Lethem on Writing, Reading, and Other Things...

The only thing I’ve ever read by Jonathan Lethem was the introduction he wrote to The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick. Despite the critical praise Lethem has received for both Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn I, for some reason, can never bring myself to buy his books. Most times, I'll go into the bookstore with every intention of finally buying a Lethem novel, but usually, after a quick perusal of the blurb on the back, I’ll put it back down with promises that I'll buy it later. The interview he recently gave to the AV Club (the surprisingly serious-minded entertainment supplement to The Onion), has me wondering if I should try again...maybe. On reading, Lethem says:

... The Fortress Of Solitude might be an exception in this, but for me, when I was a reader only, I was a very fast, voracious one. I would skeletonize the books that I read, and the things I skipped are the things I now skip as a writer. I wasn't really very patient with long evocations of clouds and trees and buildings and landscape, nor did I pause over elaborate descriptions of the facial characteristics or clothing styles of the characters. I always wanted to know what they were doing and saying. And also what the mysterious big idea of the book was, what the metaphors were. So I would rush to those things, and I would be very cursory as I read the descriptive stuff.

Now, there’s something you don’t hear writers admitting to everyday. I can’t admit to not skipping certain, overlong descriptions myself but I’d also venture to say that sometimes “facial characteristics or clothing styles” could be a writer’s hint to the “mysterious big idea.” Sometimes, it could be dangerous to skip those things the author has worked so hard to include. Lethem and I, however, are in perfect sync with this:

The other thing is that, I think, sometimes visualization in writing works by a kind of homeopathic process. The less you offer, the more readers are forced to bring the world to life with their own visual imaginings. I personally hate an illustration of a character on a jacket of a book. I never want to have someone show me what the character really looks like—or what some artist has decided the character really looks like—because it always looks wrong to me. I realize that I prefer to kind of meet the text halfway and offer a lot of visual collaborations from my own imaginative response to the sentences. And so I think that I invite the reader to do the same thing.

And this quote, an extension of an article he published in Harper’s magazine last month, is interesting commentary on the artist’s place (or birth) in the larger culture:

The image of the artist is sustained by this great myth of iconoclastic individual genius. A lot of great stuff is made up by individual iconoclastic geniuses, and that's fine, but a lot of other stuff comes burbling out of collective culture. That gets invented one way and then used an entirely different way, and different people work on it, and you end up with this sort of puzzle.

On Food...and Drink

Adam Gopnik writes in next week's issue of the New Yorker:

There are four kinds of food in books: food that is served by an author to characters who are not expected to taste it; food that is served by an author to characters in order to show who they are; food an author cooks for characters in order to eat it with them; and, last (and most recent), food that an author cooks for characters but actually serves to the reader.

I can't remember the last time I read about food in a novel, which may be because the food was often just "Styrofoam peanuts in the packaging" of the novel's narrative. I can, however, recall the first sentence of a novel I've just started:

Jack Reacher ordered espresso, double, no peel, no cube, foam cup, no china, and before it arrived at his table he saw a man's life change forever.

I know Gopnik's talking about food not drink, but I think it's a prime example of a description that falls into the second category. Nothing could describe Jack Reacher, the loner, bare-minimum hero of Lee Child's thriller The Hard Way, better than that order of espresso.

More Scary News On Newspaper Book Reviews...

The folks at the blog Critical Mass report:

As reported on CNN and other places, the Tribune Company will be sold to Chicago real estate tycoon Sam Zell in a deal for $13 billion. This will make the company which owns the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the Hartford Courant and other newspapers (not to mention the Cubs and other radio and television stations) a private company, and less beholden to stock price above all else. In other words, the deal could be good news for book sections, especially if they can be seen as integral to building a bridge between newspapers' past and their future.

Which is good news, especially considering the news posted at the Literary Saloon last week:

As has long been feared and now widely reported on, The Los Angeles Times is doing away with its stand-alone Sunday book review section, 'merging' it with the opinion section, beginning on 14 April...(Yes, the press release says 14 April, which is a Saturday, and early reports suggested it would be a Saturday-section, but they do also write that it would be: "a combined Sunday section". We'll see.)

The future of newspaper book review sections seems precarious indeed. Is it possible that ten years from now the only major newspaper that may still be running a book review section is the NY Times? As much as I value the reviews in the NY Times, I sincerely hope not.

