Poetry

Reviewing the Review: December 13 2009

by Levi Asher on Sunday, December 13, 2009 03:38 pm

It's a funny thing about book reviews. It's been documented by publishing industry researchers that a negative book review can sometimes bump sales as well as a positive one, and good writers have bemoaned the fact that a great review, even a great front cover review in the New York Times Book Review, might not help sales at all. Of course, publisher incompetence can help cause the latter situation, as was recently revealed in a rather shocking New York Magazine interview:

So the book got on the cover of The New York Times Book Review and I called my editor and told him and he said, "Well, you know it will be a critical darling, but it won’t sell." And he had been saying all along that it won’t sell and I thought, what in the fuck is the matter with you? Are you kidding me? If it’s gonna sell, it’s gonna sell. Every newspaper in the country has reviewed it. Then it was sold out on Amazon for six weeks, and the reason is they refused to print books. I kept saying to him, "You could be selling so many books in Des Moines, Iowa, in Lincoln, Nebraska in Denver, Colorado, all these places, where people read, where there are great independent bookstores," and they kept saying, "No, mostly I think we’re going to push this in L.A. and New York." I thought, you dumb fuckers. Meth is not a problem in New York except for in the gay community, but it’s a problem everywhere else. But there was this feeling: "Well, yeah, but people out there don’t really read."
-- Nick Reding, author of Methland (reviewed in NYTBR July 5 2009)

Parque Gulliver

by Levi Asher on Friday, December 4, 2009 01:36 pm

Beat Generation, Classics, Comedy, Fiction, Internet Culture, Love, Music, News, Poetry, Religion, Technology, Television

1. A Gulliver playground in Valencia, Spain.

2. Beat poet Andy Clausen on YouTube.

3. Amazingly, the Velvet Underground will be reuniting at the New York Public Library, though I'm not clear if this will be a talk, a musical performance or both. It's sad that late sweet-toned lead guitarist Sterling Morrison will be missing, but it's a nice surprise to see the reemergence of Doug Yule, who is widely disliked for replacing the great John Cale on bass after Reed kicked Cale out, but who helped them record their best album.

4. Jerome's Niece, a Buddhist poetry blog.

5. Onetime Heeb writer Jason Diamond offers a "Kaddish for Jewish Zines".

6. In the end, after a sluggish start, Electric Literature's much-discussed experiment with Twitter fiction turned up an excellent Rick Moody story about relationship anxiety, thwarted love and people who cling to their phones on dates. An excellent Rick Moody story, that is, but not necessarily an excellent Twitter story. Moody focused on the 140 character limit, but I think Twitter's most distinguishing feature is not its character count but its pacing and easy interpersonal immediacy (note: you can follow me on Twitter here). It became clear why Moody missed this when he revealed in an interview that he'd taken on this project because Electric Literature had asked him to, not because he had any actual interest in Twitter. There are many writers who do get Twitter -- say, Colson Whitehead, who is marvelous at it -- and I hope Electric Lit will turn to one of these writers for their next foray. Overall: great publicity, moving story, well done all around.

7. There will not be a Literary Kicks Best Books of 2009 list. Please excuse my grumpiness, but I mostly find these aggregate lists annoying and unremarkable. I do like to read personal lists of lifelong favorites by smart readers, but I don't care for annual lists or lists put together by groups.

8. Henry Rollins visits Bhopal, site of a chemical plant disaster 25 years ago.

9. For database techies, here's NoSQL. Elsewhere, here's just plain No.

10. I don't agree with this. I'm amazed at how good "The Office" manages to be, season after season. Sure, there are ups and downs, but this is one of those rare shows -- like "Twin Peaks", like "The Honeymooners" -- that represents television's ascent to the realm of literature. I will watch it until Jim and Pam drop dead.

Green Books Campaign: Savage Gods, Silver Ghosts

by Levi Asher on Tuesday, November 10, 2009 12:01 am

American, British, Ecology, Nature, Poetry, Publishing

Eco-Libris, a company dedicated to positive environmental practices in the book publishing business, is currently sponsoring a Green Books Campaign, a blogger event designed to call attention to green publishing in which 100 blogs will simultaneously review 100 green-published books.

I'm not completely sure what exactly "green publishing" means, but I like this organization's entrepreneurial focus and I was happy to join in once I saw the array of fairly freaky book titles available for review, including Hope and the Super Green Highway, Adventures of an Aluminum Can, Raw For Dessert, Listening to Trees, Ethnic Knitting Exploration and Sleeping Naked Is Green. I picked a title called Savage Gods, Silver Ghosts, a book about fishing with poet Ted Hughes.

This book looks like a regular slim hardcover, and if I hadn't been told the book was "green" I would never notice a difference. Is there actually a difference? It's printed on recycled paper, but that doesn't seem to me to go far enough. There are lots of reasons to wonder if there is any substance to "eco-friendly" publishing at all -- MobyLives recently asked some probing questions about this.

The biggest concern for eco-friendly book publishing is not the small run chapbooks but the mass-market titles, and when it comes to these I think the book industry will have to do much more than print on recycled paper before they can wear a "green" stamp. I'm mostly thinking about the obscene amount of waste produced by the bad habit of printing massively hopeful over-runs of expected supersellers in bulky hardcover, shipping them on giant container ships from the third-world countries where they are manufactured to the chain stores near you where they are often displayed for a few days, forklifted back to the warehouse, packed off to discount outlets and eventually pulped.

