Category: literature

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Unrequired Reading: Oct. 20, 2006

Sorry for the lack of posts this week, dear readers. I’ve been kinda busy in the evenings, and a little outta sorts in the mornings. Fortunately, I’m still up for some Unrequired Reading if you are!

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When the official VM wife became the official VM fiancee, we had to go out ring-shopping. (Since I proposed a little sooner than I had planned, I didn’t actually have a ring for her.) She researched a bunch, and decided that the diamond trade was just too venal for us to get involved with it as a symbol of our love. So we went for a gorgeous aquamarine instead.

Here’s a piece (plus slide show) about shopping for the guilt-free diamond.

(Note that I’ve resisted making any comments about using the term ‘conflict-free’ as it relates to engagement rings.)

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Congrats to the state of Oregon, for upholding a law restricting asset forfeitures. I never really understood how cops were able to seize and sell a person’s assets even if the person isn’t convicted of a crime.

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I admit to letting the Darfur slaughter fall off the VM radar since I first wrote about it in May 2004. This is mainly because I believe the western world has failed to stop the Sudanese government and militia from killing the civilians and rebels in Darfur. By failed, I mean it’s gone past the point of no return. To make up for my lack of coverage, here’s an interview with Paul Salopek, the journalist who was imprisoned in Khartoum for a month on trumped-up charges:

FOREIGN POLICY: What is the biggest misconception about the crisis in Darfur as reported in the Western media?

Paul Salopek: Well, I think it’s been oversimplified as this Manichean struggle between ethnic Arab herders who are armed by Khartoum, and these helpless African farmers who are struggling for their rights in this very desolate, Western region of the Sudan. I think that has a fundamental truth to it, and that has been historically a problem that goes back for generations, if not centuries. But I think that perception has to be overlaid with much more complicated tribal rivalries that are then manipulated at the national level in Sudan. Even internationally, there’s a layer of interests that are tugging and pulling at that area of Sudan.

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Holy crap! Discs of Tron was on the Atari 2600?

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Playing it safe with the design for the NYTimes’ new HQ.

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If you have a Wall Street Journal account, you really oughtta read this article about how Holt & Co. blew more than a million bucks trying to engineer the next Da Vinci Code.

Historical thrillers in particular are hot. One theory says readers are seeking a certainty in these books that since the end of the Cold War they’re having trouble finding elsewhere.

“We’re seeing a return to the past because everything was in its place, and people were recognizably polarized in a way that gives us comfort,” says literary agent Richard Curtis. “In the post 9/11 world, we aren’t clear about our enemies. Is the military officer in an Iraqi uniform a friend, or is he a terrorist posing as one? We need to know who to root for and historical fiction provides us with that.”

So Holt went after a novel starring Freud & Jung. No, seriously. (In what may be a first, it looks like Amazon is actually charging more than a bricks & mortar store, since I saw this book with a 50% off sticker in Borders on Wednesday.)

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The new issue of Men’s Vogue (sue me) has an excerpt from the autobiography of art critic Robert Hughes, Things I Didn’t Know. It centers on Hughes’ awful car wreck in 1999 and the legal problems he had after. He was raked by the “meejah” for being an elitist expat.

For of course I am completely an elitist in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and ufll to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work or a good carpenter chopping dovetails or someone trying a Bimini hitch that won’t slip. I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be iwth as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unles the latter is a friend or relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm arond apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has.

Here’s a review of the book in the Telegraph.

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Why is NYC losing financial jobs? Relocation, relocation, relocation.

The city and state bear some responsibility for the space shortage. A nearly ten-year effort to rezone Manhattan’s Far West Side for commercial development wound up getting bogged down in Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to build a stadium there and lure the Olympics to New York. Potential construction of office towers in the area is thus still years away. The city has now missed two real-estate expansions, going back to the late 1990s, in trying to rezone the Far West Side.

