Somebody get me this book!

"That summer, he abandoned the science-fiction novel he’d been working on and started what became Gawker Media."-- from the New Yorker profile of Nick Denton

Here's a cool twist on the best-of list: The Los Angeles Times finds the 10 best "best-of" collections from this year. Especially looking forward to the 2010 edition of NONREQUIRED READING.

The Harper Perennial book about literary tattoos I wrote about last summer is coming out this week! It's called THE WORD MADE FLESH and its accompanying (some images NSFW) blog is providing me a much needed image break after staring at THE INSTRUCTIONS all weekend. (That's right. I have run straight out of words. I fear for the future.)

Leftovers

• Not only is there potentially a fourth Stieg Larsson book, his dad is now claiming there is a fifth which he wrote before #4 because it "was more fun to write." (L.A. Times)
• "The Kindle changed my reading habits, because I now buy books pretty much only when I’m drunk, and late at night." Elif Batuman sounds like she'd be fun to hang out with. (Boston Globe via Peter W. Knox)
• Forgive me if you all knew that Keith Olbermann is a huge James Thurber fan who reads his short stories out loud on his show. I just found out this week, perils of the cableless. (GalleyCat)
• Literary betting news! Britons can no longer bet on the Booker Prize after a suspiciously large amount of money was placed on only slightly tarnished star Tom McCarthy. (Guardian)
• "Discussed: Comical Hats, Tertiary Characters, Conan the Barbarian, The Dark One, Typologies Within Typologies, Moral Predicaments, Braid-Yanking, Rhapsodies Over Brocaded Silk, Arcane Metaphysical Theology, Clark Gable." Name that fantasy author! (The Believer)
• This SPOILERY review of "The Social Network" is probably my favorite which I also disagree with. It's an art. (The New Republic).
• "It was a great way of getting out of the house, of not being stuck alone in my room all day, and, as I have Lonoff say in THE GHOST WRITER, I got to use a public urinal — that was a breakthrough — and also I got to read a lot." Yeah, Philip Roth, it sounds like you really got a lot out of teaching. Any of his former UPenn students wish to speak to that experience? (Esquire)

Spoiler for JANE EYRE [although really...]

Sassy Gay Friend, you really get me. (If you don't understand this image, watch this video on "Romeo and Juliet.") See also: Spoiler for ETHAN FROME; MOBY DICK; spoiler for GONE WITH THE WIND; spoiler for HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS.

Filmbook: "The Social Network" (2010)

The most interesting tidbit I read around the David Fincher-directed, Aaron Sorkin-scripted adaptation of Ben Mezrich's 2009 book THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES was that Fincher and Sorkin were not regular Facebook users. This can no longer be excused by their generation, considering that it's the most popular social networking site among the 46 percent of boomers who use such sites (source: Mashable). Possibly they choose not to use it so they can actually get things done, things like directing Oscar-winning movies and writing critically acclaimed if canceled TV shows. (Jesse Eisenberg also said in an interview he doesn't use it. Jesse, your pants are on fire.)

Armed with that information I went into "The Social Network" fearing it would be at best a little off-base about the role of Facebook in the lives of its users, and at worst hilariously off-base in the TV docu-drama format. ("Are your children Facebooking? Right now??!??!") In the end, Sorkin and Fincher played to their relative strengths and made a movie about primarily the man, and to a lesser extent the men, involved in the creation of Facebook. Still, in the final scene, which I will not spoil, there's a snapshot of the user experience which you'll either find embarrassingly on the nose, or perfect. I thought it was perfect.

It's too early to tell, and I won't venture to guess, whether "The Social Network" is the best movie of the year. But there's something so exciting about seeing a movie that spools out in your (my) lifetime, in your (my) common environment. I didn't go to Harvard but I was hanging out there, and in places like that, at the time Zuckerberg was dropping out and moving to Silicon Valley. A special correspondent to this blog reminded me that I was the one who got him to join Facebook when we got it on our campus. (Six years later, still signing up for new blinky things! And proselytizing!) I kept thinking of the first line of Bret Easton Ellis's recent novel IMPERIAL BEDROOMS: "They made a movie about us."