Like every modern industry, book publishing will have to do some real soul-searching before it can credibly start wearing green. Still, any spot is a good place to start.

And none of this has anything to do with the eco-friendly book I will now briefly review, Savage Gods, Silver Ghosts: In The Wild With Ted Hughes by Ehor Boyanowsky, published by Douglas & McIntyre of Vancouver, Canada. This is a book about two things: fishing and poetry. The author indulges ecstatically in both, preferring the Pacific Northwest territory near Vancouver as his stomping grounds. Years ago, his infectious enjoyment of both arts caught the attention of renowned British poet and former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Boyanowsky brought the British poet to his favorite rivers to bond with a certain type of fish known as steelhead salmon, and this book is the account of their sport and their conversation.

Boyanowsky is an elegant and sensitive writer expressing unabashed joy at finding himself with his two favorite things in the world -- a great poet and some great salmon -- at the same time. The truth is that I don't particularly love either fishing or the poetry of Ted Hughes, but it's Boyanowsky's powerful voice that holds me and makes me like this book.

There are also dark currents in this book -- naturally, since Ted Hughes was the husband of two women who committed suicide, one of whom was Sylvia Plath, and since their son Nicholas Hughes, another enthusiastic nature scientist, committed suicide just this year.

Nicholas Hughes appears several times in this book, usually with fishing gear in hand. But like his father, many of the fish in this book, and nature itself, his secrets remain mysterious.

Reviewing the Review: November 8 2009

by Levi Asher on Saturday, November 7, 2009 05:49 pm

Fiction, Lit-Crit, Poetry, Politics, Psychology

I was wondering if Sam Savage's worthy The Cry of the Sloth would get attention in the New York Times Book Review (Savage's earlier Firmin did not). The novel only gets a paragraph within Joseph Salvatore's "Fiction Chronicle" in this weekend's Review, and Salvatore finds that "as rich as the humor is, such satire does not finally sustain the novel". It did for me, but I'm glad to see the book showing up here at all (along with Nick Cave's Death of Bunny Munro, which doesn't blow away the hard-to-please Salvatore either).

James Parker definitely appears to be blown away by Stephen King's ambitious Under The Dome, a 1074-pager that seems to recall his classic The Stand in imagining the United States of America in the throes of a slow-motion metaphorical apocalypse. Parker's review starts at the boiling point and never cools off:

Now that the town halls have blazed with vituperation, and fantastical patriots are girding themselves for fascist/socialist lockdown, Americans of a certain vintage must be feeling a familiar circumambient thrill. Boomers, you know what I’m talking about: cranks empowered, strange throes and upthrusts, hyperbolic placards brandished in the streets -- it’s the '60s all over again! Once more the air turns interrogative: something's happening here, but we don’t know what it is, do we, Mr. Jones? Stop, children, what’s that sound?

That's a lot of big words and at least two song references. I'll probably never read King's book (1074 pages? Has he been hanging around with Vollmann?) but I enjoyed this review.

John Irving is one of a handful of contemporary authors who've written books I dearly and obsessively love (in this case, the great, great World According to Garp) but whose new novels I never read. Joanna Scott's dismissive review of Last Night in Twisted River, Irving's latest shaggy bear story, quickly convinces me not to make an exception of this one. I'm sorry, John. That was a hell of a book you wrote in 1978, but sometimes lightning strikes exactly once.

I will, however, look up poet Amy Gerstler's Dearest Creature after enjoying David Kirby's rave on her behalf, and I'm also interested in Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, which fictionalizes scenes involving Leon Trotsky and Frida Kahlo, even though it's no surprise that Liesl Schillinger likes the book (I'm still waiting to read about a book she doesn't manage to like).

This weekend's richly packed issue includes two psychological pieces: Hanna Rosin on Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided, a critique of positive thinking, and Nicholas Thompson's consideration of socio-quant Bruce Bueno De Mesquita's The Predictioneer's Game. There's also a short appreciation of David Nokes' Samuel Johnson: A Life by the esteemed Harold Bloom that somehow escapes being annoying or stuffy.

Finally, a long letter by author Mark Danner about the harsh review George Packer gave to his Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War three weeks ago has quickly gotten attention in the Huffington Post and elsewhere. I did not know that Packer and Danner had a long history together, but when I wrote about that article I did sense something strangely personal, and definitely out of place, in the piece. Here's what I wrote:

Packer is impressed by Danner's hands-on reporting but can't stand his writing and even, strangely, accuses him repeatedly of being "erotically" attracted to the horrors of war and political terrorism. I suppose Packer's got to call the shots the way he sees them, but the evidence presented here does not strongly back up the rather shocking charge, and by the end of this review I simply wish another reviewer had explained the book better.

I'm glad Danner wrote a letter; I've often heard that a shunned author should never write to a publication objecting to a bad book review, and I never understood why. If an author has a legitimate gripe, why not get it out there? It's not like the extra publicity isn't going to help the book's sales.