on books

So do you have a cookbook there, Mrs. Muir?

Aug 172008

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.

Back to the present

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Aug 012008

purse

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.

Covers judged, in pictures

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Jul 102008

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.

book covers aiga

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

Juding books by their covers at the New Yorker

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Jul 092008

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.

Linkety binkety boo

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Jul 082008

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.

Now here’s a list

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Jul 062008

I waited a long time to get to this book. Gosh it’s good.

At the bottom of the steps, he passes through the lost-articles room, lined with pegboard, furnished with shelves and cubbyholes that hold the thousand objects abandoned or forgotten in the hotel. Unmated shoes, fur hats, a trumpet, a windup zeppelin. A collection of wax gramophone cylinders featuring the entire recorded output of the Orchestra Orfeon of Istanbul. A logger’s ax, two bicycles, a partial bridge in a hotel glass. Wigs, canes, a glass eye, display hands left behind by a mannequin salesman. Prayer books, prayer shawls in their velvet zipper pouches, an outlandish doll with the body of a fat baby and the head of an elephant. There is a wooden soft-drink crate filled with keys, another with the entire range and breadth of hairstyling tools, from irons to eyelash crimpers. Framed photographs of families in better days. A cryptic twist of rubber that might be a sex toy, or a contraceptive device, or the patented secret of a foundation garment. Some yid even left behind a taxidermy marten, sleek and leering, its glass eye a hard bead of ink.

Other than the sheer beauty of the words (zeppelin, marten), there is an awful lot of goodness in this list. it says so much about the people that have passed through the hotel: a logger did, a salesman. The people came and left the relics of their falling-apart bodies — canes, a glass eye — as well as all those hairbrushes, tools to improve the appearance. There are tools for the spirit, too, the prayer items, most obviously Jewish, one Hindu. There are odds and ends, things that should have been missed (odd shoes), things that seem antique — cylinders for a gramophone, a toy zeppelin instead of an airplane or rocket.

And all these things evoke not just the lost and left behind items of the people in this hotel in this fictional Jewish settlement in Alaska, but the items so systematically taken from Jews by the Nazis, those storehouses of personal items (like those now in the museum at Auschwitz). Although it’s a different world, a world where perhaps some of those people might not have been victims of Nazi atrocities, the ghost of our world is there, echoing in the vintage-ness of the items, in the unusual quantities, in the way they’ve been saved and stored. The list ends with an offbeat taxidermied critter, cute yet also undeniably dead.

And that’s only pages 10-11. I can’t wait to get to the rest of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

The mercy crying game

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Jul 042008

I started reading a book last night, a book I thought would be fun. It didn’t grab me, but I was sleepy. So I crashed and after getting up, I read some more.

Then I made breakfast. I ironed a skirt to wear to a barbecue. I wrote a post for tomorrow’s Jacket Copy. All the while, I thought about the book. Still wasn’t grabbing me. I have to get to page 50, I thought. I flipped it open. I was past page 50.

Keep going, I thought. Look how far you are!

But I started noticing things. Like the listing: “There was a bakery, a variety of cheeses, wines, homemade jams, relishes, and salad dressings, and a mishmash of housewares, personal hygiene products, and curios. In one corner, they had jeans, hip waders, fishing lures, and, honest to God, cowboy boots.” At first I wasn’t sure why the listing was bugging me, then I realized: it’s the emptiness. This list is empty of a character’s perception or narrator’s message, empty except for the incredulity at the cowboy boots. What kind of cheeses? What does a variety of cheeses mean? Is this place upscale or touristy or homey or a hard-to-decipher combination? It is none of these things. It is a list.

And it wasn’t just lists of things. This is how a character cleans: he “scrubbed down the entire room, dusting, polishing, mopping, vaccuuming the mattress and the drapes.” The listing started to strike me as lazy. No choices, just words piled on, like an undergraduate trying to reach a minimum page count. Another character is attracted to “this pretty, competent redhead, with her clear blue eyes and sharply carved face. There was something irrefutable between them, a flirtation, an attraction.” God, as I type them the words bug me much more than they did the first time. I crave an editor. Can we just pick one, please? How about an irrefutable attraction? A flirtation? Something between them? Do we need all those things, really?

