lit

Bookish stuff, including things that relate to the writing, reading or discussion of literature.

My heart wanted to stab things but didn’t have arms

6 January 2009 in lit, politics | No comments

(The title is from a poet named Tao Lin in a collection called this emotion was a little e-book).

The Internet is like a small town, especially when there’s something to disagree about. Recently, some of my favorite Internet citizens got into it over Obama’s decision to have poetry at his inauguration.

I’ve always liked George Packer, the New Yorker’s man on the ground in the early days of Iraq. I devoured his book about the first year of the occupation, The Assassins’ Gate. It tells the stories of a few Iraqis who put their necks on the line to support us when we arrived in 2003, and it comes to mind whenever a conversation turns to the need to find a way out of Iraq. I also read his blog, Interesting Times. He’s the kind of journalist who always does his homework, which made it all the more puzzling when he somewhat flippantly criticized Barack Obama’s decision to ask Elizabeth Alexander to read a poem at his inauguration:

For many decades American poetry has been a private activity, written by few people and read by few people, lacking the language, rhythm, emotion, and thought that could move large numbers of people in large public settings ... [Ed.: Ouch.] ... Obama’s Inauguration needs no heightening. It’ll be its own history, its own poetry.

Ouch. A blanket dismissal? The activity of “a few people?” I started writing a response to this, but Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic beat me to it. His blog rules. He called out Packer for being prematurely judgmental, and suggested that perhaps hip-hop lyrics were suitably rhythmic and emotive for the occasion. Yes.

Lo and behold, Packer just posted what amounts to an apology, and he does so in the best way, comparing the current poetry scene to the NBA in the 1970s:

Contemporary American poetry has too many mansions to be summed up under a throwaway phrase like “private activity.” Its multitude of schools and forms is like the N.B.A. in the nineteen-seventies, when there was no dominant team but a confused contest of warring tribes. And I should have read more of Alexander’s work than appears on her Web site, and more carefully, before expressing skepticism that she’ll be equal to the occasion on January 20th.

So, the real question is: Who will be the David Stern of 21st century American poetry? Chris Fischbach, I’m looking at you.

Hellified quotatiousness

25 November 2008 in lit, tech, web | No comments

Ever since Shaquille O’Neal left the Lakers, I’ve been more love than hate. He’s smart and charismatic in ways that are rare for a professional athlete, and of course he’s given out the League’s best nicknames — The Big Aristotle (to himself), The Truth (to Paul Pierce), The Big Fundamental (to Tim Duncan), The Big Ticket (to Kevin Garnett), and Flash (to Dwyane Wade). But now that he’s started Twittering as THE_REAL_SHAQ, I’m very firmly in the Shaq love camp. He’s quickly picked up on Twitter’s conventions, and he’s engaged a variety of fans and other folks on a variety of mundane topics. @Shaq: I feel you, my friend. Keep it up.

A selection of Twitter Shaquliciousness:

His bio, two words: “Very quotatious.”
Yesterday: “Last nite i told greg oden , ‘we r not the same, i am a martian’”
Last week: “About to go to yoga, gotta get my stretch on”

Which reminds me of another star who has a way with words: Randy Moss, who recently launched “hellified” into the everyday sports lexicon. Back in 2002, he became a permanent fixture on my refrigerator when this passage appeared in Sports Illustrated:

The perception was that [recently hired coach] Mike Tice, after one game as interim coach, was given a three-year deal last January because he convinced McCombs he could control Moss. “No,” says Moss. “Mike Tice got the job because he and Randy Moss can get along. Nobody controls me but my mama and God.”

There’s something about that quote that sticks with me. Only controlled by his mama and God. @RandyMoss: It takes a special kind of person to even think in those terms. Keep it up.

The future of reading / A reading list

29 October 2008 in basketball, ideas, lit, tech, web | 2 comments

I love reading, and I’ve been thinking a lot about how technology is affecting the way that we read now and in the future. I keep thinking about something Sven Birkerts said in a 1998 interview with Harpers: “If you touch all parts of the globe, you can’t do that and then turn around and look at your wife in the same way.” [PDF] Of course, one could be turn around and look at one’s wife in a more informed, more educated way, but that’s not the way he sees it. I share this anxiety: I love reading the New York Times on my phone, but I can’t help but sense that something will be lost if all printed matter moves in this direction.

