Syntax of Things

O Eugenides

Oprah's Book Club has posted an interview with Jeffrey Eugenides.  You'll have to join the club to read it so a link here will do you no good unless you're willing to give up your email address and a DNA sample.  If you do, you'll be able to read more than just this:

What are the most unusual questions you've been asked about Middlesex?
They usually involve my pants. People want me to remove them. It's difficult to convince some people that I make things up for a living. They think all this really happened to me, which it didn't.

Friday Fix #2

If the video I posted earlier got you jonesing for a fix of David Foster Wallace, here he is, bandana and all, at the 2006 Le Conversazioni Festival in Italy.  (Bonus points if you spot Franzen in the crowd.)

+  Le Conversazioni home page.  Check out videos from the likes of Zadie Smith, Nathan Englander, Jeffrey Eugenides, and JFranz.  That's just the 2006 lineup.  This year saw an equally impressive roster, but as of this posting, no video footage.

Friday Fix #1

If, like me, you're missing your weekly new episode of The Office, here's a little video clip that might help. Most of you are probably aware that John Krasinski (Jim Halpert) is directing a film adaptation of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.  No, this isn't a first look at the film; it is him reading from one of the "brief interviews," #14 if you're wanting to read along (p. 17 in the paperback edition).

A New Low

Thanks to CNN:

Not necessarily in that order.  Someone told me she was reading from her prison journal.  I have a sick feeling that this might become the best-selling prison memoir of all-time.  Shoot me now.

Hummingbirddinger

Something told me I wouldn't have to wait too long to find out more information about Mr. Urrea's new project.  Unfortunately, it's a good news/bad news thing:

Well, amigos and amigas--I have been writing for several days now. Feeling like hell. Hot and bored and listening to music and burning candles (for that good spiritula light) and burning incense (for that old Hummingbird vibe) and smudging the desk with sage oils. All kinds of spaced out rituals left over from my shaman-saint years. Basically to distract me from planting my butt in the chair. But I've been writing.

As you know, I wrote House of Broken Angels this year. BUT IT WAS DEEMED TOO SHOCKING. That's right--I committed a thought-crime of some sort, and the great powers above me felt that you, my friendly book-club-lovin' readers, would fall over dead if I unleashed a furious book upon you like that one. I was frustrated in my arguments--after all, The Devil's Highway is hardly a gigglefest...and if you think about it, Hummingbird's Daughter is charming, but it deals with genocide, poverty, violence against women, the poor and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. In fact, if you look at the Urrea bookshelf, you'll find lots of really nasty stuff. So the outcome of this difficult change of direction for me was that they made me an offer: write something else. And then write Hummingbird II. Then we'll think about this Broken Angels business.

Fortunately, Wen-Fu and the Theory and Practice of Trust (Faith!) never fail, and I had a killer idea. And I'm two excellent (if I do say so myself) chapters in. It looks like it's going to fly. It's going to make you happy. It's a secret.

She Calls Me Bukowski

I'm going to be a touch busy the next few day, so posting will more than likely be on the light side.  In fact, today, all I have is this Raymond Carver poem about a Charles Bukowski reading, which might be the best thing I've posted in a few weeks come to think of it. 

Round

Be sure to stop by the tireless Mr. Wickett's place for his annual litblogger roundtable, this year featuring a couple of my regular reads, a Met fan who also happens to be one of my favorite bloggers, and a few blogs that are new to me. 

Jessica Stockton – Written Nerd – www.writtennerd.blogspot.com

Darby Dixon – Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks - http://www.thegrue.org/tdaoc/

John Fox – BookFox - http://www.thejohnfox.com/

Callie Miller – Counterbalance – www.counterbalance.typepad.com

Carol Novack – I am Not Who I Think I Am, or is it Whom? - http://carolnovack.blogspot.com/

Carolyn Kelloggg – Pinky’s Paperhaus – www.pinkyspaperhaus.com

Levi Asher – Literary Kicks – www.litkicks.com

Kelly Spitzer – Kelly Spitzer – www.kellyspitzer.com

Matthew Tiffany - Condalmo - http://condalmo.typepad.com

As Dan would say, Enjoy!

