Colum McCann on high-wire acts, writing and 9/11

Colum McCann's novel "Let the Great World Spin" is set in New York in 1974, with a wide array of characters: hookers under a freeway overpass in the Bronx, an Irishman living in the projects nearby who is kind to them without ever telling them he's a monk; an affluent Park Avenue matron who's lost in grief; an ambitious teen photographer obsessed with subway taggers; a group of early computer programmers. Their lives intersect, however obliquely, through Philippe Petit's astonishing highwire walk between the towers of the World Trade Center. McCann's novel, which echoes with resonances of Sept. 11, is nominated for the National Book Award; he talked to Jacket Copy from his home office in New York.

Jacket Copy: Philippe Petit's walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974 is at the center of your novel. How did you come to know about his feat -- was it something that you'd heard about when it happened that stayed with you?

Colum McCann: A good few years ago, long before Sept. 11, I read Paul Auster's "The Red Notebook," and in that book there was an essay about Philippe Petit. I sort of stored it at the back of my memory. I thought it was a spectacular feat, and they seemed to have a very strong relationship, Paul Auster and Petit. Almost immediately after 9/11, when the towers came down, I remembered the essay, I remembered the fact that somebody had walked up there. It seemed to me that his walk had been an act of creation, in opposition to the act of destruction that had happened. It was very shortly after 9/11 that I re-remembered  it and started thinking about it over the next couple of years -- to see if it would work just on its own as a story and see if it would work as an allegory, you know?

JC: Have you seen the documentary about Petit's walk, "Man on Wire"?

CMcC: I was about two years into my novel when I suddenly heard there was going to be a documentary and I was like, "OK! Well, there's going to be a documentary." Then I heard there was going to be a really good documentary. I said, "Well, OK." Then I heard it was coming out shortly before my own novel came out, and I thought, trouble now. Then I went to see it. I thought it was wonderful; I really think it's a fine work of art, but it was completely different to what my novel was trying to do. In a curious way, I think that they dovetailed in together. I wasn't frightened by it after I saw it. I went into the cinema at Lincoln Plaza on the West side of Manhattan early one morning, must have been 11 o'clock in the morning, shivering in me boots, thinking, "Uh oh, all that work that I've done for the last couple years, was it all down the drain?" But it wasn't.

JC: Although Petit's walk is at the center of the narrative, you start in a very different place, and bring the edges of New York to life. Could you talk about your experience with New York – is it something you yourself experienced?

CMcC: In August of 1974, which is when the novel takes place, I was most likely running ...  in the west of Ireland wearing my short pants. I knew absolutely nothing of New York -- at that stage, I was 9 years old. I have been here the best part of 15, 16 years. I've known it from a lot of different angles. It is my home now, and I do love it. I had to go back in and re-create – so I did a lot of walking in various parts of the Bronx. I spent a lot of time in public libraries, especially the New York Public Library at 42nd Street, where they have all sorts of access to photographs of the time, maps of the time, oral histories from various people, lingo and all sorts of things. I did ride-alongs with the police, in both Manhattan in the Bronx; that was fascinating. They showed me rap sheets of various people. I had to do work discovering what the computer world was like back then. I've done other novels that were more difficult than this novel in terms of research, because I know New York and I love New York and it is my city now.

It wasn't a huge embarkation. It was a fair amount of work, but that's what I love about writing novels – that moment of research, stepping into a body that's not necessarily yours, or time that's not necessarily yours, and discovering new things about it. That was what was challenging. And I wanted to see the walk in a kaleidoscopic way, not just as heroic moment, this man walking up above in the air. But it's seen from lots of different angles: some people just don't like it, some people think it's a flagrant flirtation with death. I think this is the real world as we have it, in the sense that stories have to be told from all sorts of different angles. My favorite writer, John Berger,  says, "Never again will a story be told as if it were the only one."

JC: You inhabit so many different characters – hookers, people with strong beliefs, who've lost their beliefs, people subsumed in grief, people trying to get lost -- which of these many characters was the hardest for you to get right?

Philip Roth bus tour includes ... Philip Roth

Alumni of New Jersey's Weequahic High who signed up for the Oct. 17 "Philip Roth's Newark" bus tour as part of their 50th reunion celebrations were surprised to find that it included Philip Roth himself. It's the second time the author has made it to the bus tour, the Newark Star-Ledger reports, but it's the first time he's done the whole route.

