It's like bullet point rock, except quieter, but with a big yelling climax

A few quick things:

• Looking for a book? Don't have time to wait for the next TDAOC recommendation? You might try giving this site a shot. (Via The Elegant Variation.)


• Think literature in America is dying? Move to Russia. (Via Bookslut.)


• Just finished Sarah Willis's The Sound of Us. A damn fine read, if I do say so myself. (Though I'll admit to liking Some Things That Stay more.) Further proof that there's more going on in this town than beer, sports, and mayoral races. (Please, Cleveland: vote for someone who rocks.)

And a reminder! In big all caps! TIM O'BRIEN!

Should I repeat myself?

Okay, I will.

TIM O'BRIEN!

76 brief views of Cleveland: #11

They say fall's coming on, but I don't believe 'em. Fall doesn't come on, here. Fall dashes in one week while you're sleeping, checks out the contents of your fridge, grabs a handful of candy and spare change from the kitchen counter, screws up your toilet's flap valve, and runs back out the door, hardly disturbing the sheets on the bed in the guestroom before winter comes in to dampen the carpet inside the door.

It's like that, today. A confused flurry. I'm driving home from the dentist's with a mouthful of gauze and a memory of some bit of tooth going crack. I'd much rather leave that sound behind. I missed the turn onto Clague thinking of it, so now I'm stuck on Center Ridge until I find that other on-ramp, which is up there, somewhere, usually is, when I remember to turn the way that makes no sense.

It rained the night before and it rained a lot during the day, tapering off to drizzles, taking last night's potent burst of muggy heat with it, the air cooling and the wind stirring up, like the air's got some place to be but can't find the direction, not just yet.

Before they did the thing with the yanking, we three--the soft spoken dentist, the perky assistant, and the moron who screwed up--looked out the window and said, "Yeah, looks like the storm's moving on," and I believed it, so it was a shock when I drove out of the parking lot smack into a wall of clouds, dark. They weren't raining. They didn't have to. All muscle, no punch.

And somewhere in there, the setting sun behind me reflects off an orange construction sign. (Was that on the highway? Back on Center Ridge? Or was it down Clague, down where I'd never have seen, where the sun wouldn't have reached? I'm as confused as the wind.) And for a minute, it's like a splash of color inside a black and white photo; the starkness the sharpest line in the world, the crack inside the mouth of the city. A work in progress, the season coming apart.

(In loose response to)

Let's go start a bonfire, it's Banned Books Week

Oh yeah, by the by: it's Banned Books Week.

So go celebrate, for cryin' out loud. Go read The Chocolate War. When I was younger, that book completely fucked my head. Like, the same way 1984 did. Like, a piledriver of mental pain.

People who would prevent such experiences? I have unkind words for them.

I think the vicodin is kicking in

Here's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to put a few things out there for you to look over, and then we'll reconvene at the end of the list. Alright? Alright.

1. Joss Whedon.


2. Neil Gaiman.


3. Being interviewed.


4. Together.

Back? Alright. Here's the kicker: if you found yourself squealing in disarmingly highly pitched tones of voice at least three times while perusing the above list, then chances are, you're sort of like me, which makes you a huge dork.

Which means you pretty much have to go ahead and click this link. (Via Bookslut.)

I bet there's a connection between these two paragraphs, and I bet it has something to do with the television timesink Lost

If you're into list making, and you're also into literature, and you're also into debating the nature of "importance" in works of art, then by golly, Rake's Progress has got your hook-up.

And in other news, I'm getting a wisdom tooth yanked out Monday evening, so if you see any posts around these parts that are even less intelligent than the current norm, let's just blame the vicodin in advance, yes?

Tim O'Brien comes to Cleveland (Update)

I mentioned last week that Tim O'Brien will be in Cleveland next week. Turns out you have two chances to see him in person--Wednesday at the Cleveland Public main branch, or Saturday afternoon at the Fairview Park Regional (both being rather fantastic looking buildings, by the by). So if you can't make one, make the other. Or, if you're like me, see if you can't collect the whole set!

(Thanks to Jill Miller Zimon at Writes Like She Talks for the tip!)

All I'm gonna say...

...is that this is gonna set off my Google Alert on "jonathan franzen" like all crazy.

The TBR pile beckons, doth grow

Well, okay, maybe I can flurry it up as much as possible by pointing out that The Onion A.V. Club, which posts book reviews along with reviews of everything else on the planet, got me pulling out my library card faster than you can say "Interlibrary loan requests? Damn you, Cleveland, and your superior library infrastructure! I curse ye! I CURSE YE!"

The first was pointed out by Conversational Reading and is for The Method Actors by Carl Shuker. "Fizzy dreams and fuzzy anxieties" you say? Are you sure we're not talking about some long-lost Curve b-sides? Either way, I'm there, no doubt.

The second review, for a reason or two, then snagged my attention and proceeded to throttle it. This one's for Fallen by David Maine. "Mining the book of Genesis for material" you say? Are you sure we're not talking about some long-lost Godspeed You! Black Emperor remixes? Either way, I'm there, no doubt; not to mention I'll probably pick up his first book, too (The Preservationist).

Then for bonus points, they talk about Kurt Vonnegut's new essay collection, A Man Without a Country. "A series of quirky, highly quotable, almost non-sequitorial thoughts" you say? Did you get a hold of the new Fiery Furnaces album before it came out? You bastard.

I got nothin', not even a funny post title

While lately I seem to go on a posting flurry once a week, usually on Wednesdays and/or Thursdays, I don't think that's going to happen so much right now. Things are sad, I'm totally distracted, nothing's really getting done and everything's kind of just there. So, you know, feel free to go read some other litblogs and report in with your exciting findings. Here's a few snippets worth a few minutes:

• The Reading Experience on paper versus plastic...er, blogging versus publishing.


• My girlfriend digs Rick Moody. I tried to read Purple America once and got fed up midway through. Or a quarter way through. Something. But that was back in the dark time between college and this year, when the reading circuits in my brain were kind of turned off. But I'm going to try to read the book again before the end of this year, before I go back into shut-down mode (which I hope doesn't happen), even though Rick Moody is an old fogey. (Darby, repeat after yourself: never give up the rock.)


• I always get a bit excited when someone drops an unexpected mention of The Catherine Wheel--as if it's going to lead to a reunion and the creation of the follow-up album to the classic Wishville. (It ain't gonna happen, but a boy can dream.) So of course I smiled when Gwenda Bond mentioned at Shaken & Stirred the new Rob Dickinson solo effort. (And while you're over there, check out the new design. Yeah, sure, I clean my place up, and suddenly everyone's gotta go and raise the blog-block property value on me again. I'm totally going to get kicked out of the Subdivision Blogowners Association that I'm not actually in anyways, I just know it.)


• I'm pretty sure this is exactly the way it happened.


• And finally, Those Litblog Co-Op mofos are recommending more books than you could read if someone were shaking a stick at you.

Tim O'Brien at the Cleveland Public Library

Tim O'Brien is coming to Cleveland! Yeah, great. Now I've got like a week to somehow locate my copy of The Things They Carried somewhere in my apartment and re-read it. Just freakin' swell.

Author Visit: Tim O'Brien

As part of the "Literature to Life" performance program, Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried, joins us September 28th at 7:00 p.m. at the Cleveland Public Library - Main Library.

Who's awesome? Yeah, that's right. Cleveland's awesome.

Come to think of it, someone did take someone's neighbor on a joyride in that book, didn't they? Maybe? Or maybe not, whatever

This article right here (which was pointed out by The Reading Experience) makes me want to throw down everything I'm holding in my brain right now and go spend the next week re-reading Dhalgren by Samuel Delany. Because that book kind of blew my mind in the quietest way possible, and is one of many books that I'm sure would only benefit from a second reading. Proust? Joyce? Faulkner? Fuck that shit--Pabst Blue Delaney!

And yes, I totally made up that phrase, and yes, if it means anything pertinent, it's by total accident

Those wacky cultural zeitgeist sharpshooters at the LitBlog Co-op have nominated their Fall 05 Read This! selection. Stay tuned; sounds like they have all sorts of stuff planned for the next couple weeks or so. Hopefully some of it will inspire impassioned debate and deft rhetoric, cuz so far, nobody's condemned the choice yet (that I know of), and man, I gots to have my heaping helping of deft rhetoric.

Now are we talking complicated-boy-girl-relationships messy, or are we talking oh-my-god-the-bachelor's-bathroom messy...

Aimee Bender says it and Rake's Progress points it out and then Conversational Reading riffs on it: Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is sort of a mess.

To which I'll add: well, yeah. Hell yeah!

But (if I may disagree a bit with a superior blogger, whose blog is a well-shaped perfect pebble to my own random scrunch of scattered dirt-clumps of a blog, and if I may voice my disagreement over here in the safe warm confines of my own basically non-existent corner of the internet) I don't think of this book so much as (as Conv. Reading puts it) "huge and unwieldy" in the sense that "Maybe toward the end this one got away from Murakami a little". I think, rather, that there's a definite shape to the novel. Of sorts, possibly. I don't think anything here is really accidental, or at least there's nothing more accidental than happens in any novel. The novel certainly feels like it veers toward chaos...but, I think it's an...artfully contained chaos, perhaps? Maybe? If there's such a thing as a to-be-read pile for already-read books, this one's right up there; I'm really really intrigued by it, and would love to see what comes out of a second reading. One where I'm inclined to dwell on details and consider ideas, more than I'm inclined to just read the whole thing as fast as possible because it's so ohmygod good. And in any case I reserve the right to say "Yeah, you got me, I'm a fool," if I'm shown to be completely wrong with this train of thought.

