Author: Mark Athitakis

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.

A Man in Reno

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Willy Vlautin

Last week, following a writer’s recommendation, I picked up Willy Vlautin‘s The Motel Life, a sweet-sad-simple road story about two brothers in Reno. I enjoyed its simplicity–even the type formatting recalls middle-school reading primers–though that bare-bones style doesn’t recall Raymond Carver as much as critics say. Woody Guthrie lyrics might the better point of comparison–Vlautin loves free-flowing narratives that get told simply, have room for some humor and irony, but are mainly about something gone terribly wrong.

Vlautin, as it happens, is a musician–he plays in the alt-country band Richmond Fontaine–and his second novel, Northline, has just come out in the U.K. (It comes out in the U.S. this summer, in much the same way that The Motel Life came out overseas before arriving here.) The interview with Vlautin in the Guardian suggests another Reno story. Vlautin’s notes that the book has a soundtrack, and features a rare book trailer that I can get behind:

Take That, Nonexistent Problem!

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Diana E. Sheets, James Frey, O.J. Simpson

Diana E. Sheets argues that the great American novel is dead. To do so, she lines up a couple of strawmen and proceeds to beat the crap out of ’em:

Path-breaking fiction telling the American story has been replaced with fabulist memoir (James Frey’s, “A Million Little Pieces” in 2003) and celebrity scandal (“If I Did It,” O.J. Simpson’s “hypothetical” account of the murder of his wife and Ronald Goldman. It was to be published by Regan Books/HarperCollins before it was cancelled and later reissued by Beaufort Books as “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer” by the Goldman family with comments by ghostwriter Pablo Fenjves and journalist Dominick Dunne).

Are these the only American stories to be had in publishing today? What if books were judged based on ethical standards of quality and content?

Right. Last time I was at a bookstore it was nothing but Frey and O.J., O.J. and Frey. I wept, I tell ya. I wept. There’s a longer version of the piece, with quotes from Network, on Sheets’ site.