May 2010

Reviewing the Review: May 2 2010

Economics,

Fiction,

History,

Politics

The "Up Front" note in today's New York Times Book Review tells us this about Christopher Buckley, who enthusiastically reviews Tom Rachman's newspaper novel The Imperfectionists on the cover today:

Although Christopher Buckley’s most recent book, “Losing Mum and Pup,” is a memoir of his parents, William and Pat Buckley, he’s known primarily as a political satirist and the author of darkly comic novels like “The White House Mess,” “Thank You for Smoking,” “No Way to Treat a First Lady” and “Boomsday.”

I'm not so sure about that. This fortunate son's career has had a couple of high points (getting kicked off his father's magazine for endorsing Barack Obama over John McCain has certainly been the peak), but his mild novelistic satires tend to be safe as milk. They're genial and accessible, and that's exactly the problem. From H. L. Mencken to Paul Krassner, the greatest satirists tend to be angry misfits. Christopher Buckley is way too smooth for the job, and it shows in the resulting work.

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: May 9 2010. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: April 25 2010.

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Adaptations: A PEN World Voices 2010 Conversation About Literature and Film

Philippe Djian, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Richard Price, Barry Gifford, and Francine Prose discuss the art and agony of screenplay adaptation at a PEN event.

Being A Writer,

Events,

Fiction,

Film,

French,

New York City

In Charlie Kaufman’s classic screenplay Adaptation, the main character (also named Charlie Kaufman) is charged with adapting Susan Orleans’ colorful albeit densely layered book The Orchid Thief into film. Unable to find a through line (or spine), the sine qua non of narrative film, the vexed screenwriter moans to his agent, “The book has no story. There’s no story.” Replies the agent blithely, “Make one up.” As anyone who has seen the movie knows, it’s a response that can only deepen Charlie’s already high anxiety. Adaptation is a process that requires an improbable balancing act of fidelity to the author’s original text with sufficient creative freedom for the filmmaker. Torn between his responsibility to the author—and her many readers--and the agent’s and moviegoing public’s expectation of “story”, Charlie spends the rest of the film desperately attempting to pay proper obeisance to others while somehow also asserting himself and his own artistic vision.

Listening to the panel of novelists/screenwriters on stage at the Jack Skirball Center at New York University for the “Adaptation” panel at the PEN World Voices festival on Thursday, I was reminded of this delicious exchange—the bewilderment of the screenwriter, the callousness of the Hollywood agent, and mostly, the utter agony and joy that adaptation entails. The process of adapting books into film, it seems, can be a hellish vortex from which few emerge unscathed.

Beloved and Unknown: Adventures in Marketing an International Masterpiece

Toni Morrison, Marlene van Niekerk, Anthony Appiah at PEN World Voices

What sells a book?

Picture an editor desperately scribbling at her desk. She’s drafting a “sell sheet” for a book for which she hopes to gain her publishing colleagues’ support. The author has indie appeal but virtually no mainstream recognition. Said author is also very dark, feminist, brilliant, and experimental. She’s perhaps just a bit too lucid about sexual power games to be a male critic’s darling (and most mainstream media critics remain male.) The zeitgeist also feels ever so slightly off. In her book, the author goes for the throat of an issue -- Race -- that most Americans, loudly proclaiming their liberalism in having elected their first black president, increasingly prefer to avoid. Evidence of the new postracial America is spotty but debate has, at least for the moment, been somewhat silenced. Finally said author, who is NOT Toni Morrison, is a foreigner. Even worse, the language in which she writes, Afrikaans, has associations that make people scratchy. The book is a masterpiece. Our poor editor is in a muddle:

Africa,

Events,

Fiction,

New York City,

Publishing

(Dedi Felman's coverage of PEN World Voices continues with this tale of what it takes to put an exceptional novel in front of American readers. -- Levi)

What sells a book?

Music City

American,

British,

Classics,

Drama,

Events,

Existential,

Film,

Hiphop,

Jewish,

Music,

Nature,

New York City,

News,

Poetry,

Politics,

Publishing,

Southern,

Summer Of Love,

Transgressive

1. I visited the beautiful city of Nashville, Tennessee for the first time two years ago. I can't believe how much of this great town has been damaged in last week's flood.