Although he lives in Connecticut, Philip Roth (Weequahic High class of 1950) has often included Newark in his fiction. "As you get older, you get closer to home," he said Saturday. 

Roth, who has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards and garnered numerous other accolades, is often thought to be in the running for the Nobel Prize in Literature. That honor eluded him again Oct. 8 when it went to German-Romanian author Herta Müller.

Not that Roth is sitting around waiting for a phone call. In addition to this trip to New Jersey, he's been at work on a new novel. "The Humbling," a slender 160 pages, will hit shelves Nov. 2.

He's written 30 books since the publication of his debut "Goodbye, Columbus" fifty years ago. A collection of short stories and novella, it put Roth on the national literary stage. When the passengers of this weekend's busride, the class of 1960, were still sitting in classrooms, Roth was in New York, accepting his first National Book Award.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Philip Roth in 2008. Credit: Richard Drew / Associated Press. 

RELATED: The Nobel Prize for Literature goes to another European

John Krasinski and David Foster Wallace's endless summer

As summer winds to a close, so too has Infinite Summer -- the online readers group that challenged the brave and the bold to take on David Foster Wallace's 1,088-page novel "Infinite Jest."

To celebrate, Skylight Books is hosting a closing party tomorrow at 8 p.m. Joining in will be actor John Krasinski ("The Office"), who makes his directorial debut with the upcoming film "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" -- based on another Wallace book -- to read some excerpts and sign posters. Appearing also will be Wallace's longtime literary agent Bonnie Nadell; Kathleen Fitzpatick, who taught with him at Pomona College; and other special guests.

The 29 year-old Krasinski, whom most everyone knows as Jim from "The Office," got permission to film Wallace's story collection from the author himself before Wallace died a year ago.

"I remember him being so soft-spoken and so nice," said Krasinski during an interview with Rebecca Harper on Hulu.com. "He put me at ease right away. I remember him being flattered that someone had taken up this book and tried to run it up the hill."

Krasinski started his adaptation of "Brief Interviews" while waiting tables in New York. When he was cast in the pilot for "The Office," he used the money to buy the rights to the book.

Written as a series of 23 short stories, "Brief Interviews" lends itself to easy transcription into other media. Vince Passaro's review in Salon notes that "Wallace writes of young boys at the pool, middle-aged men in uncomfortable sexual situations and [a] woman who unbearably narrates her pathologies in the neo-vocabulary of healing and therapy."

For Krasinski, the book arrived with "almost near-perfect dialogue and the biggest challenge was editing it down to a piece that could actually fit into a watchable movie rather than an epic miniseries or something."

So which characters made the cut from the page to the screen? You'll have to see the film to find out. Due Sept. 25, "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" marks Krasinski's debut as a writer-director. It's also the first time that any of Wallace's fiction has been adapted for the screen.

-- George Ducker

photo credit: Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times

Slaughterhouse 90210: Where high meets low

Slaugterhouse 90210, a tumblr blog and column at Details, takes images from pop culture and captions them, hysterically, with literary quotes. A picture of Crockett (Don Johnson) and Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) from "Miami Vice" is accompanied by Milan Kundera: "The only relationship that can make both partners happy is one in which sentimentality has no place and neither partner makes any claim on the life and freedom of the other" ("The Unbearable Lightness of Being"). And so on.

Perhaps the image above would be captioned, "Laboring through a world every day more stultified, which expected salvation in codes and governments, ever more willing to settle for suburban narratives and diminished payoffs -- what were the chances of finding anyone else seeking to transcend that, and not even particularly aware of it?" (Thomas Pynchon, "Against the Day"). But that's just me, and I don't hold a candle to Maris Kreizman. She's the 31-year-old New Yorker who is the true genius behind Slaughterhouse 90210. 

Jacket Copy: Did you really start with just Vonnegut and "90210"?

Maris Kreizman: I knew I wanted to start a blog that featured my favorite literary quotes, but I thought that quotes alone would be a bit too precious or boring. And I have always been a connoisseur of crappy TV. So I figured what better way to indulge my guilty pleasures than by pairing them with more high-minded fare?

Once I had the idea, I needed to come up with the perfect name to convey that high/low juxtaposition. Fortunately, my co-workers are very skilled at wordplay. Some rejected blog names: Third Rock From the Sun Also Rises, How I Met Your Motherless Brooklyn, My So-Called Life of Pi. Once I finally settled on the name, the tagline came naturally. And I do happen to use a lot of Vonnegut and "90210" on the blog, so it fits.

