Condalmo

2007's final roundup.

• Talking with Mr. Bryant the other night, he had heaps of praise for Yannick Murphy's Signed, Mata Hari - maybe even a "best book in a long time" - so, 2008 will be starting with that one for me.  (He also posted about it.)
• Kate has a fine idea: a short story challenge for 2008.  I am eyeball-deep in studying materials for the National Counselors Examination, so I'll hold off on taking the Sutherland Challenge for now, but you should head right over there.
• A bookplate: "He was quite incompetent and grossly careless."
• Roberto Bolano (I don't know how to make that n properly on a Windows machine; sorry, Roberto) on being a good writer and a bad writer.
• Five Chapters ends the year with a new short story by Nick Hornby.
• I'm interested in changing the site design - though this festive one is nice, the season is ending - and would welcome hearing from anyone interested in contributing a graphic banner.  Thanks.

On average.

clipped from www.utne.com I once was talking to my friend and mentor Steve Chandler when he said to me, “Have an average day!” Taken aback, I asked him what he meant. Isn’t the idea to have great days, even exceptional ones? He told me a story about one of his mentors, Lyndon Duke, who studied the linguistics of suicide. After receiving doctorates from two universities, Duke began analyzing suicide notes for linguistic clues that could be used to predict and prevent suicidal behavior in teenagers. Duke came to believe that the enemy of happiness is “the curse of exceptionality.” When everyone is trying to be exceptional, nearly everyone fails because the exceptional becomes commonplace, and those few who do succeed feel isolated and estranged from their peers. We’re left with a world in which a few people feel envied, misunderstood, and alone, while thousands of others feel like failures for not being good, special, rich, or happy enough.

Melville moving House to Brooklyn.

clipped from www.publishersweekly.com Melville House, independent publisher of political books such as What We Do Now and novelists including Stephen Dixon and Tao Lin, is moving its headquarters from Hoboken, NJ to Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood, home to other indie publishers like Akashic books and PowerHouse, and former home to Soft Skull Press. Melville’s new space, at 145 Plymouth St., will house not only the publisher’s offices, but a bookstore and event space. Co-Publisher Dennis Loy Johnson (who runs the press with his wife Valerie Merians) told PW, “We felt that there was no real hangout for independent publishers, both book publishers and journals. We got quite an offering from the Brooklyn developer, the Two Trees company. We made a proposal to them and they liked it, and the deal for the space is something we could not have gotten anywhere else. Brooklyn is just an amazingly vibrant scene and we wanted to be there.”

Happy Holidays.

Obliged to post this picture again this year.  I have no idea who these people are, but it's a triple-play of humor as you look from one face to the other. 

I hope you all have a peaceful and joyful holiday.

A gas station in my world.

Those are all book covers.  (via.)

Brother, can you spare a tase?

The Yale Book of Quotations has selected this year's most memorable quote.

"Don't Tase Me, Bro," a phrase that swept the nation after a college student used it seeking to stop campus police from throwing him out of a speech by Sen. John Kerry, was named on Wednesday as the most memorable quote of 2007...

Shapiro said Meyer's quote was a symbol of pop culture success. Within two days it was one of the most popular phrases on Google and one of the most viewed videos. It also showed up on ringtones and T-shirts.

Welcome to the pantheon, Mr. Meyer.  No, there isn't a keg.

New Yorker winter fiction 2007.

Now online, with entries by Anne Enright, Junot Diaz (I still haven't read Drown; can you believe me?!), and J. Lethem, whose "The King of Sentences" opens very promisingly:

This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences—nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn’t rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences: “Esther’s cleavage is something to be noticed” or “You can’t have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture” or “I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort” or “I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed.” At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we’d rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies.

Inexplicably, it features an illustration of Jughead staring at what can only be Veronica (because I can't remember the other girl's name) in her underwear, which may or may not be emblazoned with sentences.  Must be this Brave New Archie I've been reading about at Galleycat.  Is this a snarky swipe at Lethem's professed love for comics?  You heard it here first, friends.

"Lost Highway" coming on DVD.

Someone dig up Dick Laurent; it's show time.  Lynch's Lost Highway is coming to DVD on my birthday, March 25. 