2. It's very weird that attempted Times Square terrorist Faisal Shahzad left a DVD of the anomie-striven movie Up In The Air to be found in his home. Novelist Walter Kirn, who we recently interviewed about the film of his book, wrote this on Twitter: "times sq. bomber leaving behind copy of 'up in the air' reminds me of chapman, lennon's killer, and catcher in the rye. icky feeling now."

Reviewing the Review: May 9 2010

Arabic,

Existential,

History,

Jewish,

Politics

This is going to be one of the hardest blog posts I've ever written. Not because it's painful, but because the topic is controversial, and I'm going to be arguing with a giant, and my words could be very easily misunderstood. I want to talk about Jewish identity, Israel and anti-semitism.

The occasion is this weekend's New York Times Book Review, which is titled "The Jewish Question" and features book reviews by two high-profile Jewish writers on the cover: Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England by Anthony Julius, reviewed by Harold Bloom, and two books on Martin Heidegger, Heidegger: Tne Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 by Emmanuel Faye, and Stranger From Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness by Daniel Maier-Katkin, reviewed by Adam Kirsch.

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review of the Review: May 15 2010. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: May 2 2010.

T. S. Eliot Is Not Obliged To Love Me

Big Thinking,

Classics,

Jewish,

Politics

T. S. Eliot is not obliged to love me. The topic of anti-semitism comes up often when this great poet and literary critic is mentioned, but I think it's a sign of our chronic over-sensitivity that we consider it a moral felony of the highest order for a poet to be a snob. T. S. Eliot has the right to hate whoever he wants.

He never hurt anybody, and I never saw any evidence that he wanted to. I love his work, his Dante-esque vision, his moral seriousness, his (yes) sense of humor. If he met me, maybe he'd hate me because I'm a Jew. He'd probably also hate me because I'm a modern American hipster slacker, a fast-food eater, a casual dresser. Who cares? It doesn't mean he wanted to Holocaust me to death.

An Epic City: Litkicks Mystery Spot #4

Polls and Questions

Yes, it's time for another literary quiz inspired by Google Maps. The hero of a novel lived at a spot visible in the image above, north of the river that streams through the city. What is the name of this epic city, and what is the name of the novel? Here are the only clues you're going to get:

• The name of the street where this character lives is a religious pun.

• A cat lived there too, and was known to say "Mkgnao".

• This character is only slightly well known, but the novel is more famous than any of its characters.

This article is part of the Litkicks Mystery Spot series. The next post in the series is Joyce's Dublin: Bloom on Eccles Street. The previous post in the series is Steventon, Hampshire, England: Where Jane Austen Grew.

Joyce's Dublin: Bloom on Eccles Street

Classics,

Fiction,

Language,

Modernism,

Polls and Questions,

Religion

The answer to yesterday's mystery spot question is: Dublin, Ireland, and Ulysses by James Joyce (a big Litkicks favorite, though not necessarily a favorite of everyone at Litkicks).

North of the Liffey River in the center of the city, across the street from a large hospital, you can still find 7 Eccles Street, where the novel's optimistic everyman hero Leopold Bloom lived with his wife Molly, his enigmatic cat and (presumably) an icebox full of kidneys, giblets and other strange foods which he ate with relish. Here's the house in a 1950 photo, and here's the the Google map itself.

This article is part of the Litkicks Mystery Spot series. The next post in the series is Romance in a Dry Land: Litkicks Mystery Spot #5. The previous post in the series is An Epic City: Litkicks Mystery Spot #4.

Reviewing the Review of the Review: May 15 2010

Lit-Crit,

Litkicks,

Personal

Five years ago on this day, Sunday, May 15 2005, I decided to start reviewing the New York Times Book Review on Litkicks. Early that morning I posted the first entry in what has become an enduring series, and a big part of my identity within the literary scene.

I had no idea what I was in for when I began this. I remember sitting in my living room wondering what to blog about that calm Sunday morning, and I remember turning to Caryn and saying "I think I'm gonna review the Book Review every weekend". "Sounds like quite a thrill," she said, and I was off.