And after all the rumors that "The Social Network" was a complete takedown of its boy-wonder CEO, I was surprised to find that as unethical and potentially thieving and shifty as I found Zuckerberg (in Eisenberg's portrayal), I was coming around to identifying with his fictional portrayal in all his status-obsessed feverish all-nighter carelessness. Granted, Sorkin had two characters at his disposal that would be too implausible if they weren't already real in "the Winklevi" -- the snotty tall WASPY crew team members accustomed to throwing their weight around -- who were easy to vilify. But it becomes a very complex portrait. It made me think, and that alone, I am sorry to say, boots it to the top drawer of movies I'll see this year.

Don't get me wrong, I'm as frustrated as the factual inconsistencies between the real story and the book AND movie as the rest of the world, but I was still thoroughly entertained by this movie. I thought the acting was much stronger than I had been led to believe, particularly Andrew Garfield as Zuckerberg's best friend and original business partner Eduardo Saverin (whose interviews formed the core of Mezrich's book, which calls his portrait into question... rabbit hole approaching...). In fact over the end credits I found myself actively wishing it were a little longer and covered a little more history.

"The Social Network" is more of a movie than what I expected, whereas THE ACCIDENTAL BILLIONAIRES is just about the book I expected it to be, but really no better. If Mezrich (of BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE fame) hadn't gotten to this material first, someone else would have, and some say David Kirkpatrick's THE FACEBOOK EFFECT is actually better. But Kirkpatrick had Zuckerberg's cooperation, which dims his star a little. And Mezrich being first, even if incorrect on micro and some macro levels, means that we won't get a movie called "The Social Network Effect." (Well, maybe in 25 years when the remake cycle has sped up enough.)

The movie is smarter and better put together than Mezrich's book, but more importantly, the book didn't become a conversation topic. I've had more substantive conversations about "The Social Network" than I have about any other movie this year -- yes Virginia, including "Inception." (And I realize I'm not a fair test case because I toil in the Internets now, but I think this will bear out for other people.) It matters less, although I'm dying to know, what its creators saw in it to make. I'm glad they made the effort.

Filmbook verdict: If you're only going to do one, see the movie. (Wow, and recommending that on my book blog... it is a funny feeling.) If you're going to do both you might as well read the book first. And as long as you're at the movies, there's a documentary about social networking called "Catfish" which makes an excellent companion piece to "The Social Network" -- but where was I, I have some reading to do.

Breaking: Mario Vargas Llosa wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Haruki Murakami set to join Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth in the Bitter
Dudes With Better Odds club. Hmmm... I for one don't really like
Vargas Llosa. What are your feelings?

File under: good cause, creative effort: Author Jason Mulgrew is raising money for the Trevor Project, a crisis center and helpline for LGBTQ teens, by inviting readers to join his fantasy basketball league. "I haven’t watched a complete basketball game in three years, but I’m still going to destroy you," writes the author of EVERYTHING IS WRONG WITH ME. The buy-in is $50 (with the option of buying in for someone else) and includes a copy of his book, and he will match every donation that comes in. (Via Monkeychow.)

I haven't been following the Frankfurt Book Fair news as I should, and Books in the Kitchen shows me why I should: According to Publishers Weekly, Jonathan Lethem just sold his next book there, the Sunnyside, Queens-set DISSIDENT GARDENS. Next, he will get someone to attack him on Twitter, impersonate him in a cloak and steal his glasses.

The men who stole Jonathan Franzen's glasses straight off his face at a book party in London have been apprehended.

Apatow and McSweeney's are publishing this anthology to benefit the 826 writing centers. Let's hope it's funnier than "Funny People." (Skeptical.)

Unfairly overlooked (by me): The Rumpus has notes from Lorrie Moore's appearance at the New Yorker Festival this weekend.

New Yorker Festival: Foer, Pamuk, Their Stuff (With Digressions)

On Friday night I went to see Jonathan Safran Foer and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk at the New Yorker Festival event “Possessed,” with Deborah Treisman interviewing and moderating. The pairing was somewhat loose but turned out to be much more within my area of interest than I had initially expected (see Digression 1): Both writers have sideline interests in art and visual projects which they were only too happy to talk about in relation to their work.

Pamuk, who described himself as a “failed painter,” is in the process of transforming his most recent novel THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE into a physical museum in Istanbul, where he was born and where his office is now. The museum, he said, will be a “cultural oddity” to people who haven’t read the book, but for those who have will attempt to duplicate various scenes from it in tableaus of objects. He contrasted visual writers who make you see the world they’re working in (like Tolstoy) to verbal writers who dazzle you with their words (like Dostoevsky), placing himself in the former camp.

