The Second Pass

What They’re Buying

John Williams — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:58:53 +0000

On its Twitter feed, the London Review called this site “oddly mesmerizing,” and I couldn’t agree more.

Best Magazine Articles Ever

John Williams — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:19:25 +0000

Here is a continually updated list of the best magazine articles ever written. It’s already getting a bit unwieldy, with more and more suggestions of things that haven’t exactly passed the test of time, but it’s still a great browsing tool. I was happy to see that someone had submitted Edwin Dobb’s “A Kiss is Still a Kiss (Even if the Sex is Postmodern and the Romance Problematic),” from the February 1996 issue of Harper’s. I remember liking that a lot when it was first published. I’ll have to re-read and see how it holds up.

Then there’s Gary Wolf’s 1995 profile of Ted Nelson for Wired. Nelson, the inventor of hypertext, was working on a massive project called Xanadu. The piece begins:

I said a brief prayer as Ted Nelson—hypertext guru and design genius—took a scary left turn through the impolite traffic on Marin Boulevard in Sausalito. Nelson’s left hand was on the wheel, his right rested casually on the back of the front seat. He arched his neck and looked in my direction so as to be clearly heard. “I’ve been compiling a catalog of driving maneuvers,” he said. “It’s one of my unfinished projects.”

Nelson is a pale, angular, and energetic man who wears clothes with lots of pockets. In these pockets he carries an extraordinary number of items. What cannot fit in his pockets is attached to his belt. It is not unusual for him to arrive at a meeting with an audio recorder and cassettes, video camera and tapes, red pens, black pens, silver pens, a bulging wallet, a spiral notebook in a leather case, an enormous key ring on a long, retractable chain, an Olfa knife, sticky notes, assorted packages of old receipts, a set of disposable chopsticks, some soy sauce, a Pemmican Bar, and a set of white, specially cut file folders he calls “fangles” that begin their lives as 8 1/2-by-11-inch envelopes, are amputated en masse by a hired printer, and end up as integral components in Nelson’s unique filing system. This system is an amusement to his acquaintances until they lend him something, at which point it becomes an irritation. “If you ask Ted for a book you’ve given him,” says Roger Gregory, Nelson’s longtime collaborator and traditional victim, “he’ll say, ‘I filed it, so I’ll buy you a new one.’” For a while, Nelson wore a purple belt constructed out of two dog collars, which pleased him immensely, because he enjoys finding innovative uses for things.

Booker Field Down to 13

John Williams — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:54:41 +0000

The 13 longlist finalists for this year’s Booker Prize have been announced. Three of them have been reviewed on The Second Pass (links where appropriate in the list below), and two others have already been assigned for review this fall, when the books are published in the U.S.

I would put my money on Andrea Levy.

The list:

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey
Room by Emma Donoghue
The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore
In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut
The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson
The Long Song by Andrea Levy
C by Tom McCarthy
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
February by Lisa Moore
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
Trespass by Rose Tremain
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
The Stars in the Bright Sky by Alan Warner

The Beat

John Williams — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:06:12 +0000

A weekly roundup of noteworthy reviews from other sources.

Rick Moody’s kitschy latest is built around a 600-page sci-fi novel within a novel. Sam Sacks shakes his head: “If nothing else, The Four Fingers of Death provides further evidence for the inverse relationship between literary theory and literary quality. As a ‘project’—that’s what the author calls the book in his acknowledgments—it succeeds; as a novel, it’s harebrained and largely unreadable.” . . . Colm Toibin praises Wendy Moffat’s “well-written, intelligent, and perceptive” biography of E. M. Forster, which addresses the writer’s homosexuality. “She uses the sources for our knowledge of Forster’s sexuality, including letters and diaries, without reducing the mystery and sheer individuality of Forster, without making his sexuality explain everything.” . . . David Greenberg assesses a new biography of the 28th President of the United States: “Woodrow Wilson is too authoritative and independent to be reduced to the gadfly position of contrarianism: it is a judicious, penetrating measure of the man and his achievements and it should stand as the best full biography of Wilson for many years.” . . . Jessa Crispin reviews a new co-authored book about the prehistoric roots of human sexuality: “[Though the authors] claim they are not out to make the hunter-gatherer way of life sound more ‘noble,’ that is exactly what they do. Their anthropology sections are basically cut-and-paste jobs, and they leave out any of the dark stuff. Complex social and sexual systems are reduced to a paragraph, sometimes a sentence, making every society they mention sound like a sexy utopia.” . . . Matt Zoller Seitz examines the “psychological evolution” of George Carlin, as told in two recent books about the comic.

