The Bosphorus in Turkey at sunset

My review of Vendela Vida’s new novel The Lovers is in today’s LA Times. It’s set in Turkey, and follows Yvonne, a 53 year-old widow. While it’s a sleek read, I didn’t love it. Here’s why:

Yvonne is the only part of the book with complexity, while everything she encounters in Turkey is surface. This may be a smart novelist’s trick, using an exotic location as an emotional map. But it also makes the book feel like it could have been set in Trenton or Detroit or Coalinga — any place both a desolate landscape and a refuge of renewal. Instead, what we get is an uncomfortable act of novelistic imperialism: the exotic land, its sites manipulated to reflect the disarranged emotional life of the American tourist, all without a sense of the place having its own history, its own cultural life — and its own tragedies.

And, for now, I think I’ll leave it at that.

Well, I don’t think it’s to be expected, because there are a lot of angles on a book, and authors spend years writing them, years in which lots of ideas have come and gone. There are many places for a conversation to go, and I’d like to think that I listen and follow and ask questions that might have interesting answers.

All these are excerpts of interviews I did for Jacket Copy. If you’d told me in 1989, when I read The Handmaid’s Tale, that I’d be talking to Margaret Atwood about penises, to a National Book Award nominee about the conflicting responsibilities of journalism and fiction, and to that guy who’d just published  Mysteries of Pittsburgh about his four kids, I would have told you yes, your acid had kicked in and it was time for you to go see the Butthole Surfers show, already. But here we are.

Margaret Atwood had just published Year of the Flood, a fearsome yet slightly giddy post-apocalyptic sideways follow-up to Oryx and Crake. Part of the novel follows an eco-cult with a charismatic leader, and it includes lyrics of the cult’s hymns. Those hymns were sung — by a choir, trio, individual — in staged performances on tour, with Atwood reading and actors performing scripted parts of the book. The performances shared a script and Atwood, but otherwise were widely different.

Kellogg: After you’ve seen [Year of the Flood] be performed in all these different ways, would you like to see it as a film?

Atwood: It might be too big and multiple for that. It might lend itself more to a series. The real stumbling block is those people with big blue penises (laughs). How are you going to show that on film? I just don’t know. You could have them lurking behind bushes, I suppose. You’d have to have somebody with a very good sense of style. It could be pretty tawdry, but of course any story could be pretty tawdry, depending on how it’s made.

Kellogg: Do you think there’s enough sex in literary fiction? Do you think literary fiction writers are a little afraid of being tawdry?

Atwood: I think they’re a little afraid of being inelegant verbally. There is an award given every year in Britain for the worst sex scene in a book, and nobody wants to win that award. It’s very easy to overwrite a sex scene, at which point it becomes comic.

Kellogg: Why do you think that is?

Atwood: Sex itself is a very subjective experience. So that when you’re describing it objectively, it can quite easily become funny.

Kellogg: But so many other states of being– [meaning to say "that are subjective that can be written well," but Atwood cut me off]

Atwood: Think about it: he put his X on her Y.

Kellogg: (laughs)

Atwood: Already it’s funny, and you don’t even know what the X and Y are. It has to be handled pretty carefully, if you don’t want to be writing just plain old porn, or if you don’t want people to collapse in hysterical laughter.

–

When Far North by Marcel Theroux was announced as a finalist for the National Book Award, I realized we hadn’t yet given it any coverage in the LA Times, so I interviewed him. Another post-apocalyptic book, this one is more quiet than Atwood’s — it follows Makepeace as she ekes out a marginal survival on the freezing edge of a disappeared society (think Mad Max on the opposite end of the world). Theroux is a novelist and journalist; he’s reported for the BBC.

Kellogg: [In Far North] Makepeace is such a loner. She spends much of the early part of her life alone, and she is often remote from the people around her. Was it hard to render the world around her? She’s always the filter.

Theroux: I never felt like her landscape was that empty, because there was so much in it, she had so many things she needed to do. There were all kinds of sources of conflict for her, and she’d had a very rich and interesting past. I guess I’m quite interested in isolation, anyway. That never felt like one of the difficulties of writing the book.

It’s a real place — the place where she is having her adventures in Siberia –- I’ve visited maybe five or six times for other reasons before I wrote the book. So it was a place that felt very real to me. Things in it — quite surprising things — I’ve actually seen. I felt confident rendering her world.