Pamuk described furnishing a piece (of which he showed pictures) where the protagonist of the book is standing in his bathroom and said the hardest part was finding the appropriate toothbrush since no one holds onto their toothbrushes from the ‘70s. For another piece he hired another artist to degrade over 4,000 cigarette butts (collected by the narrator from the woman he loves).

Foer, after publishing his first nonfiction book EATING ANIMALS (disliked by your humble blogger), has embarked on something completely different: His new novel TREE OF CODES is an art book created from the manuscript of one of JSF’s personal favorites, Bruno Schulz’s THE STREET OF CROCODILES, in which Foer has cut out parts of the pages or obliterated words in other means to create a new story from the existing story. (Even the title reflects this, see? THE STREET OF CROCODILES.) He didn’t mention this, but I think it’s worth noting that Schulz was a Jewish Pole who was shot and killed in 1942 by a Gestapo officer in a dispute with a friend of his.

To make TREE OF CODES, JSF physically worked on creating the book and shopped it around to several art publishers before finding one that would take it. (He has since started a new novel.) He talked about being inspired in a college sculpture class by the work of Joseph Cornell and wishing, like Pamuk, that he were a painter or visual artist, but deciding that the best way to inspire the same feeling in someone that he felt looking at Cornell’s work was to become a writer.

They both took questions from the audience after, none of which were particularly inspiring except a Polish woman who took the mike just to thank Pamuk for expressing something she could not have expressed. One woman asked Pamuk if he believed objects have auras and took very careful, deliberate notes on his answer (which was, in sum, “if we put them there?”) Foer expounded on his relationship with readers, describing every reading as a “misunderstanding” coming from the deepest part of himself. Unlike other panels I’ve been to, under the New Yorker umbrella or otherwise (see Digression 2), I felt like these authors had a really strong rapport and JSF was properly in awe of his cohort, as were we all.

Digression 1: This is my fourth (!) year attending the New Yorker Festival because I am awesome. However, I don’t love how they clump most of the fiction writers’ events on one night (Friday in this case). It forced me to make a tough choice between this panel and another featuring two authors I love, Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith. Ah, for a clone! My logic behind picking JSF/Pamuk was that I had never seen either of them live, and I thought Pamuk still lived in Istanbul full time, so it would be more difficult to catch him. (He actually teaches at Columbia now; see Digression 3.) Despite the pang I think I made the right choice. (Actually, I was supposed to see Foer AND Smith together at my first fest in 2006, but didn’t make it in from Pennsylvania in time. At least I didn’t have to miss that David Remnick-hosted screening of “Borat.”)

Digression 2: Between this and the Brooklyn Book Festival a few weeks ago, I’ve been thinking about what makes a good panel of authors, and have found no one ingredient that really makes it. But this I know, a bad panel makes everyone look like they’re shouting past each other into a void, and not the one where the audience is. I don’t even think it’s necessary for authors to have much in common, so long as they’re respectful and acknowledge the distance, but sometimes the rift starts in the pairing. The audience can contribute too: Two years ago I went to an A. M. Homes/ Miranda July festival event, and fully 75 percent of the audience was composed of July fanboys and -girls who had no interest in anything Homes said, and that lack of interest was mirrored onstage. Also, don’t ever be on a panel with Miranda July, she takes very odd pauses in her speaking.

Digression 3: Orhan Pamuk’s problems with the Turkish state never came up during this panel, but it was difficult not to be reminded of them as he discussed his work. “I have seen so many military coups,” he said simply in the process of explaining a scene from THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE, and having felt the current regime turn against him, even slightly (the charges were dropped after all) it’s hard to imagine it is not current in his mind. I wonder if he worries about having problems re-entering Turkey to complete his museum. It would be overly simplistic to compare the unrequited love plots that run through his books to any sort of nationalistic feeling or political critique, particularly the sense of betrayal one might feel while being charged with “insulting” one’s own nationality. I mean only a really hack blogger would do that. … …

There's a mouse in my room and this morning it shat on two books, THE GRAPES OF WRATH and a guide to positive psychology.  Meh, everyone's a critic.

This one goes out to Hurricane Nicole

When that I was a little tiny boy
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man's estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas, to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still 'had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.

A great while ago the world began,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day.


Favorite comedy, potentially favorite ending as well.