This is the top shelf on one of our book cases. It’s comforting to have the books sitting there; they’re like a version of myself, sitting on a shelf, disassembled and re-arrangeable.

In August 1995, Harpers Magazine conducted a round table discussion with Wired’s Kevin Kelly, author Sven Birkerts, the Well’s John Perry Barlow, and Mark Slouka. The results were condensed in the magazine [PDF], and the conversation outlines the two ideologies that continue to converse today: Those who believe that the paper incarnation of the book is an irreplaceable arena for the delivery of its content, and those who don’t. Birkerts discusses the former in his 1995 book, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.

In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts sent a shot across the bow in a paper called “Reading at Risk,” [PDF]. The researchers surveyed 17,000 people, and they concluded that the future of literary reading is bleak: “Literary reading in America is not only declining rapidly among all groups, but the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young.”

Still, the total number of books sold continues to rise, so is the future really that bleak? The NEA thinks so. It released a follow-on to Reading at Risk called “To Read or Not To Read.” This study focuses on young readers, and links the decline in reading to “civic, social and economic” risks.

Last spring, Nicholas Carr discussed Google’s effect on literary reading in the Atlantic, provocatively titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid.” [I discussed this in a blog post at the Cooper Journal called “Dumb is the new smart”]. In it, he interviews a blogger who confesses the following:

“I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

The article also sparked a discussion on brittanica.com, collected in a forum called “Your Brain Online.” It’s got a lot of interesting stuff from folks like Kevin Kelly, Danny Hillis and Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, who thinks that the “unprecedented abundance” of the web will function to break the vise-grip of the “literary world” on culture:

It’s not just because of the web — no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting. This observation is no less sacrilegious for being true. The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it, but that process started long before the internet became mainstream ... The threat isn’t that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the idea of reading War and Peace.

Ursula Le Guin disputes the notion that people have ever read War and Peace. (Well, maybe.)

Self-satisfaction with the inability to remain conscious when faced with printed matter seems questionable. But I also want to question the assumption — whether gloomy or faintly gloating — that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?

The title of her recent Harper’s essay pretty well sums up her position: “Notes on the alleged decline of reading.” It roars through the various aspects of the state of reading and publishing, quickly turning into a ringing indictment of corporate publishers:

The social quality of literature is still visible in the popularity of bestsellers. Publishers get away with making boring, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere P.R. because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them.

On that social note

I was just looking at my beat-up copy of “The Dharma Bums,” and I felt a sort Chris Matthews-esque tingle. I bought it during high school at Rainy Day Books in Fairway, Kansas, and it sparked my fascination with the West Coast, years before I ever traveled here. Would I ever read it again? Probably not. In fact, just now, I could barely read even a couple of pages without feeling like Kerouac was on auto-pilot. But I like the idea that my bookshelf is a kind of externalization of myself, a collection of important influences and expressions. The future of my books appears to be not so different than the present: A combination of talismans, objects of beauty, and points of reference.

On the subject of reference, in (wait for it) a Harper’s essay called ““A Defense of the Book,” William Gass talks about the pleasures of not having the world at your fingertips:

I have rarely paged through one of my dictionaries (a decent household will have a dozen) without my eye lighting, along the way, on words more beautiful than a found fall leaf, on definitions odder than any uncle, on grotesques like gonadotropin-releasing hormone or, barely, above it — what? — gombeen — which turns out to be Irish for usury.

And holy crap, there’s a whole lot more Gass at Tunneling. Articles, links, thoughts. I love the Internet.

