Katherine Dunn!

Katherine Dunn! For real! She's guest-blogging at the inferior 4+1. (Yes, the name confused me, too.)

Katherine Dunn wrote Geek Love, which I read last year, shortly after I read Gravity's Rainbow. I suppose you can call it the book that convinced me there would be life after Pynchon. Kick-ass life, at that. Life with gills.

You can draw your own added parallels, if you want: Geek Love came out in 1989; now, nearly two decades later, she's working her way around to publishing her next novel. She drops some hints about the new book, The Cut Man, in a comment to her first post:

Forgive me for being vague about this. I’m not religious but I’m definitely superstitious.

Cut man is set in the world of small town, small time boxing. The cut man of the title is the guy in a boxer’s corner who is skilled at stopping the bleeding if the boxer gets a cut or bloody nose during the fight. This book has all sorts of sub-plots and supporting as well as peripheral characters. It’s about—maybe—obsession and delusion (the care and feeding thereof) or maybe it’s about beauty—its nature and abuses—or maybe it’s just about eggs and what happens to them before the omelet appears. How’s that for oblique?

I'm excited. (I'm also going to read the essay she posted today, uh, sometime soon, I swear.)

Via and via (who was so on this, like, yesterday).

Door opens

Not feeling appreciated? Retire from something. Johns Hopkins Magazine has the latest profile of Stephen Dixon--the third such-type article this year, by my count.

This one kills off any hopes I had that I might have inherited some of his talent via genetic relation:

DOOR OPENS on Stephen Dixon's life on June 6, 1936, but at birth he isn't Stephen Dixon, he's Stephen Ditchik, son of Abraham Meyer Ditchik, a dentist, and Florence Leder Ditchik, a former beauty queen and Broadway chorus girl, both born and raised on New York's Lower East Side.

Interesting story.

Also fun (really, just go read the whole thing):

Sometime in 1963, Dixon turns on a television program and there's Rudd, talking about university writing programs. That there is such a thing as a university writing program is news to Dixon, but he likes what he sees, especially the scenes from Stanford University. "I thought, 'You can get paid to write? In California? This is for me!'" The application stipulates that he is to submit 30 pages of writing, but he sends a complete novel. Stanford responds by making him one of that year's four Wallace Stegner Fellows. In California, he says, he doesn't learn that much but he does have fun. He gets to know the novelists Robert Stone and Ken Kesey, and Jack Kerouac's sidekick Neal Cassady. "He was nuts."

His newest book (not counting the one he's working on now) is coming out in September.

Ride, sally, ride

I've started reading this little book called Don Quixote. (Well, it is little, compared to a certain other too-tempting summer reading selection [see item number one] that I learned about today via Callie's post on the subject of how sand somehow makes us stupid. Did I say summer reading selection? I meant post-holiday reading selection. Seriously, if you all starting saving your pennies now, and each of you chipped in like fifty cents in December...) Also, I'm tilting at windmills. It's my first group blog experience. So exciting! I just hope I don't accidentally destroy any semblance of intelligent discourse. I don't want to be that guy. I hear that looks bad on your blogger resume. (Unethical, too! [Really, nobody wants to take me to task for that one? I was so hoping.])

In my debut TaW post, I offer up yet another example of that hardcore Darby litcrit you've so come to know and love. Oh yeah. It's gonna be a long, awesome summer.

"Keeps your mind on the page"

I feel okay about breaking cover on this, since I know for a fact that every other person on the planet has acquired a "pre-release" of the new Spoon album, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. So it's okay for me to go ahead and point out that the second track, "The Ghost of You Lingers," is just completely unfair. It's unfair to any other song that any other band has put out this year. Hell, it's unfair to every other song on the album it appears on, which is something, since Ga⁵ is a damn fine collection of songs. But "Ghost," though...it brings it. It brings the chips. It brings the dip. And it brings the soul-crushing ennui of knowing you'll never create something so meaningful, yourself. Ever. Well, unless you have kids. I guess kids can work. But "Ghost" won't ever crash your car after a heated family argument, so: one point for Spoon.

It's sad, in a strange way, that the album is getting so much pre-release hype. Spoon feels like one of those bands that everybody secretly knows is their own private house band of the mind. Spoon "belongs" to each of us a little more than most popular bands do. Am I wrong? Maybe, I don't know. I know I'm a relative late-comer to the band--the catalog prior to Kill the Moonlight is still a bit of a blur to me--but what I've got of theirs, I like, and I like it in a way you can't possibly match, because they're sort of secretly my band. Mine. They play for me, each time I plop my headphones onto my head. As much as I want you to like them, too--and as much as I think many more people are going to come out of this year liking them, as well--I don't really want to share them with you.

It's a little bit weird. I know. But still.

One thing I do know is that there's a small number of truly excellent writing discs in my collection. I can listen to most anything when I write, but there's only a couple albums that will always make me work hard every time I listen to them, start to finish. Sleater-Kinney's One Beat does that to me. I think I can credit my recent resurgence on the fiction-producing front to that album above all else in life. (The Woods as a follow-up makes for an excellent second-wind album. You know this makes sense.) Goodbye Enemy Airship the Landlord is Dead by Do Make Say Think can usually shove me off the cliff and into the zone. A couple others. And Spoon's Gimme Fiction. If they can't be my band, then that can be my disc. It's the yum.

(Really, though: steal it from me sometime, and try to listen to "Sister Jack" without feeling a little bit less discouraged. You can't. It's anti-ennui.)

"I didn't lie and I ain't sayin'/I told the whole truth/I didn't know that this game we were playin'/Even had a set of rules"

So I guess there was a panel discussion on ethics in book reviewing at this year's BookExpo America.

Exqueeze me? Book reviewing? Ethics? Discussion? What? I mean, what do you do with the other 59 minutes of the allotted hour? Was there punch or something?

See, there's not much to it. Let me break it down for you two-step style:

The TDAOC Comprehensive Guide to Ethical Book Reviewing

1. Don't lie.


2. Don't be an ass.

Am I right? I'm so right, right? I just guess I hope it wasn't one of those panels you had to pay to get into. Think of all the Dum-Dums you could have bought with that cash.

Or not? Am I radically oversimplifying the matter? The lines are open. Please: elucidate, illuminate.

Wuss, self-aware

Fifty pages, versus bedtime: it's a too-familiar battle for us book nerds. Me, tonight, I'm choosing sleep over the end of Galatea 2.2, though not without serious reservations. Sure, I know I'm a wuss. But at least I know that I know that I'm a wuss.

In so far as knowledge of knowing can be known.

I'm generally digging the book, though I'm not absolutely in love with it. But I figure a book is doing something right when it can make me pencil myself questions like, "If you divorce religious belief from political motives, can you really blame Creationists for giving up and blaming God?" Of course, at other times, the book makes me want to ask questions like "Who cares?" Mixed bag, in other words. Thankfully, the bulk of my marginalia asterisks denote intellectual highway on-ramps to far-flung questions closer to the former's end of the spectrum. Good things await the curious.

Figuratively speaking, at least

Random thought: where most writers use similes, Richard Powers uses metaphors. Am I right? I might be wrong. That's my sense, though, after reaching the halfway point of Galatea 2.2. It's a sense I think I could parlay into a book-length thesis, were I to find a couple spare years between the couch cushions. So, fans of thesis-free blogging, take a moment to be glad that time is not loose change. Ah. Yes.

What's so disorienting about slash porn, flame wars, and table-based site design*?

The web: yet another total disorientation that became status quo without anyone realizing it.

- Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2

So I guess what I'm in the mood for right now--at least according to my recent reading of Icelander and my tonight finally having given in to Richard Powers, who I'd been resisting for a long time for reasons I can't explain or identify--is literature that makes me feel smarter and/or more clever than I really am.

It's sort of not a bad place to be. Like, I'm 60 pages into Galatea 2.2, and, I dunno, it feels sort of just right for right now. Sort of like Neal Stephenson nerd-lit but without the Slashdot/Boing Boing info-dump overtone. (Or does that joke not make sense outside my own head?)

Now this is when, of course, I'm sure, all the Powersaholics in the house chime in with suggestions for which book of his I have to read next: I'm going to cut you off by saying I've already got The Gold Bug Variations on the TBR pile. (And, well, a library copy of The Echo Maker that is so overdue I can't even stand to look at it long enough to, like, take it back to the library. Yikes.) I'm not going to get to it any time soon, but it's there, and unless Galatea totally de-rails, will be gotten to, some day. (After Don Quixote. And The Adolescent. And Ada, or Adore. And The Recognitions. And The Sot-Weed Factor. And...everything else on my steadily growing pile of "huge-fat books I feel a sudden urge to read right this very instant, hours in the day be damned.")

--

^* - Oh yeah. That's right. I went there.

