Syntax of Things

Frey Quote

Nothing James Frey says surprises me anymore, but he has a new collaborative book/photo project coming out and as always seems to be the case when he's promoting something new, well, he steps in it:

"I'm much more part of the art world than I am the literary world," Frey said before the duo's Thursday night talk at Manhattan's Strand Bookstore. "I wanted to make a cool, sort of radical, fun art book. I have no interest in being called a memoirist. I'm a writer."

Does anyone call him a memoirist anymore?  But, surprisingly, there's more:

"The idea was just to do a cool book that would piss people off," Frey said. "People who appreciate what Terry [Richardson] and I do would love it and people who don't, would hate it." So, what's next for the pair of provocateurs?

"I'm working on another book and a TV project," Frey said. "The book's about a 32-year old secular Jew in New York who comes to believe he's the messiah."

Proper

From The Rut:

[Much thanks to good pal Kay for sending this along.]

Where Have You Gone, Leo Tolstoy?

Over at the Britannica Blog, Clay Shirkey has an interesting reply to Nicholas Carr's much discussed "Is Google Making Us Stoopid?"  Basically, Shirkey claims that the Internet has hastened the demise of not reading itself, but a certain type of reading and culture:

But the anxiety at the heart of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” doesn’t actually seem to be about thinking, or even reading, but culture.

Despite the sweep of the title, it’s focused on a very particular kind of reading, literary reading, as a metonym for a whole way of life. You can see this in Carr’s polling of “literary types,” in his quoting of Wolf and the playwright Richard Foreman, and in the reference to War and Peace, the only work mentioned by name. Now War and Peace isn’t just any piece of writing, of course; it is one of the longest novels in the canon, and symbolizes the height of literary ambition and of readerly devotion.

But here’s the thing: it’s not just Carr’s friend, and it’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting.

This observation is no less sacrilegious for being true. The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it, but that process started long before the internet became mainstream. Much of the current concern about the internet, in fact, is a misdirected complaint about television, which displaced books as the essential medium by the 1970s.

As a consolation prize, though, litterateurs were allowed to retain their cultural status. Even as television came to dominate culture, we continued to  reassure one another that War and Peace or À La Recherche du Temps Perdu were Very Important in some vague way.  (This tension has produced an entire literature about the value of reading Proust that is now more widely read than Proust’s actual oeuvre.)

And now the internet has brought reading back as an activity. As Carr notes, “we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice.”  Well, yes.  But because the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we’d been emptily praising all these years, the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture is now becoming clear.

And this, I think, is the real anxiety behind the essay: having lost its actual centrality some time ago, the literary world is now losing its normative hold on culture as well. The threat isn’t that people will stop reading War and Peace. That day is long since past. The threat is that people will stop genuflecting to the idea of reading War and Peace.

Plagued

In the Dallas Morning News, publisher Jonathan Karp discusses the problems plaguing the publishing industry and offers five options for overcoming these problems:

1. Add more titles to augment sales.

But no one knows whether the books will sell! When a new project is acquired, we base our sales projections on the way similar books have performed in the marketplace – an assumption based fundamentally in blind hope. Often, these financial projections turn out to be more fictional than the novels we publish.

2. Sell more copies of existing authors and titles. A worthwhile endeavor, but also a difficult one in a retail environment that is essentially flat.

3. Ask popular authors to "increase output." Which can result in twice as many of those ingenious serial-killer books per year.

4. Diversify your "product line." Which is why there are six new diet books and presidential biographies every season: Publishers are engaged in an endless war for market share in the same limited categories, even though there's little demand for new books in many of them.

5. Cut costs, pray to the gods of movie tie-in paperback editions, or hope that one of your authors gets his or her own talk show.

Given those pressures, I understand why a conscientious publisher would choose the first option – to add titles fast and hope to catch some cultural wave. Think of Hannah Montana, Obama-mania, entrepreneurial self-promoters with a brand to build or political provocateurs such as Jonah Goldberg, whose pointless thought exercise Liberal Fascism is just the latest example of what the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once termed "boob bait for the bubbas."

Busted

Friday and the air conditioner has been dead for two days.  Luckily I have my experience of proper fan placement learned from all those years spent in non-ac'd apartments in San Diego.  But the key is to keep all activity, including blogging, to a minimum.  After all, blogging is physically demanding.  I'm starting to sweat just typing this.

To escape this heat, I hope to take in Gonzo tonight in an air-conditioned movie theater, but I definitely won't have the same experience with the documentary that Will Leitch of Deadspin had.  Here is Leitch on meeting Hunter S. Thompson:

I’d like to say he was a fevered, inspirational dervish to the both of us, but that’s not true. Mostly, he just seemed like a sad old man, stuck in a role he invented for himself but would never be able to escape. It was depressing, even for a 24-year-old who hadn’t done shit, to see an American journalistic titan reduced to asking two stranger kids –- children, really –- to relive his great moments for him, moments that were long, long gone. When we left that night, driving to Las Vegas straight, we broke our slackjawed silence only to mock him, to vow that would never happen to us.

