Month: February 2008

Red Room–What Is This Thing, Again?

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ishmael Reed, T.C. Boyle

I wrote a few weeks back about the launch of Red Room, a San Francisco-based Web site that intends to be a destination for readers who want to know more about their favorite authors. At the time I voiced some skepticism about the usefulness of the site–why do I need a portal to find an author when I have Google?–but with a new story about the site in the San Jose Mercury News (via), I gave it another look.

The story attempts to make some noise about Barack Obama being a new member on the site, but what’s on his page? His “blog” has one entry, and it’s the transcript of a month-old speech. There’s nothing else there–videos, book links, reviews–that I couldn’t find just as easily elsewhere. Ishmael Reed, the story tells me, with some excitement, has a page at Red Room. His blog? It’s got one entry, three months old, and it’s a quote he gave to a newspaper. The Salman Rushdie page getting the big push on the homepage hasn’t been updated since December. Which author pages have been recently added on the site? At a glance, I can’t tell.

This is silly, and more silliness is encapsulated in this sentence in the story:

“Readers can also join but they do not get pages.”

If this is some new frontier in social networking for book types, it’s flailing. There’s no reason why any self-respecting writer who wants to connect with readers can’t start their own blog or Web site, and while I understand that Red Room has an interest in making it clear who the writers are and who the readers are, I can’t even make pals with other readers. Does T.C. Boyle have fans? You bet he does. Can I connect with them through Boyle’s Red Room page? No, I cannot.

Crossing the Pond

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Uncategorized

Victoria Best, a lecturer in French literature at Cambridge who runs a lively blog called Tales From the Reading Room, was nice enough to deem me interesting enough to interview about the intersection of journalism and blogging. It’s long, and I’m under no delusion that it’s stuffed with genius insights. But she asked some great questions that touched on a lot of my concerns about where journalism in general, and arts journalism in particular, is going. Please give it a look.

The Southern Thing

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Audrey Niffenegger, Jack Pendarvis, Stephen Elliott

The Mobile Press-Register has a profile of publisher MacAdam/Cage, which has used the financial boost it received from Audrey Niffenegger‘s The Time-Traveler’s Wife a few years back to launch a cottage industry supporting Gulf Coast writers. The breadth of the Southern fixation is news to me, though I liked Jack Pendarvis‘ 2007 story collection, Your Body Is Changing, which MacAdam/Cage published. (Before that, I just thought of it as the house that published Stephen Elliott.) From the piece:

“There’s a complete disconnect between literature and corporate culture,” says [publisher David] Poindexter. “Corporations need a short-term payoff. They have to make shareholders happy by increasing profits every quarter. So corporate publishers need books that will make money this quarter.” These books are rarely great works of literature. “Literature takes a long time to develop,” explains Poindexter. “It’s like growing trees instead of corn.” In every way, he has positioned his own company so he can grow those trees. “After all,” he observes, “what props up the New York houses are their backlists of great titles from the past, which were generated by the business model they’ve now discarded.” Poindexter is attempting to put that model back into play.

(Via)

Sunday Miscellany

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Chinua Achebe, Marcus Sakey, Richard Yates

The Guardian makes an argument for Richard Yates‘ membership in the American canon.

Marcus Sakey‘s second novel, At the City’s Edge, is next on my to-read pile. (I’m probably sublimating some Chicago homesickness in reaching for that before Beautiful Children, but Sakey’s debut was a smart thriller, and I’m curious to see what he’s done the second time around.) The Chicago Tribune has a glowing review; the Toledo Blade has an interview.

More homesickness: Chinua Achebe, living on the campus of Bard College and missing his native Nigeria, discusses Things Fall Apart on its 50th anniversary.

Saturday Miscellany

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Don DeLillo, Ken Kalfus

Financial Times reviews the eerie cover of Don DeLillo‘s Underworld.

The Washington Post‘s book blog, Short Stack, attempts to come up with a master list of post-9/11 fiction. Here’s another vote for Ken Kalfus‘ A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, but I call shenanigans on that “deliberately” in the blurb on DeLillo’s Falling Man.

