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1) t table.
2) Typepad Mobile: overrated. (I have no idea how it's rated, but regardless, it's overrated.)
3) The Geeks will have TDC for at least another week, making posting here incredibly tedious and link-free. Everyone else is hard at work, though, lots of good stuff in the updates sidebar. And then there's Garfield Without Garfield.
I'll bet I screwed that subject up in some way. Regardless, with this brief window of internetconnectivity, I'd like to arrive late to the party (iTunes was on The Dead Computer) and point you to T.C. Boyle's reading of/conversation about T. Wolff's Bullet in the Brain. Someone tell me if it's any good, because the Geek Squad hasn't got their highway robbery hands on T.D. Computer yet. Blue corn chips are the tops, by the way.
Finally, something made me laugh. Or somethings. Just keep refreshing the pages. (via)
"I am a little worn out, raddled, squashed, downtrodden, shot full of holes. Mortars have mortared me to bits. I am a little crumbly, decaying, yes, yes. I am sinking and drying up a little. I am a bit scalded and scorched, yes, yes. That's what it does to you. That's life." Robert Walser, "Nervous"
Yeah. Car troubles, dead computer, sick kids, battling with my insurance company, trying to make ten cents out of five. Even the good news of the week came bitterly. Not the most conducive week for "The Reader." Book one was interesting enough, if not especially original; a teenage boy falls into love/lust with a woman in her thirties, they have a lot of sex, he does whatever she says, and then one day she vanishes. He looks for her, but no dice.
When part two starts, a few years later, we learn that she's been working - as a guard? - at a concentration camp. I went from carving out a few minutes every day for reading to not reading at all. I don't know, I just completely lost interest. Picked it up again this morning - I know I'm in a funk, and don't want to just reject it if a little patience will pay off - but this sealed the deal: "The other main charge involved the night of the bombing that ended everything. The troops and guards had locked the prisoners, several hundred women, in a church in a village that had been abandoned by most of its inhabitants. Only a few bombs fell, possibly intended for the nearby railroad or a factory, or maybe simply released because they were left over from a raid n a larger town. One of them hit the priest's house in which the troops and guards were sleeping. Another landed on the church steeple. First the steeple burned, then the roof; then the blazing rafters collapsed into the nave, and the pews caught fire. The heavy doors were unbudgeable. The defendants could have unlocked them. They did not, and the women locked in the church burned to death." (p. 107) OK, fine for now, thanks! I'm not looking for Schlink to blow sunshine and bubbles up my butt, but I think I'll pass on The Holocaust being my escape from difficult times.
The Interloper v. The Governator (excerpt):
Me: Hey Arnold, what’s they deal with supporting the toll road?
Arnold: What?
We at Condalmo fully support writers taking an active role in politics.
The contenders have been announced for this year's Tournament of Books. Longtime Condalmo readers
will remember the great run Ms. Stinson and I had last year. No pool this year, but never mind that: here's the list, with excerpts and, in keeping with tradition, some wildly-varying-in-levels-of-informedness predictions and comments. The links to the books are through the tournament host, The Morning News, who are again partnering with Powell's to get you these books at a deep discount. Never a better time, etc.
Run by Ann Patchett (excerpt) Could go all the way in a lesser field, but this year's got a lot of big hitters. Dark horse.
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (excerpt) Old people having sex. Or trying. Next!
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (excerpt) If Tobias Wolff had written this, the show would already be over. I've seen pretty mixed reviews from this, from genius all the way to overhyped windbagging. It's a contender in the same way the Chicago Bears' "Refridgerator" Perry was a contender to get the ball and run all the way for a touchdown - could happen, but that's a lot of cellulite to carry that far.
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris (excerpt) This was a pretty kick-ass book, and it's overdue to win an award. Ferris might just be the one to actually accept receipt of a live rooster. Should he progress in the bracketts, I may be tempted to dig out the "lost interview" I did with him, also known as "what the fuck am I doing interviewing people, this is ridiculous and vapid" - entirely my fault, he was kind throughout, and it does feature some interesting casting of literary heavyweights in the "movie version" we discussed.
Petropolis by Anya Ulinich (excerpt) I can't say I went past the first page of search results trying to find an excerpt, but there's probably one out there. I am completely unwilling to make a prediction on this one.
Ovenman by Jeff Parker (excerpt) I know people like the literary/humor books to go a ways, but this doesn't really bode well: "Skateboarder, punk rocker, kitchen slave, and general ne'er-do-well with a slightly tarnished heart of gold, When Thinfinger tries mightily to survive a seemingly endless round of troubles in small-town Florida. After getting fired from his job at the Barbie-Q, he lands a gig at the hippest pizza joint in town, where he soon becomes the leader of a disheveled crew."
