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.

Criticism of the Critics

I posted this on my other blog and I just simply had to post it here as well. WARNING: Angry rant ahead.

In the April issue of Harper's magazine, Cynthia Ozick quotes an essay titled "Defeating the Poem" written by Denis Donoghue, a literary scholar and a professor of thirty years. In his essay, Donoghue reports:

"Those students who think of themselves as writers and take classes in 'creative writing' to define themselves as poets or fiction writers evidently write more than they read, and regard reading as a gross expenditure of time and energy. They are not open to the idea that one learns to write by reading good writers."

Oh, ye Gods of literature, say it ain't so. Have we sunk so low that even writers don't want to read? Or as Oznick puts it, "So is that where the readers of the next generation are going: to the perdition of egotism and moralizing politicized self-righteousness?"

I always get a bit defensive when writers lament and cry out in letters, "The readers have all gone! Where have all the readers gone?" I wish to say, "Here I am. I'm right here. Don't I count?" I know, of course, that that's not what they mean. What they mean is that there simply aren't as many readers like myself out there as there used to be. But, doesn't it seem just a bit self-defeating to write articles about people who don't read because, obviously, anyone who reads the article is, by definition, a reader? So, it begs the question, who is the intended audience for these articles anyway? Fellow writers, literary critics, readers, or all three? No ones seems to disagree with the fact that readership is declining in America (and in Britain, apparently) so what is the point of all these articles really?

The fact that libraries are getting rid of their Shakespeare and their Dickens because young readers find them too boring and too difficult to read is outrageous, indeed. But what's being done about it? Outrage without action is annoying, boring, and frankly, pointless. Writers, however, seem content to do what writers do - write - and leave the action for someone else. In the past, that may have all been fine and dandy. But to those writers who want the readers of yesteryear back, I'd tell them the same thing I'd tell a child crying, "Mommy! Mommy! He stole my candy." Go get it back. Getting readers to return to reading doesn't require beating, cheating, or stealing (especially if, as Oznick writes, people are already "Googling obsessively (hours and hours)" and "blogging and emailing and text messaging" which all requires reading for "hours and hours").

No, what getting readers back requires is ingenuity and creativity, two things which writers have in sufficient supply. But, most importantly, what it requires is action. Action not through words but through deeds. Large scale reading programs and fairs, and English teachers skilled enough to educate and impart to their students a sense of their own passion for reading. I always tell people who tell me they don't like to read that they simply just haven't read the right book. Where are the programs to help people find their inner reader in the same way that writers are encouraged and taught to find their inner voice?

Call me naive but I truly and honestly believe that there is a reader in everyone. Anyone will read if you place the right book in front of them. This is especially the case with children and younger students, which is where it should all begin, before they've convinced themselves that their time is better spent with television, the internet, and video games. But so often, we speak of these things as if it has to be either/or. Either you read or you watch television; either you play video games or you read. This simply isn't the case. I spend plenty of time surfing the internet - checking email, Googling, blogging (obviously) and all. I also take time out of my day to watch my favorite television shows. And yet somehow, miracle of miracles, I read. A lot.

This isn't - it shouldn't be - a battle of the internet versus reading. This should be a battle for reading, period. When adults who have trouble learning how to check their email and speak of not knowing a thing about computers as if they consider it a badge of honor, champion reading books they, in effect, make reading seem old, stale, and out of date, much in the same way that young people consider cassette tapes and records a thing of the past. But reading isn't something of the past. Even if we couldn't claim that books written years ago could tell universal truths transcendent of time, books are still a thing of the present simply by their virtue of being printed everyday. If books are thing of the present, so too then must be reading.

Internet, television, and video games aren't the problem. Inaction is the problem. There seems to be this idea that marketing reading and literature is sordid and beneath the pure act of reading, especially if one is going to read literature. But if you are above marketing the sacred past-time then you must also be above complaining about the declining readership. To get readers to come back to reading today requires the kind of work that wasn't required fifty years ago and, so what? If you want your place in the hearts and minds of the public and the larger culture, you must be willing to work for it. Some of us, like myself, don't require that kind of work but, as I've said before, obviously this isn't about me or other book lovers like me. This is about the poor people out there whose lives are sadly un-enriched by the mind-blowing, thought-provoking power of books.

If we, none of us, wish to see books relegated to the "deafening silence of irrelevance" then we must take our noses out of our books, our fingers from the keyboards, and demand reading's place in the heart and mind of our community and culture. The place is there; it hasn't gone anywhere. It's simply gotten smaller. If we want to make it larger we must take a break from our philosophizing and our agonizing over the declining numbers and do something, because time is getting short. If Donoghue is to be believed, then we are already fast approaching the day when even our writers won't read. When that happens, the time for arguing and debating will be over, because there won't be anyone to debate with.

To the Library and Beyond

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine remarked that, for someone who reads as much as I do, I don’t go to the library very often. I told him what I tell everyone who asks: I don’t go to libraries because they always want their books back. I’m possessive about my books, especially books I like, and I don’t like having to give them back. It’s selfish I know, but after having accumulated $30 dollar fines on a number of occasions, I’d decided that everyone would be better served – my pocketbook and honest library patrons alike – if I got my books from the bookstore where, for a set price, my books could languish on my shelves as long as I liked.

My pocketbook, however, has of late been rather bare so this past weekend I bit the bullet, promised to be a good library patron, and applied for a new library card. I’d forgotten how much going to the library is like being a kid in a candy store with license to get whatever and however much I liked. Oh, the bounty I escaped with:

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
Tokyo: Cancelled by Rana Dasgupta
Nice Big American Baby by Judy Budnitz
Heat by Bill Buford
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
And a bunch of plays by Shakespeare that I haven’t read in a while or ever (King Lear, As You Like It, and the Henry VI plays to name a few).


Habitually, I read the first chapter of any new book I acquire. It satisfies my curiosity and allows me to finish books I’ve already committed to reading. So I spent a very pleasurable afternoon dipping my toe into a new book before flitting off to a another pool. Here’s a sampling of the first sentence from a few of the books:

“One night last summer, all the killers in my head assembled on stage in Massachusetts to sing show tunes.” –- Assassination Vacation

“Not so long ago, in one of those small, carefree lands that used to be so common but which now, alas, are hardly to be found, there was a prince whose name was Ibrahim.” -- Tokyo: Cancelled (Alright, this isn’t exactly the first sentence in the book. Tokyo: Cancelled is modeled after The Canterbury Tales. This is the first sentence in the first story “The Tailor.”)

“There was a woman who had seven sons and she was happy. Then she had a daughter.” -- from “Where We Come From” in Nice Big American Baby. I’m not going to give away the story but someone please tell me: is it even possible for a woman to carry a baby inside for her for four years and not – I don’t know – die?

"Years ago, before the trains stopped running on so many of the branch lines, a woman with a high, freckled forehead and a frizz of reddish hair came into the railway station and inquired about shipping furniture." -- Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marraige

“A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards.” – Quoted by George Orwell, from The Road to Wigan Pier as preface to Heat