Also out of all this I can pretty safely say that this re-confirms my desire to read Aimee Bender. She sounds pretty awesome.

Coming up next, Thumb Drives and Oven Clock's Fall Lets Sleep for 14 Hours a Night week

It's Fall Fiction Week over at Slate--their "second annual look at the novel," featuring much article-y goodness. Because I'm such a nice guy I'll save you a few clicks and point you directly toward the round-up of last year's fiction week, which seems almost monomaniacally focused on Philip Roth's The Plot Against America, so I won't be reading much of that until I get around to reading the book, which is still on my coffee table from the library from when I picked it up so I could read a bunch of other stuff some other people wrote on it. At the rate I'm going, I'll need to block off three times as much time as it takes me to read the book just to read all the extraneous materials.

This year's pickings seem a bit more diverse, so far. If pressed for an answer, I'd say I found the article on why Zadie Smith shouldn't get the Booker prize to be pretty interesting (and might I add that I'd be happy to take any of that fame and prestige off her shoulders if she's looking for someone to give it to--maybe we could split it 50/50?), and that this Francine Prose essay on why style rules and plot drools made for a good read, and that I plan on reading this article on "the conservative novel that liberal feminists love", once I'm more awake than I've been feeling all week.

And lest I be seen as playing favorites with the five-letter S-titled indie-news web-sites, Salon posted their end of summer reading list a few weeks back, and a take on Proust that sort of made me want to read Proust (wrapping up their "Summer School" series). And some other stuff. So go forth, click, be merry; I'm going to go pass out now.

Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper

Hrm.

The Jesus of Cleveland would probably have moved away a long time ago

I'm interested in Jesus, despite my decade-point-five-plus years of Catholic schooling. It's a loose interest--one of those interests you have that you find yourself meaning to do something with, when you have the chance to get around to it; like learning how to do origami, or organizing the boxes of baseball cards from when you were a kid. The sort of thing that runs around in the back of your head, maybe occasionally gets dabbled with out in the real world, never amounting to much but never going away, either.

And while there's plenty to be interested in when it comes to Jesus, I'm mostly drawn to the idea of Jesus as source and subject of story. Religion, Christianity--it's had its ups and downs. The downs are usually loud (Holy Wars? The current American political climate? Fucking creationism, for His sake?) and the ups are usually quiet (those who get it; those who do nice things for other people). Right now, seems like there's a lot of down to all of it--I guess its up, if you're standing on the other side of a line from where I'm looking. I won't lie; I don't get it all, I haven't studied enough or paid enough attention to be someone who can really speak about all of it with great authority. But I think that it's safe for me to say that, whether its just a current through the stream, or a core to the whole ball of wax, story has a certain important place in the entire Jesus & religion thing.

Yeah, big keen insight, I know; story being important to a religion founded on a book of stories. Woo, you say, please; let me donate to your lovely little Websitelogcast to keep the hits coming. And yet, I think it's something still worth keeping in mind. I mean, creationism? Metaphorical stories taken as literal truth? What the hell, right? I don't know, either.

But to get to a point: it's not so much the stories within the Jesus religion that are most interesting to me. Not the accepted, repeated stories, at least. What I find interesting is story that cuts through the myths, that takes the traditions and builds on them or cuts them up. Jesus: Remixed, if you will. Because I think at heart--without even saying what my own religious beliefs actually are, because I don't know what they are--the Jesus story, in all its forms and variations, is a hell of a good story. Here's this poor guy, he's told he's the son of God, and then he dies, because people are bad people. You know? Cut through the Our Fathers and the rote repetitions of creeds, and you've got enough materials to found a dozen novels on. Er, give or take.

Repetition is a sort of enemy true faith. Which is where I think stories that somehow challenge the canon, that distort it and alter it and reshape it like so much putty, these stories are somehow important to faith, by allowing one to be surprised again by what was so amazing in the first place. If you're a fan of those "a:b::c:d" things (What is the word for that? I'm completely blanking out. First correct answer gets my undying love and devotion. Or maybe a chocolate bar.) (They're called analogies and the winner of the chocolate bar is Chris!) you could think of it like, "challenging stories" are to "religion" as "metaphor and simile" are to "the real world". Completion of this "a:b::c:d" thing (analogy!) is left as an exercise to the reader.

So, all that lovely backdrop in mind: if you'd like to see what I mean, go out and pick up Tod Goldberg's book Simplify and read the opening story, "The Jesus of Cathedral City". Now, admittedly, I've got no idea what was going through his mind when he wrote the story. Everything that's come before this paragraph in this post, that's all just me, and my mental baggage, the stuff I brought with me into the story, when I read it, just now. I mean, maybe Tod had these thoughts about challenging fundamental natures of etc etc etc, or maybe he was just thinking, "Hey, wouldn't it be neat if, etc etc etc," or maybe the power and the glory and the spirit of God actually moved into Tod's writing hand and wrote the story for him and to this day Tod still isn't even aware that this story exists and that it's been attributed to him in a book with his name on it. I don't know. But it doesn't really matter anymore, because now the story's out there for people to read, and people like me, who have their own thoughts and ideas about the way the world works, they're going to read the story and get certain things out of it, things they might be putting there themselves in the first place. (Just like all art. Yeah, I know. Can I give you so much free keen insight and sleep comfortably at night? Yes I can.) What I know is that I enjoyed the story very much, considering what I knew going into it; and I know that--well, am pretty sure that--even without any pseudo-deep thinking about religion and the nature of story and their overlapping and all that, that this would still be a pretty damn good short story. So really, either way, you read the story, you win. Unless you're the type of person who doesn't like story at all, then you just suck.

Or in short: While I'm not usually a short story person, "The Jesus of Cathedral City" just slapped me in the face and stole my pocket change. And made me like it.

And in news that has nothing to do with the redesign of this site

There's some neat stuff going on out there.

Conversational Reading posts some good thoughts on a piece in which Ben Marcus swats at Jonathan Franzen, and some good thoughts on a New York Review of Books piece on Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (sparking good comments in the process). On that topic, Return of the Reluctant points out that Never Let Me Go has survived glorious combat to make it to the Man Booker Shortlist; though I'm rooting for Ishiguro's book totally by default, I'm still rooting for it with great and mighty vigor, because it was an awesome book. There's a conversation going on between Tingle Alley and Rake's Progress at Tingle Alley on Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper, which book I'm reading now, so I'm saving the conversation for later. The Lit Blog Co-up is gearing up for their next Read This! nomination--if they act in response to the uproar over their last choice, this quarter's selection is going to be written in Sanskrit. Booksquare sends us scurrying toward a fun article on experiencing art in repetition; ideally, I'd love to be reading books multiple times, but, dammit, there's too many books I haven't read once, yet. And finally, Maud Newton points us towards some tits.

In Cleveland news, there's a good conversation going on at Brewed Fresh Daily (starting here and wandering to here before winding up here) about, uh, something. I'm still not really sure what it's all about, but it's been fun to read along. Something to do with someone who wants to re-tech Cleveland, or something. I dunno. Check it out and if you figure it all out, clue me in, because I feel like I should know what's going on.

Finally, for you Cleveland people, if you're for some reason on a hunger strike waiting for the release of the next bits in the 76 Brief Views of Cleveland series, you're probably either very pissed off at me, or you're dead. I hope you're just pissed off at me--I don't want to have your foolish hunger strikes hanging over my head. I do have at least four more slated, I've just gotten all crazy lazy, and haven't written them yet. But know I haven't quit yet. So, you know. Have a cracker or something.

But I'm allergic to dust

Pardon the, ah, mess.

Things will be less messy, er, sometime soon.

Update: While things aren't less messy, I've just gained a +2 amulet of javascriptcut&paste-fu. Awright!

Update 2: Okay! Alright! That about does it for tonight. I'm probably not done, and yeah, and stuff. But this'll do for now. Hopefully this doesn't suck.

Thumb drives and smily faces! Hooray!

Editor's note: in the process of writing the following post, I realized that for some reason, I really felt like dropping the f-bomb. A lot. Then it occurred to me that maybe some members of the highly theoretical and likely imaginary TDAOC reading audience (previous link via) might prefer an ounce less profanity in their blog readings. Here at TDAOC HQ, we aim first to kill--because warning shots are bullshit--and second to please. So we've taken the unprecedented step of providing two versions of this post. Call it the black coffee/creamed coffee post, if you will. But hopefully you won't, because that's a damned silly metaphor. So go ahead: make like Indiana Jones and...choose wisely.

