Book After Book After Book

Switching Over

2010-11-10T10:23:00.000-05:00

My last entry here was in June, but I never made a conscious decision to quit here. I never thought of anything for this space again. Something about this particular format defeats me; I either want to write too much, or too little, and my (very) rudimentary html knowledge never quite allows me to fix any formatting problems that arise. I think I'm done.

I'm tentatively posting stuff here now: Not An Essayist
and we'll see how long that lasts. It's not really a public site, per se, but more of a place for me to catalogue links I find interesting. If it ends up being a bunch of This isn't happiness reblogs I might have to rethink it.

Overheard

2010-06-14T19:45:00.000-05:00

I was in a very slow-moving line at a cash register today. Two of the customers in front of me had struck up a casual, small-talky conversation, which sort of trailed off when one women made an unexpected joke related to her boyrfriend's testicles.

Moments later, the testicle-joke lady declared to one of her family members that she would "move to another country" if strappy pink high-heeled shoes were made widely available for men.

Neither of these comments was quite as contextless as I've presented them here, but it was the juxtaposition of these two particular statements that seriously irritated me. So, it's okay to comment on a third party's testicles to someone who clearly wasn't expecting the conversation to take that turn, but it's not okay for a dude to feel pretty and click a little bit as he walks?

The Lakes of Canada

2010-06-10T11:47:00.001-05:00

The first time I listed to Sufjan Stevens's cover of The Innocence Mission's "The Lakes of Canada," it didn't exactly grab me, but this song has been creeping up on me ever since.

I can't put my finger on why I find it so appealing--when I can parse the lyrics, they're not usually blowing my socks off. Maybe I've embarked on a love affair with the banjo.

(I am also fond of the Charles Boyer-esque French accent on the guy talking to Sufjan Stevens at the beginning of this particular video.)

Getting Closer

2010-06-07T16:19:00.000-05:00

When my Mom was moved to Palliative Care (that's never good), I had only a few books with me. One of them was a library copy of Dodie (101 Dalmations) Smith's I Capture the Castle, and it's the one thing I recall reading in her room, during (rare) lulls between other visitors. It was in late May, and the bright sun streamed through the mid-century hospital's wall of windows, and sometimes I was alone, with Mom and the book.

I've since gotten my own copy of the book, but haven't yet been able to read it from start to finish; for a year or two, I keep losing heart about a quarter of the way into the story. I'm getting closer to the end this time.

Tigermilk

2010-06-04T10:22:00.001-05:00

I can't stop listening to Belle and Sebastian's Tigermilk lately. I've long since known every song on it, but I hadn't listened to the album as a whole until very recently, and it's so, so lovely.

It's a14-year-old album now (!), but I wasn't clued in to Belle and Sebastian until about three albums later (Fold Your Hands, Child...). Books and music were a totally different story in the pre-internet days**, for rural kids like me. I had to trust Spin magazine and the one alternative radio station out of Windsor-Detroit (89X) to point me in the direction of music I might like, and neither would have covered music from an album with such a limited initial release (1000 albums).

**Actually, I know the internet existed in 1996, but I also remember that circa 1993-94, my high school only had 2-3 computers capable of hooking up to the internet. IF my home had internet in 1996, it was most definitely a dial-up connection, which meant we couldn't be tying the phone line up for hours. And I feel 90% sure that my parents didn't get an internet connection until a year or two after that. In fact, the longer I think about it, the less sure I am that my parents had replaced the Commodore 64 (seriously) until after I moved away for school. For assignments, I used an electric typewriter from my last year of high school until midway through my third year of university (although that was unusual, at the time).

So, yeah, Tigermilk. The best song is the first song:

But I love 3-4 other songs almost as much, and the only one that's a bit of a dud is "Electronic Renaissance."

Forgotten

2010-06-02T08:26:00.001-05:00

I've forgotten something that I can't put my finger on, so I've been scrolling through my google searches to see if something there will jog my memory. Nothing is.

Meanwhile, I've been amused that one search consisted entirely of "Civil War" -- I was looking for a timeline of the U.S. Civil War, and I think my vague search time actually pulled up exactly what I wanted (this), but I'm still astounded at how lazy the original search was.

I also had to recently search "define: passim" ("throughout or frequently" in citations--I can't believe I never ran across that one before) and "horse collars" and "recursive smurf" (I was looking for this picture) and "street" (just street--I think I may have hit enter before I was done with that one) and "lemon cake" and "slice" (the drink?) and "armin tanzerian."

My mind is a junkyard lately.

Vocabulary

2010-05-28T13:41:00.000-05:00

I have watched Arrested Development enough times now that today I had to look up "circumvent" to make sure that I was using it correctly. I was confused once I recalled G.O.B.'s declaration that the Bluth company should "cicumverent" union penalties, or that he intends to "circumvrent" his mother as he steps past her to leave the room.

The meaning I wanted was "to avoid by artful maneuvering," which is a real and correct definition, after all.

Mushroom "Meat"balls

2010-05-25T10:13:00.001-05:00

I have nothing to say for myself, so I'm posting a recipe instead. These are a vegetarian version of something to bulk up a dish of spaghetti without having to pile on the noodles.

Mushroom "Meat"balls
-the mushrooms have to do a bit a sitting and setting in between steps, so if your prep time is dear, fry the mushrooms and vegetables the day before you'll need them.

4-5 cups white button and cremini mushrooms, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 small or medium onion, diced
1-2 stalks of celery, diced
a few sprigs of fresh thyme, leaves only
red pepper flakes, black pepper to taste

1 medium egg
1-2 slices of stale brown bread, crumbled

1. In a saucepan with a little olive oil, fry the onions, celery and garlic, for 2-3 minutes, before adding the mushrooms and cooking them down. Add the thyme and red pepper or black pepper once the mushrooms are in the pan.

2. Remove the mushrooms from the heat and let cool. When cool enough, transfer the mushrooms to a covered dish and refrigerate.

3. Later, take slightly more than half the mushrooms, add the egg, and blend into a paste. Return to the dish with the remaining mushrooms and mix well. Add the crumbled bread and mix well. I put the mixture back into the fridge at this point to set some more, but that step may not be necessary if the consistency seems good already.

4. Just before your meal, form the mushrooms into small-ish balls and flatten them slightly, then fry in a pan with olive oil, 3-4 minutes per side.

Filler

2010-05-18T13:49:00.003-05:00

I'm trying to knock the "Drunk History" entry off my main page because the video is no longer available, so I'm slapping up a filler page of links to other things.

Baby's Touch 'N Feel Guide to Russian Literature
I took several Russian lit courses, so I am enjoying this page immensely. And I'm always happy to read a summary of Behemoth's role in The Master and Margarita ("Pet Behemoth's soft black fur. Behemoth is a giant cat who walks, talks, and discharges firearms. His owner is Satan.")

"We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things. - Herb Kelleher"
The sentiment in the quotation is near and dear to my heart. I'm an inveterate doer of things.

