Author: Mark Athitakis

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.

Saturday Miscellany

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Charles Bock, James Wood, Theodora Keogh, Tom Wolfe

The New York Times Book Review‘s Web site excerpts the first chapter of Charles Bock‘s Beautiful Children.

Financial Times profiles James Wood. The critic was no fan of D.C., which was home to his long-time outlet, the New Republic, before he recently jumped to the New Yorker:

“It’s a dead place,” says Wood. “Unless you are going to conquer it like something out of a Balzac novel, or climb the political world, it’s dead, totally dead.”

The article also includes some of Wood’s more pointed assessments, like his take on Tom Wolfe‘s A Man in Full:

Unfortunately, Wolfe’s characters only feel one emotion at a time; their inner lives are like jingles for the self. As Picasso had his Blue Period, so Wolfe’s characters have their Angry Period, or their Horny Period, or their Sad Period. But they never have them at the same time, and so the potential flexibility of the stream of consciousness, precisely its lifelike randomness, is nullified.

Theodora Keogh’s stepdaughter notes in the comments of my brief item on Keogh’s death that the Charlotte Observer piece I pointed to wasn’t an obit. True enough: What I linked to was an appreciation. The Observer‘s obituary was published on Jan. 8. Clearly, I’m not the Keogh expert. Brooks Peters, however, very much seems to be.

Annals of Quixotic Ventures

by Mark Athitakis, posted in George Plimpton, Toby Barlow

Toby Barlow, author of the new novel Sharp Teeth, apparently still wants to get a statue of George Plimpton placed somewhere in Manhattan; an article in Crain’s Detroit Business notes he’s still pursuing the project in an article about his day job as an ad exec.

Barlow announced his ambition in 2005 in the Huffington Post, and while the having-a-larf, Jib-Jabby design of the official Web site suggests he’s doing all this in jest, I do think that design idea number two–showing Plimpton walking with a sheaf of papers–should seriously be avoided at all costs if the project ever moves beyond the brainstorm phase. When I was working in downtown Chicago a few years back, I’d take daily head-clearing walks down Wacker Dr., where I passed a statue of much-loved columnist and TV host Irv Kupcinet. Scott Marks‘ Emulsion Compulsion has a few photos of it, which show Kup benevolently reaching out with one arm while holding a newspaper under the other.

It’s not a bad statue. But whenever I’d walk by it I couldn’t but help but imagine a child strolling down Wacker with the parents, seeing it, and asking, “Daddy, what’s that man holding under his arm?”

News and Notes

by Mark Athitakis, posted in David Morrell, Jonathan Franzen, Sara Paretsky

Jonathan Franzen wrings his hands about the God thing.

Sara Paretsky is suing an Indiana man in the wake of a traffic accident that she argues impaired her earning power.

David Morrell, author of First Blood, is quite happy with the Rambo films.

(And a quick Dept. of Self-Promotion note: I have a short review of Marc Masters‘ fine book on New York’s No Wave scene in this week’s Washington City Paper. An interview with Masters is now up on CP‘s music blog, Black Plastic Bag.)

“Absolutely Terrible”

by Mark Athitakis, posted in Chris Lehmann, Eric Banks

The Literary Saloon joins the chorus of bloggers bemoaning the news that Bookforum is losing editor Eric Banks and will introduce current-affairs coverage under the stewardship of new editor Chris Lehmann. TLS thinks this is “absolutely terrible,” but while I know it’s easy to be frustrated with the way book reviewing is treated like a sad-eyed, flea-bitten dog, I don’t get the logic here:

This ridiculous notion of thinking they’ll be more successful if they try to appeal to a larger audience by offering current events coverage seems seriously misguided. How many current Bookforum readers/subscribers leaf through their copies and sigh, ‘If only they had more current events coverage’ (or sports coverage, or whatever) ? Surely almost none.

The better question might be: How many readers see Bookforum on the shelves, sigh, and say “I don’t want to read a bunch of book reviews, I want something more newsy,” and move on to something else? Something, perhaps, like the New York Review of Books. Surely not a whole lot, but Bookforum is a direct competitor of NYRB, and as much as this competition is between a pair of intellectual journals, it’s also a Coke vs. Pepsi-style battle for market share between two players. If adding current affairs coverage seems foolish, so is not paying attention to what the market leader is up to. NYRB‘s circulation is 130,000, while Bookforum‘s is 40,000; I wish the PW story had given NYRB a jingle and asked what adding current-affairs coverage has done for its readership, but I doubt that Bookforum‘s keepers would pursue this route if they didn’t think it boosted it.