The raw, uncut, sex lies and blogiotape version

The latest edition of Bookslut might just be their best fucking edition yet. Though I haven't really checked to see if there are, indeed, fucking tons of profanity. And it might not actually be their best edition, but it's the edition with the most articles that have looked interesting to me since I've started reading the site. Which was, uh, sometime before today. Anyways. There's interviews with Mary Doria Russell and Aimee Bender (neither of whom I've read but who I mean to read and probably will once I read the interviews); reviews of the new Rick Moody book (whose Purple America I once started reading then stopped reading but which I plan to try reading again but for real this time), the new Tod Goldberg collection of short stories (which I plan to buy once I get some damned cash in my pocket), and the new Cory Fucking Doctorow book (whose book I feel I will probably read someday once I get over my grudge against BoingBoing, which I used to read religiously until I woke up and realized I'd read just about as many fucking stories about mash-ups and DRM and re-mixing and how DRM'd mash-up creative commons re-mixes would be the best fucking thing since I put underwear on that morning, at which point I stopped reading because, seriously, fuck); and like a whole bunch of other stuff that looks cool perhaps due to mere proximity to the above directly-to-me-interesting stories. But most importantly (but wait, there's MORE?), an article I've been looking forward to for a while now (or I guess since August 16th or so): Wrapped Up In Books: A Guide to Rock Novels, which is a list of like 50 rock novels, grouped up and classified for your list-devouring enjoyment. Me, I look forward to ordering them all from the library, snorting a line of coke off the back of High Fidelity, and going to mother-fuckin' town. (For professional reasons, of course.)

The everything is pink daffodils and happy puppies version

The latest edition of a website which propagates negative images of the sensual ways in which one might interact with bound collections of paper might just be their best procreation edition yet. Though I haven't really checked to see if there are, indeed, a seriously large procreationary number of tons of profanity. And it might not actually be their best edition, but it's the edition with the most articles that have looked interesting to me since I've started reading the site. Which was, uh, sometime before today. Anyways. There's interviews with Mary Doria Russell and Aimee Bender (neither of whom I've read but who I mean to read and probably will once I read the interviews); reviews of the new Rick Moody book (whose Purple America I once started reading then stopped reading but which I plan to try reading again but for real this time), the new Tod Goldberg collection of short stories (which I plan to buy once I get some !!!! cash in my pocket), and the new Cory who may have known the flesh of another Doctorow book (whose book I feel I will probably read someday once I get over my grudge against BoingBoing, which I used to read with great regularity until I woke up and realized I'd read just about as many OH GOSH DIDDLY GEE! stories about mash-ups and DRM and re-mixing and how DRM'd mash-up creative commons re-mixes would be the best MOTHER LOVE BUCKETS! thing since I put underwear on that morning, at which point I stopped reading because, seriously, I SURE DO ENJOY FUDGE ON MY ICE CREAM); and like a whole bunch of other stuff that looks cool perhaps due to mere proximity to the above directly-to-me-interesting stories. But most importantly (but wait, there's there was no profanity here but this was the point in the original post when I started think, gee, I'm swearing a lot, maybe I should tone that down some, so I guess I feel the need to atone for what might have been bad thought in this space MORE?), an article I've been looking forward to for a while now (or I guess since August 16th or so): Wrapped Up In Books: A Guide to Rock Novels, which is a list of like 50 rock novels, grouped up and classified for your list-devouring enjoyment. Me, I look forward to ordering them all from the library, practicing some intelligent design, and going to get into my car after I finish reading all the books so that I can pick up some milk and sugar from town. (For professional reasons, of course.)

The wound-up Darby chronicle

Recently read (as in, sprinted through) Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. I liked it rather a lot. It's...troubling. (So is this post, in its haphazardness. You've been warned.)

See, here's the deal. The novel, I was told or was informed ahead of time, was weird, or surreal, or post-modern, or just plain not normal. That's cool. I dig the not-normal. But when you launch into a book that is supposedly not-normal, and the first half or so is focused on the disruption of the routine of a completely normal guy's life (with maybe a psychic or something thrown in there for flavor), you start to wonder if all that talk about the not-normal elements was misplaced. Not, mind you, that anything in the first half is anything less than compelling. Just, ya know, there's no footnotes, and nothing so terrifically weird as to make one stand up and take notice. Unless, I suspect, one has never read anything too-weird before, in which case, well, yes. That being my other concern: maybe I've read so much not-normal stuff by this point that I've gained a sort of immunity. A resistance, if you will.

Nope. No resistance. At least, not to this book.

See, thing is, this novel, it's got a fascinating shape. Picture for yourself--or click here for assistance--the stereotypical mushroom blast. Sort of a column of smoke, upon which a cloud sits. Hang on to that image; tip it over on its side. You can slice it horizontally through the middle if you wish but it's not necessarily crucial here. Either way, what you've now got, reading that image from left to right, is the shape of Murakami's novel. The narrow focus of narrative through the first two sections of the book, the drive and direction of it, giving way to...a point, where things change. Where the book becomes less a story and more a rush in outward directions.

I was hooked on the book through the first two sections fine enough, but it's in the third part (which comprises half the book) where the story really begins to dance. The story expands and connections begin to form and it just really becomes something other, more cloud than column. I'm repeating myself; point being, if you're new to Murakami (like me), and you find yourself wondering, through the first two sections...just, keep going. It's good. It's really damn good.

It's funny. I mean, occasionally. There's little bits that are laugh out loud hysterical. (A Van Halen t-shirt? That's just awesome. Or maybe that's just me. Dunno.) But what I really mean is that it's funny in that there's the funny stuff and then there's the brutal stuff, the stuff that's just...oh, lord, there's a bit with people digging a hole, it happens in a flashback (of sorts), and there's a baseball bat...yeah, it's just. Geez. Really compelling stuff.

And it's funny in that, though this is definitely literature, capitalized or whatever, your call--the books it brought to mind weren't really what the literature-crowd would think of as literature. I found myself occasionally thinking of Stephen King, though not necessarily for the most convincing reasons. I also found myself thinking of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, in the way the book dealt with modern-day (okay, 1980s, but close enough) material versus World War II-era material. Not that I want to drive the comparison too far but I think there's something illuminating here in reading the books side-by-side (or as distanced by years, hey, whatever) in that, both books were written well after the war in question, but in completely different cultures. There's something to seeing that one book was written in a culture that came out of that war this way, and that the other book was written in another culture that came out of the war that way, and those are very different ways. Something to that. (Hint: I liked Stephenson's book plenty well enough, but I think I like it slightly less now, after reading Murakami's book.) Or maybe I'm way off base here. Dunno.

But okay, what I really mean when I say it's funny, is that it's funny that the book should change character midway through. To go back to that. The book, so much of its subject is the ways in which people change. And I don't mean change over the course of a lifetime, but the ways in which people become literally (philosophically? you be the judge) entirely different people. Who are still the same people, but different people nonetheless. It's funny. Funny, like that.

Anyways. Random babbling aside. If you're like me and you heard the hullabaloo over Kafka on the Shore coming out a while back, but the library's got you queued at like 78 and the number keeps getting bigger, I'd happily recommend The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Just, y'know...keep an eye on your cat.

...

I plan to say more about this, but right now: tired, thinking muddled. It's been a rough week. But yeah, go, click that, read; offer help if you can. I plan on writing something for the project, so.

You've heard lots of horrible shit this week. But there is still plenty of good in this world.

I'd throw in an extra buck for Naughty Pynchon Reading Photos, except, not really, cuz, that'd just be weird

Just a quick note to say that I think this blog-based "mini-seminar" at The Valve on Philip Roth's The Plot Against America is a pretty sweet idea. I haven't read the book yet so I haven't dug into any of the posts yet, so I don't know how substantial or of what merit they are, but I definitely like the idea. (And this did motivate me to finally want to read the book sooner rather than later, so I've ordered a copy of the book from the good ol' Cleveland Public Library. My girlfriend and I, we agreed I wasn't allowed to buy any more books until I made a significant dent on what's already in the apartment; but we never said anything about ordering from the library! Score! Except, oh wait, this will just slow down my progress through the already-bought pile...aw, crud.) In any case, I think it's something I'd like to see more of, enough so that I've given some thought to adopting, bastardizing, and mutating the hell out of the idea myself. Though I probably won't. Lazy. (And yes, friend Chris, I'm looking at you, over there, mister "freely admitted to wanting to write a paper on dorky lit and philosophy stuff" man. Bad idea, or best idea ever?)

And in other news, if you dig contests, and really, who in their right mind doesn't enjoy contests, then take note: the Return of the Reluctant has extended the deadline for the Naughty Reading Photography Contest, and over at The Elegant Variation there's the "Kipen & Pynchon 4ever" contest. Check 'em.

Some books

• How We Are Hungry by Dave Eggers - They're stories, some of them are quite short, one's rather long. I liked the longer stories better. Some stories I read without feeling too invested in them; some I got more into. Overall, not bad. This Eggers kid--he's gonna make a name for himself, someday.


• The Ghost Writer by John Harwood - It's a ghost story, in a gothic/Victorian sort of manner, with a modern twist; it's also epistolary; it's also got stories within the story. It's sort of a glorious mess, a compulsive page-turner to the point where I realized I'd failed to pay attention to things I'd needed to pay attention to and was focusing too much on things I'd need not have. The book does have one of the most wicked murders I've ever read. And the short story (within the story!) "The Gift of Flight" was probably, by itself, worth the price of admission. I'm not one to get creeped out by horror or scary stories, but, uh, well, let's just say I could easily see how some people who might have a certain aversion to dolls might not quite make it through that thirty-page chunk. Overall on the book--not what I'd expected, and maybe not as good as I'd hoped. But that's just me. And, y'know. Halloween is coming up. Just sayin'.