Dogblog
and the original Dogblog, which is no longer updated (that's all on the tumblr) but does have an extensive archive. I always make a mental note of which dogs I see when I am out and about, but I am not as funny as the writer of the Dogblog.

School Lunch Websites
I have an inexplicable fascination with this stuff, especially considering that I've never really eaten school lunches; in fact, I'm pretty sure that most grade-school-aged Canadians don't attend schools with cafeterias or have school lunch programs. It may be a different story in the most heavily urbanized areas, now. At my elementary school, we ate bag lunches at our desks.

Fed Up With School Lunch
This website is premised on a sort-of stunt, wherein an elementary school teacher consumes the same meals available to her students, every day. The food looks pretty lousy, but I keep cringing at all the packaging. Each segment of the lunches comes in separate cardboards with clingfilm lids. Multiply that by however many students, and the daily waste disposal for just that one school must be epic.

What's For School Lunch
This is a more conventional pictures-of-what's-in-the-title blog, with some commentary. Lunches are from schools around the world (and Canada is absent from the list of nations in the sidebar).

Plague

2010-05-17T10:56:00.000-05:00

I forget why I looked this up, ages ago, but I was startled to learn that the plague is still pretty active (1-3 thousand cases per year), for a disease that I thought burned itself out after decimating a good chunk of Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. (By the way, I learned pretty recently that most people use the word "decimate" incorrectly, to describe near-total disasters. It literally means reduce / destroy by 10%, hence the "dec-" in the word. I'm not sure how / why people got in the habit of inflating its meaning.)

The American Centre for Disease Control notes that, within the U.S., the plague is most common in the American Southwest. Which means that you probably shouldn't pet a prairie dog, even if you have the opportunity to do so.

Gripe

2010-05-14T11:59:00.001-05:00

I'm increasingly irritated with word processing programs that only allow for one language setting; I'm a Canadian writing Canadian English, but most of my sources, primary and critical, are American. Which means that, whatever the setting, half my documents are always criss-crossed with angry red zig-zags.

I also seem to be categorically incapable of writing "neighbourhood" American-fashion on my first try. I guess it's just as well that I do have the program nagging at me about my mis-spellings, or I'd be getting the quotations wrong all the time, writing about "colour" and "neighbourhoods" where the author writes about "color" and "neighborhoods." (I also no longer have the slightest idea whether, as a Canadian, I ought to be writing "grey" or "gray," but that doesn't come up as often.)

Plus, I don't know if this is something I am doing wrong, but it seems like no matter how many times I tell my programs that my default is Canadian English, the program changes its mind and defaults to American again a few documents later. It's one of those low-grade irritants that pops up on a regular basis, and it's not going to drive me to the brink of madness or anything, but it makes me roll my eyes every time.

So You're Struggling With a Chapter in Your Dissertation...

2010-05-13T14:02:00.000-05:00

Clearly, the best way to cope is to bust out your tin box of artist-quality pencil crayons!!

Marvel at how much your drawing skills--never exactly well-developed--have regressed back to (roughly) your seventh-grade level of skill!

The memory-book-journal is also progressing at a consistent pace, thanks very much.

Memory Books

2010-05-10T09:17:00.000-05:00

Just this morning, I read a post on Ill Seen, Ill Said about keeping a notebook specifically for writing out memories--a more disciplined, and more useful, version of the dream journals I used to try (and always failed at) keeping. I've already started one in a pretty notebook I never knew quite how to use. It was too pretty for academic stuff, and the unlined pages didn't lend themselves to easy use. But combining words with my best drawings of the things I remember? It's just about perfect for that.

And, of course, I immediately dumped coffee all over the very first page.

Not Sure What to Make of This

2010-04-30T10:53:00.000-05:00

I spend $1.60 on this book the other day:

It's in lovely shape, considering it probably actually is 50 years old, and the paper dust jacket lacks a library-style mylar sheaf. (The actual cover is black hardcover, with white lettering on the spine.) The first image is the entirety of the copyright page. It's worth more than the buck-sixty I spent on it, but I'm not sure how much more--early book club edition copies seem to run anywhere from $25 to about $450, depending on the impression or printing or condition or author's signature. That's in comparison to non book club first editions, which seem to fall more in the $600 to $27 000 range.

The cover image sure beats the image on my paperback copy, which seems to be the most common mass-market version.

Detroit

2010-04-19T18:04:00.001-05:00

Detroit was the nearest big city to where I grew up, although I was on the other side of the border. Because of Detroit TV and radio stations, I sound a little Michigan-ish when I say words like "coffee" (and even "sorry," which is usually one of the words that'll signal a Canadian accent). In fact, I hardly ever set foot in Detroit or Michigan--despite the fact that I literally could have walked to Michigan (if you count standing on a ferry as a kind of walking). My mother was a more frequent visitor to the City as a child, because her American uncles still lived there at the time, but they'd all migrated to Florida and the Southwest by the time I was around. (One of Mom's crinolines may still be somewhere in Detroit, lost out the window while changing out of fancy clothes in a car's backseat sometimes in the 1960s.)

I've been reading Sweet Juniper for years, looking most forward to jdg's entries concerning day-to-day living in Detroit. Eventually, I realized that I'm getting suckered into a kind of nostalgia for the place. It is one of the places of my childhood; it was the City, even if it wasn't in hot shape. The population decline had started in the city proper even before the 1967 riots, but was definitely in full swing by the 1980s. Coleman Young was in the second decade of his mayorship and the Devil's Night arson at their peak, and I remember (but have no idea how to track down a citation) the murder rate working out to one homicide every 23 hours. These things only inflated Detroit in my imagination, in a way; Detroit was a place I know, but could scarcely be more foreign to a rural Canadian kid.

I've been branching out recently, looking up news and documentation of the place Detroit is, now. Some excellent sites include:

63 Alfred Street: Where Capitalism Failed

detroitblog

deTROITfUNK

Forgotten Detroit

Mythic Detroit

The Night Train

The Incorrigible City

Edit: When I glanced at this entry again, it struck me as more negative than I'd intended. Despite all the "urban decay" stories I see in the mainstream press, most of what I read elsewhere makes Detroit sound potentially super-exciting as it re-envisions itself. That's what I meant to focus on, but the entry itself seems to have gotten stuck in the 1980s. The other sites will fill in all the blanks that I've left here.

Unnatural

2010-04-19T09:02:00.000-05:00

This spring has been so prolonged and unnatural. The bursts of icy precipitation on Saturday were bracing. I'm longing for some proper rain now, though--not one of those cloudy-windy days that scarcely wet the pavement every four or five hours, but a few good hours of steady drizzling. The bright sun just makes me feel like the unnatural one, holed up in the basement so many hours of the day.

Drunk History

2010-04-11T08:26:00.001-05:00

Redacted: the Video link to the Tesla Video is down.

