Big Book Double Edition

Regular Commenter Elizabeth sent me this article on Facebook via Flavorwire: "10 Novels That We Dare You To Finish." It's pegged to PARALLEL STORIES, a novel coming out this fall I have, yes, already requested to review because I like punishment.

I've read four of the books listed -- INFINITE JEST, A SUITABLE BOY, GONE WITH THE WIND and WAR AND PEACE, plus excerpts from REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST (but probably wouldn't add up to one of its nine volumes). ATLAS SHRUGGED and THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES I definitely intend to get along to, along with the rest of Proust. (Seriously, I still own my copies from college, refuse to sell them, but also make them live in exile with my parents. So I'm ambivalent. Maybe next year?)

Henry Darger gives me the creeps, frankly. Maybe if I make it through that documentary about him first...

Oh yeah, and while I was there, Facebook's new time-machine function dug up the following:

Never forget. If you still haven't gotten around to it you can still go back and read my review.

Filmbook-to-Be: Cast So Far For Baz Luhrmann's "The Great Gatsby" (2012?)

• Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby 
• Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway
• Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan
• Joel Edgerton (Australian, nothing looks familiar in his bio) as Tom Buchanan 
• Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson 

This post is mostly for Blogmigo Wade Garrett if he's out there because we were discussing it and couldn't come up with who had been cast as the Nick Carraway. What, Paul Rudd wasn't available? That is a shame.

The part about the murders

Today we had a blood drive at the office. It was held in one of those
mobile donation buses and afterward I was held in the front of the bus
for 15 minutes in case I fainted or something.

The driver asked me I was reading and I showed him my
still-nice-but-beginning-to-show-wear copy of 2666.

"What's it about?"

"It's about Mexico...and a bunch of people who end up there."

"Mexico!" he said. "We don't want to go _there_ anymore."

What Doesn't Kill You... In Drew Magary's THE POSTMORTAL

It's been a while since I've read a book as dark and hopeless as THE POSTMORTAL. For all its faults, I have to give it some credit for being so appreciably grim, not that that's new territory for a dystopia, but even for that it gave me the total creeps.

The novel posits that in the near future, a scientist working on an Alzheimer's drug accidentally invents an immortality treatment that causes people who take it to stay at the same age they are, and never get older -- so they can't die of "natural causes." This becomes known as "the cure" and becomes so popular on the black market that the President is forced to legalize it just to keep people from buying false toxic products.

Part of the "fun" of this book is exploring just how the world goes to hell in a scenario where people take "the cure," and the benefits are fast outweighed by the drawbacks. For one thing, and I'd never thought of this, the extra burden to the planet's natural resources created by having that many more people around (and in some cases them having second families decades after their first, because they can! Because they're still young!) is an environmental disaster. Our guide through this horrible future is John Farrell, a lawyer (at first) whose firm invents the "cycle marriage," effectively a marriage with an expiration date for people who didn't know when they said "forever" that it was going to actually be forever, and that causes a lot of social problems. He helps build the world not by being super naive and annoying, but on the survival level: If you're going to live forever and you have to quit your job, you can't retire -- so what other jobs can you take? What industries are open to you? And what if, having gotten the cure, you decide you don't want to live forever any more?

THE POSTMORTAL is frequently weird and sometimes gross, but it does kind of a sideways-step toward questions of medical ethics that I wouldn't have expected -- which is why I can't say I was entirely comforted when I closed the book and it was over.

Mike Birbiglia For Thurber Prize 2011

So excited that comedian Birbiglia is up for the Thurber Prize for humor writing this year. He'll have to beat David Rakoff and Rick Reilly (...people still think he's funny?) but I am optimistic about his chances.

If you didn't have the chance to see his show "Sleepwalk With Me" (about sleepwalking, and also growing up and parents and Walla Walla, Washington ["You can't make me speak Spanish!"]) he compiled those stories and many more into the book of the same name. He's also touring a new show called "My Girlfriend's Boyfriend."

