Note from the Office of Bad Titles: Ok, I get this one (new from the University of Notre Dame Press) and its relevance to its author (Wilkowski was the first female acting ambassador in Latin America) but c'mon.
Some puns are funny very late at night but should never appear on the cover of a book: Does anyone remember, for instance, the dreaded "Cooking with Pooh"?
Bat Segundo has been interviewing authors on his podcast since just about the beginning of podcast time. Segundo is the alter ego of Edward Champion, a litblogger who also writes book reviews, for this paper among others. Sadly, this week he announced that he's havingtrouble keeping the show going.
Shuttering the show would be a shame. Champion -- who took the character of Bat Segundo from the book "Ghostwritten" by David Mitchell -- gives equal time to highbrow literature and popular culture. The authors above are a representatively diverse sample: (clockwise from left) hostess/actress Amy Sedaris (in sprinkles), seminal DJ Grandmaster Flash, Whiting Award-winning Marianne Wiggins, professor/TV interviewer James Lipton, debut novelist Garth Risk Hallberg and Charles Baxter, a National book Award finalist who's considered a writers' writer. He's also talked to the prolific, intense William T. Vollman, bestselling chick-lit writer Jennifer Weiner and hundreds of other authors -- all archived on his site.
The interviews reveal that Champion is a passionate reader, one with both smarts and strong opinions. Sometimes he challenges writers, usually in good ways; occasionally he's annoyed them, as he reveals in this transcribed exchange with Oliver Sacks. His willingness to press a point -- even when this might alienate his subjects -- sets him apart as a contemporary interviewer. So do his elaborate, Bat Segundo introductions, which are produced with a mind-boggling creativity and variety.
As of this writing, it looks like Champion may have found a way to keep the Bat Segundo franchise going, possibly with a slimmer schedule. That's good news; the literary world would be darker without this caped crusader.
Carolyn Kellogg
Garth Rish Hallberg photo by Timothy Briner; Charles Baxter photo by Keith E. Johnson
photo of a memorial for shooting victim Dovon Harris at 114th Street near Central Avenue in Watts by Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times
Book insiders who subscribe to Publisher's Lunch caught the announcement this week that we can expect a new book from LA Times reporter Jill Leovy, which will be based on "reporting all 845 LA County murders last
year - weavig [sic] together a kaleidoscopic narrative about a murder-wracked
community in South Los Angeles with a new theory about race and
America's homicide epidemic." Since Leovy also blogs here at the Times -- at the Homicide Report, which is as fascinating as it is troubling -- we wanted to know more about the project, the ideas behind it, and what crime books she reads.
Jacket Copy: Does your book chronicle all 845 murders in Los Angeles last year? Jill Leovy: No. The book is not related to the Homicide Report blog, nor to
my efforts to cover all homicides in Los Angeles County last year. (In
reality, there were more then 900.) The book will be about the syndrome
of high homicide rates among blacks in America, their causes and
consequences.
Jacket Copy: Will you focus on a specific area or region? JL: The book will be mostly
reported out of Los Angeles, but it seeks to explain a national
phenomenon. High homicide rates among blacks are everywhere -- not just
in Los Angeles but in Detroit, Washington D.C., New Orleans, and many
rural areas and smaller cities as well. The examples in the book will
be drawn largely from Watts and South-Central Los Angeles where I have
long worked, but the argument is for the whole country.
JC: Without giving too much away, what can you tell us about your "new
theory about race and America's homicide epidemic"? The answer...
after the jump.
The Victorian era is a rich, seemingly bottomless mine for writers: in science fiction, the authors known collectively as the Steampunks have tapped it for their fantasies; and many authors--such as Anne Perry, Will Thomas, G.H. Dahlquist and so many more--continually revisit that period for novels of mayhem and mystery.
Kate Summerscale's (left) "The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher" was published earlier this year. It presented the true account of a child's murder on a family's estate and the efforts of investigators to find the perpetrator among the members of the household. In unfolding the story, the author gave readers the context of 19th century crime detection and the public's fascination with that singular figure, the detective. Many papers reviewed it. My column The Siren's Call featured a review for The Times. The book was honored this week with the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction.
As part of the prize, Summerscale, a former literary editor of the U.K.'s Daily Telegraph, will receive more than $60,000. The 10-year-old prize was organized by the BBC. Summerscale's book succeeded over finalists including Orlando Figes' "The Whisperers'' about Soviet Russia, Patrick French's authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul, "The World Is What It Is" and New Yorker music critic Alex Ross' survey of music from the last century, "The Rest Is Noise.'' The Guardian has a particularly good overview of this year's prize and why it won.
This isn't the only important prize announcement this week. Our colleague Carolyn Kellogg offers another right here at Jacket Copy.
The 7.5 hours I spent on a Pasadena sidewalk on Friday were worth it— let's just start with that. I love my new iPhone. But after admiring its sleek styling and watching the GPS trace my Gold Line ride in real time, I wanted to get down to business. I heard you can read books on these things.
