In the magazine
June 2009
- An Interview with James Hannaham
- An Interview with Colm Toibin
- Polymorphously Perverse
- An Interview with Catherynne M. Valente
- Wild Justice: Morality in Dogs, Elephants, and Rats (and Yes, Apes!)
- An Interview with Reif Larsen
June 26, 2009
Powell's chats with children's author Lenore Look, who says she's no good at cussing. I'm working on a kids' book now, and there's a lot of cursing involved (off-page so far, but you never know).
Q. What's your clean, kid-friendly curse word substitute of choice?
A. I don't curse. It doesn't come naturally, and when I try to do it, I don't sound like I'm cursing at all! I just sound like an idiot. Cursing is tantamount to spitting or throwing a shoe at someone; it should be this great projectile that, when it makes its mark, splits you open like a bolt of lightning. Well, the couple of times that I tried cursing, lemme tell you, it wasn't lightning, honey. It wasn't even thunder. It was a sad little worm that fell out of my mouth, like the kind you put on the end of a hook to cast for fish, and it cried out, "Lenore's a wimp! Lenore's a wimp! Look what she's done to me! Aaaaack!" So I don't curse, and I can't come up with kid-friendly substitutes either.
Ulysses goes graphic:
An online graphic novel version of the literary classic, Ulysses Seen, is the inaugural project of Throwaway Horse, a group seeking to spread awareness of literary classics and chip away at the air of intimidation that works like Ulysses tend to have. "The Throwaway Horse members love this book," they explain on the Ulysses Seen website, "and it kills us that it has gotten the reputation for being inaccessible to everyone besides the English professors who make their careers teaching the book to future English professors who will make their careers doing the same."
(Via @pastemagazine.)
This piece on Thomas Maier's Masters of Sex: The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who Taught America How to Love might actually be the first time the New York Times has printed the phrase "a clear Plexiglas dildo nicknamed Ulysses" since J. Edgar Hoover's obituary.
A reason to watch PBS tonight that doesn't involve the look of disappointment on an old person's face when Leslie Keno tells him that his guéridon is a forgery: W. S. Merwin (The Shadow of Sirius), one of my favorite poets, is featured on Bill Moyers Journal tonight.
Farrah Fawcett was friends with Ayn Rand.
June 26, 2009
BOMBlog's Emily Nonko interviews poet Brandon Scott Gorrell, author of the new During My Nervous Breakdown I Want to Have a Biographer Present, published by the upstart New York indie press Muumuu House, which also recently released Ellen Kennedy's poetry collection Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs.
I read both these books recently, and reread them both immediately after finishing them. Gorrell and Kennedy are the most talented young poets I've read in years, and their books are stunning it's the kind of writing that's impulsive and emotionally raw, but also more layered and sophisticated than they appear. It's hard for any poet to be funny and heartbreaking in the space of one poem, or even one stanza, but it's a skill these young writers execute perfectly. They made me excited about poetry and independent publishing all over again.
Related: Muumuu House founder/publisher Tao Lin reflects on the last book he loved, Joy Williams's Honored Guest.
In New Zealand, a school is bribing kids to read with Coke. They're doing the same thing in Miami, only the "c" isn't capitalized.
June 25, 2009
The Naked and the Read
He was older than me by a decade exactly, wore black-rimmed glasses and corduroy pants, and wrote me a letter for my twenty-sixth birthday (before anything had happened between us) that was eight-pages long, single-spaced, typed. There were reasons it shouldn’t have started, but it did, and we wrote torrents to each other. It felt huge and dangerous and for the record books. An instiller of some new enthusiasm, a reminder of how exciting things could feel -- not just romantically or sexually, but in terms of being a human alive in the world.
He decorated the envelope of the birthday letter with highlighter pens, flares of fluorescent yellow and green and blue surrounding my name. The letter itself was a combination of rambling enthusiasm and wonder -- kidlike, unfettered -- and sprinkled with quotes from Tennessee Williams and references to Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, and Aeschylus. Exuberant and intelligent, funny and odd and human. And when the stories were sad, he made them beautiful.
The same can be said of cartoonist Lynda Barry, creator of the alt-weekly staple Ernie Pook’s Comeek, creator of the inimitable Marlys -- pig-tailed and chubby of face, enthused about everything -- and her teenage sister Maybonne -- sensitive, earnest, crushed out on boys and concerned for the world. Reading through It’s So Magic or The! Greatest! Of! Marlys! or The Freddie Stories or Come Over Come Over is like getting a fast ride back to adolescence, in all its high-stakes glory and humiliation.
Who will replace the late Ken Siegelman as Brooklyn's poet laureate? The Brooklyn Paper has a shortlist of their suggestions, which includes the brilliant Matthew Rohrer (Rise Up) and nerd-pop heroes They Might Be Giants.
