Good news: The Jon Krakauer book about Pat Tillman that was withdrawn last summer under the title THE HERO will arrive in stores this fall, knock on wood, with the new title WHERE MEN WIN GLORY. It's his first since 2003's UNDER THE BANNER OF HEAVEN.

Just don't ask him about the Finer Things Club

John Krasinski seems determined to prove he is not just the hipstery hanger-on for which I'd pegged him. From TIME magazine:

How hard was it to write the screenplay for David Foster Wallace's BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN? --Zach Watson, Columbus, OH

I think David Foster Wallace is one of the greatest writers that has ever lived. The majority of the movie is his words. I didn't change too much. I felt really nervous pretty much every day for about five years because I know how many people love his work.

What other writers or novels do you admire? --Jude Lovell, Bethlehem, PA

I'm a huge classics fan. I love Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger. I'm that guy who rereads a book before I read newer stuff, which is probably not all that progressive, and it's not really going to make me a better reader. I'm like, "Oh, my God, you should read TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD." And people are like, "I'm not 15." Still good, though.

He also jokes he wanted to be an English professor "for the corduroy jackets with patches on the side." With his choices one might quibble but there's only so far I can knock him since we share an alma mater. IMDb doesn't have a release date listed yet for "Brief Interviews..." which also stars Julianne Nicholson, Timothy Hutton and (hipster alert) Ben Gibbard.

Wrapped Up in Books: It's BLOOD MERIDIAN Week

If you've read what may arguably be Cormac McCarthy's breakout book, please be The AV Club's guest at our book club this week. (And if you don't think it's his breakout, perhaps you'd like to come and argue about it. You are welcome to do so.) Last month in my commentary I referenced "The Little Mermaid"; find out what crazy pop-culture tidbit I try and apply this month.

ETA 10:13AM I just took three exclamation points out of this post. I am so ashamed. McCarthy never had to use an exclamation point in his life.

J.D. Salinger sues!

If you've been waiting for someone to write a sequel to CATCHER IN THE RYE, you may have to wait a little longer: The author of 60 YEARS LATER: COMING THROUGH THE RYE, which supposedly follows an aged Holden Caulfield adrift in New York, is going to court along with his company "Windupbird Publishing" (hmmmm) against the too-reclusive-to-appear-on-"The Simpsons" author.

I have no particular love for CATCHER... but a poll last year found it was America's 10th favorite book. Let's hope 60 YEARS LATER author John David California's prose is more inventive than his pseudonym.

Photo of a tattoo someone will live to regret: LATFH.com

And now, your moment of meta

As a teaser for an article about abandoned blogs, the New York Times writes, "Why do blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants?" Well, the start-up costs are lower, for starters?

There are a lot of dead blogs out there because there are plenty of reasons to stop blogging. I'm no stranger to abandoned blogs; visitors to my profile can see this blog had a general-interest sibling which didn't even make it to its first birthday. (I killed it even though I had plenty to write about, because I wasn't happy with what I was writing there. Now you know.) If you start blogging to live off your site, and it doesn't happen right away (and probably won't), you might not see the use of the habit. I have written and currently write for blogs that pay, and there's nothing wrong with that, but financial success may not always be proportionate to the amount of time you put in.

As usual, the Times is years behind the already questionable trend. When I started my first blog-before-you-called-it-that, I saw plenty of other writers walk away, great writers, too, writers I liked. But most of them didn't quit over failure to make a fortune, undue fame or ineffectiveness in spurring one's presidential candidate to victory. (That was once my earnestness too.) Just like any other habit, they had to decide for themselves whether it was worth fitting into their undoubtedly full lives.

If anything has changed about my interaction with the Internet, it's that most of my fly-by-night ideas for blogs never make it out of the "Hey, wouldn't it be great if..." stage, because I'd rather start something lasting. But if I felt constrained to blog now about what I did when I started, I might have abandoned ship too.

NYC: Housing Works Open Air Street Fair today

Oh, sweet temptation! SoHo's Housing Works is having one of its two annual street fairs today on Crosby and there will probably be $1 books galore. I need a good excuse not to be there -- perhaps I'm too busy reading Louis Menand's New Yorker essay on creative writing programs, which reveals (among other things) that Jonathan Safran Foer is teaching creative writing at NYU when not hanging out at the Public.

Thanks for the tips, Flavorpill and SPD.

Photo: kosloff

Raindrops keep fallin' on my head...

but I'm all about Infinite Summer today, because New York will eventually dry out. I just started a Goodreads group for it, so if you use the site and are planning to tackle the book, come on over. Wouldn't you rather get through it with the "loving" "support" of the Internet than by yourself?

Plus, reading a Big Book this summer will leave you more to show than, say, trying to find out if Neil Gaiman is really dating half of the Dresden Dolls, a piece of gossip I certainly did not just spend 10 minutes trying to verify.