Your Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle

It's a subject I sometimes get tired of reading about but one that I don't mind discussing from time to time, when I'm bored, when I'm heading back to the office for the first time in three weeks, when I'm thinking about missing my baby and my baby's mama, and ah, even when I put the earphones in to silence the pumped in office white noise and wonder why I couldn't just sit down in my dead time, fire up a Tom Waits playlist, and write the great rock 'n' roll novel.  Oh, it can't be and has never been written you say?  Avoid it all cost you say?  Someone should have told Jonathan Lethem about the pitfalls you say?  I guess that's what they all say:

Over the years, few literary subgenres have been more troublesome than the rock novel. Great Jones Street doesn’t come close to the standards of DeLillo’s later Underworld or Libra, but it’s easy to see the thinking process of serious literature fans who crave mythical rock tales: “This? Or Jackie Collins’s Rock Star?”

What novelist with a big record collection wouldn’t be excited at the prospect of writing about rock’n’roll life: the internal politics, the heartbreak, the potential for myth-making? Nonetheless, the rock-novel genre contains some of history’s most misguided books. Bad fake music journalism disguised as fiction for people who don’t read fiction? Literary slumming from writers who really should know better? Overexcited fan-boy ramblings? It’s all here.

You might have thought that, given enough time to get his beachball-sized brain around it, Salman Rushdie could write with dizzying eloquence about any subject under the sun, but The Ground Beneath Her Feet, his Orpheus-referencing story about a rock band operating in an alternate dimension, feels as inherently wrong as a man playing air typewriter at Wembley. As for Jeff Gomez’s tribute to the 1990s American indie scene, Our Noise, might it not have been easier to write a list of all the lo-fi bands operating out of Chapel Hill circa 1994 and be done with it?

Jonathan Coe’s Morrissey-obsessed indie-rock novel The Dwarves of Death – it’s rarely a sign of a writer at ease with his subject matter when he begins his book with the line “I find it hard to describe what happened” – is a faltering anomaly in his back list. As anyone who has read the passages in The Rotters’ Club about the prog rock-loving Philip Chase will know, Coe can write with great wit and perception about musical obsession. So why, when he takes music as his central subject, is the result about as interesting as a Wedding Present sound check?

It seems that the best pop-themed novels are those that dance nimbly around the edges of their subject, never quite getting to the microphone, or even the moshpit: books such as The Rotters’ Club, or High Fidelity, or Tom Perrotta’s The Wishbones. It is when a writer attempts to be more definitive that problems occur. How do you encapsulate the ephemeral, train-spotterish world of pop and rock without coming up with a book that is ephemeral and train-spotterish?

{via}

Harr/Tharr

If you believe the reports, and I really have no reason to doubt them, it looks like my old hometown fishrag, the San Diego Union-Tribune, is about to cut its standalone book review, one of the last standalones remaining in the country.  Have no fear.  Apparently, instead of a highly useless petition, it looks like protesters are getting ready to launch a chain e-mail bomb campaign.  I bet if that doesn't work, there will surely be enough energy left in their laptops to type out newspaper articles blaming the litblogs for this also.  The maggots live!

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Of course, there's plenty of blame to go around.  Apparently, book clubs just might be bad for reading.

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Meanwhile, my current hometown paper,Raleigh's News & Observer, began a new era of book coverage today with Marcy Smith taking over as the Literary Editor.  Smith has announced a new occasional  feature she calls Spoken Out Loud in which she and guest columnist will write about all things book related, hopefully with a local twist.

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A new (to me) blog, booktwo, which reports on literature and technology, offers up some links to what it calls Google fanfic, including "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google" by Bruce Sterling.

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I just have to write it:  fag-pack classics.

And they do look rather authentic, spoofily constructed with fliptop box, cellophane wrap, gold ribbony bit and that traditional insert of matt foil that thumbs away to reveal ... well, not 20 Marlboro, or whatever, but a dinky book you might read in a crowded lift. Yes, just when people might think you were about to light up, and are already calling the police, you start reading aloud from 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro'! Ha-ha.  {via}

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Here's a pretty nice bit of literary trivia:  apparently the only museum in the world dedicated to the memory of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald is located in Montgomery, Alabama.  Why?  I'm sure you're asking.  Well, Zelda was from there and the two actually lived there in the 1930s.