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. (excerpt) What to say, except likely to go to the final round.
You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem (excerpt) And if not, this book isn't the one to change your mind. Sorry, Jon!
New England White by Stephen L. Carter (audio excerpt) Who? What?
Remainder by Tom McCarthy (excerpt) Number one with a bullet. I'll be watching this one closely.
The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins (excerpt) Like with the Patchett entry, this could go either way. Unrelated: I think "Shadows in the Mirror" is one of Chris Isaak's best songs, and suggestive of some past trauma.
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño (excerpt) If it wins, I'll finally get around to pulling it from the shelf and reading it. A heavyweight contender.
Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (excerpt) You know, I think this one's got legs. The excerpt is from Five Chapters, and I liked it quite a bit.
Shining at the Bottom of the Sea by Stephen Marche (excerpt) A Cloud Atlas type contender. I'll explain that if you ask. I know you won't ask.
What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman (excerpt) The Uses of Enchantment without the Julavits name recognition? I haven't read it, but I don't think this one will fare too well, unless it gets lucky in the matchups (meaning, "what the dead know" is that reading about old people sex is no good, it spells bad news)
An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England by Brock Clarke (excerpt) Starts off with a fantastic title; first part of the book, good stuff - then gets weighed down with a lot of bloviating around meaning - and the end, man, the end. Like getting an ice cream cone and the sweet, delicious cream is good, maybe a little bit freezer-burned, but the cone's a bit on the stale side, and then there's a severed finger at the bottom, under the ice cream.
Anything the editors missed here from the books of 2007? Well, obviously, but this is me asking you. Don't get smart with me, you young whippersnappers, I was in this coffee shop when you were crapping in your diapers.
Can I just start by noting that I'm the oldest person in this coffee shop? I'm about twice as old as everyone here. Got to get that computer fixed.
Probably more red herrings, but NYRB gets the nod in tomorrow night's episode of Lost:
This little book—written by Jorge Louis Borges's some-time collaborator—takes its inspiration from H.G. Wells's Island of Doctor Moreau, mixes it with the author's adoration of the silent-movie star Louise Brooks, and went on to inspire Robbe-Grillet and Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (and probably countless film-theorists). It should be of interest to anyone fascinated by the ubiquity of media and mediated images in modern daily life, or anyone who likes an impossible love story.
An escapee is marooned on a formerly inhabited island. He believes he's alone until he spots the presence of a group of vacationers, dressed in resort clothing from another time. But try as he might, they just won't take notice of him. Here is his first description of "the intruders":
From the marshlands with their churning waters I can see the top of the hill, and the people who have taken up residence in the museum. I suppose someone might attribute their mysterious appearance to the effect of last night’s heat on my brain. But there are no hallucinations or imaginings here: I know these people are real—at least as real as I am.
The fact that their clothes are from another era indicates that they are a group of eccentrics; but I have known many people who use such devices to capture the magic of the past.
I watch them unwaveringly, constantly, with the eyes of a man who has been condemned to death. They are dancing on the grassy hillside as I write, unmindful of the snakes at their feet. They are my unconscious enemies who, as they corner me against the sea in the disease-infested marshes, deprive me of everything I need, everything I must have if I am to go on living. The sound of their very loud phonograph—“Tea for Two” and “Valencia” are their favorite records—seems now to be permanently superimposed on the wind and the sea.
Perhaps watching them is a dangerous pastime: like every group of civilized men they no doubt have a network of consular establishments and a file of fingerprints that can send me, after the necessary ceremonies or conferences have been held, to jail.
The site has a clip from the show. Sawyer gets a lot of time to read, doesn't he?
Posting here will be light, as the computer has gone belly up - a corrupt Windows system file. I'll still be checking mail, though, and the updates bar on the side will continue to point you to good reading.
Did it ever occur to you that the simple phrase "Be My Sweetheart" (hereafter referred to as B.M.S.) has been occluded by the desalinization of love, or rather the concept of love, which has been transmuted into an ironic declaration of faux-sentiment for the benefit of self-fulfillment of sheeplike masses (SLM) with the endless Hollywoodization and crass consumer-mongering of the media buoyed by the post-Christmas holiday onslaught of sales-driven shelf-filling multinational retail conglomerates intent on upping the ante on first-quarter revenue?1
The Blog of Disquiet has a new participant. Compliments not necessary for participation, but you won't get the free Pessoa Trucker Cap from CafePress if you don't show a little bit of love.
