Screen Book Reviews

So here's one for you, the week that I got drunk and watched very late-night tennis instead of reviewing the Book Review for you: should we bother reading book reviews? What's the point of them? Whom do they serve? I don't mean to ask these things rhetorically, but really: after all, I do read book reviews, compulsively, and wherever I can find them. I am often unsatisfied, for example, with my review-knowledge of a book of short stories if I haven't seen a breakdown of each story, with a little description of each one (vide my high-school era review at Prestigious Critical Organ amazon.com, of Girl with Curious Hair {or rather don't vide it, because I wrote it in high school}). I want to know what's what, going in, usually.

But I don't know if I want book reviews. I think that really, what I want is something like "to have already read the book and formed a shorthand reminder of what it's about, which reminder is:". So, instead of a few quotes and some musing and scene setting, my pre-reading review of, say, the Adventures of Kavalier and Clay would be "Depression and World War II Era comic book guys/lots of relationship trouble/episodic pacing/very well written/satisfyingly unsatisfying ending". It would be like "plot keywords" on IMDb, except for books. And really, too, I do not know whether that would lead to a better idea of what was in store for books I meant to read or not; probably not, given that most of you who have read Kavalier and Clay might've put down totally different keywords, and many of you who have not read it might now be imagining Kavalier and Clay, based on my list, to be a book totally different from what it actually is. Although possibly not too different, because probably too amorphous. The reason I got to wondering all this about the worthwhileness of book reviews has to do with the occasionally massive discrepancies between the actual books we read, and the books we imagine we're approaching based on their reviews.

Pierre Bayard borrows a term from Freud and calls the idiosyncratic set of ideas we each make for ourselves out of the reputation of a given book that "screen book", and I think that what happens so often to me is that I dream up, based on a book review (or an amalgamation of book reviews) a screen book that is radically unlike the idiosyncratic ideas about the book that are based on actually reading the book. Which is absolutely not to say that I feel as if book reviewers are disingenuous, or shoddy, or creating unjustified hype; simply to say that I am I and they are they and thus we think different things. I think the most egregious case of this was the review I read a book that I enjoyed very much, the Emperor's Children by Claire Messud. I don't know why; subtle phrasings like this: "the metaphorical pawn in their struggle [that is, between Murray Thwaite, Mr. Earnest Liberalism, and Ludovic Seeley, who is basically Nick Denton] -- a struggle over status -- is Bootie Tubb." This is a slightly sophisticated point; in the book, Murray and Seeley are largely unconcerned with Bootie, who's kind of a twerp. But the position here in the book review made me keep an eye out for it. Also, the three main characters are introduced, naturally, at the beginning of the review, and as a group; in the book, they are less of a group and more of a loose aggregate.

Are these big deals? Are they some kind of misrepresentation of the book? Absolutely not. But they are a series of what, to a reader sensitive to sorts of readymade stories, could launch a weird series of in-between screen books. So, in sum, I don't know what to do about book reviews. I guess I'll just keep reading them; it's not like I've got that much better to do. Except maybe read the books they're about.

Time in a Bottle

Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano have made it to Europe, at the point I've gotten to thus far, and Ulises Lima farther than that, to Tel Aviv. Today I want to talk a little bit about how the oral history structure of the book is working, and how that contributes to the way, discussed earlier, in which Our Guys are got at peripherally, rather than head-on. First a note on what it is not: every once in a while, when someone says something particularly nice about Arturo Belano, I am tempted to think what I have been told is sometimes thought, viz., this looks like a way for Bolaño to sneak in some nice things about himself, like Norman Mailer's huffing and puffing about "Norman Mailer" in the Armies of the Night, or anything that has to do with Agent Michael Scarn. But I don't think so. I don't have a really definite reason for why I don't think so; maybe it's just because I haven't read the introduction, and don't yet know how narrowly or widely the life of Belano differs from the life of Bolaño.

But I mention this because it is, critically, not that displacement strategy which I think is served by the oral history. Now, to be disclose-y, I am not what you'd call an oral history expert; the only other one I have read is Rant by Chuck Palahniuk which, like the Savage Detectives, is totally made up. What I think Bolaño is doing, and doing better than Palahniuk does in Rant, is to create different time signatures. The passages that made up Rant tended to be roughly the same size, and passed not chronologically as far as the events related were concerned, but seemed presented chronologically with their telling. Not so with the Savage Detectives. So far, I have sorted out three kinds of passage: one, the self-contained stories, like Auxilio Lacouture on her activities during '68 or Norman Bolzman talking about Ulises Lima in Tel Aviv; then, the running commentaries that keep pace with Our Guys, like those by Quim Font and his daughters, or Luis Sebastian Rosado, whose years of comment keep ticking up; and then, by itself, the very long description of an encounter with Arturo Belano and Felipe Muller that we get, alway from 1976, from Amadeo Salvatierra. That last one, in particular, is probably one on which to keep an eye.