Dustin Long interviewed at The Inside Flap

So, I'm trying to catch up on my homework: The Inside Flap recently posted a lengthy interview with Dustin Long, and drops mention of the fact that the paperback of Icelander will be out on June 1. I haven't read the entire interview yet, but it certainly looks meaty, and the snippets I've seen seem intriguing; nor have I seen the paperback yet, but I suspect it won't be as well-assembled as the pleasing McSweeney's Rectangular hardback^*.

--

^* - But, of course, it will be cheaper, and therefore, far more likely to wind up in my permanent collection, and therefore, far more likely to cause my girlfriend's hardcover to return to her own bookshelves. Such are the economics of love.

I wanna be a Refurserkir when I grow up

Icelander, by Dustin Long. Has anybody else read this book? I recall no lit-blog or not-lit-blog buzz about it. Which shocks me, since it's a McSweeney's book, and it seems like there's always somebody somewhere loving themselves up the latest McSweeney's books. Did this slim tome fall under the mammoth shadow of The Children's Hospital? I don't know. I haven't checked the timing. I haven't done my research. I skipped the homework.

See, I was too busy last night, reading this book.

This ridiculously fun book.

True, it's of that type or genre of book I am going to call "footnote lit"--your classic case of intratextual cleverness run amok. Pale Fire, House of Leaves. The Facts of Winter, to name another McSweeney's example. Whatever: you know the stakes when you flip through its pages the first time; five seconds is all you need to decide whether you're in or out.

If you're out, you're missing a party.

If you're in, you're going to a party.

An intratextual, metatextual, Nabokov-meets-Nancy Drew^* murder mystery of a party. One that takes place both on and under Iceland. One that involves objects as stories, forgery as the foremost form of artistic expression, karaoke qua heroic epic, and political plots as personal vendettas. One that realizes exactly what it is, and pays homage to the gate-keepers while gate-crashing itself.

Text in love with text.

Text that kept me up past my bedtime, dizzy, and maybe a little drunk, and certainly confused as to how I got where I'd went when I was done. Text that sort of made me want to go right out and read every book ever, immediately.

Which is to say, in short: Yay!

--

^* - Credit due where credit's due: it was my girlfriend who voiced the Nabokov/Nancy Drew merger-comparison when I found the book on her bookshelf (the first time I'd seen or even heard of the book being during a random perusal of her bookshelves) and asked her if she'd read it and/or liked it. She had, and had. Selling point enough, even without the apt description.

Would you like a side of IN YOUR FACE! with that?

New York Magazine posts a list of the 61 best books you've never read. But guess what? I've read two of them. Oh snap! Take that, fancy-pants literati!

(Via Dorothy--whose efforts in leading the Tilting at Windmills blog have me thinking it's time to get Don Quixote off the TBR pile this year.)

Holiday weekend wrap-up

I walked inside a bridge!

Meanwhile, the Baltimore Sun published a good appreciation of Stephen Dixon.

The Muttering Retreats @ The Beachland Tavern, Tues 5/22

Hey! Fresh off their gig opening for Daniel Johnston, my good friends The Muttering Retreats will be kicking things off tomorrow night for Chris Garneau at the Beachland Tavern. This'll be their third show, and you know what they say about thirds.

Also, while you're on the internet, check out Tim's new fancy blog, and go be BFF with Chris, or at least listen to some of his solo songs.

"The time to rise has been engaged/You're better best to rearrange"

I finished Demons today. Well, I finished my first reading. First of how many? I don't know. I know I'll likely need to go back more than once. Because, see, it's a curious thing, reaching the end of a book that I thoroughly enjoyed but understood only, at best, elliptically, in disconnected glimpses, through the corners of my eyes, of the rapidly passing textual landscape, one both aesthetically dense and continuously evolving. The interpolative process of extrapolating critical meaning and understanding of the book is one I hardly feel capable yet of undertaking in any vigorous manner, my brain littered with information and ideas the way your coffee table might be coated with jigsaw puzzle pieces, were you to buy your pieces via some Netflix-like subscription plan in a time of some plague-ridden Pony Express delivery system. The thrill of connection is strong, if momentary, and random.

Cough, cough. You're right, I pretty much blew the lit-crit wad on that last paragraph. I'll say here though that according to my records, I've somehow helped sell three of you beautiful people on this book. I have to admit this gives me a bad case of the quaking uh-oh feeling, the one that comes around when someone does something based on things I say, thus opening a portal through which the viscous black oozing mass of my own intellectual frauditude might be exposed to and unleashed upon the public. But if that selfsame portal might also let in some illumination, I'm willing to take the slight hit to my credibility rating, in service of the common cause. Your thoughts and reactions, I do eagerly await, in the steamy kitchen of my own overcooked-metaphors' making.

Review this

I was going to take the time tonight to wade back into the book review discussion by tossing out a couple more Recursive Monkey Wrench awards, for valor in the field of being totally fuckwitted, but you know what? Hell with it. Life is too short to waste it on wasting it.

Let's be happier people. Let's be better book nerds.

To that end, I'll point you toward a really good bit by Richard Powers on literary reviews:

Reading is solitary; reviewing is the shared solitude of reading. As throughput accelerates and the cost of information falls, engaged seclusion and slow reflection become more valuable. Changes in technology change the terms of this contest, but not the stakes. Like any good crisis, this one can only be resolved through narrative – the turbulent act of figuring out how to read what’s writing us.

Amen. (Mr. Powers, I might just have to get around to your books sometime this century, after all.)

Also, there's a choice comment appended to a post at The Elegant Variation that's says what I'd have said, had I said it myself (third comment down, authored by John):

On a larger scale, that's what I want as a reader. I want to learn about books I might want to read, and I'm helped much more by simply seeing that a review has been done - and by who and in what tone - than by the review itself. Too much "thoughtful literary criticism" gives too much away, and I'd rather not know too much going in. I may turn to BookForum or the NY Review of Books after the fact to amplify points or help me to better appreciate what I just read, but I seriously doubt more than a fraction of the people who read with any consistency slog their way through several thousand words before deciding to pick up a book.

Amen. It's felt like far too often during this whole "save the book reviews" campaign (and really all the time before this campaign as well) that I've seen book reviews and book criticism discussed as if they are the same thing. They are not. Or, they should not be. I really would love to see both forms flourish, and I don't care whether it's done via newspapers or periodicals or blogs or online news sites or whatever. (Well, more online stuff wouldn't hurt. It's proven surprisingly hard to find good, thoughtful, lengthy considerations of Dostoevsky's work via quick Googling. Not that I'm helping much with my "Hey this quote read this quote! Whoa that's awesome huh? Ok gotta go! Cya later!" posts, but.) But it certainly doesn't help the case when people look at the one and accuse it of not doing what the other does. Let's get our terms and tools straight: I would not use a tow truck to take a photograph; I would not use a 500 word review to provide 5000 words of critical analysis.

Dead Russian authors do it four to the floor

If Demons were music and Dostoevsky its DJ, Part 3 would be when he lets the beat drop.

(Ah, yes, the sweet, sweet feeling of reluctantly putting a book down at the end of the night, mind alight with questions. (Historically speaking, when did social unrest become interested in itself? How straight is the vector between Demons and Pynchon? How consciously did Ishiguro inject parallels to Demons into The Unconsoled? Is Stavrogin a good guy or a bad guy? Quantitatively speaking, how many levels of awesome was the literary reading scene? Would the world mind much if I put the coffee on and spent the night reading the book and blowing off work tomorrow?) All that and I've still got 150 pages to go--I want to finish, I want it not to end...)

Unquote

"'"'''''"''""""'"""""''"""'""""'''"""""''L8r Sk8r''"""""'''""""'"""''"""""'""""''"'''''"'"

"Paranoia/I adore ya/Where the hell would I be/Without you there beside me"

About the coolest thing I can think to say about Demons is that my experience reading it is like being in a relatively constant state of deliriously enthralled mystification punctuated by sudden em-dashes of clarity; it's like I'm reading the novel through the most slightly tattered gauze. Meaning eludes me and importance defies me, and yet, I'm thoroughly snagged. What I can't tell is whether that gauze is there due to my failings as a reader (irregular reading schedule, bouts of laziness and/or exhaustion), certain unavoidable cultural/temporal division (mid-19th century Russia versus, uhm, Cleveland), and/or authorial intention (Dostoevsky doesn't even want to know what's coming next). It's the sort of thing that might be terribly off-putting, if it weren't for those dash-shaped holes in the fabric between me and the words, those moments when it's all clear, for a moment, just what's on the line, what's (maybe) at stake here. That momentary feeling that even though I know it's not all going to connect, it's still all connected, in a constant state of connecting. Elusive as dandelion gauze in a stiff literary breeze.

