Getting academic about David Mitchell

Academics and book lovers in Scotland are gearing up for the first University of St. Andrews conference on the work of writer David Mitchell, taking place Thursday and Friday, Sept. 3 and 4. Conferences such as this are nothing new -- you can't swing a stick at an academic calendar without hitting one on James Joyce, Virginia Woolf or any number of other major writers -- but this one is unusual.

Because Mitchell -- whose most acclaimed novel, "Cloud Atlas," was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize  -- differs from the likes of Joyce and Woolf because he's alive. He might even be said to still be in the early phase of his career: He just turned 40 this year, published four novels in the last decade, and his fifth is due out in 2010. Yet his body of work is weighty enough to merit attention from professors from across the United Kingdom, France and even UC Davis.

Like other conferences, this one will include a number of panels on the author's work. And as they are at many other conferences, the panels are charmingly arcane. A sampling:

Intertextual Doppelganger: David Mitchell’s "number9dream" and "Japan"

Narratology and the Mitchell Multiverse

"Versed Enough in Antipodese Etiquette": Speculative Fiction as Postcolonial Critique in "Ghostwritten" and "Cloud Atlas"

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, from Postmodernity to the Posthuman

Writing Inside/Out: Genre and David Mitchell’s Paratext

Hypertext, Palimpsest, and the Virtual Text: Tracing the Digital in David Mitchell's "Ghostwritten"

Reading those titles makes me both want to attend and wince with embarrassment. How fun it would be to discuss narratology and posthumanism and text and intertextuality in relation to Mitchell's work! How silly and removed these discussions are from the job of writing and the joys of reading!

Maybe it's better that Joyce and Woolf and other study-worthy novelists are gone. Are these really the kinds of discussions a novelist should be aware of? Ask Mitchell. The sprightly young novelist is scheduled to appear at the conference in person; he'll read and answer questions on Friday evening.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Images: Random House and the University of St. Andrews

43 years of skepticism: Christgau on Cohen

Robert Christgau is a legendary rock critic -- on his website, he calls himself the Dean of American Rock Critics -- and as he's been writing about music a long, long time, he's got the kind of experience and knowledge to bring to a review of the performance CD/DVD sets by 75 year-old Leonard Cohen.

But sometimes history can work against you. Christgau's column for the Barnes & Noble review begins:

As someone who admired poet Leonard Cohen's second and last novel "Beautiful Losers" in 1966, before Cohen was a recording artist or I was a music critic, I followed Cohen's musical career with admiration from the beginning. But the admiration was always cut with skepticism -- a skepticism that the focus and reach and three-hour duration of his February 19 comeback concert at Manhattan's Beacon Theater blew away.

If I read that right, Christgau has followed Cohen's career with admiration/skepticism since 1966.That's 43 years.

Is it that Cohen has suddenly changed? Perhaps -- Cohen has a constantly-evolving persona, and Christgau outlines his recent evolution from well-heeled troubadour to surprisingly broke monk to hardworking road performer.

But maybe it's because as a critic, Christgau has begun to want something different from Cohen. Later in his piece, he explains:

Rock and roll has produced a surprising bounty of old men with something to say. Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Lou Reed, Randy Newman -- rather than credibly courting eternal youth a la Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney, these seniors explore the aging process with an edge that's been rare in pop music, where nostalgia is such a staple. Cohen fits this paradigm, with two significant differences. The first is that he's rock and roll only by association. He's really a Gallic chansonnier, in it for the lyrics rather than the liberating musical intensity even Dylan has made a vocation. The second is that he was always old -- older than Elvis and also more sophisticated, the kind of artist you'd look up to at 24 only to find yourself surprisingly, alarmingly entering his age group four decades later.