There are hundreds of new apps — they work on the first generation of iPhones, too — and I began my search assuming that I'd need to get an e-book reader and then go find some e-books.
But first I stumbled across the Harper Collins offering, which seemed like a good place to start. After pointing my iPhone's Web browser to the Harper Collins mobile page and selecting the iPhone option, I got a list of titles:
"Beyond the Body Farm" by Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson
"The Case for the Real Jesus" by Lee Strobel
"Ike: An American Hero" by Michael Korda
"A Killer's Kiss" by William Lashner
"Life on the Refrigerator Door" by Alice Kuipers
"Love is a Many Trousered Thing" by Louise Rennison
"The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions" by Marcus J. Borg and N Wright
"Now and Forever" by Ray Bradbury
"Obama: From Promise to Power" by David Mendell
"Soul Catcher" by Michael C. White
"Sweet Revenge" by Diane Mott Davidson
"When the Game Is Over, It All Goes Back in the Box" by John Ortberg
"Winning" by Jack Welch and Suzy Welch
I was hoping for a little more literary fiction — like Annie Dillard's "The Maytrees," which can be previewed on the publisher's Browse Inside page — but I knew where I wanted to begin. The book, and the reading experience, after the jump.
Books are receptacles of human thought, and they are also, quite literally, receptacles — who has not found an old movie stub, photo or grocery list that had been acting as a bookmark?
Recently, a reader delivered to Book Review a tiny piece of its heritage, a note retrieved from a book and dated to 1978. The note was written by Robert Kirsch, one of Book Review’s earliest editors and critics, and also father of our regular contributor, author Jonathan Kirsch, and grandfather of poet and critic Adam Kirsch.
The note writer, a Mr. Katzin, apparently contacted Kirsch to find out more about the papers of James Boswell, edited in a series by Frederick A. Pottle. Such an exchange was much more common and routine in those pre-bibliofind days.
Brief but gracious, brief but engaged, Kirsch's reply serves as an example of a hospitality that seems harder to muster today. What, to respond to a reader’s question? In a handwritten note? With a friendly tone? You expect too much! "Indeed, Pottle did!" Kirsch writes at one point. "There are now eight or nine volumes." He then directs the reader to possible sources for the existing volumes. The note had been found inside a book donated to a local library: Thanks to Connie Unger for finding it and for realizing we might like it for our archives.
Of course I put the note in the mail to his son. But before I did, I held it in my hands and felt the distance between his time and ours.
In college, I had a roommate who came off an acid trip babbling endlessly about "the universal hologram." When she became obsessed with repeatedly washing down the walls of our room with bleach, I chalked it up to post-trip craziness. But maybe I should have paid closer attention: Theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind has proposed a holographic principle that might just be crazy enough to be true, according to Jesse Cohen, who reviews Susskind's latest book today.
In "The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics," Susskind not only discusses the holographic principle and string theory, the book is also "a gregarious narrative of intellectual brinkmanship."
In this interview with rock musician and physicist Brian Cox, Susskind shows his amiability while discussing string theory over wine.
Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers this week for his 1981 winner book "Midnight's Children," prompting Jacket Copy to look at other trophies he's gathered (pretty ladies all).
"First Stop in the New World" looked into the inner life of Mexico City, while we got the straight talk from Gustavo Arellano, the writer behind the O.C. Weekly column and book called "¡Ask a Mexican!"
Speaking of powerful African Americans: Barack Obama has two nonfiction books on the L.A. Times paperback bestsellers list, "The Audacity of Hope" at #3 and "Dreams From My Father" at #8. (John McCain's "Why Courage Matters" does not appear in the Top 10).
"Knoxville: Summer, 1915" is one of those passages that has turned my turgid rail commute into something bearable. Since first reading this in school, the disputed opening pages of James Agee’s "A Death in the Family," I have returned to it often. When I first read it, I looked for more of this kind of anguished lyricism, but was disappointed when I could not find it (Agee's stories were hard to find in collections, and even the rest of the novel seemed in shadow beside this luminosity).
There was a collection of Agee’s poems, edited by the epic translator Robert Fitzgerald, but those were the pre-pre-Amazon days, and I resigned myself to the fact that I might never find them. Old wishes were realized this week with the arrival of a galley of the forthcoming "James Agee: Selected Poems," which the Library of America will publish in the fall.
Here is yet another effort to keep a writer’s name and work within our reach. The L of A has already published much of Agee’s work; there are also the efforts of editor Michael A. Lofaro to keep Agee's name before our eyes (although his "restoration" of "A Death in the Family" has not received apprecation from all quarters, especially not in the pages of our Book Review).
