Author: Mark Athitakis

Another Log on the Fire

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Kindle

Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Ezra Klein fusses over what the Amazon Kindle means for the future of reading. He’s not entirely sold on the device after carrying it around for a month:

Let me be clear: though the Kindle has some advantages over traditional books, for the moment, I’d stick with the low-tech option. The problem is that the Kindle tries to compete too directly with paper. It attempts to electronically mimic the experience of reading a book. But the book is very, very good at providing the experience of reading a book. In this way, the Kindle occasionally comes off as if Ford, failing to make the conceptual leap to the car, had instead built a motorized horse. Sure, there would be some advantages: the robo-steed would never grow tired, and could be outfitted with more plush seating. But horses are pretty good at being horses. And books, like horses, have evolved to maximize their advantages.

Largely, though, he’s enthused about what the digital book means for readers. (CJR’s Web site has a video of him discussing the story.) To overgeneralize his point, the Kindle (or at least digital text) makes text flexible—more free to be amended, corrected, and discussed. Fair enough, but I think Klein’s piece missed the target. There’s a hint of the straw man in his thesis: He wrestles with the question of whether the Kindle will spell the death of the book, but no sensible person is making that argument. Oddly, though, Klein never really gets at the main problem with the Kindle—the impermanence of the device itself. “If you drop it in the bathtub, you’re out $400,” he notes. But it’s deeper than that, because you need not drop the Kindle in the bathtub to have an obsolete device. Just wait five years, where it’ll take the place of all the tech devices you had five years ago and no longer use; your first-gen iPod, your iMac, your PDA. (Yes, I’ve ranted about this before, but I’m always game to bring it up again.)

The Chicago Wave

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Aleksandar Hemon

Chicagoist checks in with Aleksandar Hemon. His new novel, The Lazarus Project, is based in part on the true story of Lazarus Averbauch, a Jewish immigrant (and alleged anarchist) who was killed by Chicago police in 1908. Says Hemon, a Bosnian-born writer now living in Chicago:

[W]hat interests me as a writer is that displacement necessarily results in stories. On the one hand, you tell the story of the old land, wherever it is, whatever your attitude towards it is. But you also tell the stories to the people of the new land, and you define yourself to them. But you also tell the stories of your new land to yourself and you listen to stories of the new land to understand what it is. And then at some point you tell the stories of the new land to people from the old land. That’s very simplified (laughs). But it perpetuates stories, displacement. When you’re at home, if you’re telling stories with people you are with your whole life, then there are no new stories coming in. You keep telling the old stories. And as comforting as that can be, new stories come with displacement.

Roundup: Cutting-Room Floor

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Angela Carter, Kate Christensen, Rick Moody, Toni Morrisson

Rick Moody on studying with Angela Carter at Brown University, in the Age: “On the first day, the class was overenrolled. She basically got it down to 14 people by scaring people out of the room. Some guy raised his hand and said, ‘Well, what’s your work like anyway?’ She said, in her mild-mannered way, ‘My work cuts like a steel blade at the base of a man’s penis’.”

Kate Christensen, on winning the PEN/Faulkner award (and being only the fourth woman to do so in 28 years), at NPR: “For writers and artists, it’s always a balancing act between wanting to be the center of attention and wanting to be invisible and watch what’s going on,” she says. “It makes you vulnerable to win an award. It’s nice to get the attention, but your neck is stuck out.”

Toni Morrison, clarifying that “first black President” statement, in Time: “People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.”

When Trilling Failed

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Cynthia Ozick, Lionel Trilling

Cynthia Ozick‘s extensive but absorbing essay on Lionel Trilling in the New Republic is well worth the time it’ll take to read. The peg for the piece is Trilling’s The Journey Abandoned, an unfinished novel that was recently discovered and just published by Columbia University Press. The book is, to Ozick’s mind, a failure, but an interesting failure that allows her to delve into the tricky business of being a critic who takes on fiction. When you were a critic such as Trilling, deeply concerned with the mechanics of literary greatness, the stakes were much higher. So for him to write what what Ozick calls merely a pretty good novel, 1947’s The Middle of the Journey, was essentially to fail. Ozick writes:

Then surely it behooved him to bring forth not merely a good novel, and not merely a very good novel, but a great novel? This he had not done. Q.E.D.: since with all this capacity for greatness, he had not produced a great novel, it must follow that he had produced a bad novel–gray, bloodless, intellectual, without passion. For the lauded critic who stakes his truth on a transcendent standard, there may be a lesson in it: do not try to practice what you preach, or your admirers will gather round to pick your bones.

