Review Reviews

Do you guys know those ads that look like no one was trying, that show up at the bottom of websites when you search for free streaming football games?  The all-text ads in blue that reflect an uncomfortable amount of knowledge about your Google searches, so that I keep seeing things like "Looking for singles in Pembroke, MA??" on my sidebar?  Those things appear to be constructed with the same eye and attention to detail as the book review of the newspaper of Buffalo, NY (our fair city).  Which, I think, is too bad.

I've been looking at majorish American cities' book sections in an attempt to see if anything comes close to the Times Book Review, which has the pole position by a lot.  (I don't actually understand poles and the positions of cars relative to them, so I only assume that you can have the pole position by a lot).  I liked the San Francisco Chronicle's section but it has more announcements and reportage than reviews. I like the one at the LA Times-- like its northbound statemate, both have a clean and colorful page setup. The one done by the Globe is ok, too, but has too much non-book stuff crowding it up.  And then there's the one from Buffalo (our fair city), the place that accounts for the "majorish" instead of a major in the first sentence of this paragraph.

I will admit, that as a rabid partisan of the New York Times, and as a person who likes to quote Christ on the reception of important people in their own towns, that I figured that the Buffalo News's book section would be a good opportunity to exercise the muscles used for scoffing.  But, I am an idiot, as you know.  This reviews are quite good.  They are not as voluminous as the ones at the Times but, well, obviors.  They are quality assessments of the books under consideration, which I guess is exactly what you want from a review.  But.

But, this is not a place I would go to three or four times every day (as I do NYT's Book Section, Bookforum, Bookslut, themillions and a few other booknerd places), and part of the reason is the failure to show a confidence that their readers care about books.  This is something I have noticed not only in reading reviews at different places, but in talking to people who are usually casual readers.  The greatness of the NYT Book Review, and of similarly great writing about books, is that they know that you, the reader, want to read something, and that reading is an important part of what you do.  They know it.  They don't have to sell you on reading a book of some kind instead of watching television; they want to tell you how the book they are talking about will shape itself into your life as a literary person.

So, Buffalo News: you've got the chops, go for it!  Shine up your book review website, show a little confidence in yourselves and trust in your readers! They (I) are (am) out there!

Loudth

Are there any loud books?  I have this idea that there are loud movies and quiet movies, and I am thinking about this idea because I am watching RockFest on VH1 Classic right now, and Guns 'n' Roses and Black Sabbath are certainly loud. Now, my first thought would be "no" because movies and bands make noise, and thus can be loud or not, and books, being made of wood, do not make noise unless you like bang them together. Even then, the noise will be unsatisfying and muted. But. I just went up into my room and yanked out a few things that might be contenders for loudness (incidentally, I hate the word loudness, and think it should be replaced with something classier like loudth, but loudth looks insane...I may try it for the duration of this post nevertheless).

So, first, Hemingway, who, if there is going to be SOUND DYNAMICS in fiction, has got to be among the quietest. He is the verses on Gigantic. His style is muted to the point that it gets made fun of for it. I guess that if books are quiet, Hemingway represents the bookiest books. There seems to be a studiousness about his work that is essential to it; try shouting a line from one of his stories at someone -- it will not work as well as it would with Mark Leyner, I guarantee it. Even a line that seems shoutable, like "Will you please please please please please please please stop talking" from "Hills Like White Elephants" sounds, relative to the world, wrapped in muslin.

Here are some guys whom I think might have some loudth, yanked from my bookshelves after a quick scan: Geoffrey Chaucer, John Barth, Norman Mailer.  Let's see how they do.

Ok, here's Chaucer: "And whan I saugh he wolde nevere fyne/To reden on this cursed book al nyght/Al sodeynly thre leves have I plyght/Out of his book, right as he radde, and eke/I with my fest so took hym on the cheke/That in oure fyr he fil bakward adoun./And he up stirte as dooth a wood leoun,/And with his fest he smoot me on the heed/That in the floor I lay as I were deed."  That's from the Wife of Bath's Prologue, and it maybe this seems louder to me than it might've because it is in verse, and thus more like music; and music, like the music I was talking about before, is for performance and thus can obviously be loud.  Maybe the Wife of Bath is the thirteenth century Lita Ford.  That bit about the fight between her fifth husband (wilcome the sixt, whenever he shal) can have some loudth because Chaucer is so good at rising, both in tempo and dynamically (both sentences start with "and"), and with his repitition (I think it is loudly, raucously hilarious that she says that both she and Symkyn hit each other with a fist).  So Chaucer can get up there, mixing it up with some loudth and being funny.  Anyone else?

Barth, I think, is not really loud like Black Sabbath, but loud like this guy.  He's not raucous; he's fast and showy.  You don't get measured as quiet anywhere by stopping your story over and over to throw in an assessment of Freytag's triangle.  If Chaucer drummed up some literate loudth by honing in on a musical description of a raucous event, Barth gets his by making noise.  I think that is how a lot of postmodern writers, and Joyce work; Joyce is way loud, where most of his contemporaries are Hemingway-soft.  In The Sot-Weed Factor he has a list of women calling one another whores in English and in French, and that's a lot of loud noise.