Ron Paul: Shoot to Thrill.

It's unlikely that I would ever vote for Ron Paul, Internet Superstar; but, you've got to admire the man for calling "fascist" when he sees it.  We're seeing it a lot these days; nice to see it dropped into the discourse, if only briefly. 

Also: will someone please kick that "news" "anchor" in the ballsack?  All I want for Christmas.

(via.)

"Beginners"/"What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" - a comparison.

It's rare to get such a behind-the-scenes look at the give-and-take between an editor and a writer.  Even rarer for a writer of Raymond Carver's stature; bundled with controversy around releasing Carver's original versions, and you've got an end-of-the-year firecracker.  See for yourself.

Also:

On the morning of July 8, 1980, Raymond Carver wrote an impassioned letter to Gordon Lish, his friend and editor at Alfred A. Knopf, begging his forgiveness but insisting that Lish “stop production” of Carver’s forthcoming collection of stories, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Carver had been up all night reviewing Lish’s severe editorial cuts––two stories had been slashed by nearly seventy per cent, many by almost half; many descriptions and digressions were gone; endings had been truncated or rewritten––and he was unnerved to the point of desperation. A recovering alcoholic and a fragile spirit, Carver wrote that he was “confused, tired, paranoid, and afraid.” He feared exposure before his friends, who had read many of the stories in their earlier versions. If the book went forward, he said, he feared he might never write again; if he stopped it, he feared losing Lish’s love and friendship. And he feared, above all, a return to “those dark days,” not long before, when he was broken, defeated. “I’ll tell you the truth, my very sanity is on the line here,” he wrote to Lish.

Some high stakes, there, no?  Whole article here.

Eee-yi, the ninja cry.

It's no secret that discussion of Remainder is my own special drug.  Bookninja's got my hit:

Literature has to remain frustrating – to withhold something, remain incomplete  – or it’s not literature anymore, but rather entertainment, edification or interpretation. That’s literature’s USP: staying unresolved, keeping its most vital messages unspoken, creating a zone of noise where everything and nothing is said at the same time. My books are most definitely godless, utterly atheistic. In a way, Men in Space is about confronting that absolute absence, the ellipse where there should be a full circle. Remainder, too, begins with the heavens falling to the ground. In religious, or  post-religious terms, they turn around the death of God I suppose. But there’s no ‘spirituality’ in them; that’s a word I’d never use. When people die, what they experience is not transcendence but an intimacy with matter, with the world. So Anton in Men in Space sees the ground from closer and closer: the layers of moss, the beetles in them, the specks of earth. And the drug dealer whose death the hero of Remainder re-enacts has a similar experience (the hero imagines): looking at the cigarette butt, the texture of the pavement, the letters on a cab-company’s window reflected in a puddle. These things are beautiful, and affirm the world even as it’s being taken leave of. And yes, it does have the charm of a dream; but it’s a dream of here-and-now, the here-and-now revealing what it is. That’s one hundred percent materialism: a material, not spiritual, endgame. It’s what poetry at its best gives us: Wallace Stevens, Francis Ponge – the sheer and ecstatic there-ness of existence. By the way, in neither of the passages you quote above does the character die in my opinion – although it’s left ambiguous, open to interpretation.

Kids, that's just an excerpt!

Extra credit to anyone who can identify the book referenced in that subject line - redeemable for "Condalmo Credits" of no market value.

Franzen hates shoe stores.

Just kidding.  Really inappropriate, starting another Franzen blaze, considering that he's right on the mark here:

Yes, in theory, words are words. But literature isn't data. The difference between Shakespeare on a BlackBerry and Shakespeare in the Arden Edition is like the difference between vows taken in a shoe store and vows taken in cathedral.

(via.) 

(Did you catch my subliminal reference to the Kindle?  I'm telling you, I'm on fire today.)

Inane in the membrane.

Was just sitting here, looking at the hundreds of unread feeds in Google Reader (and this, after completely flushing it out just the other day to start fresh), trying to figure out which subscriptions to cancel.  I've had a love/hate thing with Critical Mass (no link; keep reading) - they, at times, offer up interesting interviews, point out new titles that interest me.  Other times - well.