Conspicuously

I never miss an excuse to go over to the Strand and  when I got notified that my requested books were in, that was reason enough to run over. (I know, I know... but they were reasoned purchases.)

I rode the elevator down from the office with a guy who could have been John Hodgman's twin. Same slightly slumped posture, same haircut, nearly the same glasses. (I suppose it might have been the guy himself, but that's an extremely outside chance. Extremely.) He was wearing a brown and white checked shirt and he held the front door open for me. I turned right to cross the street, and so did he. Then I went north, and out of the corner of my eye I saw him again.

"I bet he's going to the Strand," I thought, and wasn't surprised when as soon as I walked in I spotted him up ahead of me. He was heading to the basement, as was I; I bumped into him later ribboning through the Half Price New Hardcovers. I wanted to say something to him the third time, something like, "What are you shopping for?" or "Love this place." But for a couple of reasons, I didn't.

When I go to the supermarket, I don't look at the other customers and think, "They're just like me! Because they also like to eat and prepare their own food." When I am standing in line at a coffee shop I don't think, "That girl also likes iced lattes, therefore we should be best friends." So maybe I shouldn't treat book shopping as any different, it's just another expression of my personality through buying stuff... and yet... I still believe that the books I own say something more critical about me than the contents of my fridge or the dregs in my mug. And that someone would choose to go book shopping on her or his lunch hour, no matter that anyone can do it, says something significant about that person. Maybe my priorities aren't in order.

Neither snow nor sleet nor, uh, earthquake, nor, uh, what the f-

Here in New York City, as you might have heard, we're about to descend into a Valley of Inclement Weather whose exit is uncertain. So in case we get warshed away, there's about a week of blog posts left to go before we crank to a stop. By the end of that, either we'll have power (and INTERNET) back or we'll see you on the news!

Play us off Scary Tom Waits:

Impossible game Friday

Pick your favorite group of the following groups of 3 writers:

• T. Coraghessan Boyle, Joyce Carol Oates and George Saunders
• Chang-rae Lee, Tim O’Brien, and ZZ Packer
• Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, and Yiyun Li
• Jeffrey Eugenides, Nicole Krauss, and Jhumpa Lahiri
• Karen Russell, Gary Shteyngart, and Colson Whitehead

It's like eating at the best restaurant ever. How can I decide?!

I didn't just make them up; these are the New Yorker Festival writer panels as announced so far (from a list in the Observer).

Hurricane Preparation For Nerds

Edited for typos and to add punctuation.

ME: that is my plan -- make a thermos, get some books, hunker down
COWORKER: I have another 500 pgs of GAME OF THRONES to plow through
ME: ahahahaha. You're all set then.
COWORKER: yep. And when I'm done w/ that I can read the next book in the series
which is probably like 800 something [pages]. As long as my Kindle doesn't die...
ME: oh nooo. You can't rely on it. Paperbacks my friend!
COWORKER: I have a few at home to get through as well. Not as exciting but if i must... when in doubt... I could reread the entire HARRY POTTER series...
ME: a few?! I thought you were a nerd
COWORKER: Yea but all my books are home on Long Island, not in my tiny apt
ME: :(
COWORKER: for real
ME: I'm blogging all this. It's ok, I will hide your name so no one has to know you are reading George RR Martin
COWORKER: haha, I look forward to reading it. WINTER IS COMING. Also rain.

Return of Shakar

(Also, the 9/11 novel, and some advice from Susan Choi.)

There was a moment last month when everybody was talking about author Alex Shakar and his essay "The Year Of Wonders." Ten years ago Shakar was a wunderkind* novelist with a six-figure advance and a coveted September pub date for his debut THE SAVAGE GIRL, feeling all the high highs of that status -- followed by the low lows as first his editor died, and then the September 11th attacks just a week before he was set to go on book tour mowed down any momentum the book might have had.

"My very loss was meaningless compared to those who’d lost for real," Shakar writes. Yet there's something of an undercurrent of anger to the piece, and not (to my mind) entirely undeserved. Who wouldn't want to rail at the heavens with a mighty "It's not fair!!"