In the UK, the Guardian bemoans the death of the love story, while in the U.S. there’s some speculation that the Kindle isn’t the world-beating success that Amazon claims it is. (Valleywag asks the pertinent question: Have you actually seen somebody in public using one of these things?) I don’t mean to force a connection here, but is Amazon doing enough to push the Kindle into the hand of romance-novel readers? In some ways it seems like a perfect match: At the risk of generalizing, romance readers don’t especially committed to hanging on to copies of their books (why else would used book stores explicitly refuse to accept them?), and the Kindle embraces the disposability of books (a few weeks back I argued that I need more convincing that I can actually own a Kindle book). Also, those patterned slip-on book covers you see on the subway don’t exist for nothing–they’re meant to cloak the gaudiness of the romance novel you’re reading, and a big beige reading device does the job just fine. A device that’s anonymous and allows you to have a bunch of books handy and handily disposable might be a winner with romance readers. (Sony seemed willing to give the idea a whirl, though perhaps the hot-pink color scheme doesn’t provide the anonymity a reader might hope for.)

More on Doc

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Harold Louis Humes, Peter Matthiessen

An essay in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review follows up on the story of Harold L. Humes, the eccentric novelist who’s the subject of a new documentary, Doc. Much of the piece reworks information in an earlier Times article, but it does bring the news that we may be hearing more soon about the odd intersection of Humes, Peter Matthiessen, the CIA, and the Paris Review (Matthiessen has acknowledged that he used his Paris Review gig as a CIA cover):

The C.I.A. thread is discussed in greater detail by Matthiessen and others in “George Being George,” an oral biography of [longtime Paris Review editor George] Plimpton scheduled to appear this fall, said Nelson Aldrich, who compiled the volume for Random House. Aldrich worked as an editor at The Paris Review in 1957 and subsequently as a public relations functionary at the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He concurred that the literary magazine had never received money from the congress, though he noted that Julius Fleischmann, a literary socialite and known conduit to the congress, had donated $1,000 to The Paris Review in its early years. Aldrich said it was Fleischmann, not his front foundation, that gave the money, “although who knows, he might have gotten it from his foundation.” (Aldrich married Humes’s former wife, Anna Lou, in 1967.)

Rhymes With “Lemons”

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ben Greenman

Ben Greenman, author of the erratic-but-fun (or is that amusingly erratic?) short-story collection A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both, has been spoofing musicals for a while now at McSweeney’s Web site. His latest one riffs on the Roger Clemens-Brian McNamee foofaraw, and has Clemens’ character singing some of the funniest lines I’ve read in a while:

I’ll flatten you out like a Passover matzo.
Don’t think I’ll do it? Ask Mike Piazza.
Only an idiot angers an ace.
I’ll unretire my fist from your face.

(Via.)

Update: The Clemens-testimony-as-poetry-meme trend has begun!

Dept. of Self-Promotion

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Susan Choi

My brief review of Susan Choi‘s new novel, A Person of Interest, is now available at City Paper‘s Web site. Choi reads at Politics & Prose on Monday.

Speaking of which: On Saturday (tomorrow) at 1 p.m., P&P will host a discussion of the National Book Critics Circle “Good Reads” project, in which the NBCC compiles recommendations from member critics and other writers, and the upcoming NBCC awards. This stop is part of an ongoing road show that’s being covered by the NBCC’s blog, Critical Mass, and it’s a great set of panelists: critic-blogger Scott McLemee, Washington Post Book World critic Ron Charles, critic and Author Author! host Bethanne Patrick, poet Michael Collier, and novelist-critic Louis Bayard. (Lou’s a friend who’s written the occasional film review for me at the CP.)

A Brief Encounter With Ben Fountain

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ben Fountain

Ben Fountain wrote one of my favorite books of 2006, Brief Encounters With Che Guevara, a wide-ranging story collection largely set in the Third World. Texas Monthly’s Web site has a short Q & A with him:

Do you have any interest in doing the same cultural and historical studies you did in “Brief Encounters” in another part of the world?

To me it’s as natural as breathing, to want to know how life is lived someplace other than where one lives. I want to know more, feel like I need to know more, and the only way I ever really learn something is if I write it.

Primal Howl

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Allen Ginsberg

The Oregonian reports on the recent discovery of a recording of Allen Ginsberg reading his transformative Beat poem, “Howl,” at Reed College on Feb. 13, 1956–a month before what was long believed to be the first recording in Berkeley:

This isn’t just any tape. Not only is it the earliest known recording of one of the most famous poems of the 20th century, but also the sound quality is excellent, and Ginsberg gives a strong, clear reading with enough textual variations in “Howl” and the other poems to keep literary scholars busy for years.