As usual, these ideas are inchoate, and consist mostly of notes and very little of judgments (beyond the fact that, given that I am now reading this book at a rather fast pace, they appear to be working). But so. There's something about the Savage Detectives to bear in mind. Until to-morrow, friends.

Where's Waldo?

Today I have some books missing. Now, I always have books missing, somewhere or other. Many of them are lost to the ages, that I lent to people whom I no longer ever see, like the pothead who ran the coffee shop in Lockport when I was in high school, or the son of my family doctor. Others, I just don't see around my bookshelves anymore and can simply not account for. The white whale of these books is the Norton Anthology of Poetry (Shorter Edition), which I had to buy for English 121, in 2004, and which fell into a black hole shortly thereafter. But. This white noise of lost books is nothing at all compared to the freakout in which I engage when I lose a book which I am in the middle of reading. This has happened before, as documented here, when I left Gargantua and Pantagruel at a Buffalo Bisons game, and couldn't handle 24 hours before buying a new one. Now, the book I have lost is Ralph Waldo Emerson's Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems, a book that my facebook Visual Library says I've been reading for eight months.

I kind of have; I keep starting it and then getting distracted and then deciding that the part where I pick up isn't resoundingly Emersonian enough and starting again at the beginning. But now, I don't know where it is, and I find this troubling. Should I clean out all of our cars? Look in the refrigerator (I've found books there before)? Last night, after looking for it at my uncle and grandfather's houses, I went to Barnes and Noble and stood looking at the outside of the book for like twenty minutes, wondering whether or not to spend $4.95 on a new one. To put how hard of choice this really should've been in perspective: I spent more than twice that much this weekend buying shots of Ouzo for the bartender. But I didn't buy it, then went home and sat around scowling that I didn't have any books of Emerson to read. I tried reading some Civil Disobedience, but it just wasn't the same.

Thinking about it, I have no idea why I didn't just buy a new damn Selected Essays &c. I have some things underlined in my current copy, but nothing that's really lighting the world on fire. Most, in fact, are things that I got all excited about from recognizing them from other things that referred to Emerson, like the epigram to Then We Came to the End (Is it not the chief disgrace in life, not to be considered a unit?) or things that Bootie Tubb really liked from the Emperor's Children. I guess I just like having lost books. I wish them well; I hope that they are doing right by whoever has found them. (The big exception in this case is my copy of High Fidelity, which was lent out and which, I have on good authority was unread and then later dropped in a ditch and not recovered, sad, sad.) So. I think I will resign to another lost book, and by another copy later today, and keep it on my shelf next to my successor copy of Gargantua and Pantagruel. A proud spot, indeed.

The Book Review Review

There was a big deal a few years ago, when the Detroit Tigers were all of the sudden good, when Jim Leyland had Pudge Rodriguez bat, for either the first time in his career or for the first time in a long time. That it was it was like when, smack first in the Book Review this week (subtitled "Democratic Vistas"), we get a facefull of roundup, this time a roundup of books about Obama by the guy who wrote my AP US History textbook. The leadoff roundup has all the benefit, really, of an extra essay, which is basically never bad. Brinkley gives a brisk rundown of books about the election, including one that he says is interesting but less prescient than it should be; the former because it is by Rahm Emmanuel and the latter because it is by 2005 Rahm Emmanuel. Which made me think: who is reading these election books? Don't the kind of people who would get these, just get newspapers instead? It seems to me like topical books like this need an angle on which to hang their hats, like Recent Book I Liked Imperial Life in the Emerald City: for years, it can be The Book about the Green Zone. I'm not sure that things bode well for books to be The Book about the Obama campaign, if they are being collected in a roundup by Alan Brinkley. But who knows.

The other democratic vistas all look either sobering or inspiring, just as they ought to; there's Gwen Ifill's book The Breakthrough, a book on the composition of Martin Luther King's Dream Speech, and a piece on a spate of books about FDR. Never one to shirk their Prime Directive, they also throw in a few otherwise-ly literary choices. And the essay, about William Buckley meeting Reagan, and the way they represented the battle between the brains and the brawn of the conservative movement, is intriguing. All in all a decent one, but still waiting to return to midseason form after the winter holiday.

There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists

So I guess if you're a visceral realist, the word of the day, everyday, is "poetry". Like I said earlier, Brian Blood is skeptical of the visceral realists and their poetry. I kept making the "These books make me want to smoke on curbs in Lima" argument, and he kept saying "Yeah, but you won't talk about poetry all the time like they do." This is, perhaps, true. In general, I do not talk that much about poetry, except in April (and, btw, get ready for a bonanza April). But I think that I could, and I think that I for sure would if I were friends with the poet Ulises Lima.

This is how, early in his career (1976, when he was 18 or so), Ulises Lima is described as creating poetry:

He wrote constantly, that's what I remember most about him, in the margins of books that he stole and on pieces of scrap paper that he was always losing. and he never wrote poems, he wrote stray lines that he'd assemble into long strange poems later on if he was lucky...

