My Brooklyn Is Boring*

There's already been so much discussion and a measure of controversy over Amy Sohn's portrait of Brooklyn "regressives" -- parents who adopt teenagerish habits as coping mechanisms for what they see as very staid and stable existences -- that I hesitate to add my two cents. Just kidding, this is the Internet, why wouldn't I?

Not only do I live in Brooklyn, I'm in the same general geographic area as Sohn (although I haven't been there as long). I have really, really liked living there for the year and a half-ish I have been in residence. I accept the stereotypes about our shared neighborhood, that it used to be grittier and cheaper and more diverse, that we all eat too many bespoke cupcakes and hang out in bars instead of our living rooms, that young families abound and the streets are safe at 3AM.

No online publication outlet in the universe would publish my account of that time, even though in my view it has been filled with as much confusion and exuberance as Sohn describes in hers. That's because compared to her I am one of those monks who sit on a mountain for 27 years without speaking.

"Moms (and dads) who are crazier than they seem" is just an angle, as produced as the New York Post's pieces on secret Upper East Side bondage aficionados, or the TIME cover with the breastfeeding lady, or THY NEIGHBOR'S WIFE, or... I could go on. It's a great place from which to promote a book! That doesn't automatically make it more authentic than the place I live in.

*positively exciting enough for me

NYC: Housing Works Bookstore Google Offer

The last time they offered a $15 for $30 deal, I was convinced the incredible scores I made would put them off ever doing it again. I was wrong. Buy it now! (Non-New Yorkers, it's valid till January 2013 if you plan to visit our fair shores.)

Via coworker C. who clearly has my best interests at heart.

Sparrows

This one time, I read a Richard Yates novel and was surprised how depressing it was. I must be really off my game right now.

I had set a goal a few years ago to read all of Yates after loving REVOLUTIONARY ROAD (a dysfunctional relationship, perhaps) and my plan is to drop one of his novels onto my library request list every so often when I'm not using one of my precious 15 holds. I didn't know anything more about it when I picked up my library paperback than that it was Yates' second novel, not the ideal way to go into it for reasons I think will be clear.

First of our surprises: this is primarily a war novel, following young Robert Prentice who turns 18 and enlists at the tail end of World War II. Feeling mediocre in all things, Robert goes to war with dreams of a tight bond with his fellow soldiers and the noble sacrifice of battle, only to get bogged down in the dirt (literal and metaphorical) of the Army's engagement abroad. He discovers that he's not really good at the day-to-day work of being a soldier at the inopportune moment of landing in Europe, and then he's really stuck

Intercut with the parade of humiliations that is Robert's service, the indomitable spirit of his mother, Alice, looks like a pie-eyed view of the world, then an outright rejection of any of its truths. Alice divorced Robert's father when he was very young because she felt that he was stifling her artistic career (first a graphic designer, then a sculptor). Her belief that she can support the family on her art if she just gets that one big break leads her to fall deeper and deeper into debt as she moves around the New York City suburbs trying to find the right place to be "inspired." This conviction is similar to April Wheeler's in REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, but April has no power and Alice has wrested it for herself.

Because of their early struggles, Robert and Alice are really too close as mother and son, and the war hurridly creates for them the boundaries they should have had all along. In a way, Robert drinks from the same well of potential hope as his mother, just thousands of miles away. Alice is steadfast in her belief that she's just a "one man show" away from making it, well into middle age, but Robert envisions war heroics as an eraser ridding himself of the shame of growing up poor and picked on; he just finds out right away that it's not going to be like that. Yates loves this topic (earlier this year I read his story "The Canal," treading similar territory); of course, Frank Wheeler was also a World War II vet. The brutality of the humiliation in A SPECIAL PROVIDENCE, though, is arguably worse than the actual acts of war themselves, and it never seems to let up on Robert.

If you've recently read REVOLUTIONARY ROAD I think you'll find this a satisfying deep cut, with a very odd jag into Westchester County society in the 1930s. Zadie Smith compared it to BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S mixed with ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, and damn, don't I wish I had thought of that first.

Programming note: Mostly dead is slightly alive!

Posts may be briefer than usual this week while the HAL-9000 of our operation is getting its logic board and keyboard replaced. (Normal damages to a four-year-old laptop pressed to do just about everything; just like my cell phone that died a few weeks ago, no good story to go along with it.) Relying on mobile and virtual keyboards doesn't make our thinking any less complicated, but it slows down production and makes amusing hyperlinking more difficult. 

