Spotted on the subway

Thirtysomething man, '90s haircut, burgundy polo shirt, brown Coach leather tote bag or satchel of some kind. But I didn't see the cover you see here because he was reading on the white Nook (black and white, not color).

I haven't had the chance to play with one of those yet, but from up close (my nose poking over my own book, which was Kate Christensen's THE ASTRAL) it looks a lot like a Kindle, but white and with the wheel or round click-button.

From what I've heard, people normally elect Nook over Kindle for the ability to take it into a brick-and-mortar store. I certainly don't mind spending time in Barnes & Noble, but I haven't had a problem thus far with my Kindle that I couldn't solve by Googling. (That's how I learned to take the battery plate off... and in fact that the Kindle had a battery plate in the first place.) Still, it strikes me that B&N could do more to capitalize on the bookstore-online relationship where the Nook is concerned, to make it a viable alternative.

If only Franzen had seen this one

before it was too late! Source: Married to the Sea

The other thing I learned from "Midnight In Paris"

S/he who has read the 2-volume biography, has the last word. I think I've only read two of them in my life, but when Gil (Owen Wilson) claims to have read one of Rodin in order to shut up Michael Sheen's pedantic, mansplainy Paul, I felt a shock of vicarious vindication for him. So many Pauls are not so easily put off.

My collection of 2-volume biographies consists of Edward Mendelson's EARLY AUDEN and LATER AUDEN and Peter Guralnick's LAST TRAIN TO MEMPHIS (soon to be adapted?) and CARELESS LOVE, about Elvis Presley. Neither has allowed me to settle any scores, but I'm young still. If you'd like to fill the brag box with people you've actually read a 2-volume biography of (or more, if you're one of those waiting for Robert Caro to finish his LBJ opus), please feel free.

The Man In The Mirror In The Gray Flannel Skirt

Since he was a teenager, Jon-Jon Goulian developed a penchant for wearing women's clothing, survived major surgery (medical and cosmetic), moved from surfers' paradise to New York City and made it through law school before deciding he would never become a lawyer and taking a series of odd jobs instead. As chronicled in his underwhelming memoir THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SKIRT, he thinks it could have gone a little better.

Self-awareness, for Goulian, arrives on the scene like a hero, just as one might despair it will never arrive. It fits his narrative together thus: For years, he has been navigating among various sources of self-consciousness, and subsequently producing some eccentricities to make himself able to face the world. Impending baldness can be disguised by a shaved head (this is the least eccentric in that everyone and his dad has seen it); bodybuilding forges a physique that makes people who shout slurs on the street reluctant to take their harassment any further. And an abrupt decision at the age of 17 not to care about school hides the disappointment in a low test score and the thread of being the least as well as youngest of three brothers, in a glossy coat of teenage nonchalance.

Don't worry, young Jonathan gets into Columbia anyway (nepotism), but what's missing from his account is any awareness that he's not alone on these islands of bodily insecurity and low self-esteem. There isn't a comparative grading to attest that Goulian had it worse, just no acknowledgment whatsoever. Instead, like a solipsistic Job, he lists and re-lists these trials in flat narration and the insistence that doesn't want sympathy. (Ironically, the most resonant is likely the least common, a hernia that manifests itself first as a testicular lump too shameful to be shown to anyone for years. Talk about teenage misery.)

Goulian's take on his life choices seems to be, at the end of the day, that he's resigned to living with his quirks, not overcoming them. He'd rather dwell on them than on the circumstances of his luck. While his family may be puzzled as to why Goulian enjoys wearing skirts and makeup but is still straight, it's a largely supportive concern. Despite not practicing law, he has carved out some kind of itinerant career (underdescribed for this reader, his stint at the New York Review of Books just some kind of circular anecdote about having a really good if slightly nutty boss), which in New York City is always something to note. The end of the book finds him in (spoiler) the family cabin in Vermont, feeling both isolated and relieved by his distance from civilization.