Your input demanded. No, requested. No, politely groveled for. But not bribed for, because I'm cheap like that

Google comes up blank when you search for the phrase "literary representations of motion". This is a hole that I'd like to see filled, and I'm drawing a total blank. So I turn to you, oh vast, infinite, sexy Internet, and ask: where have you seen motion best depicted in fiction? (Or, really, in any written form; but I really want examples drawn from fiction, for reasons I can't quite explain.)

I can tell you this in return: the band Godspeed You Black Emperor! absolutely nails the musical equivalent of motion on the track "Sleep" (track one of disc two of Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven!). Every time, every time I listen to these 23-odd minutes of music, I'm made to fly, without ever standing. I'm a little more amazed by it every time I hear it.

And, okay, I'll even toss off a tentative example of literary motion (though not one from fiction, damn my brain): chapter two of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The driving, the throwing of frisbees. Good stuff.

I was going to make this post longer but I hear they're running out of space on the Internet

There's a fun discussion about long novels going on (or that has already gone on) at The Elegant Variation. Additional reading material can be found at Return of the Reluctant and Conversational Reading and probably other places I haven't found or don't recall right now. This is all sparked by the Canadian-published Hunger's Bridges, which is soon to be imported to America and which clocks in at a spritely 1360 pages. More on this little dish can be found here.

My take on the issue--if you can call it an issue, and if anybody cares for my take--is that novels, good novels, are exactly as long as they need to be. Long novels can read fast and short novels can be turgid. Long novels can be turgid and short novels can read fast. Both short and long novels can transcend to air the limitations of their pages while bashing you in the head with the weight of the language itself; both can wholly suck you into a world for an extended period of time, both can leave you wishing there could be more. Length, when proper and correct, is relatively insignificant. And before this paragraph becomes inappropriate, let's call up a paragraph break.

All that said: there is an occasional implication by the occasional person that sometimes words count more in other modes of writing; that because column space is limited so every word in an article counts, or that because of rhythm and cadence every word in a poem counts, that these somehow imply that, because the length of a novel is decided only by the whims of the author, the editor, and the marketing team, there are words in novels that do not count. Suffice it for me to say, merely, humbly, that I disagree. And I shall leave it at that, lest I begin to froth at the mouth while spitting juvenile insults.

All of that said, you should probably take two hours to read Paul La Farge's translation of Paul Poissel's The Facts of Winter, a slender volume of text that I think I've already spent more time thinking about than I did actually reading. At 150 pages, it's light as air and completely adventurous; reading it is to take a hard gust of wind to the cloudiest edges of your mind. In color. In black and white.

I guess on the upside, this gives me time to read his first two books

Cry.

I wonder, are there "pre-bloggers"?

Chances are, most of us pre-published fucktards dream of the glamorous life that awaits us when our genius is recognized and we're sent on tour, the champagne and hookers and cocaine nights and fast cars and having people love us, a lot. It's a good thing, then, that A.L. Kennedy, author of the really good book Paradise, is here to set us straight on that. I'm guessing this means the cocaine isn't really "mountainous," per se.

A.L. Kennedy is really damn funny. Though I think I've linked it before, the FAQ on her site is good stuff. Maud Newton excerpts some of the touring essay here, and as much as I want to excerpt the orgasm paragraph--for purely informational purposes, of course--I'll let you find it yourself. Here's another choice bit:

The point I'm trying to make is, the author you look at on stage, who may appear sane and healthy, may actually be undergoing multiple humiliations designed to deconstruct his or her entire personality. If they didn't already know they were ugly, hours of prodding and teasing will have convinced them. They will be vaguely aware that they are sluggish and stupefied with tiredness, when they ought to seem wise, or at least coherent, like an author should. If they are anything like me, they will find that four or five days of signing – and I don't ever have to sign that much, bear in mind – four or five days of signing will mean that they lose their ability to reproduce their own signature. My signature is a dreadful scrawl anyway, but trust me, it's truly alarming when all you can produce is a completely unfamiliar dreadful scrawl and you can't explain this to the well-meaning stranger in front of you, because they might become alarmed if you begin rocking and moaning and wondering if you'll ever be able to write a cheque again.

Hell, I sign two register receipts in one day, I might as well be trying to work that pen like I've got no opposable thumb. I wonder if it's too late to go into, like, politics, or construction, or something?

(And no, by the way, in case the humor was lost in translation, I do not refer to myself as "pre-published." I prefer the term "pre-dead," actually, because as with all troubled geniuses, it won't be until after I've left this mortal coil that the brilliance of my work will be...yeah, no.)

From now on, all TDAOC blog posts will be authored by the fictional character "Darby", who is not me

Tingle Alley stirs up a bit of conversation about authors writing themselves into their books. There's been a clump of books that have done this lately, including Salvador Plascencia in The People of Paper, which is right now on my TBR stack.

And moving up it quickly, due to Tingle Alley's early "Yes, it's a really exciting, original, kickass book" review. I picked up The People of Paper when the McSweeney's crew came through town last weekend, based pretty much entirely on the fact that Salvador Plascencia was one of the most entertaining readers I've had the chance to see. ("And this," he said, holding up a large white card with a big black dot in the middle--and yes, this made total sense in context, "is the saddest of the punctuation marks. It's the end. It makes time stop.")

Also, Kelly Link neatly handles my comment under the Tingle Alley post in that interview I linked in the previous post. Which I'll link again here for your convenience, because I like you that much.

Darby sat back, looked at the words he'd typed, then down at the keyboard. How could he say such things? How could he imply he liked the reader that much? He wasn't even sure he had readers, let alone readers he could confirm that he liked, to any degree. Maybe everyone who read his blog was a total asshole. He didn't know. And here he was, spewing nonsense into the void. He was shaken by doubt and his shimmering, glistening sense of the tentativeness of ideas, identity.

Then he shrugged. "It's just business, baby," he said to the screen, before chugging two bottles of Jack Daniels while having sex with European supermodels.

Or maybe it's just total freak coincidental timing

In celebration of me finishing reading Stranger Things Happen, Maud Newton posts an interview with Kelly Link as conducted by a former maudnewton.com guest blogger. I was going to pull out some choice quotes, but really, the whole thing is interesting, so. You know. Click the link and pick a paragraph and pretend I quoted it here.

Blurb & dash; the up all night reading Kelly Link edition

I'm not sure what I expected from Kelly Link, but in Stranger Things Happen, I found quite a few stories that made me feel...profoundly unsettled. (In a good way, I think.)

I kinda gave away the answer there, huh

For your reading enjoyment: an article on Indian writers writing in English, and an article on the rock novel. Bonus points if you can name the book that qualifies in both categories of literature, and no it's not High Fidelity. (Hint: it's called The Ground Beneath Her Feet and it's by Salman Rushdie and it's been moved from my second-tier to be read shelf to my first-tier to be read coffee table pile.) Interesting stuff.

(Reading Dan Chaon's You Remind Me of Me reminded me of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, and while I can think of one very clear parallel between the two books, in terms of structure, I'd be lying if I said I'd read Roy's book recently enough to draw further comparisons between the two; let's just say that The God of Small Things will probably be moved from the depths of the already read shelves to one or other of the to be read piles, and then maybe someday I'll make the grand pronouncements my feeble snap-judgments are making me want to make.)

A little bit more about You Remind Me Of Me

I suppose what struck me most about Dan Chaon's You Remind Me of Me--aside from the metaphorical language, and everything else I can't think of right now--is that it wasn't until I'd read about seventy pages that I realized, Aw, hell...I've got absolutely no idea where this is going.

Which thought was closely followed by, And...so?

Seventy pages, of a 350 page novel. That's about a fifth of the book. That's a long time to remain mostly in the dark, without even realizing it is dark.

See, what I didn't realize when I started the book was that Dan Chaon had made a simple request of me, before I ever picked up the book. He'd asked me to trust him. To trust that these pages were going somewhere, were directed. To trust him that the ride was going to be worth it, and that the destination would repay the effort put into the trip. What I didn't realize was that each time I turned the page, I was responding with a yes. I didn't see any of this, because each page is a destination. The language (metaphorical and otherwise) and the story telling were so very compelling, they exploded any possible doubts.

While it's true that anyone who puts a book out there for people to use cash to purchase and time to read makes a similar contract with the reader--when I hand over my sixteen bucks, I expect my books to entertain and to provoke thought (often in different measures)--when you open your book with four chapters that feel almost completely unrelated to each other, four points of view that are only tenuously connected by translucent threads of fact, you're grabbing that demand and boldfacing and underlining it. Lesser writers would flub this. Dan Chaon, needless to say, does not.

Blurb & dash; the up all night reading Dan Chaon edition

In You Remind Me of Me, Dan Chaon seems to effortlessly pluck bits of world-expanding metaphorical language from trees in an orchard of story-telling that, even if I thought I could find directions to it on Mapquest, I'm afraid I wouldn't know how to enter. And that's just the language of the story. The story itself is even better.

