RIP Suze Rotolo

The author of a memoir called A FREEWHEELIN' TIME: GREENWICH VILLAGE IN THE SIXTIES -- it's good! -- and the girl on Bob Dylan's arm on the record at left passed away Friday at 67. (They went out right before he met his more famous next girlfriend Joan Baez.)

For local buffs, they're on Great Jones Street walking away from Bleecker.

The real reason O: A PRESIDENTIAL NOVEL flopped

So hey I stopped blogging about this book because I got busy and I didn't have time to finish it -- also it was slow and not very suspenseful -- but I finally finished. Now I know why this didn't become the 2011 PRIMARY COLORS, but in order to tell you why I'm going to spoil the end of this book.

If you don't want to know how O: A PRESIDENTIAL NOVEL ends, stop reading right now.

I mean it.

Well okay then! O: A PRESIDENTIAL NOVEL takes place over the 2012 election cycle in which Official Presidential Standin is running for reelection against Tom Morrison, a McCain-Romney hybrid (decorated war hero, former governor of a moderate Democratic-leaning state). Morrison is basically untouchable. Also, the economy and the war in Afghanistan are major issues -- not surprising. There is a passing mention of Sarah Palin, but nothing much. The main villain, at least as described here, is an Arianna Huffingtonesque new-media magnate named Bianca Stefani who pays bloggers almost nothing to report on scurrilous rumors.

The central plot twist in this book concerns one such scurrilous rumor of a cover-up on the side of the Morrison campaign that Stefani and the reporter/blogger assigned to the Morrison campaign amplify, to the potential detriment of the O. campaign. The O. campaign is approached with this rumor by a major donor a few days before Stefani publishes it, but decides not to do anything; unfortunately, because Stefani's site leans left, everyone blames the O. campaign for letting it get out. Then the campaign finds out that major donor had his own agenda for leaking that rumor and have to keep that quiet, as well. From there on it's all, idealists lose their steam, campaign staff sleep together sometimes, et cetera.

Here is why ultimately this book is not still making news: It doesn't have an ending! It literally ends on the day before the general election. After acting so shocked over all the corruption and bad behavior in politics, the anonymous author could at least have had the courage of his convictions to pick a winner. Why did I waste my time otherwise?! Oh, I am steamed. Well, hopefully I saved you the indignant anger.

Oscar Weekend Special: Top 3 Books (And One Essay) About Movies

As the 2.7 regular readers of this blog know, I love movies. It seems like an odd thing to admit on a book blog, but makes sense if you pull back to medium shot and look at an all-around culture vulture, who just happens to be more obsessive about (and have slightly more to say about) books. I know many hard-core cineastes who hate the Oscars, but I can't help but love them. I loved them when I thought they were the Last Word In Great Film and I love them now that I disagree with half their decisions at least.

This year in honor of the ceremony I'm getting my roommate to teach me to make popcorn over the stove (the taste difference is incredible) and I'll probably burn both hands in the process, so today you get a deluxe edition of books about movies and moviemaking that everyone should read:

William Goldman, ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE 
It could be argued that this book is more about screenwriting than movies themselves, but Goldman has hung around so many sets and been called in on so many ailing projects that his book is more like a memoir-slash-screenwriting handbook. (Among others, he's most famous for writing the book THE PRINCESS BRIDE, and the screenplay for "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.") It was from him long ago that I learned the phrase "in turnaround" which I try to work into conversation a lot in non-film contexts.

Peter Biskind, DOWN AND DIRTY PICTURES
Get ready to read this history of Miramax in the '90s with your Netflix account open frantically adding all the movies you missed to your queue. Because I was just on the edge of too young (and/or too sheltered) to enjoy the early '90s indie-film renaissance the first time, this book educated me properly so I can argue about whether Daniel Day-Lewis is all that and a summer sausage or not. This book also kindled my love/hate relationship with the Weinsteins. So good for American film... so evil at the same time... My latest love/hate moment is over their decision to edit "The King's Speech" down to PG-13 over the director's objections. If you've seen the movie, you probably know the 1 scene they are editing and why (I think) it is actually an integral part of the plot and shouldn't be taken out. Harvey!!! Why must you torture me like this Harvey!!!

Pauline Kael, KISS KISS BANG BANG
Love her or hate her, Kael undeniably changed the face of movie criticism as we know it. A true contrarian at heart, she's what Armond White goes to bed crying every night that he's not. I wish she were still alive so I could tell her how wrong she was about "The Sound Of Music," and if you read any of her collections you'll probably find your own sacred-cow-slaughtering over which to confront her. But like a classy lady, she still has the last word on a lot of movies; her championing of "Bonnie and Clyde" practically pushed the movie into the mainstream. You have to be lucky to find a copy of any of her books though, as most if not all are out of print.

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
If you took a film class in college you're either violently nodding your head or violently banging your head against a wall at this suggestion. Perhaps both! But you need to read this essay in order to argue with anyone, anywhere about movies, and particularly if you want to talk about or dispute how female characters are represented onscreen. (That should be all of you.) Psychoanalytics are out right now but the same techniques she calls Hitchcock out for are still being used constantly and you'd best have an opinion on them.

