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a reader's progress

a journal of robert birnbaum's reading activities

4 January 2003

After recently bemoaning the declining quality of films these days with no less an enthusiast than David Thomson—he, of the glorious Biographical Dictionary of Film (4th edition)—I have been thinking a bit about the relationship of movies and books over a range of, uh, issues. In early December PW published a short q & a with pseudonymously named novelist Ray Shannon (Man Eater), who apparently works in Hollywood. Here’s the question posed to him:

How would you describe the book and the film industries today?

Unfortunately I think one is becoming more and more like the other. There was a time when the book industry and the film industry were totally separate entities. Not only in terms of their end products but also in terms of their behavior. More and more you see the book industry mimicking the business practices of the film industry in terms of how the material is produced and how it’s put out there for the audience. In terms of what a viable product is and what it is not. There was a time when if you could write a good book your chances of getting it published were pretty good, and I think that is less and less true because, again, the book industry emulated the film industry and it’s looking more and more for a specific type of book as opposed you one that has literary merit.

That this is sad and bad—well, I think that’s pretty obvious. That it is new news is puzzling. For a few years now, reports regularly surface of manuscripts and galleys making their way (often from the trash) to the desks or whatever is used as work surfaces in HOLLYWOOD of the big machers before agents have cut deals with publishing houses or editors have made their magic they make. I vaguely remember the inestimable Joan Didion excoriating the art of the deal which these days may be the main art. Let me segue to an article Laura Miller wrote in the New York Times Magazine, "This is a Headline for an Essay About Meta," also, a few months ago. I am still pondering what alchemical process Ms. Miller employed to turn a simple idea into a 3700-word revenue source (on that count, yeah for her) or more honestly what exactly the point was. I’ll get back to that soon and, if not there is always my tell-all memoir (where I name names and give dates) It’s All Good.

So as the kids say, “Oyez perro.” Reading my local shopping and eating magazine, Boston magazine, I noticed that Rob Reiner’s next film Alex and Emma is based on Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler, a story about a writer who has problems—like writer’s block (which is actually a distinctly 20th century ailment) and gambling debts. And then there is Adaptation, which may be the exemplar of Ms. Miller’s ‘meta’ fetish. Here a screenwriter struggles to take a book, in this case, Susan Orlean's highly regarded The Orchid Thief, and make it into a movie. So the movie is about making a book into movie. And then I was viewing Arliss Howard’s Big Bad Love, based on Larry Brown’s stories. The central issue in this film is the ongoing effort of the working stiff protagonist to get his writing published. A movie about a writer and his travails, Big Bad Love is a well acted and imaginatively directed and a bittersweet drama. All of which started me thinking about movies that use writers and their concerns as a narrative core. There is Wonder Boys, a good-natured romp in ripe fields of academia and the writing world. And Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls, which brilliantly cinematizes Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas’ memoir of struggle and creation, of the same name. Who could forget the Coen Brothers' great Barton Fink, a tale of a young screenwriter on the make in Hollywood with its cameo appearances of the troubled and somewhat discombobulated William Faulkner character? Then there is Herman Wouk’s Youngblood Hawke, a young Kentucky truck driver played by James Franciscus, who goes to New York City to make his fortune as a—writer. Can you imagine? Who could forget the immortal Jay McInerny’s Bright Lights, Big City with star turns by magazine fact-checker/writer hopeful Michael J Fox and John Houseman as the William Shawn type character. That some one made a movie about TS Eliot, Tom and Viv, or rather his perversity makes sense though that film has ended being the answer to a trivia question. And I faintly remember A Sheltering Sky having something to do with Paul Bowles’ life (he is actually in the film) though I don’t recall if it had a thing to do with his writing. Naked Lunch, while using a William Burroughs title, is David Cronenberg’s rendition of Burroughs’ storied life. It has a Paul Bowles character as well as Ginsberg and Kerouac characters. Alan Rudolph certainly took on an ambitious project when he filmed Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle about the famed Algonquin Round Table clique. One of my favorite films, Pinero, is about the very talented Newyorican poet/actor, writer/addict Miguel Pinero with Benjamen Bratt who glows white hot in the lead role. This narrative is so on the money, it can even handle Mandy Pantkin as Joseph Papp (I wonder if I am alone in thinking that Mandy’s greatest role was that of the villain in Elmo in Grouchland). As there must be a deeper question to justify this shopping and eating magazine type list, here it is: Does the reason there is such great interest in writing as a career (evidence of which is the proliferation of writing programs) have to do with the glamorization of writers and their lives? Something to consider, huh?

Or it could be the drugs. John Lanchester’s “High Style: writing under the influence” in The New Yorker (Jan 6,2003) illuminating discussion (mentioning Thomas De Quincey, Jean Paul Sartre, Philip K. Dick, WH Auden, Arthur Rimbaud, Hunter Thompson, Sir Walter Scott and Denis Johnson) is sparked by his notice of Marcus Boon’s The Road of Excess and its focus on recreational drug use and writers is a gem. Not the least of the points of light emanating from Lanchester’s article is his review of Jean-Paul Sartre’s drugs of choice and their consumption and this excerpt from Sartre's "The Critique of Dialectical Reason" (his seminal work?):

But it should be noted that this regulatory totalization realizes my immanence in the group in the quasi-transcendence of the totalising third party; for the latter, as the creator of objectives or organizer of means, stands in a tense and contradictory relation of transcendence-immanence, so that my integration, though real in the here and now which define me, remains somewhere incomplete, in the here and now which characterize the regulatory third party. We see here the re-emergence of an element of alterity proper to the statute of the group, but which here is still formal: the third party is certainly the same, the praxis is certainly common everywhere; but a shifting dislocation makes it totalizing when I am the totalized means of the group, and conversely.

Whoa, Nelly (of course Lanchester had a more a thoughtful response: There are a number of valid responses to these arguments. One might be: They sure don't make public intellectuals like they used to. Another might be: I'm not sure Sartre's arguments constitute more than a footnote to his work in "L'itre et le Neant." A third might be: What was he on?) I guess this would be the time to confess that I never read Sartre beyond his (seminal work?) Nausea. But at least I didn’t wear black berets and smoke Gaulloise as an undergraduate—I saved my existentialist posturing for a brief period just before disco. As for drugs, I’m trying get a handle on my coffee thing. And I take it a day at a time, when I know what day it is.

RB by Anthony Russo

1 January 2003

There are many societal conventions that I can’t seem to connect with, the calendar year and most of the holidays contained therein are some of them. Thus they have no celebratory meaning for me. As a white lighter for many years (not quite like Fran Liebowitz, who claims she went out every night for 15 years) the notion of joining well-meaning throngs enjoying some kind of socially liberated New Year’s Eve frolic…well, it was just never my thing. Not to mention my strong suspicion that like other holidays, Dec 31 represents hard-to-pass up revenue potential for many businesses. We know money changes everything. And therein lie the rub and an another digression.

The social convention that did take a hold on me and which still operates to this day is the school year calendar. Try as I might, I have always started the new year in September and ended it in June. July and August float in free time, as do the Xmas vacation and Spring break. Maybe that’s where my troubles begin? Anyway (perhaps my favorite word) I’ve been watching the rest of the world end the calendar year 2002 with predictions and lists and resolutions and recaps and flashbacks and that got me to thinking about how I missed the boat with my Under-Appreciated Novels of 2002. So I went back over the books I’ve read since the century began and have prepared my list (with the 2002 books) of the Under-Appreciated Fiction of the 21st century: It’s never too early to create another definitive list:

THE MISSING WORLD – Margot Livesey
WHERE MOUNTAINS WALKED - Kate Wheeler
GOD’S FAVORITE – Lawrence Wright
THE FEAST OF LOVE- Charles Baxter
THE MARRIED MAN - Edmund White
THE SLEEP-OVER ARTIST- Thomas Beller
DON'T THE MOON LOOK LONESOME TONIGHT - Stanley Crouch
THE SECOND ANGEL - Phillip Kerr
GHOSTWRITTEN – David Mitchell
THE BEAST GOD FORGOT TO INVENT - Jim Harrison
LOVE ETC. - Julian Barnes
THE GLASS PALACE – Amitav Ghosh
RECENT HISTORY – Anthony Giardina
CARRY ME ACROSS THE WATER - Ethan Canin
THE COLD SIX THOUSAND – James Ellroy
MORNING – WD Wetherell
BARGAINS IN THE REAL WORLD - Elizabeth Cox
LAST REFUGE OF SCOUNDRELS – PAUL LUSSIER
THE PRACTICAL HEART – Allan Gurganus
KILL YOUR DARLINGS - Terence Blackman
THE SHOT – Phillip Kerr
BASKET CASE – Carl Hiaasen
THE FEAST OF GOATS – Mario Vargas Llosa