Andrew Hudgins, editor of "Selected Poems," says it contains much of the Fitzgerald edition. There are familiar pieces here (like the stirring dedication to Walker Evans at the beginning of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" that begins "Against time and the damages of the brain/sharpen and calibrate..."). But there are other things that come as a surprise, such as "John Carter," his failed attempt à la Byron’s "Don Juan" to chronicle the life of a modern young man. Or else there's this surprising little bit, about work habits:
Wake up Threeish, Clean up the sink Air out the bedroom Pour out a drink Drink to the daylight Sit down and think I’m Open All Night.
Can't you hear the mock humor? Can't you feel the defiance? This is the kind of voice that helps you through difficult times, through times of self-doubt. Though Agee never published more than one volume, "Permit Me Voyage," he kept writing poetry, Hudgins tells us. I’m glad that he did.
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.
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.
A car wash employee speaks with a labor representative/translator on his left; author Barbara Ehrenreich (in green) listens from the sidelines.
Barbara Ehrenriech was full of conversation at Skylight Books Thursday night. She read a few satiric passages from her new book "The Land is Their Land" but mostly talked liberal politics to a receptive audience. Heads nodded at what she called "the growing division in our society between the extremely rich and everybody else." There were several spontaneous bursts of applause.
It started to feel a little like an affluent dinner party of "The Nation" subscribers, everyone in quite comfortable circumstances agreeing on our leftist politics. But Ehrenriech, who worked low-wage jobs to research her 2001 book "Nickel and Dimed," did more than just preach to the converted. To read exactly what she said, see below ...
You've been seen with many enchantresses of late. First, there is your novel "The Enchantress of Florence," a story brimming with the bewitchments of the female gender.
There's also that White House outing in April with actress Olivia Wilde on your arm:
The new "Hellboy" movie is out, and our reviewer Kenneth Turan thinks that unlike "Iron Man" or "The Incredible Hulk," "The Golden Army" is an exhilarating story that translates well to the big screen.
I'll bet, though, that Stan Lee's Marvel Movies Machine didn't experience any of the obstacles that director Guillermo del Toro and "Hellboy" creator Mike Mignola faced in making "The Golden Army." If you have a chance to read "Hellboy II: The Art of the Movie" (Dark Horse Books: 224 pp., $24.95 paper), the introduction by Del Toro shows what an ordeal it was to make this movie — even though the fantasy genre seems to be one of those surefire profit centers that studios can’t seem to make enough of.
"The scale of the sequel was huge — in fact, almost impossibly big. Especially if one considered that the first movie had grossed a modest theatrical return and that most everyone was in favor of a scaled-down sequel," he writes. "Scaled down" is hardly what Del Toro says he had in mind. He describes their effort to shop the script around town.
If you’ve ever read the "Hellboy" series, you may have noticed that Mignola’s pantheon of deities is extremely ecumenical. Several years ago, when Mignola and I did a one-on-one at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, he explained why so many familiar figures like Baba Yaga, Hecate, Rasputin, Norse gods and others appear in his stories. They’re fascinating, they have universal appeal and, he joked (though he was also quite serious), they save him an enormous amount of time trying to come up with villains from scratch.
The same seems true for the movie. Del Toro writes that he and Mignola "argued back and forth about magic beans, golden clockwork soldiers, a seemingly jarring musical duet between Abe and Hellboy." They also made an effort, he said, to avoid "the Anglo-Saxon/Celtic magical universe that is common in mainstream films" — which may be why our reviewer says the movie's fresh approach to myth is part of what makes it so enjoyable.
By the way, "Hellboy II: The Art of the Movie" includes the final shooting script for "The Golden Army," so you can memorize all of Red's best one-liners. For instance: "Memory gets pretty sketchy when you burn to death," or, as he looks over at Liz, his love interest, "I would give my life for her, but she also wants me to do the dishes!!"
Nick Owchar
(Photo credit: Egon Endrenyi / Universal Pictures)
The breadth of material Iton examines is both impressive and exhaustive; it seems no African American pop icon who helped shape black political consciousness and influence over the last century is left out.
The review begins with Paul Robeson, the singer, actor and All-American football player whose leftist activism "damaged his career and opened a debate about the role black entertainers should play in politics." To fully appreciate Robeson's role as a political catalyst, I think, you have to hear his incredible artistry. This clip of him in concert includes a voiceover by Harry Belafonte, explaining the evolution of the lyrics to "Old Man River."
Science fiction is usually (usually) the genre which creates alternative histories of the world -- histories in which, for instance, Napoleon triumphed at Waterloo or Hitler in World War II or the computer emerged in Queen Victoria's reign, or....
Now there is a novel, "Cardinal Mahony," which imagines a different leader for the Catholic archdiocese of Los Angeles. How different? According to the book, this Mahony gets kidnapped by liberation theologians and, in the end, "falls in love with his kidnappers and leads the American Catholic Church into a radical new way of being."
The author, Robert Blair Kaiser, is a longtime journalist who has written books about Robert Kennedy ("RFK must die!") as well as about the Catholic Church in the years since Vatican II ("A Church in Search of Itself"). He's a former Jesuit, an activist Catholic deeply concerned about the Church as many are.
