Unfortunately, a couple of today’s posts will come from the Death of Literacy Department. First, I present Mr. Kanye West, and his 52-page, spiral-bound, co-written opus Thank You and You’re Welcome.

As one news report puts it:

Rapper Kanye West does not read books or respect them but nevertheless he has written one that he would like you to buy and read.

One entire page contains nothing more than this gem: “I hate the word hate!”

Take it away, Kanye:

“Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph. . . . I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life.”

If you haven’t seen it yet, take some time this week to read William Deresiewicz’s review for The Nation of several books about “literary Darwinism.” As he explains near the top, “The nascent field of Darwinian aesthetics seeks to account for the art-making impulse in evolutionary psychological terms. If art is a product of the mind, and the mind is a product of evolution, then art is a product of evolution.” This reminded me of reading Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett several years ago. Terrific book, but it truly lost me (and infuriated me) when it started trying to apply Darwinism to the cultural survival of certain works of art.

Among other one-liners, Deresiewicz calls evolutionary psychology “the Malcolm Gladwell of science: facile and glib, but so persuasive and charming that no one wants to ruin the fun.” It’s a smart, lengthy piece about why we should resist replacing Theory (about which he also has strong feelings) with a Darwinian approach, why it “really would be the death of humanism, not to mention the English major,” and why “the finest books demand a criticism that attends to what makes them unique, not what makes them typical.”

I mentioned a review of Michael Lewis’ latest in yesterday’s Beat roundup, only to realize soon after that Lewis himself has a review worth reading this week — of a new book about Warren Buffett. Here’s how Lewis starts:

There is now a long shelf of books about Warren Buffett, but this is the first time he has gone to any trouble to add to it. Reportedly Buffett now regrets his decision–he has apparently put some fresh distance between himself and his official biographer. If so, it’s not hard to see why. Alice Schroeder is a former Morgan Stanley research analyst, able to understand and to explain Buffett’s money-making, but she declined to confine herself to the business at hand. She has sought to describe Buffett’s psychological landscape as clearly as his financial one. For the reader, the results are pretty terrific–there are not a lot of 838-page narratives that leave you wanting more–but for Buffett they are no doubt upsetting.

In a world of terrible sequels, here, refreshingly, is a great one: The Final Four of Everything. It’s a follow-up to The Enlightened Bracketologist. In both books, the national frenzy for brackets inspired by March Madness is put to use in settling (and starting) debates about everything from the best presidential speeches to the best breakfast cereal. The format is simple: Take 32 of anything, pit them against each other in a tournament-style bracket and see who or what is left standing.

In the new book, Second Pass contributor (and excellent saxophone player) Nick Trautwein considers the best jazz solos. Luke Dempsey — obsessive bird watcher, author of A Supremely Bad Idea, and another friend to this site — designs a tournament for . . . birds.

Other subjects among the book’s 150 include Supreme Court decisions, the worst movies by great directors, high school movies (criminally, Ferris Bueller and The Breakfast Club are made to meet in the second round, meaning one of them goes home way too early), sitcom dads and sitcom moms (teaser: one Huxtable comes out on top; the other doesn’t), and impressionists (not the painters, but people like Dana Carvey and Robin Williams. The finals of that one rightfully pits Frank Caliendo against Darrell Hammond. If you haven’t seen Hammond’s German-language Phil Donahue, you haven’t lived.)

One of the funniest concepts comes from cartoonist Roz Chast, who tries to determine an ultimate champion among her fears and phobias. Her final four: Going blind, plane crash, cancer, and — balloons.

There’s a blank bracket in the back, so I’ll have to come up with a subject of my own and fill it out. Perhaps R.E.M. songs, or contemporary novels, or obscure 1980s baseball players. Come to think of it, I might need to make some copies of the blank . . .

The Browser, a terrific aggregation site (or “intelligent general reader,” as it bills itself), has started a series about books. Recently, Anthony Gottlieb, the author of The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, spoke to the site about books that “weigh religion and secularism.” The interview covers five books, one of which Gottlieb calls “arguably the masterpiece of English language philosophy.”