That's Lima, and that's what I want to be; or rather, that is the kind of poetry that I could talk about all of the time. There's a kind of poetry not in vilanelles, or perfectly formed pieces of performance, but in scribbled down bits -- stray lines that could, maybe, be assembled into long strange poems. More so even then the kind of commitment to poetry that, in their more theoretical moments motivates the visceral realists, this kind of commitment to words is what makes me glad to have, on the basis purely of hype, picked this as our book club book.

But you guys? What do you like about it?

Short Story COUNTDOWN

So here's another list you all like so much, this time of my favorite short stories. I am not, I think, a short story expert, because I've only read one short story by Chekhov and that was in ninth grade. But whatever, I'm not a Judy Blume expert or a Robert Herrick expert either, and lord knows that didn't stop me from talking about them. Top five:

6. Josephine the Singer, or, the Mouse Folk, by Franz Kafka -- So I think there are basically three kinds of short stories: short stories that basically do what novels do, but shortly; short stories that have a plot culminating in some sort of gimmick, like stories by O. Henry; and then there are stories like the ones by Kafka and Borges and Steven Millhauser, that are all gimmick and almost no plot. Like the one by Millhauser all about the town that is a copy of the town that the narrator lives in, or Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which is all about an encyclopedia. There is not really a plot, as such, to my favorite Kafka story, Josephine the Singer, or, the Mouse Folk. It is all about the one mouse, in the mouse community who wants to sing songs, and the slow-building resentment of the rest of the mice. It is a great slow burn, of mouse resentment, and it's weird, and, for Kafka, it's surprisingly undepressing. Or rather, still pretty depressing, but more depressing about mice than about us, which kind of lets us off the hook.

5. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl --This story absolutely freaked me out when I read it as a kid, because at one point, the narrator interrupts his story about a guy who uses yoga to see through the backs of cards and win money to tell you what might happen next, and what the narrator tells you is that Henry -- a slightly unscrupulous but generally charming guy -- may just look at himself in the mirror and see, with his yogic powers, a blood clot, and then fall over dead. What actually happens is that Henry becomes a philanthropist, and founds orphanages all over the place. Imagine being twelve and having this author butt in to tell you that his characters survive only because of his caprices, that he could at any minute blood clot any one of them, even the titular hero of his "wonderful story". Yikes. This one gets on the list on sheer oomph.

3. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri -- This is a pretty good example of the short story as a mini-novel: it's got an interesting, metaphor-ready situation (the main guy is a tour guide whose other job is translating diseases for a doctor who doesn't know English) and then a few hours' worth of emotionally charged plot. Not a lot "happens" happens, but with Lahiri's quiet prose, not a lot happens very very strikingly.

2. Menelaiad by John Barth -- This thing, which is seven levels of story going in and then seven more exploding out, is a bravura retelling of some of the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey, told by Menelaus. Of the stories on this list, except for the creepy authorial interlude in Henry Sugar, this one has the most going for it in terms of short story gimmick, what with its nested stories and classical references and such. And in the middle of all of that is the most plangent thing I think I've ever read -- in the middle of yet another narrative three-ring-circus about his slightly embarrassing marital life, Menelaus breaks through half a dozen layers of story to ask the reader, "Why don't they call her Helen of Sparta?" It there were ever a claim on which to hang my nerdy hat, ladies and gentlemen, there it is.

1. Spring in Fialta by Vladimir Nabokov -- The season is cloudy and dull, but the story is wonderful. This is not a short story that's built like a novel, but a short story built like someone talking to you about a novel. It is also elegaic and full of delightful sentences and remorseless analysis, which is why I like it so much. I think that it strikes a mood of elegy, in fact, that is uniquely suited to a short story -- such a novel would get maudlin, such poems have too much the element of performance about them (see Dr. Johnson on Lycidas, e.g.) -- and makes it my favorite instance of what a short story can do.

Nonfiction Lunch

Every New Year's my Uncle Paul names the year that's going to happen. For the first few years this millennium, it was Body 2000, then Body 2001, and so on. Then it was 2004: It's All Coming Together, which was really the rightest one because that year his family gained a cute daughter, and the Red Sox won the World Series and the Patriots won the Super Bowl, which got Uncle Paul all amped up. Since then it's been things like 2006: Nice One and 2008: This Year We Play For Keeps. Anyway, the thing is that the little manifesti that Uncle Paul announced to go along with the year names were usually only partially achieved. Like all named things, the years since 2000 have been in some way a disappointment. And even so with the dead horse I'm going to here kick, my Summer of Adventures without Underlining.

That, the lonelier of you will recall, is what I meant to do last summer in order to save money and learn things: since I didn't expect them to have a lot of finely tuned phrases (no "(picnic, lightning)"s to scribble under), I could forgo underlining nonfiction books. And because I didn't have to write in these books, I could get them at the library (cheap!). And then, as you know from my reporting on the epic battle of me vs. Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte, the best laid plans &c. But! I have been secretly sticking with it, to surprise you! On a day just such as this! With the news that I have kept up low-level commitment to nonfiction books, and, for an inveterate fiction snob like yrs truly, it has been going ok.