Callie asks who or what you'd most like to spend your time re-reading; what books warrant a second (or third or additional) look, even in the face of all those other books that are still waiting for you to take them out on even a first date. I sort of answered over there but I'll rephrase a bit here: if I had to pick two authors whose catalogs I think I could most consistently lose myself in, I think I'd go with Dostoevsky and Kazuo Ishiguro. Because even as I'm reading this book this first time, I'm already looking forward to re-visiting it someday, to seeing how much more I might get through another pass. I just read Crime and Punishment and When We Were Orphans last year and yet, yikes, itching for another read, already. And this is to say nothing against the single-read authors/books--many single reads are brilliant things and should in no way feel slighted by my lack of interest in revisiting them. (Like for instance I'd maybe toss most all of David Foster Wallace in this category, whose books I liked/loved but I don't really feel any need to go back there again, except of course for Infinite Jest, which 80 years from now I'll still be saying I'm going to re-read, one of these days.) It's just that some things really do seem to demand additional attention.

So I'll extend and advance the question in the hopes of sparking a lively comments section that will mask my recent blogging shortfalls. Desert island authors: go!

Janice Galloway goes into seclusion, gives me a chance to make up on my past failings

Janice Galloway is about to do something that sounds awesome. She is also, it seems, about to finish one book, and about to begin another book. I, meanwhile, am about to be very excited by these developments.

In the meanwhile, I'm bumping Clara back up on the TBR pile from the "Oh god, I can't believe I didn't finish it the first time through, I need to try that book again" pile. So it's gone from "I'll read it this century" status to "I'll read it this year...maybe" status. Which is a good move for it to make.

May Quick Hits at Arriviste Press

I've got some Quick Hits up for you at Arriviste Press. Go read me talk pretty about Explosions in the Sky, Cynthia G. Mason, Prosser, My Teenage Stride, and Minmae.

While you're over there, you can read an interview with Neal Pollack, and an interview with Carice van Houten of the movie Black Book. You can also read a preview of, and an interview with/by the author of, the latest Arriviste Press publication, Michael Standaert's novel The Adventures of the Pisco Kid. (I haven't read it yet, though I do have a copy of it on my TBR pile. So even though I've got no idea whether it's any good? I'm still going to tell you that you need this book. Go buy it. Buy ten copies for the kids. Order twenty copies and pay for forty. Right now. Make Arriviste Press flush. Make it so they can afford to fund my extravagant music-reviewer lifestyle full-time. Seriously, people, all these Soft Batch cookies aren't exactly buying themselves.)

Short Reactions to Short Stories: Celebrating Short Story Month on a time crunch

May is Short Story Month! Woo! I don't know how it started or who started it, but lots of litblog folks are playing along at home, including Matt and Callie and Dan and Jeff and probably lots of other people I'm not aware of at this moment. (Is there a sign up sheet? I always miss the sign up sheet. Drat.)

I guess you can count me in, what with my recent surge of interest in the form. To kick things off, I read "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor the other night, and, from the perspective of one participating in intense critical discourse, I'd like to take this moment to say holy fucking shit, have you read this story? I had not. I had some memory of being in high school and reading something O'Connor wrote, maybe, and thinking it was sort of...symbolic and meaningful, in a stuffy and dull "answer the essay question" way. I have no idea what story it was. I think there was a sky? I don't know. But something somewhere suggested to me it was time to go back and revisit O'Connor's work. So I grabbed the A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories collection, and I read the title story, and, and, and it's like...holy fucking shit! What is that? What do you even do with that? Wow, ya know?

Quote of the Moment: The End of the World edition

Because...well, just because:

Never in my life have I seen a more grim, gloomy, glowering face on a man. He looked as if he were expecting the destruction of the world, and not just sometime, according to prophecies which might not be fulfilled, but quite definitely, round about morning, the day after tomorrow, at ten twenty-five sharp.

- from Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

I mean, come on: that's awesome.

Speaking of speaking

Callie's set to speak (sans hype) about Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics (now out in paperback); meanwhile, Ed doesn't speak so well when face-to-face with a pretty girl. Some friends of mine, I think, last I heard, were kicking off a weekly ("weekly" being synonymous here with "hardcore") book club with Special Topics. I've spoken about the book once or twice before, and despite the odd plummeting of my opinion since I read the book (see also my comment to Callie's post), I've remained oddly intrigued by the ongoing (re-)evaluation of the book.

I do admit I think it's funny that discussions about the book have to be explicitly not about the conversation about the book's hot author's great hair. For what it's worth, if I ever get a book of my own published? You people can talk about my great hair all you want. I'm okay with that.

The devilish revenge of Summer of Dostoevsky Aught-Oh-Six

So I'm reading Demons (a.k.a. The Possessed) by your favorite dead Russian and mine, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and I realized two things as I read the opening chapters:

1. Really funny stuff happens here. And not funny like "Oh ho ho I'm a stuffy English major" funny, but funny like, "Hey, Stepan? Varvara? That shit's hilarious!" funny.
   
   Like Imani's experiencing with Don Quixote (also on my TBR pile, as it's been for far too long now), I'm finding great enjoyment in finding unexpected humor in what you might call "dead lit." After all, as we all know, dead lit is serious business! So what's up with all the hilarity? I'm reminded of none other than your favorite living Brit and mine Kazuo Ishiguro, whose stodgy high school reading list Brit Lit book about a fucking butler for cripe's sake how much more dull can you get for real right was, I found when I finally read it, genuinely hysterical. (And heartbreaking, too, right.) But like, really, who would have thought, you know, with the the way we all go on like humor is some kind of basic feature you might find listed under those "Minimum System Requirements" that have no actual bearing on how your program is going to run once you load it up.
   
   Comedy! It's not just for postmodern novels anymore! (Nor is it just for lit crit types, either. That sound you hear is my standing ovation for Callie and her being "so tired of everything being so goddamned serious." Seriously.)


2. I have absolutely no idea where any of this stuff Dostoevsky is describing is going. None. Well, I know there's a murder--the back of the book suggests there will be one--but that's about it. And I realized that of the big D's big Final Five novels (Demons is so Starbuck so far) there's only two--Demons and The Adolescent--that I get to approach with this degree of freshness. I find that simultaneously exciting and saddening, and it makes me sort of want to read the book even slower than I am already. To savor the sweet directionlessness and unpredictability of it. Which is, from what I know, precisely how F.D. would have liked me to read it.
   
   Also, in case you didn't catch that, I am a huge flaming lit dork.

Yes they are. End of debate.

We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn. Burn, motherfucker. Burn:

Chicago-area high school senior Allen Lee recently wrote an essay with violent images that greatly disturbed his English teacher.

The teacher informed school administrators, who informed police, and Lee was eventually arrested for disorderly conduct.

The action has prompted a local debate about whether officials are overreacting because of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech.

(Via.)

Why I no longer read fiction

Because questions have answers now.

Well, okay, so I did watch a couple hours of TV tonight--but it wasn't my TV, so it doesn't count

"Whole problem 'th you folks's generation," Isaiah opined, "'nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it--but you sure didn't understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th' Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars--it was way too cheap...."

- Vineland, Thomas Pynchon

And the second Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks Recursive Monkey Wrench award goes to...

...Michael Dirda, who, in trying to convince people that newspaper book reviews are worth saving, ridicules and trivializes the very people he is trying to convince:

Every blogger wants to write a book. In fact, the dirty little secret of the internet is "Littera scripta manet"--the written word survives. A book is real, whereas cyberspace is just keystrokes--quickly scribbled and quickly forgotten. ...If you were an author, would you want your book reviewed in The Washington Post and The New York Review of Books--or on a website written by someone who uses the moniker NovelGobbler or Biografiend?...

...Instead of trimming book coverage, the wise publisher would beef it up. After all, the people who make up the hard-core readership of newspapers are also the people who buy and care for books. A newspaper that takes away its book review section ends up alienating its most faithful--and influential-- readers.

Tooltastic! Congratulations, Mike! You hereby join Keith Gessen in being recognized for your upstanding and outstanding efforts in service of absolutely and totally failing to get it!

To (re-?)(-cursively?)quote myself:

I've said it before, and I hate that it has to be said again: if you, in the literary criticism and analysis world, make fun of people who should naturally be your primary audience (i.e., people who love literature and love talking about literature and love responding to discussions about literature and generating new discussions about literature), you are a huge recursive tool. I'm sorry, but it's true: you are a monkey wrench you have thrown into your own self.

You know what we need? We need a graphic. A badge, suitable for printing, that winners of the TDAOC Recursive Monkey Wrench award can print out, frame, and display on their desks. Any of you graphic/art/drawing people want to take the lead on this initiative? Drop me a line.

Not dead

Just, ah...napping. Much like my houseplant. And disco, pre-LCD Soundsystem.