Double David

by David Rakoff
pgs. 1-67

Unfairly or not, reading David Rakoff inevitably engenders comparisons with his namae frater David Sedaris, the superstar memoirist of the hilarious and critically-acclaimed compilations Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. The two Davids are both witty gay men in their late 30s (early 40s?), whose sharp eye, self-deprecating humor, and ease with a pen makes most of their selections both informative and humorous reads. However - and this is where the comparisons really begin - Rakoff, simply put, just isn’t as funny as Sedaris. Nor has he quite yet developed Sedaris’ skill at using his comical set pieces to transcend their often zanny and (sometimes) toilet humor to something that comments on the larger human experience. But here’s what: it seems that with Don’t Get Too Comfortable (subtitled: The Indignities of Coach Class, the Torments of Low Thread Count, the Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems), Rakoff has finally discovered that he doesn’t have to be. With this thus far engaging compilation of both new and previously published essays, Rakoff has eschewed riding the coattails of Me Talk Pretty One Day - a tendency so evident and poorly-executed in Fraud that I couldn’t finish it - and decided that a bit of investigative journalism intersped with occasional bouts of humor and personal, biting commentary is more his style. It’s a fine choice and a perfect fit.

In “Sesion Privada” Rakoff joins a couple of photographers, cameramen, their crew and three Playboy centerfolds on the paradise island Caya Espanto where they will film a Latin American Playboy television program. One would expect that a gay man on a Playboy soft-core shoot would be the perfect recipe for nothing but one-two knock-out punches of humor. But Rakoff seems to have discovered the art of subtle satire. Of the shoot, Rakoff writes:

The crew confers about her moves. The video-camera man demonstrates what they want. Sinking to his knees, he twists his torso and drags his open palms slowly up his chest to his head where they rub slow circles through a hypothetical jungle of tousled hair...Perhaps this is just the nature of soft-core, but the girls’ hands are kept so primly far away from their genitals that all of their crypto-masturbatory back arching and moaning for no apparent reason starts to look a little mentally unbalanced, frankly.

The joke is there; it’s just a whole lot quieter than what you would have found in Fraud. It’s not a knock-out punch to the face so much as it’s an unexpected soft blow to the back of the head. And, like I said, it’s educational too. In “Wildman” Rakoff informs readers:

...flowers were once thought to have no purpose greater than pleasing the human eye. It wasn’t until experiments in pollination during the Renaissance that people realized to their puritanical horror that even the loveliest of blooms were nothing more than sex organs. In Catholic Europe, people burned Carl Linnaeus’s books as corrupting filth. (To give them their due...they kind of had a point: Linneaus was a bit of a sexual obsessive, vaginally fixated, pushing his penchant so far as to name an entire genus of plants Clitoria.)

I don’t know about you, but my first order of business after reading that passage was to immediately drop what I was doing and see if Lenneaus’ genus name stuck. I’ll save you the trouble...It did.

The Best American Travel Writing 2006 (Final)

There are plenty of reasons why people travel: vacation, exploration, and/or illumination to name a few. I myself, travel frequently for business, which is merely a convenient excuse for me to hop on a plane every two weeks to land in a city unseen by my eyes. But I have never before heard my desire to see what could previously only be explored through words or through pictures put as poetically and as succinctly as Kira Salak puts it in her piece “Rediscovering Libya”: “to see what cannot be imagined, to be taken into my dreams.” That, when it’s all said and done, is the reason why I travel and it is also why I find pleasure with no end in reading The Best American Travel Writing 2006.

So often, I find, people mistake travel writing for something similar to what you might find in a Lonely Planet guide (a book I never leave the house without when I travel). However, for those of you who might be tempted to ask me if I’ve discovered any hot new vacation spots while reading TBA Travel Writing, I’ll say that travel writing isn’t for those looking for the best restaurant in Tokyo in which to eat, or the hippest club in Amsterdam in which to pick up a hot foreign date. The best travel writing is a highly personal experience, more memoir-ish in its execution, and is written to illuminate something about the author, the place, its culture, or its people. The very best travel writing somehow manages to do all three.

