I love Kay Ryan’s poems. They’re simultaneously playful and profound. The Washington Post interviewed the U.S. Poet Laureate during last weekend’s National Book Festival. She was asked if she ever gets recognized in public now:

I do! I was at a festival recently at Yosemite, and I was standing in line to use the bathroom. This was up in the Tuolumne Meadows, and the people said, You go first! And I said, Oh I couldn’t possibly. They said, You must! There was quite a line, and I said, This is great! And then at the reading, I said: Auden said that poetry makes nothing happen, but that’s not true — I got cuts in the bathroom line.

Jon Fasman — novelist, Second Pass contributor and good friend — recently sat down to tea with James Ellroy for The Economist. They discussed Blood’s a Rover, Ellroy’s latest, and other subjects.

Starting at the two-minute mark, Jon draws forth a very candid response about the book’s dedication. The rest is filled with Ellroy’s confidence (“this is a book that has it all”), and his thoughts about combining real and invented history (and whether he cares about acknowledging which is which), how much he outlines and how much he improvises, and “vicariously dig(ging) . . . voodoo alcohol.” Enjoy:

The Millions wrapped up its list of the 21st century’s best novels last week with The Corrections at numero uno. Eek. Not a choice I would make — or sanction, or even learn of without gasping — but all’s fair in democracy, I suppose. The list of participants in the poll was impressive (I snuck in somehow).

Also of interest is the comparison of the panel’s top 20 to the top 20 of Millions readers. The readers, I think, were collectively smarter than the panel about Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and Atonement by Ian McEwan, ranking them higher. They also recognized Richard Russo (Empire Falls) and Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), which the panel didn’t. (I’m a big Russo fan, but think he published his best work in the 20th century; and I didn’t love Chabon’s novel, but given how many others seemed to, I’m pretty shocked it didn’t make the panel’s top 20.)

The full top five I submitted, for what it’s worth: Gilead, Atonement, It’s All Right Now by Charles Chadwick, The Master by Colm Tóibín, and The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall.

To complement our review of Tad Friend’s Cheerful Money (up today in Circulating), here’s an interview with the author over at the site of his employer, The New Yorker. Among other things, he discusses the odd notion that his children may not consider themselves WASPs:

I guess I’d like Walker and Addie to feel they always have a broad set of choices about how to live—where, and in what manner, and toward what ends—while at the same time I would feel sad if they entirely repudiated the way I grew up. Because that would feel, to a great extent, like a repudiation of me. I know this is a mixed message, but I comfort myself that sending mixed messages is what parenting is all about.

The other day, browsing at the local B&N, I came across an alarmingly thick novel written by Ralph Nader, and now the New Yorker takes a closer look at this development. The book — Nader eschews the term novel for it; prefers the hilariously oxymoronic “a practical utopia” — is called Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us! (The exclamation point is a part of the official title and “super-rich” is even underlined on the front cover, leading me to believe the novel — sorry, the practical utopia — may have been ghostwritten by an 11-year-old girl.)

This is, as far as I can tell, the final step in Nader morphing into the left’s Ayn Rand. For instance, the naming department: Not cowed by the difficulty of beating Rand’s Ragnar Danneskjöld, Nader’s stand-in for the real world’s already-goofily-named Grover Norquist is “a conservative evil genius named Brovar Dortwist.” (The magazine deserves a major prize for coaxing this from Norquist: “I have warm fuzzies for [Nader] on a number of levels.”) But surely Nader can’t match Rand’s imagination when it comes to outlandish blueprints for ideological wish fulfillment? Well, check out this sentence fragment: “Yoko Ono, who in the book invents a logo called Seventh-Generation Eye that causes millions of people suddenly to shed their political apathy . . .”

Oh, my. The book is ranked 166 on Amazon as I write this, so it appears people are actually reading it.

I’m a very big baseball fan, but I had no idea the Tampa Bay Rays had an outfielder who would feel moved to write this:

One of my first managers always preached separation from the game for the sake of our own health, and for the sake of our performance. The game can be maddening, and we ought to corner ourselves in this trade only so far. I’m in love with baseball, but eventually my prime will end, and she’ll slowly break my heart. Baseball has remained remarkably impervious to modernity, but is, like any modern industry, highly alienating. I turn to poetry because it is less susceptible to circumstance. I’m not especially touched when a poet deals with a ball game; I’m not especially interested in having one world endear itself to the other.

He also says of Robert Creeley: “He has been my most important poet, because I can take him anywhere, like oranges . . .”