And there’s this, on Spinoza:

. . . he was generally thought of as an atheist, though he certainly wouldn’t have described himself as one. He thought he was just trying to show what God was really like, and in fact the German poet Novalis called him a “God-intoxicated man,” with some justice, because Spinoza never stops talking about God. Well, you can’t be both God-intoxicated and an atheist.  But you can, of course, be both God-intoxicated and yet unimpressed by traditional Judaism.

On the Backlist today, Anne Trubek examines a true oddball in American literature, Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland. I was assigned to read it in college, but have only vague memories of it — it’s probable that, like Trubek, I didn’t make it through back then. I’m eager to now.

Here are the book’s opening two paragraphs:

I feel little reluctance in complying with your request. You know not fully the cause of my sorrows. You are a stranger to the depth of my distresses. Hence your efforts at consolation must necessarily fail. Yet the tale that I am going to tell is not intended as a claim upon your sympathy. In the midst of my despair, I do not disdain to contribute what little I can to the benefit of mankind. I acknowledge your right to be informed of the events that have lately happened in my family. Make what use of the tale you shall think proper. If it be communicated to the world, it will inculcate the duty of avoiding deceit. It will exemplify the force of early impressions, and show the immeasurable evils that flow from an erroneous or imperfect discipline.

My state is not destitute of tranquillity. The sentiment that dictates my feelings is not hope. Futurity has no power over my thoughts. To all that is to come I am perfectly indifferent. With regard to myself, I have nothing more to fear. Fate has done its worst. Henceforth, I am callous to misfortune.

Starting here, I’ll occasionally recommend older books on the blog, in a form somewhere between what you see on The Shelf and The Backlist.

Denis Johnson is perhaps best loved by readers for his 1992 collection of clipped, hallucinatory druggie stories Jesus’ Son. He won the National Book Award in 2007 for Tree of Smoke, an epic novel set against the Vietnam War. And his latest, a slender homage to noir called Nobody Move has been getting praise.

My favorite book of his is his first novel, Angels, published in 1983. It’s one of the most original novels I’ve read, poetic but propulsive (an endangered combination). Following socially marginal characters, it’s heartbreakingly sad and suddenly funny, leaving you feeling like you might if you listened to the dialogue from Raising Arizona while strolling through an exhibit of Dorothea Lange photos.

The story follows Bill Houston (always referred to by first and last name in the novel), an ex-Navy man, one of three brothers who are troublemakers mostly because they’re a bit too dim to be anything else, and Jamie Mays, a mother of two young children fleeing an abusive husband in California. The two meet on a cross-country bus, making their way to the Rust Belt before heading back west to spend time with Bill Houston’s family in Arizona.

Johnson has a perfect instinct for when to leaven the grit with a laugh, but he doesn’t flinch when his hardscrabble, self-destructive characters get themselves into trouble. Jamie’s encounter with a con man in Chicago leads to her being drugged and raped, and the reader sees the danger of her trusting him long before she does. Soon after that attack, Bill Houston tracks her down, and Johnson exhibits an uncanny ability to mix tones:

He found her at the Children’s Services Division in the afternoon, napping in a chair of torn-and-taped imitation leather. Baby Ellen lay in her lap, and a few chairs away Miranda disputed with a little baldheaded boy about the possession of a coloring book. The place smelled like an ashtray. Everybody was black or foreign or deformed. There were people with crutches and people clutching soiled magazines to their chest, and children all around them. He leaned close and said, “Jamie,” hoping he was being quiet enough.

When she opened her eyes she said, “I been looking for you.”

“Well, you found me. How about us getting out of here?”

“I got to fill out some more forms, I think.” She looked around, apparently trying to locate herself among these others.

“Shit. Once they start you on filling out forms, it just don’t ever end.” He tried to think of a way of explaining to her that even now, as the two of them dawdled here, these people were inventing the forms that would defeat her grandchildren.