Futures / Literary books, small presses, & technology

27 October 2008 in ideas, lit, minneapolis, tech | No comments

Last weekend, I had an unlikely opportunity: I was invited to sit on a panel that discussed the future of small literary presses, non-profit publishing, and — in general — books that took place at Coffee House Press in Minneapolis. I love books, reading, and non-corporate media, so I jumped at the chance to talk about this stuff in public. You may ask: Why me? I have a person on the inside who knows that I like to talk.¹

My fellow panelists were a murderer’s row of publishing insight. Rick Simonson is the co-founder of Copper Canyon Press and a book buyer at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle; Richard Nash is the publisher of Soft Skull Press; Patricia Wakida runs Wasabi Press; and, Michael Coffey is the Managing Editor at Publisher’s Weekly (and the author of an excellent baseball book, 27 Men Out).

When we got started, I suspected I’d been tossed in a shark tank wearing a meat necklace. I found myself rattling on about things in my frame of reference — technology, social media, iPhones, Kindles, stuff wanting to be free — and I worried that all of it was simply chumming the waters for my fellow panelists who (a) know a lot about publishing, and (b) clearly recognized that their business models are being eroded by technologies that offer new ways to read (i.e., everything with a screen) and supply chain disintermediation, i.e. Amazon.

Side note: The weather was beautiful

Whenever I take a picture of him, Fish (i.e., Chris Fischbach of Coffee House) tells me: “I better not see this on the Internet.” But I just had to take this one while he and Katie (of Graywolf and New York Times fame) took me on an excellent walk along the Mississippi just before winter arrived.

As it turned out, we had a series of productive conversations. My colleagues and the audience were keen to know about how companies go about determining the right way to conceive technological products, and to implement them appropriately. Meanwhile, I learned a lot about small presses, publishing, and the ways that editors at literary presses think about their work. Allan Kornblum, the founder of Coffee House Press, saw himself as “the inheritor of the Maxwell Perkins tradition” in creating deep and lasting relationships with artists, supporting them and providing a consistent venue for publication. Fish said that he wanted “to create art objects that last.” Both of those goals make a lot of sense to me, and they seem like a firm foundation for a business in transition.

So, what is the future of reading, anyway?

I’m going to put together another post about my thoughts on this topic, and in the meantime I’m going to be digesting some of the work that my fellow panelists referenced during our discussions; this list includes Ursula Le Guin’s “Notes on the alleged decline of reading” that I saw in Patricia’s pile of notes; Michael mentioned Bill McKibben’s new book, Deep Economy in making a comparison between regional literature and a larger movement toward regional and local economies; Richard spoke a couple of times about literary subscription programs, such as Soft Skull’s annual edition, and Powell’s indiespensable list.

¹ I was there because my friend Fish (the senior editor at Coffee House Press) thought that my experience with technology and online product strategy would complement the deep expertise of the small press luminaries on the panel. Or perhaps he just wanted to see what happened when I said the words “Kindle” and “free” around Michael Coffey. In the end, there would be no way of knowing.

Haruki Murakami / The act of passing through

30 September 2008 in lit, reviews | 2 comments

I’ve always loved Haruki Murakami. I share his tastes in music — Miles Davis, the Rolling Stones — and I’m easily taken in by his smoky bars, rainy nights, noir pacing, puzzling plot twists, and spare, reserved prose. His books are filled with cool, crisply imagined situations that are eerily layered with shadows and mystery, and that shift subtly between reality and surreality, between the natural and the supernatural.

Recently, it was revealed that he is a runner, like me, when he released a book of ruminations on running and its effects on his life and writing. It’s called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and it is easily in my personal tops of the pops for 2008.

There was something about his writing that struck a deep chord with me, but the nature of it was not revealed until he described a specific moment of “passing through” during an ultra-marathon. People talk about “hitting the wall,” but, in my experience, running is about hitting many walls, and somehow emerging on the other side.

... Around the 47th mile I felt like I’d passed through something. That’s what it felt like. Passed through is the only way I can express it. Like my body has passed clean through a stone wall. At what exact point I felt like I’d made it through, I can’t recall, but suddenly I noticed I was on the other side. I don’t know about the logic or the process or the method involved — I was simply convinced of the reality that I’d passed through.