American Catholicism has been tainted often in recent years, in particular by the priest sex abuse scandals (something the real Cardinal Mahony is still handling today), and many activists have written polemics about the Church's mistakes and what should be done next. Kaiser could easily have done the same, but instead he frames his views as fiction, explaining in a brief preface that he hopes to "help seventy-five million American Catholics see the possibilities--to help them understand how they can be Catholic--and aggressively American as well. And why they should."
Not just your average work of speculative fiction.
Iconic detective Sherlock Holmes and his trusty aide John Watson are returning to the silver screen, to be played by Sacha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell.
The fact that both comedians are better known for their clueless on-screen personas -- Borat, Ron Burgundy -- than for their clue-solving abilities is part of the joke. "Just the idea of Sacha and Will as Sherlock Holmes and Watson makes us laugh," Columbia Co-President Matt Tolmach told Variety. "Sacha and Will are two of the funniest and most talented guys on the planet, and having them take on these two iconic characters is frankly hilarious."
Sherlock Holmes first appeared in "A Study in Scarlet," a novel published in 1887; author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote three more Holmes novels and more than four dozen short stories over the next 40 years. The character has endured in ways that few others do. Today there are thousands of Sherlock Societies, and in London, you can visit the Sherlock Holmes Museum, located at 221b Baker Street, where Holmes, the fictional character, "lived."
Holmes has been living on-screen since the earliest days of silent movies, when Doyle was still writing the stories. According to the IMDB website, the first Sherlock Holmes film was a 1908 Danish short; Essanay (the company that made Charlie Chaplin's films) made its first Holmes picture in 1916. In 1922, John Barrymore, one of the screen's most esteemed actors, appeared in the title role. And on and on, with the Baron Cohen-Ferrell picture scheduled for 2009.
Holmes also plays on smaller screens: You can get the Holmes story, "A Case of Identity," delivered to your cellphone for about $10. And Daily Lit, which will send books by e-mail in installments, offers all of the Sherlock Holmes novels and several of the stories free.
Carolyn Kellogg
Photo credits: Sacha Baron Cohen - Robert Caplin / For The Times; Will Ferrell - Frank Masi / Associated Press; Sherlock Holmes statue - BBC News
Last month, the editors of the Book Review published a long list of new books that might make good summer reading. The books for July are here and on the next page. When reviews are published, we'll add links to the list. Happy reading.
The Alchemy of Stone: A Novel of Automated Anarchy & Clockwork Lust by Ekaterina Sedia An automaton finds herself caught among gargoyles, mechanics and alchemists in a struggle for control of a magical, clockwork realm.
All About Lulu: A Novel by Jonathan Evison In a family of bodybuilders from Venice Beach, Calif., a young man's attraction to his troubled stepsister turns into a first step on his search for self-identity.
Ark of the Liberties: America and the World by Ted Widmer A history of the United States that argues that its leaders, from the very beginning, had global ambitions to secure rights and liberties for all.
Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry The author of "Lonesome Dove" recalls his attempts during his Texas childhood to acquire his own personal library and his eventual establishment of a bookstore.
Chasing Darkness: An Elvis Cole Novel by Robert Crais A corpse discovered in Laurel Canyon sets L.A. private investigator Elvis Cole on another quest.
It's already clear how gas hikes affect the grocery store (food transportation costs have increased, leading to higher prices for most goods). Recently Publishers Weekly offered an interesting angle on how rising fuel prices affect the book industry -- that fewer people will be willing to drive out to a bookstore to meet authors at a reading.
If that is indeed what happens, I would still recommend venturing out if you hear that James Howard Kunstler will be at your nearby bookstore (even though I know he would probably protest against this). His "World Made By Hand," a novel published earlier this year, gave us a stirring apocalyptic alternative to Cormac McCarthy's "The Road." He appeared on a panel I moderated at our Festival of Books in April, and it's impossible not to keep thinking of his vision of the future: a world devastated by a massive jolt to the world oil supply as well as many other catastrophes.
Still, while many people are lamenting that they must use their cars less now, Kunstler answers with a picture of a car-less world that is somehow lulling, distressing though it all is. Consider:
It was about a three-mile walk home to Union Grove. In the old days, you'd drive it, of course, but now you walked. I didn't mind. I enjoyed the peacefulness and easy pace of the walk. In a car, I remembered, you generally noticed only what was in your head or on the radio, while the landscape itself seemed dead, or at least irrelevant. Walking, it was impossible to not pay attention. On a mild luminous evening like this, the landscape came alive. The crickets had started up. In the distance a last glimmer of sun caught the top of Pumpkin Hill where men were still out mowing....
Of course, to get to this Wordsworthian vision of a simpler time, the world must go through government collapse, wars and terror, and killer flus that substantially reduce the population. The prose is lovely, and Kunstler is one of those writers who demonstrates that making socio-political commentary in fiction does not have to be tiresome. His book could certainly be called speculative fiction, but if I were a bookseller, I wouldn't dare put it in the science fiction aisle, especially now.
