Wallaceblogging: Well played, "The Simpsons"

This is a screenshot from last night's episode, "A Supposedly Fun Thing Bart Will Never Do Again." (Source: the Howling Fantods.)

Blind item

What Brooklyn-based writer was skulking around my neighborhood on Saturday looking bored? Just because you used to work nearby and don't any more, that's no reason to be glum. It's Saturday night - wake up, sir!

You've Been Warned: 50 Shades of Suck

Normally I believe a simple "NSFW" warning label may be appropriate, but for the really good stuff, we wait for the weekend.

Do you enjoy jokes about poor grammar crossed with wince-inducing erotica? Alternately, would you like to cringe to death? Oh, it was really funny for a while, joking that I would read 50 SHADES OF GREY and laugh about it. Don't look so shocked, moms of America! Then I found this blog of excerpts from the book, and now I think I might have met my match. These passages are just so bad, guys. So bad! And by bad I mean "very poorly written, and some are also regrettable in content."

Anyway, you probably aren't at work right now and if you are definitely don't click on the blog I'm about to link to, which if it were an R-rated movie would be so rated for "explicit sexuality" and "sexual content," as well as spoilers for 50 SHADES and some truly horrifyingly bad dialogue. But since some of you are as unfortunately curious as I am, go read 50 Shades of Suck. Ugh, I'm going to go take a shower and then maybe become a nun.

Thanks

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
smiling by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark though it is

--W.S. Merwin

Oh, happy day

noreply@nypl.org	12:14 PM (40 minutes ago)
to me

                                                           04-26-12

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AUTHOR:  Franzen, Jonathan.
TITLE:   Farther away

Spotted on the subway

There comes a time in a woman's life when she crosses over a line, beyond which she recognizes there are "heartthrobs" or "hotties" designed for a demographic younger than her own, who hold no attraction for her. For me, that line is the Efron line. I didn't get it when "High School Musical" came out, and I still don't get it now that he's "playing" a "grown-up." Less than a man he resembles a formula plugged in to a person-creating calculator, all plastic-abbed like a Ken doll. Perhaps this woman on the N line just doesn't see it that way.

I enjoyed reading the spoilers for this book on Goodreads, particularly the review declaring that the best developed character in the novel was the dog.

Heidi Julavits/ Other People

I just discovered the Other People podcast (interviews with authors) and this Heidi Julavits interview is blowing my mind, man. She says part of her process is to write, essentially, a whole other novel before starting her novel and then chucking it before writing what became the finished book. Can you imagine? (This also opens up the possibility of all that unpublished work being published someday... hopefully she didn't actually throw it away, in the physical sense.) Why didn't you people tell me about this podcast sooner? You were saving it for a special occasion, right? Well, this was special enough.

Judging a book by its cover, or, the "Charlotte Harbach" project

We all like to think we obey the old adage, but how honest are we being with ourselves when we protest how unbiased we are about cover design? I've seen otherwise sensible people set aside books because of the covers, I've probably even done it myself.

Particularly, the conventions of design for "women's fiction" are so well known as to be a joke, categorized as "those books with shoes on the cover" or "all those pink covers that just look the same." In her recent New York Times op-ed about fiction by women being critically considered on a different plane from fiction by men, Meg Wolitzer writes, "A writer’s own publisher can be part of a process of effective segregation and vague if unintentional put-down. Look at some of the jackets of novels by women. Laundry hanging on a line. A little girl in a field of wildflowers. A pair of shoes on a beach. An empty swing on the porch of an old yellow house."

In that spirit, I decided to remake five covers from books by men that were published in 2012, "re-gendering" them by name and design. (I also took a counter example and gave the same treatment to a novel by a woman published in the same year.) I have nowhere near the skill and talents of a professional graphic designer, so consider this a thought experiment; I tried not to make any intentionally foolish choices (use of Comic Sans, for example).

(original here)

(original here)

(original here)

(original here)  

(original here)

And just for fun, a counter-example:

(original here)

Photo credits: Tyler Wilson (ART OF FIELDING), Jolante van Hemert (PARALLEL STORIES), Faylyne (HOUSE OF HOLES), Gillie (ARGUABLY), Quinn Dombrowski (THE MARRIAGE PLOT) and bagsgroove (THEN CAME YOU) All photos are protected under a Creative Commons license. Covers were created using the free software Gnutella Image Manipulation Program (G.I.M.P.).

"If we live consciously we can live well."

Watch Marilynne Robinson talk about American life and contentment at the Big Think:

"If you like stories about midgets on cocaine, this book is like MOBY DICK."

Last night I went to a night of "Awesomely Bad Music Videos" presented by Rob Tannenbaum, co-author of a new oral history of MTV called I WANT MY MTV. I received this book as a gift and it has been sitting around shamefully unread ever since; still, seeing some of the videos discussed in the book as well as those Tannenbaum's guests had picked made me really want to get around to it sooner. Take a break on me and enjoy some really terrible music videos: They just don't make 'em like this any more (and by "like this" I mean 800 minutes long). Nothing says "this piece is dated!" like referencing ad campaigns no one remembers any more. Tanenbaum said this video came up the most in interviews when he asked his subjects what the empirically worst video was. Now it just looks kind of goofy, rather than career-torpedoing. This is the only one I had seen previously, but it's just so magnificent. (Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield's pick.)