So, who do you want to win Best Picture? Are you watching the Oscars for anything in particular?

Ooh, the author of a dealbreaker! I'm really making it on Twitter now!

Actually, I think I will follow him back and see how long it takes him to offend me enough to not want to read any more. I call this the Kelly Oxford game.

Awesome Oscar-weekend in-development news: Lisa Chodolenko, director of the all right "The Kids Are All Right," will next tackle an adaptation of Tom Perrotta's The ABSTINENCE TEACHER. (Also, wearing a great suit!)

"I was always writing comedy, I just didn't know it." --Michael Showalter

Last night I went to see Michael Showalter read from his new memoir MR. FUNNY PANTS at Union Square. Showalter was full of mirth in a way that didn't quite gibe with his , but set out to write the über-memoir -- "A MILLION LITTLE PIECES meets A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS meets EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED meets EVERYONE POOPS" -- and ended up with a meta-memoir and collection of some of his comedic pieces that translate well to the page.

I saw Showalter read from MR. FUNNY PANTS way back last year but this time he really took it to another level with a dramatic reading of a poem he wrote when he was 18 called "The Apartment Story," full of all the grit and seaminess 18-year-olds think the world contains. It's sort of faux-Bukowskian. You can read the text here or hear him read a version of it here (from 2006).

The reading was part of the Upstairs at the Square writer/performer series (see my review of the Joseph O'Neill/ Aimee Mann event here) and the other featured performer of the night was singer Neko Case. She was an ideal counterpart to Showalter, in that she was very anti-performative and casual until she stepped up to the microphone and gave everybody chills. Here's a number she sang last night called "Magpie To The Morning" (video is static image):

Spotted on the subway: Magic!

I get on the train at 14th street. A woman gets on from another door and we end up sitting next to each other. She pulls out a book. I pull out a book. It's the same book.


It was CARTER BEATS THE DEVIL and you should all go out and read it, not just because I feel as though I ought to go out and buy a lottery ticket now.

For demographic context the woman across was reading a neon purple paperback with the word KILLING in the title (I want to say it was THE KILLING TIME, but can't find it online) and the guy next to me was reading SWAMPLANDIA! on his Kindle.

Wallaceblogging: All too brief on THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM

First, and this is in no way meant as a slight, but I expected this book to be much more arcane given my experience with INFINITE JEST. But compared to that undertaking, BROOM is relatively straightforward. Sort of. In that it has one true main character, absolutely.

We meet Lenore Beadsman as a slightly withdrawn high school student visiting her older sister at college; when we get back to her, she's 2 years out of college, working as a switchboard operator in Cleveland without much in the way of ambition. Lenore comes from a prominent local family but doesn't want to have anything to do with her parents, refusing to accept their help to get a better job or apartment. Most of her days are spent putting up with the spiteful admin with whom she shares her office, hanging out at a "Gilligan's Isle"-themed bar(1) and seeing her obsessive, twitchy boyfriend Rick Vigorous, who is pressing her to commit to him more fully. Lenore's world is jolted by a phone call from the nursing home where her beloved great-grandmother, also Lenore, lives; the elder Lenore has apparently escaped, along with a busful of her neighbors. Lenore's father is a corporate big-shoulder, her mother in a mental institution in Wisconsin, so it's up to her... or so she decides.

In capturing that post-college unwillingness to stir BROOM is startlingly pointed, but in its details, sometimes a little sketchy. It isn't clear how Lenore became the only point of contact for her great-grandmother, except that they had always been close; nor do we get the backstory of how Lenore and Rick got together (2) as theirs is, shall we say, an unconventional workplace romance. THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM kind of rushes over these details to get to... more interesting details and it's only a mild spoiler to point out that we never really get an answer to the answer of where Great-Grandma Lenore has gone -- but I wouldn't even call that the central conflict. The central conflict, as I see it, is that Lenore (spoiler?) comes to realize that the life she has constructed, the limits that she has set for it, are not really working out for her.

DFW wrote BROOM as an philosophy major at Amherst, and a common theory or ideation of the book holds that it expresses his feelings toward the application of philosophy (or lack thereof) in life, or that it was his way with grappling with all those ideas. I have been trying to read up on these philosophical underpinnings and am in a maelstrom of information over it, but Section III of this Slate article was a great way to start. But briefly, Lenore The Original took classes from Wittgenstein and Lenore comes to believe that her great-grandmother's disappearance may even be in some way philosophically based. And we haven't even gotten into the talking bird yet! Well, too much about the talking bird already.

All of which is to say that when I put this book down it sort of made a whoosh! because the ending was slightly unsatisfying, and I wished that it was longer -- or rounder, because the end is much more of a play-type ending than one that makes sense of the strands the author has been playing with the whole time, only to just ball them up and throw them back at the reader. Oh, that's me! Like a lot of DFW, it can make a person extremely self-conscious about how her act of reading is shaping the book that she's reading.