Several of the stand-out pieces are of the journey taken in the literal sense, which eventually comes to stand for the one so often used as a metaphor to mean spiritual or revelatory progress. In one of the more heartbreaking pieces of the collection, Michael Paterniti in “XXXXL” travels to the Ukraine to visit the giant Leonid Stadnik, a man of extraordinary proportions, to escape his own unsettled discomfort with his growing feelings of normalcy. He writes, “I had two great kids and a pregnant wife whom I loved, but a part of me – my old self or soul or me-ness had been subsumed by fatherhood. I’d let it happen, of course, but there were still moments when I found myself going a bit haywire.” So, with the blessing of his wife, Paterniti goes to the Ukraine to visit a man tortured by his own uniqueness: “’In my life, I’ve done my best to become a normal person…to reach something. But because of my unusual body, I will never have a family or wealth or a future. I’m telling you, I’ve done my best. Everything that depended on me I’ve done…God punishes the ones he loves most.’”

But things aren’t all spiritually uplifting and morally illuminating in the world of TBA Travel Writing. Some are of dangerous exploration, as in Mark Jenkins’ “A Short Walk in the Wakhan Corridor”:

I’m surrounded by rocks painted blood red. I know what this means – it’s the first thing you learn upon arriving in Afghanistan: land mines…I am twenty feet into the minefield. Very carefully, step backward. I place one foot precisely in its own footprint…Delicately, imagining myself as weightless as the ghost I could become, I retrace my steps.

Others, like David Sedaris’ “Turbulence”, are - like all Sedaris pieces - hilariously irreverent. In “Turbulence” Sedaris has the misfortune of sitting next to a most unpleasant woman. This wouldn’t normally be an unusual problem for anyone who’s ever flown if it weren’t for this opening sentence: “On the flight to Raleigh, I sneezed, and the cough drop I’d been sucking on shot from my mouth, ricocheted off my folded tray table, and landed in the lap of the woman beside me, who was asleep and had her arms folded across her chest.” What follows is a classic David Sedaris piece with its classic self-deprecation even when, technically, he’s in the right. I mean, really, what sort of woman gets so angry just because a stranger doesn’t want to switch seats with her husband? If you ask me she’s the one who’s eight-lettered crossword clue might read, “Above the shoulders, [s]he’s nothing but crap.”

Despite the fact that it took me an enormously long time to finish this collection (nearly four months, sad, I know), TBA Travel Writing 2006 is excellent reading nonetheless. It’s exciting, it’s sad, it’s educational, and sometimes it’s scary. And if you’re going anywhere worth going, it’s essentially travel.

The New Yorker, April 2

Alright, I received my April 2 New Yorker issue in the mail three days ago and I decided enough was enough. I am drowning in New Yorkers. I’ve been trying so hard to get through the books I’m reading that I simply haven’t had time to finish a single New Yorker since the end of February. This week’s New Yorker, which arrived a full five days earlier than it usually does, was the last straw. I am proud to say that, four days later, I have finally finished a complete New Yorker.

I decided to do something a bit different this week. Instead of reading the magazine front to back, which is what I usually do, I decided to read the articles in order of interest. So, I started with John Updike’s review of Walter Isaacson’s Einstein. In his own Picked Up Pieces, a collection of assorted prose, Updike lays out his own rules for writing reviews. One of those rules was:

Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending. (How astounded and indignant was I, when innocent, to find reviewers blabbing, and with the sublime inaccuracy of drunken lords reporting on a peasants' revolt, all the turns of my suspenseful and surpriseful narrative! Most ironically, the only readers who approach a book as the author intends, unpolluted by pre-knowledge of the plot, are the detested reviewers themselves. And then, years later, the blessed fool who picks the volume at random from a library shelf.)

It’s a good thing that Updike admits to breaking his own rules because plot summary is exactly what he did with this review of Isaacson’s biography. Albert Einstein is such an iconic figure that it’s unlikely that the new biography is fraught with suspense and “surpiseful narrative.” Only those who have read the book (I haven’t) would know whether Isaacson sheads new and shocking light on Einstein’s life and if Updike knows it, maybe he’s following his own advice and not telling us. But if it’s unknown whether Isaacson has anything new to say about Einstein’s life, it’s certainly clear that Updike doesn’t.

I don’t see how this article could classify as anything other than an elegant summary. Updike neither provides a new theory or way of looking at the man, nor does he provide any illuminating comments on the biography itself outside of calling it “thorough, comprehensive, [and] affectionate.” One wonders if, for all of its elegance, this article would have even been accepted by the New Yorker if it hadn’t come with John Updike’s byline.