Margot Livesey’s eerie drama about memory and perception is a riveting story and more convincing evidence about how good a writer this woman is. Ex-Buddhist-nun Kate Wheeler fashions a very thoughtful tale around do-gooders and missionaries in Latin America. A novel about that whacko General Manuel Noriega (remember him?) by Lawrence Wright somehow should have gotten more attention especially since it was a very skillful interior investigation. Charles Baxter is the real deal, and as I have often said, if he were an East coast writer (as opposed to living in Michigan) he might be as big a star as Richard Ford. A Feast of Love is Baxter’s homage to Shakespeare. Unfortunately for broader acceptance, Edmund White has been ghettoized as a writer. That has nothing to do with the excellence of The Married Man as a novel or White as a very fine writer. Thomas Beller, being youngish and good looking and tall and a Manhattan sophisticate who manages to write here and there for woman’s glossies, still managed to write a fine follow up book to his premier effort Seduction Theory. Stanley Crouch is just brimming with talent and he manages to deliver some of it to his initial work of fiction. British author Phillip Kerr has published 11 novels and like Elmore Leonard he is pretty much good for a novel every year or so. Though my personal favorite is Philosophical Investigations his last three outings have been worthy. The Second Shot has a very unusual angle on the Kennedy Assassination. Young David Mitchell has published his second novel but Ghostwritten still haunts. Good ol’ Jim Harrison’s books sell, but here on the East Coast it would seem that most people think he writes about serial killers. His so-called memoir Off to the Side is also a wonderful piece of work.

Julian Barnes' unplanned sequel to Talking it Over is a terrific and smart story that grapples (quite well) with the complexity of relationships with a refreshing and able touch. The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh is a fitting novel to bookend with Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner. A family--against the panorama of history of the sub continent from the late 19th century through Independence--well told. Who can say why Anthony Giardina’s novel of a young man’s struggles to overcome the impact on his own life of his father’s homosexuality didn’t get more attention. This is a terrific novel dealing with a compelling and submerged subject. Ethan Canin’s books are almost guaranteed to get notices as did Carry Me Across the Water. To be brief about it, that’s not the same as being appreciated (this of course is why it is both useful and amusing for people like Gore Vidal and Anthony Lane to periodically review the bestseller lists of yesteryear). Okay, James Ellroy is wacky (to say the least) and the second in his Underworld USA trilogy was judged by some critics to unreadable. Well, I read it, so there. And I look forward to the third volume. Walter Wetherell’s novel on the first morning TV show is both a thoughtful walk down the memory lane of mid-century America and a very fine story well told. Betsy Cox’s total output of short stories are real bargains at any price. While David McCullough’s Adams tome grabbed attention awards, and the book buying public’s money, Paul Lussier’s send up of the Founding Fathers and the American Revolution made it real, if you know what I mean. Allan Gurganus’s novellas (whatever a novella is) are not to be missed. The Practical Heart is worth the price of admission. But there is more. Terence Blackburn’s Kill Your Darlings is the best lampoon of the literary world since The Information. That makes it worth taking note of…Carl Hiaasen’s Basket Case brings him back to where I thought he was after Strip Tease. Alas, what followed, Stormy Weather and Sick Puppy were, well, just okay. Carl’s back on the case with this brilliant poke in the eye, of all things, the newspaper business. And he really means it. I can’t say I have always been a fan of Vargas Llosa (especially when he ran for the presidency of Peru) but The Feast of The Goat, a drama that flashes back to the brutal, US-supported dictatorship of Generallisimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina "the Benefactor, the Father of the New Nation, His Excellency, the Chief," also called by Dominicans, the Goat is as instructive as Martin Amis’ Stalin book about totalitarian total terror. Mi gusta.

Thinking about the books I have read has as much to do with the big question of rereading as it does with according them some proper place in the big library of life. This is a big problem for me, and I suspect, many other readers. Currently the only books I reread—on an alternating basis— are One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in Time of Cholera. Some of the books I have mentioned above are probably fitting candidates for a second go—when I can get to them. In the mean time I think I’ll go read Jay Cantor’s new novel Great Neck.

28 December

Despite the rising din of war drums I managed, lately, to read a few newspapers. The recent flap over alleged Iraqi atrocities when they occupied Kuwait (rehashed in the HBO movie of CNN’s purportedly valiant efforts in covering that war) reminded me of the anecdote surrounding William Randolph Hearst’s dispatch of artist Fredrick Remington to Cuba. He was to illustrate the fighting in Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain. Remington, having a few things to learn about the war correspondent’s craft, wired Hearst from the vantage point of the patio of the Hotel Inglaterra, “EVERYTHING IS QUIET. THERE IS NO TROUBLE HERE. THERE WILL BE NO WAR. I WISH TO RETURN.” To which Hearst famously replied, “PLEASE REMAIN. YOU FURNISH THE PICTURES AND I’LL FURNISH THE WAR.” -W.R. HEARST. Of course, we know things have changed these past hundred years since the United States fought so unselfishly for Cuba’s independence—from Spain. Apparently, for this next and all foreseeable future wars, the Defense Department will be in charge of both the wars and the pictures.

A bad week for mid Centurians, it was. First, the death of Joe Strummer, who composed one of my favorite pieces of music, the soundtrack to Alex Cox’ under-appreciated film Walker, and then the passing of glamour photographer Herb Ritts. These deaths no doubt raise the chill factor among the overabundant male baby boomer generation who in so many ways display an undaunted disregard for mortality or even the decrepitude of aging.

As Mark Feeney by-lined the obit/appreciation of Herb Ritts in the Boston Globe, I approached my reading of it with no trepidation. My confidence in Feeney’s intelligence and judgement was again reaffirmed:

American culture has always had a healthy regard for cash, calculation, and celebrity (especially celebrity - what other flag boasts so many stars?). Yet something changed in our relationship to those things in the 1980s. What had once been considered commodities were now seen as virtues. The Reagans were in the White House. ''Dallas'' dueled ''Dynasty.'' Madonna ruled the charts. ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' topped the bestseller list.

It was Herb Ritts who took the decade's family portrait.

Not so, in Ginia Bellafante’s obituary in the New York Times. Here’s her first graf:

Herb Ritts, the photographer whose glorifying images of the well known helped to further mythologize celebrity in the 1980's and 90's, died yesterday in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 50 and lived in Los Angeles.

Now, granted, Feeney had about 150 more words to form something with, but I wondered why one would read further into Bellafante’s piece...except, perhaps, for some sign of thought and reportorial craft. Which, alas, did not obtain.

Feeney had much else in the way of incisive observation about Ritts’ place in the celebrity industry, much of it the result of some keen thinking and an easy grasp of the cultural milieu of ‘80s and ‘90s. Not so the NYT writer who called, what I guess are the right people: Vogue’s Anna Wintour, Ritt’s gallerist, Ethleen Staley, Richard Gere, and Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter— who was able to get the word "iconic" in the piece.

I met Herb Ritts a few times. A nice man. I was always impressed that Herb had taken pictures of Stephen Hawking and Charles Bukowski and some other folks who were not, you know, beautiful. But my story will have to wait for the publication of my highly anticipated memoir-in-progress, currently entitled Primum Non Nocere.

There is an inverse relationship between my avowed disinterest in reading book reviews and reviews of any kind and my wanting to avoid disparaging my comrades who, for some reason, are ploughing and back bending in the potato patches of criticism. As Steve Almond recently told me, “The life boat is small enough as it is…” On the other hand, just having read Dutch Leonard’s (yeah, I feel like I can be familiar because, I have met the man and he even told me why he is nicknamed ‘Dutch’. But, why digress?) story collection I couldn’t pass up perusing the New York Times review on When the Women Come Out to Dance. Truthfully, my dance didn’t begin well:

“If you were to tell me you had just read an Elmore Leonard novel where someone says something out of character, I'd say you were a liar.” What kind of fahcockta way is that to start a conversation? Then this, “Reading the clipped, unfailingly accurate dialogue that comes out of the mouths of Leonard's characters can make you feel as if you're in the presence of a writer who is both ventriloquist and psychic.” I’ve read over twenty of Leonard’s novels, some a few times, over the past ten years and it would never have occurred to me to cast Dutch in this light. Was it my failure of imagination? But here’s the capper on that, “It's not just that Leonard captures the cadences and elisions of each character's speech, it's that he has an uncanny sense of knowing what each will say next.” Oh my!

