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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Algorithms

Will BookLamp be the Pandora for books?  Go here and give it a try.  The prototype is rather limited and the fact that I've read all of two books on the list of offerings makes it fairly useless for me to figure out if it has any value.  But I've signed up and will give it some time to build a database before passing judgment.  You can see more about the project in this video.

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Twain Time

{Note:  Typepad keeps eating posts this morning so I'm keeping it brief for now.}

Has anyone seen the new issue of Time?  I keep waiting for my wife to "borrow" a copy from her doctor's office. Here's the cover:

Reading Jail

Raleigh News & Observer correspondent Sean Rowe spent 30 days in jail for doing something "stupid and immoral" and used his time observing the reading habits of those incarcerated with him:

Aside from the weekly canteen, the book cart represents life's most important drama for Wake County's inmates -- 1,173 men and 137 women as of Monday.

Take a guess at the type of book that dominates the book cart. Science fiction? Poetry? Inspirational tales and religious texts? No. Not even crime novels.

Half the books on the cart are just like half the books published and purchased on planet Earth. They definitely qualify as "escapist literature," but they do not include "The Great Escape" by Paul Brickhill or "Papillon" by Henri Charrière.

They're romance novels.

That's right. The street-wise inmates of the Wake County jail are offered mostly "A Knight in Shining Armor" by Jude Deveraux and "Mr. Perfect" by Linda Howard, "Ravished" by Amanda Quick and "Carnal Innocence" by Nora Roberts and "Lord of Scoundrels" by Loretta Chase. (I myself enjoyed "Son of the Morning" and "Duncan's Bride," both by Linda Howard, plus "Sleeping Beauty" by Judith Ivory and "Family Man" by Jayne Ann Krentz.)

Sweetest Little Bookworm

Leave it to My Morning Jacket to sing a song about a lust that many of us know too well. Enjoy this live version of "Librarian" from their new album Evil Urges, and have a great 4th:

+ My Morning Jacket -- "Librarian" (live at Bonnaroo)

Walk across the courtyard, towards the library.
I can hear the insects buzz and the leaves 'neath my feet...

Ramble up the stairwell, into the hall of books...
Since we got the interweb these hardly get used.

Duck into the men's room... combing thru my hair...
When god gave us mirrors he had no idea...

Looking for a lesson in the periodicals...
There I spy you listening to the AM radio...

Karen of the Carpenters, singing in the rain...
Another lovely victim of the mirror's evil way.

It's not like you're not trying, with a pencil in your hair
To defy the beauty the good lord put in there...

Simple little bookworm, buried underneath...
Is the sexiest librarian, take off those glasses and let down your hair for me.

So I watch you thru the bookcase,imaging a scene:
You and I at dinner, spending time, then to sleep.

And what then would I say to you, lying there in bed?
These words, with a kiss, I would plant in your head:

"What is it inside our heads that makes us do the opposite?
Makes us do the opposite of what's right for us?
Cause everything'd be great... and everything'd be good...
If everybody gave... like everybody could."

Sweetest little bookworm. hidden underneath...
Is the sexiest librarian...
Take off those glasses and let your hair down for me.
Take off those glasses and let your hair down for me.

Simple little beauty, heaven in your breath.
The simplest of pleasures, the world at it's best.

He Said What?

Here's some trivia for you in case you feel like trying to win a few free drinks off of your book-loving buddies at the bar tonight:

“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”

The sentence does not appear, nor anything close to it. Nor does it appear in any of the other four Dostoevsky novels whose complete English texts are available online. The fact that a nonexistent text can be widely attributed to a famous author reveals the limitations of pre-computer scholarship. The fact that I could so quickly prove it erroneous highlights the opportunities for modern scholars. It is true that “If God does not exist, everything is permitted” is an accurate capsule description of the belief espoused by Ivan Karamazov in the early chapters of The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan has concluded, or pretends to conclude, that there is no God, no immortality. As what he claims is a logical consequence, “everything is lawful.” However, Ivan never speaks the sentence in question, and neither does any other character in the novel! The phrase, “everything is lawful,” is used frequently by other characters as an idea that they got from Ivan. And once, Ivan says “If there is no immortality, there is no virtue.” But the magic sound-bite sentence is not to be found. Jean Paul Sartre has said that all of French Existentialism is to be found in Ivan Karamazov’s contention that if there is no God, everything is permitted. But what did Dostoevsky say?

King Dork

Frank Portman, founding member of The Mr. T Experience and author of the very good King Dork (which just went up as an audiobook on eMusic) discusses the difference between crafting songs for a punk band and writing a book:

With the records — and I love them all as I would my own learning-disabled children — they were deeply alternative in terms of the market, put out on a $300 budget by a very small label. To have a book published by Random House is very different. I took songwriting seriously but there is an inadvertently ephemeral aspect to music. With a book it feels much more significant and permanent.

With anything, you spend your time doing all these things and everything you do leads you to a network of people. Maybe they latch onto one of those things and if it becomes a cultural phenomenon to any degree, it does reinforce the other littler things you’ve done, so I think in the long term, having a successful novel, given that it shares the theme of so many of my songs, will draw attention to them and they will reinforce each other.

Bookslut

I KID!  Actually, I just wanted to put this here to remind myself that I'd really like to get this made into a poster.

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Don't Call Me_______, Moron

After reading this piece on the offensiveness of Bookslut--the moniker itself more so than the blog (though the writer does have a problem with the lack of male nudity on the site, it seems)--I have to declare to the litblogging public at large that if I ever see a blog called Bookshorty, I'm going to write something similar.  I'll never forget that day when I was twelve, coming out of a Piggly Wiggly in central Alabama, holding my mother's hand as we crossed the parking lot singing "Don't It Make Your Brown Eyes Blue" when the town bully pulled up on his Huffy and called me shorty.  Mom sang louder but I heard the taunt and before I knew it I had missed a couple of notes and ruined the whole singalong.  I was short then; I'm short now.  I cringe when I hear the word shorty to this day.   