Of books I wanted to read, I am not doing so hot. I've only read one, the Nine by Jeffrey Toobin, but that is the one about which I want to talk to you today. The Nine was a very good book, and had a lot to say about the Supreme Court under William Rehnquist, and some sharp things to say about where the court is headed now. That said, the only thing that really stuck with me about the book (apart from a few zingers from Scalia) was that David Souter eats an apple for lunch every day -- and eats the core, too. That blew me away. Did his parents teach him, in harsh New Hampshire winters, that no part of the apple should go to waste? And did their parents? Or did Justice Souter just decide one day, enough is enough, I'm eating this whole apple? This was the main thing I took away from this sharply written, thoroughly researched book about one of the three most important bodies in the United States. That probably means something.

Anyway now I'm reading the Dark Side by Jane Mayer, which is good. On the lunch front, all I've seen so far is that David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff, ate gazpacho for lunch everyday by himself. That seems to be sadly humanizing, but doesn't hold a candle to Justice Souter's bravura, philosophy-encapsulating lunches. More on nonfiction next week, and a list later today!

This Week in Thinking Too Much About Shakespeare

So, I took my show on the road this weekend, hoping to knock off some books. You will remember, from your slavish devotion to this website, that I am trying to pack in the ol' library a little, by means of reading some of these freaking books before buying more. It has gotten to the embarrassing point. When I meet women in bars, I am sick of the sheepishness with which I have to say, on presenting them with the wallet-sized photo of my bookshelves in my wallet, "Well, you know actually, I haven't read all of them...no, actually, I haven't really read about that, er, third in the middle". My dad doesn't impress patients with a bunch of diplomas on his office wall that he's thinking about getting. So anyway: trip to New York, booklight, big hopes about finishing Jane Mayer's the Dark Side, Ben Jonson's the Alchemist, and maybe putting a dent in Rabelais and his World. Way-ell, that is not what happened. Rather, I read thirty pages of the Dark Side, none of anything else, and wound up with a net gain of like 1000 pages on my increasingly onerous spreadsheet of pages left to conquer.

Part of this was not my fault (Christmas, magnanimity). Part of it was (outright theft). Happily, none of it was books bought, so at least I am doing ok in the "Don't Buy Books" part of my resolutions for a better life. I was not (imaginarily) peer pressured into buying these 1000 pages by cute booksellers; I did not do any mental gymnastics to convince myself things like, "If I didn't think I was supposed to tend bar on a particular day, but then did, the money made that day is free money and thus can be spent on books." But I got more books, nonetheless. I feel like Lyra Belacqua, and book pages are dust. Just unavoidable, given who I and what they are. So what am I going to do?

On the drive home from this eye-opening trip to New York, I did what you've been waiting for me to do ever since I called this feature what it's called, and I thought about Shakespeare. Specifically I thought about this:

...But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required,
Some heavenly music, which even now I do
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I'll drown my book.

(I love that he's going to bury his broken staff "certain fathoms" in the earth; not five or a few, but "certain".) That's right: I thought about, deeper than ever did plummet sound, drowning my books. Getting rid of 'em, something. But that seems like such a throwing-one's-hands-up-in-resignation thing to do. Prospero, shortly after this announcement, claims further that in Naples, in his post-libricide life, every third thought will be his grave. Unpleasant! So here's what I am going to do. I am going to view that spreadsheet as onerous no longer. It's not a list of books I haven't read, but a list of books that I have thought about having had read. Subjunctivity will save my face again. What a happy day! Also, I'm going to tell my dad what the hell, go ahead and throw that MA in Architecture he's always fantasized about right up on his wall.

Los Detectivos Salvajes: (Upside Down Exclamation Point)Primera Vista!

So what's going on in the Book Club Book, you ask, having remembered that it is Roberto Bolano's the Savage Detectives, translated into English by Natasha Wimmer? Not a lot. As far as I know, I and Blood are reading it actively, and we have slight commitments from the Dudebrodawgman's father, which is good, but anyway here comes a CAVALCADE OF SPOILERS so sit back.

I'm 140 or so pages into the book, which has been narrated by a guy named Juan Garcia Madero, who is usually called by his friends the Poet Garcia Madero. i do not want to hang out with the Poet Garcia Madero, but that's ok, because he is about to be relieved of narrative duties. What will continue, I know from reviews, is a bunch of different narrators will take over and slowly tell us more and more about the Main Event of this novel, the chief visceral realists, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. Even if you hadn't read the reviews, you would know that these guys are ones on whom to keep an eye, given that a) they always show up as a unit and b) the latter guy has a name that looks a whole lot like Roberto Bolano's name. This is maybe one of the few times I have wondered why a writer would throw such an obvious reminder of himself into a text and come up with an almost immediate answer: in a book in which the most important people are only seen peripherally, it's a heck of an effective way to get us to remember that he's important. And that might make Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano the coolest people I've ever seen in a piece of writing.

