Archive for December, 2009

Eavesdropping on MLA

paperhaus December 29th, 2009

I spent two years in graduate school, getting an MFA in creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, which I wrapped up last fall. I was older than most of my fellow students, about the same age as one of my professors, yet of all of them, I was the digital advocate.

It was almost silly. I’d tried to talk about literature in the online world — litjournals, blogs, access to agents, literary conversations — and was met with blank looks. I was baffled — how could so many 20-somethings not know what an RSS feed was? Didn’t they blog or have a stale livejournal account or anything? Eventually, we did manage to launch a good online literary journal that was supported by the department — although I bet some people are still asking when it’ll go into print.

What you might do with reading and the online sphere was given attention only by a few. My second year, I taught English composition, and when I got to an exercise about writing personas in the syllabus I adapted it to Facebook. The day we looked at those student projects, I was observed by my mentor. I was excited. She didn’t get it. I was reprimanded.

The resistance to new forms of writing and communication was discouraging. But there were a few people in the PhD program who were engaging with, as the academics say, texts in interesting ways. I’ve continued to follow their work.

And as I watch what’s being tweeted and blogged about the MLA conference this year, I have to say I’m excited all over again. People do get it. Smart engaged readers and academics not only have noticed that the online world is fertile and interesting, they’re trying to figure out clever ways to plug into it — as teachers, as scholars, as thinkers.

It’s inspiring. It makes me happy for academia. Long may it be plugged in.

In praise of living on the cheap

paperhaus December 24th, 2009

Possum Living was published in the late 70s as a sassy guide to anti-consumerist living. Mostly ideology-free — unless you count a cheerful curmudgeonliness as an ideology — the book, written by the pseudonymous 18 year-old Dolly Freed, has just been reissued by Tin House. And I wrote about it for Boldtype/Flavorpill yesterday:

Dolly’s practical lessons are presented with an irresistible wiseass grin: “We usually leave on the head, tail and fins for the simple reason that the fish looks nicer that way; and it means less work,” she writes. “Also, many fish have considerable amounts of meat in their heads — just like some people.”

Dolly lived with her father on a half-acre lot in suburban Philadelphia off just $5,000 a year, which was perplexingly cheap enough in her day to get her on the Merv Griffin Show. Her dad earned the little cash they needed doing odd jobs during winter, but the book is about everything else it took to live like possums: the gardening, the scrimping and shortcuts, the “merrily gurgling” home still.

What’s remarkable is how prescient, or smart, or just plain no-nonsense Freed’s advice was, because so much makes sense today. Not only do they ditch their car and ride bikes instead, but she warns against getting overly expensive bicycles — see ya, fixies — that might get stolen. Like my neighbors, she uses her yard as a vegetable garden, which she plans carefully (she explains how). She grows herbs and preserves the extras in vinegar. She makes pickling sound simple, cooks over an open fire when she can, buys clothes at Goodwill, and has plenty of time left over for playing chess on the porch.

Some of the projects are harder to imagine adopting. She and her father purchase wheat, soybeans, and potatoes in bulk from a feed store — there are still feed stores around, it turns out, but how many of us will make the time to clean and grind our own wheat? Freed made moonshine with a pressure cooker, some copper pipe, and rubber tubing, assembling the pieces with dough. OK, that’s inventive, but would it be so terrible to buy a gasket or two? Winemaking is easier in the final stages — once you put it all together, you just let it ferment — but even with Freed’s fruit-and-sugar measures supplied, calculating it all gets pretty complicated.

But the real challenge is the bunnies.

This is where Freed is awesome in her punk rockness: like a band that knows it will offend, she puts the hardest track right up front. She raises chickens and bunnies; the chickens provide eggs. The bunnies? They provide meat.

There’s more (more!) and I swear, even if the byline bears the editor’s name, it was written by me. And now I’ve got to hop offline to buy some bunnies soil to see if I can get a garden going.

Another year in reading

paperhaus December 20th, 2009

If you’re trying to keep up with the year in reading at The Millions, then, like me, you’re a little bit overwhelmed. So… many… books! All read in 2009. And all beloved by someone.