Which is to say I liked it, and I'd like you to like it, and I gotta go to bed now.

Gimme two letters that spell perfection. And master's degrees. But mostly perfection

(Possible alternate subtitle: "In loose, altogether random, and likely unnecessary defense of the queen godmum of chicklit".)

If you'll pardon what might be a pseudopun, Jane Austen's Emma is about as textbook a case there is of how to write a novel, where novels are based on the problem/solution model of plot advancement. In this model, you can read pretty much every novel as a mystery, plus or minus genre conventions. Sure, you won't find private detectives and styrofoam cups of coffee in Emma, but you will find the driving motive of tension being generated through the solutions to existing problems creating new difficulties that must in turn be solved. There isn't a murder to be solved with bucketloads of other dangers and obstacles created along the way while dealing with plentiful red herrings; but there is the desired outcome of Emma's eventual happiness that has to be reached through the process of overcoming social maneuverings and flubs, some external and some created by the heroine herself, made all the more complex through blatant misdirection. Problems create solutions create problems.

To see how a novel works, you could do worse than to spend some time with Emma. Sure, it might feel a bit sloggish in the middle, and the endgame feels a little random and drawn out, but the basic structure of it is all there, plain as day. It's funny, but of all the books to be reminded of while I was reading Emma, I was reminded of The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus, which I read earlier this year, which, to be honest, I didn't really "get". Now I think I get it: Marcus's "novel" is one of all problems, no solutions. Tension without release, crescendo without crash. Not that I'm saying I'll understand the book any better if I come back to it, but at least maybe Jane Austen is reminding me of, ahem, my roots. (While I'm here: Infinite Jest? Mostly problems, huge crescendo; but the band takes the resolution off stage. Or something.)

One might also make a case for Emma as an epic--hero takes a journey (in this case, a social journey) and comes back changed--but I'll save that for later.

I got lists of lists waiting to be listed here, y'know

Speaking of lists...

• The longlist for the 2005 Booker prize has been announced. These kinds of lists usually just make me feel bad, because I've most likely never heard of most of the nominated titles. Or authors. (Ouch.) Looking over the list, I can say right now I'm gunning for Kazuo Ishiguro to take home the freaking huge stack of cash because Never Let Me Go was a really awesome novel. And because it's the only book on the list I've read. Well, I did try to read Ian McEwan's Saturday, but, ah...well, hey, Maud Newton says it so much better than I could. I was going to say I didn't realize Zadie Smith had a new book out, then I learned that her book isn't out yet, so I don't feel so bad. (I've had trouble finishing her books, as much as I've enjoyed reading them. Maybe third time's a charm.) Salman Rushdie's book isn't out yet either, but I'm looking forward to it, despite the fact that it has "clown" in the title, which gave me a real heeby-jeeby creepy feeling when I first read it. (His classic, Midnight's Children, by the way? Read it.) Anyways, if you're looking for contemporary BritLit that's been validated by a process, look ye no further.


• And speaking of lists and books that aren't out yet, I forgot to mention in my last post that Tod Goldberg's Simplify would be on my TBR pile, were it out yet. Yeah, crap. Like I really need to start a virtual TBR pile on top of the physical TBR pile. Er...aw, crap.


• Also, if you're interested in music lists, what was known as Audioscrobbler is now Last.fm, as powered by Audioscrobbler. Yeah, I was confused for a minute, too. Anyway, you can check out my profile page here if you're inclined towards pseudovoyeuristic pleasures. There's all sorts of fun charts and lists and stuff, historical and current (or as current as the overloaded servers will allow). It's about as close as I'll ever come to sticking a web cam directly into my ear drums.

From the "blogging when I gosh darn well get around to it department" comes...

...bullet! point! ROCK!

• Chances are, I've written more unpublished (and let's never mind the "potentially unpublishable, too" conversation) novels than you. I can sit down at the laptop and let words flow like water. (Some of those words, I hasten to point out, turn out not horrible after much, much revision, I like to think.) And yet, nothing compares to the tales told of Thomas Wolfe we're pointed to by Maud Newton: "Wolfe would be asked for a short linking paragraph — and return a few days later with 10,000 words."


• Amazon sales rankings are bullshit. Consider Tod Goldberg's exhibit one and M.J. Rose's exhibit two (with appropriate comments from #2 pulled out here).


• So I guess the story (via Rake's Progress) goes that someone slammed the new John Irving book then it was pointed out there was some connection between the author and the reviewer and it made some people look bad. Hey, whatever, man. This link/story is mostly a cheap excuse for me to break certain personal tendencies long enough to point out that holy crap did A Prayer for Owen Meany suck. And I mean, it was bad. Reading that book was like watching a 700 page flip book in which the picture never ever changed. In slow motion. In dire heat and humidity. While John Irving sat on your couch eating your Doritos and saying (mouth full, during chewing) "You know, I'm more significant than you" every fiftieth word. In other words, blech.


• Four words for you: Naughty Reading Photo Contest. Rawr! Me, I'm hoping for some good sexy librarian photos.


• I've been quiet about what I've been reading lately because I've been deep into the "writing unpublishable crap" end of the "writing unpublishable crap"/"reading published doubleplusuncrap" continuum. But I can tell you I've been reading Emma by Jane Austen and that I don't give a damn if that makes me a less manly man. And it's not because I'm some uber-enlightened 90s guy who thinks women are just as good if not better than men in both the writing department and the all-the-others department, though I am all that and a bag of cheese. No, it's because Jane Austen knew a thing or two about spinning elegant sentences together in a classy way, and it's nice to spend some time in the company of a gal with a little culturin' under her bonnet. Chick lit? More like KICK! lit. (If it weren't for the fact that the To Be Read pile is growing thicker than wild grass, I'd be tempted after this to stick with a 19th-century dame writers theme to take another spin through Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh. Mark my words, kids: EBB? Victorian Hottie.)


• And speaking of the taller than tall TBR pile, I can tell you that books I'd possibly be talking about right now if I could read as fast and as often as I like include
  
  
  • Mothers & Other Monsters by Maureen McHugh;
  
  
  • The Sound of Us by Sarah Willis;
  
  
  • You Remind Me of Me and Among the Missing by Dan Chaon (though I can tell you this much; I read the first story of Among the Missing, "Safety Man", and I was laughing by the end of the opening paragraph and cursing my fate that I should not be as superb and as chilling a writer as Dan Chaon by the end of the second damned page; "Something is happening to her", you say, Mr. Chaon? Something is happening to this damned reader, I tell you.);
  
  
  • Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link, which I picked up today when I realized that even my completely fictitious pet rock has read and enjoyed Kelly Link by this point and thinks very poorly of me for the fact that I'm still absolutely clueless;
  
  
  • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, which has been sitting on my coffee table, far too overdue from the library, with its entirely tempting opening paragraph beckoning to me far too often, until I finally gave in today and bought my own copy, making the commitment to get around to reading it...eventually;
  
  
  • Tisch by Stephen Dixon (but only because it's short and I need a damned fix damn you give me my fix arrrgh);
  
  
  • and what looks like a whole bunch of other stuff that's all the way across the room right now.
  
  So, you know, if that's the sort of thing that interests you. These lists usually interest me. What's on your "Oh man, I really need to read that, soon" coffee table stack?


• Speaking of lists, I, uh, mean to do my own list of the five (or so) books I read the first half of the year that I think you should read too, the first semi-annual TDAOC Reads Awards or something; hopefully something longer, because, face it, TDAOCRA really isn't long enough an acronym. But, uh, you know. Life gets in the way. And stuff. And it's not like the world is going to die without my list, and it's not like the astute and long-time reader can't pretty much tell what I like the most and all. But still, lists are pretty cool, and I'd like to do some. I think I've bought one or two CDs this year that have been worth a mention, too. Now if you'll excuse me I have to go convince the bank to let me take out a mortgage on my apartment building, which I don't own, so I can come up with enough cash to buy something resembling food tomorrow.

When the two focuses of this humble blog collide

Cleveland and literature, I like to think, have a few things in common; for example, both are bastions of glittery gems that don't scream out their existence, but rather require a little bit of work for them to be found. This isn't necessarily the way things should be, but it does give the two worlds a certain sort of allure to those who are tuned in to their unique joys. (Also, Cleveland is home to damn fine beer, and literature goes well with a nice pint. One might also say that both Cleveland and literature sometimes get bad raps due to their hidden-gems natures, but I'm wary of overextending the comparison and finding myself spouting nonsense. Pretty soon I'll be claiming that Cleveland is made of paper and literature is made of asphalt.)

So maybe it's understandable that I get a little happy when I find out that the two worlds collide; see also Maureen McHugh and Grant Bailie. And of course the always-entertaining George Bilgere. I've suspected for a time there's plenty of other literary gems lurking about town who I've missed due to my own incompetence and/or laziness. So goes my mental state when I open up the Mac's Backs upcoming events e-mail today:

Our book club has been meeting for about 10 years. It's on the 2nd Wednesday each month at 7:30 p.m. and on August 17th we will be discussing Dan Chaon's terrific novel You Remind Me of Me, a nuanced look at fate and identity. Dan will attend the session to answer questions and sign books.

