Silly me. In the September preview I posted the other day, I left out Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked. It’s about Hornby’s familiar themes of distinctly male pop-culture obsession, boy-men and the women who try to love them, etc. I’m looking forward to it.

In the meantime, I think I prefer the UK cover (at left) to the U.S. cover, which does do clever things with iPod headphones.

Over at Paper Cuts, I participate in their Living With Music feature. My playlist is made up of songs about writer and books. I start with “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” by the Mountain Goats:

The horror writer H. P. Lovecraft moved to Brooklyn in 1924. Soon after, broke and alone (his fairly new bride had fled the city to find work in the Midwest), Lovecraft became even more than usually hateful and paranoid about the people around him. In his story “The Horror at Red Hook,” he describes the neighborhood where he lived as “a maze of hybrid squalor” and “the polyglot abyss of New York’s underworld” and “a babel of sound and filth.” He didn’t like it there.

And as you can probably tell, his complaints were of a distinctly racist variety. (If you need it clinched, read the whole story. A Grand Wizard might find the floridly demeaning descriptions of immigrants a bit much.) This song’s style complements its substance. It sounds paranoid, both musically and vocally. It begins with a lyric any New Yorker can identify with: “It’s gonna be too hot to breathe today / But everybody is out here on the streets.” Toward the end, the agitated narrator goes to a pawn shop to look for a switchblade: “Someday something’s coming / From way out beyond the stars / To kill us while we stand here / It will store our brains in mason jars / And then the girl behind the counter / She asks me how I feel today / I feel like Lovecraft in Brooklyn.”

The rest is here. And you can listen to the Mountain Goats performing the song here, or the Aesop Rock remix here.

I’ll be traveling all day, so the site will be quiet. Things will be back up and running on Wednesday…

I hope to accomplish two things with this post: 1. Make your day a little lighter. 2. Increase site traffic by roping in unsuspecting tweens who constantly Google Miley Cyrus. Ladies and gentlemen (and tweens), the latest literary thoughts of Ms. C.:

Let’s get back to your favorite obsessions… What was the last book you read?
I’ve just finished reading a book called Catcher In The Rye. It’s a really great book. If you haven’t heard of it, check it out. It’s by JD Salinger and it’s a bit of a classic.

What makes it such a good book?
It’s a really good story. Plus, when I was reading the book, I thought that I was a little similar to the main character. He over-thinks everything and I’m like that.

What do you over-think?
In the book, this guy is obsessed with a girl called Jane – and I can be exactly like that when it comes to boys. I’ll be thinking, ‘I really hope they like me.’ And I’ll stress and stress and stress about it.

(Via Mark Athitakis)

At the Times (London), David Grylls reviews the second edition of John Sutherland’s Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction. He points out several flaws in the book, but (rightfully, it sounds like) praises the project’s ambition:

. . . the book represents a staggering achievement that is unlikely ever to be equalled. That a single scholar, working un-assisted, should undertake to synopsize 554 (now 560) novels and offer biographical accounts of 878 (now 900) novelists, as well as compiling entries on forty-seven magazines and periodicals, twenty-six major illustrators and thirty-eight (now forty-one) miscellaneous items (“Sandism”, “the Yellowback”, “The Nautical Novel”), is a feat that beggars imagination, especially since much of the work was completed before the availability of the internet and searchable digitized texts.

In a wide-ranging interview, Paul Collins discusses the effect of technology on the history of writing, what print-on-demand might mean for chain bookstores, the subject of his next book (the coverage of a gruesome crime in 1890s New York that “was sort of the beginning of yellow journalism”), and the subject of his current book, Shakespeare:

I don’t think there’s any way he could have known that people would be reading [his work] hundreds of years later [. . .] someone can write something now and think, ah, people will be reading my work in hundreds of years, but that just didn’t happen back then, to anyone writing in English.

And speaking of Shakespeare, an argument that his character was “what one can only describe as Christ-like.”

(Collins interview via Books, Inq.)

On his blog at Vanity Fair, James Wolcott has a post worth sharing, and not just because he sensibly links to Deborah Shapiro’s excellent piece about Eve Babitz from back in the Second Pass’ infancy. He shares an anecdote that also includes Leonard Michaels:

. . . on one visit to L.A. [Babitz], me, Amy Hempel, and Leonard Michaels strolled through Venice Beach, stopping at Muscle Beach to watch the oiled prodigies go through their Atlas exertions with free weights and on the chin-up bars. It’s difficult to imagine a more striking contrast than that between the bodybuilders in their briefs and sculpted physiques and the saturnine-looking Michaels in his English-prof wear.

The book I was planning to write about as this week’s paperback has really grabbed me and inspired a longer review for the Circulating section in the coming days… So on this Thursday, the young feature skips a beat.

The Book Bench interviews Michael Idov, whose novel, Ground Up, follows a young couple as they try to open a Viennese cafe in New York, to disastrous results. From the interview, I learn that the book’s epigraph is this quote from Thomas Bernhard, which describes how I feel on the worst days in New York (there are plenty of good days, for which I’ll have to find another quote):

The truth is that I have always hated the Viennese coffeehouse because in them I am confronted with people like myself, and naturally I do not wish to be everlastingly confronted with people like myself.