The other issue was the wackiness/improbability quotient: things got unlikely for no reason, except to ratchet up the kooky factor. Small town. So it’s OK if you want a character’s jealous ex-girlfriend to be a highly-competent dot-com refugee ex-lawyer and the mayor, too. It’s not OK if she’s the one hammering nails into his tires, because then she is a crazy person, not highly competent. It’s OK if you have an aspiring Hollywood producer bring an out-of-control has-been Hong Kong action flick actress to his brother’s smalltown farm because they’ve been kicked out of their hotel; it’s not OK if the brother walks in unaware and said actress is freshly naked and knocks him out with a kick to the jaw. Because that requires a host of illogical things to happen — the producer-type breaking in instead of waiting, the actress riding in a car for two hours without learning where they were going, or noticing they were in a private home, choosing to walk down a strange hall naked and dripping out of the shower instead of finding a towel, having impeccable reflexes even though she’s a has-been, etc…. It’s OK if you have a guy leave a highly successful NY art career, even a People’s 50 Most Beautiful People kind of successful art career, for a smalltown California Brussels sprouts farm, and it’s OK that he’s the last holdout against the evil corporate developers who want his land for a golf course, it’s even OK, despite the fact that we’re to believe he’s the misanthropist of the century, that he makes friends with a local surfer, of all the local surfers the one who lost a foot in a freak shark attack, I’m still OK, even here, but it’s not OK that the farmer has teamed up with said surfer to grow some pot on his property, the same property he so desperately is trying to save from the developers, and accidentally grows too much and he can’t believe the surfer has told his friends about it… because none of that fits. Stoner surfers share. People in fear of losing their land don’t grow pot on it, especially when their ex-girlfriend the mayor has a vengeful ex-husband who’s a cop. And when an artist walks away from the art world, (a la Lee Bontecue, that doesn’t mean they stop making art, stop thinking about art, stop needing to do the art that got them bigtimefame in the first place.

It was at page 112 that I cried mercy. It was contrived, not fun. I felt like I was reading an elaborate storyboard, not a novel. If someday it gets made into a wacky movie — well, I don’t think I’ll make it to minute 112.

Ray Bradbury, venerable but clueless

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Jun 262008

bradbury acres of books

Ray Bradbury spoke at Long Beach’s doomed Acres of Books last night. He said nice, touching things about the bookstore and his fondness for it. Right on.

Then he said: “Right now there are no bookstores in downtown L.A. That’s terrible. That’s stupid, isn’t it?” Yeah, sure is. Except Metropolis Books IS in downtown LA, near 4th and main, and has a fantastic selection of literary fiction. It’s a new, wonderful independent bookstore and could use your support, Mr. Bradbury.

Then he said: “There’s no bookstore in Venice, California right now.” Bzzzz! Wrong again. There are TWO independent bookstores in Venice, California. Right now. Small World Books is easy to find — on the boardwalk — and has a well-known bookstore cat. In the retail district on Abbot Kinney, Equator Books features art books, specialty books (from skateboarding to bullfighting) and collectibles. Probably even some vintage Bradbury.

Mr. Bradbury, so many people listen to you, and you’re good at making stuff up. But when it comes to dissing neighborhood bookstores, please make sure you know what you’re talking about.

Responding to the litblogging boys

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Jun 242008

Ed swipes at Jay McInerney, unfairly, I think. McInerney’s review (of Andre Dubus III’s The Garden of Last Days) was so entertaining that it made me curious about what else McInerney is writing these days. For my money, though, the best review of the book appeared in the LA Times; although it was a little more sedate, it provided historical context, illuminating a seeming contradiction in the balance of fiction and fact that Dubus lays claim to.

Max answers the question: why is there no literary imdb? It could be easy, since there are obviously APIs for books’ ISBNs — that’s how LibraryThing and Goodreads must get their data. But the original question isn’t for a massive database of books so much as it is for a massive database of book reviews. I think Librarything and Goodreads both are good for this — they combine social networking and book databases and reviews — but it might help if the major book review sections joined and added their voices so you could follow them.

Speaking of joining and following, publisher W.W. Norton is on Twitter. I didn’t realize that I’d been getting addicted to the micro-blogging service (can I call it that?) until it went haywire last week and I got a twitterjones. Anyway, as Ron says, it would be nice for publishers to use web 2.0 services like Twitter for behind-the-scenes info rather than just another press release venue. But maybe that’s just us, Ron — maybe we’re too inside baseball, and the average reader can’t be expected to care too much about what Andre Dubus had for breakfast.

Out Stealing Horses and more criticishness

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Jun 122008

Per Petterson’s “Out Stealing Horses” is currently the bestselling book at Powell’s. Which makes me feel not so bad about saying it just didn’t do it for me. Initially, I found it both too quiet/cold (man walks dog by frozen lake, appreciates remote wilderness) while also being too halcyon (he remembers his teenage youth in golden fields — literally, at one point, harvesting hay). But then there was some blood, and some sexual intrigue, but the drama dribbled along without ever heating up much. The narrator is the classic passive observer — he observes his friend, his father, his own memories, the Norway/Swedish border — and it felt like he sat in the passenger seat of the story when I wanted him to jump behind the wheel and rev up the gas. As for action, he chops up a tree and feels achy afterward. Pretty darn low key, right? It felt like one of those movies I’m supposed to like, with long takes and quiet contemplation of the landscape; I get itchy, wishing something would please please happen.

But so what? How valuable are the opinions of book critics? This morning, that’s what Minnesota Public Radio asked agent/former book review editor Steve Wasserman, Chris Lavin from the San Diego Tribune and litblogger C. Max Magee, proprietor of The Millions. Audio is online (Wasserman namechecks Sarvas).

Litblogger Ed Champion performs a little book criticism today, reviewing The Reel Stuff, a book that returns to the science fiction origins of scifi films, in today’s LA Times.

On Monday, Salman Rushdie will be at Town Hall Los Angles in conversation with — Carrie Fisher. If that’s not the most fabulous literary mashup of 2008, I don’t know what is. And yes, I’ve got tickets.

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