This piece wends its way toward conclusion with this lofty and sage proclamation, “There are plenty of literary luminaries who could learn a lot from the discipline and craft of writers pigeonholed — or dismissed — as genre writers.” And then —I must confess I was frothing as I read and reread — “My Christmas wish this year was that when Cormac McCarthy, Michael Ondaatje and Toni Morrison, to name but three, looked under their trees, they found that some kind soul had been thoughtful enough to send them a copy of Elmore Leonard's latest."

That this is self-evident idiocy, I am convinced. Meretricious glibness masquerading as literary criticism? Maybe. A good reason never to read Charles Taylor’s goofy blabbering again? Absolutely.

Herb Ritts, photographed by Red Diaz

26 December

Having disconnected myself from television—at least for the short term—I expect I avoided innumerable promotions for broadcasts of what has become a Christmas holiday cliche, It’s a Wonderful Life. As I have also pulled the plug on that other great American past time, shopping, it is no wonder that my growing alienation from the mainstream sparked a deeply lodged contrarian impulse that led my hand to pull out The Grapes of Wrath from my video library and spend the evening of Dec. 25th watching John Ford’s version (for which he won an Oscar in 1940) of John Steinbeck’s epic novel. Maestro Ford certainly did nothing to quell the great egalitarian values espoused by Steinbeck and sustained by Nunnally("Only a hack is consistent") Johnson’s screenplay. I especially enjoyed this exchange in a scene where an Okie farmer, as he is being informed that he must vacate the land he and his family have lived on for 75 years, questions:

“You mean I have to get off of my own land?”

“Aww, don’t go blaming me, it ain’t my fault.”

“Whose fault is it?”

“You know who owns the land. It’s the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.”

“Who’s the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company?”

"It ain’t nobody. It’s a company."

“They got a president don’t they? They got somebody who knows what a shotgun is for, ain’t they?”

“Son, it ain’t his fault, he’s only doing what the bank tells him to do.”

“All right, where’s the bank?”

“Tulsa. What’s the use of picking on the manager? He’s half crazy trying to keep up with orders from the East.”

“Then who do we shoot?”

Of course, these days of the new world order in the new century we are (us Americans) not so susceptible to such rabble-rousing indignation. Waving the flag and beating war drums requires lots of energy and attention. Times may be tough, but with exemplars of public service like Trent Lott and Henry Kissinger and Bernard Law—well, we should be confident that we can muck on through. Right? Having survived a great depression and a world wide war and a yet another totalitarian attempt at world domination there is some security in knowing that some part of the American elite is still hell bent on making the world safe for democracy. Or at least safe for the New York Stock Exchange. Oh well, the opera may change, but the aria stays the same.

As the end of the calendar year draws near and the real world is subject to the inertia of the holiday season, impending war and football bowl games not withstanding, I have found it a useful time to do more of what I usually do—read. In the last week I’ve already read the best novel of 2003, Richard Price’s Samaritan, and caught up with Elmore Leonard’s delicious and delighting story collection When The Women Come out to Dance—some of the stories of which appear to be precursors to novels, like Out of Sight and whatever one featured Raylan Givens. And I have rejoined Thomas Perry, in whom I had lost interest after his second Jane Whitehead novel (maybe he finally did too) devouring his new novel, Dead Aim. In addition to the necessary arsenal of skills required to craft and sustain a good story, Perry has a very good sense of the minutia that make up various human enterprises, and more importantly he knows how to employ those details to advance a story. Since my good friends at Knopf sent me the new, three-volume Everyman Raymond Chandler, I dipped into it to read The High Window, which had somehow escaped me when I was on a Chandler binge some years ago. He’s always fun to read—how could a man who wrote, "he had more chins than a San Francisco phone book," not be? Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto is a wonderful book, which I would have probably missed had not Dorothy Allison reminded me of it in the course of a recent conversation. I was privileged to be allowed to read John Usher’s (a pseudonym) unpublished novel, Mattie and Jem. For reasons that need not be explored here (there is always the fail-safe of my forthcoming memoir, Badly Dealt) I read Michael A. Thomas’ first novel (published in 1980), Green Monday. Thomas, who for a long time was the reason that I subscribed to The New York Observer—his pungent and unbridled observations about such sacred cows as Barbara Walters and Herr Dr. Kissinger, as well as his finely honed articulations of the follies of various and sundry power brokers and short-fingered vulgarians were both hilarious and on target—apparently had left that paper and my belated discovery moved me to catch up on his fiction. I found Green Monday to be very much in the mode of Colin Harrison’s Afterburn. And both very much a New York kind of book. Anyway, Thomas seems to know his wines, his men’s clubs, tactics of stock manipulation, art, Italy, four star international hotels and in general the trappings of the good life. And, also, how to tell a story. Which Steve Almond does as well… Steve’s story collection, My Life In Heavy Metal, came well recommended by novelist Patricia Henley. And despite a youthful and understandable fascination with sexual encounter and relationship there appears to be more there, there. Almond is also a very nimble wordsmith which can be a good thing onto itself. Two pieces in this collection standout despite or maybe because of their brevity. “Moscow” and “Pornography” satisfy in the way that a well intended hors d' ouvre serves us; a good taste, a craving for more and not too filling.

13 December

My life of reading, of loving books, was launched by my mother’s good instincts in taking me to the Chicago Public Library at the age of eight (I think) for my library card and on a weekly basis thereafter helping me take home a stack of books from the Belmont Avenue branch. There are, I suppose, many reasons for my early adoption of reading as a life-sustaining activity, but the unpacking of that will have to wait for the publication of my memoir. The reason for that is, that those reasons are probably only interesting to me and their inclusion in a published memoir will be prima facie evidence that I have done something worthy to warrant the immense good fortune of being published. In which case, a little self-obsessed self-indulgence will be tolerated by my editor and mentor. By the way, my working title is The Messiah Waited.

Now the thing about libraries is that as dignified, holy as they might be, they are still impersonal, and utilitarian and most significantly, connected to a larger authority, such as a school or a government. Aesthetically, they are permeated with institutional colors and scents, lighting and design, all in the service of being of service necessarily to a community but at least to a large group of people. I have more to say about libraries and the public imagination and I am planning to make that chapter III of the second volume of my memoir, currently having the working title, Why Don’t We Do It?

The real awakening in my life came with the discovery of the idea of owning books—and the early stirrings of my love for bookstores. And the frosting on this cake was the growing and seemingly never-ending story that the people who owned these stores could be so fascinating and original (these days, such stores are unimaginatively designated as independent bookstores). In Chicago, while there was a Krochs and Brentano’s chain, the stores of which I was most enamored were Stuart Brent’s (in the high rent district of upper Michigan Avenue), Barbara’s Bookstore (on Well’s Street, in Old Town a few blocks over from the Carl Sandburg Village. Reportedly, this high rise complex had been originally planned as affordable housing in an area proximate to Chicago’s Gold Coast. By the time this development was completed, its prime mover, Arthur Rubloff, had succeeded in redefining ‘affordable’. Which was what one might expect from a person so committed to high standards of personal grooming and hygiene that he—again reportedly—sent his shirts to New York City to be laundered.) And then there was Great Expectations Bookstore, under the EL tracks on Foster Street in Evanston, on the Northwestern University campus.

Great Expectations was the haven and enterprise of one Truman Metzel. Now it is a common pastime of writers and readers to regale themselves and anyone else that will take note, of the iconoclastic, idiosyncratic, curmudgeonly, eloquent and generally anti-social types that they have met in their commerce with bookstores. So yeah, Truman was a character all right. And now as I think of him, he looms larger in my memory. Firstly, he introduced me to French Market Coffee (with chicory) from New Orleans—which I still drink forty years later, and secondly, he was the first person to extend me credit. In fact, he held the quaint notion that he needed to regularly discourage me from paying my entire outstanding balance because of his belief that as long as I owed him money I was his client. No outstanding balance left me, in his mind, untethered in the world of book commerce.

Truman’s shop specialized (this is not quite accurate but these are the things that brought me to his door) in contemporary philosophy (of which I was then a student) and contemporary literary fiction. It’s a peculiar thing that when I occasionally put my hands on a copy of the Tractatus or Philosophical Investigations, I am more likely to think of that book world encapsulated in Great Expectations, as I knew it, than kicking away any ladders when I am unable to speak of things. Truman, a large man with Van Dyke facial hair was also a pleasing storyteller and an engaging conversationalist, and his shop had that sanctified aura that I have come to identify as I have gone on to encounter innumerable other shops and booksellers. Amply lit, wooden shelving, tables not quite neatly displaying books, the scent of cigarette smoke, WFMT (home of Studs Terkel) broadcasting over the radio, a cup of strong-but-fresh coffee always available at the long rectangular wooden table off to the side of Truman’s desk. No cash register, no credit card modem. Lots of books and something else…

I am seized by such memories these days because the time is drawing near when the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookstore is closing its doors on Newbury Street. As a regular and sometimes frequent personal port of call, that closing—besides requiring internal and emotional recalibrations—shifts the arc of my peregrinations in my adopted village of Back Bay, Boston. No small thing, for the perennially peripatetic, like me, but probably a useful sign of my times. I, of course, expect to continue seeing Vince and the store cat Blue and hopefully the Merry Band that has worked with him. But there will be no going home again to that place. A place I am certain that is destined for local mythology.

