Category: literature

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0-fer of the week: Pulitzer edition

Evidently, this year’s Pulitzer Awards come out soon. In fact, they may’ve been awarded already. I’m not really sure, because I don’t give a crap about awards.

But, so, hey, I came across a link to this AbeBooks list of the Top 10 Forgotten Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels, and guess what?

I haven’t read a single book on this list! In fact, I haven’t read any other work by any of the authors on the list, except for one!

That would be Steven Millhauser, because David Gates recommended one of his books to me. This recommendation was from our first conversation a dozen years ago, and I realize now that I never actually read more than a couple pages of that book, although it looked promising.

It’s Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright, and now that I think about it,  it might make a good post-Salinger read for me. I’ll try to get to it this summertime and let you know.

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0-fer: MLB edition

This isn’t a true 0-fer this week, but it does point out my literary failings, which is what I’m all about.

Last night, it occurred to me that the number of ballparks I’ve visited may be greater than the number of Shakespeare plays I’ve read. I checked out both lists this morning and I’m glad to report that’s not the case:

Ballparks I’ve attended:

  1. Anaheim
  2. Baltimore
  3. Boston
  4. New York Yankees (old)
  5. New York Mets (old)
  6. Oakland
  7. Philadelphia (old)
  8. San Diego
  9. Seattle
  10. Toronto

Shakespeare plays I’ve read:

  1. As You Like It
  2. Henry IV, 1
  3. Henry IV, 2
  4. Henry V
  5. Hamlet
  6. King Lear
  7. Macbeth
  8. The Merchant of Venice
  9. A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  10. Much Ado About Nothing
  11. Othello
  12. Richard II
  13. Romeo and Juliet
  14. The Tempest
  15. Winter’s Tale

I’ll probably see a Braves game when I’m in Atlanta next month, but I also just began reading Antony and Cleopatra, so the deficit will remain at 5. Unless I go on a real Shakespeare binge (which is possible) or get fired and decide to go on that “8 parks in 10 days” tour of midwestern ballparks I plotted out back in 2002 (which is very unlikely (I hope)).

Howzabout you, dear readers? Any of you read fewer plays of Shakespeare than the number of MLB ballparks you’ve visited?

Bonus! NBA arenas I’ve attended:

  1. Philadelphia
  2. Chicago
  3. New Jersey
  4. Toronto
  5. New York
  6. Washington (old)
  7. New Orleans
  8. Dallas

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The 0-fer Intersection

Many years ago, when I was a micropress publisher, the first book I put out had an introduction written by Samuel R. Delany. This was a coup, because Delany had built a significant fan-following over his years in publishing, first in science fiction and then in the high-brow world of literary theory. He loved the short stories that we were publishing and, while his introduction may not have convinced a single person to actually read the stories, I believe his imprimatur did boost sales. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that having his name on the cover helped us move tens of books. (I keeeed: I was not a good publisher.)

A year later, shooting the breeze in his impossibly book-lined apartment, Chip (as I’d come to know him) asked me what the press’ next book would be. I had no ideas, so he offered me two collections of his letters, one set from 1984 and another from the early 1990s. I looked over both sets of bound photocopies. I thought about the cachet of publishing new work by a guy who’d written some of the seminal science fiction (and fantasy) novels of the 1960’s and ’70’s. I considered the kindness he was bestowing by essentially offering to waive any royalties in order to strengthen the micropress.

And I told him, “Y’know, Chip, I’d love to say yes right now, but I have to tell you: I’ve never read a single book of yours. Given that fact, I’m a little nervous about committing to publishing a book by you.”

He chewed on his lower lip for half a second, reached over to one of the many bookshelves in his apartment, and said, “Well, why don’t you read the Einstein Intersection? It’s quick and somewhat representative of my earlier work. You can read it in a day or two and then let me know if you still want to publish my letters!”

I did, and I did and we published 1984 a year later. (Neil Gaiman gave us a blurb for that one; I’d actually read his work beforehand.)

So that’s our 0-fer of the week: I was once asked to publish a book by someone whose books I’d never read.

I’ve gone on to read a bunch of Chip’s work, including his best-known novel, Dhalgren. I’ve even volunteered to proofread his galleys under crazy time constraints (the all-time craziest being the 30 hours I spent poring over the reissue of The Fall of the Towers back in 2003). Despite my insecurities, we’ve stayed pals long after I closed the press down, and that brings me to the point of this piece: to wish my pal Chip a happy birthday!

Many happy returns, y’hirsute galoot!

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Wednesday 0-fer

You may not have realized it, dear reader, but I’ve actually been adhering to a somewhat regular schedule with some of this blog’s features. Monday is What It Is day, Tuesday’s are for Lost in the Supermarket, Wednesday is 0-fer day, and Friday brings us Unrequired Reading! (Since Friends went off the air, Thursdays have been a bleak time for me.) (Just kidding; I’ve never actually seen a full episode of Friends, but that doesn’t mean it qualifies as an 0-fer.)

Maybe I’ll put up a sidebar that breaks out the schedule and shows the most recent post in each series. Considering how long it took me to go through my blogroll and pare away sites I’m no longer interested in (while adding a bazillion sites I’ve lately discovered), I wouldn’t hold my breath for that.

Anyway, I went downstairs to my library yesterday to figure out who this week’s 0-fer should be. There are plenty of candidates, as I’ve bought far too many books over the course of my life by far too many authors whom I’ll never get around to even sampling. Still, there’s no fun in bringing up an 0-fer whom no one has ever heard of (“Why, you’ve never read J.A. Macgillivray?!”), so I combed the shelves until I came up with . . .

D.H. Lawrence!

Yup! I’ve never read a word of his stuff: not Sons & Lovers, nor Lady Chatterley’s Lover, nor Women in Love, nor any other of the Love-related titles. Possibly for that reason.

A pal of mine from grad school has offered to read some Lawrence with me in a remote book club, but I’ve hemmed and hawed about that, since I’d feel too much pressure to

  1. read the book
  2. have something smart to say about it

Even though that’s, like, what I do.

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The Book of, uh, something and something else

I was too darn busy this weekend to write about that final Montaigne essay, and this week’s going to be pretty rough at the office, but I don’t want to leave you guys in the literary lurch. So here’s the closing passage from Philip Roth’s 1980 interview with Milan Kundera.

It’s not that I’ve been poring over Kundera lately, or contemplating this interview. Rather, an acquaintance sent out a request for someone to dig this interview up and provide him with the passage for something he’s writing. It initially ran at the end of Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but Roth included it in his Shop Talk collection of interviews & essays. I typed it up for him, then decided to share it with you:

Roth: Is this [novel], then, the furthest point you have reached in your pessimism?

Kundera: I am wary of the words pessimism and optimism. A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don’t know whether my nation will perish and I don’t know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian novel, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.