Travel suggestion via blogmigo Wade Garrett: the New Orleans house where William Faulkner wrote his first novel now holds a bookstore.

Wallaceblogging: About to get slightly more interesting.

Guess what I'm going to pick up today!!!!! After all the fuss about a Certain Book's release on April 15 to coincide with Classical (Not In 2011) Tax Day -- because some of the book takes place at an IRS branch office, if I'm not mistaken -- the release date seems to be less of an embargo and more of a guideline, really.

(I am under the impression that you actually have until April 18th this year, but -- and let me make this completely clear -- I am not an accountant and you should seek the services of a competent financial professional before you trust some lady with a blog. Also don't sue me, all I have are books and a talking Jimmy McMillan doll to my name.)

It's kind of a funny story how I came to preorder my copy. I was hanging out on Twitter, reading the usuals, and Matt Bucher (who runs the DFW mailing list [of course that's a thing {I mean, what do you subscribe to, philistine}]) tweeted about an indie bookstore near my apartment that was broadcasting that it Had Copies. I haven't declared any allegiance to a bookstore since I moved, but buying in my neighborhood appealed to me -- and being able to get it before pub date was a bonus.

Not only did the bookstore tweet at me when my copy came in, they also left me an old-school voicemail. Twenty-first-century handselling... What's not to love? I'll tell you all about my new great store after I have visited it and claimed The Precious. Also, apparently this is all something of a cluster because Amazon started shipping before it was supposed to, which (excuse the hackneyed) makes me wonder -- Do you have to pay extra for an embargo? Does it cost more to tell online and brick-and-mortar bookstores "Hey, please put this out on Such-and-such date but don't sell it until then"? One would think so but maybe a bookstore employee, or friend-of, can provide more insight.

Incidentally, the PALE KING hard copy price will be the most I have spent so far on my David Foster Wallace, ah, hobby, the total outlay up to this point looking something like this:

• $10 Tenth anniversary edition of INFINITE JEST (purchased during the 10th-anniversary year, 2006, and unread for three years after)
• ??$2-3 library fines on his various other books, those I have not received as gifts 
• $28 Enfield Tennis Academy shirt 

Given that the shirt was unnecessary (though nice to have... very) I will go ahead and pat myself on the back for the relative inexpensiveness of this passion.

Finally, I enjoyed this piece on the accidental synchronicity of THE PALE KING and the final touring days of LCD Soundsystem.

Bookfilm: Charles Portis, TRUE GRIT (1968)

The work of American writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen is something of an acquired taste, and with enough time and study I feel confident that I have acquired it. Shown "Fargo" way before I could appreciate it, I eased into their work and eventually crowned 2009's "A Serious Man" my favorite movie of that year. I know that I like them because I will faithfully go to see their movies even when I'm not sure what they're on about -- and 2010's "True Grit" would definitely fall into that category.

"So it's a remake... of a Western..." doesn't sell well to my quadrant, and that this remake of the 1969 John Wayne movie exceeded box office expectations probably reflects the classic holiday movie dilemma more than anything. ("I can't talk to these people any more... but what movie will they all dislike the least?" Last year's "Sherlock Holmes" did gangbusters for my family, because we like action, trickery and Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr almost smoochin'.) But in the end I couldn't rope anyone in my family into seeing "True Grit" apart from my dad, the old-school Coenite responsible for that first viewing of "Fargo."

I liked the movie just all right, in the end. I need some Jeff Bridges detox time because every role he takes looks the same to me, was pleasantly surprised by Matt Damon and surprised neutrally by Josh Brolin (forgot he was in the movie, although he is on the poster!) By far my greatest enjoyment was derived from the performance of Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross, the 13-year-old with a wad of cash bent on avenging her father's death at the hands of his own hired man, who pays bounty hunter Rooster Cogburn (Bridges) to take off after him into Indian country. Mattie may be naive, but she's also a total badass who stands up to men twice her age and weight without flinching. She's tenacious; no one tolerates her in most environments, but she clings on until the yielding point. A peculiar feeling swept over me contemplating Mattie Ross, which could be summed up as, "If I ever have a daughter, I hope we can watch this movie together."

My knowledge of Westerns as in literature is about on par with my knowledge of Westerns on film -- scanty and derived mostly from looking over other people's shoulders. I sat down with TRUE GRIT just to be able to say that I'd read it and move on to something for which I didn't already know the ending. This is the risk you run, reading the book after seeing the movie! (Suppose it's the other way as well... but never mind.) But with all due respect and the lagging processes of the New York Public Library, I didn't pick up TRUE GRIT until well into March. But the Mattie of the novel is even saucier than the movie version, and her voice delighted me. Here are my top five Mattie Ross Burns, which I actually took the time to type up:

• "The magazines of today do not know a good story when they see one. They would rather print trash. They say my article is too long and 'discursive.' Nothing is either too long or too short if you have a true and interesting tale and what I call a 'graphic' writing style combined with educational aims. I do not fool around with newspapers. They are always after me for historical write-ups but when the talk gets around to money the paper editors are most of them 'cheap skates.'"
• "LaBoeuf the Texan was at the table, shaved and clean. I supposed he could do nothing with the 'cowlick.' It is likely that he cultivated it."
• "[Your work is] the same idea as a coon hunt. You are just trying to make your work sound harder than it is."
• "Run home yourself. Nobody asked you to come up here wearing your big spurs."
• "Keep your seat, trash." (This is from the best scene in the movie, and that's all I'll say about that.)