 

(Related life advice: When you drop something off at the Apple Store to get repaired, read the "work authorization" they e-mail you afterward very carefully, in case you notice that you're about to be charged $453 for the part the Genius told you, multiple times, would be replaced for free. The Genius' boss sounded irritated that I called back, as if I were disputing the adding up of a tip.)

 

In the meantime, read this really boring blog post about James Franco seeing "Gatz" in London. Spoiler alert: He only made it to 3/4ths of the show (quitter!) but he liked it. I don't think he has the mettle to make it here.

Peter Hessler on Twitter

Well played. And still his 730 followers keep wishing.

Dummy Fined

A Poughkeepsie, NY man will be paying publisher John Wiley $7,000 in compensation for allowing others to pirate WORDPRESS FOR DUMMIES over BitTorrent. Or "sharing" it, depending on your perspective.

Your Assistance, Please: Kindle is Hungry!

Since extensive Googling and the device FAQ have only made me more
confused: can anyone recommend an SD memory card compatible with the
1st generation Kindle? And where I might acquire one?

I asked a sales guy at Staples who was standing next to the Kindle
display and he said "Are you sure it's not a Nook you're asking
about?" FTLOG.

Headphones On: Chad Harbach on WNYC

Leonard Lopate opens this interview with Chad Harbach by asking "So, does everyone hate you now?" That takes balls! It's a great listen though.

Summer Reading: JOSEPH P. KENNEDY PRESENTS the old Hollywood, same as the new Hollywood

Joseph P. Kennedy had a running start in life with a plum position at his father's bank and an alliance with the mayor of Boston's daughter. But that wasn't enough, he wanted to be bigger: he wanted Hollywood! And the more that the mini-mogul denied that he was in it for the renown, or anything above making money, the less convinced a figure he cut.  

As an outsider Kennedy was aided by the fact that the movie industry was going through huge changes at the time, from vaudeville and nickelodeons to "talkies," from the studio system of keeping directors, actors and writers on salary to job-to-job employment detached from particular studios. (Helpful note: Don't mention this last part to anyone working in the entertainment industry now because it will make him VERY angry.) Convinced that any studio could be fixed to turn a profit if it were put under his aegis, Kennedy outmaneuvered careerlong studio executives to get as full control as possible and moved through a series of troubled studios -- either streamlining or gutting, depending on your perspective. But in attempting to eliminate "unnecessary" spending and waste in his Hollywood, Kennedy met his match in two figures, director Erich von Stroheim -- infamous for his lavish productions and months-behind shooting schedules -- and actress Gloria Swanson, with whom Kennedy had an expensive affair for years.

This book illuminated for me a side of the Kennedy patriarch I had never seen, though his businessman's approach to the task at hand will seem familiar from any playbook of mergers or takeovers. He made his ascent with banking money, some of which was made under less than savory circumstances such as moving funds to shell corporations (Delaware!) and buying and selling among his holdings to profit, and largely got away with it. Author Cari Beauchamp gently suggests that Kennedy enjoyed his Hollywood exploits because he was, intellectually, right at the waterline -- it was his version of the stock market, and the stakes were satisfying. (Kennedy did fine on the real stock market, too -- too easy for him?) 

Kennedy, largely seen today as the thwarted politician pushing for his sons' success at all cost, is a fascinating character, but Beauchamp surrounds him with equally fascinating characters. Von Stroheim could be lined up against any number of "problem directors" today and give them a run for their money, and the saga of Frances Marion, one of the early successful female screenwriters who formed a power couple with Westerns actor Fred Thomson, illustrates how Kennedy used people whose expertise was valuable to him to move up in the film industry and then discarded their friendship as a tactic. In the end, it's hard to know whether Kennedy left satisfied by his Hollywood endeavors, because he did such an excellent job of pretending to be interested in his projects, not just the profits.

How to Acquire More Books for Little Money Without Amazon

This morning Elise Nussbaum published a piece on the personal finance blog The Billfold called "Books I Acquired for Last Year for Little or No Money" -- a topic near and dear to our hearts as frugal-ish book people. Borrowing and Bookmooch are covered, but she's taking a little heat for admitting that she bought all her new books on Amazon and

As a frequent Amazon user I have no leg to stand on to criticize Nussbaum, and she does call out a church in her locale (Jersey City) with what sounds like a kickass weekly sale. But if we're going to establish some kind of collection of best practices for book buying, I picture them like this:

Buy new hardcovers and paperbacks as gifts or when splurging on yourself. Gifts are my densest locus of new-book buying, so I budget accordingly.