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The film rights to two works by William Faulkner, Red Leaves and Light In August, have been acquired from the author's estate by actor-director James Franco who plans to start filming Red Leaves this year with no date as of yet for Light in August.

Beached Beats

Peter Orlovsky, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs.  {via}

QotD: Baseball and the Disappearing Book Review Section

During the 8th inning of last night's game between the Detroit Tigers and the Atlanta Braves, longtime Braves broadcaster Skip (son of Harry, father of Chip) Caray had this to say:

I see where the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Braves are teaming up to sponsor a book drive tomorrow.  I find that ironic considering the [AJC] doesn't have a book editor anymore.

Breaking: Albert/LeRoy Liable*

So sayeth a jury:

The Manhattan federal jury awarded the production company $116,500 after deliberating for several hours in the case against San Francisco writer Laura Albert. Antidote International Films Inc. had sued Albert, who went to strange lengths to hide her identity behind her alter ego, a male prostitute named JT LeRoy.

We're eagerly awaiting the first comment from JT.

*Thanks Richard.

Well-respected Man

Birthday number 63 for one of rock and roll's great (and underrated) poets, Ray Davies.

Alcohol  (see it performed live here)

Here is a story about a sinner,
He used to be a winner who enjoyed a life of prominence and position,
But the pressures at the office and his socialite engagements,
And his selfish wife's fanatical ambition,
It turned him to the booze,
And he got mixed up with a floosie
And she led him to a life of indecision.
The floosie made him spend his dole
She left him lying on skid row
A drunken lag in some salvation army mission.
It's such a shame.
Oh demon alcohol,
Sad memories I cannot recall,
Who thought I would say,
Damn it all and blow it all,
Oh demon alcohol,
Memories I cannot recall,
Who thought I would fall a slave to demon alcohol.
Barley wine pink gin,
He'll drink anything,
Port, pernod or tequila,
Rum, scotch, vodka on the rocks,
As long as all his troubles disappeared.
But he messed up his life and he beat up his wife,
And the floosies gone and found another sucker
She's gonna turn him on to drink
She's gonna lead him to the brink
And when his moneys gone,
She'll leave him in the gutter,
It's such a shame.
Oh demon alcohol,
Sad memories I cannot recall,
Who thought I would fall,
A slave to demon alcohol.

{ht}

Rollin, Rollin, Rollin

Here's video of the On the Road scroll being unrolled recently for its display in Kerouac's birthplace, Lowell, Mass. I admit, it's about as exciting as watching paint dry, but those of us who have yet to see it in person get our best look at the scroll since it went on its cross-country tour a few years ago.

Drop In

There's a lot to like about this snippet from the BBC documentary "Timothy Leary: The Man Who Turned on America" but I would have to say that one has to wonder how different the world would have been if Leary hadn't been tripping the night before Kesey and the Merry Pranksters dropped in on Millbrook and if the "psychedelic cheerleaders from the East and West Coast" had actually been able meet during the 1960s.  Would we be here now?  Would there be an Internet as we know it?   

You can see more of the documentary at this site.

I/We/S/He/It

If ever there were a trial made for Court TV, it would have to be the civil fraud trial of Laura Albert, the woman who invented JT Leroy and who is being sued by a film company that she fooled into believing that Leroy was, in fact, a living breathing somethingorother.  Just reading the story of how she came to invent JT Leroy begs many, many questions, and leaves one wondering about the woman's sanity, but is there an insanity defense in civil cases?.  A few choice quotes from the article:

• “He was my respirator,” she said. “He was my channel for air. To me if you take my JT, my Jeremy, my other, I die.”
• As a heavy girl with an unfortunate last name, Ms. Albert told the jury she was teased in childhood as “Fat Albert,” going so far as to sing for them the television show’s key line: “Hey, hey, hey, Fat Albert!” She said, “I didn’t want my name.”
• Ms. Albert said: “She became JT. It’s like a trinity. We experienced it. It was as if he would leave me and enter her — I know how it sounds.”
  Then she said: “He wanted his own body. He so wanted to be out of me. I wanted this other child I had to be out in the world. He didn’t like being inside me. He could talk such smack about me.”