T.C. Boyle has a new story in the New Yorker: 1300 Rats.
The secret to the illustrations in the award-winning British children's book "Little Mouse's Big Book of Fears" by Emily Gravett? Rats. Gravett's daughter's pet rats, whose contributions included gnawing holes and urinating.
Lynda Barry, who has a new book on creativity called "What It Is," talks about a ratlike inspiration in this interview with The Comics Reporter:
How can an image that just comes up in your mind make you feel happy? I don't know! But I know that comics can do that. Don Martin from Mad Magazine did that for me a lot when I was a kid, and so did Big Daddy Roth's Rat Finks.
Q: What does the cover of a book tell you about the book itself? A: Nothing / Everything.
Can an uninitiated reader know anything more about the contents of James Joyce's Ulysses simply from seeing that iconic, large-lettered cover? Do J.D. Salinger's white-white paperback editions offer any guidance? The little enigmatic rainbow at the top corner certainly doesn't help.
These kinds of things were on my mind as I visited the opening reception for "Cover Version," a bookishly-themed group show at Culver City's Taylor De Cordoba gallery. The premise was simple: artists had been asked to redesign the covers of their favorite books. The end result was offerings from over twenty New York and Los Angeles based artists that ranged from the literal to the oblique.
Using wood panels, TM Davy provided a literal "translation" of the cover for Jean Genet's "The Thief's Journal," with two pages of text filled in by hand on either side. Scott Hug's "Breakfast of Champions" brought a mirror-ish metallic sheen to Kurt Vonnegut's novel. It also completely fooled me into thinking that someone had just left a real, published edition of Vonnegut's novel out as some sort of tribute. Jacob Feige took JG Ballard's "Vermillion Sands" to a Martian landscape as seen by Mondrian and MF Tichy's video installation of "Notes From Underground" promised (and delivered) every page from Dostoevsky's novel in seven seconds.
Timothy Hull, the New York-based artist who curated the show, said that he keeps several exceptionally designed books "on display" at his apartment and told me that his own book collection included several first editions from Gertrude Stein. " 'Wars I Have Seen,' with that Cecil Beaton photograph, is probably my favorite of hers, cover-wise," he said. "And I love the no-nonsense, academic covers that Routledge puts out. Especially the ones by Jean-Francois Lyotard. They're just so precise and straightforward."
I could tell he meant it, as Hull's contribution to the show was a similarly pared-down version of W.H. Auden's Selected Poems: just the words themselves in bright yellow and red against a sky-blue background.
Lastly, on the subject of book covers, please check out the winners of the 2008 Penguin Design Award and what is surely the most bizarre, naturalistic cover for On the Road that I've ever seen. More Penguin covers through the ages are here.
Ethan Canin's new novel, "America America," is getting attention from newspaper book reviews across the country. Everyone says that it's grand in scope and ambition, which tempts comparison to other grand, ambitious novels.
Both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Washington Post compare it to Robert Penn Warren's classic "All the King's Men." Like the earlier novel, "America America" follows a charming but flawed politician from the narrative perspective of a younger aide/journalist.
That young aide is brought into this circle of power and politics by a wealthy patriarch, a man with both riches and a sense of noblesse oblige. That character prompted the LA Times reviewer to make comparisons to "The Great Gatsby;" the Chicago Tribune went with another F. Scott Fitzgerald work, "The Last Tycoon."
The reviewers aren't entirely in accord with how successful the book is; some note that, despite its achievements, there are some structural problems (for the most extreme critique in this department, see the New York Times.)
The one things that everyone agreed upon is that there is a real-life corollary to the politician in "America America": a liberal senator with Presidential ambitions that are hampered by a tragic accident. If you can't guess who that might be, here's the answer.
In tomorrow's Book Review, Sarah Weinman reviews "Black and White," a new novel by Lewis Shiner. The book deals with some weighty issues, including a terminally ill parent, a murder and urban planning. In a post on John Scalzi's blog, Shiner focuses on the latter, writing about freeways:
When I started researching my new book, "Black & White,"
I hadn’t thought that much about freeways...."Black & White"is
about a North Carolina neighborhood called Hayti, once the most
prosperous black community in the South. During the 1960s, Hayti was
bulldozed to make room for the Durham Freeway, leading to a new
industrial development called Research Triangle Park. The money to do
it came in large part from the federal urban renewal program. All told,
urban renewal wiped out 150 neighborhoods like Hayti, and virtually all
of the displaced residents were African-American. Freeways were often
the excuse for the demolition....
The dream of the Interstate Highway System was to end traffic congestion forever. With the advantage of hindsight, [writer Tom] Lewis [in "Divided Highways"]makes it clear that the dream never had a chance. Once a highway is
built, new homes, stores, and workplaces will naturally spring up in
proximity. With more destinations now in reach of the freeway, traffic
grows to fill all available lanes. Expand the number of lanes and more
cars show up to choke them as well.