And he wrote a piece for the New York Times about the music players choose to play when they come to bat, which includes these tremendously entertaining thoughts on his own selections:

There was only one song that I would choose for myself, and that was the “Price Is Right” theme. The horns are so brave! . . . In the way of “pump up” music, I used Talib Kweli and the Walkmen, but quickly learned it wasn’t advantageous to feel like I wanted to jump or scream about ex-girlfriends. . . . When I got to the major leagues, I went Motown. My friend asked why, and I said it was a diplomatic selection, that Motown, like Chinese food, is one of the few things people of all sorts can agree upon.

This is almost enough to make me a Rays fan. Almost.

(Via The Morning News)

The new fall issue of The Paris Review features an interview with James Ellroy. In the excerpt available online, he trashes Raymond Chandler and praises Dashiell Hammett:

Chandler wrote the kind of guy that he wanted to be, Hammett wrote the kind of guy that he was afraid he was. Chandler’s books are incoherent. Hammett’s are coherent. Chandler is all about the wisecracks, the similes, the constant satire, the construction of the knight. Hammett writes about the all-male world of mendacity and greed. Hammett was tremendously important to me.

But what wisecracks and similes! Ellroy also accounts for himself during the years 1965-1975 — a section that is, er, not G-rated — and bemoans the focus of the attention he gets:

I’ve told many journalists that I’ve done time in county jail, that I’ve broken and entered, that I was a voyeur. But I also told them that I spent much more time reading than I ever did stealing and peeping. They never mention that. It’s a lot sexier to write about my mother, her death, my wild youth, and my jail time than it is to say that Ellroy holed up in the library with a bottle of wine and read books.

Click on it for the answer:

“I know that what I do is not literature . . . If I try to understand the complexities of the human soul, people’s character defects and those types of things, the reader gets distracted.”

(Via Book Bench)

I’ve taken the plunge. The Twitter plunge.

From now on, you can follow The Second Pass at this page. And please, do sign up to officially “follow.” It will make me feel good.

I know the site updates on a somewhat irregular schedule (though those who are paying attention know that certain blog features appear on certain days), so if it’s easier for you to be notified of new material via Twitter, I hope this helps. Mostly, the posts (refusing to call them “tweets” is my remaining form of protest, I suppose) will be links to the site, but there will be occasional random thoughts (I’ll try to keep them bookish), and occasional trivia (like the fact that I’m listening to Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland” as I type this; that kind of thing).

The six finalists for the Best of the National Book Awards Fiction award have been announced. Four of the six are short-story collections — all of them of the “complete” or “collected” variety, which seems a little like cheating. Those four are by John Cheever, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. The other two finalists are Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison.

When I first wrote about this, I (hesitantly) predicted that Invisible Man would win it. Go to the site, vote, and make me a visionary! If you give them your e-mail address, you’re entered in a contest to attend this year’s NBA ceremony in November and spend two nights at a Manhattan hotel.

(Update: I just voted, and they show you the current results. Flannery O’Connor is in the lead with 31% and Ellison is second at 24%. Looks like it will come down to one of those two. Cheever’s bringing up the rear.)

For five years now, UK blogger extraordinaire Norman Geras has been curating a Writer’s Choice series, in which writers expound on some of their favorite books. Now, he’s put together an index for the entire series. There are well over 200 entries, with contributors including Philip Pullman, Christopher Hitchens and Alain de Botton. Several friends of The Second Pass have added their talents to the mix, so I point you to those in particular: Jon Fasman on his first encounter with Sherlock Holmes; Jason Zinoman on the criticism of Pauline Kael; Jennifer Szalai on an illuminating work of philosophy; Carlene Bauer on Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth; the “Charles” exacta of Bryan Charles on Charles Portis; Edward McPherson on his annual habit of rereading Poe; Robert Westfield on Dostoevsky’s “brilliant comedy of spite,” Notes from Underground; and yours truly on David James Duncan’s The Brothers K.

Over at The Millions, they’re counting down the top 20 novels since the turn of the millennium. The methodology and a general intro to the project can be found here. I was flattered to be on the list of respondents to their poll, and further honored when they asked me to write the entry for the #20 novel, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. I could argue that this is much too low a spot for it, but democracy has spoken. My take on one of my all-time favorite novels can be read here. (”The book’s modest, carefully planed language and its concern with primary human needs make it timeless, but it’s hard not to also marvel at and appreciate the way it functions as a timely corrective.”)

The feature continues throughout the week, culminating in the appearance of #1 on Friday.