They show up occasionally in Garcia Madero's diary, which is more about women that he has slept with. The bounce in and out, usually making oracular claims like that the visceral realists walk "backward, gazing at a point in the distance, but moving away from it, walking straight toward the unknown." Garcia Madero:

I said I thought this sounded like the perfect way to walk. The truth was I had no idea what he was talking about. If you stop and think about it, it's no way to walk at all.

Too true, pedestrian Garcia Madero. And that's the whole point of these guys: marked with his author's name, Arturo Belano and his friend maintain their haunting, outrageously cool auras, models of coolness cooler than real people, or even real head-on characters in a novel could ever be. They are just too cool. Do you guys think so? I mean, every time I read about them much I want to grab one and maybe two friends of mine and move somewhere -- Vancouver, Tucson, Buenos Aires, anywhere far away -- and sit on curbs and smoke Camels and talk about books. It was brought to my attention that that was just what I wanted to do all of the time, which is not true, because as you know, some other non-book stimuli make me want to be drunk, rather than talking about books in Tucson. I am intrigued to see whether or not Bolano can keep this up; throughout the rest of this long book, whether or not is possible for mystique to be sustained for so long. Also, can people maintain being this cool while being way into poetry? Brian Blood says no. Next time I talk about the Savage Detectives, one of these days, I will tell you about the poetry angle that Blood finds so silly. Til then, patriots.

The Book Review Review

Let's take a look at this Sunday Book Review, shall we? Frankly, when I first looked it over, I decided it looked a little boring so I read the whole thing while listening, over and over, to the whistle intro to "Patience" by Guns n Roses. So, uh, bear that in mind.

The big ticket reviews are a new novel about a guy who wishes he were a bird, a "no really, he wasn't that bad" book about William Randolph Hearst, and a bunch of letters from Allen Ginsberg. The latter made me wonder how much I will have to be interested in a writer to want to read his or her letters. I think someone should make a Best of Letters book. I would read that, and then know whose letters were worth pursuing. Same with journals. Get on this, Penguin.

Then we had the Roundups, which I read this week: a crime writing roundup, and a children's books roundup. The angle on the children's books were that they had to be about math. Here's what I thought about the crime roundup: everyone's worried about slim pickings available for long form journalism, and afraid that the Atlantic and the New Yorker are not bulky enough anymore. They should make the cover of PW next week look like US Weekly and have, I dunno, Harper's looking cadaverous in a bikini: LONG FORM JOURNALISM: HOW THIN IS TOO THIN? Anyway, what about really really short form journalism? Not like twitter, but like this crime roundup, which I thought was great because it just sat down and got the job done. It has abrupt little new paragraph ledes that reminded me of Groucho's time in the announcer's booth in Horse feathers. "When did publishers get so smart about re-issuing out-of-print mysteries?" she writes, after having written about something else. That's a great cold segue. I found this tremendous. Anyway, the kids' one was good too, it did what anything about childrens' fiction in the times should do, which is made me think "I should get that for my cousins so that when they're seventeen I can remind them about what a Hip Positive Influence I was." The other thing that jumped out about the kids' roundup was this: the reviewer, Jim Holt, who wrote a book about jokes I really liked, commends one author for her bold palette, then adds in a suspiciously offhand way: "those who experience numbers coloristically (in my case, four is blue, seven is green and eight is orange) know how important this can be in making friends with them." Wait, what? Do other people experience numbers coloristically? (Komorowski, I'm looking at you for help on this one.) This was definitely the hidden highlight of my week's reading of the book review.

The essay is about kids' books too, or rather a particular new kid's book that compiles old and out of print radically leftist stories for littluns. It is a good little essay, or rather a good longish review, but not one to set the world on fire, like that glorious old one about books that were turnoffs to teh ladies. Anyway, that's all for today, a bunch more on Bolano tomorrow, PAX.

Party Party

This is the Thursday listicle, showing up on Friday because I'm lazy and because my car started leaking gas and I had to take it to the shop and then go to the gym or WHATEVER. In the future I hope to bring you more fun things on Thursdays. I have to report to you on the doings of the Mechanical Reproductionists, who are still at large and still about as much a book club as this thing, and we'll get to that Friday-proper-ish. But for today, this ersatz Thursday (and my mother's birthday!) here is a Thursday listicle, of the top parties in literature, which I would like to have attended. Bear in mind that these are the ones I would have wanted to attend, not necessarily the best or rock-out-ingest ones. Frankly, I probably would have just been resentful and sat in the corner at most of the rock-out-ingest ones, and I can do that in real life.

5. Pnin's Faculty Party -- just because I feel for the guy. I want to stay at his house once it's over, and at the very end of that chapter yell "your glass isn't broken!" before he has to suffer.