Meanwhile, state and city officials haggled for years over the plan to redevelop Ground Zero, with some observers, including Mayor Bloomberg, pessimistically calling for a reduction in the office space planned for the site, assuming that it would be unneeded. As a result of the delays, only one building, 7 World Trade, is nearing completion — developer Larry Silverstein could rebuild it quickly because it wasn’t part of the site that the government controlled. Other Ground Zero towers won’t be ready for years.

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VM bleg: Anybody know a gin snob who can tell me if Cadenhead’s Old Raj Gin is worth the $44 for a 750ml bottle they want at Wine Library?

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The official VM wife sends word that Cameron Diaz looks like crap.

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Whatcha really get’s a box of Newports and Puma sweats (damn!)

(I just felt like making a 3rd Bass ref; sue me)

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We should go to the Chihuly exhibit at the New York Botanical Gardens next Thursday night! Who’s with me?

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Congratulations to the Cardinals for pulling the upset on the Mets, earning the right to walk into a buzzsaw.

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This week’s non-web reading: Chronicles Vol. 1, by Bob Dylan. The first chapter, covering the period he first arrived in New York, is fantastic. The chapter discussing losing his mojo in the late ’80s, and rediscovering it while playing with the Grateful Dead? Not so much.

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More congrats!

First, Official VM just-about-closest-friend-in-the-world Ian gets his chief petty officer pin, and now he goes off and pops the question to his One True Love! Much congratulations are in order! Go, Ian!

In additional friends-of-VM news, my buddy Faiz reveals the true reason he couldn’t meet up with me & Amy in Paris: he and his wife are expecting their first kid! (And Paris is evidently inimical to developing life!) Also, I’ve been insanely remiss in not mentioning Faiz’s first children’s book, My Alien Penfriend! Go, Faiz!

That’s the extent of the super-wonderful news. In not-so-wonderful news, it looks like I’ve got an upper respiratory infection, so I’ve got some antibiotics working on that. Go, azithromycin!

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Unrequired Reading: Oct. 13, 2006

It’s the Friday the 13th edition of Unrequired Reading, dear readers!

Maxon Crumb’s not a hockey-mask-wearing serial killer, but he did come off as a weird bird in the great documentary about his brother, Robert Crumb. Here’s a good profile about him in the San Francisco Chronicle.

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Gunter Grass is actually creepier than Max Crumb. Still, he wasn’t a serial killer for the SS during World War II. Sez Tim Cavanaugh:

It’s not so much Grass’ hypocrisy as his self-satisfaction. In what fucked-up parallel universe is it considered persuasive to argue, at this late date, that postwar attacks on the West German establishment (and frequently more-than-tacit support for the East German terror state) in any way obviate, or mitigate, or do anything else but compound the error of supporting the Nazis during the war? Why is it the default assumption that Grass’ anti-capitalism was a rejection of National Socialism rather than a continuation of it? (I actually think it may be neither, but among Germans who are irate at Grass over the lifelong SS coverup there seems to some sense that he’s let down his core principles, so it’s worth asking what those core principles are.)

Enjoy.

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There was creepiness aplenty in HP Lovecraft’s stories. In NYROB, Luc Sante writes about the new Library of America edition of Lovecraft’s work, and Houellebecq’s book about the demented writer of Rhode Island (I visited Lovecraft’s grave once, which evidently is going to grant me invulnerability to harm from nerds):

That the work of H.P. Lovecraft has been selected for the Library of America would have surprised Edmund Wilson, whose idea the Library was. In a 1945 review he dismissed Lovecraft’s stories as “hackwork,” with a sneer at the magazines for which they were written, Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, “where. . .they ought to have been left.” Lovecraft had been dead for eight years by then, and although his memory was kept alive by a cult — there is no other word — that established a publishing house for the express purpose of collecting his work, his reputation was strictly marginal and did not seem likely to expand.

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Beck creeps some people out, but his Sea Change album helped me through some heartbreak a few years ago. Here’s an interview about his new record, work habits, and religion.

And here’s a piece about the unique packaging for that new record.