Kellogg: By things you’ve seen, do you mean the way people live in that environment?

Theroux: Partly that. Things in the far north — I’ve been into reindeer herders’ huts in north Siberia. But even smaller things. I went to Chechnya in 2000, which then was in the grip of a terrible civil war. The place — Grozny, the capital — had been bombed to hell, and it was very, very dangerous. There were Russian soldiers in checkpoints along the streets, and they would kind of hide in their little posts at night because it was even too dangerous for Russian soldiers to go around. There was a guy whitewashing the sidewalk outside his apartment, which was an insane bit of punctiliousness. The whole place was horrible. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was cleaning it. His name was Shamsudin. I kind of put him in the book, to commemorate him, that civilizing impulse. He was a guy who decided he needed the sidewalk to look nice outside of his largely ruined apartment building, which I thought was kind of amazing and improbable.

Kellogg: You’ve been in some pretty rough places as a journalist.

Theroux: I’ve tried to avoid them, but I have occasionally. I suppose Chechnya was the hairiest place.

Kellogg: What are the different responsibilities of the journalist and the novelist toward violence and brutality?

Theroux: In fiction, you’re saying, “look at this horrible brutality,” but at the same time, the author made it up. So the author’s weirdly complicit in the brutality in a way that a journalist isn’t. I’m sort of haunted by violence, I suppose everyone is. I find it –- I’m sort of fascinated by it. I suppose one of the things I’m interested in is that human beings have composite brains that reflect different stages of evolution — we have a lizard brain that is violent and impulsive and ugly, and we have successive layers of more sophisticated brain that have higher functioning, empathy, the capacity to love and care for each other. The ghastly truth about human beings is that all these things coexist in the same person. And the structures of civilization are a restraining influence on our capacity to do horrible things to one another. I suppose that’s another reason why post-apocalyptic — I prefer calling it speculative — genre is interesting, because it allows you to explore what would happen when some of these civilizing influences are taken away, the same way that [William Golding] does in “Lord of the Flies.”

–

Manhood for Amateurs had already been covered by the LA Times when I talked to Michael Chabon about it. The book is a collection of essays Chabon wrote for Details, and while I don’t know anything about fatherhood or being a son, it was still a lovely read. Chabon’s writing is like that — really lovely, even when it’s saying something difficult.

Kellogg: In our review of your book, Steve Almond wrote that you’re incapable of writing a boring sentence.

Chabon: How about that? That was very nice of him.

Kellogg: But I wonder if maybe you’re incapable of publishing a boring sentence? I’d like to ask you about your writing process. Because I’m guessing that these pieces did not spring fully formed onto the page.

Chabon: Oh, no, they definitely did. I actually just wrote them on napkins. While I was cooking dinner and watching a baseball game.

Kellogg: (laughs)

Chabon: I work really hard on my sentences, and on my paragraphs, too.

Kellogg: It’s kind of stunning to anyone who’s ever tried to write that you and Ayelet have four kids and you both actually finish books. What’s your routine? How do you make space to craft your work?

Chabon: Thank god school was invented. I don’t know what we would do if it hadn’t been. We send them away every day. They leave the house — we drive them to school, and then we’ve got all this time. Ayelet works primarily, almost entirely during that period, and she’s very efficient. When she’s really working on a novel or whatever she gets her word count in every day, and that works well for her. I have a harder time — my natural rhythm is to work at night, stay up late and to sleep late. I can get more writing done between midnight and 1 o’clock in the morning than at any other hour of the day.

Unfortunately, that schedule does not work at all well in a family with small children. If I sleep late, then I miss out on what I think is the nicest, most pleasurable time of the day, of an ordinary, everyday routine. In the morning — my kids are generally in a pretty good mood when they wake up, you know, we make breakfast. I hate missing out on that, so I get up. So that means I can’t really stay up as late as I might like. Or else I don’t get enough sleep. I struggle with the schedule. And I’ve been struggling with it for years. Lately, sleep has been losing out. I’ve been staying up late, and getting up early. It doesn’t work as well for me as it does for Ayelet, and I envy her that she’s more of a morning/day person than I am.