Before I actually saw Abelardo Morrell’s new ensemble of photographs collected in his a book of books (with a predictably insightful and delightful introduction by Nicholson Baker), I was a bit worried that his pictures would contribute to that province of the book world that turns books into things themselves (dings an sich?). Not to beat this drum too often, but the Avenue Victor Hugo featured signs all over the place saying, “Please Touch the Books,” a noble, and to me, entirely correct sentiment. In what I believe is the most mundane corner of the book world, it is the unread and unsullied by human hands book that has the greatest value. Those are the ones collected and traded and seemingly relegating content to a distant and superfluous consideration. I have even noticed local bookstore advertising (well, they don’t call it advertising but that’s part of mantle of innocence and martyrdom that has become the fashion in book retailing) signed first editions of current books in its newsletter. It may be some kind of double think for me, the curator of a “collection” that contains hundreds of signed and inscribed first editions to mock such a commercial twist but what is the meaning of this signature if one doesn’t at least endure a bookstore reading to acquire it? Or have some, even fleeting, contact with the author?

Anyway, Abelardo’s book is not an objectification or even a homogenization of the idea of ‘book’. It is his talent—okay, his genius—to infuse these pictures of books with something else and, that additionally, that something else leads to looking at books differently and even thinking about them differently. In his Afterword to a book of books, Abe Morrell observes, “For me the magic of these objects lies somewhere between a photograph of a book and the book itself: at times, I have been convinced that books hold all the material of life—at least all the stuff that fits between an A and a Z.”

8 December

Some weeks ago Globe columnist Alex Beam — one of the few remaining and diminishing reasons justifying that newspaper’s contribution to deforestation — mentioned in passing that a particular novel was “lyrical and under appreciated.” Which immediately got me to thinking about how many novels are adequately appreciated, or even what that would mean. Then the brouhaha about Michael Kinsley’s bad attitude and bad behavior regarding his stint as a National Book Award judge (kind of like running into a church and interrupting a service yelling, "I don’t believe in God!") stirred up some dust (once again, Beam weighed in with his new theory of ABC [abstinence-based-criticism]). I previously had held Kinsley in high esteem, especially since he reportedly turned down media potentate SI Newhouse regarding the New Yorker editorship. Perhaps Kinsley realized that position would have required him to read books. Well, who knows?

More to the point for me is the issue of who the cultural arbiters are. This is something about which I worry incessantly, more at this time of year with numerous awards and the inescapable onslaught of year-end lists. While, with some temerity, I accept the need for a Katrina Kennison or someone like her to read 10,000 stories to deliver 100 or so stories to the Best American Short Stories yearly guest editor who then selects around twenty, part of that acceptance is based on faith in her informed judgement. People in the culture business know very well that there are thousands of books, recordings, videos, works of art and whatnot, relentlessly pumped into the marketplace — some with huge publicity machinery creating awareness and recognition and most with none. Kind of sad, when you think about it.

Well, given my declining confidence in the officially designated cultural arbiters (which does not stem from facts like the reliance of the NYT’s Japanese lady on the verb ‘limn’ or like irrelevancies) I thought I would try my hand at this noble business of reminding readers of what they had forgotten or perhaps never knew. Of the nearly hundred books I have read this calendar year the list that follows comprise my view of the novels (well, there are two story collections) that were —in my mind — not shown given sufficient regard:

BURNING MARGUERITE – Elizabeth Inness-Brown
FEMALE TROUBLE - Antonya Nelson
CENTURY’S SON – Robert Boswell
THE SEAL WIFE - Kathyrn Harrison
THE REAL MCCOY - Darin Strauss
A SIMPLE HABANA MELODY - Oscar Hijuelos
IN THE ROGUE BLOOD – James Carlos Baker
PRAGUE - Arthur Phillips
IN THE HAND OF DANTE – Nick Tosches
OYSTER - John Biguenet
HOUSE UNDER SNOW – Jill Bialosky
THAT'S TRUE OF EVERYONE- Mark Winegardner
THE DRIFT – John Ridley
THE PIANO TUNER – Daniel Mason
IN THE RIVER SWEET – Patricia Henley
DARK MATTER - Phillip Kerr

Elizabeth Inness-Brown’s first novel, Burning Marguerite, was as good a story as I read all year. A big story in a compact book that ranges through the past century and remote New England to lush New Orleans with admirable characters and accurate prose. Antonya Nelson’s short story collection Female Trouble contains thirteen stories that limn the subjects of the tensions that exist between men and women and the fundamental question of what women want. I suppose the fact that Nelson has been anointed by The New Yorker as one of the "twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium" might disqualify her from my list, but that honor hasn’t translated to anyone talking about her books in my neck of the woods. Century’s Son by Robert Boswell is the well told story of the existential travails of a Midwestern middle-aged garbage man in juxtaposition to his wife’s disaffection and his larger than life ex-Soviet luminary father-in-law (who allegedly had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to assassinate Josef Stalin). Kathyrn Harrison’s The Seal Wife, set in Alaska around WW I, has a young wide-eyed US Weather Service functionary becoming obsessed with an Inuit woman in a large story told with great economy. Darin Strauss’ The Real McCoy is a good story and a thoughtful rumination on American fascination with authenticity. Maybe the trendy interest in Cuban culture has been temporarily exhausted but I found Oscar Hijuelos’ A Simple Habana Melody to be another wonderful exploration of the displaced person and complete with Hijuelos' unerring ability to measure and carefully dole out the bitter-sweetness of life. James Carlos Baker strikes me as possessing the dark accurate vision of Cormac McCarthy and the bonhomie of James Lee Burke. In the Rogue Blood follows two brothers from their grimly shattered origins in northern Florida in the 1840’s to Texas and the Mexican War. Youngster Arthur Phillips put his fin de sicle experience in Eastern Europe and Prague to good use by writing an engaging novel about expatriate life in Budapest. Nick Tosches’ In the Hand of Dante is fun, funny, and thoughtful and a little bent. Cross-dressing mob hit men, the tormented Dante Alegheri, and a streetwise writer named Nick Tosches in the same story — go figure. I have been a devotee of stories set in the Louisiana bayou (John Dufresne and James Lee Burke, to name a couple of writers who set their stories there.) Along comes John Biguenet with his novel, Oyster, set in coastal fishing country of Louisiana and the story of two families and a couple of murders that bind them together. Jill Bialosky has written House Under Snow, a story of a family of women shipwrecked by the sudden death of father and husband in the awkward ‘70s. That’s True of Everyone by Mark Winegardner is a story collection marked mostly by its wise humor and its subtle honesty. The oddest book I read this year was TV writer and producer John Ridley’s The Drift. An upwardly aspiring black lawyer in Los Angeles throws “it all away” and takes up the life of a hobo — freight train hopping and all. It’s dreary, harrowing and compelling. Young medical student Daniel Mason spent his time in Burma/Myanmar researching malaria and writing his first novel about an English piano tuner who is called upon by the Crown to travel to Burma to tune the exotic grand piano of a British military commander. Mason’s novel is called, straightforwardly, The Piano Tuner. In the River Sweet, Patricia Henley’s second novel, puts her story’s family in the challenging position of having to deal with some very telling secrets. And finally Phillip Kerr’s eleventh novel, Dark Matter, focuses on Sir Isaac Newton’s tenure at the Royal Mint at a very critical juncture of British history. Newton comes off as a pompous polymath but Kerr’s rendering of London in the 1690’s seems pitch perfect.

So that’s it. That’s my list. It’s not the best. It’s not definitive. And if I may proudly point out it is not clothed in numbing and manufactured quantification albeit the New YorkTimes:

When it comes to best books of the year, the editors of the Book Review continue to find it easier to choose than find. Two years ago the number of books nominated by the editors, which had been declining by two a year for several years, fell to 20, the lowest total in a couple of decades. Last year it was 16, this year 15. Customarily the editors agree to keep in mind that the judgment is only about one year and thus to vote on the curve, but the curve has flattened into a line: last year the editors chose 9 of the 16 nominees, and this year 7 of the 15.