The name sounded familiar, as if I'd seen his name mentioned before but, due to the fact that on a daily basis I see the names of approximately billions of authors I haven't read yet, I couldn't remember where. So I did a little Googling to find out if he's a known writer and to find out what would bring him to Cleveland for a book discussion session and to find out if I'd want to take off a Wednesday night from my own struggling through trying to string sentences together into coherent pieces of story-telling to go sit in a room with him and some other people where I'd feel my total lack of social grace choking off my breathing and making my heart beat irrationally hard, to find out that he's come to Cleveland because he lives here, and that he's important enough to have his 2001 book of short stories, Among the Missing, be a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award (among other accolades), and that yes, I think I will be picking up a copy of You Remind Me of Me and reading through it in hopes of coming up with some kind of semi-intelligent question for him. (As I am horrible at coming up with good questions for any situation in which a question is called for, I'll happily take suggestions from the peanut gallery, if there's something you're dying to know. Who knows, I might even remember enough of what he says to report back to you with something resembling his answer.)

And in news that's got nothing to do with anything, I just bought a new bag for my laptop, woo woo

Hey Cleveland--keep an eye open at your local coffee shop for the latest issue of Angle: A Journal of Arts and Culture. It's the third annual literary issue. Yay for literature! Maureen McHugh contributes a short story, "Wicked," which you'll also find in her new collection, Mothers & Other Monsters, which you'll find a copy of on my coffee table.

Also, if you happen to be in Chicago on August 23rd, check out the August edition of the Bookslut Reading Series, where Maureen will be reading, along with Jennifer Stevenson and Charles Blackstone, neither of whom I've read yet, but if you can judge books by titles, Trash Sex Magic and The Week You Weren't Here are, I suspect, both very good books, which you'll probably eventually find copies of on my coffee table, I suspect.

Maybe this is educational, like, for the kids, or something

I have no idea what all this business is about but if you've got spare time I guess it might be something you use to kill some of that time. All I know is that right now, it looks like stock in this blog is dirt cheap, so if you buy it up now and, uh, I, do, uh, whatever it is that makes a blog's stock worth more, you'll be really rich. In fake Internets money. Or something. I don't really know, I failed the money classes in school, and fake money just depresses me. I never did like Monopoly. Mostly because I never got any good money there, either.

For those of you who want something of intellectual value out of a TDAOC post, here's some words to live by, courtesy of The Elegant Variation. Shares of TEV stock, incidentally, are currently approximately 20290.258064516129032258064516129 times more expensive than shares of TDAOC stock. Mmhmm, yeah, that's right. TDAOC: Bargain Basement Blogging at Bargain Basement Fake Internet Money Prices!

76 brief views of Cleveland: #10

Graffiti on the wall above the urinal in the men's room of the Arabica coffee shop at Case Western Reserve University:

"Why do some women wear glasses?"

It's an inspirational story, but not in the Left Behind sort of way, though I guess maybe there might be parallels

And finally, to wrap up this overly communicative Tuesday night, here's a little something about lit mag submissions that's been making the rounds.

I just checked my own spreadsheet (though the presence of a spreadsheet on my computer shouldn't lead one to mistake me for being at all organized in a life-wide fashion) and my oldest unanswered submission has been out for about three months. And my spreadsheet hasn't grown flush with new entries in far too long. If my current endeavor would stop gorging on middle-filling-out literary Twinkies and start concerning itself with finding an ending, that situation might change this coming month. One can hope, at least. (And yes, it is the story's fault. Not my fault! No way. Inspiration, man! Inspiration!)

Another lit mag my money will soon be going to, thank you very much, internets

The Emerging Writers Network clues in the unclued (namely, me) about an online lit mag that's about to go paper (and yes, I, too, thought things were supposed to happen in the other direction, these days), OpiumMagazine. In the publication's now four-ish years of online activity, they've published quite a few stories that seem to all be right there, clicks away, for free, and while I haven't read them yet, I do think I'll be digging through the stacks. (Admittedly probably in some part to see if there's any chance anything I write might be attractive to them--looks like they're looking for stories about "tripping over things"; I wonder, do they take sordid autobiography?) OpiumMagazine.print launches in a bit over three weeks, which gives me just enough time to steal enough lunch money from the other kids on the block for the cover price--a price that will result in the delivery of over one-quarter of a thousand pages of lit lit lit wackiness to my doorstep. Seriously! Seems there's going to be a release party in New York City, too, but they don't list a Cleveland-to-NYC subway, so I guess they'll have to get along without me.

The mag stuck out for me because Grant Bailie, whose novel Cloud 8 I recently read and liked, is a contributor to the print publication. Along with 52 other people, some of whose work I'll probably also take a fancy to. And in fact, if you've been thinking to yourself, "I'd sure like to check out that Grant Bailie novel, but isn't there some way I could get a little taste of the guy's work, first?" I'm here to tell you that you can, in fact, get that taste. He has a short-short story called "The Dead" posted at OpiumMagazine's web site. ("The Dead", incidentally, was a title I was just a few hours ago briefly considering for a story I'm working on right now, but I kind of figured maybe someone had already beat me to it. Drats.) Also, if you are into reviews, Grant Bailie offers a review of March 13th. Yeah, I know what he means about sequels. Yep. Sure do. (Sigh.)

One statement, two takes

So Steve Wasserman--some guy, I guess--believes that "The best reading experience is to occupy your time with the worthy dead rather than the ambitious living."

H'mm.

• Take One: Dan Green, at The Reading Experience, offers an interesting, well-considered deconstruction of Steve-O's statement, in defense of the notion that "The truth is pretty close to exactly the opposite of what Wasserman would have us believe." This sparks an interesting conversation I haven't fully processed yet, so I apologize if Take Two is a rehash of someone else's opinion.


• Take Two: My own opinion is that Steve Wasserman must be some kind of doodieface to think something so silly. Read deeply, read broadly, my friends: read the dead, read the living; read girls and read boys; read the local and read the foreign; read every genre that crosses your path; read it all and read it often, all for no reason more complicated than, "Yeah, duh?"

Yeah, I think maybe I made Steve's acquaintance once, maybe at a cocktail party, once, in passing, perhaps?

Over at the Emerging Writers Network, Steve Erickson, whose novels, you may or may not recall, I recently developed a slight interest in, takes part in the July 2005 E-panel interview of Literary Journal Editors, part of an ongoing series of such e-panels (click that link then scroll down to the "LitJournals" links). Steve Erickson is editor of the lit mag Black Clock, one of the many lit mags I'm going to subscribe to, ah, any day now. Once that check from my wealthy patron clears. (Right.) In the interview, Erickson reveals that Black Clock, which does not currently hold open submissions, likely will be opening up the slush pile floodgate sometime in the near future; I might as well start working on my cover letter now, because, I imagine, there's bound to be a unique thrill to being rejected by one of your idols. ("He was in the room with the intern who read and rejected my story! My words were in the same room as greatness!") Also taking part in this e-panel is Eli Horowitz of McSweeney's, a mag which I have in fact already been rejected by. My words! Making the tour! Awesome.

So those lit journal editor e-panels have been held monthly this year, and I believe I read somewhere that they're scheduled to take place for the rest of this year. With seven e-panels down, 55 editors have been interviewed on attitudes towards the slush pile, importance of agent representation and simultaneous submissions in getting stories accepted, the business of making a lit journal happen, etc. I say all this more for my own benefit than anyone else's, in that I need a serious reminder-to-the-self to go back and review all those interviews when it comes time to send out my next round of submissions. Once I actually write that total genius story I've just been holding back on until now. (Right.) Lots and lots of good information in there. Which is pretty much scraping the iceberg of what Dan Wickett e-mails out and blogs out via the Emerging Writers Network--I think he generates more worthwhile content in a day than I've created in a lifetime. Worth checking out. (If, uh, you haven't already.)

Double-O-Snark

So, seems like BookAngst 101, the anonymous blog of an NYC editor spilling the dirt all rant-like on the publishing biz, has gone the way of something or another; I don't really know, I have yet to actually digest the entire final post. Something about narcissism. (On the Internet? I know, it's hard to believe.)

So then, where are we struggling author-wannabes supposed to go for the inside-scoop on the big bad bastards who reject our works of crazy mad genius? Looks like there's two new blogs out there that might be worth keeping an eye on. The first being Agent 007 On Publishing, in which the blogger claims to be a former editor turned agent. The blog seems focused on the relationships between agents and editors--relationships that, I get the sense that, not even most super published authors really get to know that well. The blog's only been around for a week or two so you can easily catch up on the back-posts over your morning coffee or afternoon whiskey. Or morning whiskey. Whatever. (Via Conversational Reading.)

And then there's Miss Snark, the Literary Agent, a blog "in which Miss Snark vents her wrath on the hapless world of writers and crushes them to sand beneath her T.Rexual heels of stiletto snark". So, uh, you can take from that what you will. Miss Snark's been around a few more weeks than Agent 007, but not so long that you couldn't catch up during your second morning whiskey. Not that I have caught up yet. If nothing else so far I did catch a bit of whimsical advice from this post: "I swear if you write a novel you should reverse the gender of all the characters to see if it makes it more interesting." Which, you know, has all the flavor of a goofy literary exercise that you do but never necessarily do anything with, and yet I find it kind of brilliant. (Of course it made a commenter laugh, but hey ho what the hell.) (Via Return of the Reluctant. Or, uh, possibly via Maud Newton's blog, I can't remember.)