The Cherry & the Pit feature has been on hiatus because I’m waiting for some particularly tasty cherries, which have been few and far between. But in the meantime, I saw this recent sale:

Sarah Gray’s Wuthering Bites, a retelling of Wuthering Heights in which Heathcliff is a vampire.

Note to the publishing industry: Please. Please. Stop.

The Guardian’s John Crace, who writes the paper’s “Digested read” column, sits down with the new book by that Brown guy after it’s dropped off by a messenger who’s been followed:

I grabbed the book. “Sign here,” he commanded. Instead I drew a hand, the Hand of Mysteries. The courier stepped back, his face blanched with fear. “So y-y-you’re…” he stammered. “Yes,” I replied. The race against narcolepsy had begun.

Later this month, MIT will publish Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals, a book by photographer Christopher Payne that documents (stunningly, as far as I can tell) the decaying institutions that were once devoted to caring for the mentally ill.

Oliver Sacks’ introductory essay has been published in a different form in the New York Review of Books. It’s only available online to subscribers, but Jenny Davidson transcribed a few paragraphs to share.

The Book Bench offers a slide show of six photos.

Daniel Menaker — author, longtime editor at The New Yorker, longtime top gun at Random House, and of course, occasional Second Pass contributor — offers an excellent guide to the frustrations of the book publishing industry. He does some rough math to illustrate the trouble in getting noticed:

[S]ome 150,000 books are published in the United States every year. Let’s [. . .] be really draconian and say that only 10 percent of those books would be in any way appealing to generalist readers of some intelligence. Let’s take 50 percent of that 10 percent, for no reason at all, just to be even meaner, and we end up with 7,500 books. That means that on average one hundred and fifty more or less worthwhile books are published every week in this country. Let’s cut that number in half, just to make the floor of our metaphorical abattoir really bloody. That makes seventy-five decent books a week. (By the way, that number is about twice the rough and generous estimate I’ve made based on actual experience.) How are seventy-five at-least-half-decent books going to receive serious and discriminating reviews in the few important places remaining for serious reviews every week? To say nothing of getting attention from prominent publicity outlets, like NPR and Charlie Rose and Jon Stewart? They’re not. They’re simply not. These statistical circumstances make publishing into a kind of grand cultural roulette, in which your chances of winning any significant pot are very, very small.

Meanwhile, Norman Geras confronts an even bigger number — the number of books in the world — and finds an odd comfort:

Suppose you read four books a week every week for 70 years. Allowing for a day here and there where you’re unable to read, we can call that 200 books a year, and 14,000 books over the whole three score years and ten. It’s a lot of books. But relative to all the books there are, it’s a tiny, tiny fraction. According to the guy who manages the Google Books metadata team, at the latest count the books in the world now total 168,178,719. Your 14,000 books are just 0.008324477724 per cent of that. You can think of it as follows. Suppose all the books in the world made up a single calendar year, and you were reading through the pages of that year, cover to cover. Then, 14,000 books - and that’s going some - would only get you through the first 44 minutes of the year. There’d still be 364 days, 23 hours and 16 minutes that you hadn’t read. And if you get through fewer than 14,000 books in your lifetime, it will look even worse. Comforting in a way.

I read somewhere recently that copies of Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbol, which drops tomorrow like it’s hot, were being kept in some kind of giant cage, the door of which was secured by two different locks, and no one knew the combo to both locks. I’m not kidding.

Well, Janet Maslin found a way into the cage! Or — less fun — maybe the Times just ignored the publisher’s embargo. Either way, Maslin’s review is in today’s paper. If you care, she says the book is “impossible to put down.” I’ll likely solve this problem by not picking it up in the first place.

. . . the author uses so many italics that even brilliant experts wind up sounding like teenage girls. And Mr. Brown would face an interesting creative challenge if the phrases “What the hell…?,” “Who the hell … ?” and “Why the hell … ?” were made unavailable to him. The surprises here are so fast and furious that those phrases get quite the workout.

Wallace Shawn has written several plays, and his acting credits number 125 on IMDb. But like the brilliant and versatile Alec Guinness, who will always remain the Jedi in the brown robe to some, to many Shawn will always be most famous for his (hysterical) turn as Vizzini in The Princess Bride.

Now, a collection of Shawn’s essays has been published, and the Huffington Post has posted an adapted version of the book’s introduction. It begins with some pleasurably playful metaphysics:

At any rate, I didn’t ask to be an individual, but I find I am one, and by definition I occupy a space that no other individual occupies — in other words, for what it’s worth, I have my own point of view. I’m not proud to be me, I’m not excited to be me, but I find that I am me, and like most other individuals, I send out little signals, I tell everyone else how everything looks from where I am.