Check the bestseller sales at your local indie bookstores. At least two I know of in New York (the Strand and Book Court) put the top 10 fiction and nonfiction hardcovers on automatic 30 percent markdown.
Privilege online reservation systems at local stores over online orders. Because of the vagaries of my mail situation I can often get books faster by reserving them at a local indie bookstore on its website and then walking or taking the subway over to fetch my treasure. It's also greener if that's your priority (fossil fuels exerted in bringing book to store, not book to warehouse and warehouse to you).
When possible, shop online through indies.
Support secondhand stores, but also bookstores that sell a mix of secondhand and new books. I love a Half Price Books, I seriously do, but they are a giant corporate monster that eats indies for breakfast. Because they are a monster they can afford to not give you a fair price for your own books to sell, so both ways you lose.
Buy books from your neighbors at garage sales, yard sales, stoop sales, or whatever your local variant of "Hey, we are casually selling some of our possessions" is.

After that -- for those hard to find, have-to-own books -- then check Amazon.

I liked the one where Catherine and the android took off in the spaceship together

Did you feel disappointed by the end of A FAREWELL TO ARMS? Don't worry, there are 46 more! And they're all in Simon & Schuster's new edition of the Hemingway novel (out next week). This artifact seems like as good a reason as any to continue to do some writing in longhand.

"Pilgrimage," by Natasha Trethewey

Here, the Mississippi carved
            its mud-dark path, a graveyard

for skeletons of sunken riverboats.
            Here, the river changed its course,

turning away from the city
            as one turns, forgetting, from the past—

the abandoned bluffs, land sloping up
            above the river's bend—where now

the Yazoo fills the Mississippi's empty bed.
            Here, the dead stand up in stone, white

marble, on Confederate Avenue. I stand
            on ground once hollowed by a web of caves;

they must have seemed like catacombs,
            in 1863, to the woman sitting in her parlor,

candlelit, underground. I can see her
            listening to shells explode, writing herself

into history, asking what is to become
            of all the living things in this place?

This whole city is a grave. Every spring—
            Pilgrimage—the living come to mingle

with the dead, brush against their cold shoulders
            in the long hallways, listen all night

to their silence and indifference, relive
            their dying on the green battlefield.

At the museum, we marvel at their clothes—
            preserved under glass—so much smaller

than our own, as if those who wore them
            were only children. We sleep in their beds,

the old mansions hunkered on the bluffs, draped
            in flowers—funereal—a blur

of petals against the river's gray.
            The brochure in my room calls this

living history. The brass plate on the door reads
            Prissy's Room. A window frames

the river's crawl toward the Gulf. In my dream,
            the ghost of history lies down beside me,

rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.

--Trethewey was named U.S. Poet Laureate last month. Happy Fourth of July!

It can't possibly be this hard that this exists, can it?

Summer reading update: Ron $^%#ing Swanson edition

"I'm halfway through INFINITE JEST by David Foster Wallace—a writer who escaped my notice until a few years ago, when posthumously his final novel, THE PALE KING, came out. Mike Schur did his thesis on Wallace and had been in touch with him, and was absolutely religious about his writing. And Mike had organized a reading in Los Angeles—excerpts from THE PALE KING. It was Henry Rollins, Adam Scott, myself, and a couple of other actors. That was my introduction to Wallace's writing. And to continue in my fealty to Mike Schur, I decided to devour the massive feast that is INFINITE JEST."
-Nick Offerman in GQ

June Unbookening: Hey, I just read you and this is crazy

Forestalling the inevitable parody...

Received 6 books to review
Checked out 2 from the library
Got 6 from friends
14 in


Returned 4 to library
Donated 5
Lent 4
13 out

Well, this was really close. I also renewed my NY Public Library card this June. I was under the impression that they never expired, but they've now been set to expire every 3 years because, as a librarian put it to me, "items were leaving the system" with borrowers who went inactive and then couldn't be found to collect. That makes me wonder if my old library account in the town where I lived before I moved here is still active, and if the librarians are still calling my old office number (they wouldn't take a cell phone because it had to be a local area code!) to see why I haven't been in. Three years is kind of narrow, especially if you don't know about the policy change and only find out about it a month before expiration (guilty!) but I'm not sure what a better term of membership might be.