Cooking

2010-04-03T11:41:00.001-05:00

I'm stalling on the last little bit of work required to meet a mid-week deadline (I'm totally on track to get it done in time, but have becomes profoundly bored with the content), so here are a few points about vegetarian cooking, which is completely irrelevant to my work, or the implied purpose of this blog, or anything else:

Pretty much any sauce (from tomato to onion gravy) can be improved with a dollop of red pepper flakes
The best all-purpose "Chinese" vegetable sauce consists of one garlic clove (diced), one bunch green onions (chopped), one scant teaspoon sugar, two tablespoons sesame oil, and four tablespoons soy sauce. (I eyeball but don't really measure the last two ingredients.)
You can make a passable veggie burger patty out of white cannellini beans mashed with diced cooked celery (2 stalks), onion (1), and mushrooms (4), plus a few tablespoons of cooked brown rice, all seasoned with a bit of sage and marjorum.
In my experience, some grated carrots and red lentils cooked with onions provides a much nicer base for a vegetable "shepherd's pie" than a meat substitute or a weird tofu base.
As for tofu, I liked it cubed and tossed in a touch of sesame oil and soy sauce, then baked, or cut into triangles, smeared with a bit of sri racha and soy sauce, and then baked. I've never been able to make frozen tofu work very well, but I'm not convinced I've ever thoroughly thawed it.

"Poison"

2010-03-30T12:19:00.003-05:00

I'm still not back to actual books yet, despite the title of this blog. To be fair, I'm doing a lot of reading, but it doesn't lend itself to blurby little summaries, so I'm staying way off topic.

So, as a child, if I read about or heard a reference to something I didn't quite understand, I was often wary of asking an adult for clarification. By the time I was nine or ten, I'd definitely figured out that most of the stuff that was going over my head had something to do with sex, and was generally content to wait it out, confident that the joke or word would make sense to me eventually.

For example, the first time I read Judy Blume's Then Again, Maybe I Won't, I had no idea why Tony was carrying around books and raincoats to "hide" something about his body. I don't remember when I twigged to the fact that the Tony's euphemisms were about erections, but I was always aware that the euphemisms were euphemisms.

When it comes to music, however, even the euphemisms often escaped my notice. I was cheerfully oblivious to implications, and often still am. At seven, I was a fan of Madonna's Like A Virgin album, but I was really, really missing the implications in that title. (Oddly, I think that I never worried over what the title meant because I was raised Catholic; when "the Virgin Mary" is a standard turn of phrase in your daily life, you stop paying much attention to that phrases's component parts.)

So, lately, I was thinking about the Bell Biv Devoe song, "Poison," which was a big hit on the radio stations I listened to obsessively back in 1990. I was about 12 or 13 at the time, and while I liked the song, I don't recall thinking it was risque or scandalous or something that would bother my parents.

Listening to it twenty years later was startling. "What did he just say about 'hos'?" "'Never trust a big butt and a smile'?" (Admittedly, that one was startling because it was also part of the title of an academic essay about African American dialogism I read not too long ago, which is an unexpected connection.) "'Me and the crew used to do her'?"

How did I miss these, and yet was mildly scandalized by Young and the Restless's choice to rhyme the name "Judy" with "booty" in "Poison Ivy"?

Googling

2010-03-27T19:10:00.003-05:00

If you google "raccoon protagonist" you only get four results.

If you google "squirrel protagonist," you get fifty-six results.

Somehow, right up until the moment I did that search, I never fully realized that raccoons are North Americans--unlike squirrels, who live all over the place, exist in various colours, and have varying powers of flight. (My favourites are the momongas. And the Cape ground squirrels are tough little beasts.)

Admittedly, Wikipedia claims that raccoons have been introduced into new habitats in Europe and Asia, with intermittent success. Apparently, raccoons now live in "42 of 47" Japanese prefectures, and quite a few live in Germany.

Japan does naturally have tanukis, or raccoondogs, though. And red pandas--who look kinda like raccoons with makeup on--live throughout east Asia. So it's kind of dim, but not super-shocking, that I failed to figure out the dearth of raccoons abroad until now.

Scoldy

2010-03-26T09:10:00.000-05:00

It's the end of the semester, and my usual spring insomnia seems to be kicking in, and most of the things I've been writing have been veering towards gibberish. So I am providing a photograph of the really, really aggressive little red squirrel who sets up shop in the black walnut tree in the backyard. Nothing to do with books. In fact, I can't even think of a book that prominently features a squirrel. Or a raccoon. Hmmm.

White Noise

2010-03-18T08:11:00.001-05:00

Don DeLillo's White Noise has turned into one of my comfort reads at some point in the past year or two, which surprised me. It's such a peculiar book. Admittedly, perhaps I wouldn't think it quite so peculiar if not for the sequence that takes place in Iron City's Germantown--and I'm not suggesting that the sequence is a misstep or something that the reader is the least bit unprepared for. Nor can I imagine how else DeLillo would have concluded the narrative, without that sequence, but that may be the key: I didn't expect a big finish from that book. I thought the Airborne Toxic Event would be the big plot bomb, and everything else would meander around it.

I once read an article (which I can no longer track down) devoted to explaining the author's loathing of White Noise as both overrated and basically empty. According to that critic, one of the text's key failures is the lack of distinction among the different voices; indeed, most of the characters do sound disconcertingly alike. They are all information gatherers. Some, like Heinrich, are more aggressively empiricist than others (e.g. his argument with his father about the ability to conclusively state that it is raining), but they're all prone to asking strings of sometimes unanswerable questions, and to exchanging correct and incorrect information without doing much to distinguish the correct from the incorrect. DeLillo gives the impression that they are breathless with information to convey and exchange and, sometimes, to dissect to the bare bones that might (but probably won't) reveal some nugget of emotional fact.

I'm surprised I like this book, in the end, because DeLillo's style should create the kind of sterile, remote narrative voice and characters that I usually can't appreciate much at all--as is the case with Martin Amis's or James Joyce's fiction. And I don't think it did. But I can't pinpoint how he pulled off that difference, or managed that small but crucial glimmer of warmth in a narrative otherwise swimming in irony.

(Is it just that he likes Jack and Babette and Murray? Or is the difference me, and my ability to identify with these characters? I'm a speculator; I'm notorious for asking peculiar, unanswerable questions.)

The Georgia Nicholson Books

2010-03-12T11:17:00.001-05:00

I quite like Louise Rennison's series concerning the "confessions" of Georgia Nicholson. They're a bit silly and the details are sometime careless (last names change from book to book, and one of the tertiary friends--Ellen--seems to suddenly get a completely new characterization a few books into the series), but the stories are engaging enough that I don't get too caught up on the totally improbable conceit that these books are Georgia's diaries. For example, some minute-by-minute breakdowns suggest that Georgia is whipping out the diary during classes or assemblies, field hockey games, in between dances at the club, during make-out sessions. And, in fact, the bigger improbability is that a flibberti-gibbet character like Georgia would keep a diary at all, let alone in such relentless detail--the 10 books in the series apparently cover a year-and-a-half in her life (which I gathered from a throwaway line in book 10--I completely lost track of the passage of time before the series was half over).