I'm glad Bookninja is back online. Who else would share this?
Reviewing her first novel in 2006, Ryan Bigge, a freelance writer, wrote that The Continuity Girl “illuminates the limitations of my thesaurus. Uber-lousy? Fifth-rate? Super-bad? … Even the German word SaumassigeSchreibmaschiene, which roughly translates into ‘putrid garbage typewriter prose,’ fails to convey the stench of this slush pile.”
Once I figure out how to say it, I'm using it in every conversation I have. T-shirt, anyone?
Soft Skull is publishing the next Get Your War On book.
Pete Lit is doing a series.
If, like me, you cannot stomach the glossy "today's country" of CMT, it's possible that you are unaware of this show (airing tomorrow on the television; airing here, tonight: thanks, internets!) - Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, performing live. The interface is terrible, and there doesn't seem to be any way to embed it, but you are largely spared the ten-gallon redneck "patriotism" that you'd have to swallow while watching on the network.
Above: camera-phone picture of my local caucus, just before speechifying commenced.
Town Hall was mobbed. All the town halls were mobbed. Speeches for the candidates fell along predictable lines; Clinton supporters essentially highlighted her work in the Senate, her accomplishments there, her understanding of Washington. Canned; wooden. Obama speech-makers were fairly passionate, talking about how they felt that someone like this only comes along once in a great while, and while Clinton is a strong candidate, Obama inspires people. They pointed out that he's more likely to win independent voters than Clinton; they pointed out her polarizing nature; little was said about his policy plans. My elder daughter sang "Obama, Obama, I love ya, Obama" (we watch Annie a lot these days) and was called a Future Democrat six times.
Here's a map of the results. The many towns for Obama are in blue. The town - sorry, towns - for Clinton are in pink. (?) Purple towns were tied.
"I actually trusted him."
(from "Powder" - originally published in The New York Times Magazine, collected in The Night in Question, re-collected for the forthcoming Our Story Begins, by Mr. Tobias Wolff.)
Amitava Kumar has a Lydia Davis story online to note her beginning a three week residency at Vassar.
Tours of the library are available from 10-5 PDT, until the writers' strike is over. Proposed borrowing of book(s) will result in abrupt cessation of tour and re-direction to DVD closet or boxes of wife's books in the garage.
I would like to purchase this book, but will not decline it offered as a gift:
André Kertész (1894-1985) was one of the most inventive, influential, and prolific photographers in the medium's history. This small volume, first published in 1971, became one of his signature works. Taken between 1920 and 1970, these photographs capture people reading in many parts of the world. Readers in every conceivable place—on rooftops,
in public parks, on crowded streets, waiting in the wings of the school play—are caught in a deeply personal, yet universal, moment. Kertész's images celebrate the absorptive power and pleasure of this solitary activity and speak to readers everywhere. Fans of photography and literature alike will welcome this reissue of this classic work that has long been out of print. 68 duotone photographs.
I will be attending this show:
This exhibition celebrates a series of 104 photographs made by internationally renowned photographer André Kertész (1894–1985). Taken in Hungary, France, and the United States over a 50-year period, Kertész's photographs illustrate his love of the poetry and choreography of life in public and also private moments at home, tapping the power of reading as a universal pleasure. Sturdily balanced between geometric composition and playful observation, it is easy to understand how these glimpses of everyday people and places would come to heavily influence photography as an art form.
(via.)
If you were looking to find something new from the NBCC's winter list, best look elsewhere. Six hundred literary luminaries might not be wrong, but you're either not the sort of person that would ever want to read any of these fiction titles, or you've already heard about them ad infinitum elsewhere. If Critical Mass is the only site you subscribe to - which often seems to be assumed by the editors - then you're fine, good list, go forth and read.
I'll take a swing; from my forthcoming (elsewhere) review of Yannick Murphy's Signed, Mata Hari:
Murphy's decision to tell the story of a life, instead of a story of espionage, could have quickly sunk into Harlequin dramatics. She edges awfully close at some points - a storm ripping the leaves from cocoa plants outside, while inside Mata Hari makes love to the white doctor who saved her life; an attempt to kidnap back her daughter from MacLeod, who has kept her hidden away, goes wrong when the daughter walks right by her mother and isn't recognized. The difference is that Murphy in such a way as to leave it open to interpretation; the novel could easily satisfy the romance crowd, but as story progresses, the reader is free to read into recurring themes and images. As she explained in an interview at The Bat Segundo Show, this was intentional; she had certain elements that she wanted to work into the story, but not to the point of cramming symbolic meaning down the reader's throat. At the beginning of the novel, she recounts an experience in childhood:
I CHEATED DEATH. I walked across the sea. When the tide was low I went over the furrowed sandbanks in my small bare feet. I skipped school one day and traveled to an island near my home called Ameland. I had heard stories, every child who lived in the Netherlands knew the stories, about the mud like quicksand and about the water like a great gray wall when the tide came in and how it could catch you and knock you down and pour into your mouth and drown you so that you couldn't ever return, no matter how hard you tried to climb out of the mud like quicksand and over the great gray wall. But I returned...