Particularly when there's a publishing meta-game running at the same time. Lenore's boyfriend is the cofounder (and, really, most important employee) of a publishing firm titled Frequent and Vigorous(3), mostly publishing a literary magazine for which Rick Vigorous collects the submissions and sometimes reads them to Lenore. Or maybe... he's reading his own work to Lenore and asking for her comments on it, in the guise of "a submission to the magazine." The story samples range over the classic undergraduate clichés -- a lot of twist endings -- cruel twists of fate -- nothing you wouldn't recognize from a creative-writing class, should you have been in one. I am torn between "wow, those clichés were around in the '80s too!" and "ughhhhhhh," but you never get the feeling that DFW is grinding an axe against those classes -- just that, well, these are the Stories Of The Fiction Education Establishment, and so they are written in. (Don't forget, DFW and Dan Brown were in some of the same writing classes. This trivium will never not astound me.)

The blurring of that line between Rick's work and his editing work is, I assume, intentional, because as I heard from a friend it can be incredibly painful when someone you love doesn't love what you write. Lenore doesn't seem particularly blasé about his writing, only in that she is just as blasé about everything except her grandmother disappearing. Maybe it's her blasé-ness that caused me to, I think, latch onto her less than I initially expected. I was not blasé about this book, I think you should definitely give it a shot -- but if you haven't read any other David Foster Wallace before, prepare to meet the firehose. Give it three chapters.

(1) CAN SOMEONE MAKE THIS HAPPEN FOR REAL. I never even watched the show but I strongly feel this concept would take off in 20-something hispter New York.
(2) Or at least I don't remember the backstory, and I'm sure someone will correct me if it was mentioned. But that's damning in its own way, isn't it?
(3) Keep in mind this was a college-aged male writing this. Because I am writing this after half a glass of Bordeaux(4) I actually think it's funny, but I am not saying that is a stable judgment.
(4) But I wrote 80 percent of this entry this morning, before Wine Happened At Work, just so we're clear.

Filmbook-to-be: Live from the 2013 Oscars

Awesome, Peter Guralnick's Elvis biography LAST TRAIN TO MEMPHIS is (for now) headed to the big screen. Who dares to play Young Elvis Presley?

You heard it here first

The next time I open a novel and discovers it has talking animals in it, no matter what the source... I am going to set that book down and walk away.

No more talking animal books for adults. Ever! Thank you, and goodnight.

Hey New York, today's City Bakery specialty hot chocolate is called "What Would Faulkner Drink," which is funny because I don't think the place has a liquor license. Should I investigate... hmm.

Small talk shifted in large part to social networking, said Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer, a women’s blog network. Still, blogs remain a home of more meaty discussions, she said.  “If you’re looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs,” Ms. Camahort Page said. “You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.”

 --As a user of Blogger, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, I don't know which demographic I am?

If it's all good for Thomas Jefferson...

Do you write in your books? Re. this New York Times article on marginalia, I think in some ways it's already a lost art (before the advance of e-readers, I mean). I fell out of the habit of writing in my books in college when resale value was important to me but have been wandering back, somewhat.

The trouble is, once I start writing in them, I don't necessarily want to lend out those copies because the notes can feel too personal, even if they are way too cryptic to be understood. If Jefferson (PS Happy President's Day!) knew we were scanning all of his notes for insight into his personality, he may himself have felt overexposed.

The Tournament of Books kicks off 2 weeks from tomorrow with FREEDOM vs. Teddy Wayne's KAPITOIL. In other news, BLOODROOT fluked it in? Really?

Don't mess with Mister In-Between

When I recently reorganized my books I was astonished to see how many fit into the biography/memoir category... and leaning heavily toward the memoir side of that distribution. Despite being somewhat in the "too many memoirs on the dance floor!" camp, I still read a lot of them -- and have a few I think can stand up against books from any other genre. Long story short (and not to dig up this topic again) perhaps I and we are better off pointing out what we think authors of memoirs (or their publishers) do right, than to broad-stroke shelve the whole genre.

I appreciated STRETCH for its transparency, but for that purposes I must spoil a little (just in this paragraph): While author Neal Pollack began practicing yoga on his own, he eventually got deep enough into it that he began taking assignments from Yoga Journal which, he freely admits, got him into pricey conferences and festivals to help him cope with his all-consuming and somewhat expensive new hobby. (All without touching the Lululemon wire, which... is not a subject for this blog anyway so forget I mentioned it.) At one point he starts to open this subject as a serious dilemma -- the one teacher he wants to study with is conducting a pricey overseas workshop, where will he get the money?! -- and then quite fairly admits that he had gotten his advance for STRETCH already, and sunk that into workshop fees. Meta-memoir? Try truth.

It also tackled the subject of yoga as/in religious experience in a light, breezy format. Granted, I expected that having heard Pollack read an excerpt in September, but it didn't really hit that "And now we're going to get really serious" chapter, as I feared it would. Kind of also want to go to yoga class... but definitely to read Pollack's other books.