Oct 30 2008
I've been a dedicated reader and reviewer of John Updike for probably 40 years and I'm still not eligible for Medicare. From "The Rabbits" to the literary criticism (he has just reviewed Toni Morrison's new one, "Mercy," in his usual carefully measured prose of disapproval), I've been entertained, informed and challenged.
I used to greet every new novel with anticipation, but as they continued to be disappointing -- "Villages," "Terrorist," "Seek My Face" -- I retreated to reading his growing collections of essays and memoirs while giving the fiction a wary eye.
Now, however, I'm faced with opening "The Widows of Eastwick." I got as far as the first page the other day before making an excuse to pick up something else, an L.L. Bean catalog, I think. My procrastination is growing because I've read just enough about it to convince myself it's skipable.
Updike's growing preoccupation with the body's physical decline comes to the fore here because his once sexy witches are "bag hags" whose puckered sagging flesh is put on display. No thanks. Snobbish dismissals of present-day families also occupy much of his view. Some of this was gleaned from Sam Tanenhaus' adolescent crush-gush that led the Times Book Review of 10/26 which he edits. So, when you're the editor of the nation's biggest newspaper book review, you can use the front page to run your own embarrassing love letter to John Updike and nobody can say, "Maybe tone it down or at least prove your contentions." Sam is also compiling a biography of William F. Buckley
Yet, a sense of duty impells me onward, puckered flesh and all. Maybe this weekend. Oh, I forgot. I have to rake leaves.
Some news: Rick Hilles won the $50,000 Whitting Writers Award for poetry this week. The University of Pittsburgh Press published his first collection, "Brother Salvage."
Oct 27 2008
So the New Yorker has discovered a writer named Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio. It published a short story of his, "The Boy Who Had Never Seen the Sea," in its Oct. 26 issue. A promising new writer, the kind the magazine used to publish in its literary heyday? No, just this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. It appears to be the first time one of his stories made it into the magazine. It only took the Nobel to get him in there.
My point is that the New Yorker used to break new ground in the arts; now it just spots trends. Under editor David Reminick, it excels in journalism, but in cultural matters, the magazine just plows previously farmed turf.
Music writer Alex Ross has carved a shining career as a best-seller and grant winner for his reworking of dead composers' lives in his collection of magazine essays, "The Rest is Noise." My solidly informed musical expert points out that Ross' work is "fine," but conventional. "He never advances the subject."
Spotting a successful trend to follow is the New Yorker's lightweight contributor Adam Gopnik, a pleasant-enough writer with nothing new to say. He's taking Ross' approach to British writers by re-reading the multiple biographies of G.K. Chesterton and John Stuart Mill, then offering his Reader's Digest condensed version. Ostensibly, his examination of Chesterton was to focus on his strange little novel, "The Man Who Was Thursday," but instead he railed at the writer's anti-Semitism. I'm a lukewarm reader of "The Man Who Was Thursday," and was hoping for a new take on it. Instead, I learned that Chesterton was a big beer drinker and had it in for Jews. We needn't hold the thirst for ale against him, but Chesteron's ugly bigotry, something he shared with many other close-minded writers of that unpleasant era, was not evident in his pre-World War I novel. I will skip Gopnik on Mill, I think.
Another NY'er reader wonders what happened to literary critic James Wood who has been less than energetic in his contributions. He does review Jose Saramago's "Death With Interruptions" in the Oct. 26 issue, but we're still awaiting a steady contribution of criticism from the unadventurous critic.
Trend-spotting and following is the stock in trade of the magazine's former editor, Tina Brown, who needed the whiff of celebrity and gossip like Dracula needed blood to function. Sure, she shook up the New Yorker, but perhaps limited its cultural focus by emphasizing fads and buzzes.The magazine became a pre-digital version of Twitter.
Brown, who offered an off-the-cuff and uninspired chat about her "pal," Princess Diana, that drew more than the usual catnaps from the audience at the Heinz Lectures last month, has emulated Adrianna Huffington's successful move to the Internet.
She's trendy, so climbing aboard the same Web train as Huffington was neither original nor unexpected. Her site, "The Daily Beast," seems little more than a glitzier presentation of the Huffington Post.
What was she thinking?
Since I tried a brief occupation this year as a kind of newspaper Nelson, the "Simpsons'" character who snickers at mistakes by pointing them out in several new books, I have learned that authors call their misstatements of facts "typos" rather than slip-ups.
So, what do you call this pratfall: "In despair, (Hemingway) returned to his birthplace, Idaho." Huh?
Tell the folks in Oak Park, Ill., who have preserved his family home as a museum including the bedroom where he came into the world in 1899.
It's a flub of Marlene Wagman-Geller in her account of author dedications, "Once Again to Zelda" (Perigee, $16.95). In it, she purports to explain why individuals were singled out by writers in their books. This one goes back into the pile.