I found mother dead in the kitchen. The white flour was on her apron. It was up her arms. It was between the laces of her boots. It was in her mouth. The doctor said she died from an infection in her lungs. I thought she died from breathing in the flour. From the inside out, it turned her into a ghost. I never went into that kitchen again. The kitchen can kill you, I thought. I closed my eyes and was walking across the sea. Each time I remembered it, it was as if I were more there than the first time. I noticed more things. The white sand crabs burrowing beside my feet. The water coming in, the bubbles springing up from beneath me, filling in between my toes, creeping up the hem of my silk skirt.
...It's an excellent book; Murphy is bold. Where did I learn about it?
The "rest" may be "noise," but I prefer noise to homogeneity; this NBCC selection amounts to little more than old news.
An audio reminder to do your part on Tuesday, and I promise, the last politics-related post for a while.
As soon as a literary agent has sold a publisher a book, and even before it’s edited, copy-edited, proofread and indexed, the publicity wheels start turning. While writers bite their nails, the book editor tries to persuade the in-house sales representatives to get excited about the book, the sales representatives try to persuade retail buyers to get excited, and the retail buyers decide how many copies to buy and whether to feature the book in a prominent front-of-the-store display, for which publishers pay dearly. In the meantime, the publisher’s publicity department tries to persuade magazine editors and television producers to feature the book or its author around the publication date, often giving elaborate lunches and parties months in advance to drum up interest...
...once a book hits the market, the product has to move. “For all the weeks and months that go into the gestation of the book, we’re up against the so-called lettuce test once we get into the stores,” Kirshbaum said. “If we don’t get sales fast, the book wilts.”
I don’t usually read short story collections consecutively, so all the thought that goes into how to order stories goes to waste on me. Most of the time I decide to read the shortest story in a collection first and then I jump around.
(This is the "tutti-frutti" approach, endorsed by Steve Almond.)
One thing someone said that made sense is that there usually is a personal and emotional order to an author’s short stories that mean something to the writer, but doesn’t resonate with a reader. Ultimately, does it matter what order short stories appear in a book collection?
Depends on who takes the "tutti-frutti" approach (does Rudy?) and who follows the order presented by the book. I don't know: does the author usually choose the order, or does the editor/publisher? If the author, then it certainly matters.
When you buy an album, do you listen starting with track one through until the end?
I miss Ed's Roundups.
My own roundups, the links I think you should see but just don't make the cut for their own posts - I'm trying to be more diligent about putting them in the "Updates from other Sites" section of my sidebar, down there on the right. That's where I just placed a link to a new short story by AL Kennedy that just hit the streets a few minutes ago. The story is called "Saturday Teatime."
From the always interesting BibliOdyssey. Click on the picture to see detail.
Been a while since I did anything Haruki Murakami related, but like the stirring of a vastly disappointing CGI monster, well, here's a Murakami post. (I think I just insulted myself.)
Those who enjoy mocking blogs and insisting on their irrelevance: here's an interview from a magazine in another country, in another language, that this blogger has taken the time to translate and post. A lengthy interview with an author who doesn't usually sit for long interviews. Credit where credit is due. (speaking of which: via Three Percent.)
Is "spokenword" a word? Regardless:
Amazon has increased its presence in the spokenword audio market, announcing this morning that it has agreed to acquire Audible, Inc. the country’s largest provider of digital downloads of spokenword audio. Amazon is paying $11.50 per share and assuming Audible’s outstanding stock-based awards, making the value of the deal about $300 million. Audible’s stock price was at $9.33 the day before that deal was announced, although its shares were selling at a 52-week high of $14.22 in November. The purchase is expected to close in the second quarter...
Founded by Don Katz, Audible has 160 employees and is based in Newark, N.J. It has about 80,000 audio programs comprising almost 200,000 hours, and is the exclusive distributor of spokenword audio to iTunes, owned by one of Amazon’s competitors, Apple. One issue that will need to be addressed is DRM. Audible sells all of its content with DRM protection, while Amazon has begun offering digital downloads of music without DRM.
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