Not to say that Cohen was in his 60s when Christgau was 24 (his age in the aforementioned critical year of 1966). But it seems that, four decades later, Christgau has caught up to Cohen, who really isn't that much older than him at all.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Leonard Cohen performs in Italy, Aug. 3. Credit: Andrea Merola / EPA

The sorry state of music criticism

Henry Owings understands rock music. Working from his home base in Atlanta, Owings, 40, has mastered rock’s get-your-hands-dirty aspects: booking gigs, managing tours, running a record label, selling limited-edition albums and silk-screened posters, managing a website, doing graphic design and performing pretty much any task that's not as glamorous as actually playing an instrument. He's the Renaissance Man lurking in the shadows of the underground rock Renaissance. Which is why few people are more qualified to pen the recent "The Rock Bible: Unholy Scripture for Fans and Bands," a snarktastic set of hundreds of music-related "commandments," all bound in scripture-esque fake leather. (Sample: "Few singers are allowed to drape scarves on microphone stands. You are not one of them.")

Owings is best known for his zine Chunklet, a 17-year operation that infamously vacillates between enthusiastic and cruel, well-regarded as an the unflinching, cynical eye of the underground. The particularly infamous "Biggest A-holes in Rock" issue included an anonymously industry-sourced list of publicists, bands and record labels that don't exactly endear themselves to the idea of "community." The just-released issue No. 20 is subtitled "The Last Magazine Ever Printed" and features cranky musings on the impending death of music writing, including the Online Music Journalist Application Form ("When a band calls for an interview, are your first words, 'I got it, Mom. Hang up'?") and a very funny Music Mag Mix 'N' Match quiz.

Owings was interviewed for Jacket Copy by Christopher R. Weingarten, whose speech at the #140conf (available on YouTube) proved how invested he is in the end of rock criticism; Weingarten was hoping an outspoken industry vet could provide some insight on the sorry state we're in, and the sorrier one we're getting ourselves into.

Jacket Copy: What is your least favorite thing about music journalism in print in 2009?

Henry Owings: My least favorite thing is that there's just less of it. When presented with quality writing that costs money versus questionable writing that’s free, like most things, the masses go the path of least resistance. I have to watch what I say so I don't come off sounding like "grandpa grumpy pants," but even though I get a fair amount of information from the Net, I still find it to be a lesser counterpart to print.

JC: What is your least favorite thing about music journalism on the Internet in 2009?

HO: I feel this is a loaded question because no matter what I say, I'm going to sound like a grouch. I think the fact that some kid can start an online presence out of his parents' basement in Arkansas is undoubtedly incredible. To have a blog with worldwide impact out of your computer for pennies is a hell of a lot better than hustling together ad revenue to print a magazine. Although with that power also comes a myriad of concerns worth addressing, but I'll just address what I consider to be the biggest one. ... That's after the jump.

Hang around an ink well: Writing about Bob Dylan

People are writing about Bob Dylan again; the 67-year-old musical icon is releasing a new record next month, "Together Through Life." The cover, above, features a vintage photo of an awkward yet absorbing backseat makeout clinch. John Lewis at Baltimore Magazine writes that he's seen the image before -- on the cover of a book by Larry Brown.

Larry Brown's short story collection "Big Bad Love" featured the same photo on the cover -- the 1991 Vintage paperback edition did, at least.

Brown, a Mississippi-based writer, died of a heart attack in 2004 at age 53. His writing was fondly remembered by both bookish types and musicians (a tribute CD was released in 2007). The shared image is not just a coincidence, according to Lewis: a mutual friend quotes Dylan as saying, "I've read every word the man has ever written."

But as Galleycat has pointed out, any stock photo is fair game for designers: they've found covers of completely different books that share the same iceberg, the same paparazzi, the same poignant photo of a door standing in a field of wildflowers. Exactly how the designer came to use the photo on the cover of Dylan's "Together Through Life" is something scholars could puzzle over for years.

Scholars puzzle over many aspects of Bob Dylan in  "The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan," out next month. They take on Dylan and gender, Dylan and religion, Dylan as performer and songwriter and cultural icon. Editor Kevin Dettmar from Pomona gathered an interesting mix of contributors: Michael Denning teaches at Yale, Martin Jacobi at Clemson; Anthony DeCurtis is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone; Jonathan Lethem is a novelist and Carrie Brownstein played guitar in Sleater-Kinney.

With so much ink already spilled over Dylan (and by Dylan, who has published the autobiographical "Chronicles: Volume I"), why this collection now? The answer lies in the first essay, by David Yaffe of Syracuse University. "If you're reading this for Rock & Roll 101, take notes but do not plagiarize," he writes. "Leave that to Dylan (but more on that later)." It's built for college classrooms, a primer for people who were born into a world that didn't need to invent Bob Dylan because he was already there.