And the cycle grows more
vicious by the day. With more and more destinations accessible only by
freeway, cars become even more indispensable. Longer trips mean more
fuel consumption, more pollution. With highways getting all the money
and railroads proportionately starving, trucks take over all the
freight transportation. More pollution, more wear and tear on the
roads, more congestion.
And, eventually, the price of gas goes up to $4 a gallon (or here in LA, $4.73 per gallon). Which makes the real-world exploitation of the Interstate Highway System awfully pricey.
This makes me glad that a couple of years ago, a guy left Venice, CA in a convertible (I think a vintage Mustang) and drove to NYC with a time-lapse camera attached. Enjoy the result, a 4-minute cross-country drive, no gas required.
This weekend marks the first annual Sunset Strip Music Festival; many classic venues, including the Whiskey a Go Go, are hosting dozens of rock bands. But with sponsors that include Virgin America, Ticketmaster, Vitaminwater and this paper's own Metromix, it's clear this isn't the Doors' Sunset Strip anymore.
For five nights in November 1966, teenagers and police clashed on the Sunset Strip; the 2007 book "Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock 'n' Roll's Last Stand in Hollywood" tells the whole story. Only the last chapters focus on the riot itself -- most of the book provides a deep, detailed picture of the Southern California music scene in the mid-1960s, connecting the visual arts with TV and surf culture.
Author Dominic Priore's encyclopedic knowledge, it seems, encompasses everything from the origin of every garage rock band with a local hit to the industry's most powerful producers. He keeps it all tidy though, and the narrative that emerges is surprisingly detailed and informed for what appears, on the surface, to be a big pretty picture book.
It is also a big pretty picture book. More about that after the jump.
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.
... at least not to award-winning sci-fi writer and astrophysicist Gregory Benford ("Timescape," "If the Stars Are Gods," "The Sunborn").
When the UC Irvine professor and his (uncredited) coauthor, biologist Elisabeth Malartre, were researching their bestselling 1999 novel, "The Martian Race," they were "fairly certain" that ice eventually would be found on Mars, especially near the poles.
"Since 1999, NASA has found caves (large, identified from orbit) and plenty of signs of recent fluid flows down slopes, from momentary melting," Benford wrote in an e-mail after NASA announced that the substance uncovered by the Phoenix lander was most probably ice.
The before and after images -- of white stuff uncovered in a trench dug by Phoenix's robotic claw that disappears over a few days -- are spectacular in their simplicity. They underscore, for me at least, the Red Planet's grip on the human imagination. Why is that?
The film version of "Get Smart," starring Steve Carell, opens today. This kind of revisiting can often bring attention back to the original. Will that extend to the "Get Smart" books?
The campy '60s TV series featuring a not-at-all smart secret agent did not originally derive from some heavy, intellectual novel. (It was written and created by Mel Brooks.) But it was popular enough to spawn nine paperbacks, with such titles as "Max Smart Loses Control," "The Spy Who Went Out to the Cold" and "Sorry, Chief ... ." The new movie has yet to spark any price inflation — the books can be bought on EBay for less than $10.
But Smart-obilia didn't stop there. Eight "Get Smart" comics — which, according to one collector, "had absolutely no relationship to the show in terms of content or continuity" — were published in 1966-67. Those in good condition are worth more than the paperbacks because some of the artwork was done by Steve Ditko, co-creator of Marvel's "Spider-Man" and "Doctor Strange" comics.
I can't guess about the literary value of either line, but the covers sure are snazzy.
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.
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.
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.
There’s something odd about the idea, isn’t there? That’s to say, the form of the serial novel doesn’t have the currency it did when Charles Dickens (above, left) and Wilkie Collins (above, right) were banging out monthly installments against a deadline for those magazines that Dickens ran and eventually owned. Such an undertaking has a gimmicky feel, and, in the case of the recent John Banville/Benjamin Black story in the New York Times Magazine, we were faced with a definitely wonky widget.
That said, the combination of Denis Johnson and Playboy feels much more promising. Was he winking in the direction of his own book, "Stars at Noon," when, early on in this first extract, a character says in a bit of dialogue: "Almost noon?" As usual, Johnson takes characters who start at the end of their tethers, a character situation that lends itself naturally toward noir and the pursuit thriller. Which is obviously, I hope, what we’re getting here — Denis Johnson channeling Elmore Leonard, with bits of "The Sopranos" thrown in, and making the gumbo his own.
For me, the thing got going with the scene break from the car so we get the look back at what just happened: "Standing at the pay phone, Jimmy Luntz punched a nine and a one and stopped. He couldn’t hear the dial tone. His ears still rang. That old Colt revolver made a bang that slapped you silly." It’s a lovely piece of writing, delivering a narrative surprise with observational acuity and making us smile besides.
