Month: February 2008

So That’s Where the Plot for This Season of The Wire Comes From…

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Simon

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Boing Boing links to a collection of vintage pulp-novel covers. Here’s the description for the Andrew Garve novel pictured:

(1951)
There was only one thing wrong with Edgar Jessop.

HE WASN’T QUITE SANE!

And his newspaper colleagues were plotting against him, giving juicy asignments to willing girl reporters, promoting underlings and leaving his talent to rot in insignificance.

But he could show them!

And he did – – by committing an almost clueless murder, and daring the authorities to solve it.

But with his enemies multiplying around him, one murder wasn’t enough. There was another – – and plans for more – – until, slowly and relentlessly, the police closed the net.

“Plainsong” on Stage

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Kent Haruf

The stage adaptation of Kent Haruf‘s Plainsong had its world premiere in Denver last week. From the Denver Post’s review:

“Plainsong” is satisfyingly executed in nearly every conceivable way, culminating in a three-hankie third act — for being harrowing, then heartbreaking and finally for being just some kind of wonderful. It’s infused with old-fashioned heart but stays remarkably free of treacle and never shies from the underlying realities of small-town ignorance, hatred and violence.

At three hours, it’s long, but other than perhaps consolidating its two intermissions into one, there isn’t much to lose in a narrative that, admittedly, takes some getting used to. Eric Schmiedl’s fluid adaptation is remarkably faithful to the book — some might even say too faithful. With its ever-rotating narrators, the presentation seems at first more a staged reading of the book than a performed play. You wonder if we’re being cheated of action.

But it’s soon apparent that smart, meticulous decisions have been made about how best to convey every piece of this story so as to be true to a colorful swath of characters and interrelated stories, while keeping things manageable for the audience. Like a river, it flows when it needs to flow, and like a breeze, it breathes when it needs to breathe. Vicki Smith’s deceptively sparse and ever-shifting set plays an integral part in maintaining the staging’s remarkable flow, with pieces constantly shifting, sliding, rising and lowering.

On the Table

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jon Clinch

Jon Clinch, author of Finn, a novel that reimagined the life of Huckleberry Finn’s father, is participating in a contest that asks readers to assemble a menu based on the book. If I’m remembering Finn correctly, the only reasonable things to serve related to the novel are whiskey and hate, but the PR folks are hoping you’ll be a little more polite:

Use your imagination. Use your frying pan. Use catfish
and whiskey and fatback bacon and cornbread and sunfish and baking powder
biscuits and … well, you get the idea.

Big-City Reissues

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Richard Price, Tom Wolfe

Richard Price‘s 1992 novel Clockers, about which I’ll be shutting up any day now, is getting reissued on March 10. Interestingly, Tom Wolfe‘s 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities will be reissued the same day. When Clockers came out it was often compared to Wolfe’s big New York novel, which seems a little odd, now; its perspective and attitude couldn’t be more different. But Price told me the book did get him feeling competitive:

[W]hen Bonfire of the Vanities came out, and I read it, it made me crazy, because I felt like, “I want to go back to writing books.” Not that I wanted write like Tom Wolfe. But he was writing about the kind of things that I wanted to write about and hadn’t written about in so long. The book itself made me nuts, made me want to write.

Warehouse: Songs and Stories

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, John Edgar Wideman, Robert Catalionni, Toni Morrison

Baltimore City Paper has a profile of Robert Catalionni, a professor of African American literature at Coppin State University. Catalionni worked on a new disc for Smithsonian Folkways, On My Journey: Paul Robeson‘s Independent Recordings. He’s also the author of what sounds like a fascinating read, The Songs Became the Stories: The Music in African-American Fiction, 1970-2005, which came out in November on Peter Lang Publishing.

Cataliotti also demonstrates astonishing depth of knowledge not just about well-known black writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison; he is just as adept at analyzing Ishmael Reed and John Edgar Wideman. The Songs Became the Stories also includes a discography of recommended artists that includes everyone from Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Jelly Roll Morton, and Sun Ra to Alberta Hunter, Mahalia Jackson, Abbey Lincoln, Public Enemy, and Jill Scott.

Reed and Wideman are “well-known black writers” too. But still.

Tuesday Miscellany

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Ali Smith, Elizabeth Crane, Frederik Peeters, Michael Chabon, Patrick Somerville

Michael Chabon endorses Barack Obama. (via)

Chicago’s Featherproof Books has been publishing a series of handsome (and free!) mini-books. (via) There are a number of fine writers in its archives, including Elizabeth Crane and Patrick Somerville.