I'm kind of jealous. Austin doesn't have a poet laureate, at least as far as I know. Might I suggest this guy?
Every year, it's the same old story: Poetry books dominate the bestseller lists, while authors of diet books, crime novels and books where God wants to talk to you in a shack about your kidnapped child, are left to starve. And now it's getting even worse, thanks to the BBC.
Sampling Roth. This is awesome. If Jewish shouting dance music doesn't become the next big thing, then I give up.
Before you jet off to the Library of Congress to get your hands on the just-opened Nabokov archives, please know that you will not be getting your grubby paws on VN's original manuscripts. Nope, it's microfilm for you, pal. Sorry.
Inspired by Lilian Pizzichini's new The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys, Maud Newton and Alexander Chee have a conversation about selected works of Rhys and Ford Madox Ford. (There's more at Maud's site.)
Peter Rugg has an incredibly fascinating story about Hoodwinked author and Kansas City street lit hero Quentin Carter, who wrote five books while serving eight years in prison on drug charges.
Deckfight interviews North Carolina author Nic Brown, whose debut book Floodmarkers looks great. Brown is also the former drummer for an old favorite band of mine, Matt Pond PA.
Slate's business blog, The Big Money, defends Google Books, because someone has to. Right?
. . . but ask yourself this: In the past decade, who has done more for public access to knowledge. Harvard? Or Google? If you want to pick sides in this debate, that's what really tells you everything you need know.
On the other hand, Harvard isn't taking pictures of my house and putting them online. Or are they? Probably not. From what I can tell, the only threats from Harvard are the thing where the dudes dress like ladies and give awards to James Franco, and that one guy who tried to embarrass Matt Damon in a bar in front of Minnie Driver, about which I'll just say, Not cool, Harvard.
At The New York Review of Books, Malise Ruthven considers three books on the ideological divisions in Iran. (Thanks to Elise Blackwell for the link.)
Largehearted Boy has pulled together a superlist of summer reading lists for you. Among other things, it's proof that book-review editors everywhere still love a "Hot Reads" headline. (Via.)
June 24, 2009
Chris "Long Tail" Anderson, Wired editor and author of Free: The Future of a Radical Price (due out in July), is getting vivisected in certain quarters for allegedly making a little too free with unsourced material. More fascinating than the case itself is the fistfight about it--gotcha! or no big deal?--in the comments over at the VQR blog, which called foul on Mr. Anderson in the first place. ("Basically, you went nuts with the highlighter," one commenter says.)
At The Smart Set, Jessa considers the books A Vindication of Love and How to Love, and indicates she's probably never going to get married. And I'm like, Jessa, if you didn't like the book I got you for your birthday, you could just tell me.
Will somebody explain to my why this article about what writers do (answer: not much) is on Slate's DoubleX? Then maybe you can explain to me why XX exists in the first place. "What Women Really Think"? I'll tell you what I really think--I think I don't need another way to be marginalized because of my chromosomal makeup, thanks very much.
The top 10 literary ménages à trois, courtesy of Ewan Morrison, author of, uh, Ménage. He doesn't include my personal favorite novel to feature a ménage à trois, Sister Carrie. (It's not technically in the book, but I got so fucking bored reading it, I had to add one in to entertain myself. Also, my version has Transformers. Also, coke orgies.)
The Globe and Mail talks to Clancy Martin (How to Sell). (Even better is Tao Lin's interview with Martin a few weeks back.)
I just found out that the best professor I’ve ever had, and one of the smartest, most inspirational and most decent human beings I’ve ever met, has a literary blog, which has instantly become my newest addiction. Add D. G. Myers’s A Commonplace Blog to your list of sites to obsessively check every day, and thank me later.
D. G. Myers is a literary critic and an English professor at Texas A&M University, where I studied for four years. He taught me American literature and literature of the Holocaust, and his classes were transformative experiences for me. I’ve never looked at books the same way since I met him. He was my idol then, and he still is. I have lots of stories about his classes, though perhaps what I remember most is him throwing a copy of The American across the classroom, yelling “I hate this book!” (he really didn’t). It narrowly missed my head, as I recall, which is too bad, given it would have made a really excellent lawsuit. (I was drinking a lot of beer and smoking a lot of pot then, and could’ve used the money.)
He also actually saved my life, which, you know, is pretty good too, I guess. It’s a long story that starts in an emergency room in Bryan, Texas, where I was lying in a bed with a badly cut wrist and a stomach full of pills, and ends with me being here right now, happy and grateful and in love with literature. I’ll never be able to thank him enough, but what the hell: Thank you, David.
OK. Crap. This turned out a lot more sentimental than I intended. Blame Myers. Detached irony resumes after this post.
