Thursday, November 19th, 2009

386: Words in This Post (The Blog)

(Most) Thursdays (sometimes Fridays) bring a post about a paperback book.

Hendrik Hertzberg’s One Million consists of 200 pages, 5,000 dots per page. That’s one million total dots in the book, with two, three, or four dots (and their corresponding numbers) “called out” on each page with an explanatory note. For instance: “499,999: Christian hymns in existence.” The project seems meant, if this isn’t paradoxical, as a playful way to give you a headache.

A version of the book was originally published in 1970, but this is a thoroughly revised edition. (The only statistics that I assume strongly reflect the first version are the dozens that remain about Vietnam.) Hertzberg’s sly selections and juxtapositions are all we have to go on for a larger message. There are a lot of statistics about real estate and cars and employment (“22,000: newspaper jobs lost in 2008”), which seem appropriate given the financial story of the past couple of years. Less obviously explained is the abundance of facts about Texas; perhaps the lingering influence of the Bush years on Hertzberg, who writes about politics for The New Yorker.

As the pages gather on your left side, it does become easier to feel the impact of certain numbers, no matter how trivial: “696,853: Units of Wii Fit, the video game, sold in November 2008.” That’s just about one Wii Fit (in one month) for every hour that has passed since Mickey Mouse debuted in 1928. (continues)

Friday, November 13th, 2009

An Unreliable Unfortunate (The Blog)

(Most) Thursdays (sometimes Fridays) bring a post about a paperback book.

Terese Svoboda’s Trailer Girl and Other Stories first appeared in 2001, and it will soon be republished by the University of Nebraska Press. The title novella is the anchor here, followed by 16 very short stories over the course of about 80 pages.

Trailer Girl is told from the perspective of an unnamed woman who lives in a trailer park (her neighbors call her “Trash Lady” because on Tuesdays she cleans up the windblown junk that gets caught in a fence). The fence stands in front of a gully, where cattle roam, and where the narrator believes a “wild child” lives, “a little girl in red with no shoes and her hair all stuck out, fine like mine.”

There she is, and there she is not, the cows giving her red shirt or sweater room and then squeezing it out of sight just like that.

All I see is that she is not looking at me. It is like an accident that I see her at all. I almost try not to look because then I see more.

The narrator tries to convince others that the girl exists, but she is wildly unreliable, having been shuffled to several foster homes in her own childhood and having spent time in psychiatric institutions: (continues)

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

A Couple at Sea (The Blog)

Every Thursday on the blog brings a post about a paperback book.

Originally published in 1972, Log of the S.S. the Mrs Unguentine is, as Ben Marcus notes in his afterword to an edition published last year by Dalkey Archive Press, “if not science fiction, then really strange fiction.” The story is only 99 pages long, but it’s hard to use a word like novella for a work with such a fully imagined, minutely detailed world.

The narrator is the wife of Unguentine, who begins her dreamlike telling by noting that her husband has recently committed suicide, flinging himself over the side of the boat on which they’ve lived together for “thirty to forty years.” Over those decades, the barge has grown into what Marcus describes as “more landmass than boat.” That floating mass is the star of the show, a stunning creation that a filmmaker like Wes Anderson or Jean-Pierre Jeunet might love to build, but which they couldn’t possibly make more believable than Stanley Crawford makes it on the page. It includes lush gardens, farm animals, 40 trees, “a towering salt-water distillation plant,” and “five hundred sails each the size of a manly handkerchief.” There is also a dome made up of small glass windows, the construction of which is one of the most beautiful passages in the book.

Early in the story, Mrs. Unguentine confesses that her husband is a drinker who beats her, but for the rest of the book he’s portrayed as a hermit who rarely interacts with the only other person in his world. The boat is large enough that the couple “go for days on end without seeing each other.” And even when they do, Unguentine rarely speaks, preferring to write notes.

Because of its deep surreality and the impossible largeness and diversity of the boat, the novel lends itself to allegorical readings about, among other subjects, ecological stewardship and the possibilities (and limitations) of knowing and loving another person. Crawford has said:(continues)

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

The Fantastic Fourth in a Series (The Blog)

Every Thursday on the blog brings a post about a paperback book.