Idov once briefly opened a coffee shop himself (his account of it is worth a read), and the Book Bench asked for his thoughts on the gentrification of New York:

I am dully fatalistic about gentrification. It’s a cyclical process, and I find community attempts to preserve or curate, say, the remnants of the Lower East Side schmatta trade as unnatural as wanton overdevelopment.

AbeBooks has searched its vaults to come up with 30 beautiful cover designs from a century ago (give or take a few years).

Most of the books are available for somewhere between 50 and 200 dollars. One notable exception is Pauline E. Hopkins’ Contending Forces, which the site describes as:

the eighth published novel by an African American woman, and one of the most important, notable for its realistic portrayal of lynching and prejudice in the unreconstructed South. Additionally, this was only the third novel published by an African-American-owned publishing company.

A first edition from 1900 is going for $9,500. For those of us with more realistic budgets, a lot of other copies are available, starting at $2.72 (plus shipping).

Paper Cuts posts a part of David Updike’s eulogy for his father last March. A piece:

Despite being first in his class he was not accepted at Princeton — admissions office take note — and so went to Harvard instead and flourished there, in class and on The Lampoon. But an unexpected obstacle remained to his graduation: all Harvard graduates must be able to swim, and he could not. Inhibited as a child by his own imperfect skin, he had shied away from public swimming pools, and never learned. And so he dutifully went to swimming classes and eventually managed two lengths of the pool — an achievement he seemed as proud of later as graduating summa cum laude. But for the rest of his life he swam with what I would describe as a rather studied dog paddle.

I sold some books on the front stoop this weekend. Inside the cover of one old title, I found one of the better errata slips I’ve ever seen:

Our apologies in advance for the number of typos the reader will encounter in this bound galley . . . The galley was prepared by a computer scanning technique from the original Bolton works and numerous typographical quirks resulted: a capital “G” sometimes translated as a capital “C,” for instance, so that “Good God” became “Good Cod.”

The Browser updates its books page — on which experts and enthusiasts of various stripes recommend books on a given subject — with alarming frequency. The latest is worth reading not just because the interviewee has the unbeatable name of Peregrine Worsthorne. The subject is the French Revolution, and you can find out what two books cause Worsthorne to say:

They’re a model of how history should be written. You don’t just find out about the French Revolution (and this is true of all great histories), you find out much more about politics in general, society in general, human nature in general. You broaden your knowledge not only of the particular subject - you begin to understand the richness of the human condition, and how interesting it is to study.

I lied — unintentionally — earlier this week when I said the Richard Russo review would be up Thursday. It should be up Monday. Most likely.

I’m just seeing this now, via The Casual Optimist: Eight book designers talk about their favorite rejected cover ideas.

I’ve also added two more sites to the book design roll on the Links page: David Drummond and Megan Wilson. I recommend scrolling through them when the day calls for something attractive.

This new trailer for Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is pretty funny. What’s more, I think the voice-over might be done by Pynchon himself. Any chance? Listen for yourself and see. If you compare it to that Simpsons clip from years ago, it sounds like a possible match to me. (Allowing, of course, for the appropriately cartoony, higher pitch from the animated Pynchon.) Complicating things is the question of whether it was even Pynchon on the Simpsons. That could have been some kind of Pynchonian gag. And even if it wasn’t, maybe it was him, and the makers of this trailer simply hired someone and told them to try to sound like that, to mess with people. Conspiratorial recluses hurt my brain.

The Second Pass’ influence has reached the gaming world. The terrifically named site Crispy Gamer was inspired by the recent canon trimming done around here to write about overrated video games.

Taking on GoldenEye 007, a game from 1997, Kyle Orland writes: “. . . looking back now, the largely empty environments, blocky, grainy graphics and lack of a second analog stick make the game seem almost prehistoric.”

I don’t know what a second analog stick is, but yeah, the lack of it sounds lame.

Writing about a game called Duke Nukem 3D, Chris Buecheler says, “The game’s vaunted ‘interactivity’ consisted of being able to flush toilets and hand dollar bills to strippers.” I would say that’s more than I got from White Noise, but I don’t want to reopen old wounds.

But wait, Ryan Kuo saves the best for last. His answer? “Every game”! So, to our detractors: At least we didn’t say every book…

This originally appeared almost a year ago, so apologies for being so on top of things: The syllabus for a Literary Interpretation class taught by David Foster Wallace. A taste:

Certain approaches might turn out to be a waste of time. There may be abrupt changes in the syllabus. Extra work may be added. Let me say that again: Extra work may be added.

In the book The Top Ten, in which various writers list their favorite books, Wallace included two books by Thomas Harris — Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. These choices, and the rest of his list, caused some to ask the obvious question. Well, Silence of the Lambs is one of the four required full-length texts on his syllabus. So . . .

There are a lot of shorter pieces he assigned as well, which you can see starting on page 4 of the document.

(Via The Rumpus)