Improbable Lives

John Williams — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:52:43 +0000

Reviewed:
Subways Are for Sleeping by Edmund G. Love
1957 (Harcourt, Brace), 190 pp., Currently out of print

You might not think homelessness would make the most promising subject for a Broadway musical. You would be right. Reviewing Subways Are for Sleeping in the New York Times on December 28, 1961, Howard Taubman didn’t mince words:

The new musical, which arrived last night at the St. James Theatre, stumbles as if suffering from somnambulism. Its book is dull and vapid, and its characters barely breathe. Occasionally it gives off a burst of energy, like a great man struggling to stay awake, but the effort is not sustained. Someone must have slipped it barbiturates instead of Benzedrine.

But the source for the musical, a book of the same name by Edmund G. Love, is a treat in the vein of Joseph Mitchell or Damon Runyon, if not quite up to those timeless standards. Each of the book’s 10 chapters focuses on a different person imaginatively (and barely) making ends meet in 1950s New York. The title story, about Henry Shelby, a 41-year-old with a master’s degree in economics who has become “one of the thousands of men in various stages of vagrancy who wander the streets of New York City at all hours of the day and night,” first ran in the March 1956 issue of Harper’s. [You can read the piece in its entirety at the Harper’s site, and listen to a winningly dated CBS radio adaptation of the story here.] Committed to never being in possession of less than fifteen cents, the cost of a subway ride at the time, Shelby is “not a hopeless man, but he is certainly bewildered.”

Love’s subjects are down on their luck, but there is very little about them—at least in Love’s telling—to pity. Several of them are living the way they are by choice. In slamming the musical in the Times, Taubman seemed less inherently offended by the subject matter than disappointed that it wasn’t handled with more snap. There is snap in the book, and whatever offense might be taken in creating lively pieces from the lives of the less fortunate is headed off in the introduction, where Love admits that he himself drifted on the margins of society for a time, and that he considers everyone profiled in the book a friend: “I say all this because I want it understood that I did not drop into this world of which I write simply to study it. I was there because I couldn’t seem to escape it.”

Because he feels affection for his subjects, Love is eager to differentiate them from true “bums,” a word used liberally throughout the book by the author and others:

They are people of ingenuity who do not conform to the patterns of life which “sound” people prescribe. . . . I have found them in cities other than New York, but in no other city except New York have I found the same ingenuity. New York attracts the most talented people in the world in the arts and professions. It also attracts them in other fields. Even the bums are talented.

But these people I write about are not really bums. The big difference between them and the real, down-and-out bum could be called a matter of hope. I recognize in them something of what I felt myself. Most of them are in a state of reassessment. . . . These people are like the man who takes a short cut, gets lost, and then explores the countryside, forgetting completely why he took the short cut in the first place. All of them have built their improbable lives to furnish temporary security until they can achieve their goals. As time has passed, they have become attached to their way of life. It gives them real security. They become afraid to leave something they are sure of. To them there is more security in a home on a fire escape or in a job washing windows than there is in a furnished apartment or a regular job. An apartment might burn down. A man with a regular job might get laid off.

It’s harder to imagine the scrappy lifestyles of Subways Are for Sleeping—sleeping on fire escapes, trains, and in the apartments of friends, occasionally staying in a cheap hotel to shave and shower—on the fringes of the outer boroughs these days, much less in Manhattan. In 2010, slumping economy or not, people feel “lucky” to be renting 1,200-square-foot lofts across the bridge from Manhattan for $2,500 a month. Anyone attempting some of these schemes now would be living an even more dire existence, if living at all. One could undoubtedly write another book (or series of them) today about the city’s regulars, but the fact that many characters must be priced out of the new New York is one of the poignant elements of Love’s book.

On the more entertaining end of things—the end that might have tempted the musical producers—are characters like Mitts Flanagan. That’s a pseudonym for a man who lives a respectable life in Boston but visits New York when he feels the approach of one of his epic drinking binges. Flanagan is not a vagrant so much as a grown-up version of Rushmore’s Max Fischer, impulsively embracing whatever adventure or possible chance for self-improvement occurs to him: he takes piano lessons, enthusiastically jumps into stick ball games played by young kids, and convinces himself that he can win a major golf tournament despite not having played since college (which experience might be a lie):

One night, after exhausting the supply of practice driving ranges, Mitts retired to an Eleventh Avenue bar where he began lamenting the lack of further practice facilities. One of his friends who was in a slightly more inebriated condition than he was, suggested that Flanagan step outside and take a look at Eleventh Avenue. It was then three o’clock in the morning, and the traffic was almost non-existent. It seemed like an entirely reasonable place to drive golf balls and that is exactly what Mitts did, standing calmly, almost majestically, at the corner of 59th Street by the IRT power station, and teeing off in the general direction of the Lincoln Tunnel.