I think that one of the reasons that I love literature is that I am usually confident that when I like books, it is because they are good.  When it comes to music, something that I am often enchanted by but probably do not love, I have no such confidence, because I can never tell if I like the song I like because it is good or dumb or both.  The big clue for music is that the songs that I like that I tend to think are dumb, I only like when they're loud.  So I think it's fitting, I guess, that the loudest author I can think of is Norman Mailer, one of the only writers whom I can't figure out as good, or dumb.  Norman Mailer (at least the Norman Mailer of The Armies of the Night, which is the only of his books I know well) is the Ozzy Osbourne of American writing, except he's the Sharon Osbourne too because he does his own spin right along with his antics.  Here he is, talking about the character of himself, insulted by Robert Lowell: "Mailer, looking back, thought bitter words he would not say: 'You, Lowell, beloved poet of many, what do you know of the dirt and the dark deliveries of the necessary?...What do you know about getting fat against your will and turning into a clown of an arriviste baron when you would rather be an eagle or a count, or rarest of all, some natural aristocrat from these damned democratic states."  Next to this, in my copy, I wrote, "Seriously?"  And looking back, I mean...seriously?  This guy is a goofball.  But he is a brilliant and glorious dumb goofball, and so he's the loudest man in American writing.  As usual, I'm sure that there's something important about this, and unsure what.  Something about this bombastic guy being loud and yet clearly wanting to be Hemingway, and being so full of noise but reminding me of music.  Maybe if I expand my Mailer knowledge, I'll do myself a favor.  I will check back with you guys when I see if I figure out the secret of music and literature and loudth in The Naked and the Dead.

Listmania

We like lists, right? The internet is the best place for lists, as we learn constantly here, here, and here. And that's not even getting into power rankings, which are one of the better things on the internet. And amazon, the place for books and internets, has a whole feature called Listmania. So. Do you guys want some lists? The problem I worry about is that maybe books aren't ridiculous enough for lists? Certainly not the ones on cracked. Maybe Mende-Siedlecki has some advice. If you're reading, Mende-Siedlecki, hit me with your best shot. Anyway, here is the inaugural list:

The Top Three Ways in Which I Have Made a Fool of Myself in Situations Involving Books and Girls

3.  Here is #3: When I was in ninth grade, at all boys' school in Buffalo, I went to the library here in Lockport to find books about quantum mechanics.  When I was in ninth and tenth grades, you should know, my buddy Hogan and I were obsessed with pop quantum mechanics for some reason.  While there, I overheard the librarian showing some girl the books on euthanasia.  Perfect situation to meet a girl, I thought, because I had never met any girls before.  "You know," I murmured to the girl, while looking straight ahead, "euthanasia is Greek, for, beautiful, , death."  I actually murmured that, and it actually had all those dumb commas' worth of pauses.  The girl looked about as horrified as she should've.  But I was not satisfied with etymology, and I decided to go in for the kill, with puns.  "I myself" (when I was in ninth grade, I said things like "I myself") "am for euthanasia, because without them soon there'd be no adults in Asia."

In retrospect, this sheds light on my antipathy for the nonfiction section, maybe.  Also, then I didn't talk to a girl for six years.

2.  Seven years after I was in ninth grade, two of my friends and I got drunk and one of them decided to make some barbecue pulled pork sandwiches.  So far, this story looks good, because drunk and sandwiches.  However, this story also involves my Penguin Classics Edition of the Ambassadors by Henry James.  My copy had a painting on it that had some people sitting by what I thought was a river.  Or a lake.  The girl whose boyfriend was in making sandwiches, for reasons I don't super remember or understand, claimed that it was in fact not a lake or a river, but a concrete fountain.  I disagreed; she took the book away and stood on it for a few minutes.  This is how people have fun where I went to school.  Now, I especially loved this copy of the Ambassadors, and pleaded for it back; the girl agreed to surrender it, but only if, should the water turn out to be in a fountain, I would buy her lunch.  I negotiated with this terrorist, and in the cruel light of the next morning, amid pulled pork sandwich detritus, that thing really did look like a fountain.  Dammit.  So, I had to pay for a lunch.  And I felt forever disgraced in front of that copy of the Ambassadors.  I still do, actually.

1.  But because I am a recidivist, I have not stopped embarrassing myself in new and interesting ways with books and girls.  This one gets top honors even though in this story, I am only embarrassed in front of myself and, now, the internet.  And but so.  I went to the bookstore the other day, and because I parked like a block away, I brought one of my books with me.  And then.  The cute girl in the bookstore said, "Could you leave that up here?  They kind of get paranoid."  So then was I sunk.  You all remember, I've no doubt, my earlier claim that I was not going to buy any more books until I had no more than a hundred left to read.  Well, I could hardly get my book I had been reading back, in front of that cute girl, without buying a book, too.  So, here that claim's mettle was tested, and boy, did it fail.  In fairness (to me) I did hover around the poetry section in the front, hoping that the cute girl would go on break or something before I had to collect my book in penury and retire in disgrace.  But she stayed put.  So I did what anyone who is morbidly concerned with what strangers think of them would do: I threw my policy on bookbuying to the wind, and picked up the Best American Essays 2008.  Secret shame, secret overshare.

So there we have it, our first list.  Although on review it is less of a list and more three barely related things that couldn't have been coddled into full posts on their own.  Least publishable unit, I guess.  But!  Have you guys sorted your embarrassments into things with books?  Have you any ideas for lists?  Let me know!  I don't pay for the ability for you people to comment to heat the whole neighborhood, you know.