6 December

Some of my fellow citizens who are compelled to be in constant despair about the persistent decline of civilization (an attitude I have always associated with my undergraduate years) or the impending apocalypse are, I think, very much aided and supported by their synergistic (or is it symbiotic) relationship with the thing thoughtlessly (that’s a digression I may pursue if I have call to think of it again) labeled as ‘mass media’. Recently I read that 1900 American men were polled by Esquire magazine and voted Ronald Reagan the ‘greatest living American’ and that report may add to the dyspepsia of the dyspeptic. But then again, an amusing counter-weight to the perennial national self abasement Americans engage in—to show the world and each other the scope of our ignorance by pointing out what our youth cannot currently find on the map or globe—has been in my mind, established by the competition in Great Britain to ascertain the Greatest Briton. Winner of this, uh, contest was the estimable Winston Churchill. No surprise there, I think. But placing ahead of such world historical figures as William Shakespeare and Charles Darwin is the poster girl of fin-de-sicle ersatz celebrity, Princess ‘Di’. Now, I think it is a sign of the glass being more than half full that Shakespeare and Darwin are on this list…And then there is Lachlan Murdoch, scion of that perpetrator of cynical abasement of humanity (you know who and what I am talking about), lecturing Australian media colleagues about the need to make a profit, because "good business supports great journalism…"

"The profit motive is not only fundamental to our ability to reward shareholders and pay employees, it's fundamental to excellent journalism." Reportedly he scolded "the self-anointed media elite" who believe "making a profit is positively sinister." After reading this account I wished somebody had practiced some basic journalism and asked young Murdoch whether great journalism led to good business.

I must confess I have picked up a new habit from my dog Rosie. When she intends to settle down for a nap or some respite from her ambitious life style she tends to circle the anointed spot four or five—or sometimes more—times before settling. Much like my canine companion I am aware of circling around my intended subject before getting to it. In this case I wanted to offer the good news that despite the sorry state of newspapers, magazines, television, movies, radio, billboards and public signage there is evidence of intelligent life out there. I should say I am not a devotee of the nascent (maybe not so nascent, if measured by contemporary tech standards) blogging movement. Part of my recalcitrance is aesthetic, as I find the word “blogging” un-pleasing in all its aspects and moreover something I would ascribe to a distasteful bodily dysfunction. More seriously, I sense the endless fertility of the Internet weblogs, and I am overcome by the vertigo that arises from a horizon-less point of view. It has taken me a lifetime to calm my aspirations to read all the books that I am even faintly interested in and now the opportunity to peer into the minds of and converse with so many mentally agile and intellectually passionate people suggests the possibilities of overdose.

Anyway, I suppose this is where I finally get to the point. I recently engaged in some commentary regarding "leftism" at 2Blowhards.Com. The exchanges included four or five people and within a day ended with 16 comments, of which two were mine. Then two days later the definitive, conversation-stopping posting:

"Why would a rational person with some knowledge of the world choose to be a leftist?"

quite simple, that.

A: So as to never become as profoundly addled or arrogant as the likes of you and your ilk.

Posted by: s. melmoth on December 4, 2002 10:55 PM

There is a better than even chance that I will modify my attitude toward this, uh, blogging experience. At this moment, the best of it was the opportunity to express a truth about myself:

As uncomfortable as I am with labels I am proud to be identified as a person of the Left. And that identification has come mostly from the rancorous public debates of the last forty years, which is to say that being against the Vietnamese War and against Jim Crow early branded me a ‘leftist’. But I am also not a political theorist and like most people my politics flow from my sense of right and wrong. I believe in social and economic justice. What does that mean? I am against people starving in the midst of plenty and of not having adequate medical attention and medications. I am against the poisoning of our air and our water and our land by careless or greedy individuals or corporations. I am for protecting and educating our children. I believe in human rights and am against the deprivation of those rights by governments and global corporations. It may certainly be a triumph of hope over experience but I believe in the perfectibility of man much in part because I share Mark Twain’s belief that we—each of us—contain some “secret kindness.”

Well, this was responded to, by the following:

Your statement of economic justice is not leftist. It's moderate and conservative. So, I might rather conclude that you and I are both moderates (which is the same as "conservatives," as I've argued on my blog). But I guess you must believe other, more inalienably leftist, things you don't mention, since you say your are a "leftist."

And it was as I considering my response to this that I intuited an unsatisfying endgame, a kind of intellectual coitus interruptus and folded my hand, returning to my breezy reading of Bob Woodward’s new dare-I-say expose, Bush At War.

Perhaps I should be more subtle about revealing my bias, but I have never really taken Woodward seriously. Firstly, I have suspicions about people who actually call themselves ‘Bob’. And secondly, Woodward’s television appearances have never lived up to Robert Redford’s portrayal of him in “All The President’s Men.” Setting that aside, I am not sure what I got out of Woodward’s account. Near the end he is at President George W. Bush’s 1600-acre ranch in Crawford, Texas. The ranch has a simple, one-story house in a corner of its vast acreage. Woodward goes for a tour with our president in the President’s pick up truck. The National Security Advisor goes along as does a Secret Service agent:

He seemed to gave a particular destination in mind as he tucked the truck into a hidden corner of trees and stopped. We got out, having come perhaps two miles across his property. Rice said she was not getting out because she did not have the right shoes. The Secret Service agent did not follow, so the president and I walked alone across a wooden bridge about 20 yards away.

As we crossed it a giant limestone rock formation, maybe 40 yards across loomed above us, nearly white in color, shaped like a half moon with a steep overhang. It looked as if a mammoth seashell had grown out of the Texas canyon. A tiny natural waterfall tumbled from the center of the overhang. The rock looked ancient, as old as the Roman catacombs. The air had a sweet pungent smell that I could not identify. Bush started tossing rocks at the overhang, and briefly I joined in.

As we walked back, Bush brought up Iraq. His blueprint or model of decision making in any war against Iraq, he told me, could be found in the story I was attempting to tell—the first months of the war in Afghanistan and the largely invisible CIA covert war against terrorism worldwide.

“You have the story.” He said. Look hard at what you’ve got, he seemed to be saying. It was all there if it was pieced together—what he had learned, how he settled into the presidency, his focus on large goals, how he made decisions, why he provoked his war cabinet and pressured people for action.

I was straining to understand the meaning of this…

Before he got back in his truck. Bush added another piece to the Iraq puzzle. He had not yet seen a successful plan for Iraq. He said. He had to be careful and patient. “A president,” he added, “likes to have a military plan that will be successful.”

Hmm. Based on this passage I would probably be adverse to giving the book much serious thought. But then Bob does have access to Don Rumsfield and Colin Powell and Ms. Rice and some other senior policy people and his account of their interactivity is significant. I think. Maybe.

20 November

I recall Norman Mailer—who has been dumped into the dust bin of literary history by any number of upstarts, young turks and hired guns looking to make a name for themselves—was asked about his summer reading list. He scoffed at the concept, saying that he read all year around. I was trying to imagine what that summer reading idea was all about. The best I could come up with was the kind of reading one does at the summer place or at the beach carrying one’s reading materials in the canvas tote in between other socially approved activities. What I could not even come close to imagining was what the world would be like if one only read occasionally. Oh well…Sundays for me bring the joyous opportunity to gaze into the wonderfully original mind of Katherine Powers writing her “A Reading Life” column in the Boston Globe. Her November 17 offering on books on clothing and fashion has this conclusion on Paul Fussell’s Uniforms:

At other times, he reaches deep within himself to come up with an especially mysterious plum: ''If today any item of menswear could be posited as the opposite of the military uniform, it might be the sloppy bathrobe of terry cloth, worn unfastened and in need of ironing.'' Forgive my apoplectic tendency, but what is he talking about? I'll tell you what a sloppy bathrobe is and it's ''Uniforms,'' yes, it is—and I do not understand why the great and noble house of Houghton Mifflin allowed it out on the street. I just do not. No.

I say, "Go girl!" In other periodical literature the Japanese Lady of the New York Times was subjected to mildly interesting scrutiny when readers of MobyLives.com Peter Kunz, Matt Gross and then Michael Cader pin- balled some commentary that ended up in researching the frequency of her use of the word ‘limn’ in her reviews. It turns out that since 1996 TJLNYT has used ‘limn’ 21 times, 7 times last year and 4 so far this year. Then, of course Word Maven Safire weighed in, and—bingo—Dennis Loy Johnson has a tasty salad of ingredients for his “Limning Kakutani” column at MobyLives.com. Also in the NY Times on November 18 was Amy Bloom’s “Trading Fiction's Comfort for a Chance to Look Life in the Eye” where she explains why, though she is normally a writer of fiction, she chose to write a non fiction book, Normal:

I didn't know that exploring the truth of some people's lives, and the stories they had to tell, would overturn my prejudices and my common sense and poke a sharp stick into the blind spots. I didn't know that these real people's complexities and poignancies and humor would move me to write a small book about them, putting aside my own stories for a while to write theirs…. I met heterosexual transsexual Jews and bisexual transsexual Buddhists. They all seemed to have the usual human assortment of baggage and defenses, plus the burden of childhoods spent in rather deeper alienation than even those of us who became writers.