Still reading Pynchon (though I'm almost done and while I'm not having nearly as much fun as I did with Gravity's Rainbow there's still been enough moments of jaw-drop beauty to make the rest of the pages I'm not so much into worth reading) and I'm still reading Vonnegut during my lunch break (I really like the stories in Bagombo Snuff Box a lot, they've got me thinking a lot about the notion of fashion as it relates to short stories, in so far as I wonder if stories like those in Bagombo exist in any form anywhere today) and I got my copy of The Stories of Stephen Dixon yesterday (and promptly read the first story in the book and promptly fell out of my chair because it was an awesome little story and reminded me of how much possibility there is for the short story form which gave me some strength to start hacking away at a first draft of a story of my own, which might now be the first piece of writing in months that I might manage to stick with for longer than three days without getting sick of it) and I'm still thinking of moving on to John Barth next (though maybe not because maybe that book really is long and maybe I'm not actually in that mood the way I thought I was when I picked the book up a week or so ago) and somewhere in there I picked up a copy of The Collected Stories of William Faulkner (because I've been semi-randomly, semi-not-randomly itching to read some Faulkner lately but couldn't decide which novel I'd want to commit myself to for any length of time and so decided the only appropriate course of action was to commit myself to a 900 page story collection, right).

If you're looking for something that might be worth looking into, you might want to look into ways you can help save book reviews. I'm not vouching for this whole thing, as I haven't had a chance to review all the material and make anything like informed decisions about it (and as Ed Champion displays, there's complex issues at play here) (well, there might be complex issues at play here, or maybe there's just people who might be making complexity out of simplicity, like knots in shoelaces) (which is to say I really don't know what I think about any of it yet and am not nor will I hold the actions of anybody at this time against them) (as if such sanctions mattered, as you could still easily buy my respect in Canada) (no embargo, see) (ha ha) (right), but I do suspect it's a movement worth at least highlighting. Which I'm doing now, here, on my blog. So, mission accomplished.

Also in lit crit news, William H. Gass has won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin. I've got his big fat novel The Tunnel over there on the TBR pile, waiting for me to push some of the other big fat novels off the top of it. I think somewhere along the line I read something out of A Temple of Texts that made me want to read the rest of it...but, for the life of me, I can't find it or remember what it was. Bummer.

Chattiness

The book about the dust bowl that I read last week was awesome. Riveting. Terrifying. I read it like it was a novel I could not put down. The book shocked me with my own ignorance of just what that term "dust bowl" really meant. I think, in my defense, in my American History class in high school, it was nothing more than a footnote to the Real Story of the Great Depression, which happened in the cities. But I can't hold myself accountable for every question I've never yet learned I should not only find answers to, but ask in the first place. I already feel guilty enough about the unanswered questions I do know exist.

Something to be said, in any case, about the fact that I went from a fictional account of watery apocalypse in The Children's Hospital to a historical account of apocalypse by earth and wind in The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. But then it seems like every book I've read this year has been speaking to other books I've read this year with a frighteningly high level of chattiness. I really ought to be keeping a chart, because it's freaked me out more than once, how eerie the connections have been.

As for lunchtime reading, I'm almost done with Sleep by Stephen Dixon. I don't love every story in that book, but when I do love a story, I love it hard, the way a man loves a woman in a bar who he's talking to for the first time in that moment she first surprises him with some unexpected bit of connectivity. As someone who has read enough of the guy's books to think I've got a pretty good sense of his "game," I have to say I've been pleased to find myself surprised on more than one occasion. Eventually I'll be closer to the book while I'm blogging, and I'll tally up a list of "new most favoritist short stories ever" from the table of contents. I think this is the most pure fun I've had reading his work since I did Interstate and Frog. As is, only two more stories out of the book to go. (I've already read the closer, "Sleep," which, yeah. Wow.) I've already got an order in for a copy of that Stories of Stephen Dixon collection that's floating around out there, which will probably queue-jump the other Dixon books I have lined up on the TBR pile.

My next lunchtime short story reading obsession is probably going to be Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box. About whose passing I still don't even know what to say. But when I say it, I hope to hell it's funny. (My god, though, am I glad I got to see him talk when I had the chance.)

Right now at night I'm reading Thomas Pynchon again. Vineland. I'm liking it. I don't know that I'll get to Mason & Dixon and Against the Day before the year's out--like I may have foolishly once planned on doing--but we'll see what happens.

Also, there seems to be a lot of John Barth chatter amongst the litblog hepcats lately? Am I wrong? I read The Floating Opera and The End of the Road earlier this year, both of which I've long been meaning to say more about. For now suffice it to say they were fine little pieces of existential fiction at a time when fine little pieces of existential fiction were perfectly fine with me. Decent chance I'm going to start tackling The Sot-Weed Factor next (which I feel that someone out there is reading right now but forgive me for not remembering who you are at the moment?). So hopefully I'll be contributing to the upswing of Barth-chattiness in due time.

Elsewhere, from the department of "things I've read that other people have now read and have talked about online in ways that are probably more cogent and coherent than anything I've strung together by this point," Matthew Tiffany liked the book The End of Mr. Y but not as much as some others of us did, Ana María Correa is already looking forward to re-reading The Exquisite (you and me both!), and Levi Asher finds your loyalty to Cormac McCarthy....displeasing.

The Muttering Retreats - Beachland Tavern - 04-13-2007 - 005

The Muttering Retreats
Originally uploaded by thegrue76.

Tim's brother was taking uber-hi-fi shots with an expensive camera and a Really Big Flash. I was taking unter-lo-fi shots with my little pocket Canon, with the flash turned off. I believe I accidentally caught the flash off the professional camera the moment I took this shot.

Hi-fi + Lo-fi = Totally rock 'n roll.

The Muttering Retreats - Beachland Tavern - 04-13-2007 - 007

The Muttering Retreats
Originally uploaded by thegrue76.

And oh yeah

...some dude named Michael Chabon is going to be here on Sunday. Really it's just a bang-up nuts week of literary superstars. I'll be there, if I can find parking.

Big huge props to Akron, by the way, for building a gorgeous library building, and having it be attached to a parking garage. No idea how that happened, but wow, awesome. I'd go there all the time if it weren't, no offense, all the way down in Akron. (Of course, one could argue you're better off trying to park in Akron to get to the downtown CPL branch, sooooo-o-o-o.)

Pimpin' ain't easy, except when you're pimping for the number one rock and roll dance party

(Only the true of heart are able to click this image.)

From the Beachland Web site:

...Joining them are Cleveland's The Muttering Retreats, featuring Cari Santilli and Tim Thornton (Agnes High Quality, Thieves Like Me) from the Collinwood Soul Group. Chris Collins completes the trio. Multi-instrumentalists all, they switch between several instruments. At this upcoming show, they'll be playing piano, bass, drums, synths, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, violin, kazoo, slide whistle, laptop and more. Even though they've only been a band since last year, their sound is fully formed and generally upbeat, but soft. The Muttering Retreats take their inspiration from Magnetic Fields, Ben Folds, Beat Happening, Belle & Sebastian, and They Might Be Giants. The band is also largely rooted in literature (the name is a line from the T.S. Eliot poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"), so a lot of the lyrics are heavily influenced by 20th century literature. But they have songs about zombies, too....

Zombies! Prufrock! Kazoo! Tell me you're going to find any other place in any other town but Cleveland where you're going to get all three of those things on a Friday night! There will even be a limited edition tape (tape!) (cassette tape!) (sweet-ass retro home-brewed artifact!) for sale.

Really, I think you have no choice but to be there. If you need further convincing go to their Myspace page and listen to "Screw You and Your Beachfront Property." I mean, come on! What do you need with sand and sun and sin, anyway?

Kurt Vonnegut died today.

Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng, Akron-Summit County Public Library, this Wednesday, April 11, 7 p.m.

Just a reminder about the Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng event on Wednesday. Seriously, Akron ain't getting any closer; you might want to get on the road now. Avoid the I-77 highway bandits. (They sleep during the daylight.)

Of course, I have to say I'm way tempted to skip work on Wednesday and Thursday to go attend Stephen Dixon's retirement reading down in Baltimore (scroll down)--oh, if only it was on a weekend! Curses.

Truth...?

So after spending yesterday reading Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, about whom and which--as is the perpetual case in TDAOCville--more anon, I've taken a slight detour into a mysterious genre of writing called "non-fiction." From what I gather, "non-fiction" is pretty much like fiction in every way, except that when you hand in your work, you have to provide the whole proof, not just your final theorem. Yeah, I know, I don't get it, either. Making stuff up is so much easier. Makes me nervous, anyway; non-fiction is the sort of thing smart people like John Ettore talk about. Dude might think I'm trying to start a Cleveland turf war. I'd so lose.