As someone who had never heard of Shakar before the piece ran I was just as guilty of what he seemed to be accusing the world of -- and I felt guilty, but also confused. Was everyone passing around his manifesto as an example of how the book industry is vulnerable, or how it is mean? Was there another grudge I was meant to hold? (I'll gladly chalk my ignorance of him not to national events, but rather to the fact that I was a senior in high school, and was too busy either working on college applications or getting grounded again.)

I hoped to study him up close at Shakar's reading last night at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, and sure, I know how creepy that sounds. I found him calm, careful with his words, with a wry smile. And when novelist Susan Choi, who also read with him and served as his interviewer, said to him "Your first book kind of got kicked in the head -- I think that's how you feel," he didn't look sad, maybe a little chagrined. He looked very zen, in fact later alluded to having taken up meditation in the process of researching his new novel LUMINARIUM.

"A novel is sort of a contract with the universe you make," he said. "For many years I felt it wasn't living up to its end of the bargain." 

Whether he wanted to talk about his relationship to 9/11 and more broadly New York or not, the crowd wouldn't let him forget it, particularly when it was dropped that the novel was originally set in Chicago but "became" a New York book, and was set there in the years preceding and following 2001.(Don't we just love talking about ourselves now! Don't we just!) To the latter point, Shakar said he was interested in how people made meaning out of the event, rather than the event itself, but he also alluded to "the 9/11 novel as something everybody had to do" or felt like they should address in fiction (a topic previously covered here).

I haven't read LUMINARIUM yet so I can't speak to its treatment of same, but it was kind of refreshing to hear an author just get that out in the open. Maybe that's the freedom Shakar gains from admitting, hey: this is how it interrupted my life, because along with the macro-interruptions (loss of life, U.S. foreign policy, airport security) there were micro-interruptions as well. At the same time, the compulsion to respond to or describe 9/11 in literature isn't going away. I don't know whether this was by accident, but Choi chose to read a section of her unpublished work that described the day from the perspective of a very young New Yorker. It is written, and then it is written again.

***

The first two audience questions addressed writing advice and tips, and Choi offered this story from a novel-writing class she just taught (her first): She confidently assigned her students to write 300 words a day, weekends off, for the entire 12-week semester, with the proviso that they had to "file" it with her regularly. (To prevent the whole "stay-up-till-4am-and-write-something-unworkable" pattern of shorter fiction classes. Amen.) The person by whom she ran this plan past said, "Great! So you're going to do it as well?" She tried, but by her own admission, couldn't hack it.

*Actually, looking back at the essay he was 32 when he signed the deal, so let's consider wunderkind more of a feeling than a specific age for the purpose of this post. It's the least I can do.

I got you a box with nothing inside

Today's Google Doodle honors Jorge Luis Borges who would have been 112 today.

Best first lines to open your bookstore missed connection with

You were looking at magazines,
But nobody is perfect.

Filmbook: "The Help" (2011)

"The Help" is a movie full of expressions that speak louder than words and actors who are better than their material. Maybe because I expected it to be bad and potentially offensive, I found it mild and not offensive but with major tonal problems that caused me to feel very conflicted about what it was I had just seen.

I didn't like Kathryn Stockett's book and the movie essentially repeats the major mistake it makes -- except for one element the book can't replicate, which is really good acting. Emma Stone is really good as Skeeter Phelan, despite being trapped under one of the worst wigs I have ever seen. Octavia Spencer, new to me, as the  oft-defiant Minny was terrific. Bryce Dallas Howard as the reigning Southern belle of Skeeter's small town was... well, you hate her, but you're supposed to, so she's doing her job. Aunjanue Ellis (also new to me) makes a memorable Yula Mae. Allison Janney, who I didn't even realize was in this movie, is great in it in a minor role as Skeeter's mother. Mary Steenburgen is in this movie for about 2 minutes total, as a New York book editor who becomes Skeeter's long-distance mentor, and even in that 30 seconds where she is eating lunch in some swank place flanked by two dudes in suits who seem to both be her dates, she's acting her ass off. (Also, you go get it.)