Watching “Gonzo” last night, seeing those last days, when Hunter was trapped playing the part of “Hunter,” typing out limp retreads of his blistering early work, I was struck with how much we were the problem. Not just us. All those who met with the Good Doctor to tell their friends about it, to share Crazy Hunter Thompson stories. All those editors who let him get away with anything, especially toward the end, when there was nothing on the page but a legend trampling on himself, because that was all he had left to do.

And yet, as the movie points out, he had one last great piece in him. His piece for ESPN, after September 11, pretty much nails every single world event that was going to happen over the next seven years, events he would blissfully miss out on. At the time, when I read that column, I hated it. I didn’t want to hear about wars and rantings and warblings; I just wanted to drink and hit my head against things. But he was right. It still feels a little bit like Hunter. Even if ESPN was just letting him do whatever he wanted, because, Christ, Hunter S. Thompson is writing for us. Even with assholes like us, dropping by, trying to live off the old man for a while, get a story they can tell people in a blog seven years later, feel cool. We were all making it worse. We were making the old man dance for us. And he did.

Nobody Cares

I don't know who sent me this information about this new literary journal open for submissions.  I don't know who will be judging the submissions.  And I'll probably never know who submitted.  But I like the idea.

Poet Laurewho?

I have to admit that I've never heard of Kay Ryan who has been named our nation's Poet Laureate.  The challenge for the rest of the day will be trying to remember whom she replaces.

If you'd like to get to know our new PL, here's a Christian Science Monitor profile of Ryan from 2004.  The NY Times has a few of her poems for the reading.

Two

She ended her second year with a wasp sting on the forehead, which in some cultures I'm sure is a sign of good fortune.  She'll begin her third year with some barefoot piano playing and a lot of cake.

The wasps have been eliminated.

Bye Bat

July has been a hell of month and it's only the 15th.  So many deaths and demises it seems.  I'll miss this one for sure.  Of course, if there's one thing we can all be certain of, it's the uncertain certainty of an Ed Champion farewell.  Return reluctantly or not, just return when and if you're ready, Mr. Segundo.

OA Giveaway II

Going to be a slow week around these parts as the SoT family prepares for the wee one's second birthday.  So in the spirit of gift giving, I have an extra copy of the latest issue of The Oxford American, the "Best of the South" issue, which includes a must-see DVD (trailer above).  If you want a copy, shoot me an email with your mailing address and tell me your favorite Southern food.  The email that makes me the hungriest will get the issue.

Tough Decisions

Back tomorrow once I'm fully recovered from the road trip to Stone Mountain, Georgia, the return part of which included six solid hours of heavy rain and the witnessing of a Georgia sheriff deputy hydroplane off the interstate as he sped by us to investigate a wreck up ahead.  But despite the stress of white knuckling for that amount of time, I did find one brief moment of bliss, a take away from a stop to fill up with gas in an out-of-the-way town in Somewhereville, South Carolina.  Witness the above which was part of an advertisement above the gas pump.  Too bad for the "or" because I can't imagine having to choose.

Here's a Poem and Here's a Cat

We've paid the ransom and we're getting the kid back today, but we have to drive down to Atlanta to fetch her.  Before I go, here's a little Buk home video to get you ready for the weekend.

Bookwormer

A group of researchers in Toronto have just released results of a study showing that "bookworms have exceptionally strong people skills."  This comes as news to those of us bookworms who pretty much can't stand people.  I kid.

Their years of research - summed up in the current issue of New Scientist magazine - has shown readers of narrative fiction scored higher on tests of empathy and social acumen than those who read non-fiction texts. And follow-up research showed that reading fiction may help fine-tune these skills: People assigned to read a New Yorker short story did better on social reasoning tests than those who read an essay from the same magazine.

Those benefits, researchers say, may be because fiction acts as a type of simulator. Reading about make-believe people having make-believe adventures or whirlwind romances may actually help people navigate those trials in real life.

"Fiction is really about how to get around in the social world, which is not as easy as one might think," said Keith Oatley, one of the researchers and a professor in the department of human development and applied psychology at the University of Toronto. "People who read fiction give themselves quite a bit of practice in understanding that. And also, I think reading fiction sort of prompts one to think about these questions - you know, what are these people up to?"

         

I must be reading the wrong fiction.

Carried to Dust

Not sure how I feel about trailers for albums, but if it's Calexico, I'm okay with it.  Here's the trailer for their album, Carried to Dust, due out in September.

Oxford American Offer You Can't Refuse!

I think I've made my feelings for The Oxford American pretty clear over the years of blogging here at Syntax of Things, but in case you haven't been paying attention I'll just tell you that it is a magazine that never fails to impress.  And it's always a good bargain whether you're picking it up at the newstand or getting a subscription.

Well, if you need more convincing, why not grab yourself a subscription and check it out?  In fact, I have an offer that will be too hard to turn down:

The Oxford American Subscription Special

For a limited time The Oxford American is offering its lowest subscription rate ever!  A one-year subscription is only $10.95 which includes this year’s 10th Anniversary edition of the award-winning, highly coveted Music Issue with double CD.

This exceptional rate is valid through July 13th and is only applicable by subscribing online and using the designated promo code: Q0608.

Contact matt@oxfordamericanmag.com with questions regarding this promotion.

And don't forget to tell them that Syntax of Things sent you.