Portis' novel gives us some context into Mattie's telling of her tale (no spoilers!) without seeming as though it's embellishing her voice. Her frame of reference is explicitly Biblical, and I'm sure there were many in-text references which I did not get. In a way, her quest is resolutely Old Testament: Instead of giving up after her father's death, as her mother has seemed to do, Mattie invents herself a sort of avenging angel role and goes after his killer against the practical advice of everybody.

I can only guess how rare it is to encounter a female protagonist in a Western, who is not either Annie Oakley or a prostitute. In fact, after one character gives in to her demands another accuses him of basically being seduced by her, saying (and I will quote this to the end of time) "She has got you buffaloed with her saucy ways." It's funny because Mattie is the last character you would expect to behave in that way. You'd sooner see Rooster, the twice-divorced drunken old bounty hunter who just may have killed some women and children during the Civil War, whoops, flashing some sock garter. It just wouldn't happen. She is clear on her level of shenanigan, and that level is nil.

Literature could use more Mattie Rosses, and so could the world. If you're feeling that your line-up of female characters could use a little amplification, you should pick up TRUE GRIT even if you're having hesitations over the genre. As for the movie, I will begrudgingly say it's worth it for the final scene, and the song rolling over the end credits -- and a few other things. But read the book first. Don't be like me.

Notes:

• Dedicated as I am to you, my 2.87 readers, I didn't bother watching the 1969 "True Grit" for this post. If it had been available on Netflix Instant Watch, I might have considered it, but the result probably would have been the same. I know two things about the John Wayne classic: (1) According to some, it is less faithful to the Portis novel than the Coens' version, and (2) Mattie Ross is played by a 22-year-old with the most absolutely horribdiculous (=  horrible + ridiculous) haircut you have ever seen. It's like a bowl cut for a girl, but with bangs.
• It was the worst ageing-down haircut I'd seen in a movie since the Drew Barrymore/ Jennifer Connelly pigtails in "He's Just Not That Into You."
• This book was part of Your Oscar Nominees Reading List. Have you caught up on any post-Oscars reads recently? I did see some kind of book tie-in to THE KING'S SPEECH on the stand at B&N recently, related to Lionel Logue's diaries I think, but not enough to buy it right away.
• The last time I ran this feature I called it the Reverse Filmbook, but that's really not whimsical enough.

I didn't really like Henning Mankell's FACELESS KILLERS when I read it last year, but the Swedish series starring Detective Kurt Wallander (who has been played by Kenneth Branagh in a British adaptation) ends with this week's release TROUBLED MAN. If you get all the way through, let me know.

Jennifer Egan: "I wouldn't probably qualify as an actual crazy cat lady."

Last night I went to Jennifer Egan's paperback release party for her recent NBCC-winning novel A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD. The difference between an ordinary reading and a public release party is that sometimes at release parties there is free wine that will mostly be gone when the reading is over.

Egan lives near to Bookcourt, the Brooklyn bookstore that hosted the event, and even described herself pacing up and down Court Street trying to figure out a particularly thorny issue in GOON SQUAD and listening to her then-favorite song, which she can no longer bear to hear. The crowd was friendly and seemed largely familiar with GOON SQUAD's cast and plot twists (in a way your humble recapper is not -- alas --). After Egan read a section dealing with teenagers in a punk band called The Flaming Dildos, someone asked what happens to the band in the book. "Well, they aren't real," she said with a laugh. "And unfortunately, they aren't any good."

Even if they had heard it before, no one minded hearing again how GOON SQUAD was born; how Egan had written a few stories that seemed to hold something more, and began writing a story about a man before realizing it was really his crazy ex-wife she wanted to follow, and an encounter with a stranger's wallet, and so on. She described it to her agent expecting to be shot down, and was instead encouraged toward a piece that isn't a collection of short stories, nor really a novel. (Her agent was in the audience.) Egan said she loves the new paperback cover, describing it as "like candy," but what she loves more are the end-of-year lists that bumped her book back into great sales figures. (I've never heard an author opine as frankly on how much those help; it was prompted by an audience member, though, who originally asked more about the fiction award.)

As to the cats, Emma Straub (also a local, and a Bookcourt employee, who introduced Egan) mentioned them first; the first question led her to divulge she has two, Diamond and Cuddles ("named by my children"), and one of them fried her laptop knocking a glass of water into it sometime during GOON SQUAD's writing. While discussing one unconventional (no spoilers!) chapter of GOON SQUAD she even half-suggested that it was the cat that forced her into a new direction, because her new laptop allowed her to work on it in a different way.