JC: Do you usually begin with the literary quote or with a photo?

MK: It depends. I keep a list of shows and characters I eventually want to feature, and I'll keep them in mind when scanning for quotes. I am still trying to find the perfect quote that just screams "Charles in Charge." I think I should look into Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping" for that.

Meanwhile, sometimes I come across a great book passage, and I spend hours searching Google Images to try to find the characters that embody it. Like, I knew there was a Miranda July quote I wanted to use that was about people who date outside their own size groups. It took a few tries (Jim & Pam, Carrie & Mr. Big) before I settled on a more fanciful interpretation: Kermit and Miss Piggy.

JC: Do you find yourself running on a theme – say, several pictures from "Diff’rent Strokes" or a series of quotes from Tolstoy?

MK: I try my best not to duplicate shows or authors within a single week. However, some shows have such great casts and so much subtext that they lend themselves to frequent postings: "Mad Men," "Freaks & Geeks" and "Arrested Development" are a few of my go-tos. I'm also really influenced by the books I'm currently reading. When I read Kate Christensen's "The Great Man" I wanted to quote every single sentence because each and every character description was so spot-on. I think I limited myself to three.

JC: Where do you find the quotes – do you have books of them, or do they pop into your head, or something else?

MK: I have a little secret: Good Reads. Good Reads has a section of users' favorite quotes, and you can search all quotes by key word and by theme. It ends up being much more current and fresh than your standard Bartlett's. When I wanted to use a photo of Tim Gunn, I was able to search for the term "elegant" and find a bunch of quotes that applied. The winner was a Louisa May Alcott quote that captured Gunn to a T. (Another confession: I haven't read every book I quote -- I've read about half of them. I just bought a copy of Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" because I figured that I'd quoted so much of it that it was time to actually read the whole thing!)

JC: What kind of reactions have you gotten? Have you found that matching up literature with TV (and movies) leaves anyone baffled?

MK: The feedback has been generally positive. It's been great to see how many book worms there are who also have a soft spot for pop culture.  I think the bafflement really only comes when people can't immediately recognize the TV show in the post. My father, for instance, never really gets my "One Tree Hill" references.

JC: When you were in high school, what did you do more: read books or watch TV? Did you ever read books WHILE watching TV?

MK: I did A LOT of both. I still do. And I'm proud to say that Brenda Walsh  and Jerry Seinfeld and Alex P. Keaton informed my way of thinking just as much as Sylvia Plath or Margaret Atwood did.

JC: Is there anything that you’d not lampoon?

MK: Probably not -- watch out, Fox News hosts. ...

But many of my posts aren't meant to lampoon -- they're more like tributes. For instance, my very first post was a photo of Logan and Veronica from "Veronica Mars," whom I paired with a quote from Elizabeth McCracken's "The Giant's House." It was just a pure appreciation of my favorite TV characters and my favorite book.

I'm still looking for the perfect quote by Elisa Albert to pair with a scene from "Six Feet Under." Elisa was the first author whose works I acquired when I was an editor at Free Press, and I think she and Claire Fischer are soul sisters in terms of their ability to find humor in dark places. I'm glad my blog allows me to show my appreciation for some of my favorite sharp-tongued women.

Photo: "Friends," Season 1, 1994-95. Credit: Warner Bros.

Bassist gets bookish: The Sugarcubes' Bragi Ólafsson

Guest blogger Michael Shaub reviews the novel "The Pets" by Bragi Ólafsson.

With its 99.9% literacy rate (seriously), and a roster of great authors (Halldór Laxness, Hallgrímur Helgason) that belies the fact that it has a smaller population than Bakersfield, the nation of Iceland could fairly be called a book lover’s paradise. (There’s even a "Library of Water" there, which, according to my Icelandic American partner, delivers exactly what it promises.)

It could also be called a rock lover's paradise -- it's home to the acclaimed band Sigur Rós; the world’s most beloved swan-clad chanteuse, Björk; and -- because no nation can claim rock cred if the stiffest available beverage is lemonade -- Brennivín, nicknamed Black Death, an ungodly strong schnapps that tastes like rye bread soaked in sulfuric acid and then set on fire. (I speak from experience here. Bitter, bitter experience.)