So, I can overlook these potentially massive issues, and yet a minor, completely unimportant thing nearly sends my suspension of disbelief flying out the window. Two or three times--over the course of these ten books, mind--Georgia applies a hardening face mask, and then records her writing as though her mouth is immobile ("nuf noo nor" etc). Suddenly, I'm plunged into doubt. What the hell am I reading? Is it a diary, or something else? It is like in Dracula, when you learn Dr. Seward's diary was a phonograph recording? Are these youtube videos? Good lord, what is happening?

Images

2010-03-09T19:11:00.000-05:00

I've been taking tangents away from books lately, but my attention span has been compromised.

One of the things I do to give my brain a break is take walks and try to take pictures of things. I have no talent or instinct for photography--I struggle with the light, with the framing, with my own shaky hands. I wouldn't even experiment if I hadn't gone digital--the cost and the chemicals going into all that wasted effort would be too depressing.

Because I have struggled so much with close-ups, in particular, I was initially pleased with this shot:

But it's just a freaking poppy. Whoop-tee-doo. Who wants to look at a picture of a flower? It's kind of pointless.

So, anyway, here's where the reading comes in: I've been enjoying blogs that write up the ways and means of how photography works. I've been very enamoured with phone with a cord and The Year In Pictures, in particular.

Graffiti is a Kind of Writing

2010-03-04T10:11:00.000-05:00

Although, I suppose it's more like art, usually.

I'm always kind of astounded at the difference between the kind of graffiti I see in smaller towns, and the kind you'll see in Toronto: the skill levels are so radically different that I can't decide if it's just a question of sheer numbers--there's just that many more good artists--or whether the competition for available space makes everyone step up their game(s).

I do think that no one should be so obnoxious as to 1) paint over existing, commissioned art projects or 2) perfectly nice brick. And I guess I wouldn't be thrilled to find out that someone tagged my own garage door. Nine times out of ten, though, I think the graffiti is better than the peeling stucco or cinder blocks.

Look at the Harlequins!

2010-02-24T18:41:00.003-05:00

Is there not a nice special word for a pigling? ("I am toying with 'snork,' said Professor Noteboke, the best translator of Gogol's immortal The Carrick.)

He was one of those persons who for some reason or other are often interrupted, but whom no force in our blessed galaxy will prevent from completing their sentence, despite terrible new interruptions, of an elemental or poetical nature, the death of the interlocutor ("I was just saying to him, doctor--"), or the entrance of a dragon.

(Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!, 1974)

I'd probably read a half-dozen other Nabokov books before I got to Look at the Harlequins! It must be a completely different reading experience for someone unfamiliar with his other fiction or a rough outline of his biography.

Until I stumbled across these quotations again, recently, I didn't recall how amusing it was. Its excorciating sarcasm regarding the folly of "reading" an author through his fiction is what really stuck in my mind.

Burnout

2010-02-19T17:30:00.001-05:00

I've been having a slow few days of it. Although I've done some reading things, and finally completed every section of Lawrence W. Levine's excellent late-seventies Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom, I have also been getting extremely tired by mid-to-late afternoon. Since I've also been in bed by ten (or earlier) for three nights running, I suspect I've been fighting off a cold.

Also, I completely ran out of coffee in any form yesterday. Tea is good for afternoons and evenings, but doesn't seem to be bracing enough for me, before noon.

My Nicest Book -- Dead Souls (in Russian)

2010-02-16T12:13:00.000-05:00

This is a 1974 edition of Dead Souls. Purchased for me in St. Petersburg by a fellow Slavic Studies student. Cheers, F.C.!

This is inside the front cover.

This is an example of the pages and illustrations inside, although it looks more like a confusing picture of a cheap jade elephant. I was having trouble figuring out how to keep the book open without getting my fingertips in the picture. The elephant may not have been the best compromise.

This is the back cover, complete with an inscription. I think the jade elephant is marginally less conspicuous here--although my homemade macro studio is more obvious.

About a Boy

2010-02-14T12:33:00.000-05:00

"Fine. Great. Prove it. I just don't think couples are the future."

"Oh, well, thank you...Einstein."

Will had wanted his comeback to be sharper than that. He wanted to think of the name of some sort of socio-cultural marriage expert whose name two twelve-year-olds would instantly recognize, but Einstein was all he could come up with. He knew it wasn't right.

(Nick Hornby. About a Boy)

Nick Hornby does an excellent job of describing the thought process when you know you've failed at making your point, but also suspect you were never going to be able to make that point, no matter how much time you had to craft your response.

Unlikeable Books - The End of Alice

2010-02-12T09:57:00.000-05:00

I got rid of A.M. Homes's The End of Alice years ago, before I made a point of rotating books off my shelves. I really didn't want to own it anymore.

The Amazon review of the book cites Daphne Merkin's NYT book review as calling it a "splashy, not particularly likable book whose best moments are quietly observed and whose underlying themes are more serious than prurient," and I suppose that's about right on the money. "Splashy" accounts for a lot of the book's sins, though. The generally graphic detail of both the sexual and scatological interludes are responsible for the more violently negative customer reviews on Amazon's site, that's for sure.

For me, the "splashy" material has submerged the book's more "serious themes" in my memory. In fact, the only detail I recall for certain is the narrator complaining that "we" (i.e. boys) were not taught to the correct way to pee (let it come, don't force it). While it may be a well-written, serious look at bad human nature, it's also a lurid book. Homes is deliberately testing boundaries, so the lurid elements aren't motiveless, but the grotesquerie overwhelms.

Plus, honestly, it struck me as derivative of Lolita, but in a way that completely missed the point, which compounds the book's other sins. This is one of the books I wish I could unread.

This Is What Sits Above My Head All Day, Every Day

2010-02-10T17:53:00.000-05:00

e. e. cummings

2010-02-05T08:46:00.002-05:00

outside it was New York and beautifully snowing. Inside
snug and evil
("i was sitting in mcsorley's")

olaf (upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit i will not eat"
("i sing of olaf glad and big")

cause dying is

perfectly natural; perfectly
putting it mildly lively(but

Death

is strictly
scientific
&artificial &

evil & legal
("dying is fine)but Death")

e.e.cummings, with the denial of the tyranny of capitalization and his other graphic rebellions, seems like the kind of poet I should dislike--pretentious, and pretentiously gimmicky, and sort of silly because of that. Yet I admire his balls-out approach to what he thinks poetry should be. He and Auden write some of the best love poetry from the last hundred years (none of cummings's quoted here), but clearly I'm enamoured with the way he uses poetry to gaze at (human) evil, which is often gruesome, but also sometimes suprisingly small.

And cummings can sure put an image together--look at that parenthesis in the first line from "olaf."

Chandler on Writing Fiction

2010-02-03T10:37:00.000-05:00

When I started out to write fiction I had the great disadvantage of having absolutely no talent for it. I couldn't get characters in and out of rooms. They lost their hats and so did I. If more than two people were in a scene I couldn't keep one of them alive. This feeling is still with me, of course, to some extent. Give me two people snotting each other across a desk and I am happy. A crowded canvas just bewilders me.