To rustle this book's pages is to hear the faint cackle of Quentin Crisp, whose own insecurities and heightened senses of danger (as chronicled in THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT, a much better book) failed to keep him from reveling in that of himself which could not be reduced. It would be impossible for everyone to live the Crisp way, but his insights had the time to mature; Goulian's have not, and as a result, his decades-old feelings are rendered in loving detail, while his present face is a blank.

Respect to Longfellow

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
He who warned and, uh, the arms,
And bells were rung out as alarms
To tell the British we were there,
And had our guns, and to beware.

He said to his friend, “Abe Lincoln, listen
I am riding out alone
On a super-secret mission.
You can’t get me by telephone
But if you don’t hear from me by ten
Send me a text and only when
I’m at the hotel I’ll hit you back.
This way the rebels can’t attack
And long will fly the Union Jack.”

 --first two verses of "Paul Revere's Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Sarah Palin" by Ben Greenman, in the New Yorker. I usually find Greenman's homages tedious to annoying -- I know, you'd think this would be right in my wheelhouse and it has turned out the opposite! Like my "Glee" problem! -- but this is just perfect.

Mala-props

I have had a lot of run-ins with odd language in the office setting. Some words that pass for words in Cubicle America are in fact not words, but abominations; some are merely amusing and not horrible. But nothing beats the meeting I had today when someone said, "I didn't want everyone to feel like, 'Oh no, the sink is shipping!'"

If any of you have artistic talent, I think a drawing of this would make a great Threadless design, and I would happily be its mascot.

Housing Works Steet Fair haulblog

Brady Udall, THE MIRACLE LIFE OF EDGAR MINT
Richard Russo, THE RISK POOL
Katherine Graham, PERSONAL HISTORY

And a $1 CD that my friend Wade Garrett found in the "Media" section (thank you!). Nice going, Sunday. Let's all contract some mild yet contagious disease so we can stay at home and read all day, okay?

La la la, Unbookening can't hear you, Unbookening's at the Housing Works Street Fair

(Or will be after brunch. It's till 6PM in SoHo! Beer and ice cream for sale! Not afraid to be servicey!)

Received 1 book as a gift
Checked out 7 from the library
Got 5 to review
Bought 2
15 in 

Gave 1 away
Donated 4
Returned 6 to the library
Deleted 7 books off Kindle
18 out


This month's quandaries in book owning (not to be confused with book OWNAGE)
1. Do I have to count the book propping up my air conditioner as one that I own, because technically I still own it? (What? I didn't have any 2x4s lying around the house.)
2. I just deleted some files off my Kindle -- some stuff for free, and one book I bought (O: A PRESIDENTIAL NOVEL; I paid for it, but you shouldn't). Do these count the same as shedding volumes? Are they less urgent since I wasn't running out of room? Am I desperately searching for a Three-Fifths Compromise joke here? (Maybe, probably, and yes-but-there-is-none.) Edit: I went back and added those books just as I would normal books. Mission Accomplished!

V.S. Naipaul is a sexist toolbag

The Nobel Prize winner has been jamming his foot in his mouth like it was a delicious cake this week, telling the Guardian that he can tell within a few paragraphs whether something has been written by a woman, and that no female writer is as good as he is. According to Naipaul, women are inferior writers because they are "sentimental" and don't play the "master of the house" role in life, and that comes across in their work.

He also, in a spectacular piece of bridge-burning, specifically attacked his former editor Diana Athill for writing bad memoirs full of "feminine tosh." (I can't quite enjoy this Briticism due to context, but hopefully someday I will.) Sure, he singled out Jane Austen too, but she can't hear it! Athill says the critique was based on a falling-out they had over one of his novels she didn't like and that "I think one should just ignore it."

Ugh. Hint: whenever you say you can "just tell" something, you might as well be singing, "I Made A Sweeping Generalization (And I Liked It)." I believe Diana Abu-Jaber speaks for many when she writes in an NPR commentary headed, "From one writer to another, shut up." Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon takes the more bemused tack, "How banal life would be without the feud-picking, egomaniacal literary blowhard."