For the last few years, The Millions has done this year-end survey. Kindly, they ask only that the books be those consumed in the previous 12 months, not necessarily published in that window. Which is how, in 2008, I got to rave about Dracula (have you read it lately? It’s totally amazing).

This year I’ve also weighed in, with two favorites. The crew of contributors has become increasingly formidable  — this year, Hari Kunzru kicked things off — and I look forward to seeing their final boldfaced names.

Speaking of Hari Kunzru — man, I’ve really got to read My Revolutions. Maybe next year.

Dominick Dunne: does he come out of the closet in his last book?

paperhaus December 14th, 2009

When Dominick Dunne died in August of this year, he was in the last stages of editing his novel Too Much Money, out this week.

What’s interesting about the book isn’t its prose, which is execrable, or its story, which is ripped-from-the-headlines-of-rich-people-you-don’t-care-about. It’s that Dunne, who was two months shy of his 84th birthday, comes out of the closet in it.

Sort of. More precisely, he pushes his alter-ego Gus Bailey out, in this admission.

“Probably true, whatever you’ve heard,” Gus added as casually as he could.

“Heard?” Peter inquired.

“Oh you know, that I’m deep within the closet. . . . Well, maybe I am . . . in the closet. So what. . . . I feel quite relieved having said it. I’m beyond 80, you know. Mustn’t have any more secrets. Can’t die with a secret, you know.”

Dunne, who was long rumored to be gay, told the Times of London he was a “closeted bisexual celibate” in February. In the book, Gus, too, says he’s celibate. What’s sad is that a man who trafficked in gossip and rumor still felt that being gay was something to be hidden, a secret he should keep up until his 80s. Or maybe it’s not sad — maybe he finally felt like it was OK to come out (or have Gus come out).

I attended a big chunk of the first Phil Spector trial, and Dunne was there every day. I didn’t talk to him much — he was always surrounded by court groupies — although he was friendly, more friendly than a few of the web correspondents who shared the back row with me, where those of us with laptops were allowed. Near the end of the trial, the jurors were taken to Spector’s house in Alhambra for a walkthrough; only one member of the media was allowed, and we all decided on Linda Deutsch, the 40-year veteran of the AP. The photo above was taken by Steven Mikulan, then of the LA Weekly, as we all sat around waiting for the tour to finish. It was the most I talked to Dunne. We didn’t talk about sexuality — we talked about Connecticut.

I really liked him, but man, his book Too Much Money is awful. But maybe it’s good that he got something off his Gus’s chest. My review is in today’s LA Times.

revisting the NY Times book review

paperhaus December 13th, 2009

It’s been a long time since I read the NY Times book review. Chalk it up to business and professional disinterest — I never have enough time to read everything I’m supposed to, and most of what I read feeds what I might write about for Jacket Copy at the LA Times. But I can’t spend my Jacket Copy days writing about the NY Times, so I’ve been giving it a pass. Until today.

I’m so glad I did. Because Tom Bissell’s review of Season of Ash by Jorge Volpi is not to be missed. After explaining, “What it is not: surprising, involving or at all interesting. What it lacks: any occasions of arresting language or appreciable drama,” and elaborating on its other faults, Bissell writes, “That more or less ends the laudatory portion of this review.”

The negativity seems, from the review, well-deserved — but it’s the deadpan delivery that kills me.

But hey, aside from a big, promising yet not-great work in translation, I have to wonder: where’d the fiction go?

Hey, look at SA on the Book Bench!

paperhaus December 12th, 2009

The New Yorker takes note of S.A. Griffin’s poetry bomb on its book blog, the Book Bench.

Go SA. Go Book Bench. Go poetry. Go bombs. Oh, wait….

I never wrote for Kirkus, but these guys did

paperhaus December 11th, 2009

Yesterday, Nielsen announced that it would shutter several publications, including the review-o-matic Kirus, Kirkus, for its willingness to go negative.

I never wrote for Kirkus, and as I haven’t published a book, I haven’t feared its cold, cold advance publication stare. But it was interesting to read what some reviewers experienced.

Mark Athitakis: Though the editors there knew my general interests, I didn’t get a vote on what was sent to me to review. In short, it wasn’t a job for reviewers who cared only about books they felt pretty certain they’d like. Which speaks to the most contentious and, I think, admirable aspect of the magazine—that Kirkus‘ reviews were more negative than positive. Conventional wisdom argues that this is because the reviews were written by large passels of smug know-nothings who used their anonymity as a blunt instrument. I prefer to think Kirkus served an uncomfortable truth—most books are mediocre.