Often, I have to go away [to write]. I’ll go to a place like the MacDowell Colony, or borrow somebody’s cabin, or go to a hotel even. Stay up until all hours, and sleep late, and just crank. I can get a lot done. Even in three or four days, I can do about as much as I could do in a month at home.

Who will that be? I don’t know.

I hope it’s someone who cares about criticism, about the fascinating changes in publishing, about LA’s community of readers and writers and about new media, in both its narrative potential and the wonderful changes it is bringing to book culture.

Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have become an incredibly powerful source for virtually all of our news and entertainment needs. A recent news story confirmed that Facebook is the second most popular site on the internet—only Google has more daily downloads. If our readers are getting information from social networking sites, it only makes sense that university presses participate in the conversation. How can university presses harness these incredibly popular and influential sites to reach our readers? How can we develop engaged communities of interested readers? This panel will demystify and navigate the social networking phenomenon to help us get the most bang for our tweet.

Chair: Colleen Lanick, Publicity Manager, MIT Press
Panelists: Laura Baich, Electronic Marketing Manager, Indiana University Press; Jennifer Howard, Senior Writer, The Chronicle of Higher Education; Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times

I get to Salt Lake City on Thursday evening. That’s probably too late to investigate the other oil spill.

He answers his door barefoot, in jeans, and leads me through into his kitchen: grey glass mosaic tiles, white Ikea cabinetry, brushed metal hardware. He hasn’t changed a thing since he bought the place in 2006.

But I didn’t write that; the London Times wrote that. Their reporter, Tom Shone, must have visited earlier in the day, because Ellis made coffee. He offered me Coke, or Diet Coke, if I preferred, in tiny cans. And while I did write an opening with the coke-haha-Coke joke, I deleted it in an early draft. But Carl Swanson went for it in New York Magazine:

Coke for Bret Easton Ellis these days comes in those 7.5-ounce mini-cans—the new, vaguely European ones containing only 90 calories. This is what he offers me, taking one for himself, after inviting me into his apartment….

In article after article, Ellis meets a journalist at his apartment in jeans, barefoot (variation: hoodie, polo shirt). Time after time, he walks to the kitchen before settling in with the reporter in his office. It’s hard not to think the Coke offer is designed to lure writers into the allusion to drugs — what, no Snapple? — and that the bare feet deliberate, tempting (successfully) each writer to mention this seemingly unique detail.

We’re all desperate for details, something that will ring true without being exactly the same thing that gets reported elsewhere. And there’s the challenge, because as a reporter, I have to tell a story that we’re all telling: there was this book, 25 years ago. It was about LA. The author, who got famous from it, was a New Yorker for a long time, but now he’s back in LA, and he’s revisiting the characters in his new book.

As an author, Ellis has to talk about the book; what he may also be do is performing a role of as a certain version of Bret Easton Ellis. During my time sitting on the low chair in his office, as he sat behind a large computer monitor — which was beeping as, I’m pretty sure, emails arrived, and his eyes flickered to it regularly — I asked him about what Lou Reed, or maybe Andy Warhol, had said: interviews are an art form. Are they?

“They are,” he said. “But you can do them as an art form and completely tell the truth, and not like stretch the truth at all. I don’t think there is anything that I have said so far in this interview that is not true.”

I considered writing about trying to get at the real Ellis, but that wasn’t this story, and I was nowhere near the real one. I only had a vague nagging sense that it wasn’t what I was getting.

That became clear when I read these other articles: he not only went through the same routine, he said the same things over and over, virtually verbatim. Quotes about narcissism, about his idea of Empire and post-Empire, a lot of things that I left out. One thing I didn’t report has surfaced elsewhere: Ellis says that his new book, Imperial Bedrooms, is like Chandler. But right now, let me say: it’s not.

• Chandler writes like this: “It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.”
• Imperial Bedrooms has sentences like this: “The blue eyes are complementing a light blue V-neck and a navy-blue miniskirt, something a girl would have worn in 1985 when the movie takes place.”

There’s nothing wrong with what Ellis has done, but seeing how much of his interview was said elsewhere reinforced the idea I had upon leaving: that whoever Bret Easton Ellis is, I had only seen a shadow of him. And I can’t help but wish there were something more authentic about this process. That Ellis was actually answering questions, rather than performing the skit starring this rehearsed version of himself.