I'm not exactly objective, but I thought this AV Club interview with authors Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida was particularly insightful in terms of how they work. Sometimes I wish I could do all my writing after midnight; the air is clearer then.

I guess it's natural to be curious about how writers write their books and when they do. It isn't really fair to take that genesis into consideration when you think about the finished product, but I love a good story. On the one hand, you have your superstar who wrote the entire thing in grad school, and on the other hand -- you have Millard Kaufman, a screenwriter during the Hollywood blacklist days who started his first novel at 86 and finished at 90. (Not that people in grad school are necessarily excluded from having good stories.) Or Beverly Cleary, whose second autobiography MY OWN TWO FEET I just discovered, who surrounded herself with books for years but who finally began after moving into a house where she found a ream of paper in a closet, and worked on what became HENRY HUGGINS every night after her job as a librarian.

Maybe that's one of the reasons I still read blog-to-book adaptations even though they are frequently disappointing -- if you're familiar with the blog already, then you've had a front seat to that process. It's like peeking over your doctor's shoulder and seeing he's writing poems on his prescription pad (for the doctors who still have them, I guess).

NYC: Another indie bookstore bids goodbye

Don't know how I missed this since it's my neighborhood, but the Morningside Bookshop is no more. From the last newsletter:

So, raise a glass to the ghosts of bookstores past: Gotham Book Mart, Coliseum, Oscar Wilde, Hacker Art Books, Eyore’s, Ivy, Murder Ink, Librería Lectorum, Old Shakespeare and Co., Bloomsday, Different Light, Bookmasters, Walden, Doubleday’s, Scribner’s, Rizzoli, Spring Street Books, and the Fourth Avenue Bookstore Row. To all those other shops that have gone before us, we salute you. We have tried to be the little bookshop that could. We couldn’t. Not for lack of effort; it’s about money – we never had enough.

The store owners were paying $9,000 in rent to Columbia University according to the New York Times and let me tell you, it is not a big place. Some are criticizing the university for not granting an abatement on back rent.

Morningside Bookshop is survived locally by Book Culture (née Labyrinth Books) which may be taking over the lease if allowed.

A summer reading story

We don't have a TV and we don't have Internet and the market down the block doesn't rent DVDs, so what I mostly do is read. I read about infidelity among Muslims in Egypt and obesity-causing food additives and New Jersey wedding bands in the '80s. It's not because I'm unhappy where I am.

I have come to Boston for the summer ostensibly to work, but really to be free, to not be at home. I live in a third-floor walk-up above an ice cream shop and walk to the office. I see Cambridge Street in the twilight after the mosquitoes have tired and I get lost in Coolidge Corner and I don't tell anyone where I'm going most of the time, but I come out all right. My first week I buy a stove-top espresso maker online because it seems like the thing you do when you work, buy coffee and make it for yourself.

I borrow Alice Munro's THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN from the bookshelf of the girl I'm subletting from, an architecture student with a wide, flat drafting table. I borrow Andy Warhol's diaries too but don't finish.

I read Robert Benchley and James Thurber for now, Faulkner for later. I read EUGENE ONEGIN and want to take it apart in a paper. I read PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT and don't. I read Nicholson Baker's VOX in one sitting in the library, sunk down in an overstuffed chair, and feel like I'm getting away with something.

I read after I've left subpar improv shows and Philip Glass operas. I read on the grass while the chattering high school students pass. I read in the Coop and leave without buying anything. I probably brought a book to my first and only Red Sox game, but I don't remember what it was. I even read walking to work until I fall one day, then I stop. There is a heat wave and I read facing into the window fan that blows the hot air from the street into my face.

My housemate reads in the bathtub with a beer between drafts of a paper on Martin Amis' TIME'S ARROW. My fellow intern skips dinner and reads giant design books she gets at MIT. My sister reads my letters and sends me back brightly colored tales of what mischief a camp of 6-year-olds can get into.

At the end of the summer I come home sad. I read EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED on the patio and dream about going back to school. In the fall I will take that Faulkner class and struggle to read anything for fun around editing articles and conjugating verbs. My housemate will move to Iowa and the next time I go to Boston, it will be just for a concert, and not to stay. A few summers later I walk past my old building and it looks exactly as I remember. On the way back to New York I read THE NATURAL.

LA Confidential: You and your precious absolute justice.

A police-department Christmas party gone wrong sets up the dynamic of James Ellroy’s L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, which shakes three cops like dice over a map of Los Angeles. Jack Vincennes brought the booze, Ed Exley ends up locked in a closet and Bud White lets his temper get away with him, but when the smoke clears that skirmish (based on a real-life incident of police brutality) is just an establishing shot to where the three men are headed in pursuit of the perpetrators of a massacre. Meet your neo-noir if you dare.