In any case, I'm an experimental sort of guy--why, just today, I tried going to work without stopping for coffee before getting on the highway, and hoo boy, let me tell you, experiment failed!--so (in time with the Mac's Backs Book club) I'm working through Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. It's not something I would have randomly picked up on my own--what with its terribly anti-Colbertian reliance on "facts" and "reality"--but in a freakish bout of good timing, it's working for me. I've recently stumbled (or re-stumbled) into a sort of (I guess you could say long-held, though perhaps personally under-recognized) loose interest of mine in the question of where people choose to live. Big empty concept in my head meets a book full of specific examples: somewhere right now, some business manager's synergy-leveraging sensor just went off and he or she has no idea why.

So that's fun. In May, the Mac's Backs Book Club returns to the faeries-laden lollipop-strewn here-there-be-dragons land of make-believe with The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar. I've been meaning to read her stuff for a while, so I plan on trying to make it for that. Umrigar will be joining the discussion, too, so if you come, you can ask her what it's like to lie for a living. For real!

Random links: The Borgasboard edition

...because, you're either with us or against us!

• Or so Keith "I dislike babies and puppies" Gessen would have you believe, I guess? I dunno, I haven't been following the recent litblogs vs. n+1 flamewar all that closely--who's got the time, right? You miss one blog-vs-media fight, you can always catch the next one in fifteen minutes. I hear they've got them running in loops now. From what I've gathered of the current round of huffery puffery, Scott's got it about right.
  
  I've said it before, and I hate that it has to be said again: if you, in the literary criticism and analysis world, make fun of people who should naturally be your primary audience (i.e., people who love literature and love talking about literature and love responding to discussions about literature and generating new discussions about literature), you are a huge recursive tool. I'm sorry, but it's true: you are a monkey wrench you have thrown into your own self.


• Imani is reading Half of a Yellow Sun and she can't put it down. I think she's the second or third person I've known who has said they pretty much can't part from the book in a real physical sense. (I probably would have been the same way had I not started my job when I was right in the middle of the book. I might have been too tired to hold on to the book for a while there.)


• SINCE U BEEN GOOOOO-OOOOONE!!!!!!!!!!! Ian McEwan's Saturday hasn't stopped sucking ass!


• Dan Wickett found five free minutes in his schedule and has decided to fill it with an entire month of short story action. You know, I picked up a math minor in college (while other boys were picking up hot girls, ah, but I digress), but absolutely nothing in my Fractal Geometry and Chaos Theory background can possibly be used to model Mr Wickett's activity levels. Dude's a publisher too, now, you know that? I'd salute him, if I could figure out which of the fifteen clones of himself he's got doing his work for him is the real him.


• Go check out the debut issue of Hot Metal Bridge. They've got an interview with TDAOC-fav Dan Chaon, and they've got fiction and poetry and creative non-fiction, too. And it's free! On the Internet!


• Speaking of TDAOC-favs, Slate recently re-ran a piece by Jennifer Egan on Cormac McCarthy's The Road. That piece may or may not have been instrumental in convincing me to give the book a shot (after I'd read--and hated--and hated--and hated--All the Pretty Horses).


• Plus here's an interview with AL Kennedy that I think I still need to read, myself. She's awesome.


• If I ever get rich, I'm so funding a television cooking show, hosted by Erin O'Brien. ("Get a good cold-ass Bud or Stroh's or some shit like that to drink while you're doing this shit. No goddamn candy-ass nancy beer that comes in some weird-ass big bottle with an effing cork and that you're supposed to have at some effing particular temperature or anything like that. That shit sucks.")


• And uh, yup. That's it. Nothin' left for this post.
  
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  N+1? More like N minus Fun :(
  
  ...
  
  Ha ha! Couldn't resist. Oh, damn. I was doing so well...

Friday, April 13th, 9:00 PM, the Beachland Tavern: Come see the number one rock & roll dance party

(Clicky-clicky!)

This Friday, April 13, my friends Chris and Cari and Tim will be making their debut as The Muttering Retreats. They'll be opening for Casiotone for the Painfully Alone at the Beachland Tavern.

Not that I'm trying to pressure you into going out Friday night and having a really good time listening to some upbeat indie pop, eyeing up the cute hipsters, and perhaps partaking in some beverages of your choice? But I have to say, if you're not at this show? I'll probably love you less. Or maybe I'll just pretend to love you less. I'm good at playing pretend, though. I've read a lot of fiction, so I totally know how to do it. And then the only way you'll be able to get me to stop pretending that I love you less is to go see The Muttering Retreats play their second show on May 12, when they open for Daniel Johnston at the Grog Shop. Of course, because sometimes I lose track of things, you should probably simply go to both shows. That's your safest bet against a sudden painful decrease of Darby love in your life. Why take any chances?

Plus, total bonus: if you show up, I hear it's like a free pass on celebrating National Poetry Month. It's, like, in the charter. I'll dig up that clause while you go buy your ticket.

Why I sort of can't talk about The Children's Hospital (but then sort of do anyway)

I. Let's not talk about it

I would like to talk at length about The Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian, but I don't think I can go into depth about the book without talking about myself and my own religious beliefs more openly than I think I'm comfortable with. Though I do know this blog draws what can be called (in a by-the-metrics manner that, if I had a marketing department, would have said department plastering this information on press releases and posters, as if it means something more than it really does) an international audience (an audience I'm really excited about having, by the way, let's be clear on this, an audience that should in no way be offended or put off by anything I say in what follows the following parenthetical) (I mean, seriously, there's like three of you in Australia I think who read this blog now and then, and I love you people for it, and should I ever take a little road trip down your way, I'm so hoping I can count on your couches as being places I can spend serious passed-out-drunk time on), I do tend on this blog to speak something like American in 2007 America, and despite a little bit of recent Congressional nameplate shuffling, I still don't get the vibe that honesty and truth and compassion and openness is something most of us are looking for from others when it comes to discussions of faith and belief. Certainly is likely I've been reminded of this each time I've been wished a happy Easter the last couple days by people who have no reason to think they know a thing about my thoughts about what, if anything, comes after death. (Of course, my brain's been working on overdrive in the seeking-out-the-personal-significance-in-everything department the last week, anyway, so maybe the pump was already primed for me to find water in the well. Maybe there was a girl involved. Maybe it's been an emotionally complex week. Maybe.)

Point is, The Children's Hospital is a book concerned with intense theological and philosophical matters, and if you're willing to let the book in, it can muck up your mental machinery. It did so for me, and now here I am, talking about how I can't talk about it, because I simply don't know you well enough yet. I mean, really--first you buy the boy dinner, and then you ask him to put out, am I right?

It's a neat summary of my feelings about the book that by the time I finished it, for as much as I'd enjoyed the book (and yes, my definition of "enjoyment" is fairly flexible and complicated), I was still glad I'd taken this one out of the library, just because I knew that meant I could get it the fuck out of my face and back to some place where I wouldn't have to look at it anymore. That it's still sitting on my read-in-2007 pile speaks to the fact that I don't even want to touch it long enough to take it back to the library because, fuck. I can't deal with it. It is a raw, weeping wound, one I thought had stopped bleeding a long time ago. I suppose, to use a less gristly simile, it's like getting dumped: sure, you know the experience leading up to that point was awesome and beautiful and life-affirming and was worth all the sadness and all the rage, but in the end you still hurt; you still wish everything would stop reminding you of it.

Plus it's April 7 and it's been snowing all day and the roads around town are nothing but icy death. I've had enough apocalyptic craziness for one month. I feel no need to willingly take active part in more of it. Let me instead freeze while I sleep with everybody else who never knew what hit them.


II. Things said between the moment the glass was thrown at the wall and the moment the last of the Kleenex went the way of the oceans

Yes, you should read the book.

I mean, if you've come here looking for a simple recommendation, something more basic than melodramatic pronouncements against the state of States and vague hints about the potential existence of a complex mental life of a so-called blogger, you've got one. If you think you should read it, if you've somewhere along the line become interested in this book, then you should read it. I assert that it is an excellent novel.

There's all sorts of bottom-line fascinating literary stuff going on in there, stuff you can enjoy purely for the sake of art doing its arting thing. The narrator and the narrative frame of the book are ingenious, I believe, and are employed to rather excellent effect, and probably would warrant some good long wine-soaked conversation. (Definitely, if you're buying.) There's also that inherent tension, in my mind, between this book's McSweeney's-esque clever yet clean-voiced prose and the inescapable concern with seriously deep shit that has this book placing itself well in the McS's catalog while also drawing itself toward something beyond; call it engagement with a certain small-scale literary tradition combined with a gigantic leap in a tradition-surpassing direction. It's an insular story with anti-insular intent and effect, is what I think I want to say. (None of which, I should clarify, is at all meant as a knock against other McS's books--they've had the good sense to publish Stephen Dixon, and I've liked most of what else I've read that they've put out, and I certainly didn't put Paul La Farge on the 2006 Underrated Writers list because I didn't find The Facts of Winter amazing.)