Here’s Jamie again, speaking to a panel of four people, trying to prove her sanity, hoping to be released from a psychiatric ward, where she’s had delusions, among other things (thus the comment about the Empire State Building):

“How are you feeling today?” the Welfare lady asked.

“Nervous,” Jamie said.

Nervous was the wrong word. She could see that instantly.

“I mean, I have my problems,” she said, “but I don’t think this is the Empire State Building, or anything like that.”

They shifted in their seats.

“You’re just nervous about being here,” Dr. Wrigley said.

“You got it,” Jamie said.

Everybody nodded. When she said the wrong thing, the bodies shifted. When she said the right thing, the heads went up and down.

Dr. Wrigley wasn’t the only man with a chart. There was another, Dr. Benvenuto, who flipped his pages and said, “Jamie, what do you see yourself doing ten years from now?”

She closed her eyes and it came before her like a vision. “I’ll be watching a color TV and smoking a Winston-brand cigaret.”

That made their heads go up and down wildly. They loved that one.

Marc Fitten is out on the road promoting his debut novel, Valeria’s Last Stand, about a love affair in a fictional Hungarian village. To spice up his travels, he’s visiting 100 independent bookstores, and he’s set up a blog detailing what he finds. (So far, he’s been to five stores in two cities — Atlanta and Boston/Cambridge.)

I wish I had a reason to travel and do the same. Alas, I’ll just recommend four stores that I love: New York’s Strand, which isn’t exactly a hidden gem; Larry McMurtry’s Booked Up colossus in Archer City, Texas, about which I might write more at a future date; Loganberry Books in Cleveland, whose “Literary Arts” room alone would be a great store; and Lyrical Ballad in Saratoga Springs, New York, which I once wrote about for Maud Newton.

I believe in revisiting older books around here, so why not older reviews? This one’s not even that old. Last fall, the Claremont Review of Books published Cheryl Miller’s take on House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family by Paul Fisher. I’m a fervid William James fan, so the book caught my eye when it was published. Miller has dampened my eagerness to read it by discussing its approach in the larger context of biographical trends:

The pathographer sees himself as deconstructing myths, refusing, as Fisher puts it, to let the success of great men “obscur[e] the real complexity of famous lives.” Instead, the pathographer promises to expose great men for the “bad little fictions” they really are. Yet, as bold and iconoclastic as the pathographer thinks he is, he is actually in thrall to a much more powerful, enduring mythology: the myth of the tortured artist or the dysfunctional genius.

I recommend reading the whole thing.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily)

I found this at Readerville, which rightly prefaced it with, “Some things defy introduction or summarization; you simply have to see/read them for yourselves.” Such is the case with this, which left me confused, entertained, and then confused again: Poets Ranked by Beard Weight.

Researching the most recent installment of The Cherry & the Pit (below), I came across this recently acquired book:

Janet Mullany’s THE IMMORTAL JANE AUSTEN, a humorous novel about Jane Austen in Regency England who joins the vampire resistance in Bath when England is invaded by French forces.

This is on the heels of the bestselling Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which, as the cover copy charmingly puts it, “transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you’d actually want to read.”

The author of that book, Seth Grahame-Smith, has been signed to write a novel about Abraham Lincoln that re-imagines the 16th president as a vampire slayer. Don’t worry, though; Grahame-Smith’s editor reassures us that “. . . rather than just toss vampires in wherever he feels, Seth is doing a lot of research to see where they could fit in properly to the actual events of Lincoln’s life.” Whew. I’d hate to read something that turns Lincoln into a vampire slayer in some slapped-together, unrealistic way.

News of the first Jane Austen-zombie mash-up didn’t bother me too much. I’m pretty irreverent, and there’s comedic potential there. But of course, the book publishing industry, in its unending quest to become Hollywood without the profits, will now ride this idea into the deep, cold ground.

My travels have slowed the site this week, but a few posts will go up this afternoon, including a review in Circulating. I have many fine contributors around here, but behind the curtain (under the hood, or whatever cliché you prefer), it’s just me. A more regular flow will resume soon.