Category: literature

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Sunshine

What’s in the Arts+ section of The Official Newspaper of Gil Roth today?

  1. a review of two biographies of Han van Meegeren, the famous Dutch forger of paintings,
  2. a review of Richard Todd’s essays on authenticity (nice complement/contrast to the forgery review),
  3. a review of a biography of Jacob Riis, the man who chronicled the horrors of tenement life in late 19th century Manhattan,
  4. a review of a book on the New Urban Renewal and today’s gentrification,
  5. Otto Penzler’s review of Anton Chekhov’s crime fiction.

Sometimes I think their editors say to each other, “Remember that thing Gil was muttering to himself about in 1997, when he thought no one was listening? We should assign an article on that topic!”

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Life’s work

Earlier this year, I had variations of the following e-mail exchange with several NYC literary figures I know:

GIL: Just wondering: do you know Robert Caro?

AUTHOR/WRITER: By acquaintance. Why?

GIL: Would you say he’s in good health?

A/W: Not sure. What’s up? Have you heard something?

GIL: No. It’s just that, well, I loved his biography of Robert Moses, so I grabbed the first three volumes of his biography of Lyndon Johnson. But I know he’s getting up there in years and I’m afraid to start reading it until I know that he’s going to be around to finish the fourth volume.

A/W: . . . You’re a cold person.

GIL: Yeah, but do you think he’s going to finish the biography?

A/W: . . . Good question.

Caro’s own site doesn’t give info about how he’s doing and I’ve been afraid to contact his agent with such a crass question, so I’ve held off on starting the series. The first three books add up to around 2,250 pages, and winds up in 1960, as he becomes vice president under JFK. I confess that I didn’t understand Caro’s desire to devote the half his life (figuring that he started around 1976 or so) to this biography; I don’t know enough about LBJ’s presidency or his character. He’s sort of a void for me, falling between the mythologies of JFK and Nixon.

But, given Caro’s enormous achievement with The Power Broker, I picked up the first volume of the LBJ bio secondhand last summer and read the first 40 pages (introduction and first chapter) one afternoon. I was blown away by the combination of Caro’s wonderful narrative prose and his ability to convey exactly how LBJ epitomizes American politics. On top of that, LBJ’s character and his seeming desire to cover up and rewrite his past made him a fascinating literary character (to me, but I still like Thomas Pynchon’s novels). By the time I’d wrapped up those 40 pages, I knew that Caro had made a perfect choice of subject, and was looking forward to reading the whole series.

Still, I’d seen Caro in Ric Burns’ New York documentary and, while he didn’t look frail, I feared that I’d be taking a risk in diving into the biography, only to see it cut prematurely.

So I was happy to read that there was a Caro-related party this summer as part of the Authors’ Night  benefit for the East Hampton Library (and you scoff at my devotion to Page Six!). I found out about it too late to break out my seersucker suit and crash the event, but I took it as a good sign that Caro was part of the social scene.

Yesterday, I got even more of a boost when I followed an Andrew Sullivan link to a George Packer piece in The New Yorker, where he discusses the importance of LBJ:

Whenever Democrats gather to celebrate the party, they invoke the names of their luminaries past. The list used to begin with Jefferson and Jackson. More recently, it’s been shortened to F.D.R., Truman, and J.F.K. The one Democrat with a legitimate claim to greatness who can’t be named is Lyndon Johnson. The other day I asked Robert Caro, Johnson’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer and hardly a hagiographer of the man, whether he thought Johnson should be mentioned in Denver. “It would be only just to Johnson,” Caro said. “If the Democratic Party was going to honestly acknowledge how it came to the point in its history that it was about to nominate a black American for President, no speech would not mention Lyndon Johnson.” Caro is now at work on the fourth volume of his epic biography, about Johnson’s White House years. “I am writing right now about how he won for black Americans the right to vote. I am turning from what happened forty-three years ago to what I am reading in my daily newspaper—and the thrill that goes up and down my spine when I realize the historical significance of this moment is only equaled by my anger that they are not giving Johnson credit for it.”

Looks like I have a new reading project set once this Montaigne project is over!

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Catch a fire

I don’t agree with all of this guy’s points about the future of digital books vis a vis the success of the Kindle. I’m optimistic that the presence of the Kindle and other e-readers will help drag book publishing out of the horrifically dysfunctional returnable bookstore model that it’s currently in.

But I don’t think that book publishing can be directly compared to the recording industry, and I really don’t think it’s advisable to tell publishers, “If you’ll just embrace this DRM-free, digital model, you can get your sales demolished just like the recording industry did. What are you waiting for?”

I also think Steve Jobs was full of crap when he said that Apple wouldn’t develop an e-reader because  “Americans don’t read.” I think he recognized that Amazon was already in position as the store of choice, and that meant Apple wouldn’t be able to create an iTunes store for books. No store, no device.

I’m still enjoying the heck out of my Kindle, but I’m also bummed that the new Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of War & Peace is selling for $20, rather than the $9.99 that they usually price new hardcovers. Grr.

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Morning Sun

It’s a comparatively slow day at the Official Newspaper of Gil Roth:

  1. a review of the new book by James Wood, How Fiction Works,
  2. a review of an anthology on New Criticism, and
  3. a brief history (with slideshow) of Art Deco.

