carolyn kellogg

paperhaus December 3rd, 2008

I don’t mean a public library. I mean a room in my house with shelves and books and a good reading light and a place to rest my bourbon.

Friends of mine have a library. I know it’s possible.

Laura Miller (who is the subject of this Jacket Copy post) wrote about culling her book collection in Sunday’s New York Times. She knows a couple who’ve gotten rid of most of their books; agent Ira Silverberg, who purges the books by the people he’s stopped talking to; and Jonathan Franzen, who once kept a strict read-to-unread ratio. Miller’s collection is more aspirational (may unread books, including a Dickens tome), but she tries to keep a one-book-in, one-book-out policy.

But the real issue isn’t how many books you have. It’s about how much space you have, factored against how often you have to pick up all your books and move them.

If I had a big rambling house like my grandmother did, I’d never get rid of any books. OK, some of the books that end up in my possession are throw-awayable, like one Tod Goldberg had to let go, but I would not be forced to triage books I actually want. I do not, like my grandmother, live in a big rambling house with a library — it also had a paleolithic-era TV that I think had ceased to function — I live in a small LA apartment that I will probably leave when my lease is up.

In my current space, my library is everywhere — narrow halls, living room, bedroom. I keep the unread books on a short bookshelf that actually needs to be taller. No matter how hard I try, stacks of books, usually in mid-read, form on horizontal surfaces like stalagmites.

In Pittsburgh I had a ridiculous amount of space, three stories of a skinny row house (plus basement), and I used the attic as a library. But the attic wasn’t insulated, so most of the year I only made forays up there, teeth chattering, to retrieve books as needed. I picked up bookshelves for other rooms and the library expanded. I had a newly-received branch (shelf) inside the front door; a grad-school project branch in the dining room.

Probably, no matter where I end up next — hauling boxes and boxes and many many many more boxes of books — they’ll still live everywhere. Library or not.

But I still want a library.

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paperhaus December 2nd, 2008

I wrote a short blurb on the new book Posters for the People: Art of the WPA that ran in Sunday’s LA Times. The piece appeared with several illustrations; the online gallery included 13 posters - in color, even.

Everything looks so cool it makes me want to go back to then, when we were living in a depression.

No, wait, scratch that.

OK, to go back to a time when we were living in a depression and the government had these really cool workfare programs for artists and writers. Or, you know, forward to a time like that.

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paperhaus October 2nd, 2008

I read a lot of books for reviewing, or blogging, or — well, formerly, grad school. But I’m done with grad school. So I read this book … just because.

Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. It’s been ages since I’ve read pure science fiction, and in some ways the old sweater — or today, tank top?  — felt soft and comfortable and delicious. I think his characterization is great, and the bantery dialog charming. I liked the world he created, and the not-so-strong humans colonizing space against bigger, more powerful and often hostile aliens may not have been utopic, but it was believable (as were the occasions when humans were bigger and more powerful and STILL hostile).

But other things didn’t work for me. A lot of exposition-in-dialog, characters explaining the world to each-other. Sure, a lot of the world is new to the protagonist — but too often it felt like the author explaining the world to the reader. There were a few plot points that made my eyes bulge — 100,000 people die, and 3 close friends are among the handful of survivors?

As much as I liked the protagonist, I’m not sure if I’d read the next book in the series. The part that intrigued me — 70-something man becomes a young warrior — was less interesting when I realized most of the other characters in the book had gone through the same process.

Scalzi is a man-about the internet, and I hate to say anything negative about his book. But maybe I say it to ask you — have you read it? Am I misjudging?

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paperhaus September 3rd, 2008

On Saturday, three authors read from their entries in the 33 1/3 album-focused series: above, Hayden Childs reading from his book on “Shoot Out the Lights” by Richard and Linda Thompson. I didn’t get pictures of Kim Cooper (Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”) or David Smay (”Swordfishtrimbones” by Tom Waits). From what I understand, the reading followed a bus tour of Tom Waits sites around Los Angeles; I came for the books. Let me say, as I’ve said before, Metropolis Books is a fantastic bookstore in downtown Los Angeles. Tons of literary fiction, beautiful cookbooks, all the best about-LA books in a space that’s the size of Vroman’s greeting card section but still manages to include some comfy seating. Go there, my fellow book-loving Angelenos.

On Sunday my review of John Berger’s From A to X ran in the LA Times. Although this takes me by surprise, I believe I captured it better than Ursula K. Le Guin.

Big congratulations to Laila Lalami, who has finished work on her first novel, Secret Son.