It seems to me that the word anthology used to have a bit more weight behind it. To anthologize something was to acknowledge it had stood the test of time, or to ensure it would keep standing it. Now, anthologies of new, loosely connected material are published every week, and the annual “Best American” series keeps expanding, threatening to simply publish all of a given year’s American writing under one rubric or other (American Blog Posts About Parking Spaces 2009, etc.)

There is no better recent example of anthologizing done right than Picador’s series of Paris Review interviews, the fourth volume of which is being published this month. The books are beautifully, uniformly designed. They look great together. Even the paper they’re printed on feels terrific.

Oh, and what’s on the page is best of all.(continues)

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

A Way to Approach the Greats (The Blog)

Every Thursday on the blog brings a post about a paperback book.

In his introduction to The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature, J. C. Hallman, who edited the collection, writes about “a kind of personal literary analysis, criticism that contemplates rather than argues. . . .” Examples of that brand of analysis are what Hallman has gathered here, and the collection is a treat even if its larger organizing principle might have been better left unstated.

Hallman’s brief intro scratches the surface of a larger, more bitter battle between academic and popular criticism. And unsurprisingly, that battle has been joined online. This comments thread at The Valve manages to be thoughtful and productive for a while before devolving into a more typical, repetitive Internet tussle.

In an essay included here about Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde writes:

. . . where there is no exaggeration there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding. It is only about things that do not interest one, that one can give a really unbiassed opinion; and this is no doubt the reason why an unbiassed opinion is always absolutely valueless.

Many of these pieces reflect that judgment, serving as very personal testaments to the power of certain works.(continues)

Friday, September 25th, 2009

A Cold Place for the Dying (The Blog)

Every Thursday on the blog (hey, it’s still Thursday in parts of the country) brings a post about a paperback book.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times profiled Mexican author Mario Bellatín, who has written “a score of novellas” over the past 25 years, but is largely unknown in the U.S. Beauty Salon was first published in 1994, and the English translation — by Kurt Hollander — appeared earlier this year. It’s a 63-page book, on very small pages, literally pocket-sized.

The story’s unnamed narrator is a hairdresser whose salon has been converted into “the Terminal,” a place where those dying of a (also unnamed) contagious disease come to spend their last days. In its prime, the shop was decorated with several stunning aquariums, and the owner and two of his employees (all three transvestites) would sneak around the city on sexual adventures. Now, only one tank still holds fish, and it’s so murky that it’s impossible to tell how many are inside. The AIDS-like affliction has spread far and wide.(continues)

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

Among the Serpents (The Blog)

Every Thursday on the blog brings a post about a paperback book.

In his mid-30s, Dennis Covington was feeling depressed. A college English teacher who felt that his job was “minor and absurd,” he yearned for an adventure “in which the risks were real.” He found one. After reporting on the trial of an Alabama preacher who was accused of trying to kill his wife with poisonous snakes, Covington immersed himself in the Appalachian world of holy snake handlers. The resulting book, Salvation on Sand Mountain, was recently reissued to mark its 15th anniversary.

As subcultures go, this one is pretty nuts. The snake handlers believe that the Bible asks a chosen few to take up serpents as a show of faith. When a handler named Brother Clyde is bit on both hands, another church member, Cecil, tells Covington that Clyde hadn’t been fully anointed to handle the creature, and that “You’d have to be crazy to go and pick up a snake like that.”

“Do you know Punkin Brown?” Cecil asked.

I shook my head.

“Brother Punkin is from Newport, Tennessee,” he said. “Now there’s a man who really gets anointed by the Holy Ghost. He’ll get so carried away, he’ll use a rattlesnake to wipe the sweat off his brow.” Cecil paused and glanced around the square. “That brother Clyde, though. He must have been a little mentally ill.”

In a community that draws such lines, there is obviously a lot of unintentional humor to be mined, and Covington does the job, as in this reaction to a woman who describes a hospital visit to him:(continues)

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

An Essential Guide, Updated (The Blog)

Every Thursday on the blog brings a post about a paperback book.