Raymond Chandler

I've always loved Chandler's description of his sense of his own writing. My favourite is the line about everyone losing track of the hats. When I write fiction, I have similar trouble--I'll get most of the way through a scene before I ask myself Where is everybody? My characters tend to have long conversations in unspecified voids.

"Musée des Beaux Arts"

2010-01-31T16:06:00.001-05:00

"where the dogs go on with their doggy life" (W.H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts")

I have an old notebook-journal featuring pages with an upper margin; for a year or two, I took note of quotations I liked by scribbling them in that margin. A surprising number of quotations came from poets, although the language is rarely particularly beautiful or spectacular.

In all likelihood, I noted this Auden line not because the poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" spoke to me--although I do quite like some of Auden's other poems--but because this line illustrates a phenomenon in a particular school of painting that I've adored.

Whenever I go to the National Gallery in Ottawa, I insist that my companions examine one or two of the paintings in one particular room, by (or in the style of) Canaletto or Belloto. In the street scenes depicting urban Italian squares, I can always find one or two dogs, usually white or cream-coloured, most of them with the same curved, fringed tails. In "The Piazzetta" on this page, for example, I spotted two of those canine fellows, right off the bat.

The people from different eras sometimes look very alien, while the dogs are always familiar.

Ulysses, Mentally Revised

2010-01-29T09:12:00.002-05:00

For some reason, I decided that I needed to know which word Joyce used to describe the nature of Leopold Bloom's fondness for the "tang" of urine in cooked kidneys--"savoured"? "relished"? "liked"?--so I pulled down the Ulysses I used for a grad class on Joyce several years ago. The sentence wasn't where I expected to find it; I could have sworn it was the first line of Ulysses, but in fact the first line is:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

I'd assumed that people quoted that line so often because they liked the assonance/consonance in the first four words, but it turns out that it's significant for entirely different reasons: it's the one sentence that everyone who has tried to read Ulysses is guaranteed to have finished.

Apparently, I so dislike the character of Stephen Dedalus that I've mentally edited his role down and otherwise minimized his significance to the text. In preferring Leopold, I've mentally inserted Leopold into the book's starting position, so to speak.

To give my fuzzy memory a little credit, although the tang-of-urine line doesn't begin the book, it does begin Part II ("The Wanderings"); however, I also misremembered the quotation as a single line, rather than as two separate statements in a brief paragraph. The actual sentences are:

Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.

And:

Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Also, the verbs are more delicate ("ate," "gave to his palate") and the description of the flavour is slightly more graphic than I remembered.

Overrall, the description exhibits a little more warmth than I usually associate with Joyce's renderings of Leopold's consciousness, but I kind of assume that the affection is for the organ meats rather than for Leopold.

Philip Larkin

2010-01-27T14:11:00.003-05:00

I've never been a fan of poetry, given my (increasingly) limited patience with "opaque" language in general. (An impatience that also explains my difficulties with most of the literary theory texts I'm obliged to read.)

Philip Larkin is a rare poet to have piqued my interest, most likely because he pretty consistently works in accessible language. The man himself seems to have had serious issues (* sigh *), but the poems don't bring the most deplorable of his issues to the forefront.

I think his work is sometimes characterized as sour; I'm struck more by the pervasive melancholy, and his speakers' frustration with their own cynicism, while also apparently feeling that such cynicism is the only way to cope with their circumstances and their insights into their own character. This Be The Verse is probably his most famous poem, possibly because the first line is startling--not because of the f-bomb (although that may have been a little shocking when the poem was first published), but by the bluntness of the opening sentiment, which is about as transparent as you can get, in poetry.

It's the first two lines of the last stanza that get to me:

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like the coastal shelf.

He's not talking about depression here, per se, but I suspect depression informed the image. So many people who've suffered from depression seem to opt for water imagery to describe it--not characterizing the experience as suffocation, but more of a sense of going under, amplified by the sensation of a vast immense sadness always waiting. Even when the water isn't yet closing over your head, it's still out there, deepening off the coastal shelf.

Other People: A Mystery Story

2010-01-25T10:00:00.001-05:00

Despite going on a Martin-Amis-reading jag a while back, I never appreciated him much. I recognize that he's a hell of a writer, but his narrative perspective tends to be on the chilly and clinical side, which rarely appeals much to me. So, after burning through four or five of his well-written but remote books, I gave up on his fiction. (His non-fiction is more hit-and-miss for me.)

Nonetheless, I've had one brief passage from his Other People: A Mystery Story stick in my memory for years now:

[Mary] turned, and Russ sauntered into the kitchen--loose-shouldered, sidling Russ, with his glamourous black T-shirt, his chunky blue jeans, and his extraordinary shoes, which resembled a pair of squashed rats. To Mary's eyes, these rats were far from satisfied with their role in life and always seemed to be resentfully contemplating their comeback. (1981 Penguin paperback, pages 79-80)

It's such an odd description; I can't picture this character as anything other than a perambulating cubist sketch, and that's before I even try to factor those shoes into the equation.

Trainspotting

2010-01-21T10:05:00.000-05:00

Trainspotting is a one-time comfort read of mine that has completely fallen by the wayside.

Back when I had a heavy courseload and a heavy reading list (roughly, 4-5 full-length novels per week), I just didn't have a whole lot of non-academic books on my shelves, and Trainspotting was one of those few. Its vignette structure was ideal for casual re-reading, and although the material was often brutal, it was easy to skip over certain sections, or put it down and pick it up again randomly.

Trainspotting was also the first movie I saw after moving to a city from my parents' rural house, when I was nineteen. I decided to check it out based on multi-page, glowing reviews and previews in Details magazine (of all places). I saw it twice within a month, both times by myself, once in a first-run theatre downtown, and once in a second-run theatre in a seedier part of town. Probably, I bought the book after seeing the movie. My copy's cover is movie-branded, at any rate, with Ewan McGregor front-and-center, and the orange-white-black-silver colour scheme.

The movie was the better narrative, but the book is much richer in details. The movie tended to conflate certain characters--I dimly remember that the movie's Tommy combined at least two separate characters' storylines, for example. Other narrative threads and characters were dropped entirely. Hence, Renton's disaffected teenaged Goth cousin and his brother, who enlists in the army and is killed in Belfast, are both missing from the movie. Other characters are allowed to appear in the movie but are stripped to the bone, their interiority and often basic identifying details gone.

I liked the movie's Spud, but felt a greater affection for the book's Spud, with all his 'catboys' and 'catgirls,' and his general goodwill or at least harmlessness. I also liked a narrative thread missing from the movie, about an HIV infected character struggling to reveal the diagnosis to his family. This excised material is often my favourite part of Irvine Welsh's world, the source of a few glimmers of warmth in a bleak place. (The movie's Spud was the sole character to carry this burden in the movie, in my opinion.)

I couldn't even guess how many times I read my copy, but I do know it's been years, maybe even ten, since I last read it. Because of the context of my first reading of the book, it's hopelessly dated for me--to the mid-nineties, rather than the book's actual setting in the eighties. It's a relic and not enough time has passed for me to be able to revisit it.