The chapter ends with a memorable scene in which Flanagan fulfills his very recently contracted dream of operating a building’s elevator: He’s doing it secretly, in the middle of the night, having enlisted 24 patrons of various bars to “play” the building’s residents while he works the levers.

Flanagan’s exploits, on his visits from Boston, have to do with himself and his goals, but the full-time New Yorkers are usually more outer-directed, dealing with fellow citizens, patrolling city blocks for one social purpose or another. Ernie Clay spends most of his time in Union Square, where people refer to him as a “defensive lecturer . . . ready to protect the citizens against the bombardments of the invaders with soap boxes.” He often strolls down to the parks in Greenwich Village, whose artist-residents he considers pretentious. (“I’ve never seen so many people who know so much,” [Ernie] has said. “I decided to puncture the whole damned lot of them all at once.”)

Ernie knocked people down a few pegs, but a character named Father Dutch wanted to lift them up. A former Jesuit priest, he devoted himself, from his own homeless position, to helping alcoholics with no place to go. He was nicknamed the Body Snatcher, because he would find safe harbor for lingering drunks (often literally dragging them to it) before they could be taken away by police. The final scene of Dutch’s chapter—and of his life’s work—is the book’s saddest moment, with a sober power that can’t be undone by Love’s breeziness.

John Williams is the editor of The Second Pass.

Mentioned in this review:

Subways Are for Sleeping

“Oh god the pomposity”

John Williams — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:11:53 +0000

I have made my low opinion of Don DeLillo’s White Noise known around here and other places, so I was particularly happy to find this post by Alex Abramovich at the London Review of Books blog. It turns out that The Strand in New York (on a short list of my favorite spots in the world) inherited many books from the recently departed experimental novelist David Markson. Abramovich details some of his finds, but also shares how he knew to browse for them:

I’d heard about the haul from Jeff Severs, who teaches at the University of British Columbia. He’d heard about it from a student who’d stumbled on Markson’s copy of Don DeLillo’s White Noise. ‘my copy of white noise apparently used to belong to david markson (who i had to look up),’ the student had written.

he wrote some notes in the margin: a check mark by some passages, ‘no’ by other, ‘bullshit’ or ‘ugh get to the point’ by others. i wanted to call him up and tell him his notes are funny, but then i realized he DIED A MONTH AGO. bummer.

‘That’s amazing,’ Jeff had replied. ‘Did he write his name in the front or something? Did you buy it secondhand recently – as in, his family sold off his library?’

yeah he wrote his name inside the front cover and the cashiers at the strand said they have his whole collection. favorite comments: ‘oh god the pomposity, the bullshit!’, ‘oh i get it, it’s a sci-fi novel!’ and ‘big deal’.

Nuclear Bombs and iPhones

John Williams — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:53:30 +0000

Andrew Seal expresses irritation at the Gary Shteyngart essay I linked to last week, in which Shteyngart bemoaned the effect of social media and other technology on his readerly attention span. Seal writes:

I think a number of American writers—New Yorkers, mostly—have either decided or come to some unspoken and maybe half-conscious consensus that the societal changes being brought about by social media are as encompassing and as threatening to the fundamentals of something which used to be called human nature as the threat of nuclear war was in the 1950s. [. . .] In both cases, what is being described as a threat is a putatively immersive environment—in the 1950s, the fear of nuclear war; today, the distraction of social media—which is pushing humanity (seemingly as a species, although in real terms the most threatened are the most advanced societies) toward a point of crisis where what has been driven into latency or rarity—in the 1950s, the “dignity of man” or, articulated in more practical terms, the feeling of agency and choice; today, attention, which is often articulated again in practical terms either as genuine connectedness with other people or the ability to read dense works of literature—might in fact become irrecoverably lost.

Later, he adds:

For what is Shteyngart saying, really? That he checks his iPhone too often? He says, “I don’t know how to read anymore. I can only read 20 or 30 words at a time before taking out my iPhone and caressing it and snuggling with it.” May I suggest that before he had an iPhone, like most readers, his mind might have wandered momentarily every “20 or 30 words”—not to an iPhone screen, of course, but to some “interior” distraction? Do iPhones and the like really produce distraction, or do they just give a single physical destination for it?