More on "The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan" after the jump.

New Ezra Pound collection given to Ransom Center

From left: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Ford Maddox Ford, John Quinn.

Today the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced the acquisition of a substantial and important collection of Ezra Pound materials. The collection includes more than 700 letters, some photographs, a scrapbook and two chess sets.

Pound played chess on those sets with Marcella Spann Booth, a young woman who visited him while he was hospitalized after World War II; she later became his secretary. The new acquisition is Spann Booth's collection of Pound-o-bilia.

Ezra Pound challenges the idea of literary heroes: his poetry was great, but his politics, not so much. Living in Italy as an acknowledged titan of modernism, Pound supported Mussolini before and during World War II, which got him into trouble as the war ended. He was returned to the U.S. to be tried for treason, but wound up instead spending a dozen years in St. Elizabeth's, a mental hospital. It was in his last years there that he came to know Spann Booth, who wrote and asked if she could visit him. After his release, she accompanied Pound and his wife back to Italy and worked as his secretary, eventually returning to the U.S. and getting a PhD in English at the University of Texas.

That Pound continued to write while he was hospitalized has been controversial. How mentally unstable was he? In the news release about the acquisition, Brian A. Brennan, associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, says, "The Ezra Pound collection of Marcella Spann Booth gives us even greater insight into the latter part of this difficult — in every sense of the word — poet's mind and work." In the same release, Ransom Center Director Thomas F. Staley notes:

It is rare that a collection would become available today that could add so much to the scholarly record about arguably the most ubiquitous of the moderns. This untapped collection will be a remarkable resource for scholars of 20th-century literature.

There are 14 archival boxes in the collection, which will be available at the Harry A. Ransom Center in spring 2009.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Unidentified photographer, image courtesy the Harry Ransom Center. All rights reserved.

Zadie Smith on realism and not-realism

Maybe I was distracted by real-world concerns like the economy or the election, because I am coming late to Zadie Smith's New York Review of Books piece on the current state of literary fiction, specifically, realism versus not-realism (postmodernism? metafiction?). With insight and acuity, she looks at "Netherland" by Joseph O'Neill and "Remainder" by Tom McCarthy and explains why they represent two different paths for the novel.

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. In healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene.

These aren't particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked. For Netherland, our receptive pathways are so solidly established that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It seems perfectly done — in a sense that's the problem. It's so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait.

"I have written in this tradition myself, and cautiously hope for its survival," Smith writes. But her faith in it is shaken. Lyrical realism uses beautiful language to describe emotions, desires and observations, integrating flashbacks to vividly evoked and deeply felt pasts that illuminate character and drive plot. What's wrong with that, exactly? Smith explains:

["Netherland"] wants to offer us the authentic story of a self. But is this really what having a self feels like? Do selves always seek their good, in the end? Are they never perverse? Do they always want meaning? Do they not sometimes want its opposite? And is this how memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in the form of coherent, lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really Realism?

She finds a tremendous energy in the very different "Remainder," which won The Believer's book award this year, despite -- or perhaps because of -- its anti-lyrical-realism tendencies:   

Remainder is not filled with pretty quotes; it works by accumulation and repetition, closing in on its subject in ever-decreasing revolutions, like a trauma victim circling the blank horror of the traumatic event. ...

For the first fifty pages or so, this is Remainder's game, a kind of anti-literature hoax, a wind-up (which is, however, impeccably written). Meticulously it works through the things we expect of a novel, gleefully taking them apart, brick by brick.

It is rare for an author working in one tradition to laud another, which I think makes Smith's piece -- entitled "Two Paths for the Novel" particularly interesting. It's long -- about 9,000 words -- giving her enough room to go into detail about each of the books and to shape and stretch her ideas. She left me thinking that realism is overrated.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo of a cricket match (cricket appears in both novels) by Talisen via Flickr.