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: May 23 2010. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review: May 9 2010.

The Line by Olga Grushin

History,

Modernism,

Music,

Postmodernism,

Reviews,

Russian

(We're always excited to run a rave review on the rare occasion that one is deserved. Here's Garrett Kenyon on the latest work by a rising talent. -- Levi)

In 2005, while Americans of every stripe anxiously watched distant lands suffer the disastrous whims of our previous president, a minor miracle occurred stateside, right under our noses. That year, a young Russian-American writer named Olga Grushin published that rarest of literary accomplishments: a debut novel bearing the undeniable redolence of a modern classic. The Dream Life of Sukhanov was everything a first-novel shouldn't be: tight, timeless -- confidently executed with the subtlety and depth of a seasoned master. Some critics were so stunned by Sukhanov, they jokingly questioned whether it could really be the work of a novice. Another admitted he "felt like buying 10 copies and sending them to friends." He probably didn't. Which is unfortunate, because, by 2005, the firmament of American lit had become so reliably unremarkable that too few sets of eyes were paying attention when Sukhanov punctured the darkness and streaked across the sky.

Stuff I Like

Being A Writer,

Breakfast Club,

Classics,

Eastern European,

Existential,

Fiction,

Film,

Internet Culture,

Jazz Age,

News,

Religion,

Technology

Screw stuff white people like. This is stuff I like:

1. With Amazon Crossing, the well-funded online bookstore is taking an active role in publishing international authors across boundaries. Good move, Amazon. Speaking of international authors, a fifth Words Without Borders anthology, Tablet and Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East, is coming out. Way to be productive, WWB!

2. Something else we like: Ghostbusters invade the main branch of the New York Public Library to protest library budget cuts. What's really interesting about this latest effort by Improv Everywhere is that the apparently desperate New York Public Library actually allowed it to take place (though they don't seem to have warned the people in the library). Nice! We've gone way beyond "ssssssh!" by now.

Immutability: the Thingness of Books

Events,

Internet Culture,

New York City,

Publishing,

Reading,

Technology

Behold: a thing. Whatever else it is in this world, it is a thing. It may or may not have a name, it may or may not be identifiably unique, but it is an object, an instance of a class. When we talk about the future of the book (and, well, a lot of people are talking about the future of the book) I like to mention a word that I encountered a few years ago when I worked for a company in the litigation sector that made advanced search software: "immutability".

My job was to be, boringly enough, this company's expert in the PDF format, and I know a whole lot about PDF files. One thing I know is that PDFs are immutable, which is to say that they can't be changed. You can share or save a PDF file, but you can't edit or modify one. You could hack one, if you really wanted to, but doing so violates the basic principle of the PDF format: it is an unchangeable thing. This is why PDFs (and not, say, Microsoft Word documents) are the standard format for legal contracts.

Books, I believe, are immutable. Many entrepreneurs are doing (or planning to do) exciting things with the basic structure of the book -- Richard Nash of Cursor and Hugh McGuire of BookOven come to mind. A recent display of a possible future issue of Sports Illustrated rendered in the emerging HTML5 standard shows similar ingenuity with the familiar structure of magazines. But an issue of a magazine, just like a book, must be immutable -- it is a distinct thing, an object, an instance of a class. As we zoom through time and space with the next generation of browsers, will the boundaries of a text's identity itself become fluid?

Reviewing the Review: May 23 2010

Fiction,

History,

Lit-Crit,

Sports

As the newspaper business shrinks, the hazard of insularity increases. Three weeks ago the New York Times Book Review put Christopher Buckley's rave review of the roman a clef The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman of the International Herald Tribune on the cover, ignoring the fact that 99% of the NYTBR's readers have no need for a winking tell-all about newspaper office shenanigans. The "Up Front" column in today's Book Review features Lloyd Grove of the New York Daily News sharing gossip about Rupert Murdoch, subject of War at the Wall Street Journal by Sarah Ellison. One wonders if this type of thing might be better handled by internal email.