I guess the "Hoax! Hoax!" chant has been cast in both blogs' directions already, as will happen with any anonymous blog, I suspect, but it's worth pointing out. Read with grains of salt nearby.

And in conclusion, what is up with Blogger's spell-check not recognizing the words "blog" or "blogger" or "blogxploitation"? I mean, seriously.

Cloud 8 by Grant Bailie

"But always the girl is pretty or beautiful, it seems I am saying, and sooner or later you must question my judgment. But to me it is true; they are always pretty and beautiful." - from Cloud 8 by Grant Bailie

Okay, so not every book I read is pretty or beautiful. Some are annoying and some kind of suck. Some are dull and some are boring. Some, eh, I just don't like. Of course when I only talk about the books I do like, I do wonder if I'm a credible witness to what I see in literature. But, hey, that's not going to stop me from glossing over the unmemorable to focus on the good stuff--wouldn't you rather find books you want to read than wade through the stuff you wouldn't?

Cloud 8, by Grant Bailie, is a pretty good book. It's not astounding. But it's pretty. It's funny in absurd, understated ways, and sad in a delicate sort of fashion. It's the memoir of a dead man, living an afterlife almost as senseless as the life he's left behind. And it's populated by office managers, bartenders, and taxi cab drivers who dress like Abraham Lincoln.

James Broadhurst dies in a car accident to find that the afterlife is a pretty hum-drum place. It's a city. It's full of Abe. The beer is free, and the television is reality at its most real--a one-way conduit to those you've left behind. It's not heaven, but it's not hell, either. It's just a place with senseless office jobs, no weekends, and cigarette butts stomped into the sidewalk. And James has lots of time to think: to think about the life he lost, the people he loved and knew, the marriage that wasn't great, and the software product he proofreads the manual for. (Omega-Beta software: it does everything, but nobody really knows what it is.)

The book is an enjoyable read, written in good old-fashioned clear and concise prose; James our Everyman, narrating us through life in the almost big-city in the sky. It's a bit surreal, but in a sort of "I need something to ease me out of the Steve Erickson canon" sort of way. (Or as just a sort of "I need a good book" sort of way.) Grant Bailie's got an eye for the fun, offbeat detail, the kind of things that elevate a story about the hum-drum above the status of a hum-drum narrative. At one point, I thought of the book as something like Steven Dixon meeting Douglas Adams. Sort of. In a good way.

If you act fast and order the book straight from the publisher, Ig Publishing, you can snap it up for a bargain. Plus, Grant Bailie lives in Cleveland, and if you buy his book and tell all your friends to buy his book, you'll give me hope that Cleveland writers can possibly do okay with the whole "writing" thing. And, the cover is really cool, and will look good in your collection. Ig Publishing is a small, indie press, so, you know: cred points. Who doesn't need a few more of those?

Quickies

Bullet point rock! Deedly deedly deedly!

• Chicago was awesome.


• The concert festival itself was absolutely amazing. So. Much. Fun.


• The Maureen McHugh/Sarah Willis reading tonight was cool. (Maureen wrote what might be the best thing ever in my copy of Mothers & Other Monsters. It was like an adrenaline shot of writerly encouragement.)


• I'm still done with Steve Erickson. (And I think I turned Maureen on to Our Ecstatic Days. My reading may be done for a while, but the evangelicism is not!)


• I am now, coincidentally enough, reading a book by a guy from Cleveland. It's fun. It is, reading-wise, What The Proverbial Doctor Ordered.


• I'm not sure how I feel about this. (Via BookSlut.)

Steve Erickson's Days Between Stations

I'm done.

And now, Chicago. It feels terrifically appropriate, to finish the journey of these books--each of which deal with journeys, themselves--and to go on a little journey myself. Even if it's only to cross a couple state lines.

But before I go: a little reminder for Clevelanders looking for something to do this coming Tuesday night.

Catch you on the other side.

..

"Ask someone how to get to this place or that, and she'll sing you the directions."
- Steve Erickson, Our Ecstatic Days. 2005.

"Ask someone how to get to this place or that and he'd sing you the directions."
- Steve Erickson, Rubicon Beach. 1986.

Is Chicago. Is not Chicago! Is Steve Erickson. Is not Steve Erickson!

One hundred pages. (Well, one hundred and change.) Then I'm done.

Because I know that you, dear loyal reader, are biting your nails, wondering the night away: Will he make it?

Yes, I think I will: between a lunch hour snuck off to read a handful of pages, and the couple of hours I'll remain conscious before I pass out tomorrow night, I'll make it. And dammit, I'm still enjoying myself. And dammit, if someone came up to me tomorrow and said, "Hey, we just found a pre-1985 Steve Erickson novel! Wanna copy?", dammit if I wouldn't say, "Yes. Yes I do." And then I'd read it. Though I'm glad that won't happen. Me and Steve's Books, we've had a hell of a fling here, but we've come to an agreement that it's best for all parties if we go see other people and their books for a while. So that someday in the future, we can bump into each other on a lonely moon-lit sidewalk, completely unexpected of course, and then we can head in to a local bar to throw back a few drinks and remember the good old days of July 2005. Maybe, then, we'll make out a little bit, too. A little mind-expansion here, a little fooling around there, a little excess of literary fireworks up against the wall--for old times' sake. But that's for the future to decide.

So a hundred pages, and then: Chicago, for an absolutely ridiculous amount of indie-rawk carnage. Chicago and me, we get along, I think. And checking the weather reports, it's nice to see that I'll be escaping the torrid, sweat-drenched Cleveland heat for a while, replacing it with torrid, sweat-drenched Chicago heat. But see, it's Chicago heat, and that makes it special. (And hey, I hear if you don't like the weather there, just wait five minutes. It'll still be miserable but at least you got to use that five minutes line everyone digs.) Unfortunately, I don't think I'll have the chance to go one-on-one with Michael Jordan down at the park nor will I get to trade coaching truisms with Mike Ditka while I'm there, due largely to lack of available time, and the fact that it's not 1988.

A little something else for you, from the "Darby checks his search engine referrer logs way too much" department: at least as of right now, my incisive, cutting critique of Steve Erickson's Our Ecstatic Days is on the first page of hits on "our ecstatic days" on Google. I'm right up there with the Believer and Bookforum and other greats of the greats, which obviously means that what we've known all along is now official: I'm great! So, you know, if you're joining me from that route, welcome, make yourself at home, but not for too long, because you should really go read the book, since you're obviously interested enough to click any old damn link you find on the topic.

Also, I'm the number one hit on Google for "footnote technology", which, er, makes me greater, I guess.

Steve Erickson's Rubicon Beach

Five of the many possible signs you might be interested in reading some Steve Erickson:

1. You're interested in literary representations of father/son relationships.
2. You're interested in literary representations of gender and gender relationships.
3. You like characters who travel a lot.
4. You regret.
5. You need to be surprised.

Finished Rubicon Beach tonight. Six down, one to go. And I have to finish that last one this week, by Friday night. I'm headed to Chicago for the weekend for the Pitchfork-curated Intonation Music Festival, where I fully expect that in a park full of bone-thin tight-shirt-clad indie kids, I will feel like the fattest, oldest man alive. It's going to be awesome. But yeah, this Steve Erickson kick, it's been a great trip, but it's time for it to come to a close. Maybe calling this weekend my deadline for completion is a bit arbitrary, or maybe not. It feels right. It feels like, after setting down the last book, it will be good to hop in a car for six hours to go stand in the sun for two straight days, listening to lots of awesome bands play a whole lot of awesome music. Seems like the best physical external-space way to escape the emotional mental-space I've been wrapped up in for the last three months. Er, excuse me? It's only been about two and a half weeks? That's a bunch of crazy talk, my friend. A whole bunch of crazy talk.

There's a reason why I think you should read some Steve Erickson but not pull a crazy and try to read all of him at one time, and it goes back to reason number five, above. Steve Erickson is a writer who will surprise you: you'll be reading from page to page and then the next page he'll whisk the ground out from beneath your feet, replacing it gradually over the next few pages with a whole new ground, one you'll get a firm footing on just in time for him to crack it open with a literary mallet, sending you hurtling down towards some other ground, buried beneath the second ground and floating right above the first. So it's not that he ever becomes formulaic--by the time I was on my fourth book, Arc d'X, I was still damned amazed at how where I'd started was well after where I was going and how everything in between all meets up at yet some other point seemingly unrelated yet intrinsic and vital all along though I'd never known its existence; the tendrils of dream-knots coming together for brief whispers that send ripples and chasms up and down the lengths of themselves.

