Author: Mark Athitakis

Hester Prynne: Still Interesting!

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Nathaniel Hawthorne

I catch NPR only intermittently, so I’ve missed the boat on its “In Character” series, which focuses on some of the most compelling characters in literature. (“Literature” defined broadly: Last month they flooded the zone on Darth Vader.) The latest one, on Hester Prynne, is a hoot; attempting to connect The Scarlet Letter to Juno is a bit of a reach, but if ever an NPR feature was designed for AP students, this is it. John Updike, interviewed for the feature, calls out a tryst between Prynne and Dimmesdale as one of the best scenes in American literature:

“First she throws away the scarlet letter,” Updike recalls. “Then, quote, ‘By another impulse, she took off the formal cap that confined her hair; and down it fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its abundance and imparting the charm of softness to her features.’

“How wonderful, the power of the hair,” Updike says.

First Thoughts on Titlepage.tv

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Charles Bock, Colin Harrison, Daniel Menaker, Richard Price, Susan Choi

The first episode of Titlepage, an online video site featuring much-decorated literary editor Daniel Menaker in conversation with writers, is up now. Featured in episode one: Richard Price, Charles Bock, Colin Harrison, and Susan Choi. I haven’t had a chance yet to process the full hour-long conversation, but there are a lot of things to like: Menaker is an engaging host who’s clearly familiar with the books he’s talking about, he’s made some good choices in writers to feature, and the video format allows you to easily skip ahead to the interview with each author.

Not so great:  The “Talking Together” bit at the end, which makes me wonder why four authors  are sitting together in the same room if they’re not going to engage with each other too much. Much of the conversation is polite and round-table-y, and while I wasn’t hoping for a Price-Choi cage match, the energy level doesn’t change a whole lot throughout, and one-on-one conversations can be more fun to watch (even if Charlie Rose is the guy doing the interrupting).

Coming Soon: Kerouac/Burroughs Collaboration You Won’t Want to Read

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs

The Telegraph notes that in November, Penguin will publish And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a book that Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs wrote in 1945. It’s never been published, but nobody seems particularly enthusiastic about it seeing the light of day, though:

Gerald Nicosia, who wrote Memory Babe, the widely recognised definitive biography of Kerouac, said the pair would find it funny such a juvenile work was seeing the light of day.

“This was one of the first books they wrote… it’s probably pretty bad. But I’m not surprised it is being published now because it’s a sure-fire way of making money,” he said.

Roundup: You May Have the Falcon…

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Adrian Tomine, Dashiell Hammett, Dept. of Self-Promotion, Nicholson Baker, Richard Price

Stephanie Salter tries to get her head around Dashiell Hammett‘s The Maltese Falcon. My old place in San Francisco was just a couple of blocks from the apartment where Hammett wrote that novel; back in 2001 I wrote a story about the guy who lived (lives?) there.

Nicholson Baker writing “Wikipedia is just an incredible thing” is like Rick James saying “Cocaine is a hell of a drug”–the dude’s found the thing that’s going to reshape his life for years, for better or for worse. As he points out: “All big Internet successes—e-mail, AOL chat, Facebook, Gawker, Second Life, YouTube, Daily Kos, World of Warcraft—have a more or less addictive component—they hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you’re trying to sleep.”

A couple of DoSP notes. I have a brief review of Adrian Tomine‘s Shortcomings in Washington City Paper; Tomine is at Politics and Prose on Wednesday. My review of Richard Price‘s excellent new novel, Lush Life, is in today’s Minneapolis Star-Tribune. At the National Book Critics Circle blog, Critical Mass, I’ve been gathering up various materials related to Price’s Clockers; an extended version of the interview with Price that first appeared on City Paper’s Web site is running in three parts. Parts of that interview dedicated specifically to Lush Life are now up at the Chicago Sun-Times Web site. Many thanks to NBCC president John Freeman for proposing the idea, and to Price for giving up so much of his time to weather a fusillade of questions about something he did three books ago.

And So to TED

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Amy Tan, Chris Abani

TED 2008–a self-proclaimed conference about technology and ideas that’s currently underway in Monterey, California–has made a handful of novelists part of its large mix of speakers. Among them is Amy Tan, who spoke about storytelling. BoingBoing’s Mark Frauenfelder reports:

She got some B minuses in school for her creative writing. Parents pushed her to be a doctor, or to be a pianist on Ed Sullivan show. Her father and brother were both diagnosed with brain tumors. Her father was a baptist minister and said God would take care of them. He died soon after and so did her brother. Her mother believed that she and Amy would be next. She then became very creative “in a survival sense.” (This could be why she is so interested in “luck and fate and coincidences and the synchrony of mysterious forces.”)

