Melvyn Bragg at the BBC recently discussed my favorite book, William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, with a panel of three people, including Jonathan Ree, who was introduced with the incredible title of “freelance philosopher.” You can listen to the 45-minute program here. (Thanks to Levi Stahl for bringing it to my attention.) Early on, Ree concisely describes what I love (and what many people love) about James:

First of all, I think William James is one of the greatest philosophers ever, and he’s untypical. Twentieth-century philosophers, I think, fall into two groups: they’re either nitpicking, pettifogging bureaucrats or else they’re egomaniacs with delusions of genius. [laughter] He wasn’t like that. He was honest, witty, modest, flexible, generous, a very creative, open-minded thinker, and he produced prose which looks as though it was a spontaneous flow of very colloquial thoughts, but is actually incredibly carefully crafted.

Later on, Bragg asks Ree if the “figure up there, out there” in many religions exists in James’ philosophy. And Ree answers:

The point about religious experience is that it’s a sense of the unimportance of self. The idea that there’s some important thing called god is another way of expressing the idea that your own selfhood is not important, so it’s a self-abnegation [. . .] expressed by saying that I worship god. For William James, that’s equivalent to saying I don’t take myself terribly seriously.

Quiet week on the blog thus far, for various reasons. Today’s reason is that I’m headed to BookExpo America, the annual schmooze-fest for the publishing industry. I’ll be picking a lot of catalogs while I’m there, and hopefully can cobble together a fall preview of sorts by the end of the week.

Last night, I attended the first annual Moby Awards, which honor the best and worst of the nascent art of book trailers. The night was charmingly hosted by Megan Halpern and Dennis Johnson of Melville House Publishing. Johnson kicked things off by saying, “This is an idea that got out of hand.”

For a first flight, things went pretty smoothly. There were some audio-video glitches and obscenely overpriced drinks, but nothing disastrous. The awards themselves proved that book trailers are currently, with a few exceptions, mostly potential. Best Cameo went to comedian Zach Galifianakis for his appearance in the clip for John Wray’s Lowboy, the appearance itself coming off as something Galifianakis could do in his sleep.

The Best Indie/Low Budget award went to poet Kathryn Regina and illustrator Greg Lytle for the sometimes precious but also effective “I Am Up in the Air Right Now.” I’ve embedded two of my favorite winners below — Dennis Cass’ funny (but painfully true) dissection of current trends in book marketing, and a big-budget stunner from New Zealand in which the pages of a book come to life. For the rest of the winners (and losers, like Jonathan Safran Foer for Most Annoying Performance by an Author), go here. And to see some of the other finalists who didn’t win the prize, go here.

“Even while many other American poets strive for public notice, the most public man to be a poet in America strives to keep his poetic persona private.”

That’s how Paul Mariani describes Michael J. Astrue, the head of the Social Security Administration, who is also an award-winning poet under the pen name A. M. Juster. Astrue/Juster is “an outspoken advocate of the New Formalism” who mostly writes in the sonnet form, but “he is quick to point out that he is by no means against the free verse that most American poets have favored for the last hundred years.”

From the UK’s Telegraph, the kind of story The Second Pass likes to see: An editor named Ravi Mirchandani is reissuing a novel called Tony and Susan by Austin Wright. (Via Bookslut)

For the past 17 years, Mirchandani has bought (increasingly hard to come by) copies of the book as gifts for friends: “They’d all love it too,” he tells me, “and they’d say: Who is this man?”

The man was Austin Wright, an American novelist and English professor who died in 2003 at the age of 80. Despite having been praised by the likes of Saul Bellow, he remained little known in his lifetime. Yet the handsomely packaged – and rapturously reviewed – reissue of Tony and Susan, his fourth novel, is set to offer Wright’s ghost something approaching fame.

The Telegraph also has an excerpt from the novel. More from the profile of Wright:

Between 1969 and 1977, Wright wrote three experimental novels – Camden’s Eyes, First Persons and The Morley Mythology – all of which played with ideas about fiction and narrative voice. The protagonists wake up to discover they are characters in novels, or hear voices in their head so fully fledged they have real names. There are books within books and minds within minds. . . . At the time, such self-conscious writing was more or less part of the mainstream in the U.S. – John Barth was all the rage; Donald Barthelme’s stories were published in the New Yorker; it was not uncommon for fiction to wear its underwear over its clothes, so to speak. . . .

For 23 years, Wright taught English at the University of Cincinnati. He published several works of straight literary criticism and then, in 1990, a fantastically zany interpretation of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, seen through the eyes of professors and students of Wright’s own invention.

If his interests in fiction and criticism began to come together in that strangely personal tome, Tony and Susan took the fusion to another level. It was published the year Wright retired from his professorial post, and a good couple of decades after the zenith of his earlier brand of narrative exercise. Freed from fashion, perhaps, yet wedded to his own sense of play, he produced a highly commercial, fast-paced thriller that also manages to be a meditation on everything writing meant to him. As its dual effect unfolds, you can’t quite believe the triumph.