Bloom’s writing here and in other places gives strong evidence that one might find interesting bon mots even in her grocery list. Which brings to mind Mark Winegardner’s mantra that he doesn’t care what a books about, that he’s just interested in good writing. Christopher Hitchens’, late of the Nation, homage to George Orwell, Why Orwell Matters, is a typically well-argued piece by the linguistically flamboyant contrarian. One only wishes that he would take Orwell’s guidance from “Politics and the English Language” and restrain his use of French and Latin phrases. By contrast, Christopher Hitchens takes 220 pages to reaffirm the rightful place of George Orwell in the pantheon of Immortals and a mere 1400 words to dispense with HL Mencken in his review of Terry Teachout’s new biography (NYTBR, Nov. 18) of the sage of Baltimore, “As this century gets under way, it appears to me suddenly to leave the figure of Mencken decidedly shrunken and localized.” Perhaps to counterbalance some of the intellectual heavy lifting that was occasioned by reading about HL Mencken and battles with FDR and his fawning over the Fuhrer and of Orwell and The Spanish Civil War and Stalinism and about ‘limning’ and such, I turned to Patricia Henley’s highly regarded novel, Hummingbird House. And though it took place in the charnel house of Guatemala in late ‘80s, it was a very satisfying book to read. Not a false note in this very harrowing but bittersweet story (except for a little confusion about the difference between the circumference and the diameter of the Earth on p 213). After having finished Gorgeous Lies by Martha McPhee, I have read 4 of the 6 finalists for the National Book Awards (The Heaven of Mercury by Brad Watson, Three Junes by Julia Glass, and Big If by Mark Costello) and I don’t know how someone selects one book out of this pack of fine novels. But I’m sure very glad it’s not my job.

12 November

Who can explain the neural (mis)firings that lead you to zig when you normally zag? In the case at hand, I found myself reading a few so-called book reviews, a practice I had long ago eschewed and a sport (book reviewing) that I have rarely engaged in. The stone in my shoe that prompted such a reversal was my curiosity about the reception that was accorded to the talented Sam Shepard and his recent story collection, Great Dream of Heaven. Shepard is well known for declining to do the seemingly perfunctory book touring and talk-show touting that has become a mainstay of book publicizing, and because of that I also wondered if he would get any attention at all. It just occurred to me that these days at any one time American skies are probably filled with more authors than farm equipment salesmen and probably as many pharmaceutical company representatives. More signs of the times. Anyway, (fast becoming a favorite word) as I have noted previously, that New York Times Japanese lady dismissed Shepard’s story collection as minor (always a gutsy call even if you disagree, as I do) and characterized it as “this slender book is a highly uneven hodgepodge of stories, playlets and narrative fragments.” Caryn James, on the other hand, who serves as the NY Times television critic, weighs in with, “Which leads to the central question about his slim new collection of stories: are they valuable beyond what they reveal about Shepard the inscrutable icon? The answer is emphatically, and a bit surprisingly, yes. Great Dream of Heaven, his third narrative collection, is also his most literary, with half a dozen stories among the 18 that are extraordinary by any measure. He has been building toward them for years.” So there you have it, 2 smart ladies disagreeing about a book. This, of course, confirmed to me what I already irrevocably believed about the value of reading reviews. Which is, that you ought to have a very good reason for giving up valuable reading time. Having already broken my fast, I went on to read a piece by the inestimable John Leonard (who once had the audacity to entitle a book of his “The Last Angry White Man In America”) on David Eggers’ new novel. Who can say whether all that attention that accretes to Eggers’ publishing and marketing practices has some effect on what’s on the page as well as how what’s on his pages is received? Leonard takes a good shot at answering and I was struck by his dead-on view anticipating critical reaction, “But he should also trust himself. It's hard enough to tell the truth, especially if, like Eggers, you are forever taking your own temperature and second-guessing your own performance. Never mind the ululations of your self-righteous coterie or the dyspeptic bleats of those critics who will punish your second book for their having actually admired your first one.” I guess we’ll see about that. In place of reviews and being honored with many benefactions from book publishers I have found the most satisfying source of reading tips to be writers. Even my awareness of the suspect and perhaps corrupt practice of book "blurbing" (it is so commonly referred to as ‘log-rolling’ we might as well substitute ‘log’ for ‘blurb’) doesn’t dissuade me from putting a modicum of faith in some blurbs, thereby exposing my naive belief that some blurbers (log rollers) have more integrity than others. I recently talked with Patricia Henley about her wonderful novel In the River Sweet (laudibly logged by Dorothy Allison) and she mentioned a novel by Steve Yarbrough called The Oxygen Man. I read it and admire it and I’m passing that tip on. You never know…

6 November

I suppose if I were a God-fearing American I might be inclined to exclamations of "God save the Republic!" after noting that among other electoral horrors Elizabeth Dole, John Sununu and some guy named Coleman in Minnesota are the newest members of the Millionaires club otherwise known as the United States Senate. The fact that they are replacing Jessie Helms, Bob Smith and that Walter Mondale couldn’t carry the torch for the much-loved Paul Wellstone, well, I leave that to others to wring their hands about. And for the first time since the Mesozoic epoch, there is no Strom Thurmond in the (upper) house. Happily, I am wending my way through Donna Tartt’s My Little Friend and am again reminded of the joys and benefits of a literary vocation. Here’s a chase scene as the 12-year-old Harriet is running from tweaker and suspected (by her) murderer of her brother, "She heard him shouting in the distance. Breathing painfully, clutching the stitch in her side, Harriet ran behind the warehouse (faded tin signs: Purina Checkerboard, General Mills) and down a gravelled road: much wider, wide enough for a car to go down. With wide bare patches marbled with patterns of black and white sand swirled through the red clay and dappled with patchy shade from tall sycamores. Her blood pounded, her thoughts clattered and banged around her head like coins in a shaken piggy bank and her legs were heavy, like running through mud or molasses in a nightmare and she couldn’t make them go fast enough, couldn’t make them go fast enough, couldn’t tell if the snap and the crash of twigs (like gunshots, unnaturally loud) was only the crashing of her feet or feet crashing down the path behind her." Also, actually reading Ms.Tartt’s new book immunizes me from the clatter and distraction of the inevitable publicity and critical attention she receives. Unfortunately, I was not sufficiently distracted to miss the sad story of Rohinton Mistry’s travails as he attempted an American book tour for latest novel, Family Matters. Mistry is a highly regarded Canadian novelist of Indian provenance who has encountered such relentless allegedly non-existent profiling that he has cancelled the remainder of his book tour. It is exactly at such moments that I think American flag wavers might consider displaying the flag upside down, the nautical signal for "ship in distress." In part, because I was making one of my occasional investigative forays into the putative real world—which is responsible for my dim awareness of the elections and the shameful treatment of Rohinton Mistry— that I read that Japanese lady’s (you know the one from the NY Times, whose name most people can’t pronounce and whose gender many people confuse) review of Sam Shepard’s new story collection, Great Dream of Heaven. I read it because Mr. Shepard has eschewed the normal tactics of book publicity, thus seemingly condemning his books to obscurity. That Japanese lady concludes: "As a result, the slighter pieces…nearly evaporate off the page, failing to insinuate themselves, even momentarily, in the reader's mind. In the end, this book of tales is decidedly minor Shepard, a collection of accompaniment pieces, really, for the more symphonic work of his best plays." And I think, "It wasn’t that way for me at all." The upshot of this is, of course, I hope not too many people are dissuaded from reading these stories because one (thoughtful and savvy) reader wasn’t impressed.