Then there’s the scene where Luntz is trying to tie the tourniquet on the leg of the guy he’s just shot. "With surprising energy, Gambol suddenly tossed away his white hat. The wind caught it, and it sailed a dozen yards into the trees. Then he seemed to lose consciousness." He’s such a good writer. The sex scene at the end was great, and I look forward to seeing what Anita Desilvera gets up to with those Magnums she has stashed in the trunk of her car. Somehow the two main characters, Luntz and Anita, made me think of the kids in "Angels," Johnson’s first novel, now grown up in some spectacularly damaged way. At this point I’m definitely along for the ride — but then the set-up is probably the easiest bit of what Johnson is attempting here.
My 13-year old blinked when he saw me reading Playboy. "Hey, can I borrow that after you?" he said. He said he’d check out Denis Johnson too.
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.
Denis Johnson's last book, Tree of Smoke, won the National Book Award. Now, reports the New York Times, his new novel, Nobody Move, will appear in four monthly installments in Playboy, beginning with the July 2008 issue, which hits newsstands today.
Playboy's too smart to make Nobody Move available on its website; the idea is to sell magazines, after all. But if you're interested in what Johnson is up to, we'll have the story covered right here. Over the next four months, I'll be reviewing each installment on Jacket Copy as it comes out. In addition, we'll host a series of discussions about the novel, Johnson's work in general and the fine art of the serial.
So stay tuned. The first review goes live on Monday, with commentary and conversation after that.
Not all dinner parties turn out like you'd hope — that's the premise of "Dinner Party Disasters: True Stories of Culinary Catastrophe," a new book from Annaliese (formerly Mrs. George) Soros and contributor Abigail Stokes. According to its publisher, the book includes menus, "hilarious" narratives of disaster and helpful tips (e.g., how to put out fires and mend broken furniture). And it may need a sequel.
At a recent Connecticut dinner party to celebrate the book and its authors, two of the 22 guests were talking politics; one supported Obama, the other McCain. By the time the entrees hit the table, the two decided that words weren't enough and resorted to fisticuffs. Publisher's Weekly reports that the "kitchen staff came to the rescue and separated the two men." (Note to self: If dinner conversation might get heated, make sure to have a kitchen staff.)
You'd think these Connecticut Brahmin would know how to discuss politics without resorting to violence. Maybe it's just been too long since they have consulted Emily Post's Etiquette, which says we should look for common ground, try changing the subject to something entirely different and, whatever we do, "Don’t battle it out right there in the living room."
This week the editors of the Book Review published summer reading suggestions. Here are the books for June, augmented with links to the reviews (and it'll be updated with further links when the other reviews are published). Find a nice place outdoors to get reading.
America America: A Novel Ethan Canin During the Nixon
era, a working-class boy's involvement with a powerful upstate New York
family and a rising senator reveals the heights and depths of ambition
in a novel of epic scope.
The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars by Andrew X. Pham A
son's harrowing yet radiant account of his wealthy Vietnamese father's
struggle to survive the Japanese invasion of World War II, the French
occupation of Indochina and a Viet Cong "reeducation camp."
The Garden of Last Days: A Novel by Andre Dubus III From the author of "House of Sand and Fog," a pre-Sept. 11 novel -- set in Florida and involving a Saudi jihadist and an exotic dancer at the Puma Club for Men.
Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West by Deanne Stillman This
majestic tale traces the horse's evolution and die out in the Americas,
its return with the conquistadors and its spread throughout the West in
herds of wild mustangs whose existence is threatened today.
The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal by Gore Vidal, edited by Jay Parini Two dozen of Vidal's best, wittiest and most coruscating critiques, culled from half a century of mind-bending work.
Skyscrapers of the Midwest by Joshua W. Cotter A boy struggles with identity, death, puberty, religion and human communication in this beautiful collection of coming-of-age stories in graphic novel format.
Slumberland: A Novel by Paul Beatty A young, disaffected DJ from Los Angeles goes on a wild search in Berlin for a jazzman who may or may not be his double. (read an excerpt from the novel)
The Spies of Warsaw: A Novel by Alan Furst A new spy novel by a master of the genre, describing the cat-and-mouse games on the European Continent preceding the outbreak of World War II.
When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris The piercingly witty humorist takes us from the French countryside to a mobile home in North Carolina and on to Tokyo (where he tries to quit smoking), in his sixth collection of essays on the big and little absurdities of life.
I'm a fan of Kessinger Publishing. The company is one of the keepers of all those esoteric titles on Egyptian magic and Rosicrucianism that you'd never expect to find unless you happened to be browsing the shelves at Dan Brown's house. When you order a book from this company, you get a reproduction of the text as it originally appeared--not a new version cleaned up and reformatted in a modern typeface. Sometimes there are smudges and even missing pages, but I prefer this the way friends of mine like to read well-thumbed thrift store copies of their favorite authors instead of brand-new copies. It doesn't matter if you order "A Primer of Natal Astrology" or Wilkie Collins' "Alicia Warlock" — all of Kessinger's books arrive at your door in that same awful, mustard-yellow packaging.