Sticky Wickets

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Joseph O'Neill

On the Atlantic‘s Web site, Katie Bacon chats with Joseph O’Neill, the Dutch-born Irish-born, Dutch-raised author of Netherland, a novel that’s about (among other things) cricket and post-9/11 New York:

I think a lot of people here felt a similar passivity about the war, as if they were waiting for someone to tell them how they should think about it. So in a way Hans [the novel’s protagonist] wasn’t so different from a lot of Americans at the time.

Exactly, he wasn’t. He places his trust in the powers that be. But he confesses, in a way, that he doesn’t really care—which I think is not necessarily typical of most Americans. He’s too depressed and wrapped up in a private circuit of misery. To the degree that he does reflect America’s reaction, he’s not equipped to think politically about the world. It’s very sad to say that, after having lived ten years in America, it increasingly dawns on you how politically undereducated people in this country are. It’s a very dangerous thing, especially in combination with the power that the government has. I say this even though I’ve become anti-anti-American—one does when one starts to live here. I’ve become American; I just got naturalized a few months ago. I really do feel that Hans’s political limitations are reflective of limitations in American culture generally.

Best Westerns

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dept. of Self-Promotion, John Steinbeck, Rudolph Wurlitzer, William Saroyan, Willy Vlautin

The Charlotte Observer ponders the legacy of William Saroyan, who was born 100 years ago in Fresno, California. Donald Munro writes: “Who can say why Saroyan doesn’t have the name recognition today of, say, his contemporary John Steinbeck?”

Funny you should ask! In today’s Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley joins Robert Gottlieb as a member of the Salinas Handwringers Society—a small but apparently growing group of critics who take whacks at Steinbeck’s works yet still find themselves enchanted by them. “Why do people still read Steinbeck today while his contemporary William Saroyan…is almost completely forgotten?” Yardley asks, then proposes an answer:

The only reason I can come up with for the high esteem in which Steinbeck is still held is his transparent sincerity. It has long been my pet theory that in the popular marketplace, readers instinctively distinguish between writers whose work draws on genuine feeling and those who rely on art or artifice, and that they reward the former while repudiating the latter. From Jacqueline Susann to Danielle Steel, from James Michener to James Patterson, readers have recognized the sincerity of feeling beneath the utter lack of literary merit, and have rewarded it accordingly.

Yardley isn’t being cute or glib here—his assessment is couched in a wise reading of Cannery Row, and the whole essay is worth your time.

Staying in the West a little longer: I’m a little out of practice in long-form reviewing, but I wanted a little more room than usual to discuss Rudolph Wurlitzer‘s The Drop Edge of Yonder and Willy Vlautin‘s Northline. My review of both novels is in this week’s City Paper.

Secretary, Take an E-mail

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry answers questions from LA Observed about his work via e-mail—or, rather, he has somebody type out his spoken answers into an e-mail:

Q: You’ve written that the media supplies memories. Are you saying that one’s personal memory of something isn’t real unless it is broadcast on TV or the internet? Do you think that the mania for taking pictures with cellphones and standing in public talking loudly on the phone is a way to take our memories back – create our own – star in our own stories, as obnoxious as that is for people standing behind the person on the phone? What are the consequences of all of this when it comes to the written word?

A: What I meant by the media supplying memories is that we watch movies, or television, and those things become part of our memory bank. We’ll have to wait and see what consequences these things will bring. I don’t know. Maybe no consequences. Maybe these things will eliminate the written word, but it’s unlikely. I don’t use a computer, nor go near the internet. In fact, Diana Ossana, my writing partner, is typing my spoken responses to your questions into her computer.

I call shenanigans on his claim that Heaven’s Gate is now considered a masterpiece, but otherwise there’s smart stuff in the whole interview.

Inside the Beetle Engine

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Samantha Hunt

Bloomberg News catches up with Samantha Hunt, author of The Invention of Everything Else, a novel about the final days of Nikola Tesla. (It’s a great premise that I wish was better executed.) The end of the conversation between her and Bloomberg’s Manuela Hoelterhoff:

Hoelterhoff: What drew you to Tesla?

Hunt: I never had heard about him through 20 years of an American education. And so, when I finally did stumble on him, I was quite surprised to learn that he had invented AC and the wireless.