2 November

As a grade school kid, one of the few things that I found enjoyable about my ordeal by public education was my introduction to wonders of the daily newspaper. This is a habit I have maintained until only recently—my lapse being another story entirely. The best part of my daily perambulation through this school lesson was the sports pages. Chicago, being a full-blooded town, had its share of sports news: 2 football teams, 2 baseball teams, a hockey team, seated in the center of the Big Ten conference and two local Catholic Notre Dame wannabes, Loyola and DePaul Universities. Of course, none of that meant much to me at the time. What did mean a lot was that I lived a few blocks from Wrigley Field, home of the perennially losing Chicago Cubs. My first newspaper was the Chicago Sun-Times, the liberal tabloid owned by the Marshall Fields family and the yin to the McCormack family’s antediluvian Chicago Tribune yang. Years later the Tribune would end up owning the Cubs—for me, a reinforcement of the basic and obvious notion that if you live long enough you will encounter some really unlikely turns-of-events. Anyway, the sports pages in the tabloid were the back pages and often as not it's what I read first, murders and fires being of marginal interest to me. This habit of reading about sports has continued even past my participation or even my viewing of most professional contests. I still find some satisfaction in getting the inside info about sports for reasons that escape me. I would think that this kind of interest would carry over into other areas, like the literary and the publishing worlds that I inhabit, but it doesn’t. I don’t really care if Zadie Smith is dating Eminem. Or who Jonathan Saffron Foer is dating. Maybe that fact that Gabe Hudson is reportedly auctioning off his letter from President Bush is mildly amusing (The NY Observer reports Bush wrote Hudson that his book Dear Mr. President was "unpatriotic," "ridiculous" and "just plain bad writing") and the fact is whatever I think of this kind of gossip probably there are many people that find it interesting. Far be it from me to want to legislate the informational marketplace, except as an arbitor. Now, Dennis Loy Johnson’s website, MobyLives.com ("The whale lives") seems devoted to matters of literary import. I say "seems" because as a new devotee of this blog, I haven’t felt it necessary to form an opinion on its place in the cosmos. I am grateful that Johnson gave voice to something that has been troubling me for some time. That is, why photographer Marion Ettlinger has become the darling of the book publishing art director crowd. I asked Johnson if he tried to sell his piece on this photographic naked empress to NY publications. His response, "I did try to peddle that Ettlinger column around, but got no takers because, I figure, most of the editors I was peddling to (in NYC) all dream of having their photo taken by Ms. Ettlinger; it's a real status symbol, which is what makes it all the more interesting/repulsive, in a 'emperor has no clothes' kind of way." Actually far more significantly, Johnson points out a backlash brewing towards the current crop of seemingly successful young writers. Dave Eggers' deals are being scrutinized for their consistency with his initial claims about McSweeney’s books and the benefits for authors who published with him as well as the direction of McSweeney’s (next to be guest edited by Micheal Chabon) and its commitment to young unpublished writers. Jonathan Franzen and Rick Moody are being taken to task for applying for and accepting grant money (usually designated for young and penurious writers) despite their own economic good fortunes. And it being award season, the National Book Award finalists are being vetted for who they are connected to and what their provenance is and what publishing houses have been frozen out of this year's awards. This is all seemingly interesting stuff while (if) you are reading it. Maybe like checking baseball box scores in the middle of July. Interesting, but pretty much meaningless…

28 October

I missed the press announcement of the introduction of the phrase "urban legend" into public blathering. I say this because I am made aware of references to such a thing (I was tempted to say concept but I will wait on that) and the examples that fall under that heading don’t seem to have a connection with either "urban" or "legend." Unless, of course, any kind of story or anecdote can be a legend. Or it might be our various cultural arbitors feel called upon to manufacture legends, fables and myths for reasons known only to them? But that is another story. In my experience the manufacturers of myth in our culture have, for the most part, been businesses and politicians. Some where along the line the myth of brand was created so that for many people, if you could remember the name Chevrolet or Marlboro or Coca Cola or Crest or Tide, that "brand" implied some standard of high quality. If ever, no more. I walked into Blockbuster Video the other evening—looking for cheap thrills. Just the thought of being in thrall to a corporation of that ilk that includes Microsoft, America On Line, and McDonald’s chastened me, pondering whether commercial entities became large and successful by giving both good value and good product. Perhaps such an ethos would qualify as an urban legend? Back to aisles of Blockbuster—in my increasingly desperate search for an interesting and distracting video (I almost went for Apocalypse Now) I came across a VHS tape called Big Bad Love. Directed by Arliss Howard with Howard and marital partner Debra Winger in significant roles along with Paul Le Mat and Rosanna Arquette and Michael Parks and Angie Dickinson, the kicker here is that the movie is based on the great "working class southern writer" Larry Brown's stories from a collection of the same name. Everything about this gem was on target; the acting, the direction, the sound and the sound track. This would be one shining example of the high odds for coming up with something good if you start out with something good…this is a terrific piece of cinema that avoids turning into cliche the travails and tortures of the writing life. I guess I should be grateful for beneficence of the Great American Bazaar that I was able to find such a wonder, at all.

25 October

In preparation for vacating the Newbury Street space that has housed the estimable Avenue Victor Hugo Bookstore, Vince McCaffrey has placed his 150,000-plus-volume inventory on sale. Yesterday was the first day of that event, and though I expected that it would be a tad busy, I was not prepared for the crowded aisles and bargain-basement ambience that filled the store. I saw some familiar faces; former employees, a woman who is in my spinning class. It was a bittersweet experience leading naturally to question, where were these people when the store needed them? The answer, of course, straight from The Godfather is, "It’s just business." This concern about Vince and his bookstore will probably continue and perhaps blossom into an obsession at least until he closes his doors the last day of this year.

Anyway, I did a little browsing (how could I not?) and found a few books that I just had to have at that moment: Amy Bloom’s first story collection, Come to Me, Thomas McGuane’s sports essay collection, An Outside Chance, a first edition of Cynthia Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm and The American Mercury Reader circa 1946. Paging through the American Mercury (the magazine founded in the early ‘20s by H.L Menken and George Nathan) anthology triggered my recollection that there was at one time, in publishing, a category of magazines labeled ‘smart’ and the Mercury was one of them. I expect that I will have ample time to piss and moan about the sorry state of magazine publishing, but for the moment, while the sun shines and air and light are crisp and crystalline, I say at least there is The New Yorker. As I was paging through this week’s edition I noticed that in their slight Book Currents department they made note of Wislawa Szymborsk’s new book of essays, Nonrequired Reading. Ms. Szymborsk, whose name does not slip trippingly off the tongue, is the 1996 Nobel Laureate in Literature. I became a fast and eternal devotee when I read her author’s note to the above-mentioned volume:

I am old fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised. Homo Ludens dances, sings, produces meaningful gestures, strikes poses, dresses up, revels and performs elaborate rituals. I don’t wish to diminish the significance of these attractions—without them human life would pass in unimaginable monotony and, possibly, dispersion and defeat. But these are group activities, above which drifts a more or less perceptible whiff of collective gymnastics. Homo Ludens with a book is free. At least as free as he’s capable of being. He himself makes up the rules of the game, which are subject only to his curiosity. He’s permitted to read intelligent books, from which he will benefit, as well as stupid ones, from which he may also learn something. He can stop before finishing one book, if he wishes, while starting another at the end and working his way back to the beginning. He may laugh in the wrong places or stop short at words that he’ll keep for a lifetime. And finally, he’s free—and no other hobby can promise this—to eavesdrop on Montaigne’s arguments or take a quick dip in the Mesozoic.

22 October

Maybe Mark Winegardner is right that we tend to ignore writers who are prolific (for some interesting reasons). Although Sam Shepard doesn’t exactly fall into that camp, I was wondering why I had put off reading the slender volume of stories, Great Dream of Heaven, that was residing on my bookshelf. Other than the fact that I didn’t have to read it. That is, there is almost no likelihood that I will be talking to Shepard, since he is one of the few authors who just writes and refuses to do any publicity. Of course, that also didn’t explain why I read John Biguenet’s Oyster. A terrific and visceral piece of fiction. Anyway, this digression brought me to a happy realization that I was still able to sever the strictures of obligation and read beyond what I was committed to reading. All of which means that I still read for the fun and the joy of it. Back to Sam Shepard. “The Remedy Man,” “Blinking Eye,” “The Door to Women,” “It Wasn’t Proust” and “Great Dream of Heaven” are everything I read short pieces for. Compact, spare, accurate and, yes, a good story line. Now, back to days of obligation.

20 October

As I have noted before Katherine Powers is one really good reason to wade through the sales circulars and other evidence of useless deforestation in our local paper of record on Sundays. Somewhere along the line the powers-that-be at the Globe stumbled on the good sense idea of having Powers in every Sunday. Hurrah, I say. In any case, reading her piece today I thought her corrections are more interesting than many writers’ texts. To whit:

CORRECTION: Who knows what dark force clouded my intellect, unstrung my reason, and unratcheted the very cogwheel of memory two weeks ago, and thus caused me to imply that S. J. Perelman's diaries have been published. They haven't. The same blasting power (that leaves nothing wholesome in its wake, only the ashes and smashed cinders of thought) is also behind my failing to note that there is an affordable abridgment of Arthur Inman's diaries available, entitled ''From a Darkened Room: The Inman Diary'' (Harvard University, paperback, $17.95). Unburdened now of these terrible secrets, I can at last find rest.