Craig Fehrman, knowing I’m an admirer of historian and New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore, kindly passed along this interview with her. It’s from last fall. In it, Lepore responds to a question about when she decided to become a historian:

I went to college, but I didn’t want to go; I wasn’t sure what college was for, and we didn’t have any money. I went because I won an ROTC scholarship—and I really liked ROTC, actually, except I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in the military. Loved boot camp; hated SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative. So, freshman year, there I was, in ROTC, playing sports, failing all my classes, when I got a letter in the mail. Or, well, my mother got it, and she forwarded it to me. It was from me.

In high school, I had an English teacher who was that once-in-a-lifetime teacher who shapes everything that ever happens to you. He had given us an assignment to write a letter to ourselves five years in the future, or four years into the future, whatever it was. And he was not going to read it. We had to give him money for stamps, adjusted, I thought somewhat suspiciously, for inflation. I mean, good for him, but he charged us like fifty cents. Anyway, we addressed the letters to our parents’ houses. I had completely forgotten about that letter because—did I mention?—I have a terrible memory.

Turns out, it was a very scary letter. It said, more or less, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ and it went on like that, scolding, berating: ‘If you’re not actually doing what you’re supposed to be doing, quit everything and figure out your life for God’s sake. Get on with it!’ Apparently, I was a very difficult fourteen-year-old, but not altogether lacking in foresight. It was as if I had known that I would still be the jock who was reading in the dark. So I quit. I quit ROTC. I quit sports. I had been a math major; I switched to English.

This didn’t make me ‘become a historian.’ But later, when I thought about what I did want to do, I remembered that letter, that time capsule, and I wondered what it would be like to read old letters all day, other people’s letters, to listen to the past, and I knew I wanted to do that.

In his review of Martin Amis’ new novel for this site, John Davidson wrote, “Amis may be in the process of becoming our foremost contemporary chronicler of what it is to grow old.” From a recent interview with Amis in the Globe & Mail:

Amis turned 60 last summer. So how was it – balloons, bubbly, joyous celebrations? He levels a gaze that is only tepidly amused. “It was … not great.” When he recently became a grandfather – he has two grown sons from a previous marriage and an adult daughter – “it was like a telegram from the mortuary.”

In the same piece, we also learn this: “Unusually, for him, [Amis] has already completed his next novel, a satire about modern England in which a young thug wins £100-million in the lottery.”

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of publishing Bryan Charles’ debut novel, Grab On to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way. That novel took its title from a Pavement song, so it’s unsurprising that Bryan’s new book is Wowee Zowee, the latest in the 33 1/3 series, which pairs writers with records. Wowee Zowee was Pavement’s third record, a bit more experimental than its first two. I recently saw Bryan mark the book’s publication at a lovely store in Greenpoint, where he read a few pages and then discussed the band with Matthew Perpetua of the music site Fluxblog.

Without giving away too much, Bryan disclosed one of the book’s themes, which is a contrasting of Pavement front man Stephen Malkmus with Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan, who apparently refused to share the Lollapalooza bill with Pavement one year after Malkmus had made a cheeky reference to the Pumpkins in a song lyric. In the same song (“Range Life”), Malkmus refers to Stone Temple Pilots as “elegant bachelors.” This spurred Bryan to say that Stone Temple Pilots were “a thousand times better than The Hold Steady.” Not to turn this into a music blog, but: ahem. I teased him about that judgment afterward, and he hilariously signed my book with one brief comment: “STP Rules.”

I just posted about Ben Macintyre’s Operation Mincemeat on The Shelf. It’s been getting enthusiastic reviews, and I’m eager to read it. Via Clive Crook, I also found that Macintyre recently spoke to The Browser’s Five Books about his favorite books about spies and spying. Of Ian Fleming’s works, he chose Casino Royale. Here’s why:

I think it’s the best of them, and it’s wonderful because it reveals what I think is the essential Bond. The film Bond is very, very different from the character that Ian Fleming invented. The real character was unknowable. There’s something rather creepy and peculiar about the original James Bond and you get that in buckets in Casino Royale. . . .

It was 1953 and it was very remarkable for the time, because Bond was so cruel. He’s horribly tortured in the book and there are some very grim moments in it. But I also think it’s Fleming’s best writing. It wings along—it’s very hard to stop reading. It’s also brilliant at place. He manages to summon up the smoky stench of a casino in a way that no one else has ever managed to do. And it was incredibly glamorous. Here was Britain emerging from the depredations of war in a time of great austerity and here was a character on an apparently limitless expense account, having guilt-free sex and ordering dry martinis in the most glamorous places. It was a wonderful bit of escapism for the time. It’s a tour de force and by far his best novel.

He also explained why he thinks the British are better at writing about spies—and at spying itself:

Now all these books are about British spies. Is there an equivalent catalogue of great American spy books?