Reviewers love Roberto Bolano's '2666'

At this year's Book Expo conference, the book that everyone wanted an advance copy of was "2666" by Roberto Bolaño. The book was the follow-up to Bolaño's "The Savage Detectives," which was something of a literary sensation when it was published in the U.S. last year. The only problem with picking up a copy of "2666" was lifting it -- it's a massive 898 pages. And maybe there's another tiny problem: a book that big is daunting. You have to be ready to commit to it.

The book is due to hit shelves on Tuesday, and a review of the reviews so far indicates that the commitment should be made. Bolaño was ill while writing "2666," and died in 2003 at age 50 with it still in the form of a not-entirely-corrected draft. In our pages, Ben Ehrenreich gives a clear picture of the book's five sections, and concludes:

He wrote "2666" in a race against death. His ambitions were appropriately outsized: to make some final reckoning, to take life's measure, to wrestle to the limits of the void.... Stories sprout from other stories. Digression rules. Nothing is ever finished, nothing answered, nothing solved. Bolaño is too smart, or too sad, to attempt to piece it all together. He leaves it to a minor character -- an artist confined to an asylum, no less -- to point the finger at a "senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous explosion, we find communion."

Writing for Slate, Adam Kirsch also lauds the book's resistance to narrative conventions:

So much of the activity of 2666 takes place not along the ordinary novelistic axes of plot and character but on the poetic, even mystical planes of symbol and metaphor. It is in Bolaño's allusions and unexplained coincidences, in his character's frequent, vividly disturbing dreams, in the mad recitations of criminals and preachers and witches ... that the real story of 2666 gets told. That is one reason why the book is so hard to summarize—and why Natasha Wimmer's lucid, versatile translation is so triumphant. 2666 is an epic of whispers and details, full of buried structures and intuitions that seem too evanescent, or too terrible, to put into words. It demands from the reader a kind of abject submission—to its willful strangeness, its insistent grimness, even its occasional tedium—that only the greatest books dare to ask for or deserve.

In the New York Times, Jonathan Lethem gives clear, high praise:

"2666" is as consummate a performance as any 900-page novel dare hope to be: Bolaño won the race to the finish line in writing what he plainly intended, in his self-interrogating way, as a master statement. Indeed, he produced not only a supreme capstone to his own vaulting ambition, but a landmark in what’s possible for the novel as a form in our increasingly, and terrifyingly, post-national world.

At Conversational Reading, litblogger Scott Esposito cautions that "any book of this size and being granted this kind of pre-publication esteem deserves space. You just can't adequately address such a book in less than a couple thousand words." I'm not sure if I agree, as he implies, that a long review is the same thing as a good or complex review, or that "pre-publication esteem" means much. They each seem to have enough space to say what they intend, which boils down to a single message: "2666" is a big, worthy commitment.   

-- Carolyn Kellogg

MobyLives lives again

MobyLives was one of the earliest literary blogs; Dennis Loy Johnson launched it in 2001 as a kind of Web version of his syndicated book column. Soon it became a full-bodied blog, with news, interviews, sometimes-contentious discussion and even an early audio podcast. But in 2006, the blog went on hiatus and never came back -- until October of this year. Johnson's been around -- he runs Melville House Publishing with his wife -- so why, after a two-year break, is he blogging again? 

Jacket Copy: The big, obvious question is, why does MobyLives live again?

Dennis Loy Johnson: Well, the simplest reason is I just missed daily journalism. And now that I've become a publisher, I've come to think even more than I did then that the book industry is a much more interesting and vital place than you'd know from most of the mainstream media, present company a notable exclusion. The Google settlement, for instance, has been widely covered, but with a universal and breathtaking lack of any real analysis as to how it might impact the culture at large -- for example, about the way that it essentially begins the process of handing over our public libraries to a for-profit corporation, to name only one of its more ominous aspects. Another story that really compelled me last year was the fact that over a period of about six months, a hedge fund named Perseus LLC took over the distribution of something like 80% of the country's independently published books -- the overwhelming majority of the houses that publish things like poetry and translated fiction and left-wing politics, in other words. Even in trade media, there’s been a stunning lack of coverage of that, let alone of the impact that it may have on the culture. So I want to do what I can to generate that kind of observation. And there are few journalists who can speak to it the way I can, because my company was one of the publishers thus taken over -- although we've taken our business elsewhere since -- so I also feel morally compelled to speak up. But that was always my "angle," from back when MobyLives was a newspaper column -- I’d been in a famous writing program, I'd published a lot of fiction, I'd been a book critic and I'd taught fiction writing, so I thought I could really write about book culture from the inside; I thought that if I just wrote about the business the way writers spoke about it behind the scenes, I could really offer some insight.