Of the list of literary maneuvers, I like “Pulling an Austen” best: gossiping about socially sensitive topics, falling for someone who seems complicated but is in actuality a dark-haired douchebag. (via)

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paperhaus August 28th, 2008

Today on Jacket Copy you’ll find a whole series of author signatures and the stories behind them. This one is mine, and it’s last. The far-more-luminary contributors are Maud Newton, Nam Le, Claire Zulkey, Said Sayrafiezadeh, Jami Attenberg, Anne Fernald and Mark Haskell Smith.

The backstories are so good that I almost think we should be required to add them to our signed books, on special bookplates on the back overleaf.

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paperhaus August 17th, 2008

Who knows why The Ghost and Mrs. Muir ended up on my Netflix list — I must have realized that I’d seen the TV version but never the film original. I thought it was kind of a gothic-ish, romance-ish film, which it was. But golly, it was also about a book!

Gene Tierney plays a young widow who rents a beachside house haunted by the ghost of a salty old sea captain. Yeah, really salty: salty language, sea-captain clothes, rough seaworthy beard. He tries to scare her away, and when she won’t run, well, you can guess what happens. What you might not remember is that when Tierney’s funding stream dries up, she and Rex Harrison — the sea captain — hatch a plan. He will write a book, she will publish it, buy the house and, when she dies, leave it as a retirement home for other men of the sea.

The book is bawdy in ways that code-era Hollywood could only allude to; it’s full of “blast” and “blasted,” too, an antique curseword that served as 1947’s “frak.”

The book finished, Tierny goes to a publisher’s office, determined to have it seen. George Sanders (one of my favorite charming film cads) sees her with the manuscript clutched to her chest. The last thing he suspects is that she’s carrying the racy memoirs of a dead sea captain.

Is it a cookbook? I hope not another “Life of Byron.” Or is it a book of dreams?

Dreams. Cookbooks. Byron. Those were the topics lady authors were expected to explore in the mid 1940s. “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir” was a popular 1945 book by R.A. Dick, so popular that the film rights went fast — the movie came out just two years after the book, in 1947.

But add a “U” and you get U.R.A. Dick, and I think that’s not a mistake; Dick was a pseudonym. The book was written by a woman, Josephine Aimee Campbell Leslie, who lived for 81 years and published just one other novel. My short, frustrating internet searches have turned up little else about her — on a message board, someone claims her father was a sea captain, and that’s about it. In its capsule review of the film, allmovie doesn’t even mention her, indicating that the woman never fully emerged from behind the pseudonym.

There is an obvious authorial frustration embedded in the film, which gets lost in the pretty Bernard Herrmann score and weepy love story. It’s funny — or is it sad? — that a woman is the front for a silenced male author in the novel/film, whose author, in turn, is a pseudonymous, androgynous front for a silenced, almost forgotten woman.

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paperhaus August 1st, 2008

My friend Jill made me a super-cute purse for my birthday (as you can see) and it turns out I can fit three books in it at once. Three!

I was going bonkers yesterday waiting for my video of the Skylight Books expansion to upload to YouTube. It’s only 33 seconds. And it’s fun!

In the middle of bonkers I was trying to organize boxes, and moving notebooks from one to another I felt compelled to share (that’s below). Rarely did my concert notes take such a narrative form. That night, tho, I had plenty of room at the bar, nobody to talk to and a lot of time to kill.

I like Maud’s list of books she’d like to see as movies, but I fear that an important, serious (and near the end, so no spoilers) character in The End of Mr. Y simply would not work on screen. That said, someone in Hollywood should give Scarlett Thomas heaps of money anyway; it’s a damn good book.

Tomorrow morning, the marvelous Gwenda Bond will be on NPR’s Weekend Edition, talking about the new edition of Anne of Green Gables.

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paperhaus July 10th, 2008

The American Institute of Graphic Arts has announced the 2007 winners of their 50 books/50 covers competition. These are the best book covers as selected by designers, and include art and children’s books as well as literature and nonfiction. This last — which they describe as “books you read” — is my favorite; a selection of covers is below.

I love the cover of The Chess Machine. Love love love.

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paperhaus July 9th, 2008

Let’s say you’re working on a book. Let’s say you’d like for it to be reviewed in the pages of the New Yorker, and not sitting on the free-to-a-good-home book bench.

A good idea — short of becoming Philip Roth — would be to start planning your cover right now.