The annually updated Time Out Film Guide has always separated itself from the pack with sleek aesthetics, but the just-published 2010 edition reaches new heights by enhancing Paul Newman’s baby blues on the front cover and using the same striking color as a keynote throughout the interior.

There are dozens of movie guides to choose from every year, but the London-based Time Out’s is the most elegantly designed, user-friendly and comprehensive. It’s true that it doesn’t have a lot of what the DVD generation knows as “extras.” There are long lists of actors and directors in the back, a guide to 100 notable movie web sites up front, and not much else. But at more than 1,350 (small-type) pages already, it’s hard to complain about a lack of anything.

Most importantly, the book is full of sharp writing. When it says of Night of the Hunter that “(Charles) Laughton’s only stab at directing…turned out to be a genuine weirdie,” those last two words may sound vague, but if you’ve seen the movie you know they’re right on. As is this, at the end of the review for Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven: “Eventually…the narrative collapses, leaving its audience breathlessly suspended between a 90-minute proof that all the bustling activity in the world means nothing, and the perfection of Malick’s own perverse desire to catalogue it nonetheless. Compulsive.” Even when it errs and insults something as great as The Muppet Movie, it does it in a style all its own: “…the attitude towards Miss Piggy and Camilla the Chicken is, well, less than progressive.”

A small sampling of other potent opinions:(continues)

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

The History of a Small Giant (The Blog)

Every Thursday on the blog brings a post about a paperback book.

The North Carolina-based Merge Records is an independent label that is thriving while larger conglomerates try (and mostly fail) to play catch-up with the 21st century. Merge began 20 years ago as a way for Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance to release records by their band, the seminal Superchunk, and the bands of their friends in the Chapel Hill scene. In Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, they’ve teamed up with journalist John Cook to produce an addictive oral history of the enterprise. Reading the oversized paperback, generously stuffed with reminiscences and personal photos from artists, will be an intense nostalgia trip for anyone who came of musical age in the early 1990s.

With bands like Arcade Fire and Spoon currently in its stable, Merge is probably doing better business than ever in 2009, but the majority of the book covers its first decade, when it moved from a bedroom hobby to one of the most respected, influential labels in the country. In the introduction to the first chapter, we’re told that the Chapel Hillers learned lessons from Corrosion of Conformity, a 1980s band based in neighboring Raleigh that “didn’t believe in waiting around for someone with money to tell them that it was okay for them to make records” and knew that “making noise wasn’t rocket science.”

Chapters covering Superchunk and the broader history of Merge alternate with chapters that serve as mini-histories of bands like The Magnetic Fields, Lambchop, Spoon and Neutral Milk Hotel. The latter is maybe most compelling, because after touring to support the Anne Frank-inspired cultic masterpiece, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, the band’s leader, Jeff Mangum, essentially disappeared from the music world, even declining an invitation to open for R.E.M. He became — and remains — “the J. D. Salinger of indie rock.” (continued)

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

An Invention That Leaves an Impression (The Blog)

Every Thursday on the blog brings a post about a paperback book.

The Invention of Everything Else was one of the best novels published in 2008. Samantha Hunt’s first novel, The Seas, told the stark story of a young woman who believed she was a mermaid. That slender, experimental debut may have given Hunt’s headstrong imagination too free a rein, resulting in some startling moments but an abundance of precious imagery. In Invention, she wrote a sophomore novel that burnished every one of her existing strengths and introduced some new ones.

Any synopsis of Invention makes it sound plenty precious, too, but Hunt’s confident performance quickly overrides any concerns. It’s 1943, and the inventor Nikola Tesla is living out his last days hidden away in the Hotel New Yorker, where he thinks back on his eventful life, stokes resentments, speaks to his pet pigeons and befriends a young maid named Louisa:(continues after the jump)

Friday, August 21st, 2009

Just Because You’re Not Paranoid Doesn’t Mean That They’re Not Out to Get You (The Blog)

Every Thursday (or in this case, Friday) on the blog brings a post about a paperback book. This might be a book originally published in hardcover or — as with this week’s subject — being published for the first time in paperback.