And then I learned that when he was 8 years old, he created an engine that was powered by June beetles. And I thought, “Oh, boy, this man is so creative.”

He had plans to build a ring around the equator so that just by staying stationary, you would be able to travel around the world in 24 hours. And plans that almost seem like dreams. He was thinking about wind power, thinking about solar power, thinking about batteries that are far, far more efficient than the batteries that we even have here 110 years later. He had plans to photograph thought. He thought, well, thought is electrical energy, and we record electrical energy all the time. Why shouldn’t we be able to photograph it?

So What Else Is New?

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jhumpa Lahiri, Richard Price, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Uncategorized

Yesterday the National Book Critics Circle announced its latest Good Reads list—a selection of recently published books recommended by its members. Here’s the fiction list (links and formatting direct from the announcement post on the NBCC blog, Critical Mass):

1. Richard Price, LUSH LIFE, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2. Jhumpa Lahiri, UNACCUSTOMED EARTH, Knopf
3. Steven Millhauser, DANGEROUS LAUGHTER, Knopf
*4. Charles Baxter, THE SOUL THIEF, Pantheon
*4. Peter Carey, HIS ILLEGAL SELF, Knopf
*4. J. M. Coetzee, DIARY OF A BAD YEAR, Viking
*4. James Collins, BEGINNNER’S GREEK, Little, Brown
*4. Brian Hall, FALL OF FROST, Viking
*4. Roxana Robinson, COST, Farrar, Straus & Giroux
*4. Owen Sheers, RESISTANCE, Nan A. Talese: Doubleday

You won’t have to look far to find somebody argue that this list is stuffed with the usual suspects. That’s a somewhat odd complaint to me, as somebody who spent a couple of years contributing to pop-music polls. I mean, of course these lists are filled with known names—they’re consensus-building exercises. Surprises, practically by definition, aren’t going to rise to the top. And I’m skeptical about consensus-building exercises in the age of the long tail. But something to keep in mind: When I attended a gathering at Politics & Prose a few months back to discuss the last batch of selections, many of the folks who attended found all this stuff surprising, and you don’t show up at Politics & Prose on a balmy Saturday afternoon to listen to book critics natter on unless you care about reading.

This time around, I suspect that most folks with even a casual interest in contemporary literature have heard plenty about Price and Lahiri, and anybody who makes writing about books part of their daily business is thoroughly sick of the pair of ’em by now. That’s not to say that a list of books that a preponderance of critics cared about is valueless, though—if only for folks who might be curious about what critics care about, and transparency is always a good thing.

All that said, I’m an NBCC member, and I was mindful this time around about not being one more person boosting Lush Life—much as I love it, it doesn’t need any more help. My pick was Rudolph Wurlitzer‘s The Drop Edge of Yonder, about which more soon.

Impropriety

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Keith Gessen

I had a good time reading Keith Gessen‘s ruminations about Jonathan Richman and being a Bostonian in the Guardian, which is more than I can say for extended portions his novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, which I review in today’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune. (I didn’t get too far into the complex business of how the novel’s characters are largely drawn from Gessen’s life. That’s partly a function of the space allotted for the review, but it mainly speaks to my feeling that, while it’s nice to know if a novel is a roman a clef, the text ultimately is only as good as what’s in it. Ten years from now, you shouldn’t demand that a reader Google up all of this foofaraw in order to better appreciate a work, and any writer who thinks you should isn’t dealing fairly with his or her readers. Scott McLemee sagely addresses all this in his latest column for Inside Higher Ed.)

Anyway! Jonathan Richman! Gessen writes:

The Modern Lovers sounds as if it could have been made yesterday. The music is stripped of everything but the most essential rock instrumentation, and sometimes, as on “Pablo Picasso” (“Some guys try to pick up girls,” it begins, almost ominously, “and get called assholes. / This never happened to / Pablo Picasso. / He would walk down the street, / women could not resist his stare. / Consequently Pablo Picasso / was never called an asshole”) or “I’m Straight”, Richman is barely even singing. Between this and the lyrics, which are funny, self-effacing, often flat-out pleading, all traces of the rock god have been eliminated. I don’t know how much of this is attributable to the fact that John Cale, the VU’s visionary bassist, produced half the album in 1972, but most of it must have been there to begin with. The Modern Lovers is modern in the sense of being continuously modern, of having managed to fall out of time. It seems as if Richman is naked, and speaking directly and immediately to you.