Books: Check ’em out
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWxaGqjQKvE
It’s like Sir Mixalot meets Philip Larkin.
Last book I loathed
Worst book ever?
I have really enjoyed reading through the Rumpus list of writers talking about their favorite books. Sometimes surprising, occasionally illuminating and eminently useful. And you know, it has been said by some that if you don’t have something good to say, you shouldn’t say it at all. Maybe. My Manichean outlook, however, demands that likewise a list of the last books that attentive readers absolutely despised would be an equally fruitful enterprise. I know we’re all about positivity here, but I, for one, would appreciate some timely warnings of books that will, if I’m not careful, make me bleed out of my eyes and rend my bathroom slippers in agony. The three least awesome books I’ve read recently are these:
1) The Hour I First Believed, by Wally Lamb: I’m still dealing with the aftermath of this nearly 1,000 page bucket of swill. The Oprah-adored author uses the Columbine massacre as a jumping off point for his emotionally manipulative, clichéd slop bucket of senseless tragedy.
2) The Kindly Ones, by Jonathan Littel: I guess I just have a problem with books that demand a lot of my time and page-turning energy and don’t give anything but poop in return. Littel’s controversial novel of a sadistic, intellectual S.S. officer making his way through the various theaters and meat grinders of World War 2 seems like the type of thing I’d be into. Not so! The flat and unlovely prose (maybe what you’d expect of a book written by a Nazi bureaucrat) is only to be outdone by the author’s obsession with feces.
3) Break It Down, by Lydia Davis: Blasphemy! I kind of liked The End of the Story, and, to a lesser extent, Varieties of Disturbance, but this one just didn’t do it for me. For every story I liked, there were three or four that made me want to quit reading forever.
What books do you hate?
Book: The Sequel contest
Finally, a story contest that plays to my strengths as a writer: short attention span and love of despoiling classic works. Enter submissions by May 30 and write a one-line sequel to your favorite books. I went with Sentimental Education, since I read it recently and it’s good. I entitled the sequel “The Death of Sentiment.”
In the distant future, Frederic, realizing that he was somehow no longer a French dandy, but instead a heavily-armed cyborg knee-deep in gristle, shrapnel and unidentified limbs, accepted that the time for idleness and romance had passed—now it was time for payback.
Gary Indiana, Rudy Wurlitzer and YOU!
On May 28, worlds will collide as Gary Indiana and Rudy Wurlitzer converge on 192 Books in Chelsea, just south of my office. Two Dollar Radio has just put out Indiana’s The Shanghai Gesture, and is about to rerelease Wurlitzer’s Nog—a fevered dream which threatens to split our world in twain, if ever there was one (to paraphrase Scruffy). Now, I have not yet read either of these, but I have read books by these gentlemen (I use the term loosely. HEYOOOO!) before. Wurlitzer’s The Drop Edge of Yonder, which Two Dollar Radio put out last year, was rad. BMX rad, even (fist pound for the 1980s). And Indiana is a baaaddd man (to paraphrase Ali [or is it Mr. T?]). The upshot is, I suppose, that this will be a strange and surprising event the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Tunguska incident (nod to Pynchon).
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May 20th, 2009 / 7:59 am
May 20th, 2009 / 7:59 am
Pudding Pops!
This is a speech worthy of Father Mapple, given at a college by television actor Bill Cosby in Percival Everett’s new novel, I Am Not Sidney Poitier—one of the funniest books I have read in quite a while. I’ll never sell Pudding Pops for the white man. Check this book out. It’s genius.
You men think I’m going to take it easy on you. You think because you’re in college and sitting here in khakis and loafers that I’m all right with you. You think that because you’re not bopping your heads to rap music while sitting here that I’m going to embrace you. You’re wrong. You’re all pathetic. You’re pathetic until you’re not pathetic, until you do something strong and good and not until you do that. You think because you probably won’t be clad in an orange jumpsuit for stealing a piece of pound cake that I feel all warm and fuzzy about you. I sell Pudding Pops for the white man. I don’t know why I’m saying that, but I am. I make myself sick, but the white man is not to blame. He didn’t put the gun in the hands of the black kid down in juvenile hall. No, his missing father put it there. Pound cake. I’m on television. Black girls have babies by three or four fathers and why? Pudding Pops! That’s what I’m saying. Some of you are probably wondering how I can stand up here, call me high and mighty, talking about how I can stand here when I’m being sued for having babies with a woman other than my wife. Well, hell, I can afford to have babies. Pudding Pops! If you don’t know who your children’s friends are, then you’re not doing your job…I kissed a Japanese woman on screen in nineteen sixty-six and managed not to have a baby with her. I want to thank you for having me here today, and I want you to know that I will be more than happy to sign copies of my book, Fatherhood, which is on sale just outside at an attractive discount. Believe me, you need to read it. Thank you.