Once I read that, I started to remember other moments in Murakami books, moments that all of a sudden seemed to spring from his running experience. For instance, there’s a scene in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle when Boku descends into a well to try to pass through its stone wall to find his missing wife, Kumiko, in a room on the other side of the wall:

I try to separate from myself ... I try to get out of the clumsy flesh of mine, which is crouching here in the dark. Now I am nothing but a vacant house, an abandoned well. I try to go outside, to change vehicles, to leap from one reality to another that moves at a different speed.

Now a single wall is the only thing separating me from the strange room. I ought to be able to pass through that wall. I should be able to do that with my own strength and with the power of deep darkness in here.

Later, he breaks through.

All of a sudden, I was asleep, as if I had been walking down a corridor with nothing particular on my mind when, without warning, I was dragged into an unknown room. How long this thick, mudlike stupor enveloped me I had no idea. It couldn’t have been very long. It might have been just a moment. But when some kind of presence brought me back to consciousness, I knew I was in another darkness.

That sense of being changed “without warning” is so recognizable; I feel like I’ve been on long runs in which I’m transported suddenly, through time, and dropped somewhere else. And the part about “another darkness” reminded me of After Dark, when Eri Asai has somehow passed from an actual bed to a bed on a TV screen that faces the actual bed, a similar situation in which the rules were somehow totally different:

In the bed in that other world, Eri continues sleeping soundly, as she did when she was in this room — just as beautifully, just as deeply. She is not aware that some hand has carried her (or perhaps we should say her body) into the TV screen. The blinding glare of the ceiling’s fluorescent lamps does not penetrate to the bottom of the sea trench in which she sleeps.

All of these make more sense now. It’s all about breaking through, about transcending something that is both physical and mental, even spiritual.

I also loved Murakami’s running mantra: “I’m not a human. I’m a piece of machinery. I don’t need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead.” It reminded me of my own mantra, which is the final verse of Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues:

Well, if they freed me from this prison,
If that railroad train was mine,
I bet I’d move it on a little,
Farther down the line,
Far from Folsom Prison,
That’s where I want to stay,
And I’d let that lonesome whistle,
Blow my Blues away.

Running: It’s all about pain, machines, escape, and breaking through walls.

Research / East Baltimore police narratives

4 May 2008 in ixd, lit, reviews, urban | 1 comment

Last week I picked up a book called Cop in the Hood by a grad student turned cop (turned academic) named Peter Moskos. He's a ~~law professor~~ now [UPDATE: Oops. He's actually an "assistant professor of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration." My bad], but he spent a year policing East Baltimore during his PhD work and wrote a part sociological analysis, part police procedural about his experience.

If The Wire had a literary analog, this would be it, not only because it takes place in East Baltimore, but because it presents a morally complex view of the relationship between law enforcement and the citizenry with whom they interact (mostly poor people in desperate circumstances). It also adds academic underpinnings and a truly excellent set of footnotes that provide avenues to a variety of interesting sources, one of which led me to one of my all-time favorite New Yorker articles, a 1998 installment of the Cop Diary called "The Word on the Street" about the language of NYC cops. The author, the pseudonymous Marcus Laffey (actual name: Edward Conlon) recently wrote a memoir called Blue Blood, which is going on the list for sure.

I really appreciated his discussion of research methods because it puts in high relief some of the challenges that any researcher (e.g., one who is trying to understand how people use high-tech tools) interacts with their interview subjects. So much of it is very un-objective, and Moskos addresses his skeptics early on:

Some will criticize my unscientific methods. I have no real defense. Everything is true, but this book suffers from all the flaws inherent in ethnographic work ... Being on the inside, I made little attempt to be objective. I did not pick, much less randomly pick, my research site or research subjects. I researched where I was assigned. To those I policed, I tried to be fair. But my empathy was to my fellow officers. Those nearest to me became my friends and research subjects. My theories emerged from experience, knowledge, and understanding. In academic jargon, my work could be called "front-and-backstage, multisited, participant-observation research using grounded theory rooted in symbolic interactionism from a dramaturgical perspective.