The highly stylized language is your narrator as three officers, a pen-pusher, a short fuse and an addict, get wrapped up in the investigation of an April 1953 armed robbery at a coffee shop called the Nite Owl, originally believed to be the work of an African-American gang. The case is nearly closed and then under the weight of new evidence it swings open, and ruins their lives.

I finished this book more than a week ago and have been struggling with what to write about it, because it tested me. With its determination (I had earlier written “unwillingness”) not to leave out any element of the case, employing none as a red herring, it’s designed to frustrate, and when a dead end is hit it inspires a feeling of irritation that makes the same device used in Richard Price’s LUSH LIFE look like a gnat against a swarm of mosquitoes.

Motivated by hate -- of themselves, of each other, of the mighty hand of Fate -- Exley, White and Vincennes work their own angles on the Nite Owl aided or blocked by the bureaucracy in which they operate. (Epistolary remnants which occasionally pop up between sections include departmental memos whose dryness I can only assume is original to the period.) Their approach to it is at times very journalistic, which was easier to buy when I was wondering how they had the time to separate from their open cases and chase down leads. It was never repetitious but as the staccato of the sentences pushed me forward, the plot pushed back. And at first, the language too felt like an impediment; there’s a consciousness to the argot that classic noir doesn’t have, the confetti of “K.A.”s and “NMI”s, the purposeful elimination of articles, that sings its own strange tune. The reconstruction o the case approaches and recedes with each cop’s discoveries and setbacks; as a reader, you have to be willing to exist to a certain extent in that quagmire until the ending, which (to be purposefully vague) I found completely exhilarating.

The complexity of the resolution rewards readers who manage to stick with L.A. CONFIDENTIAL until then, rejecting the common approach of the “twist” which leaves you feeling dim for not picking up on it earlier. It spools out over nearly a hundred pages of lead chasing and confrontations; at one point a character even lays out for the reader the exact gaps which exist in his reconstruction of the case, as if to remind (again) of the gulf that exists between suspicion and arraignment. I wanted to go back into it and poke around in the shot-up wreckage of the Nite Owl not to see what I’d missed the first time but just to experience the whole ride from the beginning.

That’s not how I felt at the conclusion of my previous (and first) Ellroy experience, with THE BLACK DAHLIA over two years ago. I felt the same adaptive curve in getting used to the language, but flew through the book only to be stopped cold at the ending. THE BLACK DAHLIA confirmed what I expected about the genre, that there could not be a satisfying conclusion in this open-ended world (how postmodern!); L.A. CONFIDENTIAL overturned that expectation completely.

Maybe it’s because of the way I read THE BLACK DAHLIA (over a long day of flight delays, when the escapist thrill was as necessary as air), that with L.A. CONFIDENTIAL I sabotaged my reading experience by chopping up its chapters over what turned out to be two months. But it’s worth remembering that both books are considered part of the same sequence of Ellroy novels, known as the “L.A. Quartet,” being the first and third volumes of it. I don’t question that either ending was less than intentional on Ellroy’s part, but my experience with the first clearly set me up for the next.

At one point one of the women in the book, whose representation is problematic enough to deserve its own post, says of her lover that he acts in bed "like he never wants it to end, because when it ends he will have to return to what he is." As much as the LAPD wants to close the Nite Owl case, the obsessive love for it does certain things for our protagonists (don’t call them heroes) -- getting Ed Exley attention from the top brass, Jack Vincennes something to think about besides drugs and his past, and letting Bud White imagine that he can be better than his erstwhile mentor and his reputation, "A DETECTIVE -- NOT A HEAD BASHER." At L.A. CONFIDENTIAL’s best I could smell the dusty files, took a breath before a door was kicked open. I’m not done reckoning with this book; for one thing, I’ve just watched the 1997 movie adaptation, whose acclaim (along with having read THE BLACK DAHLIA) prompted me to persevere.

Men! Some of them like to read! And then they like to talk about it!

There are many things to love about this Sunday Stylesesque Boston Globe article about men's book clubs:

• The snobbery right off of the bat that a club whose purpose is to "drink beer and read Charles Bukowski" is not a real book club. A real book club contains two things: Tea sandwiches and ladies.
  

• The discovery that it is someone's job to write a column entitled "Books for Dudes." Dude, how do you get that job? If enlisted I would quickly abuse this privilege by using the word "dude" all the time, but it looks like author Douglas Lord (o lucky man) does the same thing: I spotted 19 in this column alone.

• The Page 69 rule, according to book club member and man Ned Pride:

  "There has to be something pretty sick going on on page 69 for us to read the book. Either a sexual encounter or some crazy situation. You can count on it with [John] Updike or [Tom] Wolfe, guys like that."

• I went ahead and tested this rule with a book I had in reach, Cormac McCarthy's BLOOD MERIDIAN, and it failed! Therefore, Cormac McCarthy: not for men. (On page 69 the boy is being pulled through a market and "traveling medicine show" by soldiers -- not crazy enough.)