JC: What was the main reason you stopped posting on MobyLives?

Dennis Loy Johnson: The main reason was the explosive growth of Melville House. Things moved pretty fast from the start -- our first book, "Poetry After 9/11," got an insane amount of press for a poetry book, including a New York Times profile of me and Valerie, my wife, whose idea it was to turn the blog into a publishing company. That seemed to open the floodgates, and before we knew it, we were crashing books with Bernard-Henri Levy and Howard Dean and the prime minister of France and finding ourselves without the time to sleep or eat, let alone blog.

JC: Melville House publishes many books that are liberal and left wing. Do you think that the literary blogosphere needs more strong political voices?

The answer ... after the jump.

Godard: genius or gasbag?

Maybe the problem is the length: Richard Brody's biography of Jean-Luc Godard, "Everything Is Cinema," thumps down at 702 pages. To spend that much time with a single subject requires something of the reader: enthusiasm, affection. Without a sufficient level of goodwill, the result can easily be enmity.

"Now we know how one of the greatest of all filmmakers — the man who so radically changed cinema in 1959 with his debut feature, 'Breathless' — became an intolerable gasbag. That probably wasn’t Brody’s aim in writing this exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, critical biography."

That was Stephanie Zacharek writing for the New York Times. Our own reviewer Richard Schickel fared little better, admitting, "I have rarely been so glad to come to the end of an admirable book." Both reviewers find Godard's personality difficult (also "annoying," "stubbornly confounding" and "perhaps the victim of attention-deficit disorder"). But all these qualities, which might make reading a long biography not much fun, don't make Godard any less of a filmmaker.

In 1959, Godard's film "Breathless" launched the French New Wave into American movie theaters and the dialogue of American filmmaking. Godard had also been a critic — for Cahiers du Cinéma — and he was, as Schickel notes, "a useful motormouth." But while many critics are dismissive of his later work, the Telegraph praises Godard's film legacy, explaining:

"This is an artist who has reinvented himself as often as Madonna, and to rather more invigorating effect. You can accuse him of pretentiousness and incomprehensibility, but you could never accuse him of (to use a 1960s term) selling out, and in this era of the two-minute attention-span we must treasure those few remaining artists whose work forces us to use our brains."

In its review, Time Out New York turns back to the movies and recommends watching Godard's early films. It also suggests reading a collection of Godard's essays and interviews: And "Godard on Godard" is only 300 pages.

Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in "Breathless."

Bond takes some hits

Daniel Craig as James Bond with Gemma Arterton in the upcoming film "Quantum of Solace" (photo by Susie Allnutt / Columbia Pictures)

James Bond returned to print this spring in "Devil May Care," penned by the British author Sebastian Faulks. But other than in this newspaper, reviews have been slow to surface, perhaps because people were trying to find something nice to say.

The consensus is that "Devil May Care" is disappointing. On Sunday, the Philadelphia Inquirer maintained that Faulks was "a poor choice" and that the author "misses the mark." Last week the New York Times described the villains as "a B-movie writer's dream" and cried out in distress when Faulks' Bond (uncharacteristically) turned down an advance from the book's hottie, Scarlett Papava.

Perhaps the "Scarlett" is a secret casting wish. It seems that movies were top of mind; every review agrees with Tim Rutten, who wrote in the LA Times' that this latest novel is more informed by the Bond films than Fleming's Bond books. At the end of Rutten's piece, he puts some excerpts of the latest book beside Ian Fleming's writing, and it's clear that Fleming's got a brutal clarity that's gone missing from "Devil May Care."

Most of the reviews say "Devil May Care" will probably be fine fare for those who've seen the Bond films but haven't read the initial novels. Shouldn't we just have another film then? We've still got Ian Fleming's excellent prose to read, again and again.

-- Carolyn Kellogg