As to the old stock photo, Egan looks almost exactly like that, just slightly more pink than pale, which is really not important anyway. No one asked her about her competitors for the NBCC award, nor her recent Tournament of Books match. As it should be.

RIP Diana Wynne Jones

Author of many many fantasy books for kids including CHARMED LIFE, THE LIVES OF CHRISTOPHER CHANT, DOGSBODY and (my favorite) A TALE OF TIME CITY, passed away Saturday, at 76. Evacuated from London during the Blitz as a young child, Wynne Jones overcame dyslexia to write the books she was always looking for as a young reader and counted Neil Gaiman among her admirers. She leaves behind one last book called EARWIG AND THE WITCH.

Every 3-4 months I look this one up and then I kind of shake my head a little, as if to say: Not on Kindle? Then not yet.

"Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds. I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imaginations to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is respectable to have no illusions--and safe--and profitable--and dull. Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone--and as short-lived, alas!"

-Joseph Conrad, LORD JIM

True reader confession

I love Anne Lamott's writing book BIRD BY BIRD, and everything else she writes sends me up the damn wall. I just read an article by her for a big glossy magazine about finding time to write, and between the fable about the wise man and the gold coins, and the straw men, and the oh how lovely to be sitting out in the garden... I just can't take it. My Hippie Blinders will not permit me to go on. I am sorry about this, because I feel like it is I who have a deficit, not her.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and the extinction

When I found out Monday afternoon that Adrian Nicole LeBlanc was speaking at the City University of New York this past Tuseday, I more or less postponed my life to be there. I've read her first (and so far only) nonfiction book RANDOM FAMILY four -- maybe five times? -- definitely at least four, cover to cover. I read it and I'm dazzled by the work that went into it, the lyric quality of the writing, that it's beautiful and true and, ultimately, heartbreaking.

Who could have written such a book? "Who" turned out to be a short, curly-haired woman with a dry wit, prone to aphorisms that will make you get a notebook out. Modest, but not in a fake way. Sees herself as a reporter first, and a writer second, but asserts that anyone could have written her study of teenagers and drug dealers in the Bronx. Anyone could go out and report that story?

Not anyone. This woman, who often refers to her years of note-taking and tape-recording (and sometimes, forgetting to do either during her subjects' busy days) as "the fieldwork" and says she doesn't even remember RANDOM FAMILY's warm published reception because her father was being treated for cancer, ultimately dying just after the book's release.

It's hard to shake the feeling, even as LeBlanc references the journalism class she's teaching at CUNY this semester, that that mold has been fundamentally fractured in a way. Writers in the crowd, can you imagine spending 10 years on a project now? And being able to live and continue working in the meantime (LeBlanc wasn't exactly holed in a garret, she did earn 2 master's degrees while working on RANDOM FAMILY)? Ten years. It boggles the mind. (Ten years ago I could barely see past my next AP test and/or the end of the world, for the record.) And she didn't have a book deal all that time -- it's one thing for an established author to work for 10 years on something, but another for a first-timer.

The consolation for all of us is that while they may not make reporters like her any more, she is still working -- readying a second book now, on struggling comedians (excerpts from which she read Tuesday night). That has to be enough for now.

The success of Amanda Hocking, a self-published author who's sold over a million e-books, has often been held up as proof that the e-book model is sustainable. Then she signed with a major publisher. Who will be the  example now??

"People kept asking me, 'Where are you in this book?' And my first answer was, I'm everywhere in it! I'm in every word! I made all the choices!"

--Adrian Nicole LeBlanc on RANDOM FAMILY. Saw her speak two days ago, it was incredible, I'm still digesting -- way more tomorrow.

It's nostalgia day. I just decided.

"Admit it, you hoarded these flyers in your room, painstakingly circling and starring the ones you wanted, you little word nerd." URLesque found and scanned a bunch of those book club mailers popular in the days before children could beg their parents to buy books online. 

I once got in trouble for ordering a book from book order that my parents had said I wasn't allowed to buy. (I can't believe I didn't talk about this on the blog! It was a novelization of a movie I wasn't allowed to see, which I was then told I couldn't read, but... maybe I checked off that box anyway.) Punishment: No book order for 6 months! I was 7. Those were hard times. I later watched the movie it was based on, and it was terrible, so I guess they had a point.

"Readers may be surprised to learn that SWEET VALLEY CONFIDENTIAL is the first SWEET VALLEY book Pascal has actually written cover to cover (though, she says with a laugh, "I wrote every single one of those f--king plotlines")."

--Jessica Bennett at The Daily Beast on Francine Pascal, who indeed has a new book coming out next week about the Wakefield twins. And if you have no idea what this paragraph is about, you probably weren't a girl in the '80s to late '90s.

Know what makes history better? Scare quotes!

Eavesdropping...

WOMAN IN CAFETERIA: So I'm reading THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY right now.
HER FRIEND: Oh, what's that about?
WOMAN IN CAFETERIA: It's about the Chicago World's Fair and 'apparently' there were 'a few' murders and it was 'sort of dangerous.'

In her defense this is also Michele Bachmann's summary of the book.