No wonder he was reading his email — it must be boring to say the same thing to Vice, to Movieline, to the London Times and New York Magazine and the LA Times and whoever else has gone through the exercise, pieces pending.

Thanks to Len Edgerly for asking me; it is far easier to be on a podcast than produce one.

In this mixed-level course, we will read and discuss published narrative nonfiction as a means to investigate questions of truth and storytelling, and where the two intersect. There will be in-class exercises that address specific craft issues such as scene and voice, among others, and every student will have the opportunity to workshop at least one piece of nonfiction writing in a serious environment meant to challenge and inspire each member of the class.

This course will take place in the instructor’s home in Echo Park, where beer, wine and sparkling water—and the occasional delicious snack—will be served.

In class, we will explore the pleasures of reality-based narratives and the sometimes-conflicting pressures of truthtelling and storytelling. We will discuss the difference between memoir and memory, the difficulties of disclosure, and explore the edges of nonfiction. We will also practice, practice, practice: form, technique, discipline, play. Workshops and exercises are designed to ignite the desire to read and to write. Each individual voice will be fostered, encouraging students to be the best writers they can be.

Between writing about city council meetings, ranches and drought, he did a lot of driving. His stories are as much about the people and places he comes to know as they are about where his mind takes him along the way.

Sun and solitude and desert roads led to hallucinatory leaps. Thinking he’s discovered a way to find Ambrose Bierce, Silverstein starts asking locals where they’ve seen the Devil. Later, following the La Carrera Panamericana car race, he turns up a history of crashes so bloody it makes “Death Race 2000″ look like “Mary Poppins.” These stories, so extraordinary and surreal, could not possibly be true. But they are.

Perhaps it was their strangeness that gave Silverstein the idea to fill out the book with fictions. It’s an unusual, counterintuitive move.

In recent years, the fluid boundary between fact and fiction has displaced more than one writer. There was James Frey, whose exaggerated sins set him on Oprah’s couch, apologizing. Or Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair, of the New Republic and the New York Times, respectively, who were caught making things up instead of reporting — both lost their jobs. Such incidents suggest a rumbling cultural anxiety about truth and fiction, as explored in the new book “Reality Hunger” by David Shields.

Silverstein addresses the issue head on. “I do not wish to deceive by passing off fiction as fact, as so many have done” he writes in the preface, “only to permit the real to mingle with the imagined, as it does in the deserted labyrinth of the mind.”

I’m currently fascinated by the fiction-reality trespassers and was delighted to read Silverstein’s book. It turns out he had previous published all the nonfiction pieces (in Harper’s); the fiction pieces are written around them, providing a glue and arc. I think it’s a fine approach, but a unique one. Now I’m curious how the next trespasser will see the lay of the land.

I wrote about the iPad for the LA Times, focusing on the reading experience and what it means. I compared it to Amazon’s Kindle; e-ink and light weight notwithstanding, Apple’s iPad came out ahead.

Although the Kindle is, as an Amazon.com spokesperson told me, “purpose-built” for reading, it seems to have lost an essential connection to books. You can do many things with its e-books — search them, make notes, leave bookmarks — but you have to learn its interface. The Kindle feels like an e-reading device, whereas an iPad feels like reading.

It’s possible that all the iPad’s book-like touches will eventually be shadows of a left-behind technology. But to me, it signals something more elusive: that books have a specific and unique shape.

Now that we consume so much content electronically — websites and news and blogs, e-mails and text messages — it’s unclear how the book will adapt. Will it have embedded video? Will it include links, like a Web page? The best aspects of the iPad’s e-reader show that even as books morph, there are certain things that make them distinct.

The story that ran in print is far from where I’d started. I’d wanted to write about how the iPad would affect publishers, about how Apple selling ebooks was heralding a new era in which publishing houses could see a challenger to Amazon, and that the Apple business model for electronic sales would change not just the retail model but administrative accounting details, and possibly more. And I reported some of this, but the fact is a newspaper freelancer like me, with blogging and teaching commitments, can’t write that story.

You know who can? A staff writer at the New Yorker, who can settle in and take the time to do it all. And  that’s Ken Auletta, who has written that story wonderfully. Here it is.

PS The photo above is owned by the LA Times. But I was there when they took it, and had to bring in the iPad for the photo shoot. So I’m hoping they don’t mind me borrowing it.