4. A Gatsby party of some sort -- you've got to have at least one of those. When I was little and my big ambition was to be a fiction writer instead of a blogger, I tried writing a story about one of the first Gatsby parties. You've got to figure they were lame, right? By the time Nick shows up, the man is a legend, who floats around looking out across the harbor and being Mysterious. In my story, Gatsby sits around talking himself up to no one but Klipspringer, and they eat an awful lot of citrus that he had meant to garnish a lot of drinks with. Those are the ones I want to be at -- get in on the ground floor.

3. The party at the lying-in hospital in the Oxen of the Sun chapter of Ulysses -- yeah, I made fun of that chapter the other day, but who cares. The main reason I'd want to go is that Buck Mulligan is there, being ridiculous, claiming as soon as he shows up (at a maternity ward, mind you) that "it grieved him plaguily to see the nuptial couch defrauded of its purest pledges" and that he will try to combat this by offering, free of charge, his services as a fertiliser and incubator. And, at the end of the party, when they head out into Dublin, we get this:"The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum." If that isn't a description of a night that makes you want to find the next party, I don't know what is.

2. The boat party at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest -- I can't decide whether it is more or less fun to remember that this would sort of be a boozy, hooker-y party with Jack Torrance, Frank Reynolds, and Grima Wormtongue. I'd go still, though.

1. The neverending floating party from Life, the Universe, and Everything (book three of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)-- this has been beau ideal of an event for me ever since getting together with a bunch of people stopped being called a playdate and started being called a party. This sealed it:

One night, long ago, a band of drunken astro-engineers of the first generation clambered around the building digging this, fixing that, banging very hard on the other, and when the sun rose the following morning it was startled to find itself shining on a building full of happy drunken people that was now floating like a young and uncertain bird over the treetops.

That party, in the book, is on its third or fourth generation and shows no sign of stopping, so, you know, there may be time for me yet.

Why So Serious?

Did you know that the New Yorker has talking, animated cartoons at their website? They are exactly what you expect from talking New Yorker cartoons: there is one frame, one of the characters delivers what would, in the magazine, be the caption, and the other characters respond minimally (in the two I watched, one woman in a boardroom backed away from a guy with a hand puppet, and in the other one a slug frowned). Why does the New Yorker have cartoons, incidentally? I mean, I like them; I'm glad they are there; but in an organ of serious long form journalism, why cartoons? Wikipedia tells me that Harold Ross founded the New Yorker because his old magazine, Judge, was too corny. From what I've dug up of Judge, Ross could've included just one cartoon about cowboy slugs a week, loaded the rest with depressing Seymour Hersh articles, and handily won the New York Magazine humor battle. Anyway, the cartoons stuck around, like the poems, sort of atavistically, and now here they are, littered among more technically serious business.

So that's that in cartoon/solemnity abutment; what about cartoon/solemnity melding? Not stuff like Watchmen, which is hardly really a cartoon, but stuff like Steven Millhauser's Cat 'n' Mouse or Derek Zumsteg's Bugs Bunny, Greatest Banned Player Ever, both of which consider, very very seriously, very very frivolous things. The former takes as its object of study Tom and Jerry cartoons in general, and the latter a particular Looney Tune, "Baseball Bugs". The former performs a sort of literary analysis on the lives and motives of a cat and a mouse not unlike Tom and Jerry, and the latter performs sabermetrics on a ludicrous game of baseball played, on behalf of a collection of geriatrics, by Bugs Bunny against some thugs. What they have in common is a relentless commitment to not wink. Millhauser's story has passages like this:

This makes the cat dangerous, despite his stupidity, for the mouse recognizes that he himself has long periods when the cat fades entirely from his mind. Moreover, despite the fundamental simplicity of the cat’s nature, it remains true that the cat is cunning: he plots tirelessly against the mouse, and his ludicrous wiles require in the mouse an alert attention that he would prefer not to give.

And also passages like this:

The cigar explodes. When the smoke clears, the cat’s face is black. He gives a strained, very white smile. Many small lines appear in his teeth. The teeth crack into little pieces and fall out.

The diction is the same; the authorial attitude is the same; and yet.

Zumsteg is similar, though he keeps asking how, rather than why, the preposterous events of cartoons have come to pass. He considers Bugs Bunny's unorthodox fielding style, and has this to say:

That means that Bunny was able to cause the ball to accelerate by at least 50mph/s^2. Based on these calculations, it would seem possible for Bunny to actually fly and even to achieve escape velocity and orbit the planet using only his heckling. However, it’s important to note that as demonstrated in this game, we can only definitely establish from the footage that he is able to perform the acceleration when drawing an object to him, and only on the baseball.

