Author: Mark Athitakis

Marlovian Theory

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Raymond Chandler, Sara Paretsky

At the Outfit, Sara Paretsky writes a brief but elegant tribute to Raymond Chandler‘s 1954 novel, The Long Goodbye. The story in the novel itself, Paretsky argues, mirrors Chandler’s own feelings of entrapment at the time–most pressingly, his concern that he was boxed in as a genre writer. “I might be the best writer in the country,” Paretsky quotes Chandler as writing to his editor after sending a draft of the novel. “And with two exceptions I very likely am, but I’m still [considered just] a mystery writer.” Paretsky adds:

The Long Good-Bye expresses Chandler’s bitterness and his weariness. Although Marlowe is beaten, is sent to prison, and has his life threatened, these action scenes are small punctuations in a novel about men trying to make sense of a world where they don’t feel at home. The first part of the book is an almost dreamlike series of conversations between Marlowe and Terry Lennox, a man scarred by war and by money. The middle, where Marlowe is involved with Roger Wade and his wife, has long passages filled with Chandler’s own torment about the state of his writing.

Carl Sandburg, Mountain Man

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Carl Sandburg

The Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times has a profile of Georgann Eubanks, author of the 2007 book Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains. This apparently involves much more than an extended discussion of Cold Mountain: Thomas Wolfe, Carl Sandburg, Margaret Mitchell, Anne Tyler, and more all lived there for some stretch of time. Donna Campbell, who took photos for the book, has a brief essay about attempting to locate Sandburg as a kid:

One night in 1961, poet Carl Sandburg was on CBS television talking about his biography of Abraham Lincoln. Then, right there in our living room, he talked about how much he loved the mountains of North Carolina ! My daddy was thrilled. And the next summer, when we loaded up in the Rambler station wagon and headed for the mountains, my four siblings and I heard a lot about Mr. Sandburg, how he won the Pulitzer Prize, how he wrote about the working man. We would be camping right in his neighborhood, our daddy told us, and we might even see the great writer in the grocery store. It rained the whole weekend we were in Flat Rock. We drove down a few roads looking for what might be the place. Then the fog came in on its little cat feet. So we played a lot of Monopoly in our tent. We never saw Carl Sandburg.

Roundup: Call Your Mother

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Alice McDermott, Dept. of Self-Promotion, Langston Hughes, Philip Roth, Scott Simon

The best line in the New York Times‘ piece on the Philip Roth 75th birthday celebration comes at the very end: “He has delusions of grandeur,” said Roth’s weeping mother when the writer explained that Portnoy’s Complaint was going to attract a lot of attention.

Alice McDermott: “When I go to colleges, I always look at their reading lists,” she told the South Bend Tribune, “and I still see they are very short on women writers. At least now you get an apology. Before, there wasn’t even an awareness of it.” She speaks Tuesday and Wednesday at “A Festival of Our Own: Women Writers at Notre Dame,” at Notre Dame University.

Your moment of zen: The latest VOA Special English author feature is on Langston Hughes.

And a quick DoSP note: I have a review of Scott Simon‘s Windy City in Washington City Paper, and a review of Brian Hayes‘ Group Theory in the Bedroom in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Vlautin in Ireland

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Willy Vlautin

Willy Vlautin‘s second novel, Northline, is one of my recent favorites–I’ve talked about it before, and I suspect I’ll return to it again after it officially comes out in a few weeks. In the meantime, he talks a little about some of his inspirations for the novel, particularly racist skinheads, in the Galway Advertiser. The World Church of the Creator–an organization that, depressingly, got a lot of attention when I was living in Chicago–plays a bit part Northline‘s story. Vlautin explains:

“The boyfriend is based on about three different guys I grew up with,” he says. “I worked jobs with these really tough work-a-day skinheads guys. When the Mexican immigrants would come into Reno they would get construction jobs because the bosses would hire illegal workers.

“Anyway, I would see these guys that I’d known my whole life get more and more racist and violent. I suppose I wanted to kind of try and understand that situation because it’s a common thread that runs through any country that has lots of different people. The thing that really cemented the character in my mind was when the guy who does a lot of the Richmond Fontaine artwork got stabbed by a skinhead.”

Heartbreaker

by Mark Athitakis, posted in F. Scott Fitzgerald

As literary memorabilia goes, $5.8 million is a lot to spend. But if you’re interesting in owning the home where F. Scott Fitzgerald learned all about unrequited love, it’s on the market. The mansion in tony Lake Forest, Illinois, as a story in the Chicago Sun-Times points out, was the home of a the King family, whose teenage daughter Genevre was something of a femme fatale for young Fitzgerald: “The romance lasted a few years, but eventually Genevre got tired of toying with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s affections and gave him the boot. He went on to write The Great Gatsby as well as numerous other short stories in which a rich, beautiful, but self-absorbed young woman spurns a lovelorn young man.”

The Glamorous Life

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Bloggers

Scott Esposito gets a little testy after reading Joe Queenan‘s recent piece in the New York Times about book-discussion questions. Doing side work, Esposito writes, has its downside:

This kinda gets at one big problem I see with current “professional” reviewing–namely that the critics are freelancers who need to do stuff like write supplementary questions to earn a living.

Not that there’s anything wrong with freelance writing assignments. But when a critic is scrambling around for income, I have to believe that this impingement on her time and resources begins to detract from the quality of her reviews.