But even then there eventually becomes a point where surprise becomes somehow less surprising--however surprised you are by the unexpected, you kind of knew it was coming all along. Which is kind of the headspace I found myself in about midway through Rubicon Beach, when I was reading along and enjoying myself but not letting myself get pulled away by the book. There's a point in the middle when I realized I'd just been seamlessly flown from the story of a girl living in the jungles of South America to the story of a Hollywood screenwriter whose life was success despite his own personal failures. There were plenty of surprises and odd details that had come before that that I'd liked, but it took a certain amount of a conscious mental gasp to realize just how remarkable it all was, right there in front of me the whole time. I enjoyed the story much more after that, having given my mental space a good rattle and a firm shake.

I suppose this is the sort of thing you're likely to run into with any writer or mode of writing you immerse yourself in, which is why I think that experimental fiction alone is not vital. My oft-mentioned friend Chris, having recently read Our Ecstatic Days, is currently reading Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, and I think that's a perfect pairing of novels to be read in succession. I don't know if he knows the surprises in store for him with Ishiguro's book--I sure as hell didn't tell him, but, you know, kids these days with their internets and their freedoms and all. Big surprises of Ishiguro's book known or not--the two books both work in realms of surprise entirely distinct, and, yet, revelatory, I think. One book's "Wow" factor relies on the tricks of the post-modern canon wedded to shocking forms of story-telling; the other relies on good old fashioned narrative and detail. And yet I'll posit that for all their distinctiveness from each other, the two books aren't so far apart in spirit. Like seeing the fireworks as awesome, then looking down to watch them light up the face of someone you love; or, or something. I don't know. I'm very tired.

Point being: I can't wait to see how all this Erickson affects the way I perceive other books, other modes of storytelling. The mental stretching of it, and all that. Also, did I just use the word "posit" in casual blogging? What the deuce? Next thing you know, I'll be all, making interesting points, and stuff. Good grief.

For Cleveland, a literary event; for everyone else, a reason to be jealous of us

I'm excited.

Why, you ask?

Because Maureen McHugh's short story collection, Mothers & Other Monsters, was recently released. The book has a really cool title. The book has a really cool cover. And, my hunch? The book's got really cool stories inside it, too.

Have I bought the book yet, you ask?

No, I haven't.

And, why not, you ask?

Because I plan picking up my copy next Tuesday, July 19, at 7:00 PM, when I'll be at Mac's Backs, which is where all the cool kids are going to be, because Maureen will be there, bringing on the "2005 I'm Not Dead Tour" practically to your doorstep as she reads from and signs the new book.

Okay, so, disclaimer (yes, I seem full of those tonight): I got a big huge kick in the creative writing ass from Maureen back in college, but that was a really long time ago now, so I hope you trust me when I say it's well beyond the point when I can expect to nudge up any grades through flattery. I've read most of her novels (I think I loaned the one I haven't read to someone and haven't seen it again since), and enjoyed all of them; I'd happily recommend Nekropolis to anyone interested in checking out her stuff. And I've been looking forward to getting a hold of a short story collection for a while now. (Okay, to be totally honest, maybe I'm hoping a little flattery now will mean that someday I'll get to sample her cooking again, because: yum. But food or no food, my statements stand!)

Maureen will be reading with another local writer, Sarah Willis, whose first novel, Some Things That Stay, came out in that long ago time when I was taking Maureen's classes. I think we spent much of a class period dissecting the opening paragraphs of that book. They were really good opening paragraphs. And the rest of the book was really good too. Then I turn around one day and a bunch of years have passed and Sarah Willis is on her fourth novel and I'm wondering how I missed numbers two and three. Seems I have some catching up to do.

From the Mac's Backs newsletter:

SARAH WILLIS & MAUREEN MCHUGH
Tuesday, July 19th at 7 p.m.

The Sound of Us (Berkley), novelist Sarah Willis' fourth book, is a nuanced and insightful look at foster parenting and racial relationships. Middle-aged and childless, interpreter Alice Marlowe answers a late night phone call that changes the direction of her life. Sarah Willis is a novelist who makes you think about family, friendship, community and society and The Sound of Us will keep you turning pages until the very end. Maureen McHugh's collection of short stories, Mothers and Other Monsters (Small Beer Press) is also out this summer. Maureen has won the prestigious Hugo and Locus awards for her short fiction and acclaim for four novels, including Nekropolis, a New York Times Notable book. This collection, featuring "aging parents, wayward children and nervous stepmothers are all brought to life with graceful restraint and delicacy." The two page story "Wicked" is a good way to sample the intelligent wit contained in all these stories. Join us at Mac's for this reading and booksigning.

So, you know: it's going to be an all around lit-rockin' good time. They're both excellent readers and great fun to listen to. So, you know. Show up, Cleveland. Support your awesome local literary treasures. And then, you know, thank me by buying me a beer. Or a Coke. Whatever.

Stop me if you've heard this one...

...a man drops by a blog, subscribes to a lit mag, and likes it. (No rimshot, sorry.)

One of my unstated and so far largely unfulfilled goals for the year has been to dive head-first into the lit mag scene; the smalls, the indies, the big ones, the ones I've foolishly and blindly submitted my own work to; everything and anything to get a grip on that elusive form called "the short story". I say largely unfulfilled because, uh, I've done little to achieve that goal. I--wait for it--suck.

Somewhere in my lit-blog travels, I became a fan of Gwenda Bond's Shaken & Stirred. Ms. Bond edits fiction for and writes reviews for Say..., a semi-annual lit mag that has the dubious distinction of being one of the zines I've subscribed to. And while I haven't quite finished all the stories contained in issue five ("...have you heard this one?") I can say that I'm certain I like the zine. The cover art is cool, so I've looked real hip-like carrying it into lunchtime coffee shops, and (more importantly) the stories are good. I think I approach story collections as sorts of literary "mix tapes," so there's of course some stand outs in there--"Within this Present Time," by Karen M. Roberts, and "The Last Bee Tree in Lynchburg County," by Catherine M. Morrison, in this case, so far. I think I've especially enjoyed the zine so far because it's been a reliable source of bite-sized pieces of literary non-Steve Erickson goodness for those moments when my brain just needed a little something else.

So if you're looking for some zine goodness, I'd say you'd do alright with Say...; I think you can order the most recent copy here, and I think there's subscription buttons on the Shaken & Stirred sidebar, and there's going to be a website here, soon. Enjoy!

And now, for the disclaimers.

1. (This endorsement is not to be considered a flattery-type response to the fact that Ms. Bond has been kind enough to drop by this humble blog to offer an occasional comment or two. I might not often come out lambasting books I don't like, but that doesn't mean that my I Like Good Books and Zines policy and my I Really Automatically Like People More Who Drop Comments On My Blog policy overlap, at all. Honest.)

2. (Nor does this endorsement have anything to do with the fact that I won the subscription drive prize, though winning my first random drawing since like third grade is way cool, I will admit. Honest. Though I will admit that when I saw I'd won, I kind of did a "Huh!" double-take at the monitor, and then some latent Catholic guilt kicked in when I realized I'd been lazy and I hadn't gotten around to finishing reading the mag or posting my approval/endorsement yet. I, uh, oh, what's the word...four letters, rhymes with duck...oh, yeah. Suck.)

3. (Though okay I will admit that all of this does provide a nice segue and/or hint at my next post topic, cough cough, end of last paragraph, cough cough...)

More on post-rock (music) (*bang bang*)

In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm a total poser. I like to sometimes talk like I know stuff. But I don't know stuff. This hasn't stopped me from talking about stuff, and it probably won't stop me from talking about stuff any time soon, but hopefully we can still all have some fun despite my ineptitude.

I recently went ahead and rocked the literary world to its very foundations by inventing a brand new literary genre, "post-rock lit". I picked up the music world's "post-rock" movement in one hand and Steve Erickson's oeuvre in the other hand and banged them together as hard as I could until both came out slightly dented, then I dropped them on the table and called it genius. In that post I mentioned a few modern-ish post-rock bands, which I really do think are worth checking out. But for those of you who skipped the opening paragraph of this post, let me fill you in: I'm a poser and an idiot and don't really know anything about anything.

Luckily, the hyper-indie-otakus at Pitchfork immediately came to the rescue with this week's feature article, "The Lost Generation: How UK post-rock fell in love with the moon, and a bunch of bands nobody listened to defined the 1990s".

Excerpt You! Black Emperor:

"They were an indie band that didn't want to be an indie band": That's how Paul Cox, co-founder of the Too Pure label, described Seefeel, one of his acts. That one sentence might be the single best summary of the post-rock project-- a crew of underground guitar bands who suddenly got the idea that they could play much more than rock, and spent the next few years trying to break free into whatever that "much more" might turn out to be.

"Indie bands that didn't want to be indie bands," though-- it's kind of a mouthful of a genre name, and the critic Simon Reynolds quickly stepped in with something more concise. His first use of the term "post-rock" came in a review of a Bark Psychosis record; the one that counted came in a 1994 issue of The Wire. One album does not a genre make, and in that '94 article, Reynolds went about lassoing together the bands that made the scene: Disco Inferno, Seefeel, Stereolab, Pram, Moonshake, and others.

It's a fun article, and it comes complete with a "recommended listening" list, so if you're the kind of person for whom the term "post-rock" holds a certain allure, you know right where to go to find out where it all started. And if you're me, you know right where to go so you can earn yourself some learnin' on the roots of the movement so you can bang art-forms together to greater impact and general non-poser-ness. Elitist nature, here I come!