On EUGENE ONEGIN at least we are agreed

It is regrettable that Russian re-President Vladimir Putin did not announce his plan for a Russian canon of literature that will be required of high school dropouts by shooting a new series of beefcake photos of himself straddling a library desk or lifting stacks of Tolstoy and Chekhov.

Nihil sanctum

"Horrified" is also the word I would use about author Mike Daisey's fabrication around his new show "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," for which he seems to have made up interviews and described meetings with workers that did not take place. While it seems that the offenses Daisey described did take place (staffing with underaged workers and poisoning), they did not take place on his watch.

"This American Life," which aired some of his show in a special hourlong episode, has issued a retraction and will discuss that retraction in this weekend's episode. 

"And in the midst of all that, I had this manuscript. I had figured that it was just going to be a matter of a couple of months of temping before I was raised aloft! [Laughs.] You know, published with great honors! Of course, it was nothing like that. I sent it to agents and it would immediately come back to me— it was like a boomerang. And then I would send it to friends, and they really did not know what to say to me." -- Jennifer Egan at The Days Of Yore on life before the Pulitzer Prize

Almost Fainting While Listening To Cintra Wilson

Last night I went to a comedy show at Greenlight Bookstore featuring a number of contributors to the Believer, on the occasion of their latest book of advice coming out this week. (Contributor Julie Klausner looked at the cover and sniffed, "I didn't know those were the cars. That's illegal.") The Believer's advice column is short on actual advice and long on wit, if you've never read it, but contributors had enough latitude to add jokes as necessary and I suspected some of those who read last night were ad-libbing at least a little.

I think I was most curious to see critic Cintra Wilson, who read from her forthcoming book about advertising and fashion (and some of her advice pieces, including a very funny one about needlepoint). Wilson has stepped back from the New York Times style section after criticism over this column about J.C. Penney, which was too bad because her Critical Shopper columns had a delightful bite to them that no one else replicates. (That I didn't find the column offensive is neither here nor there, really, but I'm pointing it out anyway.) Wilson has a voice in the Jerri Blank region and climbed up on a store table to read because, as she explained, not only was she short but she also had "totalitarian" impulses.

I took a friend from work who is a Michael Ian Black fan (who isn't?) and who, by chance, had never been to the bookstore, so I felt I had done my good deed by promoting it. Black read from his new memoir YOU'RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT about the first harrowing months of parenting and how they mysteriously seemed to double under the spell of advanced sleep deprivation.

The one regrettable spot to the evening was that it was very warm in the bookstore and midway through Wilson's "Fast Five" review (which I loved) I started feeling unsteady and dizzy and, with none of my adult grace, wobble-kneed it down to the floor for the rest of the reading. I'm not a fainter, but I wasn't the only one who was suffering from the heat. (Astonishingly it was much cooler at floor level and I was able to stare at people's Converse and Danskos and come back to myself.) Greenlight, if you're checking your referrals this morning, please open the door next time as I could probably take about 4 people down with me if I fell and you don't want to be responsible for that kind of carnage.

Spotted in the neighborhood

Maybe I shouldn't have been walking by that house after dark. It was sitting on the front lawn of the house along with a few other items including (and I swear I only saw one) a gold-glitter knee-high boot. Free to a good home?

Some sights of literary New Orleans

"A literary tour is the secular echo of a religious pilgrimage. The hope is the same as with saints’ relics: that some residue of genius will survive in the physical objects an author has touched, that the secret to his mind will turn out to be hidden in the places his body passed through — the proportions of a doorway, the smell of old stone." -- Sam Anderson

Before this plot held a hotel it was the major open-air slave market of New Orleans, the one chronicled in UNCLE TOM'S CABIN. In more recent but also tragic history, it makes an appearance in Ethan Brown's true-crime story SHAKE THE DEVIL OFF as the place where troubled war vet Zackery Bowen committed suicide after killing his girlfriend.

Truman Capote spent so much time in the Monteleone Hotel (halfway down the street, where the flags were) that he used to say he was born there. This was a slight exaggeration. Before I left I grabbed Capote's late-career story collection MUSIC FOR CHAMELEONS which I'd had sitting around forever, and in the one story in it set in New Orleans, everyone Capote talks to speaks exactly like him. I did not find this to be the case on my visit, although New Orleanians were very hospitable.

William Faulkner lived in this yellow house for just over a year while he was working on his first novel; now it's a book store, called, what else, Faulkner House Books. In terms of locations this would probably be my preferred one to live in due to its proximity to beignets at the Cafe du Monde (well, of course I did) and the view of the park across the narrow cobblestone street. Just before I ducked down the alley I watched a second-line wedding parade pass by the Saint Louis cathedral.

Tennessee Williams lived here when he wrote "A Streetcar Named Desire." There are no streetcars operating on the Desire line any more, but I was fairly pleased to find out that you can still ride in the streetcars for a very reasonable $1.25. Usually they aren't even that crowded.

Major landmarks I missed: statue of Ignatius J. Reilly of A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES (stored for Mardi Gras, apparently); half a dozen plantations claiming to inspire the ones in GONE WITH THE WIND, as well as any of the places Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara went on their honeymoon (figured they would be too hard to find, but here's a good stab at it).

I'm ashamed to confess I'm at least 50 percent more interested in this FIFTY SHADES OF GREY story now that word is out that the novels began as a really long piece of TWILIGHT fanfiction. It's going to be a really hard case to prosecute on plagiarism if it comes to that. Fandom wins!

