and bikes to local Paris cafes to tap in. Another journalist is more disciplined: He opens exactly six tabs in Firefox every morning (apparently, like some of us, he didn't leave a hectic array open the night before).

Litblogger Maud Newton has a pretty hectic lifestyle, abetted by her iPhone addiction. She writes:

The very ADD impulses that enable me to blog the way I do tend to hamstring larger projects, like the novel I’m writing, the review that’s coming due, the day-job work. No doubt this is true of most people who keep weblogs for fun rather than for profit — a dying pursuit, apparently. What still excites me about the Internet is that it facilitates endless foraging, and not only courtesy of my favorite blogs and newspapers. As more publications and critics go digital, I find myself sampling the offerings of literary magazines, squandering hours in the Harper’s archives (which stretch back to 1850!), formulating ever more intricate and passionate dissents....

More habits, both good and compulsive, here.

Carolyn Kellogg

photo of the Cafe de Floré in Paris by sergeymk via Flickr

Happy birthday, Thomas Pynchon!

America's second-most elusive author turns 71 today, if Internet sources are to be believed.

There's something charming about Pynchon's unwillingness to jump into the churn of literary culture, as many authors feel compelled these days to blog and respond to reviews and go on "Charlie Rose" and do book tours and read at festivals and talk to NPR book shows and whatever else they can to reach new readers. Without any of these things, Pynchon has built a devoted, even cult-like following.

This weekend, in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Freebird Books & Goods held a pre-birthday bash for Pynchon fans; the lighthearted invitation sparked some controversy. Attendees on Sunday dined on items from "Gravity's Rainbow" and sent faxes (ostensibly) to the man himself.

The fax number is one trace of evidence that Pynchon lives and breathes. He's also written occasionally for the New York Times and, around the time of the publication of "Mason & Dixon" in 1997, was photographed in New York.

His most fun -- and unexpected -- engagement with popular culture was his appearance on the animated TV show "The Simpsons." Drawn with a bag over his head, Pynchon (allegedly) spoke his own lines, which included shouting to passing motorists, "Hey, over here, have your picture taken with a reclusive author! Today only, we’ll throw in a free autograph. But wait! There’s more!"

So I hold out hope that if he's watching TV (while not writing 1,000-plus-page dense and brilliant novels), he's also on the Internet. Wouldn't it be nice for Thomas Pynchon to google himself and wind up reading this birthday greeting?

Happy birthday, Thomas Pynchon!

Carolyn Kellogg