• The ham-fisted attempt to tie book-club participation to the recession ("At a time when men account for nearly 80 percent of the 5.7 million Americans who have lost their jobs") by suggesting that the groups provide both support and networking. Because in a boom economy, no one needs to read.

Much as I would fully support a man joining a book club (friends, brother, the pseudonymous Camus, whoever) this is just silliness. But maybe something good can come out of it: Using the beer-Bukowski model, describe your fantasy of what a book club should be, man, woman or child that you are.

"Revolutionary Road" out on DVD today

Fans of Kate, Leo, suburban derangement, soul-searching, or seekers of proof that I don't hate every movie: The book is still better, but I stand by my claim that last year's Sam Mendes effort was probably the best adaptation that could have happened. And it's not as depressing as the trend wrought by this week's other book "adaptation" on DVD, "He's Just Not That Into You," a film I was happy to skip and plan to keep skipping.

If you like REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, you might like THE STORY OF A MARRIAGE which is now out in paperback. I can't find any evidence of a forthcoming adaptation, but I assume we'll see a Weinstein Co. Best Picture nominee in 3 to 5 years. My casting suggestions are a bit spoilery, so I will put them in the comments.

Dear People Who Signed Off On This Movie Poster For The Forthcoming Adaptation Of Jodi Picoult's "My Sister's Keeper"

What in the blue hell is this? Did any of you READ this book? Because, if so, you know that this poster is a chocolate-covered lie with warm deception sauce and two scoops of preposterous.

I have no particular love for Jodi Picoult's book and think any movie which dares to promote itself "from the director of 'The Notebook'" deserves to lay on the 4 for $20 table at Blockbuster forever(1), but this is a travesty. For those who don't know, this book is about a girl trying to medically emancipate herself from her parents because they conceived her as a genetic match and donor for her older sister, and now Sis needs a kidney. (Or, by the transitive property, NEVER LET ME GO minus PREP.) In other words, this movie is not at all like THE NOTEBOOK. Nor does it take place in a hazy garden sprinkled with motes of light, but I can see how you would make that mistake!

I haven't seen "My Sister's Keeper" because it doesn't come out until June 26, so I can't properly determine that it will suck. And it does have Alec Baldwin in it -- I believe he plays the kindly bubble man who gives Cancer Kid in the corner her first wand. I have seen "The Notebook,"(2) which suffers from a lot of things including the absence of Alec Baldwin, but I would put it in the genre of romantic drama.(3) This is more like a family drama, and anyone who sees the poster and goes in expecting a string of tender moments will probably want their $16.50 (4) back.

What this poster says to me is: "Medically emancipating yourself can be fun! And your mommy will totally understand. And somewhere in the distance, your sister will blow bubbles preciously, as if to emphasize the fragility of life. Hers, in this case. but never mind that!"

If I didn't already have several reasons to not see this movie, I've sure got one now. Shame on you, New Line Cinemas and Curmudgeon Films (ooh, but good call on the name there).

Poster source: filmofilia.com. It's not their fault.

---
1. On the other hand, judging by Nick Cassavetes' resume, there's not a lot to talk about. "John Q," "Alpha Dog," a Marisa Tomei-Gena Rowlands buddy movie? From the director who is also some dude in "Face/Off"? I would have gone with "From the best-selling novel by Jodi Picoult."
2. Look, my Spanish host mom foisted a pirated copy on me when I was too sick to say no. Do I get any respect back for watching it dubbed in Spanish? No?
3. I hate "The Notebook," but less for what it was (cringe-inducing script, decent acting by leads with good chemistry) and more for what it represents: It is but one course in the unending dinner of movies I, as a lady of a certain quadrant, am supposed to love and instead can't stand. I have even been accused of not being a romantic because I didn't love "The Notebook," but I would argue it isn't even that romantic of a movie, and I could give you ten better without blinking. I am hardly alone in this belief! And this footnote has clearly wandered off another blog, perhaps Tiger Beatdown.
4. Had an Old Moment this weekend at the movies when the machine spat out this price for "Up" in 3-D. It was the glasses. And the fact that we went to the Empire in Times Square, but the glasses played a part. Pixar, do you know how hard it is to cry with two sets of glasses on? Do you??

May Post-BEA Unbookening: We won't dance, we won't sing, we won't talk

Bought 6
Got 7 to review
Checked out 5 from the library
Picked up 10 at BEA
28 in

Gave away 10 books
Donated 24
Returned 11 to library
Left 1 at JFK, 2 on flights, 1 in a hotel
49 out (21 more out than in)

Here is a BEA fiction for you: I met a lot of authors and it wasn't awkward, after which I enjoyed a delicious meal at the Javits Center and took a hovercraft home. See you in 2010!