So I guess I oughtta flip over to the NYObserver, which is more hit-and-miss in its Gilcentric writing:

  1. the decline of newspaper reporters in NJ, and
  2. an interview with Amtrak president/CEO Alex Kummant about transit plans in NY/NJ and the need for new rail capacity?

Looks like I have nothing to complain about.

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Monday Morning Montaigne: The Reloadening!

I gave up on my Monday Morning Montaigne project a year ago for two reasons. The first one was that I reached Apology for Raymond Sebond, the central essay of the second book. This essay — the introduction to (and kindasorta defense of) Sebond’s Natural Theology, which Montaigne’s dad asked him to translate — runs almost 180 pages and, though translator Donald Frame breaks it up into several sections, I couldn’t see how I’d make it through that essay and manage to convey anything of interest to the readers of this blog.

The second reason I gave up was that I convinced myself that nothing I’d written in my Monday Morning Montaigne posts was of any interest to the readers of this blog. I don’t think I expected a rousing conversation among commenters, few of whom likely have read more than a smattering of Montaigne, and none of whom were exactly going to read along or look back into the essays to counter my points. Still, there was so little response to it, I figured no one would notice it was missing.

As it turns out, my posts were more like timed charges. In the last year, I’ve been getting hits from different colleges and universities’ IP addresses, presumably by students who are looking to cheat on their Montaigne assignments. I mean, “who are researching various critical opinions of Montaigne’s essays online (in order to cheat on their papers).”

It struck me that I put myself in a position of responsibility with this project. Without Monday Morning Montaigne, these students would have no choice but to read one of the other two million google hits for “montaigne essay opinion,” and who knows what sort of perspective they’d cobble together? Who knows when they’d get around to finding my posts, but better they rely on my flawed, rambling viewpoints than those of someone who’s actually done some research into Montaigne! With half-assed misreading comes half-assed responsibility! Excelsior!

So I decided to dive headlong into the aforementioned Apology this weekend. You can expect the first installment on Monday!

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What It Is: 8/11/08

What I’m reading: Finished The Good Rat, by Jimmy Breslin, continuing Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, by Blake Bell, and getting back to reading Montaigne’s essays.

What I’m listening to: my iPod, endlessly shuffling among 13,000 or so songs.

What I’m watching: Fourth season of The Wire, and The Dark Knight, over at the Imax at the Palisades Center.

What I’m drinking: a rosé that my wife picked up on Saturday, and Stella Artois. Not at the same time.

What Rufus is up to: Around 6 hours on his own upstairs when I’m out! I’m still hesitant to leave him out of his crate for my full 9-hour workday, and I keep him upstairs so he doesn’t meander around down in the library, where he’s less familiar. But he seems to have figured out that he shouldn’t drink a lot of water when he’s alone in the house.

Where I’m going: Nowhere special

What I’m happy about: I’m not sure, but I’m generally elated at present. I feel a little bad that I’ve neglected friends I need to write to, but maybe I’ll have time and motivation to fix that this week.

What I’m sad about: The deaths of Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes.

What I’m pondering: The irony that the Yankees’ healthiest and most productive pitchers this season are 38 and 36 years old.

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F*** You, You Whining F***: 8/5/08

Why are newspapers falling to pieces? There’s a perfect storm of reasons, including the destruction of the diurnal newscycle, the obliteration of their local classified ad market by Craiglist and its ilk, and increases in paper and distribution costs.

Then there’s the fact that they publish crappy, irrelevant opinion articles. Case in point: today’s Whining F***, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post. A few weeks ago, Cohen wrote an Andy Rooneyesque rant about kids today and their crazy tattoos. Today? He complains that Amazon is destroying The Book by trying to “digitize everything in sight” and make us all buy Kindles.

See, Amazon is “inadvertently thinking of ways to make the world worse for children and for the grown-ups who love them to pieces” by, um, offering people options for how they buy and read books (and not trying to end world hunger and/or take Rush Limbaugh off the air: seriously). I support independent bookstores over chain stores; I love the serendipity factor of walking among the shelves of a well-stocked used bookstore.

That said, I really love Amazon’s ability to find virtually any book that I’m looking for, and I love the Kindle’s ability to get me a book within moments of my ordering it, like it did last evening after I read a sample of Jimmy Breslin’s new book, The Good Rat.

Here’s my favorite — by which I mean, “most befuddling” — passage from Mr. Cohen’s cranky rant regular column, which was published in one of the largest newspapers in the country:

I used to frequent one in New York — Books and Co., now closed — that recommended certain kinds of books. It led me to Joseph Roth, the great central European writer of the interwar period, and Thomas Bernhard, the eccentric Austrian who so hated his country he wouldn’t permit his plays to be staged there. I read all of Bernhard and all of Roth. What joy — although Bernhard, to tell the truth, was sometimes a bit of a slog.

Can Amazon do anything like that? Does Kessel — “We wake up every day thinking about digital,” he once told the New York Times — even know who Roth was? Roth killed himself in Paris. At least he never knew that one day he might be digitized.

So, while we weren’t looking, Amazon must have updated its store and removed all “you might be interested in” suggestions as well as the reader reviews that offer up just these sorts of associations. Or Richard Cohen is a Whining F***.

Any suggestions for his next column topic?