Comfort Reads

2010-01-19T18:26:00.000-05:00

I am a re-reader. I have a little stable of books that I read again and again, in increments, in the window of time between when I lay down in bed and I turn out the light. Sometimes, after a few re-readings, I have to retire a book, permanently or for a number of years. In other cases, I half-regret finishing the book (again) because I wish I could still be reading it, and/or could start it again, right away. These are the core books. My top three core books are Lolita, Infinite Jest, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

Lolita has, so far, proved inexhaustible, for seventeen years now. I've read it at least 12 times, and probably more than that--the last time, just this past November. It's a rare book in that I read every page, every time.
Infinite Jest has a lot more material to withstand my exhausting it. I've read the whole text more than once, but I usually do skip certain sections or, at best, skim them. (It is a lot of book and either the content or the dialect in some sections can be excruciating.) My copy's about twelve years old now, and I most recently re-read it this past summer, when Infinite Summer was going on--although, I inexplicably stalled out less than fifty pages from the end, this time around.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay has been holding up very well to re-reading, so far, but it's not as established as the other two, yet. And there is one section that I read only once, so far. (I suspect that most people familiar with the story could probably guess which section, right away.) I particularly love the earliest sections with the New York setting, and the obvious pleasure that Chabon takes in rending comics into pure text.

"Comfort" read is actually a lousy way to describe these, now that I think about it--the subject matter of all three is grim, at root (i.e. pedophilia, substance abuse, the Holocaust). And all three are difficult, in their own way. But that is where I find the value in them; with these books, I get the benefit of familiarity without the boredom of re-ecountering a fully knowable fictional world.

Madeline

2010-01-17T13:18:00.001-05:00

The book Madeline was the first story to horrify me.

I don't remember any details of the narrative; what stands out in my memory is the illustration of Madeline, standing on her bed, pulling aside her hospital gown or pyjamas to show the other little orphans the scar on her belly from from appendix-removal operation. (I may be misremembering some details.)

I was four, maybe five years old when this was read to my class at school, and was appalled to learn that adults literally and deliberately cut up children and permanently removed items from inside their bodies. That they inserted a knife and severed material inside and then, adding insult to injury, sewed up the child's skin with a needle and thread.

(Madeline's author, Ludwig Bemelmans, was pretty hardcore in real life. He was shipped to the United States when he was quite young, after shooting and badly wounding a fellow employee at his uncle's hotel in Austria.)

Revision

2010-01-16T21:19:00.003-05:00

A few (well, six or eight) months back, I pulled down most of the entries on this blog. I'd been feeling increasingly uneasy about the potential for some of the material to be cut-and-pasted by a desperate student writing a last-minute essay, so I yanked everything with the intention of evaluating what could stay up, and what should stay down.

And then everything stayed in limbo for several months.

I did eventually repost the non-academic stuff, but only after thoroughly mucking up the original dates / post times through carelessness. That whole clusterfuck discouraged me from further coping with this danged project for, oh, another month or two.

So, I'm forcing the issue and making myself write something, anything again. I'll admit, my hopes aren't high that I will actually stick to the plan--mostly because I'm not reading much new material lately. I seem incapable of taking in new narrative in anything other than television or webcomic form.

Gah

2009-05-14T17:26:00.007-05:00

So, I bought this book the other day:

If I'd gotten a load of this when I was a kid, it would have haunted my dreams.

Patricia Wentworth

2009-05-01T20:36:00.025-05:00

Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver mysteries are pretty much a straight-up rip-off of Miss Marple. Sure, the characters' detecting methods are different--Miss Silver exploits her governessy authority over middle class characters where Miss Marple pretends to be flustered or befuddled to play up her apparent harmlessness--but they are both Victorian-style spinster lady detectives who knit as they detect, so there's a considerable overlap. (Dorothy Sayers's Miss Climpson, a secondary character in a few of the Peter Wimsey books, is another variation on the type; she's more emphatically Victorian than Miss Marple, and craftier than Miss Silver, and I don't recall many references, if any, to her knitting.)

Miss Marple's narratives sometimes strain credulity a wee bit--there seems to be a disproportionate amount of violent crime in her neck of the woods--but not to the extent that Wentworth's stories do. Christie wrote less than 15 books or story collections featuring Miss Marple, however, where Wentworth made use of Miss Silver more than 30 times, probably exhausting the possible uses of her spinster detective. (Christie was able to get way more mileage out of her eccentric Belgian former policeman, Hercule Poirot.) I think I've written this before, but Wentworth has to work awfully hard to insert Miss Silver into some plots; I suspect she's aware that few characters would cheerfully hire an elderly lady as a private detective, and so throws up her hands and resorts to something implausible just to get the story rolling. Hence, she half-heartedly has Miss Silver vacationing with her niece in the same town where an infamous crime takes place. Or happen to witness a faked shoplifting incident. Or be on the scene investigating a more minor crime before a murder takes place, rendering her available to "chaperone" ladies during their interrogation by official police. Pretty much all of her books also feature a young couple that can only be united by the successful resolution of the mystery; often, one half of the couple knows someone whose own happy marriage was enabled by Miss Silver solving an earlier crime in another book. Plus, Wentworth throws a couple of policemen with loads of social and professional connections into many of the stories, both of whom are always happy to have Miss Silver sort out their cases.

I've read a number of brief articles or blurbs suggesting that Miss Silver mysteries have been unjustly forgotten, but they really aren't as good as Christie's stories in the same vein. They're not only derivative, they're more obviously formulaic. I like them, but they're pretty fluffy.

The Wentworth books I own have pretty harmless cover designs--nothing as awful or just plain ugly as some of my mass-produced Christie paperbacks. This copy of Death At Deep End (a.k.a. Anna, Where Are You?), for example, features the worst of the covers I own. While the actual illustration is pretty stupid, it's not badly drawn, and it's not completely irrelevant to the book's content. The typeface of "Brilliant as Agatha Christie!" looks pretty low-rent, and its placement emphasizes the dead space on the cover all the more; if it weren't there, I feel like the cover would be about 10% better.

Yes, I did throw a completely random percentage into that last sentence, but otherwise, I think that the point stands: it's just not much of a design, and the type slapped across the top of the cover adds a touch of ineptness.

My copy of Wicked Uncle features a cover design that I've seen more often for Wentworth's books. Again, I think the design is neither terrible nor very good. I'm not crazy about all the white space inherent in this design, and find the really long quotation on this particular cover busy. But although I think the cover illustration is too cartoony for even a "cosy" murder mystery, at least I can understand the reasoning underlying that choice i.e. playing up the "cosy" angle. (After all, in a cosy mystery, the murder victim usually deserves his or her fate, so the death isn't really random or scary or a tragedy; if any murder can be called harmless, cosy murders are harmless.)

Still, this kind of cover seems...grandmotherly. Matronly? Spinsterish? I don't know. All it's missing is some kind of stylized feline nosing around the knitting in the logo. I'd kind of feel more embarrassed reading this publicly than I would reading a more luridly designed book.