With that in mind, it's not entirely surprising that Iceland has given the world one of the best novels written by a former rock musician. Granted, that's not a long list to begin with. If you don't count Jimmy Buffett's mystery novels -- and you really, really shouldn't -- you're left with a pretty sparse hand. (But one with some high cards -- Joey Goebel's "The Anomalies" and Frank Portman's "King Dork,"  both excellent novels by American punks.)

So enter Bragi Ólafsson, former bassist for the Sugarcubes, the legendary post-New Wave band that made Björk a star. After the band broke up, Bragi turned to literature, writing poetry and fiction, and translating Paul Auster's "The Glass City" into Íslenska. The indispensable Rochester publisher Open Letter released Bragi’s first novel rendered into English, "The Pets," translated beautifully by Janice Balfour, in October of last year.

"The Pets" is not about rock, at least not overtly. The novel follows two Icelanders who have recently returned from abroad: Emil Halldorsson, who's been vacationing in London after winning the lottery, and Havard Knutsson, Emil's former roommate, who's been on a more involuntary vacation in a mental hospital in Sweden. Emil is a mostly nice guy, although he's a mostly nice guy who seriously wants to cheat on his girlfriend with a stranger whom he first lusted after 15 years ago. Havard is a mostly unreconstructed psychopath.

Bill Clinton reads Jacket Copy, among other things

On July 4, I posted about the literariness of former President William Jefferson Clinton. You might have missed it -- understandable. A lot of people aren't reading blogs on the Fourth of July.

But someone was on the computer and told someone, and so on, and shortly thereafter Bill Clinton made his way to Jacket Copy. This was before, I assume, he was called on to help bring two journalists home from North Korea. In a window when he wasn't working with his foundation, taking meetings about the global economy, supporting Harlem businesses and doing all the other things he does. Heck, he used to be president: I have no idea where he finds the time to read a book blog. I'm just a blogger and I can barely find time to do laundry.

But read it he did. How do I know for sure? Because he offered a correction: His dinner with Bill Styron was in 1994, not 1999. Thanks, Mr. President. It's fixed now.

The main part of his note was to let me know what he's been reading lately. And I think that he wouldn't mind if I share that list with you. Here's a list of books Bill Clinton has been reading lately, from his own pen:

1. Steven Johnson's "The Invention of Air" and "The Ghost Map," esp. #1
2. Tom Zoellner's "Uranium"
3. Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers," his best book.
4. John Bogle's "Enough"
5. Selden Edwards' "The Little Book"
6. Richard North Patterson's "Eclipse"
7. Andrew Greeley's "The Cardinal Sins" (now almost 30 years old)

If I had to guess, I'd wager the reason he made time to read a book blog was because Clinton, an author in his own right, really enjoys books. In that way -- even though he used to be president -- he's just like us.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: A letter from former President Clinton. Credit: paperhaus via Flickr.

Kick Kerouac out of the canon?

The excellent literary website the Second Pass has decided to take a bite out of the canon. Its victims are books by Don Delillo, Charles Dickens, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Jonathan Franzen, D.H. Lawrence, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cormac McCarthy and Virginia Woolf. And Jack Kerouac.

On the one hand, some of the targeted books are lesser works by masters whose other books, it is implied, would remain safely canonized. "Absalom, Absalom" should go, but other works by Faulkner should stay. "The Road" might be Cormac McCarthy's bestselling book, but it's not his best. "'A Tale of Two Cities' would be a good book by another writer," they write, "but for Dickens it was a failure."

But in other cases, it's a direct attack. If just one book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez could go on a must-read list, it would be "One Hundred Years of Solitude" -- but they would banish it. The same for Jack Kerouac's "On the Road." Which is where I draw the line. This is how the critique begins:

Like many nerds of the ’80s and ’90s, I read "On the Road," that classic of identity literature, in high school. I read it as a textbook on how to be cool. And like many of the traditional textbooks I read at the time, it filled me with awe and boredom.

I'm not sure when "On the Road" became "identity literature" -- is it creating an identity? How can something that described a lifestyle that was alternative to mainstream culture in 1950 be an adoptable identity today? The author goes on to describe the cultural role that the book played, both personally and in a greater sense, which she (it is a she, I checked with the editor) found alienating.

But I would argue that whatever cultural hallmarks it might signal, the book is a work of literature, one with an intensity of vision and a language of impure steamroller incendiary jazz.