As your pal the Rake understands it, members of the NBCC were asked to participate in an "Ethics in Book Reviewing" survey.  Peep some of the responses to the litblog-centered questions from these professional book reviewers:

Should literary blogs adhere to the same rules of ethics, whatever the consensus may turn out to be on them, as newspaper book-review sections?

• I don't know what a literary blog is.
• Blogs seem to me nearly irrelevant, so unregulated are they.
• kind of an irrelevant question; so far as I can tell, no ethics apply to blogs.
• Frankly at the moment review blogs are such jokes, it doesn't really matter. It's like asking what rules apply to people's comments on Amazaon (sic)
• No, they shouldn't. Blogs are the toilet paper of reviewing -- quality varies, but none of it is worth keeping.

YPTR goes on to comment:

Do you know who litbloggers (and litblog aficionados) are, anonymous commenter?  Dedicated and passionate readers. I understand that the general perception is that bloggers are an unruly and unwashed horde, and it's true that some are more wild and dirty than others, but for the most part it's as simple as saying that litbloggers are readers.

Therefore, you've just announced, along with other likeminded colleagues, that readers do not matter, and that, in a nutshell, explains the trouble that you find yourself in.  Or, that is, the trouble in which you find yourself.

Yup.  Critical Mass: there's the door.

A good idea.

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Tardy.

Sorry for lack of content here lately.  I've been adjusting to a new work schedule, have had little time for reading/listening (studying for a licensure exam with mp3's and books, and listening also to Fogerty's new album, which let me tell you, Revival is the perfect name: if you like CCR, listen to the first track of this new album - even just the first 15 seconds - and tell me that isn't just a slice of perfection) and the feed reader is backed up to over four hundred unread posts.  Lots of interesting end-of-year goodness out there, though; people hootin' about their favorites of the year always leads to good recommendations.  The wishlist swells.

You are ready to rumble.

The 2008 Tournament of Books

Believe it or not, the Rooster of 2008 is fast approaching, and this year he is a monster, more ruthless than ever, ready to rip the guts out of 2007’s best novels to find out which one is the hardiest, the meatiest, the most delicious.

But we need your help. Please let us know by Friday, December 14th your top two (2) favorite novels from 2007 so we can make sure our readers have a voice amidst all the screams. Please note: Books must be fiction, in English, and published in 2007. Short story collections and novellas not invited.

Shoot your two (2) nominations with the subject Rooster 2008 to tob at themorningnews dot org. Thanks.

George Saunders and Bill Clinton.

Well, as you may have heard, I'm mainly a fiction writer. So I apologize in advance for my ineptitude. But to start: People like yourself and Ira Magaziner and Tom Hunter and Paul Farmer and so on—can you tell me, what's the difference between those people and other people who are just as gifted and accomplished but don't choose to go in the direction of service?

Well, I think the people who do it, do it because they feel morally obligated to do it—because they can, because they have the capacity to make a contribution, because they believe it will make a difference. Maybe because someone asked them to do it. And because they find it more rewarding than the other things they could do with their time or money. It's pretty straightforward. I don't think most people who do it consider themselves any better than anyone else… If you think you can make a difference—if you know enough to know that there are things that you can do that empower other people, so that you actually give them the opportunity to change the way things work—then you should do it. I also think it makes people happier when they do it.

Here's the rest. 

Early Christmas presents.

• The new Lit-Blog Co-Op Winter 2007 pick is online. 
• A new issue of The Quarterly Conversation is online.
• The Millions has book recommendations on the way from many notable authors/site hosts.

Me, I'm off to play outside with my four-year old on the first snowy day of the season.

More Gallant aloud.

She seems to be popping up everywhere.

This program celebrates the remarkable writer Mavis Gallant, a long-time contributor to The New Yorker. In the 1950s Canadian-born Gallant quit a steady journalism job to move to Paris and take a risk on fiction writing, with great success. The tale featured on this program, "Grippes and Poche," chronicles an epic relationship between a wily French novelist and a tax collector. It was published in Gallant's collection Overhead in a Balloon: Twelve Stories of Paris. Gallant reads her own story from the stage at Symphony Space, and the novelist Jhumpa LaHiri pays tribute to Gallant as an inspiration to the current generation of writers.

An appealing way to serve spam.

Spam turned art.