I found the story itself engrossing and captivating. More so than I'd honestly expected. Truth is going into this book I did not want to go into it. I really wanted to resist it. I simply did not want to deal with a 600 page hipster doorstop, but then it turned out I didn't know what the hell else I really wanted to deal with, and so I picked it up and started reading it and, well, nothing else seemed worth putting this one down for. I read it in fits and starts, short chunks and quick gasps broken up across nearly three weeks. And yet I was hooked. The book pulled me forward and through some unmarked point of no return, some point when I knew I had to finish it, however long it was going to take. This is good storytelling, plain and simple.

But then, had that point of no return happened far later in the book, things might be different. Thing is there was a point--I'll say it was around two-thirds of the way through the book--when I got the very clear and sudden sense that, by the time I reached the end, the book was going to break my heart. I knew that in a physical sense I did have a choice; I could have put the book down, I could have walked away from it, and all this crazy emo stuff I'm spilling out onto the Internet would not have been necessary. But no; in a mental sense, I had to see what lay around the bend.

The results, as you may have guessed, were potent.

The Children's Hospital

Ow.

I really am giving up reading, now. Or, at least, I'm not reading anything else this year that at all contains emotionally disturbing content.

I mean...gee. Gods. Ow.

Not that you'll notice any perceptible change in the quality of my reviews

I've decided to give up reading.

I had this sort of revelation today, see. I realized that so much of what I'm looking for from literature is about getting at both sides of the story, whatever the story is. Like, for example: in terms of the gender war, I try to read as many books authored by women as by men. To better respond to the question of quality, I look at the work of a spectrum-spanning assortment of writers--from the mightiest of the mighty Dostoevskys and Pynchons to the lowliest of the low Dan Browns and Don Delillos. I read non-fiction to learn how the world really is, and fiction to learn how the world could be. Short stories let me perceive things impossibly small, while novels let me subsume into myself the infinite and the ungraspable.

But some deeper primal knowledge has eluded my grasp for about 27 years. Not even my forays into the Derridadian meta-divide between literature and literary criticism could allow me access to an elevated understanding of the one fundamental, ultimate, and true binary pairing through which lens we all come to know works of literary value.

That's the division between the literate and the illiterate. According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, as of September 2006, there are 780,923,753 illiterate adults worldwide. That's approximately 17.8 percent of the world's population that has a completely different view of literature than you or I do.

Well, than I currently do, I should say. While I have been assured that the lobotomy procedure should be painless (in fact, once complete, I shan't remember a moment of it), I'll admit I'm uneasy about taking such a drastic step. But I'm confident in my decision, knowing that once I'm back on my feet, my carers leading me by the hand through the most seemingly common of daily tasks, I shall be able to report for duty as the first totally illiterate blogger in the entire litblogosphere. By combining new podcasting technology with an innovative new round-the-clock recording set-up, I shall be able to communicate, via sub-literate and unintelligible grunts and moans, my feelings, thoughts, critiques, and criticisms of the literary landscape from the perspective of one who is wholly unable to engage with literature in any way, shape, or form.

Oh, sure, I'll paw at the pages of books placed before me while gutturally shrieking my discontent with the unconscious knowledge that something once familiar has forevermore been stripped from my being, and I'll also likely also crash my car into bookstores, which I imagine will doubtlessly happen, what with my being unable to follow the directions posted on street signs. Perhaps I'll even burn my entire book collection, the inescapable result of my inability to read the warnings printed on bottles of lighter fluid. But as for the deeper communion with printed text that I have spent so much of my life enraptured with--well, my post-operative barks, yelps, and squawks will be far more indicative of my new found state of mind than anything I could think to type up here, from my comfy seat in the ivory tower of literate privilege.

Current music: Amiina, Kurr; Current mood: intricate and intimate and charming and delicate

[ Editor's note: an early draft of this post may have leaked to the net prematurely. Someone, somewhere, is going to be fired over this. ]

Jim asked me what music I'm digging right now. That's one of those questions I'm likely to change my answer to not just from week to week but day to day. Hour to hour, some of those days. It's true, as I think I've mentioned in passing this week, that I'm sort of zany for the new Modest Mouse disc, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, which I think ranks up there with the most exciting rock records released this decade. Putting "Dashboard" and "Parting of the Sensory" and "Spitting Venom" all on one disc is the curve-breaking move that pisses off the other kids in class. And if you'd told me a couple weeks ago I'd soon fall for a Modest Mouse ballad, I'd have ordered you off my land. But then I heard "Little Motel" and well there you go, a Modest Mouse ballad, and I've fallen for it.

But enough of this malarkey: let's talk about Amiina.

They're an Icelandic four piece who are somehow so underground they don't yet rank a description on All Music. At heart, they're a string quartet; they've done back-up duty for Sigur Ros (whose album Takk I think is about the best thing Sigur Ros has ever done). On their own, Amiina play all other sorts of noise-makers, laptops and bells and harps and musical saws and that wineglass-rim trick (which they use to great effect) and things I can't identify but which look totally sweet when played live. The compositions they build up from these elements are intricate and intimate and charming and delicate. Pretty, if you don't let pretty connote dull.

I saw them open for Sigur Ros when the Hopelandic boys came through town, and it was obvious they had game, but just how much game I didn't recognize until I caught them headlining their own show last Sunday. They made so much more sense in an intimate small-club environment. I'll go so far as to call it one of my favorite concerts in recent memory--which is saying something, since I drove to DC to see Explosions in the Sky a couple weeks ago, who now own two of the four best concerts I've ever seen (Sleater-Kinney having walked off into the sunset with the other two).

I picked up a copy of Kurr, their debut album, after the show, and I'm pleased to say that while it can't match the strange intensity of their live performance, it does make for excellent home listening. Listening to it makes life feel nicer. Downright blissful, at moments. A mighty purchase, yes.

And, well, I mean, let's be honest here: they're Icelandic girls. Which, I don't know which ways your tastes run, but I for one am into that sort of thing.

As it is, I'm considering driving down to Cincinnati after work on Friday to hear them play again at the MusicNow festival. On the one hand, three and a half hours is a long time to drive to see girls who I have no hope of dating. On the other hand, looks like they're going to open for--and, I believe, play as the backup band for?--My Brightest Diamond. Shara Worden is one of my newest favorite singers, like, ever; check out Bring Me The Workhorse if you haven't yet; your reaction to the opening track, "Something of an End," will be used as a litmus test to determine whether you stay on my holiday card list. Really, there's some serious equation-balance-tipping action going on there, combining these two acts into one show. My car is begging me not to make that drive, but I think my brain is going to win that debate. Stupid brain. Stupid, awesome brain.

The cold

The universe has seen it fit to reward my Angry Week with a not particularly evil but still just nasty enough head cold. Achy, sleepy, sniffly, all that jazz. This is sad to me because it comes at the tail end of what was my Healthiest Winter. Unemployment, and the ensuing sleep-filled nights and relative lack of daytime contact with The Outside World, was totally awesome for keeping me in the clear. Yeah, unemployment was awesome.

Meanwhile: I totally dropped the ball (ha ha) this month on plugging The Morning News Tournament of Books. The final match was just called in favor of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. So if you're wondering if you want to get involved in all this Oprah business, and you're looking for lots of small little commentaries about the book, head that way. I'll excerpt my favorite Judge's Decision here, which is, yes, hilarious and awesome:

DAN CHAON: I’ll go for The Road, at least in part because it includes some excellent recipes.

There's plenty of other Antics over there, for the diligent link-diver. Me, I'm still bitter about last year's elimination of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, which probably partially explains why I paid so little attention this year. Grudge much? Yes: much.

Three ways to quickly rid oneself of bad mojo

Because I've been all wugga wugagaga GRR! this week, I feel it is only just and right to offer up three heart-zapper-paddle fast ways to cheer up:

1. Watch the video for Sleater-Kinney's "You're No Rock 'n Roll Fun." Seriously, Corin's eye moves? Quickest imaginable way to sooth the angry indie boy's jaded heart. I melt a little bit each time I catch one. (Blogflexive hat-tip to Carolyn for digging that up out of You-Tube.)


2. Look at James Murphy's goofy mug. Seriously, dude's goofy looking. In a sort of indie-rocker David Lynch way.


3. Scroll down on the James Murphy guest list page linked above, and read his thoughts on Pynchon. Pynchon! I suppose it would not hurt things much if you read that while listening to the new LCD Soundsystem album, which is sort of an ultra-insta-party disc.

Back to less angsty bookish shenanigans in due time.

...and so long as I'm doing the bitter and angry thing this week I might as well go ahead and politely ask you to...