There is a natural inclination to say (many of the people who commented at USS Mariner have said) that the focus of serious critical apparatus on cartoons is simply a waste of time. Really? For one thing, in neither of these cases does it seem like a waste of time relative to the most probable alternative -- say, doing literary analysis on Ralph Nickelby rather than a mouse, or doing sabermetrics on like the Seattle Pilots-- and I don't even think any of those things is really a waste of time. Another inclination would be to say that somehow it's an eiron's work to treat frivolous things like cartoons as bits of seriousness -- that it levels down, and shows as frippery our attempts to take serious things seriously -- but I don't think that's right, either. What I think is that this work is a kind of leveling up: if Bugs Bunny has merited sabermetrics, if we give the same attention to Jerry the mouse as we do to Lambert Strether, maybe that is good news too for the rest of us; maybe eventually we'll all deserve remorseless analysis.

This First Week in Thinking Too Much About Shakespeare

So, this is part of the New Year overhaul attempt: the Tuesday morning-ish installment of Unpacking My Library, which I have codenamed "This Week in Thinking Too Much About Shakespeare", in which I will have something to say about my adventures as a person who thinks about books, and Shakespeare in particular, more often than the other "guys seeking friendship" on Buffalo craigslist. I imagine that this series will have a lot to say about bookstores. And this installment, in fact is going to be all about bookstores, as well as The Economy, because that's what the whole internet is talking about and who am I to disagree. It doesn't actually wind up having any Shakespeare mentioned, though I did look at a few books about him at the bookstore. Maybe I could do with a better segment title? Thoughts?

Yesterday I talked to one of my friends who had recently decided that she didn't know anything about the economy, because she talked to people from Barclays and found herself conversationally adrift. Rather than sniffily call economics the dismal science and get back to Bolano, which is what I would have done, she trooped out and got Alan Greenspan's the Age of Turbulence, which is what I would have done if weren't lazy. She also bought the World without Us by Alan Weisman, about what would happen if we homo sapiens turbulent ourselves right off the planet. So, bleak. Anyway, that was yesterday.

Today, I got hustled out of bed in the EARLIEST HOURS of the morning, in order to take one of my brothers to school because the other brother had made off with his car. Being up then, with no plans for the next five hours, I decided to go to Starbucks and read, and from there I decided to go to Barnes and Noble and see what was up. It was bleak there, too: all of the holiday-fattened displays had slimmed down, and even the once proud front display, where mere weeks earlier I had seen Paul Krugman's new book about Depression economics rubbing spines with A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity by Bill O'Reilly now was all fitness books. And not entirely new fitness books -- books that people already deludedly bought when they were going to really change their lifestyles in 2006. This was depressing: not enough books. We hear about that all the time, of course; print media is always in crisis, and why not? The number one way to deal with a print media crisis is to write about it, and that gives a lot of us something to do, and some people even something to do in print.

What struck me the most about these two days, though, was the way in which the latter undercut the former: that is, the problem that one of the ways in which people try to understand Our Troubled Times is to read books, while one of Our Time's Troubles is that books are getting sparser. I can't imagine that the kind of information that my friend sought in her books by Alans will go away (or at least not before we are in much deeper trouble than that), and I suppose that kind of faith in things to get written is something on which to hang our collective hat. But it's more troubling to think about slimmer bookstores, offering less comfort to the only recently ungroggy who go to just wander around among all that heft of words.

Of course, I could just go in my room, where there is a shit ton of books sitting around, too. So I've got options.

What's the Story, Book Review?

So you can tell that I wasn't dicking around about that recommitment to this blog, I am posting again, in what I hope will be a new running feature in which I tell you what I think about the New York Times Book Review. For friendless book nerd, the New York Times Sunday Book Review is the most important thing that happens every week. It's got a lot going for it. It comes on Sunday, and what else are you going to do on Sunday? It combines book reviews, lists of best sellers to be indignant about, and, the piece de resistance, the Fun Essay About a Topic. This is the NYTBR equivalent of the New Yorker's Critic at Large pieces, which are basically little chunks of thinking out loud about books that are occasioned by Events. Lots of times, the Event is a biography or a movie or something. This week's fun Essay About a Topic is about a new translation of something, namely Kafka's first novel, Amerika. Adam Kirsch considers the weirdness of this, Kafka's first and unfinished novel, as the first spin of a spiral that "surveys the same spiritual territory but from a [progressively] more commanding height." As Adam Kirsch, who wrote this essay, notes, Amerika is the least commanding height; the Trial and the Castle would later encompass more of our guilt, and understand our complicity in a way that the more defensive Amerika fails to.

This Fun Essay About a Topic was a good one. As for the rest of the NYTBR, well, I will admit that this first week was not the best, and that I did not (ahem) technically read all of it. Or really any of it, apart from that thing about Amerika and the review of Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman, which failed to be totally excoriating and thus determined that I will end up reading Downtown Owl. Which leads me to want to say another thing about why the NYTBR on Sundays is so great: the reviews. What's so great about the reviews, you ask me, those are in every day excluding Saturdays! Well, I say, these aren't just any reviews. They are like the Judicial Branch reviews. Every day, Janet Maslin, Michiko, and those other guys show up lay down the book review laws. Then, once a week, in rolls the big shots, reviewing books that may or may not have been reviewed by the everyday guys, doing whatever they please. Interpreting the laws. So anyway, hopefully soon I will have more things to say about the reviews. But for now: don't necessarily avoid Downtown Owl.