Andrew MacDonald and Irene Coray, owners of KULTURAs Books in Santa Monica, are moving back to D.C. after 3 years on the other coast. After Monday's deadly crash on the Metro system and the white-supremacist rampage at the Holocaust Museum a couple of weeks ago, this town has been on the ropes lately, so we can use some happy news. Welcome back, KULTURAs.
"D.C. is an information town," MacDonald said. "It's full of think tanks and there are seven or eight universities that are within a couple of miles." (Via TEV.)
We even buy and read books here once in a while.
A statistically meaningless and highly anecdotal but perhaps diverting look at how publishers pick lead titles for their seasonal catalogues. Which I still insist on spelling the old way.
Bloomsbury publisher Kathy Rooney is this year's winner of the Kim Scott Walwyn prize for women in publishing [insert A.S. Byatt huffing here]. Rooney's credits include the World English Dictionary "which powers the spell-check in Word", an accomplishment surely right up there with my contribution towards getting this published. You're welcome, literature.
Bookslut favourite and possessor of character-actor good looks, James Kelman, has won Scottish Book of the Year for his novel Kieron Smith, Boy.
Three East German writers have been recognized with a major award from the German National Foundation for their work. Across three generations, Erich Loest, Monika Maron and Uwe Tellkamp are German writers "symbolizing, personally and with their literary works, the multiple fractures in German history."
Weimar, 2010: Jessa Crispin receives National Award for services to Kansan-Berliner relations. Avenue renamed in her honour, schoolchildren given day off, ticker tape parades etc.
Author Pasha Malla, resident of the mythical land of Toronto, has won the Trillium Book Award for his story collection The Withdrawal Method.
There is some hot Malla action to be found over at Maud Newton on writing for and about children:
When I rewatched Star Wars as an adult, for example, I was completely astounded to discover that the movie had a plot — even though I could remember exactly what happened in every scene, and even entire passages of dialogue. And think about popular kids’ books like Goodnight Moon and even Where the Wild Things Are — so often the story, if there is one, is peripheral to mood, tone, imagery, and feeling. Those seem to be the things that attract and stay with kids about a book, far above what actually happens.
June 23, 2009
Parents of incoming first-year students at an Illinois high school attempted to ban Sherman Alexie's YA novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian from the school's summer reading list. (They failed.) Chicagoist points out that students were offered an alternate book if their delicate parents couldn't stand the thought of their kids reading books with naughty language and references to masturbation, a practice which God knows no 14-year-old is familiar with.
More troubling is the suggestion by parent Jennifer Anderson that "offensive" books feature warning labels on their covers. She might be onto something. Remember the Tipper Gore/PMRC dust-up in the '80s? They convinced record companies to put warning labels on albums some parents might find objectionable. And after that, no popular musician ever used profanity or sang about sex ever again.
At $115, Social Security: A Documentary History may be wee bit north of your price range, but you can read a profile of author and Social Security historian Larry DeWitt for free:
From behind his large, tidy wooden desk at the Social Security Administration’s headquarters in Woodlawn, Larry DeWitt...will happily discuss the philosophical underpinnings of social insurance and the importance of knowing the past when making future decisions about the nation’s economic safety net.
But DeWitt, the historian at this vast federal agency and the lead editor of a weighty new tome of primary source material about the agency, Social Security: A Documentary History (CQ Press), can’t conceal the plain truth. He is just itching to get out of his seat and show off his collection.
It doesn’t take long to see why. The adjoining office is crammed with pamphlets, placards, books – and even old agency telephone directories. A wartime poster reminds why it’s important to hold on to Social Security cards: “Replacing 1.8 million cards last year cost Uncle Sam the price of 550 jeeps.”
I think I will start calculating the cost of everything in jeeps from now on.
Legendary author and badass Ray Bradbury, 88, loves libraries and Bo Derek, but not so much the Internet:
“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’”
This is why I can't wait to be old, so I can say things like that. I mean, I like the Internet, but I fucking love Ray Bradbury.
Powell's, my soon-to-be-hometown bookstore, selects the winners of its six-word memoir contest. My favorite, from Leah:
Turned lemons into lemonade. Added vodka.
My kinda gal.
K.M. Weiland (A Man Called Outlaw) is taking a poll: Just how execrable (hey! big word!) has the vocabulary in modern literature gotten? Your choices are pretty much dumb, dumber, and dumbest, but go vote anyway.
Welsh SF author Alastair Reynolds (House of Suns) signed a million-pound contract to write ten books in ten years. (For my fellow American readers, a million pounds is equal to roughly holy-shit-our-economy-is-so-fucked dollars.)
Also in The Guardian: Stop making fun of fantasy readers. Or they'll throw their copies of Selling England by the Pound at you. (Kidding! Kidding!)