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Keep your cultural baggage: That's going straight into my canon. 

After the jump: Kerouac reads, accompanied by Steve Allen on piano. The above passage begins about 2 1/2 minutes in.

NEA's literary stimulus (barely) reaches L.A.

On Tuesday, the NEA announced its stimulus grants (aka its American Recovery and Reinvestment Act direct grants) to support arts organizations around the country. More than 25 L.A.-area nonprofits, universities and municipalities received grants ranging from $25,000 to $250,000, for a total of more than $1.6 million.

And of that, there was a single grant to an L.A.-based literary organization: PEN Center USA West, which got $50,000.

Although funds from other arts grants may trickle out to support the Los Angeles literary scene, it's hard not to feel a bit, well, underfunded. Especially when you look at how much other cities garnered to support their bookish culture.

In Minnesota, four literary nonprofits in Minneapolis-St. Paul received grants totaling $125,000, more than double what L.A. will receive. The region has a population of 3.1 million, less than a third that of L.A. County's 10.3 million. If you do the math, that's about a half a cent per person in L.A. for literature, versus 4 cents per person in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Not that the math really makes sense -- those funds are likely to support infrastructure as well as programs.

Not surprisingly, New York maintains its place as a center of literary life, with seven organizations in New York City slated to receive $275,000, far more than any other region of the country.

Literary institutions can support and maintain the cultural dialogue of a city through readings, celebrations and more. Clearly, the NEA has made it a priority to support nonprofits struggling to make it through these challenging economic times. But will book-loving Angelenos have anyplace to go? Other than N.Y. or Minneapolis, that is?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

When pop goes postmodern: Scarlett Thomas

Colleen Mondor would not say she is an expert in postmodernism -- but she happens to like the work of some authors, like Scarlett Thomas, who write deliciously readable books that quietly veer into postmodernism. An England native, Scarlett Thomas has published seven novels with an eighth due later this year; Colleen Mondor is a reviewer for Booklist and columnist for Bookslut. She has recently completed a memoir on Alaska aviation and lives with her family in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.

As the last English course I attended was in 1986, my understanding of postmodernism remains frozen in the frenzied period of study prior to my AP exams. I did manage to retain a great love for books in spite of many high school literary traumas, however, and can certainly recognize a complex and satisfying read when I find one. James Joyce may not be my cup of tea, but Scarlett Thomas is another matter entirely. With her fun skewering of our capitalist economy in "PopCo" (2005) -- which includes pirates, World War II code breaking and the evils of Hello Kitty -- she sold me on a style that willfully includes all the things that interest her at the moment.

Where Thomas’ mind took her in "PopCo" was the life of Alice, raised by code-breaking grandparents on a continuous diet of ciphers and puzzles and a very real mystery of lost pirate treasure. Readers learn of World War II espionage through flashbacks while Alice’s contemporary life plays out at a corporate "Thought Camp" where she and her fellow employees are tasked with designing the next big material object for teen girls; it will exist solely for the purpose of ownership and serve no function. (This would be where Hello Kitty’s ubiquitous example comes into play.) From a childhood tasked with finding solutions to an adulthood that has landed her as a servant of capitalism, Alice is at a serious crossroads.

If the book were only about Alice's career, it would be one thing, but Thomas refuses to let go of the mathematical equations that have propelled Alice through every moment in her life:

One of the most famous contemporary uses of a Caesar shift cipher is, according to SF geeks, in the naming of the fictional computer HAL from "2001: A Space Odyssey." Taking into account a Caesar shift of minus-one, "HAL" of course reads "IBM." I used to have a little Caesar-shift wheel.... 

Upcoming LBGT arts festival heavy on the literary

Eloise Klein Healy, pictured, is one of the poets making the trip from L.A. to San Francisco for the National Queer Arts Festival, a six week-long festival of music, dance, visual art, spoken word, poetry, comedy, fashion and theater. 

With hundreds of events taking place in 18 venues across the city, you might think that poetry and literature would be drowned out. But in fact, one of the highlights is Testimonies, Chisme, Spilling the Tea on Monday, an evening of poetry featuring Dorothy Allison, Rigoberto González, D.A. Powell and Angelenos Healy, Ching-In Chen and Griselda Suárez. Tickets run from $12-$20.

The festival, which began in late May and continues through July 11, is organized by the Queer Cultural Center. It's now in its 12th year.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times