NYC: "February House" arrives in May

The Public Theater is opening a world premiere musical based on the bizarre vignette of Brooklyn history where W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers and Paul Bowles all shared a house in Brooklyn Heights. Uncovered and named by Sherrill Tippins, the "February House" was kind of a glorious mess and it sounds like its inhabitants didn't get a whole lot of work done, just developed inappropriate crushes on each other (Paul Bowles' wife on Auden, who was gay, for example) and got cranky at fellow housemate Benjamin Britten for playing too much music. In other words, it's just like every roommate situation that ever was. (Anyone want to tell my upstairs neighbors that their bass playing is no good? OK then.)

"February House" was cowritten by two fellow graduates of the Best University Ever, Gabriel Kahane and Seth Bockley. I don't know them personally but I remember seeing Bockley onstage in college (most notably in Sarah Kane's "Crave") and think this is a really cool project. Also one of them, or their associates, is running a @FebHaus Twitter feed that is fairly incredible. Sample tweet: "Carson burned the soufflé, but the housewarming party last night otherwise went off without a hitch."

The dollar cart wins again

These are the gag books my coworkers got me for my birthday (yesterday) proudly displayed on my desk. Caption on GOING ROGUE says "I red books and things! Happy Christmas!"

That greenish item in the front is my real book present, Adam Christopher's dystopian New York novel EMPIRE STATE, which looks kick-ass. Nice job, coworkers. My heart leapt up when I saw that Strand bag.

Authors born on this day include...

• Jack Kerouac
• Edward Albee
• Millard Kaufman (BOWL OF CHERRIES)
• Carl Hiassen
• Dave Eggers

Letter To New York

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

—Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.
--Elizabeth Bishop. As invoked in David Rakoff's HALF EMPTY, where the author recites it to himself as he goes in for an MRI.

The bag of my dreams

Keep your Birkins and your Louis. I don't need another tote bag but I NEED this BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER one from (where else?) Melville House. It says it can carry a French bulldog, not that I have one, but still.

Shit Franzens say

I was sorry that while Jonathan Franzen and I overlapped a little in New Orleans, I had left by the time he hunkered down on Tuesday night at Tulane to give a talk about why he hates everything and Edith Wharton isn't pretty enough. Just kidding! It was part of the school's "Great Writers" lecture series.

Jami Attenberg was, and from her report here are my three favorite quotes:

• "I am committed to endings…I can no longer be mistaken for a post-modern author."
• "Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose."
• "I was taught to be nice to people, which is my credo even though I seem to have some small gift for offending people without intending to."

Sadly I missed the ensuing #jonathanfranzenhates series of jokes (in short, everything). According to the Tulane report he also said "Writing a novel is an experience. The process is more important than the product," which I'm definitely not sure I agree with. But Jonathan Franzen surely hates when we speculate on his process, and the best way to get us not to is to drop hints like this constantly and submit to major magazine profiles. Obviously.

Tournament of Books '12: Let's do this thing

This was a fun exercise! I recommend it! That said I only went 11 for 16 on this bunch. I had time to start OPEN CITY, but not finish it; library copies of THE SENSE OF AN ENDING, STATE OF WONDER and THE SISTERS BROTHERS were scarce, and I didn't get the gumption to start 1Q84. So I made my picks based on the information I knew and where I thought each match-up would break; the only one I really had no idea on was STATE OF WONDER vs. SISTERS BROTHERS. Anyone want to fill me in?

Edit: And in classic March Madness fashion my bracket is already blown. Oh, well.

Tournament of Books '12: Hiding from THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME

For those who like their Cormac McCarthy just a little more tender.

Donald Ray Pollock created the rural Ohio area chronicled in (and giving the name to) his first book KNOCKEMSTIFF as a microcosm for mid-20th-century depressed America, venal and corrupted even when it tries to do good. Even the one true innocent in THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME is eventually turned by his environment, the poverty and lack of community in his small town slowly curdling inside his chest. America!

That innocent for me was Arvin, the son of a war vet and a waitress who loses both those parents in a manner so grim* the townspeople he encounters afterward are afraid of him.Taken in by his grandmother, who is also raising a girl abandoned by her father (whose mother also came to a grisly end), Arvin grows up wary and spoiling for a fight in a town of thieves, cheats and murderers, all with perfectly respectable public faces. It's like an even darker side of WINESBURG, OHIO. If there's anything fundamentally good left in Arvin, it's because his grandmother tries to shield her charges from Knockemstiff's worst faces as long as she can.

Finding out what happens to Arvin kept me furiously turning pages even as the people he crosses paths with go from garden-variety unsavory to icky to truly depraved. Sometimes it's impossible to read a character without wishing he would just be okay on some kind of cosmic level (even as you know it's not possible). In terms of plotting, Pollock really delivers in bringing several other characters around Arvin into his trials. He's a fairly new author (THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME is only his 2nd book) and I will be anxiously awaiting his next book even as I fear to crack the cover.

ToB first-round opponent: THE SENSE OF AN ENDING, a book I didn't get to because I was stubborn and refused to buy a novella at hardcover novel prices. (I didn't mean to get all fist-shaky about it, but truly it wasn't worth it to me. Why, that's nearly 14 cents a page!) That said, I'm predicting this one will fall Pollock's way because he's the underdog against Booker Prize winner Barnes. Later today I'll put up my whole bracket, because hey, the tournament is here! In fact, this is the first matchup, tomorrow (with Emma Straub judging).

*For me it was right up there with the famous tree in BLOOD MERIDIAN. The (spoiler) tree of dead babies. That gross and horrifying. Have fun! "Oh hey, what are you reading?" "Just a book with a tree of dead babies in it. How was your weekend?"