Jonathan Taylor in the Stranger: From mountains of galleys that loomed all around her office, my editor took care to pluck out some interesting obscure books that otherwise would have been, or probably still were, destined to pass largely unnoticed. Most of the books were boring–kind of all right or sort of bad–in either case hard to do justice to in less than 300 words. It gave me great pleasure, though, to craft just what I wanted to say about the really bad ones and the really good ones.

All wrote anonymously, all wrote short, pithy reviews — less than 350 words — and all tended to express their opinions boldly. Perhaps that was the consolation they got for writing cheap. In some ways — cheap/fast/short — it reminds me of CMJ’s reviews; I wrote a couple when I began writing about music, because I wanted the clips. Not having much of a say as to what landed in my mailbox (this was in the era of CDs) meant I had to work hard, sometimes, to hear the music on its own terms and not my own.

Taylor takes on the question of reviewer impartiality. “For me, it’s like a massive crush, almost literally: I stopped writing reviews because my interest in books has led me quite naturally into a position of a ‘conflict of interest’ with regard to the literature I love the most.” But I’m not sure that’s entirely true — I think it’s possible to remain in love with literature and review it. At least, it’s still possible for me.

Hear me on The California Report

paperhaus December 5th, 2009

This week I reviewed the book In My Father’s Shadow by Chris Welles Feder for the weekly magazine of the California Report. The show is broadcast by public radio stations statewide at various times over the weekend. It was on San Francisco’s KQED Friday at 4:30pm and it’s online now. Here’s how it begins:

Orson Welles was a genius filmmaker, with all the complications that genius seems to bring. The desire to learn more about one of the most fascinating characters to pass through Hollywood is understandable. But it’s this interest in Welles that gives the new memoir by his eldest daughter its unusual shape, if not its title: In My Father’s Shadow.

Yet the book is no cliched litany of star-offspring complaints. Feder might have had them — like the punch line of a Johnny Cash song, she’s a girl named Christopher. But Chris, now 71, adored her father, and is a talented storyteller who brings alive the golden era of Hollywood.

If you listen, that silky voice at the beginning isn’t me — it’s Rachel Myrow. I’m the more nubby one that follows.

10 favorite books of 2009

paperhaus December 4th, 2009

The LA Times list of favorite books of 2009 is now online, a total of 50 books in two parts, fiction/poetry and nonfiction. It’s a master list that is compiled by the editors; some of my suggestions made it. But not all.

I’m not including all the books that I loved in 2009, but right at this moment, here are 10 of my favorites, in alpha order by author, including a few I haven’t even read.

Invisible by Paul Auster (haven’t read it, but I really really want to read it)

Ablutions by Patrick deWitt (from bad to worse, told with raw precision, in a sleazy Hollywood bar)

I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett (haven’t read this either, but sometimes favorites are those books that are all potential)

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (if you can eat chicken after reading this book, you’re not well)

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (like Ms. Kakutani said, except the opposite)

Generosity by Richard Powers (I loved The Echo Maker so much that I don’t believe his follow up could possibly let me down)

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon (Sixties, smart, silly, streamlined Pynchon that’s about the end of mystery while masquerading as a detective fiction).

A Bright and Guilty Place by Richard Rayner (the true story of two Angelenos whose intersecting lives capture two aspects of the city in a critical defining era)

When Skateboards Will Be Free by Said Sayrafiezadeh (memoir of growing up red & poor in the 70s & 80s)

Far North by Marcel Theroux (when civilization crumbles, head to Siberia and follow Makepeace’s lead)

PEN tonight

paperhaus December 2nd, 2009

Heading to the PEN USA West awards tonight at the Beverly Hills Hotel. In my many years in LA, I’ve never before been to the pink icon of Beverly Hillsiness. Nor have I been to the PEN Awards, actually. Last year Veronique was tweeting the winners to me, but this year she’s in Guadalajara with many other LA writers at the massive book fair. I guess it’s up to me to tweet — so I will, right here.