But a broader insularity emerges when Graydon Carter (yawn) reviews The Pregnant Widow (yawn) by Martin Amis (yawn) on this week's front cover (yawn). Sex jokes and alcohol jokes abound. Replace the name "Martin Amis" with "Christopher Hitchens" and you've got a ready-made review of Hitch-22, which will surely be lauded as a major work on the cover of the New York Times Book Review very soon (yawn). Here goes the shoveling:

Amis is one of the true original voices to come along in the last 40 years. The fizzy, smart linguistic fireworks, with their signature italicisms, riffs on the language and stunningly clever, off-center metaphors are certainly evident in "The Pregnant Widow".

This article is part of the Reviewing the New York Times Book Review series. The next post in the series is Reviewing the Review: June 6 2010. The previous post in the series is Reviewing the Review of the Review: May 15 2010.

Written In Prison

American,

Beat Generation,

History,

News,

Politics,

Psychology

(On the forgotten 50th anniversary of a once-controversial convict's execution, Beat historian and Library of Congress archivist Alan Bisbort provides a sweeping summary of the prison-writing genre, and the therapeutic invention that once supported the genre. -- Levi)

Fifty years ago, on the morning of May 2, 1960, the State of California executed Caryl Chessman in the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison.

For more than a decade prior to that date, Chessman had been a thorn in the state’s side, as well as a pinprick at America’s conscience and an international cause celebre. His case drew support from all corners of the globe and all areas of human endeavor, from the sacred (Pope John, Albert Schweitzer) to the profane (Marlon Brando, Steve Allen, Shirley MacLaine), from the literary (Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and, yes, William F. Buckley, Jr.) to the mundane, with petitions to the California governor to spare Chessman’s life coming from millions of people around the world who’d been touched by his case and his writings. From Brazil alone, a plea for Chessman’s life sent to Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown in March 1960 contained 2.3 million signatures, as well as offers from forty Brazilians, many of them women, to die in his place. And when he was finally killed, after 12 years on death row and eight stays of execution, riots broke out in European and Latin American cities.

Interlude: The Proustian Obsession

Classics,

French,

Lit-Crit,

Reading

We’re into the home stretch now in our pondering of Proust -- four volumes down and three to go. We have been introduced to a fascinating and vast cast of characters, from the cook Françoise to the Prince de Guermantes. We have found out that Charlus is gay, and that the Duc de Guermantes is a Dreyfusard. Let’s take a break, then, before we tackle the last three tomes, and reflect on a new addition to the Proustian literature: Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time, by Patrick Alexander.

Outside of Alexander’s offering, there are two books that stand as must-reads to gain insight into Proust’s massive work. The first is Marcel Proust: A Life by William C. Carter, an excellent biography of the author of A la Recherche. The second is How Proust Can Change your Life by Alain de Botton, a witty look at how this author's writings can be applied to everyday living. Certainly there are numerous other books on Proust, but you can safely read these two and remain a serious but sane aficionado. Go beyond these and of course you risk entering into the dark realm of Proustian obsession. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing.

This article is part of the Proust Beyond The Madeleines series. The next post in the series is Pondering Proust V: The Prisoner. The previous post in the series is Pondering Proust IV: Sodome et Gommorhe, or Cities of the Plain.

E-Books: A Lousy First Date

Publishing,

Reading,

Technology

According to the research, which examines eBook reading and purchase behavior from print book readers who recently purchased either an eBook reader or an eBook, eBook sales went from 1.5% of all book sales in Q1 2009 to 5% in Q1 2010, with 33% of eBook buyers entering the market in the last six months. "We are expecting exponential growth," said Gallagher.
-- EBookNewser

I'm just throwing this out there, because I'm at Book Expo where everybody's buzzing about e-books and the impact they'll have on the always turbulent publishing industry. I'm going to do a full #BEA10 wrap-up later, and tell you about the all fun I'm having (and some new novelists I've enjoyed meeting) at this crazy annual convention. But for now I just want to repeat something I said to a friend on Tuesday, because I think this is an important point about the future of print and electronic book publishing.

I want e-books to succeed. I have always been an e-book advocate. But there's a big problem with the product model, and I don't understand why the book publishing industry is now twisting itself up into a state of hysteria about e-book pricing and piracy and distribution without addressing this big problem with the product model. The problem is this: consumers don't like e-books.

