Category: literature

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What It Is: 11/3/08

What I’m reading: The Spy in the Ointment, by Donald Westlake. I checked this book out of my local library around 25 years ago, and I decided to go back and check to see if it’s still there. After they computerized the system, they threw out the old sign-out cards, so there’s no sign of when I actually took this one out. But I think I was around 11 or 12 years old. It’s a hoot of a caper novel, so I’ll probably return to some of those Dortmunder novels that I was too young to understand.

What I’m listening to: Mind How You Go, by Skye.

What I’m watching: Not much. Watched the third episode of Mad Men (season 1), and am still sorta eh about it. I guess the aspect I find the most interesting is the way the female characters are all portrayed as stunted, crippled personae. But maybe I’m more fascinated by the way that, at certain angles, Jon Hamm resembles Steve Carrell with a much smaller nose.

What I’m drinking: I’m out of Plymouth gin, so it’s back to Wet by Beefeater.

What Rufus is up to: Having his Saturday night bath and smelling nice and fresh. Oh, and playing with his new hedgehog toy, which I’ve alternately named Hedge Fun and Hedgie Murat.

Where I’m going: Atlanta in a couple of weeks, but nowhere this week.

What I’m happy about: Getting out to the Giants game on Sunday!

What I’m sad about: The realization that I’m likely never going to see my copies of Grant Morrison’s Bible John comic, having lent them to Chip Delany a number of years ago.

What I’m pondering: Lydia Hearst: Hot or not? Broken reflection of Heather Graham or not?

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Me and e

Virginia Heffernan has a nice piece in the NYT Magazine about Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. The biggest complaints I hear about the Kindle from tech geeks is that it needs to have an color touchscreen with a high-powered browser, cellphone service and maybe a camera. Which is to say, they miss the point. It’s an e-reader, not an e-everything. I agree with them, of course, when they say it’s a butt-ugly piece of design.

Ms. Heffernan does a good job of explaining how the Kindle’s “limitations” are what define it as a great device for . . . reading books. Which I do a lot of.

In short, you get absorbed when reading on the Kindle. You lose hours to reading novels in one sitting. You sit up straighter, energized by new ideas and new universes. You nod off, periodically, infatuated or entranced or spent. And yet the slight connection to the Web still permits the (false, probably, but nonetheless reassuring) sense that if the apocalypse came while you were shut away somewhere reading, the machine would get the news from Amazon.com and find a way to let you know. Anything short of that, though, the Kindle leaves you alone.

And alone is where I want to be, for now. It’s bliss. Emerge from the subway or alight from a flight, and the Kindle has no news for you. No missed calls. It’s ready only to be read. It’s like a good exercise machine that mysteriously incentivizes the pursuit of muscle pain while still making you feel cared for. The Kindle makes you want to read, and read hard, and read prolifically. It eventually makes me aware that, compared with reading a lush, inky book, checking e-mail is boring, workaday and lame.

The only thing she doesn’t touch upon is what I consider the Kindle’s game-changing aspect: the ability to download free samples of e-books rather than having to buy the whole thing. There are a number of books that I’ve decided not to buy after checking out their first 30 or so pages on the Kindle. In some cases, I decided I simply didn’t like the book enough to buy it; in others, I’ve passed because the formatting of that particular book hasn’t looked good on the device, or because a translation isn’t the one I wanted (Amazon’s Kindle store is a little hinky when it comes to books in translation).

Give it a read.

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F*** You, You Whining F***: 10/25/08

I suppose a disproportionate number of these F*** You posts are going to come from the literary world. I just have a great deal of pissed-off with regards to people who think book publishing could be a utopian wonderworld if publishers would just stop caring about making money. Don’t get me wrong; a lot of money gets wasted and big publishers are hemmed in by a blockbuster mentality, but that said . . . well, let’s just leave it to the David Ulin, book editor at the L.A. Times:

What’s more likely [than mid-list authors getting low-balled in favor of hype-driven Big Deals], I think, is that publishers will scale back some of their higher-end advances, especially in regard to certain risky properties: books blown out of magazine stories, over-hyped first novels, multi-platform “synergies.” At least, I hope that’s what happens, because one of the worst trends in publishing — in culture in general — over the last decade or so has been its air of desperate frenzy, which far more than falling numbers tells you that an industry is in decline.