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Must be Friday the 13th if Gadaffi is making sense. It’s pretty much an article of faith in modern times that countries with great natural resources will fail to develop human capital on a par with countries that have little by way of natural resources. Or, as Kyle Baker put it, “If you can get an A without trying, why work for an A+?”

Give that man a laptop!

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A while back, I explained why I love Vegas: it’s like an alien theme park of planet Earth. Here’s a piece about architecture, engineering and culture in Sin City.

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Vegas is no Transgondwanan Supermountain.

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Congrats to Orhan Pamuk for winning that Nobel literature prize. I’ve got a couple of his books somewhere in the library downstairs, but I won’t even pretend I’m going to break one out in honor of his honor.

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On the other hand, I oughtta get around to reading Bernard-Henri Levy somedarntime. This profile’s got some neat passages, including:

So why has France been quite so vitriolic about America? “France and Germany,” he corrects in fluent English. “It has nothing to do with what America does and was long before Iraq. It is about the idea of America, Rousseau’s social contract, where you decide to join a society. Its people have no roots, no memory. This is seen as an insult to what a real community should be, which is about blood and the soil.”

and

So what browns him off about Blighty? “We, you and France, are the two most snobbish countries on earth — full of invisible keys to invisible doors.” Isn’t America just as excluding, but on grounds of materialism? “Not true,” he insists. “Wealth has to be earned. There is still a very puritanical view of wealth. Without philanthropy it is not respected. Money might be god, but it is a guilty god.”

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Rounding out this week’s Unrequired Reading: an obscure reference from the Simpsons!

Chief Wiggum: “All of our founding fathers, astronauts, and World Series heroes have been either drunk or on cocaine.”

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F-books

“The market for downloadable books will grow by 400 percent in each of the next two years, to over $25 billion by 2008,” predicted the keynote speaker at the 2001 Women’s National Book Association meeting. “Within a few years after the end of this decade, e-books will be the preponderant delivery format for book content.”

This NYTimes lede serves double duty: it sets up a review of Sony’s new e-book and provides more proof that women should never talk about technology.

(Sorry, Carly)

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Unrequired Reading

I promised some Unrequired Reading for a Friday morning, so here it is:

Jane Galt has a sad post about the economic destruction of Zimbabwae. There are some “interesting” comments after the post.

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Via Bookslut, a collection of covers from old Penguin and Pelican books.

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Ten YEARS of South Park?! Man, I’m getting old.

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It’s Ramadan. Don’t be a jerk.

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What’s organic?

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Mark Cuban talks balls.

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Ron Rosenbaum on William Kennedy, Hunter Thompson and the America’s Cup.

Bonus: Ron on the Dunkin Donuts Coffee Roll.

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Unrequired Reading

No one will pay to see Scarlett Johanson. You know your career’s in trouble when you’re being compared to Ben Affleck:

Years back, it was Eddie Murphy, who went from mega-star to loser when he churned out such bombs as Pluto Nash and I Spy before recovering his stroke. Kevin Costner still seems to be in the penalty box, although his upcoming action film, The Guardian, may change that. And there’s the sad story of Ben Affleck: good-looking, kind-hearted, talented, and death to just about any film he’s in. (Remember 2004’s back-to-back stinkers, Saving Christmas and Jersey Girl?)

Well, welcome to box-office hell, Scarlett. An intelligent woman with some two dozen films to her credit, Johansson, 21, has everything that Hollywood wants in its starlets. She’s charming and she genuinely can act. Better yet, she’s drop-dead gorgeous. But of late, she seems to inject poison into just about every film that has her name in the credits.

I’m very disappointed that he didn’t make a comment about Kevin Costner finding his stroke.

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Pimp my kippah. (thanks, Sirk!)

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ESPN had the very stupid idea that people would buy cell phones for a network operated by ESPN, rather than Cingular or Verizon or somebody. It failed.

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Idiocracy will be the next cult classic.

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In grad school, I subscribed to the economy theory of liver destruction: If you’re going to get drunk, drink malt liquor. You can’t get more messed up for $1.99.