What's chilling about his brashness, besides his apparent taken right to say whatever he wants without backlash, is contemplating how many writers of his generation could share his views, but just have the good sense not to broadcast them. (I'm not going to name names because I don't know, and would rather not speculate anyway.) Let's not pretend he's the only sexist person out there. One tends to drift into the mindset, as with other forms of bigotry, that it might be best just to wait for the bigots to pass of natural causes and stop putting their thumbs on the scale of international opinion.

Plus, it's a double-edged sword for women who write. I belong to a site on which I write and comment under a gender-neutral handle, and I've been mistaken for a male writer 3 or 4 times. I have always found this funny, as well as sociologically interesting -- absent the cues of photos or pronouns, how do people decide? -- but it gives me via Naipaul cause to wonder: Were they saying "You write like a dude" as a descriptor, or as a compliment? Should I not have been so amused to be divorced from my gender-nominatively-female name and appearance? (I assume the same would hold true for a male writer wishing to tackle a topics he fears would pigeonhole him as a writer "for women" -- whatever that means in that context.)

To test Naipaul's claim (and okay, probably to drive more clicks to the controversy created by reporting on the thing!), the Guardian set up a "Naipaul quiz" on which you can test yourself according to the "gender" of various texts. I scored a 70 percent, which is better than Roger Ebert, but I think it was only because I recognized a few of the passages. I would never claim to have this ability, but it's not because I am a dainty flower afraid of picking fights. It's because it's ridiculous.

Just The Tipping Point

Happy Friday! Apparently in Nicholson Baker's new novel, there is a male character who refers to his junk as his "Malcolm Gladwell."

The New York Observer ferreted this one out although curiously they couldn't get Gladwell to comment on this piece of trivia.

Being in possession of this knowledge I will now go blush myself to death.

For all the Chad Harbach fans out there

Somehow this blog has become a search draw for information related to n+1 cofounder and debut author Chad Harbach. Since the first reviews of his novel THE ART OF FIELDING are trickling out, here's the sum of my knowledge about this writer and his anticipated debut this fall.

Harbach grew up in Wisconsin, like me, and went to Harvard (undergrad) and UVa (MFA). THE ART OF FIELDING is a novel about college baseball players that got blurbed by Jonathan Franzen and chosen for a panel at Book Expo America, the big annual publishing trade show, that is known for launching the biggest fiction books of the fall. This panel last year launched Emma Donoghue's ROOM and Siddhartha Mukherjee's THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES (plus another book I liked not at all that is currently doing a great thing in propping up my air conditioner). I like baseball books and college fiction, so I'm looking forward to this. There's a fair amount of baggage that comes with the n+1 label, but not as much as in previous years when it was a plucky upstart.

He also scored one of the most condescending news headlines ever when Bloomberg covered his book deal as, "Unemployed Harvard Man Auctions Baseball Novel for $650,000." It's hard to know which implication is worse, that there is something distasteful about being unemployed after having gone to Harvard (the recession happened to them too!) or that the book was some kind of rainy-day-shed project he developed in the absence of a job -- when in fact, as the profile notes, he'd been working on it for ten years. (My own headline: "Chad Harbach will be buying a lot of drinks this weekend..." though really, people should have been toasting him. Which I likely would, if given the opportunity.)

Look for THE ART OF FIELDING from Little, Brown in stores September 7.

New York Times discovers ghostwriters

So cute, like they just grew up! I think someone's about to get in trouble for this, though:

"[Nicole] Richie [former reality-TV show star, child of famous person Lionel Richie] promoted her second novel, PRICELESS in an interview last year with USA Today, describing her writing routine: write early in the morning, before the rest of her family wakes up. 'I write all my own stories,' she said.

But Ms. Richie’s publisher, Judith Curr of Atria Books, indicated otherwise, saying that a ghostwriter did most of the writing of Ms. Richie’s book. (Ms. Richie did not respond to a request for comment.)"