I do quite like the recent cover series from Hodder's editions of Wentworth's books, with illustrations taken from advertisements circa the time period many of the books were originally published.

Sometimes the product advertised is obvious:

And sometimes the product being advertised is... not so obvious:

Not all of the drawings are as good as these examples--I have one featuring a sketchy generic blonde standing in a featureless grey-white void--but I find the idea stylish and the uniformity of the covers pretty appealing:

Nice, right?

Difficult Writing

2008-11-19T18:43:00.007-05:00

It struck me today that the writers I find particularly difficult tend to be a) Nineteenth Century American writers or b) Modernist women writers.

The second category is less of an issue for me, because I'm basing that opinion on a handful of texts--a Stein book here, an H.D. poem there, a Djuna Barnes book here. The most difficult poetry on my Field Exam was definitely the H.D. poems with the flower names--"Sea Poppies," "Sea Lillies," and "The Sheltered Garden." They are deceptively simple; when it came time to try to analyze those poems, or suggest something, anything about their meaning, my whole brain would freeze up. The novels by the female modernists strike me as much more aggressively experimental than many books by male novelists. There are a few exceptions to that rule--I would not try to argue that Joyce, for example, is not aggressively experimental--but I would argue that, as a group, the women modernists take more radical approaches to language and narrative in novels than your average male modernists. That does not mean I enjoy their work very much. I don't feel like Stein's novels reward the work I have to put into them. (Woolf's do; a stories, her books work better, for me.)

The other category is a much bigger pool, but it doesn't include every Nineteenth Century American author. I do struggle with most of the Big Name Authors--Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, the transcendentalists. When I look at that list, no particular shared characteristics of their writing leaps out at me. Something about the style Americans used to express themselves in literature in that century really, really does not entertain me, nonetheless.

Christie Covers

2008-10-18T08:59:00.011-05:00

I recently bought a pantload of Agatha Christie books from a second-hand store that was selling them off at 50 cents a copy. Most of them were paperbacks from the seventies and eighties, with a few hardcovers and more recent paperbacks thrown in. A lot of the books were from the same publishing house, Fontana, which seemed to favour pretty bad covers.

This is one of their better covers:

This is from the school of "photograph three items relevant to the plot" mystery-novel cover design, but the image itself is better than most--I think it's actually a photorealistic illustration, and not a photograph, which was a good choice for an image that features a stuffed-weasel-thing so prominently. The illustrated version is more stylish and less creepy than a plastic-eyed photograph would have been. (Although, I know I have read this book, and I honestly can't remember where the weasel-stoat creature comes into the story.)

This book cover follows roughly the same design as the one above, although I prefer the previous cover's fonts, and the white band across the bottom of the cover, to this mild tweaking of the format. While this drawing is done in the same skilled photorealistic way as the previous cover, the items illustrated are way more off-putting. I think, as a general principal, I would omit shrunken heads from the cover of a book titled anything other than Shrunken Heads.

This cover would be about ten times better if it had omitted the hand with the chocolate and bullet in the foreground. The illustrator seems to work better with nice straight lines and architectural detail and even reflections than with the always-difficult details of the human hand. At the very least, that nail polish colour was a bad decision.

This cover has a little too much going on, and none of it is drawn particularly well. The way the doorway and the figure in the doorway shade into the void is the first bad touch. The decision to put the flower vase somewhere off the cover but have the flowers themselves drip all over the foreground also seems bizarre, until you realize that the ornate clock had to be crammed in there, too. And I cannot make sense of the flamey-fire-cloudy business shooting out of the clock--that's about what it looks like when you're holding the actual physical copy of this book in your hands.

This cover is less willy-nilly than the one for A Murder Is Announced, but it's still not very well-drawn. The angle of the book when I took this picture actually minimized the problems with proportions--the girl's mouth and jaw seem out of whack both in relation to the giant flower and to the way the head behind that flower ought to be shaped. The effect is unsettling, but I'm not convinced that was the intention.

This is the lone bad cover not from Fontana that I am including here, and it is an excellent example of the "photograph three items" style of cover. I find it notable mostly because the lighting has turned the cat dim and cloudy, as though it were badly edited into this background from an entirely different photograph. The book is old enough that I can't tell if the cat was always dim, or if that is the peculiar and unforeseen result of the colour gradually fading.

And this is my favourite of the covers I picked up: so pulpy. The event that is illustrated actually kind of does happen in the book, but the character is not the kind of lady who dies her hair platinum blonde and runs to the cliffside in a negligee and leopard-print coat. I would be interested to know if this was an existing illustration that the designer noticed could be used here, or if this was a deliberate attempt to sex up the story.

My other pulp cover is less impressive:It's still a pretty stylish/stylized cover, and I like the simplicity; I guess I just wish the background was any colour other than mustard-yellow.

Covers as "Advertisements"

2008-10-09T12:00:00.011-05:00

On the Smart Bitches, Trashy Novels site, SB Sarah's entry on Books Covers, Celebrity, and 'Dumbing Down' discusses the branding involved in book cover design; both the entry and the comments include some interesting discussion. (The entry also includes lots of links to other webpages that discuss the issue.) I agree with Sarah's basic points, especially regarding how current cover design trends indicate less 'dumbing down' than an increasingly blatant treatment of book covers as advertising products. In another discussion of the redesign of the book Zuzu's Petals, the initial cover's sales are described as tepid, "while the redesign ... was a hit with retailers, two of whom tapped the novel for in-store promotions" (GalleyCat's Ron Hogan). Hogan's wording suggests that the redesign encouraged the retailers to promote the new cover more aggressively. At the level of the buying public, then, the way retailers handled in-store promotion after the redesign could have prompted better sales, rather than the new cover itself.

When commerce drives art and/or make art available to its consumers, I suppose that might be symptomatic of a particular form of dumbing down, in the sense that readers are not using their discretion in choosing their reading material, but are relying on advertising to guide them towards what they want to consume. It's "dumbing" in the sense of encouraging passivity. This is not exactly an entirely new element in packaging books. In my entry on Sayers covers, a commenter pointed me to this cover of Strong Poison, with its sleazy-pulpy illustration that would be too lurid for a James M. Cain book (although not for a Mickey Spillane, if the characters' hair/ outfits were slightly updated). That cover seems like a blatant grab for an audience that otherwise would never pick up a book featuring a titled British fine book collector who investigates minimally lurid, if not downright mannered, crimes i.e. the sellers are fooling a wholly new audience into consuming material they don't want, on the strength of its 'advertised' contents, rather than the actual content.