I don’t think the Americans do it nearly as well as we do. Yes, there are lots, but they’re all fairly derivative and I don’t think they have the same psychological depth. The British are particularly good not just at spying but at writing about spying. I think it’s to do with the natural theatricality of the British character and also a public-school system that for many generations encouraged a covering-up of what you really felt and thought. Hidden homosexuality, hidden feelings about loneliness. The British class system encouraged a certain amount of subterfuge.

Ben Segal and Erinrose Mager are soliciting submissions for a new project, The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature. The idea is to write a blurb or short description of a book that doesn’t exist. More details below (and full details here). Please don’t confuse this project with the excellent Invisible Library, maintained by Levi Stahl and Ed Park, which catalogs “books that exist only between the covers of other books — as descriptions, occasionally as brief excerpts, often simply as titles.” All clear?

We are very excited to announce the coming existence of The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature. The Catalog is to consist of a series of blurbs/short descriptions of books that do not exist. In order to compile that Catalog, we have asked many of the writers, theorists, and text-makers we most admire to imagine that they’ve just read the most amazing book they’ve ever encountered and then write a brief blurb about the imagined text.

As many of you know, The phrase ‘potential literature’ is highly associated with the Oulipo group. We choose to use the phrase here because, as the Oulipo says, their project, properly, is to conceptualize forms and potential works: not necessarily to bring them into being. Literature is potential literature when it is that shimmering non-work of total possibility. Though Official only by way of titular hyperbole (itself, like the blurbs contained within, a kind of unfulfilled and unfulfillable promise), the Catalog will evoke a library of wonderful–maybe even impossible–books; books that, in spite or even because of their non-existence, excite and fascinate. Each paragraph will be the promise of the unopened book in the moment before reading.

Over at The Barnes & Noble Review, I review Brady Udall’s new novel, about a man with four wives and 28 children. Here’s how it starts:

In Reality Hunger, a self-described manifesto recently published to much chatter, David Shields argues that the conventional novel, with its contrived plot points and all-seeing authorial voice, is dying, and deserves its fate. David Shields, meet Brady Udall. In the tradition of John Irving and Richard Russo and dozens of other novelists whose work appeals to something in people that Shields either can’t or doesn’t want to understand, Udall writes unabashedly old-fashioned fiction. It’s stuffed, in the present case, with fallout from A-bomb tests, a frisky ostrich, births and deaths, and a family, “like so many overextended empires before it, coming apart along the seams.”

Read the rest here.

At the Daily Beast, Sarah Weinman lists her favorite true crime books. Some are classics (In Cold Blood, Helter Skelter) and others are more obscure, like an out-of-print book about forensic techniques that “may now seem quaint in the age of DNA and CSI-style glamorization,” and an 800-page book about “one of the most troubling criminal chapters in [Canada’s] history.”

In a recent feature here, Matt Weiland recommended Calvin Trillin’s Killings, an out-of-print collection of his true-crime pieces for The New Yorker. Weiland said the book is “true to the raw, messy drama of the living as well as the dead.” Trillin is still at it, with a very good piece in this week’s New Yorker called “Incident in Dodge City.” It’s available to subscribers online. If you don’t subscribe, of course, you should.

Brady Udall’s The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint was one of my favorite books of the century’s first decade. His second, just out, is The Lonely Polygamist, and I’ll have a review of it up soon at another fine online establishment. For now, Jill Owens interviews Udall at Powell’s, and I’m glad she asked him about a character in the book named Ted Leo, which is also the name of a famous (in certain circles) indie rock singer, pictured at left:

Jill: This is a somewhat tangential question. Do you know the band Ted Leo and the Pharmacists?

Udall: [Laughter] You are now the third person to ask me that! No! Well, now I do. After I was told about them, I listened to some of their music. But as far as his name and most of the characters’ names, like I was describing about all the kids’ names, there are dozens of them. I don’t settle on one until near the end of the book. So, the character was called all kinds of things throughout the book, and then it settled there on Ted Leo, and suddenly it belongs to some musician.

Jill: I thought maybe you really didn’t like their music, since the Ted Leo in your book is such an evil character.

Udall: [Laughter] Actually, I really do. That’s what’s crazy; I really like the music.

I’ve always been a fan of Nick Hornby’s “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column in The Believer, a casual, smart, funny enterprise that has even led me to some books that I’ve enjoyed. In 2008, Hornby left the column behind, but now he’s back: “It’s never easy, returning home after failing to make one’s way out in the world. When I left these pages in 2008, it was very much in the spirit of ‘Good-bye, nerdy losers! I’m not wasting any more time ploughing through books on your behalf! I have things to do, places to go, people to see!’ Ah, well.”

This is a welcome development. Only the first three paragraphs are available online, so I need to pick up the magazine, because one of the books Hornby’s been reading is one that I just started:

David Kynaston’s superlative Austerity Britain is more than six hundred pages long and deals with just six years, 1945–51, in the life of my country. The second volume in the series, Family Britain, 1951–57, has already been published, so I plan to move on to that next; Kynaston is going to take us through to Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, and I’m warning you now that I plan to read every single word, and write about them in great detail in this column.