...shut the fuck up about Jonathan Franzen, already, because you know what, it's not about Jonathan Franzen, it's about Cormac McCarthy, and it's about his fine novel The Road, and it's about a lot of people reading it now who might not have otherwise read it ever in a million years, and it's about some of those heads getting fucked in the process, and it's about how we're going to get to see Cormac McCarthy be interviewed on television and that's going to be pretty cool because you don't see that every day, and it's about all of that being totally awesome in real throw-the-horns and bang-your-head sorts of ways, absolutely none of which preceding material has anything to do with the fact that once upon a time years ago Jonathan Franzen handled a situation more poorly than maybe he would have liked, especially if he had had the opportunity to look into the future and see how you people can't let it the fuck go already.

End of story. Done. Move on. Go read The Road. It's a really great book. Go read The Corrections. It's a really great book. I loved them both, for different reasons. Me? I'm going to step away from the Internet before I start adding links to this post. It would take all night, and I've got a concert to go catch.

I'm going to go practice my karate kicks and windmill powerchord attacks; but first, a question

Am I the only person who blogs in order to attract mates?

I mean, I thought we all came here to get laid, right? Getting laid is good. Some might even call it hot. But lately it feels like every time I look at the lit-blog-o-sphere somebody is going on and on and on and on and on about how we're all here to be self-important elements in the continuing discourse of the critical culture who people better pay attention to because we're the irreversible new media vanguards of incorruptible content and blah...blah...yawn-blah. Never mind the fact that when I signed my name on that lit-blogger-for-life contract I was doing it specifically to get corrupted, if you know what I mean. Did I miss a memo? Damn, why am I always missing the memo?

But oh well, whatever. People will do what people will do, right? Some people are going to blog because it's serious business. I'll keep blogging because it's rock 'n roll fun. I hope I won't be alone.

If you know what I mean.

The funny thing about frantic cred-grabbing is that sometimes it works. You go, O

Oprah's Book Club is reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. That is...awesome, and hilarious, and awesome. And well yeah, sort of hilarious. But, yet? Awesome.

No, I mean, I really, really like that album, a lot

So I unleash a little music-snob blog bile and then I get paid an incredibly kind (via round-about ensued hilarity) compliment and then I feel all sorts of guilty for being bilious and blog-lazy. For my laziness, I apologize, a heartfelt plea for mercy hanging ready on my fatigued lips; for my music-snob smarm, I can only note that in war, there are victims, and if the only murdered prisoner in this case is my usual sense of restraint, then I think the world remains an overall worth-it sort of place.

Books! Ah, books. I'm still reading them, though slowly, and in fits and starts. I polished off the debut issue of Avery last night. I read almost every word in there. Naturally, not all of the words I read were of equal value. Which is only to be expected. There were some stories I'd like to mention as being ones I particularly enjoyed; I'll do that sometime when my copy of the book is less over there, and more over here, near where you are, you sweet, sweet Internet people, you. As for the words I did not read--they were simply too much, too elusive, too allusive, too recursive, too asterisk-sive for me to handle the moment I came to them. The astute Avery reader will, I suspect, know of whose story I speak, and shall admonish me for my ineptitude. But there's only so much coffee a man can justify in the pursuit of artistic revelation, you know? I mean no snoot in this; I only speak of where I am, right now.

I've decided to devote my lunch hours to short stories. Today I resumed reading selections from Stephen Dixon's collection Sleep, which I've picked up now and then over the last few months. There's great stories in there. The book as a whole has confirmed my suspicion that there are gems to be found in the stupendous number of Dixon's short stories. There's an story early in the book (which, again, the title is in the book which is way over there, out of my arm's immediate reach) that I'll dare to suggest might be one of my favorite short stories ever. I'll get back to that. Eventually. Some day. Oh, Time, oh, Sleep; you fickle, fleeting mistresses.

At night I'm still trekking through The Children's Hospital. I think when I last left it, some crazy shit had just happened. So I'm looking forward to getting back to it, about five to ten minutes from right now. Of course, I'm also looking forward to setting it down a few hours later, my eyes heavy and my body weary, only for my best laid plans to lay for the best night's sleep ever soon to be shattered by irrelevant wakefulness. This does, you are right, define good times.

Not that I sort of like the album maybe a tiny bit or anything

After reading this review of the new Modest Mouse record, I'm forced to conclude that Peter Hepburn has no soul. If you opened up the guy's chest, you would find a gaping sphincter where most people store their immortal ethereal beings. I think that might explain how he could write such a horribly gray, soggy, boring, prideless, safe, stable, stale, rote, terrible, nebulous, over-long, formless, repetitive, pointless, annoying, poorly written, overproduced, smelly music review.

To quote Dom Sinacola (whose idea of a good time, after reading his track review of "Parting of the Sensory," I suspect must involve sitting at home having absolutely no fun at all, ever): "I seem angry. I am angry, and I get cheap when I'm mad." Well, yeah, you boys went cheap; consider this your change: hang it up and call it quits while you can still remember the memory of a time you could consider now and then cracking your critical faces with smiles.

Five alternate titles for Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9

1. Moby Dick II: reAhab


2. Flubber!: The Musical!


3. In Lieu of Meaning, Check Out My Girlfriend's Ass


4. In the Ocean, the Mighty Ocean, the Audience Sleeps During the Tea Ceremony (A-weem-o-whale, A-weem-o-whale)


5. Matthew Barney's Delicate Purple Dinosaur

Cory Doctorow makes for cheap, easy, but awesome laughter around these parts

Awesome.

And yes, I'll be blogging in a cape from now on. An evil, copyrighted cape! Muaha!

Also

Also: No, Dickens did not last. Yeah, I know. I'm such a spaz. Instead I'm now making a valiant pass at The Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian, which is good and all, but not as good as fourteen uninterrupted hours of sleep would be. Like on the one hand it's got that cool apocalypse and angels thing going on, and that's cool. But on the other hand it's got that McSweeney's McSweeney'sishness thing going on. And I like the McSweeney's vibe and all, I'm cool with it. But it's sort of weird in this case. Sort of.

Also I am reading stories from the debut issue of Avery. I really like some of the stories. And the ones I haven't liked as much have not morally or aesthetically offended me. So I'd call that a pretty healthy start for the upstart literary anthologists over there at Avery HQ. But why take my word for it when you can get all the words in the book for your own self?

Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng, Akron-Summit County Public Library, Wednesday, April 11, 7 p.m.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking: you're thinking, "Akron?" Ah, but don't be fooled, it's not that far away. Well, it's not that far away from my new employer's office building, at least. The one I drive like forty minutes to get to every morning. Which takes me about halfway to Akron.

Okay, so, yeah: Akron. Yeah.

From the library's Web site:

Dave Eggers, one of the most engaging and acclaimed authors of this generation will speak the Auditorium of the Akron-Summit County Public Library on Wednesday April 11, at 7pm. Dave Eggers won critical acclaim in 2000 for his memories: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. His most recent book What Is the What, follows Valentino Achak, Deng one of the lost boys during the Sudanese civil war. Not only will Dave Eggers discuss his latest book, but the subject of his latest book will be his special guest. Do not miss this unforgettable evening. The event is free and open to the public, with question and answer period and book signing following the event.

Also following the event? Me standing in the parking lot, looking around with my hands thrust into my pockets and a look of disdain and despair smeared across my face, and my speech, just before I traipse off to my car to begin the long journey north, being all like, "Akron? ...Akron?"

(Thanks to Amy for the tip.)

In which your narrator has nothing nice to say

Five synonyms for "good times"

Things, randomly:

• Blackout: Last week, inspired by the efforts of Austin Kleon, I did my first Newspaper Blackout Poem. This week, you can see it on the Internet! Oh, Internet! And seriously, it was fun to do, and I intend to keep doing them. Here's the current challenge.
  
  
• Thinking: Thanks, Imani! I'm quite flattered. (Especially what with being listed right under The Reading Experience which, were I to put together a list of five of my own, would most likely be included. I mean, damn, Dan Green smarts.)
  
  
• Ishiguro: The two comments added to my last post on Kazuo Ishiguro are very fine comments, and are worth going back to read, if you are digging the recent Ishiguro-ness of this blog. I swear I will respond in kind, and shall continue that post's topics, once I manage to land a full night's sleep right before a day in which I have some time to put some thoughts into not-so-crappy words.
  
  
• Contact: I've abandoned my gmail spam folder. It's closing in on a thousand messages. I'm unwilling to sort through that, and I'm also unwilling to check it on a regular basis. Life is too short. So if you send me e-mail and I do not reply within a week or so (I am so terrible at replying to e-mail) and a response was required or generally expected, feel free to nudge me. Maybe you got spam-foldered, or maybe I'm just being a huge e-mail flake. Likely the latter, of course.
  