Yesterday there was also a discussion of the question, “What Stirs Us?” The TED blog is currently on the fritz, but among the speakers was Nigerian-born author Chris Abani:

My search is to find stories of everyday people that transcend us, that don’t look away at the reality: we are never more beautiful than when we are ugly. What I’ve come to learn is that the world is never seen in the grand gestures, but in the accumulation of the simple, soft, selfless acts of compassion. In South Africa they say “Ubuntu”: the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me. Which means that there is no way for us to be human without other people.
So Abani tells stories of people. People standing up to soldiers wanting to kill them. People being compassionate. People being human, reclaiming their humanity, recognizing that we are surrounded by amazing people, who offer all of us the mirror to a whole humanity.

Abani spoke about his writing, the commonalities between Africa and America, and why Things Fall Apart is like Gone With the Wind last June at TED.

Government Work

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Paul Theroux

In an interview with the Bangkok Post about his travel writing, Paul Theroux explains why some authors and power figures don’t get along. I’m not sure I buy the bit about Steinbeck falling out of favor because he coddled LBJ (or the argument that nobody reads Steinbeck anymore), but it’s an interesting read:

How much influence do you believe travel writers have in the international arena?

I don’t know whether I have power. First I don’t re-read something after it’s published. In terms of power, I think the nearer you are to power, political power especially, you become morally blind or morally ambiguous. Political people have to make very pragmatic decisions, so it’s wrong to seek power and it’s a big mistake to be close to power, because you begin to blur the line between truth and practicality. Take John Steinbeck, for example. He was on good terms with President Johnson, whose son was in the Vietnam War, and he became kind of an apologetic for Johnson for the war. No one really reads his books these days. So if a US president like George Bush Jr invited me to the White House I would worry a lot if he took interest in me. There are two kinds of writers, I think. There are great writers that governments are afraid of, because writing is like a moral authority, whereas the second group of great writers governments love, because they can use them. So I’d like to be in the first category.

In D.C. Tonight?

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Dinaw Mengestu, Edward P. Jones

I’m kicking around the idea that D.C. is the only major American city that isn’t the setting for an important novel. I’ve gotta be wrong about this, yes? But at the moment all I’m coming up with is Ward Just‘s Echo House as a novel that’s any kind of rival to, say, The Man With the Golden Arm or City of Night or The Bonfire of the Vanities. I’m hoping that tonight’s reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library featuring Dinaw Mengestu and Edward P. Jones will help me out a little. I liked The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears well enough, but it’s no classic, and no amount of strenuous effort can make All Aunt Hagar’s Children into a novel. Suggestions?

Today’s Post has a piece on Jones; Mengestu was just announced as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the first-fiction category.

Dateline Kurdistan

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Denis Johnson

I haven’t heard a lot of noise about Denis Johnson‘s article about economic development in Kurdistan in the March issue of Portfolio. That surprised me a little, because Tree of Smoke was such a buzzy book and because the Denis-Johnson-is-in-Iraq! meme was pretty popular in the days before it was announced he’d won the National Book Award.

Whatever my reservations about Tree of Smoke, Johnson’s article is a tremendous read, a rangy, deeply researched piece about how northern Iraq is getting reshaped in terms of everything from oil to shopping to media to bowling. I have no idea what Nick Denton is all pissy about–just read it. There are tons of quotable bits, but I like this:

And the Kurds love Americans. Love, love. Investors swarm in from all over the globe, and foreigners are common in Erbil, but if you mention tentatively and apologetically that you’re American, a shopkeeper or café owner is likely to take you aside and grip your arm and address you with the passionate sincerity of a drunken uncle: “I speak not just for me but all of Kurdish people. Please bring your United States Army here forever. You are welcome, welcome. No, I will not accept your money today, please take these goods as my gift to America.”

Roundup: Frome Here to Eternity

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Charles Bock, Edith Wharton, Hillary Jordan, Jim Shepard

Continuing our ad hoc Wharton Week here: studiously monochromatic Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt made a point of reading Edith Frome annually because “it expresses everything about how horrible New England is.” (via)

Jim Shepard‘s 2007 collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, has won the Story Prize.

Interested in reading a novel that’s stuffed with mouse-over ads because the authors have put every word up for sale? Your ship has just come in.

Hillary Jordan‘s Mudbound gets the big push in USA Today.

Charles Bock‘s Beautiful Children gets the big push from its publisher, Random House, which has made the novel free to download as a PDF until Friday at midnight. The Millions rings up publicist Jynne Martin for details. “If it’s good enough for Radiohead it’s good enough for us!” Martin exclaims. Hang on: It was good enough for Radiohead because the band has alternate revenue streams (back catalog, touring) and a fan base willing to kick in a few bucks out of sheer loyalty, two things a debut novelist has in short supply. Even so, this is probably a winner, thanks to the tight download window and the PDF format, which is clunky–you can’t carry it around with you unless you print out the pages (which is slow with PDFs). Anybody who’s seduced by the book online will likely drop money to own it.