And the best of them all is Oscar nominee Viola Davis* as Aibileen, who just takes up the entire screen. Viola Davis is in fact so good in this movie I began to fantasize about an alternate third-cinema version of it in which Emma Stone's character asks Davis' character for her assistance (...or her help? Thank you, I'll be here all week!) over and over again, with Davis' character perpetually refusing. The plot doesn't go forward, Skeeter doesn't find another solution to her "problem" of wanting to find an interviewee for her book; she just asks over and over, and Aibileen turns her down. Nowhere is she strongest in this movie as when she is putting debutante-with-a-conscience Skeeter Phelan in her place. Of course this is "silly" from a narrative standpoint because without Aibileen's participation, there essentially is no movie, except the one in my head called "Viola Davis Will Not Help," which will be up for the Academy Award for best movie ever made.

But I digress! Writer-director Tate Taylor (who also played the bondsman in "Winter's Bone") seems to have struggled with balancing the comedic and dramatic elements of the story, and the onscreen evidence suggests he ultimately decided that the best way was to wildly alternate between them. In a matter of minutes the audience is swung wildly from shit jokes (literal) to "We could be killed!!!" As I have been saying too often these days: That is a choice! A wildly ineffective choice for message delivery. But a choice!

This didn't occur to me at the time, but Taylor may have opted for this approach because a straight drama about segregation would be too depressing, too "hard to take" in one go. I don't think "The Help" exactly pats the audience on the head and says "Good job, now we're all better"--and at least it's less deadly earnest than the book and its insistence that the book-within-a-book Saves Lives--but neither of these are satisfying treatments.

Filmbook verdict: For that reason I would recommend you skip both the book and the movie. Not that either of them are the worst things going, but go read TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and watch that movie instead. I will hand out spoilers to any and all.

*Roxane Gay wrote a great review of "The Help" for The Rumpus this week from a perspective I don't have, that of an African-American woman, and on her blog she continues the discussion saying, "It is unfair that an actress of Viola Davis’ beauty and caliber has such limited artistic choices... Jennifer Aniston played a maid once, in 'Friends With Money, but in every other movie she’s the hot love interest. Viola Davis never gets to be the hot love interest and yes she’s older now but when she was younger, she never had that chance either. Also, she’s only four years older than Aniston and she’s equally beautiful so why shouldn’t she play the wife in 'Bounty Hunter' or the dentist in 'Horrible Bosses'? Why couldn’t she have gotten the Julianne Moore role in 'Crazy. Stupid. Love.'? Those are terrible movies but it would be great for her have the opportunity to turn those scripts down. It would be great for all actors of color  to have the same opportunities as their white peers."

Excuses offered by my roommate for not having read "Hamlet" when it was assigned to him in college

• It's a play and plays are meant to be seen and performed, not read
• It's too long
• Shakespeare is really dense
• He had read some of the other plays already
• He was depressed
• It was for a stagecraft class, it wasn't like he had to write a paper on it
• It was a shitty time in his life
• He watched the Mel Gibson movie
• It was a long, cold winter
• He gave it a shot but only made it through 20 pages
• It's overrated

Music Video By The Decemberists Invokes INFINITE JEST's Eschaton

Sorry we need to digest this so we're not doing anything else for the rest of the day.

Video is directed by Michael Schur of "Parks and Recreation" and Mose Schrute fame. Source: NPR's All Songs Considered.

Notes:
1. The beanies. The beanies!!
2. The bandanna'd one I assume is Jenny Conley, who just returned to the Decemberists' tour after taking most of the summer fighting breast cancer. Don't mess with her.
3. Is it just me or were you also imagining the students at ETA as somewhat older and less conventionally attractive? I mean, the age thing is just a chronological error in my mind but something else is off.
4. For more like this, although without the literary tie-ins, check out the Decemberists' "Sixteen Military Wives" -- probably my favorite song by them.
5. If BHD (bookworm hipster douchebag) could be assessed on a score from 1 to 10, this video would probably get a 9. Agree/disagree?