I was left half hoping she would make more errors…

19 October

The Boston Globe’s David Mehegan wrote a piece on the year-end closing of Avenue Victor Hugo bookshop. Maybe he got Vince McCaffrey’s 4 page press release—which like so many things dedicated booksellers do, flew in the face of conventional wisdom (keep it short). Anyway, Mehegan was properly reverential and sympathetic. But in the end I come away wondering how Ave Victor Hugo managed to make it through the ‘90s on what has become a high end strip mall, Newbury Street. I also wonder why no one has, in Boston, done what booksellers like Powell’s and others have done. That is, to shelve new and old books together (Vince says he did that, and he did but that certainly wasn’t the perception the public had of his store). So it goes. Poteet, poteet…

16 October

I had a conversation with Daniel Mason, the young author of The Piano Tuner and the subject of books we read when we were young came up. I had recently watched Milos Forman’s film version of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and was thinking of the other books that were part of the ‘60s canon: Trout Fishing In America by Richard Brautigan, Slaughterhouse-Five and Thank You Mr. Rosewater or Pearls Before Swine by Kurt Vonnegut, Siddartha and Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse, books by Anais Nin and Germaine Greer, Rd Laing and Fritz Perls and Ouspensky. And of course, On the Road by Jack Kerouac and Howl by Allen Ginsberg and Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice. And, to be sure, many others that I can’t recall. I suppose it is some kind of truism to say that I was influenced by these books. But I think only in that I was impressed in some way with their connection to a world that I was just finding out about. In high school I could never read Hawthorne or Melville or Austen (a habit I have carried on into adulthood). In surveying what I have read in past 10 years or so I have read almost nothing that wasn’t written before the mid ‘80s (except for Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Graham Greene’s The Comedians and Our Man in Havana and Gabriel Garcia’s 100 Years of Solitude). Hmm.

11 October

Three very different writers remind me why I don’t lose interest in this ongoing conversation with the literary planet/nation. I’m hoping that’s also why they (these talks) might be viewed as fresh and interesting. I’m not bound to anything but my own curiosity and the call and response riffing that a good conversation that produce or simulate. Also, it may be far fetched to say you can never tell what people are going to say but it isn’t far off the mark to say that I’m frequently surprised.

8 October

Busy week for me. I’m talking to Dorothy Allison about her republished story collection, editor and poet Jill Bialosky about her fine first novel, House Under Snow, and Mark Winegardener about his short stories and the world of writing, he being the chairman of creative writing at Florida State University…

6 October

One of the good reasons to read the Boston Globe is the appearance of Katherine Powers’ column, A Reading Life. Always, or almost always on the money, this weeks entry focuses on diaries—something I am acutely interested in—as I try for the umpteenth time in my life to keep track of well...That’s the nub of it for me, What am I trying to keep track of? Powers offers some reasons to plod on:

“The real essence of a diary, its quintessence, in fact, is the working of time, the accretion, augmentation, suppression, rejection and mutation of the writer’s impressions of the world and himself. It is a gradual accumulation, a product of circumstance and will. No plot can be imposed on a diary; attempts at it break down and can be seen through…the tale meanders on entry after entry, heading who knows where. It is uncontrollable, a force of nature…”

3 October

On the hunt for some older hardcover fiction (Dorothy Allison, Mark Winegardner), I stopped by Avenue Victor Hugo Bookstore on Newbury Street. I was neither shocked nor surprised but indeed saddened, by the news that Vince [McCaffrey] has decided to close his 27-year-old shop by the end of the year. I am sure I will be thinking more about this as that unhappy day draws near, but for the moment it reminds me of the frailty of the book business and the odd ducks that people it. In Boston the big chains have not faired well and that, I suppose, is because of the savvy and commitment of the so-called independent booksellers like Brookline Booksmith and Harvard Bookstore. But in the past few years a number of brick-and-mortar used book dealers have fallen the by the wayside. According to Vince, where there were only about 10,000 such dealers a few years ago, the Internet has expanded used book dealing ten fold. Now Ma and Pa in Sweetwater, Montana can, as Vince points out, with little overhead, deal books from their kitchen table…anyway, bad news, indeed.

I was zipping along through Mark Winegardner’s new story collection, That’s True of Everybody, in preparation for talking to him later this week. I got to the 7th story, "Janda’s Sister," and the opening paragraph had me laughing hysterically:

Curt Jansen and I go back to when the high school basketball coach shot off the tip of his wife’s nose, painted his privates blue, and strode naked through the town square of Tulliard, Ohio, waving his revolver and singing selections from Disney movies, songs first sung by bears, dogs and monkeys. The coach knew all the words. The bars had just closed, and my mother bore witness to the event. The coach she told me later had a thin lovely tenor that you didn’t expect to hear floating from the mouth of a fat gun-wielding lunatic with blue testicles.

2 October

One of the seasonal blessings of each year is the fall publication of Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Stories and Essays, which has been expanded in recent years to include Travel Writing, Mystery Writing, Sports Writing, Science Writing, Recipes and this year—a Dave Eggers(hmm) guest-edited Best Non-Essential Reading (more hmmm). Beyond my quibbles about the concept of ‘Best’ in play here, who can fault the beleaguered publisher for trying to cash in on a successful brand? This year’s Best Mystery Stories is guest-edited by that Madman from Missouri, James Ellroy, and it contains a wonderful excerpt from John Biguenet’s wonderful new novel, Oyster. I seem to have a weakness for the bayou cajun-set thriller. I loved the early James Lee Burke Dave Robicheux books as well as John Dufresne’s comic romps in the Louisiana parishes.

Last week’s New Yorker actually had two pieces that was able to read in full: Franzen on William Gaddis and _______ on Harold Bloom and The NY Observer had Ron Rosenbaum unraveling the mystery of Robert Lowell’s various versions of poems that were used by Robert Stone as titles for his first novel, Hall of Mirrors, and the later and curiously overlooked and underrated Children of Light.

Dave Eggers’ new novel, being published by his corporation McSweeney’s, apparently is being sold in stores despite the bulletins emanating from the young publishing juggernaut that it was only being sold online and that its 1st edition was a print run of 10,000. This number is rather sparse for a writer who will probably sell minimally a few hundred thousand copies. No doubt copious media attention will be devoted to all matters Eggers. What do I know? I’m still having to remind them on a regular basis that I signed up for a lifetime subscription in 1999…

bio

Robert Birnbaum came to journalism, where he has been a practitioner for the past two decades, from a series of possibly (it's too soon to tell) educational vocational experiences that are too numerous to mention. In the '80s and '90s, as publisher/creative director of STUFF magazine in Boston, when he wasn't attending industrial gatherings, he interviewed nearly 500 hundred writers — from Martin Amis and Isabel Allende to Marianne Wiggins and Howard Zinn — and read almost 1000 books. He is currently, among other things, pondering if there is a place for him in a profession increasingly infested with vulgarians who believe 'editorial content' is celebrating restaurant and shop openings, endlessly lionizing the same small group of celebrities and reiterating the press releases of the publicists they have just had lunch with. He lives with his Labrador retriever Rosie and helps parent his young son Cuba Maxwell.

Note: Featured author in November 2000

E-mail: reddiaz@aol.com

Author interviews: Dorothy Allison, Nicholson Baker, Julian Barnes, Andrea Barrett, Alex Beam, Jill Bialosky, Amy Bloom, Amy Bloom 2002, Alain de Botton, Arthur Bradford, Ethan Canin, Stephen Carter, Sandra Cisneros, Michael Connelly, Richard Conniff, Frank Conroy, Mark Costello, Elizabeth Cox, Jim Crace, Nicholas Dawidoff, Andre Dubus III, John Dufresne, Tony Earley, Barbara Ehrenreich, Gretel Ehrlich, James Ellroy, Richard Ford, Alan Furst, Alan Furst 2002, Anthony Giardina, James Gleick, Adam Gopnik, Allan Gurganus, Barbara Haber, David Hadju, Ethan Hawke, Christopher Hitchens #1, Christopher Hitchens #2, Gabe Hudson, Elizabeth Inness-Brown, Ben Katchor, Nora Okja Keller, Chip Kidd, Anthony Lane, Annette Lemieux, Alan Lightman, Paul Lussier, Ruben Martinez, Daniel Mason, Thomas McGuane, Thisbe Nissen, Tim O'Brien, Susan Orlean, Ann Packer, Arthur Phillips, Samantha Power, Christopher Rice, David Rieff, Hazel Rowley, Richard Russo #1, Richard Russo #2, John Sedgwick, David Shields, Ilan Stavans, Darin Strauss,