The latest iteration of the National Book Critics Circle’s Good Reads list–formerly the “best recommended” list–is up now.  My fiction pick for this go-round was Ali Smith‘s Girl Meets Boy and my nonfiction pick was Frederik Peeters‘ graphic memoir Blue Pills. Neither American, I know, but they were the only 2008 books I had some enthusiasm for in early January, when the call went out.

Chris Offutt’s Third Way

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Chris Offutt

The Macon (Ga.) Telegraph has a story on Chris Offutt, who, like a lot of novelists, has a teaching gig–in his case, at Mercer University. Thing is, he’d almost escaped the world of low-paying adjunctery; after unsuccessfully pitching a show about country singers, he landed a job writing for HBO’s vampire drama, True Blood. Then the strike hit:

“I got my big break in September and moved to Hollywood for a six-month job,” said Offutt, who is from Kentucky. “I was able to write one episode before the strike. Then I went back to Iowa. I began working on a book of stories again and a novel.

“(The strike) opened up the opportunity to come to Mercer, so I cleared it with my boss. The strike will probably end before the Oscars, so by the time I’ll go back out there, nothing will conflict with my teaching.”

Stick-to-it-iveness

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Junot Diaz

Junot Diaz makes the case for persevering as a writer:

God bless perseverance. Because it’s not easy. A young person, or someone who’s writing in a different way — in some ways you could say, eventually someone will find them. Eventually someone will hear them. But it’s good a lot of young people persevere. Because sometimes you have to send something out a thousand times before anyone recognizes your value.

I think of myself — all the stories that I sent in that were rejected by publications, that people just dismissed with form letters, ended up being published later by the prestigious “glossies.” And what was the difference between the story a year before and a year after? Very little. It’s just that it was easy to dismiss it — it was just one story in a pile of million — and then eight months later, “this is the exemplar of a new voice.”

[HT: TEV]

The Problem With McSweeney’s

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dave Eggers, Stephen Amidon, Yannick Murphy

(The obscure indie-rock references will stop soon, promise.)

In the London Times Stephen Amidon addresses the joys and frustrations of the McSweeney’s diaspora. Yes, it’s irreverent and experimental, which is a good thing. But the McSweeney’s brand also winds up serving a very narrow coterie of readers, in part because that brand is defined by Dave Eggers‘ particular brand of irreverence and experimentation:

The ideal McSweeney’s reader (or writer) lives in Brooklyn, wears interesting T-shirts, has a blog he works on in coffee shops, and knows it’s cool to oppose globalisation but uncool to go on too much about it. And while grouping together such distinctive authors as Jonathan Lethem, George Saunders, Joyce Carol Oates, Roddy Doyle and David Foster Wallace is about as easy as herding cats, most of the writers allied with McSweeney’s do share an occasional interest in mixing reportage and fiction, as well as in buffing the surfaces of their prose with italics, unusual fonts and antiquated typography.

Eggers lost me after the first 100 pages of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, once it became clear to me that all his rhetorical feints–the run-on sentences, the faux-narcissism-that-isn’t-really-faux, the italicized exclamations!–was doing more to obscure character and story than to reveal it. I kept trying, but McSweeney’s always felt a little like homework, The Believer always felt like My Weekly Reader, and Eggers’ Genius follow-up, You Shall Know Our Velocity! was so jumbled it barely qualified as a novel. I tried to extricate myself from this stuff, but as a Kirkus reviewer I still had to confront it–Yannick Murphy‘s Here They Come was so dispiriting and exhausting a novel that I couldn’t bring myself to even try to read What Is the What, despite all the acclaim it’s received.

McSweeney’s doesn’t seem to be run by editors so much as boosters, which reflects a certain contempt for readers. I very much want to have faith in what McSweeney’s does, because its support of writers, writing, tutoring is good and important. But those good efforts are lashed to a lot of bad writing–and if you alienate enough readers with awfulness, you’re destined to remain interesting only to the coffee-shop-blog set, when you ought to be transcending it.

[HT:The Literary Saloon]

Suri Explained Infinity

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Manil Suri

I’ve just finished Manil Suri‘s second novel, The Age of Shiva, which prompted me to do some googling. I’m curious about Suri’s dual life as a novelist and a mathematician–I can’t think of any career that’d put more of a burden on both the left and right brain simultaneously. In the process, I came across the video below, in which Suri gives a presentation he coauthored on the concept of infinity. My brain started hurting about a half-hour into the lecture, but the fault isn’t with Suri, whose genial and patient discussion also touches on the way that mathematicians have a way of being depicted as madmen in popular culture.