I left a comment underneath the post, but I’ve continued thinking about it and figured I would bring the issue here, in case anyone wishes to join in. On the one hand, I don’t like to pass judgment about large cultural shifts when the upshot is simply Things Used To Be Better. Partly this is because a great many things, in fact, used to be worse, and partly because I too often feel like a grumpy 86-year-old when I’m 50 years younger than that. But on the other, larger hand, I don’t think it’s just grumpiness that might cause someone to be alarmed by the potential effects of social media. There are many of those potential effects (not all of them bad, of course), but the focus for Shteyngart and Seal is attention span.

What surprises me is how quickly Seal equates interior distractions and iPhones before moving on. Shteyngart and others might sometimes overstate the peril of the human soul, but I think Seal’s post understates the nature of the shift represented by social technologies. Picture yourself sitting somewhere—and it doesn’t have to be idyllic; let’s say a crowded coffee shop in the middle of Manhattan—and you feel an “interior distraction.” The distraction originates, presumably, in some thought or subtle sensory perception of your own. (If someone, say, stepped on your foot or spilled a hot drink on you or started shouting to all the gathered customers about Jesus, that would be an external distraction.) You follow the distraction to its conclusion and return to your book or other work.

The iPhone, I hope we can agree, is an external distraction, and I think immediately of two traits that therefore make it distinct: It’s an intrusion created and controlled by someone else, rather than by your own thought process, however random that process might be; and it easily leads to other distractions. Seal doesn’t appear interested in distinguishing between internal and external distractions. (I realize his thoughts could be elaborated on to dispel this notion.) To me—and maybe this is where 36 actually is very old these days; I’m not sure of Seal’s age, but I think he’s a bit younger—distinguishing between them is crucial. And what deepens that difference is that our external distractions are now fully portable. A call on the iPhone could easily lead to an hour or several of texting or surfing the web on the same device. When Seal writes that Shteyngart’s mind might have “wandered momentarily” before iPhones, he ignores the fact that our wanderings are constant now, almost never momentary.

This does not mean that humanity is doomed. But it does mean something. To see much younger generations use their cell phones, Facebook, et al., is to see people who do have a different relationship to reading and writing. I find that hard to ignore, whatever its consequences—perhaps those consequences will end up being thoroughly beneficial, but my inner octogenarian seriously doubts that. In any case, it’s fair to say that it’s an issue worth exploring. Even Seal’s analogy—the nuclear age—gives me pause. Is it possible to say that the creation and proliferation of nuclear weapons did nothing to collective human psychology and behavior?

A Deep Devotion to Standards

John Williams — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:12:27 +0000

Mary E. Laur, an editor at the University of Chicago Press and part of the team that puts together new editions of The Chicago Manual of Style, writes about the reactions she gets from readers:

More often than not, people who hear that I work on the Manual—even those from outside the worlds of academia and publishing—instantly recognize the title, a rare treat for an editor in scholarly publishing. Sometimes they tell me stories of college days spent wrestling with proper footnote format or of interoffice battles over comma use, both of which likely involved recourse to the Manual. Inevitably, they ask me questions. Their curiosity increasingly centers on the broad issues that preoccupy those of us on the revision team, such as how changes wrought by technology affect everything from editing processes to citation style. But the question I still field most frequently concerns a matter of much smaller scale:

After a period or other sentence-ending punctuation mark, should I leave one space or two?

The Manual’s answer to this question is simple enough—one—but I have learned from experience that everyone who asks it wants me to say two. Often I suspect they know my answer in advance and hope to pick a fight with me. [. . .]

Although I still puzzle over the widespread attachment to this particular convention, I have gradually come to see it as a manifestation of the same force that underlies the long-term success of the Manual: a deep devotion to standards in the realm of the written word. [. . .] For all the hand-wringing about our imminent decline into a text-messaging, “LOL” culture devoid of standards, I see evidence every day that people still care about getting the details of their writing right.

This is heartening, given that I’m a hand-wringer myself. In fact, more on that in the next blog post…

A Note About a Note

John Williams — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:45:00 +0000

A well-intentioned lie on the blog yesterday: The Backlist section will now be updated Monday, not today. I know you will somehow manage to get on with your life and enjoy your weekend.

A Few Notes

John Williams — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:33:12 +0000

Just some housekeeping and reminders on this Thursday afternoon: If you’d like to follow the Second Pass’ RSS feed, you can do so here. You can also follow me on Twitter here. The site’s index has been brought up to date, if you care to search through the archives a bit. The Shelf has been updated this week, and will continue to be, hopefully at a better pace than recent weeks.

Tomorrow will bring an overdue update to the Backlist section. Thanks for continuing to visit during the dog days of summer — lots of fun things planned for the coming days, weeks, and months.