Book publicist's quote of the day:
"In the midst of our politcal and economic uncertainty, readers seem to be finding comfort in 'cute'. . ., " says Laura Adams, senior publicist for Gotham Books, publisher of "I Can Has Cheezeburger: A LOLcat Colleckshun" and "Dewey: The Small Town Library Cat Who Touched the World." The titles have made several best-seller lists.
She suggests that if I thought these would make a "purr-fect" trend piece, she could hook me up with the authors. I'll leave the trends to Tina Brown, although I admit the cover photo of the late Dewey is cute.
Instead, I've renamed my feline companion "Joe the Cat" for the duration of the election campaign, trusting in his judgment more than a sometime plumber from Toledo with tax issues of his own.
Oct 24 2008
It's official. I've become a blogger. My aim is to find as many kitchen sinks about books, authors, publishing and toss 'em in. My initial entry is one born of frustration.
My economic indicators face me five days a week. They are the boxes of fresh new books hauled to me from the mailroom. This year there are more boxes - ‘way more, spilling out on to floor. (Publishers send tons of free books to the media.)
When I started this job maybe 20 years ago, I never thought I would resent the chance to sort through books every day, but now I do.
It takes me a hour on Mondays because of the weekend backlog. Vacations? A few weeks off, and a kind of panic sets in when I get back into the office. I feel like I'm in Charles Foster Kane's basement at Xanadu. Whole days are lost sorting the haul.
A few weeks ago, Chicago Tribune Literary Editor Elizabeth Taylor showed me her "book room." (She gets a room, I get three metal cabinets.) Books were everywhere, overwhelming her shelves, stacked on the floor. We exchanged knowing glances, but said nothing. One of the dirty little secrets of the book editor's job is that it's impossible to get a handle on the volume of volumes that publishers bombard the media with. We have no idea what the hell's out there; we just manage it the best we can. That's getting harder, too as space and budgets are cut.
You see, the other source of my resentment is the inability to get these books properly reviewed. I could put out a 20-page book review section every week if I had the money and still be forced to bypass what looks interesting.
American publishers have gone nuts lately, printing hundreds of thousands of new books, more every year since 2000. Will this economic debacle force them to rein it in, turn off the spigot and use their diminishing income to concentrate on quality?
Look at the stuff that came in to the Post-Gazette this week. "The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest Book: The Winners, the Losers and Everybody in Between" (Andrews McNeel, $24.95). The august magazine runs a weekly contest for readers to pick the best joke line to uncaptioned cartoons. Fine, but do we need a book of them?
The New Yorker has been recycling everything it's published since the 1920s, trying to wring every dime out of its archives by assembling dozens of books of old stuff. Note to publishers of these books: Don't send them to me. I don't want them and I don't need them. Fat chance.
"Is It Me or Is Everything Sh..? Insanely Annoying Modern Things: by Steve Low and Alan McArthur with Brendan Hay (Grand Central Publishing, $22.99). The obvious answer is "yes' simply based on the existence of this book. Even though it took three guys to assemble this useless piece of comedic detritus, it still is the ultimate in irrevelance. And the price, c'mon. The thing is a hardcover and there aren't even any pictures.
"The Optimist's Handbook: A Companion to Hope" and "The Pessimist's Handbook: A Companion To Despair" by Niall Edworthy and Petra Cramsie. With names like those, they have to be British and like many of their country's comedians, they delight in useless whimsey. The book's two sided -- quotes on hope and gloom are selected. And their point? I don't know.
That's enough for now, but as this blog goes on, I will be listing my "Bozos of the Week" in published books.
The world's biggest publishing trade show wrapped up this month -- the Frankfurt Book Fair where the focus is more international or at least more European -- than BookExpo America. The news, though, seemed straight out of the city of Oz as the official word was, despite the sagging economy, "the business situation for publishers would remain consistent." That statement means that for the near future, the glut of books will continue.
As reported by Michael Cader, the shrewd and cynical observer of Publishers Lunch, even the number of book agents was up 5 percent. "That's all we can do, keep selling," a source told Cader.
Across the pond and nation in Los Angeles, Times Book Editor David Ulin, still standing after layoffs and space cuts, sees a silver lining in the coming recession. He believes, somewhat Oz-like, that publishers will cut out the crap and produce "serious literature," pointing to the Depression days of the 1930s when even "popular literature got serious."
True, but then Hollywood stepped in and turned America into an Astaire-Rogers musical.
Ulin, a great guy and baseball fan, is a Pollyanna about publishing, I'm afraid. Serious doesn't sell, in hard times or good. As the times get tougher, the books get fluffier and more of it will be churned out, stuff as solid as the bubbles from Lawrence Welk's machine (developed at the William Penn Hotel, apparently.)