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Dubai’s making great strides in its efforts at becoming a free-trade zone. Of course, I’ll never be allowed to set foot there, since I’m a Jew.

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When I visit someone’s home, the first thing I look for is the host’s bookshelf. So does Jay Parini:

What interests me about other people’s books is the nature of their collection. A personal library is an X-ray of the owner’s soul. It offers keys to a particular temperament, an intellectual disposition, a way of being in the world. Even how the books are arranged on the shelves deserves notice, even reflection. There is probably no such thing as complete chaos in such arrangements.

Thanks to Delicious Library, you can check out mine.

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And I’ve decided to take Little, Big with me to Paris. I’ll letcha know how it goes.

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Unrequited reading

Sorry to be writing less frequently, dear readers. I’m in the midst of a work-crunch of monumental proportions. Gotta finish a giant issue of the magazine by next Wednesday, then help put on our annual conference & exhibition Thursday and Friday, then get on a plane Saturday for a chemical ingredient conference. On the doubleplusgood side, said ingredient conference is in Paris, and my wife’s coming along for the trip.

On the down side, the book I just started, Witold Rybczynski’s City Life, is boring me silly, so I may have to drop it. I enjoy WR’s architecture articles on Slate, but the first 50 pages of this book have been pretty dull and pedantic, especially the second chapter’s extended take on how population size does not say much about the importance of a city. Again and again.

Fortunately, Amazon is about to deliver my copy of Shakespeare Wars, the new book from Ron Rosenbaum. Unfortunately, I don’t want to carry a 640-page hardcover with me overseas. So why don’t you suggest a book for me to read, already?

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Who’s Buried In Grant’s Tome?

I discovered With Nails: The Film Diaries of Richard E. Grant in 1998, as I was walking through a Borders bookstore in a mall. The book was on the New Releases table and its cover — the grimacing face of one of my favorite actors, framed by a cardboard box — caught my eye.

I picked up the hardcover and flipped to the table of contents. It was organized (mostly) by movie, and included a chapter about my favorite bad film, Hudson Hawk. I was tempted to pick it up, but $24.95 was a little steep for me back then. I thought, “I’ll wait for it to get on the best-seller list, then pick it up on discount from Amazon.” [Remember: this is 1998, before Amazon started dropping prices on everydarnbook in stock.]

During the drive home, I thought, “You idiot! That’s book’s never going to become a best-seller! It’s the film diaries of Richard E. Grant, ferchrissakes!”

So, a few days later, I bought a copy at the Montclair Book Center (at a modest 10% discount), and proceeded not to read it for nearly a decade.

Now, it’s not as if I lay down books like bottles of wine, waiting for a maturation process before I ingest them. It’s more to do with a combination of laziness and that whole “worlds enough” business.

During this past summer (technically, it still is summer, but the 40-degree overnight temps last week have put that season to bed), we caught an installment of Higher Definition in which Robert Wilonsky interviewed Grant about his directorial debut, Wah-Wah, a semi-autobiographical take on Grant’s childhood in Swaziland during the British handover.

We thought the movie sounded good, and wanted to go see it, but discovered that it had the most eclectically limited distribution of all time. Each Friday, we’d hit the Showtimes link on its IMDB page, to discover that it was only playing in five far-flung theaters that week: Cedar Rapids, Logan, Bangor, Bismarck and Mineola. The closest it came to NY/NJ was about 3 hours’ drive away. We started to joke about just which out-of-the-way cities it was going to appear in.

As it turned out, the Higher Def episode was a rerun from a month or so earlier, and the film actually HAD shown in Jersey (Montclair, naturally) in May. We’ll wait for video.

During that interview, I mentioned to Amy that I had With Nails downstairs in the library. “Of course you do, darling. He’s your boyfriend,” she said. I didn’t try to argue. She took a break from Don Quixote and granted Grant a chance.

For the next several nights, while we read before turning in, I noticed her trying to suppress her laughter. “Anything I should know about?” I asked the first time.

“You have to read this book,” she told me.