Contemplating Book Expo 2010

Events,

New York City,

Publishing,

Reading

New York City's Book Expo America conference, where thousands of publishing industry professionals gather each year, takes place on Manhattan's West Side riverfront. The smoked glass walls of the Jacob Javits Center seem to contain an entire bustling city, but those who step outside and walk behind the building to make a phone call or enjoy some fresh air see a different vista: the mighty Hudson River, the modest cliffs of Hoboken and Weehawken across the way in Jersey, and a series of picteresque rotted piers, the only reminder of a shipping industry that once dominated Manhattan's riverside. The Titanic would have anchored near here in 1912, if if it had completed its first voyage.

Pessimistic pundits like Garrison Keillor might see a metaphor for the future of book publishing in these fallen piers, but, thankfully, many other industry observers are rejecting this type of gloomy nonsense for the craven self-flattery it really is (all people like Garrison Keillor and Philip Roth are really saying, when they claim that literature has no future, is that their generation was more sensitive and refined than any future generation can possibly be). Myself, I relish Book Expo every year as a chance to see book publishing's living past and exciting future as a single vast swarm. The conference brings out the veterans and the journeymen along with the eager upstarts and interns. Staring at the river, I see a slender elderly man who, I fantasize, might have once bolted drinks with John O'Hara, negotiated contracts with Jacqueline Susann, sipped cocktails with Kurt Vonnegut. He looks maybe 70 or 75 years old, his craggy face ravaged by plastic surgery, his thin hair an improbable red against a pale sun-scorched scalp. He's wearing a robins-egg blue seersucker summer suit with a folded handkerchief in his pocket and a yellow tie.

Peter Orlovsky, Beat Muse (and Dennis Hopper)

American,

Beat Generation,

Film,

Poetry,

Summer Of Love,

Tributes

"... Simon's a true Russian, wants the whole world to love, a descendant indeed of some of those insane sweet Ippolits and Kirilovs of Dostoevsky's 19th Century Czarist Russia -- And looks it too, as the time we'd all eaten peyotl (the musicians and I) and there we are banging out a big jam session at 5 P.M. in a basement apartment with trombone, two drums, Speed on piano and Simon sitting under the all-day-lit red lamp with ancient tassels, his rocky face all gaunt in the unnatural redness, suddenly then I saw: "Simon Darlovsky, the greatest man in San Francisco" and later that night for Irwin's and my amusement as we tromped the streets with my rucksack (yelling "The Great Truth Cloud!" at gangs of Chinese men coming out of card rooms) Simon'd put on a little original pantomime a la Charley Chaplin but peculiar to his own also Russian style which consisted of his running dancing up to a foyer filled with people in easy chairs watching TV and putting on an elaborate mime (astonishments, hands of horror to mouth, looking around, woops, tipping, humbling, sneaking off, as you might expect some of Jean Genet's boys goofing in Paris streets drunk) (elaborate masques with intelligence) -- The Mad Russian, Simon Darlovsky, who always reminds me of my Cousin Noel, as I keep telling him, my cousin of long ago in Massachusetts who had the same face and eyes and used to glide phantomy around the table in dim rooms and go "Muee hee hee ha, I am the Phantom of the Opera" (in French saying it, 'je suis le phantome de l'opera-a-a-a) -- And strange, too, that Simon's jobs have always been Whitman-like, nursin, he'd shaved old psychopaths in hostpitals, nursed the sick and dying, and now as an ambulance driver for a small hospital he was batting around San Fran all day picking up the insulted and injured in stretchers (horrible places where they were found, little back rooms), the blood and the sorrow, Simon not really the Mad Russian but Simon the Nurse -- Never could harm a hair of anybody's head if he tried --"
Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

Peter Orlovsky, Beat Generation poet and muse, died this weekend. A gentle and exuberant spirit, Orlovsky did not aim for literary fame but his reflection was caught in the work of his virtual spouse and best friend Allen Ginsberg, and in the writings of Jack Kerouac, who transformed him into a character named Simon Darlovsky who lit up the pages of the great late-period novel Desolation Angels just as Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) and Japhy Ryder (Gary Snyder) had lit up On The Road and Dharma Bums.