Later, Shawn has some fun with the image of Eleanor Roosevelt to describe the differences between his skepticism and his mother’s earnest charity:

Mother loved UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund, which helped poor children all over the world, and she loved the United Nations; and, to her, being an American meant being a person who loved the United Nations and was a friend to poor children all over the world, like Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson. . . . I never became as nice as my mother. But by the time I was 45 I understood a few things that she’d overlooked. I suppose I’m something like what my mother would have been if she’d gone down into her basement and stumbled on Eleanor Roosevelt murdering babies there.

(Via Book Bench)

The Guardian interviews and profiles the great William Trevor:

“If you take away the sadness from life itself,” he muses, “then you are taking away a big and a good thing, because to be sad is rather like to be guilty. They both have a very bad press, but in point of fact, guilt is not as terrible a position as it is made out to be. People should feel guilty sometimes. I’ve written a lot about guilt. I think that it can be something that really renews people.”

The rest includes thoughts on religion, his work schedule, his unhappy parents, and his own long, happy marriage.

(Via Norm Geras)

When I started this site, I described myself as a “relative Luddite.” And that’s true, as far as someone can be a Luddite and run a web site. So when I read predictions of books on paper disappearing, I bristle (in addition to thinking such predictions are wrong). Of course, I’m not alone. “Pedro of hawthorn” has my back:

‘I welcome the day when I can ditch that heavy book and download a dozen titles on to my lightweight e-reader’. Good for you, just don’t peddle your jargonistic, dystopian brain-cell sapping vision of a concentrationless techno fueled post human post book world on the rest of us simple reflective paper loving folk.

Jack Pendarvis debuts a new column at the Oxford American with a doozy, about reading Woody Allen and Roy Blount, Jr., and about insiders and outsiders in art, and about being southern, and about how Steve Allen was a “slick, affected, old square.” It starts:

There’s a false notion that Woody Allen has never achieved widespread popularity among bumpkins like myself. Allen has encouraged the perception: “Some of my films have never played south of the Mason-Dixon line,” he told Roger Ebert just a few years back.

That may be true, but I saw all of them from Annie Hall through Husbands and Wives on the big screen in Mobile, Alabama (a forty-minute trip from my home in Bayou La Batre), and Manhattan Murder Mystery through Scoop in Atlanta.

I’ll admit the pace slacked off once I moved to Mississippi.

“I don’t like him,” said Miss Deanne, one of the women who drove us to school in the carpool when I was in the eighth grade, “but I know he’s a genius.”

She was reacting to my hard-won paperback of Without Feathers, one of Allen’s humor collections. The first time I took it up to the counter, the clerk said it was “too grown-up” for me and refused to sell it. So, of course, I skulked around until another clerk showed up, and bought it from her.

Read the whole thing.

A beautiful Labor Day here in New York, so I’m off to enjoy it. Regular posting will pick up again tomorrow, with a new review in Circulating and some action on the blog as well.

The Millions recently interviewed Phillip Lopate about his latest book, Notes on Sontag, the first in Princeton’s Writers on Writers series. Lopate on Sontag’s grab for the brass ring:

Sontag felt the big game was fiction. And that’s where you win the Noble Prize. You don’t win it for writing essays. That’s understandable and that would’ve been great had she been a great fiction writer. Some people can do both, but she lacked a deep sympathy for other people — which is okay if you’re a critic because you don’t have to be that empathetic if you’re a critic, you just have to know what you think about something. And she lacked, for the most part, a sense of humor. It’s hard to be a great novelist without those two things. . . . I’m not saying anything that devastating because she was so good an essayist, it’s not a crime not to be a terrific fiction writer also. It’s just that because I love the essay, I regret that she came to put her eggs in another basket.

And on how that lack of humor inspired his mischievous side:

One of the amusing sides for me in the book is that Sontag was a brilliant writer who was not particularly known for having a sense of humor. A lot of my material is comic, more or less, and so I thought that even though Sontag isn’t funny I could find a way to write in an amusing way about her and about myself. Because, in a way, there’s nothing funnier than someone who takes herself very seriously and has a solemn reverence for greatness. So I was able to play with that.

I think that one of the main things that gets me going as a writer is the opportunity to do mischief. And in this particular respect I was analyzing one of the sacred cows of contemporary literature, an icon really. I knew that I was on thin ice a lot and that itself piqued my interest because I could get in a lot of trouble.