One, Two, Three, Four

So what do you do when your punk rock career is over? 

As the featured soloist with The Pasadena POPS Orchestra (www.pasadenapops.com), Richie Ramone--an extraordinarily gifted as well as technically skilled musician-- will be drumming a 17-minute interpretation of the Leonard Bernstein classic, West Side Story. This first series of performances with the POPS represents a new career direction for Richie Ramone, who will be touring with other symphony and pops orchestras through 2009.

Widely considered one of the fastest and most exacting drummers in rock music, Richie Ramone's unique style has inspired a generation of punk-rock fans. For his solo performances with the POPS, Richie Ramone will be playing with noted composer, musical director, arranger and keyboard player Ron Abel who created the Suite under Richie's direction. Ron Abel has worked with numerous stars of stage and screen, such as Lucy Arnez, Liza Minelli, Michele Lee and Shirley Jones, and has won awards writing the score for Twist of Fate.

{via}

The Anti-Snob

Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller makes an interesting case for "book like," saying that we--the nose-in-the-air book lovers--need to both give credit to and help foster the needs of those folks who just like books.  Remember, the likers are the future:

In the midst of last weekend's wonderful Printers Row Book Fair, I listened to author after author, moderator after moderator, panelist after panelist (including me), automatically refer to the assembled multitude as "book lovers." Now, book lovers are wonderful. Book lovers are essential. I love book lovers. But it occurred to me that the audience surely included a good number of people -- perhaps even a majority -- who, if pressed, would classify themselves as "book likers." As people who enjoy reading, as people who respect authors and seek knowledge, but for whom reading is not a consuming, world-obliterating, walls-come-tumblin'-down passion.

If literature is to survive beyond the next few years, assailed as it is by the triple whammy of brutal economics, shrinking attention spans and unrelenting competition from less demanding pastimes, it will survive as much because of book likers as book lovers. Book lovers remain a fairly stable unit from century to century, a crucial but relatively small segment of the population for whom words are life itself. Book lovers, that is, aren't a growth area.

But book likers -- those whose livelihoods don't depend on the publishing industry, those who might be teachers, roofers, chefs, accountants, tow-truck drivers, financial analysts or waitresses -- constitute a huge potential market. The number of book likers can readily expand, depending on how solid a case we make for the merits of a particular book -- and how well the book, once opened, does its job. The miracle of the Harry Potter series, after all, is how many new readers it has lured into literature's tent. Author J.K. Rowling performs her greatest magic on people who heretofore weren't regular readers. Her works reach out to book likers, not just book lovers. Book likers are literature's only real hope; they are its last, best chance.

Yet the arts often come swaddled in snobbery. There are critics, unfortunately, who encourage this snooty exclusivity: If you've not attended the symphony for a while, if your nightstand isn't stacked with literary classics, if you've let your Art Institute membership lapse, you're made to feel as if you really ought to just shuffle along to the ball game, beer in hand, and leave the highbrow stuff to the masters.

Tuileries

I do like a little Steve Buscemi with my Coen brothers. And I renew my call to have Mr. Buscemi play Don Knotts in any role save a movie version of The Andy Griffith Show. Just thinking of Hollywood tinkering with TAGS makes me retch.{via}

Urrea on Immigration

I keep doing the occasional check of his blog to try and find out the what/when/where of his new book but thanks to the surgery haven't checked in while.  So it was a nice surprise to see that one of my favorite writers, Luis Alberto Urrea, has written an article on immigration for the Washington Times:

Immigration is a handy political card trick; it has always been possible to distract the American public, a large conglomeration of displaced aliens, with the threat of large conglomerations of displaced aliens. In 1868, the first Border Patrol was mounted to chase the Chinese out of the gold fields and off the rail lines; it kept Great-Grandpa's mind off Reconstruction and that pesky Indian problem. In the early 1950s, "Operation Wetback" rounded up all those Mexican produce-pickers we'd brought in after we put our Asian agricultural workforce in internment camps, then had to let them out. Hmm. I wonder what we have going on today that might require inflamed posturing from cynics and carpetbaggers.