Having recently cleared my slate of snooty-pants highbrow books, I finally read With Nails last week, and she’s right; it’s impossibly entertaining. The main reason for this is Grant’s charming naivete at being ‘Swaz Boy In Hollywood’, but there’s also something special about the era in which it begins (1985). Grant recalls numerous auditions and social occasions where he’s crisscrossing with Branagh, Nighy, Day Lewis, Oldman, Roth, That Other Grant, and other British actors who are busting out in their own careers. When he gets to Hollywood, it’s at the peak of the Guber/Peters era, as budgets first began blowing through the roof.

There are great behind-the-scenes stories of how films can go disastrously wrong (along with a pretty clear illustration of why Pret-a-Porter sucked), and then there’s the absolute epic of how messed up the Hudson Hawk shoot was (it’s the biggest chapter in the book). I can’t begin to convey the mind-blowingness of those anecdotes, which culminated in him and Sandra Bernhard clinging to each other for an island of sanity. Try to wrap yer mind around THAT concept, dear reader.

(Bonus: from his description of the accommodations during the Budapest stage of the shoot, it appears he stayed in the same place I did during my trip there two years ago. Also, from his description of the horrors of those accommodations, it appears the country made some major strides from 1990 to 2004.)

While Grant comes off as a sweet, wide-eyed guy in this book, he doesn’t pull punches with some of his characterizations. Steve Martin, for example, comes off as a good-hearted man who is All Business, contradictory as that may seem. And Grant’s Barbra Streisand story needs to be read to be believed. I mean, it’s tough to believe he’s heterosexual after that one, but hey.

He also takes name-dropping to a new level, but never in the “Saw DeNiro at NoBu last night, AGAIN: yawn” mode. He seems genuinely thrilled about meeting many of his idols, and his description of meeting Tom Waits is perfect:

Everyone else is in smatterings of designer casuals. Mistah Waits arrives straight off an old record cover in a ’64 open-topped Cadillac, with fins, with a funnel of dust trailing down the dirt road. The gravel voice gets out some howdy-doodys and his clothes and hair are crumple-sculpted to him. Doesn’t seem to have a straight bone in his bearing and kills me off with his cool by growing out a compliment for Withnail & I. Out the side of his mouth. Like we might be being spied on by the bailiffs. Him, rolling tobacco and reefer. Winona and I are “We’ve got all your recordings, Tom!!” To which he just heh-hehs.

I’m still undecided about how the arc of the book makes me feel: it covers the career that begins with Withnail & I — which gains him massive amounts of praise and launches him to Hollywood — before moving to a sequence of films directed by some of our finest directors — Altman, Coppola, and Scorsese — and ends with him shooting Spice World. Of course, it’s better than the alternative of not working.

And we do have those Wah-Wah diaries to look forward to.

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This week in Unrequired Reading

Stories that have been sitting in my RSS feed this week:

Tim Cavanaugh of Reason magazine muses on the 40th anniversary of Star Trek:

And finally, [Star Trek is] a story of a powerful belief in what the franchise represents: the right of individuals, through machinery, weaponry, or barehanded intelligence, to live, be free, and pursue happiness, no matter how horrific the results (and we can all agree that Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture was as slow and agonizing as any torture devised on that evil Enterprise from the “Mirror, Mirror” episode in which Spock has a beard). Put all these ingredients together and it’s clear: Star Trek is the story of America.

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Mary Worth and Nothingness

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Tom Spurgeon interviews Sammy Harkham, the only “young” cartoonist whose work I’ve started to follow. I have an unfinished post from earlier this summer, about the MoCCA comics festival in NYC. The post was all about my realization that I’ve become a boring old fart, because I couldn’t think of any cartoonists whose work I discovered in the last five to eight years. Fortunately, I picked up one of Sammy’s comics then, and found a small book of his a few weeks later that impressed me.

Sammy edits an anthology called Kramer’s Ergot, and the interview discusses the process of putting the most recent edition together. As ever, I find this stuff fascinating, but you may not.

