Free lit course starts Monday - recommended by me

One of my favorite professors, Dr Arnold Weinstein, is diving into the world of MOOCs (massive open online courses) with The Fiction of Relationship this summer. The course starts Monday, so great news, you still have time to sign up!

The first week's reading is Abbé Prévost's MANON LESCAUT which is available in the public domain. Future weeks will tackle JANE EYRE, BARTLEBY (which I'm ashamed to never have read) and J.M. Coetzee's DISGRACE. Let me know if any of you actually sign up and we can start a back-channel discussion.

Post-Its: Oprah umps the doubleheader

Photo of the audience at the Brooklyn Book Festival's Happy Ending reading from the L.A. Times' Jacket Copy, with "proof" that I was there. (I promise this isn't going to become one of those blogs.)

Oprah.com: Oprah's latest book club selection is Uwem Akpan's SAY YOU'RE ONE OF THEM, a collection of short stories first published in 2008 by a Nigerian Jesuit priest with an MFA. The Washington Post broke the news yesterday, saying the distributor had "accidentally" leaked the choice. Did you have your money on BRIGHT-SIDED: HOW THE RELENTLESS PROMOTION OF POSITIVE THINKING HAS UNDERMINED AMERICA? You lost. (That's the title of the new Ehrenreich.)

Via the Book Bench: A new T-shirt company has created a line-up of baseball jerseys for an imaginary 19th-century-American-lit team. So many questions: Is it safe to mix fictional characters with nonfiction authors? How are Hester Prynne's reflexes? And would even the biggest Melville fan buy a shirt that has the number 1 and "Dick" on it?

NYT: Another literary movie goes head to head with "Bright Star" this weekend for the readin' crowd -- an Australian-helmed adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's DISGRACE starring John Malkovich as a recently dismissed college professor. Normally it would be a bad thing that I had never heard of this before, but perhaps it was just on the festival circuit because the consensus is good.

Via the Manhattan Users Guide: When was ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND banned and why? Most of the other titles on this kitschy Banned Books bracelet I recognize, but that one stumped me. (Is too relevant.)

Slate: Matthew Schneier's round-up of guidebooks for men on how to be men is entertaining, not least for its discussion of yeomanliness versus gentlemanliness. Having seen the other side of how men's magazines come up with their tips, though, I'm not sure I would trust any of them.

NYT/ The Lede: You probably haven't spared a thought as to what Osama bin Laden wants you to read, but he's coming through for you. Check out the books an al Qaeda leader wants all Americans to read at your own risk -- after he saw it, Glenn Beck swore never to read again.

Via Idealist: Here's a category of Things Named For Writers I never contemplated before. The first annual Runyon 5K on November 15 will memorialize journalist and short-story writer Damon Runyon with a bit of a lope through Yankee Stadium. I have not been in the new stadium yet, and I wouldn't call myself a fan, but the proceeds are going to cancer research, and this sounds downright cool. I... am seriously thinking about doing this. (Lobotomy went well, by the way.)

Likely last ever Infinite Summer corner: This week after one of their numbers was nice enough to link to my Brooklyn Book Festival coverage I joined wallace-l, the David Foster Wallace listserv, although when they find out how new I am to the magic of DFW they will probably kick me off. But that's where I learned from New York magazine via Sarah Weinman that -- are you ready for this piece of trivia -- DFW was a creative writing classmate at Amherst of none other than Dan Brown. Yes, that Dan Brown. My mind is blown like I just watched The Entertainment. (Now they've got another reason to get rid of me, my horrible jokes.)

Man Booker Shortlist Announced

Pick the winner if you dare:

A.S. Byatt, THE CHILDREN'S BOOK
J.M. Coetzee, SUMMERTIME
Adam Foulds, THE QUICKENING MAZE
Hilary Mantel, WOLF HALL
Simon Mawer, THE GLASS ROOM
Sarah Waters, THE LITTLE STRANGER

I'm one for six (the Waters; liked it, didn't love it). Coetzee has already won it twice, Byatt once; Adam Foulds is the youngest nominee at 34. According to the Guardian, bets placed on the list heavily favor Mantel; I know it's illegal, but I really wish America had more of a cultural-gambling culture.

Post-Its: Better than direct mail from John Grisham

I received a charity letter "from" John Grisham on behalf of the Southern Poverty Law Center in the mail while I was gone. Putting "Author" as part of your return address is a great way to get me to open your unsolicited mail; thank goodness spammers haven't caught on. (J.M. Coetzee wants to help me with the ladies? Sweet.)

• Because a lot of people are winding up here looking for it, my Frank McCourt note from a few weeks ago has been updated with public memorial information, as current as I could find. Not afraid to be servicey!
  


• My copy of LOLITA which I admitted to re-purchasing several months ago has still not turned up. I think it either has been lent out for a long time or got mixed in with another family member's books. I may even have been the forgetful lender; that's where my copy of THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER AND CLAY was all this time, on the nightstand of the West Coast bureau (who has since finished it). Meanwhile, another book has pulled a disappearing act when I most wanted it, which is why you're not currently getting "Incomprehensible Notes From My Adolescent Copy of LEAVES OF GRASS."



• This Times article on how serendipity is becoming extinct has so many techspletives in it it's practically unreadable. But I'm posting it because "serendipity" is one of my favorite words, and I see no reason that we have to let the concept or the term go. Now get off my lawn.