Burned by your own publisher!

Also, and just because it's the only one of these books I have read personally: Whoever ghostwrote L.A. CANDY should (have) be(en) fired. For about two chapters it looked as if it would be kind of subversive and present a kind of nested meta-commentary, but alas -- it was so boring, and not just in a "YA book not normally to my taste" way. It was just dull. I don't feel ashamed about starting this book, but I should not have bothered to finish. Ohhh, now the healing can begin.

Cultural Learnings Of Spanish World For Make Benefit Glorious Degree-Granting Institutions

Oddly enough, my previously expressed desire to get back to reading in Spanish was triggered by a book I read recently in English by a Spanish-language writer, Marcelo Figueras' KAMCHATKA. This book reminded me of a dozen others I had been assigned over the years in Spanish classes, but in a pleasant, nostalgic way, which I'm not sure the author was going for... but I'll get to that.

My Spanish literature education fell along a couple of different lines, but I was assigned a lot of what might be called historical-problem works -- those that that use the backdrop of a recent event to inflame or inform a domestic drama. In KAMCHATKA's case, it's Argentina's 1976 military coup, leading to tens of thousands of people on the other political side being "disappeared" (that's tortured if they're lucky), and while the eleven-year-old narrator of the novel doesn't know exactly why he's been pulled out of school to stay at someone else's vacation home, he's fairly sure it's not because his parents want to surprise him. Particularly when his parents tell him to choose another name by which he'll be known on their extended-non-vacation. And when he chooses Harry, in honor of Harry Houdini, a biography of whom has been left in the vacation home.

To alleviate the boredom from being taken out of school and told not to leave the grounds or call their friends, "Harry" and his younger brother "Simon" (who chose his name in honor of "The Saint") drop into hours of games of their own devising, from trying to train the toads that fall into the pool to walk out to determining the limits of Superman’s powers, while their parents leave them in the care of an impossibly cool 18-year-old whose own lack of context -- who is he, why is he there? -- is a mystery.

Because “Harry” writes from adulthood, the fate of the family in KAMCHATKA is all but spelled out in its earlier chapters, with the stay in the countryside just a way station toward the inevitable. In the moment, the villa figures as both a protected space and an arena made dangerous by uncertainty; most of the time, for Harry, it’s the former, a locale where he can ‘train’ for future feats of heroism. Yet he doesn’t dream of rescuing his family from their uncertain fate, only of returning to the status quo. Like his namesake, he only wants to go back to being free.

There are pedagogical reasons to include novels like this, because they pack a double punch of language development and cultural knowledge. That I didn't catch onto that part as I was inching up the institutional ladder at first is assured. But it took me back to the (now obvious) realization that learning another language isn't just a matter of translating word for word, or even sentence by sentence; you have to strive for the words behind the words, the way Argentineans use "disappeared" to talk about dissidents of that time, not because they aren't sure where the people are.

What I Learned About Famous Authors From Watching "Midnight In Paris" (dir. Woody Allen, 2011)

(Spoilers.)

• It's okay to call T.S. Eliot "Tom" if that's how he introduces himself.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald is a nice dude but his hair is questionable. And his wife is 12, if not in real age than in behavior and stature.
• Alice B. Toklas doesn't talk and is practically invisible.
• Ernest Hemingway would not be that much fun to hang out with, in part because he has to work his man-credentials into every conversation. Also, he hates you. He'll still get a drink with you, but he hates you.
• That Djuna Barnes, man, she can dance.
• It's fun to hang out, but in the end Gertrude Stein is the only one who will actively help you get your shit together.

Filmbook-to-be: Trailer for U.S. "Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" enters the world

Sony is busy yanking all of these off YouTube, so not sure this is going to work, but here's a bootleg version of the redband and the greenband is below:



It looks a lot like the Swedish adaptation at first pass (read my review here) but not all of its Fincherisms might translate to a sneak trailer. In any case: Christmas! A bloody, leave-Grandma-at-home Christmas to you too.