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George Will reviews a 9/11 novel that doesn’t sound very interesting to me, but that’s because the 9/11 novel I published tanked:

Messud’s Manhattan story revolves around two women and a gay man who met as classmates at Brown University and who, as they turn 30 in 2001, vaguely yearn to do something “important” and “serious.” Vagueness — lack of definition — is their defining characteristic. Which may be because — or perhaps why — all three are in the media. All are earnest auditors and aspiring improvers of the nation’s sensibility.

Uh, yeah.

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BLDGBLOG interviews author Jeff VanderMeer about the intersection of architecture and the novel.

As a novelist who is uninterested in replicating “reality” but who is interested in plausibility and verisimilitude, I look for the organizing principles of real cities and for the kinds of bizarre juxtapositions that occur within them. Then I take what I need to be consistent with whatever fantastical city I’m creating. For example, there is a layering effect in many great cities. You don’t just see one style or period of architecture. You might also see planning in one section of a city and utter chaos in another. The lesson behind seeing a modern skyscraper next to a 17th-century cathedral is one that many fabulists do not internalize and, as a result, their settings are too homogenous.

Of course, that kind of layering will work for some readers — and other readers will want continuity. Even if they live in a place like that — a baroque, layered, very busy, confused place — even if, say, they’re holding the novel as they walk down the street in London [laughter] — they just don’t get it.

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Times UK restaurant reviewer Giles Coren visited Croatia for a column:

The language is called Croatian these days, except in Serbia, where it is called Serbian, and it hasn’t got any easier. Chapter two of my Teach Yourself Croatian book was about counting to ten, and gently explained as follows: “The number one behaves like an adjective and its ending changes according to the word which follows. The number two has different forms when it refers to masculine and neuter nouns than when it refers to feminine nouns, and is followed always by words in the genitive singular, as are the words for ‘three’ and ‘four’. The numbers 5-20, however, are followed by words in the genitive plural. . .”

This is why you never see Croatians in groups of more than one or less than five in a bar. Because it isn’t actually possible to order the right number of beers.

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Official VM buddy Jecca reviews the second issue of Martha Stewart’s Blueprint (which, as I type it, sounds like something she came up with while she was in the joint, a la that Prison Break show).

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Gorgeous pictures of the world’s greatest libraries. There’s a book about it.

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Choose Life

We watched a little of the Emmy Awards last night, before the finale of Deadwood started. Unfortunately, there was a typhoon going on, so we lost the picture for a while. Amy gave up on trying to catch that episode, and we TiVo’d a later showing for her viewing this evening.

So, while she finds out how things shake out with Swearengen, Hearst, et al., I’ll share the following Emmy-moment with you.

(I should note that we were watching largely out of malaise. It had been a pretty dreary weekend, and Sunday was one of those days in which I engaged in so little activity I never really got hungry. Awards shows aren’t really my thang, except for goofing on how wackily everyone dresses.

(It was pretty funny that Conan O’Brien spent the opening number of the show performing a song and dance about how his network is doomed. And that irony thing might just catch on. Anyway:)

We were watching the “Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie” category, and marveling how the first four nominees — Ellen Burstyn, Shirley Jones, Cloris Leachman (always a hoot), and Alfre Woodard — were all on the senior circuit.

“Is this the lifetime achievement award?” Amy asked.

“Can’t be, unless they all have breast cancer or abusive spou — oh, wrong Lifetime.”

Naturally, the award went to the fifth nominee, 30-year-old Kelly Macdonald, who was in a TV movie about the G8 or something. It starred Bill Nighy, who is pretty entertaining but has chosen to wear some terrible eyeglasses in his promotional pics.

“Have we seen her in anything?” Amy asked.

I thought she looked familiar. “She’s Scottish, so maybe she’s been in a Danny Boyle film,” I said.

Amy reached for the laptop to find out and, as her bio came onscreen, I announced, “Oh, I remember: she was the underaged girl who got naked on top of Ewan Macgregor in Trainspotting!”

“And that’s why I love you,” Amy said.