• "If Nora Ephron had been born buxom, what else besides that article might she not have written?" I'm just catching up to Ariel Levy's profile of Nora Ephron in the New Yorker from a few weeks ago, whose second paragraph can only be described as an equal-opportunity offender for the ladies, but if you can make it past that there are some nifty tidbits about her life as a writer. Related: Tina Fey's forthcoming book (!!!) was described at deal time as being "in the style of Nora Ephron."
  


• INFINITE JEST corner: What the hell do you say when people unfamiliar with the book ask what it's about? This has happened to me several times and my latest answer was the best, but I feel as if I owe people more than a shrug and a smile. (Let us not speak of the back-cover copy, which is atrocious.) My latest answer incorporated the current situations of the various Incandenzas and, since I passed Interdependence Day a while back, a smidge of the alternate-reality politics going on behind them. The last thing I want to do is deter anyone from reading it, which a vague answer or an "It's extremely complicated" might.


• Finally, shamelessly, self-promotionally: The AV Club's latest Wrapped Up in Books round begins Aug. 17 on John Crowley's LITTLE, BIG. That's two weeks from now. It is possible that you have not started the book yet, and I am not judging you, promise. But now would be a good time to start it!

The old man on the ground floor

"In public life the role I play nowadays is that of distinguished figure... an appropriately comic and provincial fate for a man who half a century ago shook the dust of the provinces off his feet and sallied forth into the great world to practise la vie boheme. The truth is, I was never a bohemian, not then and not now. At heart I have always been a sobrietarian, if such a word exists, and moreover a believer in order, in orderliness."
- J.M. Coetzee

I finished DIARY OF A BAD YEAR last week and, not surprisingly, I really liked it. I thought the structure was very innovative and led to Coetzee's being able to tell the story -- which in itself was interesting -- in a new sort of way. What's going on with the three sections I mentioned is not a matter of three stories pulling your attention away from each other, although when you first start reading it's easy to feel that way. Instead, they comment on each other in unexpected ways. Here are a few examples I found:

• In one of his essays, Señor C is talking about the parts of his body and whether they are truly "his" (hair, teeth, a tumor). Underneath that, he is commenting on how Anya won't refer to him by his name -- how she only calls him Señor, rejecting that which is truly his.

• One of Señor C's sections comments on the crime wave in the new South Africa; under that in Anya's section, her lover Alan says, "Every word he says is bullshit." A built-in skepticism -- very cool.

• Sometimes these instances are more wry: A discussion of how athletic victory is now determined by machines, supplanting human power,* flanks a paragraph about Anya's typing, a chose Señor C could do on his own (and a mechanical chore at that) but chooses to have performed by Anya.

It struck me as I read that the opinions or essays Señor C is writing may or may not be Coetzee's own -- it's not really important -- but, if they were published by themselves, I might not read them. Some are quite short, and others are pretty muddled in terms of the conclusions they reach. Additionally, while some are related to each other, they hold to no order within the book and have no common theme. Maybe they only make sense in context -- perhaps the point Coetzee was trying to make.

*One of my favorite passages in the book comes from this opinion:
"One can of course hear stunted and mechanical speech all over the world. But pride in the mechanical mode seems to be uniquely American. For in America the model of the self as a ghost inhabiting a machine goes almost unquestioned at a popular level. The body as conceived in America, the American body, is a complex machine comprising a vocal module, a sexual module, and several more, even a psychological module. Inside the body-machine the ghostly self checks read-outs and taps keys, giving commands which the body obeys."

So much more than a diary

Over the weekend I started J.M. Coetzee's latest novel DIARY OF A BAD YEAR. I'm not a Coetzee scholar; the only other book I've read of his is FOE, and I don't remember a whole lot about it. But I was drawn to this book because of what I had heard about its format. There are three narratives which comprise the novel and they are stacked one on top of another on the page.

The protagonist, Señor C, an older South African writer who now lives in Australia (like Coetzee), is writing a series of short essays or opinion pieces -- that's the first layer. Under that, Señor C relates the story of his relationship with Anya, a beautiful young woman he meets in the laundry room of his apartment building and convinces to type up his essays. And, beginning a little way into the book, Anya herself recounts her impressions of Señor C as well as her relationship with Alan, the man she lives with on the top floor of the building.

Once I finish the book I'm sure I'll have more to say on the novelty of that format and how Coetzee makes it work, but here are some other books with surprising formats that I would like to read:

• David Foster Wallace, INFINITE JEST -- I have heard that this book began the trend of footnotes in fiction. It's a trend I am in favor of, and I look forward to climbing that mountain sometime. I picked up the 10th anniversary edition (for $10!) at Auntie's Bookstore and it looms large over my shelf. The last person I saw reading it called it "the ultimate novel."

• Mark Z. Danielewski, ONLY REVOLUTIONS -- Danielewski's first novel HOUSE OF LEAVES used footnotes and played with fonts, but his National Book Award-nominated follow-up presents two different narratives -- two characters on a road trip -- whose stories overlap and collide. Each narrative starts on a different side of the book, so it would appear to have two front covers, or two points of entry. Carol Shields' novel HAPPENSTANCE also does this in its tale of a troubled marriage; each spouse gets a narrative.

• Julio Cortázar, HOPSCOTCH (Spanish title: RAYUELA) -- How's this for procrastination? I own this book in Spanish and English, but have made little headway in either. Cortázar's 1963 novel can be read in two ways, in the conventional order or in an intricate sequence which scrambles 154 out of the 155 chapters. Also, the author supposedly said one can read the first 56 chapters and skip the rest (which, according to Conversational Reading, have the feel of footnotes). Hey Danielle, have you read this? Got any pointers?

Coming up this week: Dot-com drudgery, the changing of the seasons and a Wormbook field trip to a great New York bookstore.