OK, so you get the idea that this publisher is about 100 miles away from the mainstream, right? And yet, the Associated Press reports that the publisher has enjoyed an unexpected surge in sales thanks to ... yes, you are reading this correctly ... the movie "Sex and the City." The character of Carrie Bradshaw is seen reading the book "Love Letters From Great Men," and, quicker than you can say "product placement," audience-goers scoured the Internet for this book, which is fictional, and found instead a 1920s book published by Kessinger: "Love Letters From Great Men and Women: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day." As of this afternoon, that 80-year-old book ranks at No. 129 on Amazon.com.
I’ve got a few days of vacation planned and some of it will include lazy hours of uninterrupted reading -- I hope! What to take along?
I consulted our excellent list of recommended summer releases, and jotted down a few musts (Alan Furst’s latest, "The Spies of Warsaw" gets a boffo review from Jonathan Shapiro in The Times).
But if you’re like me, there are other fine books already on bookstore shelves that I haven’t yet gotten around to yet, novels like the acclaimed "Child 44" by Tom Rob Smith (Grand Central Publishing: 400 pp., $24.99) and "The Plague of Doves" by Louise Erdrich, who, reviewer Brigitte Frase wrote, composes "symphonies filled with a complex wisdom about the strands of darkness and light that make up a human life."
And with the Rockefeller clan recently demanding management changes at Exxon Mobil, I’m intrigued by a March release on the investigative journalist who forced change on the oil giant's predecessor, Standard Oil, "Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller" by Steve Weinberg (W.W. Norton: 256 pp., $25.95).
So I've been thinking a lot lately about a foggy concept that I've dubbed The Great Rock And Roll Novel. It started when I re-read Stanley Booth's "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones."
The book, written and re-written over a period of two decades, details the Stones' arrival in 1969 Los Angeles, following the recording of "Gimme Shelter," after the death of Brian Jones. Writing in the first person, Booth wends his way backwards and forwards in time, corralling images of Keith, Mick and Brian in dingy London bedsits with interviews of their parents and their history as rising rock icons, concluding in the nightmarish Altamont Free Concert (see photo above) where a black audience member, Meredith Hunter, was stabbed to death, and from which the Stones (and Booth) escaped by helicopter.
To read this book is to know as much about Booth himself, as a twenty-something covering the Rolling Stones--his wife left behind in Memphis, his feelings of dread in the face of agent Allen Klein's legal rigamarole, his inevitable touring infidelities--as it is to go behind the scenes of the traveling sideshow that was their progress through the '60s.
Booth's book, however, is not a novel. It trades on a shared knowledge of one famous rock and roll band and the songs they played. If you're not a fan, chances are you've never even heard of it.
For me, the Great Rock and Roll Novel would be broadly defined as a fictive version of what Stanley Booth accomplished.
Tom McCarthy's novel "Remainder" has received the 2008 Believer Book Award. The judges selected it from a short list of 10 excellent, underappreciated novels.
The midwest's largest book fair -- Printers Row -- opens its doors in Chicago this weekend. The LA Times Book Review's David Ulin will be there to interview Andre Dubus III about his new novel "The Garden of Last Days."
The NEA has added four new books to its Big Read library: A selection of Edgar Allen Poe's poetry and short fiction, Louise Erdrich's "Love Medicine," Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" and Thornton Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," plus they're throwing a little love to his play "Our Town."
The academic literary community at The Valve is considering a summer book club: "The Portrait of a Lady," perhaps, or something else by Henry James? Or by W.G. Sebald? Or maybe "Green Grass, Running Water" by Thomas King?
Meanwhile, Oprah's book club has already gotten started with Eckhart Tolle's "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose," and is conducting online classes starting June 16.
Charles Dickens never got to take an online class; instead of a computer, he worked at a big mahogany desk, which, with its walnut chair, sold at auction this week for $848,000. That's about seven times the original estimate, which proves only that Christie's didn't have great ex
The Victorian era is a rich, seemingly bottomless mine for writers: in science fiction, the authors known collectively as the Steampunks have tapped it for their fantasies; and many authors--such as Anne Perry, Will Thomas, G.H. Dahlquist and so many more--continually revisit that period for novels of mayhem and mystery.
Here is yet another effort to keep a writer’s name and work within our reach. The L of A has already published much of Agee’s work; there are also the efforts of editor Michael A. Lofaro to keep Agee's name before our eyes (although his "restoration" of "A Death in the Family" has not received apprecation from all quarters, especially 
Yet Disch wasn't the only writer to die on July 4: 
Science fiction is usually (usually) the genre which creates alternative histories of the world -- histories in which, for instance, Napoleon triumphed at Waterloo or Hitler in World War II or the computer emerged in Queen Victoria's reign, or....
Q: What does the cover of a book tell you about the book itself?
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.
Tom McCarthy's novel "Remainder" has received the 