You can read more in an excerpt here [PDF], and he’s got a blog that discusses media coverage of the book here.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s family polaroids

4 May 2008 in cinema, lit, visual | No comments

Back when the Berkeley Public Library was the hub of my social universe, I spent a lot of time in its video room — in the mid-90’s, it occupied a little corner of the basement — working my way through its extensive collection of foreign VHS movies. I had plenty of time on my hands, (also, no money), and I quickly exhausted the canon — Metropolis, The Seven Sumarai, Jules & Jim, Breathless and a lot of Godard. At some desperate point, I explored what were to me, at the time, the margins — Fassbinder, Jacques Tati, Andrei Tarkovsky, all of which were astounding, like gold, but Tarkovsky was the most revelatory. The library had Solaris, Nostalghia and Stalker, all of which twisted my noodle with their bizzare, dream-like, surreal sequences.

I just discovered that Thames & Hudson has published a stunning collection of Tarkovsky’s polaroids, taken of his family and travels. The Guardian displays of number of them here.

Andrei Tarkovsky - polaroid - Procession

Lots more at this blog. In Russian, too. Nice.

Books / Pelican covers

16 April 2008 in inside art, lit, visual, web | 1 comment

things magazine has amassed an incredible index of Pelican book covers from the 1930s through the 80s. The one above is from 1968. Check it.

William F. Buckley was the Wizard of Oz

15 March 2008 in lit | No comments

Dick Cavett has a blog called Talk Show at the New York Times, and he has recently written two [1, 2] hilarious entries about his friendship with William F. Buckley. The most recent includes an excellent story about Buckley’s love of practical jokes, one of which I’ll paste in its entirety right here:

Dick Clurman of Time magazine, an affable gent, was a guest on the Buckley yacht in the Caribbean. After dinner, Bill B., leafing through a TV log, announced that “The Wizard of Oz” would be starting in half an hour — in English, broadcast from Puerto Rico. Clurman was delighted and confessed to never having seen it.

At the appointed time the set was switched on, but to everyone’s chagrin it seemed the movie had already been on for a good half hour. Bill had read the starting time wrong. Clurman’s disappointment was visible.

“Let’s see if my name cuts any ice down here,” his host said. The incredulous Clurman later described how his friend grabbed the phone, rang up the station in Puerto Rico, managed to get through to the engineer, explained his guest’s disappointment, and asked if it would be too much trouble to start the movie over!

In disbelief, Clurman saw the screen go blank, followed by a frantic display of jumbling and flashing. And then — the opening credits and the comforting strains of “Over the Rainbow.” The movie began anew. Clurman declared that never until then had he known the full meaning of “chutzpah.”

I think Bill decided to let a year go by, giving Clurman time to regale all his friends and acquaintances with the tale of the Oz miracle. It was then, still reluctantly, that the magician revealed his secret. The movie had not been broadcast at all that night — except on Bill’s tape deck, which he had secretly manipulated with his unseen left arm while “talking on the phone” using the other.

Given Buckley’s love of literature, I would wager that the choice of movie was yet another layer of the joke. Right? The wizard seems by all accounts to be supernatural, but is in fact quite human, making the “magic” happen by pulling hidden levers and turning secret knobs?

Read the rest here.

Impactful

19 January 2008 in lit, tip | No comments

It’s not a word, but lots of people like to use it as if it were. Over the past few years, I’ve heard it more and more often, but today was the first day I’ve ever seen it in the mainstream media. Hmmm.

Is there something deficient about “influential” or “resonant?” What about affecting, authoritative, controlling, dominant, effective, efficacious, forcible, governing, guiding, important, impressive, inspiring, instrumental, leading, meaningful, momentous, moving, persuasive, potent, prominent, significant, strong, substantial, telling, touching, weighty, beating, booming, deep, electrifying, enhanced, full, intensified, loud, mellow, noisy, orotund, plangent, powerful, profound, pulsating, pulsing, resounding, reverberant, reverberating, rich, ringing, roaring, round, sonorant, sonorous, stentorian, strident, thrilling, throbbing, thundering, or thunderous?

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