When you sort through hundreds of books a week, it’s hard not to resort to snap judgments. Anything with women’s shoes on the cover is chick lit; anything with a title that takes up the entire cover page is a thriller; anything with a plain blue background and text in thin white letters is some abstruse but probably fascinating scholarly book from M.I.T.

I think it is unjust that people who get paid to sort through books are resorting to snap judgments. But since they are — and have the guts to admit it — I think authors should be prepared.

If you want to be taken seriously by the gatekeepers at the New Yorker, here are some tips:

• don’t include any women walking, or women with closets, either of which might tempt a cover artist to render a woman’s shoe.
• no long titles. This is no guarantee — for example, PREY, just 4 letters, was rendered in a big font — but you’re asking for trouble with a lot of long words. So if you were thinking of following in the tradition of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, think again.
• use plain words. Plain words that will not lead people to think you are abstruse. In fact, avoid “abstruse.” Otherwise you will end up with a book that looks smart. A book that appears, to the people who sort through books at the New Yorker, to be bafflingly smart. To the giveaway book bench with you, smartypants book!

What’s really interesting is that these rules don’t hold true at all. Sure, the MIT Press website has a blue background, but many of their books’ covers are brightly-colored; a good percentage have cool photos (America’s Food, Andy Warhol: Blow Job).

As for titles? Amazon’s bestsellers in thrillers are evenly divided between BIG AUTHOR NAME/little title and little author name/BIG TITLE. I know some of these books are designed to SCREAM AT YOU from an AIRPORT BOOKSTALL, but many of them have jumped on the more subtle, literary-fictionlike design wagon. Alan Furst’s The Spies of Warsaw has a tiny title and a big black and white photo, maybe from the 1950s, of a woman sitting in a man’s lap in front of a cafe, lost in a kiss. And on the cover of The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follett’s name is much larger than the title, both of which are superimposed over a line drawing of plans for a gothic cathedral. Way arty.

But then we get to shoes. Indeed, 20% of Amazon’s top 20 women’s fiction books have shoes on the cover (BTW, go Janelle Brown, clocking in at #8!, with a sundae, not a shoe). The only “literature & fiction” book with a shoe on the cover is the one that tops the women’s fiction list. Shoes still indicate chick lit. Beware: even The Time Traveler’s Wife has shoes on the cover. Not a Chicago library. Shoes. So if you have a character that walks or travels, you may be sucked into the shoe-cover vortex; it seems there is no escape.

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paperhaus July 8th, 2008

A short piece on Steve Erickson appeared in the July 2 issue of the LA Weekly, and I’ve just caught up with it. I’m not sure the author thinks about Erickson’s writing the same way I do — he cried at Zeroville, a book which made me laugh — but the more props Erickson gets, the more just this universe becomes.

Darn that pesky universe! Book pages are being cut at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Scales shift back to less just.

Take heed, people: Wikipedia is convenient but it can be amended by any bored fourteen-year-old, deposed world leader or other psychopath. If your job is to prep your boss for his meeting at the G8 summit, don’t give him pages from Wikipedia. Seriously. (via)

Rachel Resnick is revealing the westside highlife and sharing writerly advice (from Samantha Dunn and others) at Bookfox this week while proprietor John is elsewhere.

Mark is getting Rothalicious, a condition that will most likely worsen before it disappears.

Maud thinks about twitter, both as a source for publishing industry leaks and as potential means of hype and buzz manipulation. Very smart. I’ve also got twitter notes coming up Wednesday on Jacket Copy — unrelated, but the meme seems to be out there.

Writer Jules Tygiel died in Northern California on July 1 from cancer. While everyone mentions his baseball histories first, I knew him by his book The Great Los Angeles Swindle: Oil, Stocks and Scandal During the Roaring Twenties. The story of C.C. Julian was so unbelievable that it makes Enron look logical and transparent, but Tygiel unraveled it well.

In Los Angeles in the early years of the Great Depression, C.C. Julian and the Julian Petroleum Corporation were household words. They symbolized, not merely what President Franklin D. Roosevelt would later deplore as “a decade of debauchery of group selfishness,” but the failed hopes and dreams of the great boom of the 1920s. Indeed, no single story captures the essenc of the 1920s in Amrica — its booster optimism and rampant speculation, its entrepreneurial mania for mergers, its overlap of business and politics, its application of new communications technology, and its cast of oilmen, stock promoters, Hollywood stars, cinema moguls, banking executives, Prohibition-era gangsters, and evangelists — quite so well as the Julian Petroleum swindle.

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