Jeffrey Parker, the protagonist of Barry Schechter’s debut novel, The Blindfold Test, says, “It’s one of the conventions of sanity that you allow plenty of room for coincidence in your misfortunes.” But Parker has learned that his particular life of misfortune — a stymied academic career, a girlfriend who refuses to commit because he’s “unobservant,” and a host of other happenings (his hair is briefly, inexplicably set on fire while riding the El) — may not be coincidence at all.

In his office at Skokie Valley Community College one day, Parker notices an old acquaintance named Steve Dobbs waiting for him in the hall. Dobbs is the editor of a National Enquirer-like newspaper called The Exhibitionist, and he’s come to educate Parker: Nestled among headlines like “Hitler’s Brain Found in Bus Station,” ten percent of the paper’s stories are actually true. And Parker’s life is going to be the subject of an upcoming article — one of the ten percent. The book is set in the early ’80s, and Parker’s brief association with anti-war activities years ago — tepid attendance at rallies, a couple of editorials for the school paper — got the attention of the government, which then decided to make the rest of his life an unspectacular failure.

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

Us vs. the Magicians (The Blog)

Every Thursday on the blog brings a post about a paperback book. This might be a book originally published in hardcover or — as with this week’s subject — being published for the first time in paperback.

In his sharp, brief foreword to Ad Nauseam: A Survivor’s Guide to American Consumer Culture, Rob Walker writes:

It’s a sad fact that while the shaping of consumer culture is an incredibly important topic that touches all of our lives on many levels, the vast majority of commentary about it is written by a group of people whose opinions are decidedly skewed. These are the marketing professionals and gurus whose assessments of commercial persuasion in American life invariably boil down to Seven Tips for Selling More Whatever to today’s savvy consumer. Whatever value that sort of thing may have for the trade, it’s not very useful to the other participants in consumer culture: everybody else.

So, “everyone else” is the large target audience for this book. How to promote a book that is so deeply suspicious of promotion is a conundrum I will leave to its editors, Carrie McLaren and Jason Torchinsky. McLaren began a zine called Stay Free! in 1993. It hasn’t been printed on paper in a few years, but it’s still around online to “explore the politics and perversions of mass media and American (consumer) culture.” About 70 percent of this illustrated book has been culled from the magazine’s archives.

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

This is Your (Musical) Life (The Blog)

From here on out, every Thursday on the blog will bring a post about a paperback book. This might be a book originally published in hardcover or — as with this week’s subject — being published for the first time in paperback.

In Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums That Changed Their Lives, there’s a lot said about albums, and even more said about some writers’ lives. Several women in the collection attach their musical memories to external experiences: Asali Solomon’s thoughts about Gloria Estefan were influenced by a semester spent in the Dominican Republic with a friend ; Claire Dederer learned to love the great Hedwig and the Angry Inch because her friend, a fellow mother, insisted they see it live; and Sheila Heti worshipped the Annie soundtrack and went to perform “Tomorrow” on a popular Canadian TV program. (“I longed to be in an orphanage,” Heti writes. “One afternoon, I demanded to be shown my birth certificate to determine my true parentage. Which turned out to be my parents.” Her entire piece can be read here.)

Men, on the other hand (and with several exceptions), are more concerned with what the music says about them. Benjamin Kunkel self-consciously sought out the Smiths “to induct me into the mysteries of sophisticated music for teenagers”; Joshua Ferris (somewhat miraculously) felt like a personal secret was betrayed when Pearl Jam’s Ten became big (that album was born big); and Mark Greif, writing about Fugazi, bemoans that, “Rock is for children. [. . .] By twenty-eight you’re left with the knowledge that you’re the fan of a deficient art form. Your emotions have evolved to deny you rock music’s best benefits, and it’s become much too late to develop any comparably deep feeling from any other music. As a grown-up, still listening to the same stuff, you’re genuinely ruined.”

Elsewhere, things are less morose.