OK, hands up: Who of you out there gets to review books full-time without other duties impinging on your time and resources? Congratulations, you’re lucky. Or you rob banks. (But not if it’s gonna take you away from the new Jhumpa Lahiri!) Or the Bank of Mom & Dad cuts you a check every so often. Or, perhaps, you’re a full-time freelance book reviewer, which likely makes you part the very problem that Esposito speaks to: Because book reviews pay so poorly, you write so many of them and plow through books so quickly that you yourself are hardly worth reading.

I’d love to review books full-time. But I just took a look at my monthly mortgage bill and added up the amount of freelance money I made reviewing books last year, and, gosh, it’s practically a 1:1 ratio. So, I work a day job, read when I can, write when I can, do all of it as responsibly as I can, and have some awareness of when I’ve taken on too much. (This is my best argument for being a professional, and I refuse to put the word into scare quotes like Esposito does.) The notion that the best-case scenario is to subsist exclusively on reading books and writing reviews of them–no editing work, no Q&A writing, etc–is nice, but so is the notion of world peace. Like Esposito, I’m all for “broadening the field”–though I never thought of it as especially narrow one, especially now that anybody with a blog and some enthusiasm can get cracking. But to say that we need to “give more critics the opportunity to spend an adequate amount of time with a book under review” is to register a complaint about a problem that isn’t going to go away. Everybody works under time pressure; if Esposito is waiting for reviewers who have ample time to read books and review them, he may quickly learn how difficult “broadening the field” is going to be.

Oates Interviewed

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Smith

The Columbus Dispatch has an e-mail interview with Joyce Carol Oates–the first I’ve seen with her since the death of her husband, Raymond Smith, in February. She has a new book of short stories, Wild Nights! Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James and Hemingway, and inevitably the discussion turns to Smith:

Q: In your journal entries, you have described yourself as “ lazy” and even “staggeringly indolent” and yet you’ve been astonishingly prolific for decades. Do these contrasting inclinations still exist?

A: Since my husband’s unexpected death, I really have very little energy. I am tired nearly all the time and have terrible insomniac nights. So perhaps the longtime theme of my “energy” is no longer relevant. … Now, living alone, I feel as if I am lacking gravity, or oxygen … the freedom of aloneness is a melancholy thing.

My husband was not at all involved in my literary life; he did not read most of my writing, only just reviews (as an editor, Ray had a first-rate eye. We were together in this house most of the time, in our separate offices, meeting for meals, afternoon walks and bicycle rides, and social engagements. Ray never interfered in my professional life — did not offer opinions, and did not read most reviews of my work or articles about me. We were each other’s best friend and confidante — though I tried not to disturb Ray with bad news of any kind, unless it was necessary.

The Man Who Groused

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Alfred Kazin

The London Telegraph has a review of Michael Cook’s new biography of Alfred Kazin, a book that portrays the critic as a melancholy, adulterous man who (as a critic at least) shot his wad before he was 30. Grumpy critics may be the most vulnerable people on earth. Witness this catty exchange mentioned in the review: “While he said of his third wife, the novelist Ann Birstein, that no writer ever read less, she countered that she had published more than him if you removed his quotations.” Michael Dirda came away with much the same feeling reading the biography, though the Kazin he describes has an optimism to bolster all that misery:

While Kazin remained throughout much of his career a public advocate for 1930s-style hopefulness — the one aspect of Edmund Wilson he didn’t admire was the great man’s pessimism — he nonetheless poured out his own angst and spite and growing melancholy in his journals. While he consciously believed in human aspiration, moral passion and ideals, within the chambers of his heart he seems to have fought constantly against self-pity and the kind of loneliness we associate with the figures in the paintings of Edward Hopper — or with Melville, Dickinson and many other 19th-century American authors. And yet writers, the critic was convinced, couldn’t wholly retreat from life into the self. He believed strongly that art needed to be grounded in the real, to be an attempt to grasp the complexities of a time, place or people.

Hoop Dreams

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Sherman Alexie

I’m not keeping up with NBA or Sherman Alexie the way I ought to. Since the beginning of the year the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger has run a regular column by Alexie titled Sonics Death Watch. (The Seattle SuperSonics are moving to Oklahoma next season, which was news to me. Sorry, I’m a baseball guy, though the Nats make that particular affection difficult.)

Anyway! Alexie has this column on the Sonics and it’s…OK. The guy clearly loves his team, and occasionally he finds a way to neatly work in his thoughts about race into a basketball column and not make it seem ungainly:

I think white fans love white point guards, even the disappointing ones, because of tribalism. The small white guys in the stands identify with the small white guys on the court. Makes sense to me. If a Native American ever makes it to the NBA, he will become one of my favorite players, even if he’s terrible.

But I truly love NBA basketball because of its otherness, not the otherness of race, but the otherness of athletic ability. During a recent game, Luke Ridnour threw a bounce pass into the key that was gorgeous and extraterrestrial. And for just a few seconds, I loved Luke and chanted his name along with the other fans.

J.D. Vs. X

by Mark Athitakis, posted in J.D. Salinger

04_malcolmsalinger.jpg

I’m not entirely certain where Dan Starling‘s study of Malcolm X and J.D. Salinger is going, but his visual juxtapositions are interesting. Here’s what’s on the Web site of the Richmond Art Gallery in Richmond, British Columbia, where the exhibit is on display: “Both men stopped speaking and publishing during the same historical moment in 1965. Photographs, a travelogue video and book works examine the last public significations of both men. The artist reconfigures what these materials might represent in considering the formation of cultural memory in a society preoccupied by celebrity, racialization and authenticity.”