That is, faced with hard times and a declining global economy, book publishers are going to abandon their quick-hit strategy, and start promoting “serious” literary midlist authors whose books could take decades to catch on (if they ever do). Oh, and they won’t do this because it would make any sense to their management and ownership per se, but because that’s what I want to happen.

And this will work why? Oh, because our global economic tumult will make us all crave “serious” literature!

This, of course, may be the silver lining to our current economic contraction: No more will publishers or writers have time or money for ephemera. During the Great Depression, even popular literature got serious: The 1930s saw the birth of noir. As the money dries up, so too, one hopes, does the gadabout nature of literary culture, the breathless gossip, all the endless hue and cry.

I just hope they don’t let him review business and finance books.

Bonus: the writer refers to the “ridiculous (and ongoing) print-versus-Web non-controversy” despite the fact that he works at a newspaper that’s collapsing . . . because all of its readers have left for the Web!

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There’s nothing wrong with you that I can’t fix. With my stats.

Possibly the greatest basketball-to-comics non sequitur ever, courtesy of ESPN’s NBA preview article on Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey:

Morey grew up reading Bill James’ Baseball Abstract and later worked for the stats guru, but his geekier tendencies might actually have more to do with his boyhood love of comic book anti-heroes who cut against the grain, figures like Frank Miller’s Dark Knight. “In a league in which 30 teams are competing for one prize, you have to differentiate yourself somehow,” Morey says. “We chose analytics.”

What’s great is that this article is all about using calm, cool reasoning and “analytics” to explain the decision to trade for Ron Artest!

Bonus: Did I mention that the annual Virtual Memories NBA Preview will be posted on Tuesday morning, just in time for the debut of the 2008-2009 season? I just did!

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Caption Contest!

I was bored at lunch today, and flipped through the funny pages of the local crappy paper. Not only did I discover that “Love is . . .” is an ongoing comic strip/panel, I also discovered that it’s gotten pretty risque!

So, I offer up a new Caption Contest! Submit your entries in the Comments section below!

I’ll kick things off with, “Love is . . . realizing you’re the only girl at a swingers’ party.”

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What It Is: 10/13/08

What I’m reading: Samaritan, by Richard Price. Because I miss The Wire.

What I’m listening to: Body of Song by Bob Mould and Angel Milk by Telepopmusik.

What I’m watching: 30 Rock, season 1, LSU/Florida (ugh), and a bunch of close NFL games.

What I’m drinking: Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. I’m still on my one-drink-a-week routine, weirdly enough. Which means I haven’t had a G&T in more than 2 weeks.

What Rufus is up to: Attempted rape at the paws of a savoy down at the local farmers’ market on Saturday. Oh, the shame! He also got to take a short hike to Ramapo Lake, and stopped in at the Garden State Barkway to get his nails clipped, so on balance it was an okay weekend for him.

Where I’m going: Nowhere this week. I really oughtta get into NYC sometime.

What I’m happy about: My mom’s busted wrist healed well enough for her to go on her hiking trip to Utah this week. And that official VM pal Paul Di Filippo had his new book launch with comics legend Jim Woodring out in Seattle!

What I’m sad about: Only three weeks left in the presidential campaign! No!

What I’m pondering: Why this exists.

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Pale Fire

Adam Kirsch, my favorite book critic at the now-defunct New York Sun, has landed at Slate. It doesn’t say if he’s going to have a regular spot there, but I hope that’s the case. I also hope he’s given as much range in his assignments as he was at the Sun.

Kirsch’s first post-Sun item is on the idiocy of Horace Engdahl, that Nobel literary judge who recently remarked that American writers are too insular to measure up on the world stage. Sez Kirsch:

As long as America could still be regarded as Europe’s backwater—as long as a poet like T.S. Eliot had to leave America for England in order to become famous enough to win the Nobel—it was easy to give American literature the occasional pat on the head. But now that the situation is reversed, and it is Europe that looks culturally, economically, and politically dependent on the United States, European pride can be assuaged only by pretending that American literature doesn’t exist. When Engdahl declares, “You can’t get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world,” there is a poignant echo of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard insisting that she is still big, it’s the pictures that got smaller.

Nothing gives the lie to Engdahl’s claim of European superiority more effectively than a glance at the Nobel Prize winners of the last decade or so. Even Austrians and Italians didn’t think Elfriede Jelinek and Dario Fo deserved their prizes; Harold Pinter won the prize about 40 years after his significant work was done. To suggest that these writers are more talented or accomplished than the best Americans of the last 30 years is preposterous.

Read the whole thing.