Auld Lang Syne

And resume. Happy New Year, kinder! So, that was a long vacation, and I'm sorry. I have successfully navigated some claims on my time, and now we’re back: in the spirit of backness, I'm officially turning the page on Pnin (sorry, Pnin) and declaring a new book...at the bottom of this post (surely you all remember the heady early days of this blog in which I communicated mainly by e-mails that had 800 words of throat-clearing followed by the book pick at the end; and here we are again). Before I get to that, I want to say some things about another one that got away: our old pal Henry James.

Not the real Henry James, but David Lodge's Henry James, the fussy old failed playwright who is the going concern of Author, Author, a book of which I claimed that it was thin on top, and which I held out hopes that it would get portly in the middle. These are some hilarious jokes when one remembers that Henry James himself was both of those things, and because I am actually laughing right now as I type them for the second time, I can see why I am often lonely. Anyway, I read the rest of that book, along with most of Kafka's short stories, on a trip to visit my grandmother in Florida a few months ago, but only remembered to tell you more about them until just now. Oh well.

One of the reasons that I was originally fascinated by the idea of this book was because I liked Henry James and because I liked the sort of decoupage idea that a successful and established writer would want to plaster a different successful and established writer all over one of her novels. To this end, I bought Author Author and The Master of Petersburg and decided to get cracking. And then, best laid plans as you know, of course, and I wound up not reading them for a while. So here, belatedly, is what we have to say about: the Purloined Author.

Though, before going on, this is what C. Auguste Dupin has to say about a method for finding a purloined letter: “When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is anyone, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart as if to match or correspond with the expression.” That’s what Dupin learned from a schoolboy who hustled for marbles, and it set me to imagining Lodge fashioning the expression of James’s face, or the lightly bearded Coetzee fashioning the expression of the massively bearded Dostoevsky. But none of that happened in these books I read; the Master of Petersburg reads an awful lot like Disgrace, and Author, Author looks an awful lot like Changing Places. Neither book knocked my socks off; I don’t know if they would have, had one sounded more like Crime and Punishment and the other more like the Ambassadors. That may have been worse, actually, netting us a kind of limp parody or, god help us, something like the Oxen of the Sun chapter from Ulysses.

The Lodge book had a few moments that seemed like the explanations to jokes; at one point, his Henry tells his friend du Maurier that his cousin Minny, for whom he had stilted romantic feelings, had “a burning desire to do something great with her life.” Du Maurier responds: “Like Isabel Archer, in The Portrait of a Lady?” I cannot imagine a circumstance in which Henry James would ever need reminding whence Isabel Archer, and I cannot imagine a friend of his thinking that he needed such reminding. That is the problem with this guy, the protagonist of Author, Author: we frequently are reminded that he is Great Novelist Henry James, which gets irksome. It is as if people kept asking Hamlet if he felt melancholily Danish; to be part of a believable universe, it is better if that sort of tag is just assumed. This is not to say that the book is irrevocably scuttled; just occasionally bothersome. In fact, I enjoyed greatly the section in which James’s play opens miserably; its panoramic view (of other notables sitting in the audience) and its lack of Henry James proselytizing (all he does is fidget) made it an interesting portrait of an artist as his play flops.

The Dostoevsky of the Master of Petersburg is not constantly reminded of his Dostoevskiness, which is slightly odd given that unlike the events of Author, Author, the plot to which he’s purloined is almost entirely made up. It is built up out of some facts about a historical nihilist named Nechaev, some from Coetzee’s biography, and some from a suppressed chapter of Dostoevsky’s Demons. Out of this stew we get a peripatetic author, who gads about Petersburg thinking Dostoevsky things (beauty will save the world, gambling is great) in Coetzee’s short, present tense sentences. (For some reason, I can’t imagine the actual Dostoevsky abiding the historical present tense, by the way.) In both books, I found myself consistently wondering just why these authors had been impressed into protagonist duty, and unable to come up with much. Michiko Kakutani finished the Master of Petersburg “marveling at the waste of Mr. Coetzee’s copious talents on such an odd and unsatisfying enterprise.” I’m with her. Like the letter in Poe’s story, Dostoevsky seems to just sit available in the open – in his own writing – while Coetzee dismantles the tables all around him, searching for what’s really going on.

I don’t know if this spells the end for these other-writer books with which I thought I’d be so delighted; I’ll hold out hope for Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun, about Shakespeare. But! In book club news, here we shift back to the safer territory of books about thinly disguised versions of their own authors, with: the Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolano, a book that the part of me that pretends that I have Janet Maslin’s cell is shocked I haven’t read already. I have actually started it; it is fabulous. Expect fuller updates later in the week, as we begin a new and newly committed year of unpacking my library.