In fact, I'm even a little offended by the term short story.

So no Bookshorty.  You've been warned.

Update: I give Bookdwarf a pass. 

Balmy

When Sam Tanenhaus offers up this:

No literary work captures the languid menace of summer better than “A Streetcar Named Desire,” its characters squeezed into a sweltering tenement in New Orleans, all gnawing at one another. “Temperature 100 on the nose, and she soaks herself in a hot tub,” Stanley Kowalski growls when his sister-in-law, Blanche, the corrupt hothouse orchid, hogs the only bathroom in his cramped, overheated apartment.

I, as someone who has spent more than 2/3rds of my summers in the South and who knows all about the "languid menace of summer", would offer up this.  It probably doesn't fit Tanenhaus's thesis for this article, but to say "no literary work" is a stretch, even for Sam. 

Warm Family Moment

The NY Times has more on the upcoming Hunter S. documentary, Gonzo:

As the documentary demonstrates, the bottom for the pair came when Mr. Thompson was assigned to cover the Rumble in the Jungle, the fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire in 1974. Mr. Steadman explains in the film that in an act of enormous cocaine-assisted hubris (or perhaps fear that Mr. Ali, one of his heroes, was about to take a huge beating), Thompson gave away his tickets to the fight and went for a swim in the hotel pool. In doing so, he missed one of the greatest upsets in boxing history and, more important for a journalist, did not get the story.

By the accounts of many Thompson never recovered from that episode, gradually morphing into the character of Uncle Duke that Garry Trudeau introduced in “Doonesbury,” a cartoon figure who fired automatic weapons from his sun deck at apparitions and enemies that only he could see. He became the sum of his trademarks — the sunglasses, cigarette holder and inchoate rage — and ended up imprisoned by them.

“He was the master persona maker,” said Douglas Brinkley, the historian and friend of Thompson’s who serves as executor of the estate. “If Ernest Hemingway was going to go big-game hunting in Africa, Hunter wanted to use a submachine gun to hunt wild boar in Big Sur, Calif. He was dangerous, like handling nitroglycerin, and he liked to keep it that way.”

In the end everyone wanted to be around Thompson except Thompson. And on a bright winter day in Woody Creek, with his son in the house — Juan Thompson sardonically terms it a “warm family moment” in the film — he called his own bluff and blew his brains out.

He was infirm at the time, spending time in a wheelchair. Given his fundamental allergy to institutions like hospitals, his decision to set the terms of his exit is unsurprising.

“Hunter was very much one to share the pain when things went wrong, but he would share the glory as well,” said Anita Thompson, who married him in 2003. “He was a generous person, but he ended up surrounded by leeches and hanger-on-ers. It is the curse of fame.”

0-5

O, The Oprah Magazine, gives us "The wisest poetry, the most extraordinary prose: five top-shelf books that will blow open your understanding of the world."  Interesting selections considering the source.  I do wish the almighty O could give us the choices on one page so that we could read without clicking through.  Does she really need the page view revenue from her site advertisers? 

Spud

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I had no idea that Ezra Pound was from Idaho.  I definitely do now.  The Boise Weekly gives us an extensive look at the impact that the state with the most interesting shape had on the poet:

Some scholars now theorize that it was Pound's childhood in the Idaho silver mining town that shaped his view of global economics, which in turn led to his fascist and anti-Semitic leanings.

Pound set out to change not only the world of poetry, but the world of banking and finance as well. His plan to eliminate debt by taking control of credit from central banks, and giving it to communities was fatefully tied to his apparent belief in an international conspiracy of Jewish bankers to rule the world through financial bondage. He accused these conspirators of "usury"—charging high interest rates on loans—which he claimed made slaves out of the citizens of a nation and pawns of their governments.

While Pound's Jewish conspiracy theory may seem wildly misguided today, the perennial mistrust of the rulers of capital is still as fresh as a daisy in his hometown, where his childhood home now houses the Sun Valley Center for the Arts.

Between the two World Wars, Pound became one of the giants of literary modernism; editing T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land," trading conversation for boxing lessons with Hemingway, and coming to the aid of many of the writers of his generation who worked, as he did, to free English verse from the moralistic, Victorian constraints of the 19th century.

Nobody Move Moves

In case for whatever reason you've been a little hesitant to grab a copy of Playboy, and I can't imagine why, well, it should make you happy to know that the Denis Johnson novel that is now being serialized in the magazine will be available in book form from FSG in the Spring of 09.  No word on whether or not photos will be included.

My Momma Says...

Canada's National Post discusses the books they claim that you are embarrased to be seen reading in public, and they somehow managed to get a quote that only Forrest Gump could love:

But there will always be literary snobs. British Columbia romance novelist Nancy Warren, author of The One I Want and Harlequin's NASCAR series of novels, says she was recently arguing with a friend who writes comic books about who gets dumped on the most. She says books like hers are "like a very nice piece of chocolate. You wouldn't want to live on it exclusively, but you would never want to deny somebody such a nice and delicious treat."

Warren says she's heard all the criticism, and has learned to brush it off. Although she prefers to the term beach read to the "trash" tag her books are sometimes slapped with.

Sometimes I'm thankful that I'm allergic to chocolate.  Because really, I can't think of anything I'd rather not read than a NASCAR Harlequin, and I don't care if I am dumping.