Something I should’ve read a long time ago but didn’t because I was probably playing video games or sleeping: Animal Farm by George Orwell
It’s like Milo & Otis meets The Hunt for Red October! As I read about Napoleon and Mollie and all the rest of the barnyard communards, I begin to wonder: This isn’t really just about talking animals, is it? It’s, like, a metaphor or something, right? Touché, Mr. Orwell.
Fiction break: Eric Hobsbawm
Leon and I are birthday buddies
Good historians are hard to find. I was awhile ago reading this book Reappraisals by Tony Judt (that book is worth reading for sure), and he wrote this piece on Eric Hobsbawm in which he says:
Hobsbawm doesn’t just know more than other historians. He writes better, too: There is none of the fussy “theorizing” or grandiloquent rhetorical narcissism of some of his younger British colleagues (none of the busy teams of graduate researchers, either—he does his own reading). His style is clean and clear. Like E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Christopher Hill, his erstwhile companions in the British Communist Historians’ Group, Hobsbawm is a master of English prose. He writes intelligible history for literate readers.
No small praise, that. So when I saw a copy of Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 on the discount non-fiction table at the Strand, I dug deep into my linty pockets, dumped a pile of quarters at the register, and cracked open my purchase. The book is the last in a series of four in which Hobsbawm pretty much dissects the cadaver of western civilization to find out how we got where we are (much of it with an endearing pinko slant). So, yes, I’m suggesting that you read both Judt and Hobsbawm if you’re sick of reading the Bleak Houses of the world, but, also, I was thinking of this panel I read about at the PEN World Voices Festival in which they discussed non-fiction and why (or why not) the better examples of it should be considered literature. Fun! Thoughts? I’m looking at you, Orwell.
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May 6th, 2009 / 8:21 am
May 6th, 2009 / 8:21 am
Robert Walser offers an alternate reason for the decline and fall of fine booksellers everywhere
You have disappointed me. Don’t look so astonished, there’s nothing to be done about it, I shall quit your place of business this very day and ask you to pay me my wages. Please, let me finish. I know perfectly well what I want. During the past week I’ve come to realize that the entire book trade is nothing less than ghastly if it must entail standing at one’s desk from early morning till late at night while out of doors the gentlest winter sun is gleaming, and forces one to scrunch one’s back, since the desk is far too small given my stature, writing like some accursed happenstance copyist and performing unsuitable for a mind such as my own.
…or not. Guilty pleasures
I am so fascinated by Jimmy Chen’s peeks into the bookshelves and psyches of Giant readers, that I find myself wondering what volumes were lying on the periphery of the pictures submitted for Haut or Not, outside the camera’s some-encompassing portrait. What books do we not want our fellow tea-sipping lit snob confederates to see? I think we should lay it all out on the line, and I’ll start. In the interest of full disclosure, I won’t even stop at one bastard lovechild—I’ll give you three.
Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand: The heroes are libertarian caricatures, the underlying philosophy is borderline psychotic and it’s a bazillion pages long. But, damn it, Rand plays me like a fiddle, and after each time I’ve read it (twice, so far), I emerge like the second coming of Ron Paul for about a month, until I remember that I’m not really a fascist asshole.
Any book by Clive Cussler: Sure, some are better (Treasure, Cyclops) than others (any of his latter day sins), but this modern master of pulp has written some of the best devil-may-care banter I have ever read. I wrote to him when I was in Little League, and not only did Cussler write back, but sent me the original postscript page, edits and all, of his book Inca Gold. Dude rules.
Shroud of the Thwacker, by Chris Elliott: I waited in line to get him to sign my copy of this book. Which he did. As Hiram T. Wifflepop III.
What books are you ashamed to love?
Stupid as gherkins?
As I waited to be found unfit for jury duty today, down at the Brooklyn Supreme Court, I came across a line in Sentimental Education that made me chuckle. It helped get me through a miserably boring morning, and I’d like to share it with you.
‘All this lacks form and colour,’ Frédérick’s neighbour continued. ‘I do trow, honoured sir, that we have degenerated. In the good old days of Loys the Eleventh, nay even of Benjamin Constant, there was more of a rebellious spirit among the scholars of the town. I deem them as meek as sheep, as stupid as gherkins, and by my troth, well fitted to be grocers.’
Now that I think about it, maybe the reason I was not selected was that I quoted this (without attribution) to Judge Chun when he asked if there were any possible impediments to my being an impartial juror.
Anyone looking to get out of duty, feel free to use the quote, but don’t come whining to me if the judge isn’t a fan of literature and throws you in the brig.