  
• Reading: I'm about to start reading some Dickens. Why? Why, when I said I wanted to spend this year reading short books, would I start reading Dickens? It's because I'm in that super-fussy/ultra-futzy mood when nothing on my bookshelf is right and I just finished the book I was reading (The Diviners by Rick Moody which, jeez, that wasn't so bad, the way I think people wanted to make it out to be; it wasn't particularly great, either, I mean, I think I liked Purple America more, but it was still generally fun to read, until maybe the last chunk, when I sort of just wanted to move on) and now I don't know what to read next and and and and and my brain is a spaz. So I'm going to read some Dickens because if you're going to default, you can default to far worse authors than Dickens. (I mean, I almost decided to go with Delillo? Which would have just been a huge mental brainwreck. If you know what I mean, then oh boy, do you know what I mean. Maybe.)

Kazuo Ishiguro and knowledge

Scott Esposito's latest Friday Column at Conversational Reading addresses a subject that you might guess I might find slightly interesting: Kazuo Ishiguro. Well played, sir!

Scott makes some good points about Ishiguro's writing, and provides a good introduction to what makes Ishiguro Ishiguro. Worth clicking over to read. General spoiler warning in effect, both for Scott's post, and then, when you come back, for my own, if you're into knowing about that sort of thing.

Back? Good. There's a few points from Scott's post I'd like to respectfully disagree with. Here's the first point. (I'm saving additional discussion for additional posts.) This one's on the nature of missing information (the fact that we tend to know things that Ishiguro's narrators do not, which Scott rightly points out is a technique Ishiguro has sort of mastered):

Ishiguro's narrators tend to be ignorant of certain, fundamental facts about themselves: For instance, in Never Let Me Go the narrator is missing out on the fact that she's a clone, and then later on the role in society that she is destined to play.

Maybe I'm being picky, but I don't think this accurately represents the novel. It's my understanding that the narrator understands quite well who she is and what she's been put there to do. It's true that she does not know this as a young child, at the beginning of the actual story, that this information is attained by her during her time at the English boarding school Halisham. But as the novel is plotted, the present-tense narrator, the one who is telling the story, looking back at and recounting the events of her life, she knows the facts. She has long since learned what we learn gradually as we read her story.

Which I think is important because it's in there, that realm of knowledge, where I believe the story's pathos lies. I think the tension between what the reader knows and what the character knows is of a far more emotional than factual nature than compared with the other Ishiguro novels that I have read. (This is where I'll step back and note that I'm still trying to place The Unconsoled in terms of this dynamic--I mean, damn, does anybody in that book know anything at all?--and my memories of When We Were Orphans are a bit rough and will bear serious revision after having read The Unconsoled again after so long. Not that I've plans to re-read this novel any time soon, or to pretty much re-read Ishiguro's work repeatedly over the course of my natural life, oh no. Maybe he's a writer I'm sort of completely retarded for. Maybe just a little bit. Maybe. Anyway, point is I don't want to seem as if I'm trying to pass myself off as some all-knowing expert. Yet. Give me another couple re-reads.)

What I'm trying to point at here is the fact that if you compare Never Let Me Go with The Remains of the Day (for the most obvious and, to me, right now, in a coffee shop, away from my books, easiest example), that tension in the latter book arises from the fact that we possess factual information that the narrator does not (or refuses to) have (the chick wants him and his boss is a Nazi), whereas in the former book, we the readers know exactly what the narrator knows (that she is a clone, destined to die). The tragic response of the latter novel is in how we react to that information in a vastly different way than the narrator does. Kathy H. is pretty much okay with things, while we're stuck wanting nothing more than to scream at her that she doesn't have to think that way.

It's like--if you don't mind getting deconstructive with me; don't worry, you'll only feel a bit of a pinch here--if you look at the first verbs of the opening sentences of these two books, you've got a mile-high view of the difference between the two narrators. Take Remains of the Day's "Tonight, I find myself here in a guest house in the city of Salisbury." Then look at Never Let Me Go's "My name is Kathy H." Find versus is. Discovery versus assertion. Surprise versus understanding. Transition versus knowledge. Journey (if you will), versus (if you don't mind) arrival.

Yes, that previous paragraph? Hot-ass decon lit-crit sexy. It's okay if you have to pause here, perhaps to fan a quick breeze over your flushed face, before reading on.

Back to the point: It doesn't have to be that way, that way it is, is what we conclude, when we read the novel. But it does, it is this way, is what Kathy H. concludes, is what she knows. We are reacting to the same information in different ways, and I think one real challenge of this novel is that we need to set aside what we know (or think, or believe) and see things the way the narrator does. It's at that point that the nature of our response is challenged, our assumptions (if you post-modernly will) questioned, and it's then that we might find that it is not Kathy H. who comes up psychologically lacking, but us, stuck here in our lives of quiet desperation, going to jobs and looking out at a cultural landscape riddled with meaninglessness and pointlessness. For it is Kathy H., not us, who knows exactly what she is there to do. She knows her purpose in a literal way we never can, or can only hope to construct for ourselves in the way we lead our lives, the people we surround ourselves with, the things we choose to do or believe in, the families we (are allowed to) create, the knowledge never far from out conscious minds that it's all so much construction that can be blown apart at any time. That what we are is in no way how it must be.

For me, though the novel is tragic in that I want Kathy H. to come to a moment of realization, to see that things can be different for her, that she could escape her fate, I am also alternately drawn into her story and the comfort she has in knowing what she does and why she does it. This fantasy of Ishiguro's, it is, I believe, simultaneously pleasing and depressing. That he evokes this reader's envy of a tragic character may be one of his greatest writerly masterstrokes.

(Next up, sometime soonish: on Ishiguro's being "fully formed" as a novelist.)

Usually blacking out and winding up famous in a foreign land involves a lot more heavy, heavy drinking

Austin Kleon is famous in Canada. (It's the analogue version of being famous on the Internet!)

But seriously, do check out the first round of Blackout Poetry winners. Then do your own poem for this week's challenge. Time to break out my Sharpie. And something to clean my monitor screen with.

Are you...accessible?

Maureen McHugh has a great pair of posts (one and two) about accessibility and writing (and all sorts of other related fun stuff, much of which spills over into the comments) over at group blog Eat Our Brains.

Not that these posts are well-timed to any coincidental recent interest in artistic accessibility of my own, what with my reading of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled and my seeing David Lynch's Inland Empire twice in the last week. I mean, not at all, really, no connection in the slightest. It's certainly not like either of these works raise any interesting questions about artistic intent, or about how works of art can use of familiar language or imagery and through (seemingly?) careful assembly generate hugely disorienting effects. Pft. Pshaw. Next in line, please!

Well, okay, maybe there are one or two small questions you might consider asking, something to get you going down that train of thought. Maybe if you were maybe really bored, or on a desert island, or, you know. If you were me. Or whatever. (If only I was unemployed again and had gobs and gobs of time to write intense, astute pieces of criticism for this blog all the time, I might actually get some of these thoughts up here into something like a readable format. Because I did that so often and so well when I was unemployed. Really! The posts are there. In the archives. Of my secret imaginary blog.)

The unconwhat?

You know what I really don't get about The Unconsoled? The title. I didn't get it the first time I read it and I didn't get it this time I read it. Though I definitely liked the book about a thousand times more than I did this time through than I did the first time I read it. So maybe if I read it again in another 15 years I'll understand a thousand times more things than I did this time through, and maybe I'll get the title, that time? Maybe? Or not.

Which is all my way of saying I want to say more but I'm still not sure what to say. I'm pondering the mental illness theory, mentioned in a comment here, a theory which I think has something going for it, but which doesn't quite click for me. Or at least not in a reductive "Oh that makes everything make sense" way, which, well, I think I want very much not to find that kind of theory to explain the book. I think the book actively wants to tease the reader with the potential existence of such a theory, a theory that doesn't actually after all exist. I suspect it's sort of more fun that way. Lynchian, but not. (Did I mention I liked Inland Empire? Did I mention that dreamlike reality is pretty much the only way I'm seeing things this week? Right? Okay.)

But anyway, the mentally ill thing, I think...I think if the narrator is mentally ill, or suffers a mental illness, then it's sort of like Ishiguro is trying to write an Everyman sort of story. Like, if Mr Ryder is mentally ill, then so are we all. This is a very unbaked thought of mine. I think my thoughts are swimming somewhere in the realm of the idea that the line between external psychology and external reality is not just non-existent but actually, like...take that line and turn it into a pipe, between those two realms. One in which the two are forced to flow into and out of each other. Or...

Or...

I'm going to go think some more. Also I'm going to read some more of The Diviners by Rick Moody which I just started last night because you know, sometimes, you just need some Rick Moody, right? It's like, PBR, or something. Sometimes you just need to get down and dirty with the heightened significance of signifiers. Oh and I mean dirty.

Inland Empire

Oh holy hell. (I do so so so look forward to seeing it again sometime this week.)