Tara Dooley of the Houston Chronicle takes a look at the book-swapping websites BookMooch (which has a weirdly unsettling illustration on their homepage of what looks like alien teddy bears consorting with scarily anthropomorphized books) and PaperBackSwap.
I haven't used any of these sites, but it really is a great idea. I'm in the middle of moving from Austin, Texas, to Portland, Oregon. Anyone want to trade my only slightly coffee-stained copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being for, say, a $50,000 cashier's check? I'd also like to announce that the movie rights for this post are now available. Act now!
The New York Times talks to Michael Thomas, who recently won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his debut novel, Man Gone Down.
“It lowers the stress of chasing money around and provides some time,” he said. “I can pay off whatever credit card debt I have and get off this high wire for a couple of years, and then start over again. As a friend told me, there is no down side to this: ‘You can’t find one, even you.’”
Ben Zimmer of the Visual Thesaurus thinks he has found the earliest use of the honorific "Ms.":
On page 4 of the Springfield (Mass.) Sunday Republican of November 10, 1901, under the heading "Men, Women and Affairs," is the following item, in which the writer suggests that "a void in the English language" may be filled by Ms., pronounced as "Mizz," as an alternative to Miss or Mrs.
Zimmer posts a scan of the newspaper column in question, and explains what led him to it. Who doesn't love a nifty bit of archival sleuthing?
UPDATE: Stephen Laniel of stevereads.com dropped me a note to say that the OED disgrees with Zimmer that, until now, 1949 was the earliest known appearance of "Ms." The OED's "earliest example of the use of "Ms." is from a month after the Republican used it," Steve wrote. The OED entry suggests that "the OED was at least glancingly aware of the Springfield citation, but chose not to use it." The etymological plot thickens.
Braniac's Chris Shea pokes some gentle (?) fun at a recent act of authorial self-promotion committed by Fred Kaplan, whose new book is--oh, just go Google it, or read Kaplan's Slate article about it. Shea writes:
The piece is pegged to a recent article in the New York Times on the subject of grandiose book titles. However, as Kaplan notes, "reporter Patricia Cohen doesn't mention my contribution to the genre." Inconvenient! But Kaplan does not let that stop him from writing a 1,400-word article that reads like an advertorial, or just an ad. Nicely played, enterprising author!
Brazen or admirable? Shea says: "I can never decide. When it comes to promoting one's own book, maybe shame is baggage that must be shed."
What do you think, authors? How do you gauge when you've taken self-promotion a little too far?
Geek your library. (Via LISNews, which I look forward to every morning almost as much as I long for that first cup of coffee.)
June 22, 2009
Mark Athitakis wonders about the Great Mormon Novel ("Is there a novel that addresses Mormonism with thought and care?"), and points to a debate on the subject at A Motley Vision, a Mormon arts-and-culture blog.
My husband and I were talking about Katie Roiphe's NYTBR review of Cristina Nehring's A Vindication of Love. Luckily for our marriage, we had the same reaction: Yes to passion, but why would you want to be in a relationship that makes you feel like jumping off a bridge? (See entry for 1795.)
Erotic-Horror Screenplay Discovered On Office Printer.
Related, kinda: Can women write about sex? The answer, of course, is no. Also, Presbyterians can't write about golf, Jews can't write about food, and lesbians can't write about the economy.
Jodi Picoult wants you to know your child is probably dying right now.
A sad story about novelist Kaye Gibbons (Ellen Foster), who suffers from bipolar disorder, and was recently convicted of fraudulently obtaining painkillers from a North Carolina pharmacy.
Man, I've been gone from the blog for three years, and newspapers are fucking still running stories expressing surprise that these crazy "graphic novels" are actually considered literature. The latest depressing installment contains this sentence which might just make you cry:
Typically, graphic novels are marketed at people who have trouble reading.
Yeah, I remember how excited all us illiterates were when Art Spiegelman picked up that Pulitzer in '92. I don't know nothin' 'bout no fancy book-learnin', but I sure do like them pretty pictures!
Book editor/journalist goes missing in Tehran:
The co-editor of the book Transit Tehran, published by Garnet Publishing, has gone missing amid the protesting and political tensions in Iran. Maziar Bahari also works as a journalist for Newsweek, which reported that the 41-year-old was taken from his home in Tehran by security officers...
"Transit Tehran: Young Iran and its Inspirations" was published in February this year and is an original anthology of writing and images focused on the generations of photojournalists working during the reformist movement.
Newsweek covers the story here. Read more about Bahari and the book here.
The BBC profiles José Saramago:
"I may have three, four years more to live, maybe less. Every time I finish a book I wait for another idea, it may not come this time, we shall see," he smiles as he waves good-bye.