There is as little wisdom from pundits as there is from politicians. Rhetorical flourishes and racial profiling solve nothing, accomplish nothing except to cause inflammation. We are plenty inflamed but little informed. How many times have Americans heard the term "illegal"? How many times has the law being broken been explained? We all know what a "coyote" is, but have talking heads spelled out the difference between civil law and criminal law? Yon illegal immigrant -- have I likened thee to a speeding ticket?

Punk (Planet) Is Dead

So long Punk Planet Mag.  At least, for now, the book imprint will continue.  But with the folding of so many other small, indie presses, the question has to be, how long?  Buy something from them now!

{via}

Oates Readings

I need to do a better job of announcing local events but I have a hard enough time keeping up with my personal schedule, which is little more than wake, work, eat, sleep.  Anyway, I suppose most people will classify Tuesday night's Joyce Carol Oates reading at Durham's Regulator and/or Wednesday night's Oates reading at Raleigh's Quail Ridge Books & Music as big events.  It might just be enough to get me out of the house on Wednesday.

By the way, I've done a little calculating.  If J.C. Oates were to read 1/100,0000th of her lifetime page count at either one of these reading--and we're talking  just the published stuff-- at the rate of one page a minute then one would probably be sitting at the reading for 3 days, 18 hours, and 43 minutes, give or take a minute.*

*I kid, but would it surprise you if that isn't far off?

Paw Day

I snapped this photo on Saturday afternoon in Raleigh's Pullen Park, where the wee one, wife, and I enjoyed an afternoon of carouseling.  Not to go all "what I did on my Father's Day weekend" type blogging on you, but I have to say that now that I'm on the other side of this whole Father's Day business, it really ain't a bad thing.  Meaning, I actually put aside all plans to revamp this here blog's design, even the plans to be productive and catch up on some long overdue tasks, and spent most of the weekend being just a dad.  And despite my love of books, of music, of movies, of all of the things that usually get written of here, there's nothing better, at least nothing that I've found, that even comes close to matching the time one gets to spend with an appreciative, sweet, utterly loving nearly one-year-old child. 

And just when I thought my first Father's Day couldn't be any better, what with the nice gifts and the still-mushy-by-necessity breakfast and the declaration by my wife that I could just relax and do whatever on "my day", I got treated to the best present of all, Marlie's newest word, "book," a word I think she was saving up just for me.  Just for my day.

Web in Front

You'll have to pardon the occasional screwy looking site template and strange test posts this weekend.  I'm finally trying to gussy this joint up a bit.  To make it up to you, or at least to make one or two of you as happy as I was when I found it, here's the video for one of my five favorite songs of the nineties, and until last night, I'd never seen the video for it.  And if you've never heard of Archers of Loaf, go grab yourself an emusic subscription pronto.  Tell 'em jephab <at> gmail sent you.

Like Jack

I lost count at some point in February, but I know I've seen at least five of these "On the road like Kerouac" stories from our nation's various and sundry newspapers.  This time, it's USA Today's Jerry Shriver, who "reread the book during a 1,727-mile journey trip through America's midsection. His goals: to See What's Out There and give armchair Kerouac fans an update on the state of roadside culture. (Owing to his middle age and hopeless entrenchment in the establishment, pliant bohemian chicks were off-limits.)"  It appears that he did so in a rented Mitsubishi Eclipse, which explain why out of everything to see and write about on the open road, he managed around what looks to be about 1,200 words, or at least that's what his editors allowed, and most of it no better than this:

Here in Kansas City come roses, roasted meats, Bass Pro shops, cherished friends, saloons where you can smoke, an underground edginess, plentiful parking spaces and tree blossoms falling onto young women who sport bare midriffs and stoners who brag of skateboarding while drunk.

I could move here.

Brilliant.