Authors, we encounter authors

On Friday I went to see Anne Enright read at the KGB Bar in the East
Village. Enright is a short, wry woman who interjected her reading of
an excerpt from her latest novel THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ with eyebrow
raises and "oh dear"s, which was very charming. The bar phone rang
several times during her reading and she made a joke about how
impossible it would be to read in the pauses between rings (where was
the bartender? Why was there a phone there in the first pace? Who ever
knows) I dislike using the adjective "earthy" because in most contexts
I find it lacks meaning, but as her narrator cursed, so did Enright,
without decorous pause.

On Saturday I went to see an author who first became known ("famous"
is a bit of a stretch) as a character in someone else's book. In
Christopher McDougall's BORN TO RUN Scott Jurek is just one of a
handful of Americans who travel to Mexico to compete in a foot race
against members of the Tarahumara tribe, who run insanely long
distances in the desert in sandals made out of old tires. McDougall's
book is more fad than fantastic (Peter Sarsgaard liked it so much he's
directing the movie version) but has brought to Jurek, a physical
therapist by trade, kind of a cult status. His event this week,
unfortunately, was overshadowed by the death of another character in
BORN TO RUN, a man who went for a run and never came back. (Because
there hasn't been an autopsy, there isn't much to say besides what a
shame it is.) So while Jurek was primed to talk about his new book EAT
AND RUN, about nutrition on some kind of macro level I didn't
completely follow, he was eased away from that by the restless
audience, most of whom were in some kind of running gear.

"We stacked them in the reception area, around my secretary’s desk, in the hallways, in my office. We couldn’t move but for all the copies of A TIME TO KILL. The boxes were everywhere, and I would just give them away. If one of my clients wanted a book, I’d try to sell it. If not, I’d give it away. I’d sell them for 10 bucks, 5 bucks. I used them for doorstops. I couldn’t get rid of these books." --John Grisham, reminiscing about a time when 5,000 copies of his debut novel was a lot to sell.

Pulitzer fiction juror: It's the board's fault

Take it away, Maureen Corrigan:

"Like everyone else, we three jurors found out Monday that there would be no 2012 prize in fiction. That terrible news capped what was otherwise the greatest honor of my career as a book critic and professor of literature."

After reading 300-plus novels and short-story collections, Corrigan, Susan Larson and Michael Cunningham made their pick in November, Corrigan told the Washington Post.

"We were not told to stick to the middlebrow, nor did we egg each other on to aim for the edgy. Our directive was to nominate 'distinguished' works of fiction, published in book form in 2011 that, ideally, spoke to American themes."

She suggests THE PALE KING was taken out because it's unfinished (true), TRAIN DREAMS because it was short (true) and already published in the Paris Review (also true), and SWAMPLANDIA! because its author is young (true but specious).

"We’ll never know why the Pulitzer board declined to award the prize this year, because, as is the board members’ right, they’ve drawn their Wizard of Oz curtain closed tight. We jurors have heard only the same explanation that everyone else has heard: The board could not reach a majority vote on any of the novels. I’d like to think that THE PALE KING, TRAIN DREAMS and SWAMPLANDIA! each garnered such fierce partisans on the board that no compromise could be reached. Right. Whenever I succumb to that fantasy, the words written by the winner of the 1953 Pulitzer Prize in fiction ring in my head: 'Isn’t it pretty to think so?'"

That's a SUN ALSO RISES reference, of course. Don't mess with English professors, they will quote you. Corrigan's suggestions to fix this problem are to allow the jury final say (unlikely), allow the board to ask the jury for alternate selections (kind of icky and political) or change the voting rules so the winner doesn't need a majority (might be the best). Was Corrigan wrong to turn out the lining of all this? What do you think they should do?

"My stridency was fortified by American literature’s constellation of small-town exiles. Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson all wrote their best work after abandoning their small Midwestern hometowns. Only Cather opted for aria. Hemingway, typically, chose silence, not once writing about Oak Park, Illinois. Fitzgerald seemed to hold his Minnesota boyhood in a regard that is half sneering, half heartbroken. In MAIN STREET and BABBITT, Lewis horse-whipped America’s small towns so ferociously the latter has become synonymous with everything strangling and conformist about them. Anderson is the most influential small-town anatomist, his WINESBURG, OHIO famously coining the term “grotesques” for small-town people and inspiring what might best be called the “Up Yours, Winesburg” tradition in American literature."
--Tom Bissell, "Escanaba's Magic Hours"

NYC: A recommendation, and a caveat

Anne Enright is reading at KGB Bar tomorrow; her book THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ was one of my favorite books of last year and I'm hoping to catch her this time around. She's reading in a series sponsored by the NYU MFA program, just like the Chad Harbach reading I went to last week.

I hadn't realized when I arrived that some of the MFA students would be reading before the main event, as opening bands to the headliner, but it didn't bother me. Two of them were very good, including one woman whose novel excerpt made me wish I had taken her name down, and one was all right. The fourth student reader aired out a poem dedicated to a poet who had recently visited his class for a guest lecture, the first line of which was: "Meghan O'Rourke equals hot." Forget tying sonnets to trees; apparently it's now too much to ask for a decent analogy in the first line of a poem. Suddenly being alone forever doesn't seem so bad!

But my point is, public-service announcement, if you are student-reading averse for whatever reason, don't get there too early; and if you can't get out of work in time, you might not be too late.