In contrast, books intended for a more specific and academic public may take a very different approach to deciding what selling points belong on the covers. Most of my theory books avoid cover illustrations entirely--Hayden White's Metahistory actually involves a pretty fancy design sensibility, when compared to an average theory anthology like Michael McKeon's compilation, Theory of the the Novel. Others will use a painting or vintage photograph if the content is relevant to that particular period of time. Prominent theorists or philosophers might get their own kindly mustachioed faces on their book covers, as on Benjamin's Illuminations. These are not books that people will pick up out of curiosity in a big-box bookstore, though; most of them are listed in bibliographies or field examination reading lists, prompting students to track them down in libraries or second-hand bookstores or, if they're lucky, through online retailers. These books aren't sold in quantity, and they aren't sold in ways that make the cover images matter. The covers communicate only the hard facts that ensure the book is the one the student was looking for.

In other cases, an academic book's cover design will emphasize that it addresses issues, representations, or content that hinges on offensive behaviour or thinking. Eric Lott's Love and Theft features a prominent image of the performer in full blackface, reinforcing the subtitle's reference to minstrelsy and blackface--no one could be surprised that Lott discusses the historical implications of the appeal and popularity of such performances.

Of course, in such cases, whoever is packaging the book is at a disadvantage from the get-go. My next example isn't quite the same as the Lott book, because it is fiction rather than analysis, but most readers of Carl Van Vechten's best-selling novel are not reading his fiction in a casual way. They are studying the book for contexts re: the Harlem Renaissance, modern(ist) primitivism, portrayals of African Americans in fiction, etc. My edition of the book uses one of two Aaron Douglas illustrations associated with the original version of the book on its cover. The publishers chose the illustration that was actually designed with a specifically African-American audience in mind--it was used in advertisements for the book that ran in periodicals like The Opportunity. Thus, it is a historically accurate and apt approach to designing the book, and one which alludes to crucial concerns regarding the audience for the white author's portrayal of African-Americans. However, no amount of care in design can overcome the fact of the title, which was inflammatory in the mid-1920s, and is only more so now. 1

Books like Lott's and Van Vechten's are packaged with rigorous honesty regarding the contents. This honesty disregards the future of the book as a potentially offensive artifact, out there in the world. It's sort of the polar opposite of choosing a pastel-hued, butterfly-ridden cover for a Jane Austen book--the content is all-important, since there's no way to make the (sometimes or often offensive aspects of the) content appealing, in a marketing sense. Hence, as 'advertisements' they are literal indications of content rather than attempts to appeal to someone who never knew that he or she wanted to read the book, unlike the more "designed" covers cited at the beginning of this entry.

Footnote:
1. The publishers may have made a choice not to partially censor the title, as did the designers of Elektra/Wea cover for Ol' Dirty Bastard's CD, or to try to swap in an inoffensive substitute title for the cover (e.g. no publishers issue Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None under its original title). As awful as the title is, it is crucial to understanding the role of the book in the contexts I cited above, and in understanding the cultural responses to it after its publication. In addition, the choice of title and its imagery regarding the position of African Americans in American culture was pretty crucial to its creator, despite his knowledge that it was going to hurt some of his personal friends.

Sayers Covers

2008-10-03T12:14:00.007-05:00

Because mystery novels from the 1920s and 1930s were a) hugely popular and b) paperback-format friendly, pretty much all of the books by the major writers from that era, whether cozy or hard-boiled, feature a range of covers from wonderfully apt to puzzling, odd, or off-putting.

Dorothy L. Sayers is one of the less prolific writers from the period. Agatha Christie wrote at least 80 mystery novels and had two major recurring detective-characters; Ngaio Marsh wrote 32 books featuring Roderick Alleyn; not counting posthumous releases, Margery Allingham published 20 books featuring Albert Campion. A slightly later writer who was strongly influenced by Christie, Patricia Wentworth, wrote 32 books featuring her Miss Marple-style spinster detective, Miss Silver. In comparison, the Lord Peter Wimsey books amount to only fourteen titles, although a few additional short stories do appear in a few other story collections. Maybe the more limited number of books prevented cover design teams from succumbing to fatigue, which I think is at work in some of the "slap together three concrete items relevant to the plot and photograph it" style of covers I see on some Christie titles. Fourteen books are not inconsiderable, but the covers for Sayers's books (at least the ones that I happen to own) tend to be much nicer than some of the covers for detective fiction by writers from roughly the same time period.

This is one of the older style of paperbacks I've picked up over the years, dating to sometime in the late seventies, probably. While it's not fantastic, it's also not bad--certainly, it's better than most of the seventies-era book designs I happen to own, whether literary or genre fiction. The book-title-to-author-name ratio is more radical than on other editions, but Sayers's name is always bigger than the book's name. "Dorothy L. Sayers" actually tells you more about the story you're going to read than a generic-mystery title Strong Poison. Also of note is the fact that this is my personal favourite of her books (along with Murder Must Advertise, which is actually a rare example of a book with a relevant and not-exactly-generic title).

This is also an older paperback, from the mid-eighties, and to me it looks like a circa-1986 idea of vintage Englishness. This is possibly my least favourite of the Wimsey covers I own. Again, it isn't terrible, but it is busy, with the Wimsey caricature, the addition of Harriet Vane's name above the title, some gratuitous lines surrounding Sayers's last name, and the quotation from the LA Times. The optic-illusion-ish check on the dead man's shirt isn't helping the overall situation. A narrower range of colours for the illustration, and a relocation of some print below the picture, might improve the cover, but I suspect it's just plain trying to communicate too much information at-a-glance.

This one is not a good cover by any means, but it's so bare bones that there is not much to offend. Four titles, the author's name in a different-coloured band, a drawing of two guys in full evening dress standing in a blue void. Bunter looks all right, if rather saucy-Cockney (which he emphatically isn't in the books), but Wimsey's face is a little...off. The shading on his face is heavy-handed and his lined hair looks like the kind of hair that I, who am not a professional illustrator, would draw. Drawing him with the monocle-in was probably a mistake, given the illustrator's apparent abilities.

This is a nice stylized sort of cover that seems to have been available for about two decades (eighties and nineties), with period-appropriate illustrations and a good font. I've got nothing bad to say about any of the covers I've seen in this series.

This is the most recent style of covers for a series-reissue, and it's one that I like quite a bit. While I'm not always crazy about photographs, these deliberately vintage pictures really work. I've seen a few of these covers, and most of them are careful not to show the pictured person's full face, which keeps the covers abstract despite other period details in the photos.

This cover includes almost as much information as the Busman's Honeymoon cover above, moreover, but has managed it much better. Here's the narrower colour-scale I was talking about; no one slapped gratuitous lines and frames all over the place to split up the pockets of information; the text spacing makes sense. The end product doesn't look all clip-arty the way the Busman's Honeymoon final product does.

I guess I have a lot of negative things to say about that cover described above as "not terrible," but, really, its clumsiness isn't totally off-putting. If the illustrator for the Omnibus above had also drawn a whole bizarrely-scaled but detailed background, and inserted those shading-heavy well-dressed characters into it, that would probably have been a god-awful cover, but the relative restraint there makes the final product okay (if a little amateurish looking, which is a problem throughout that edition--it's possibly the most typo-ridden book I own). I'll take some pictures of the some of the seventies- and eighties-era Agatha Christie paperbacks I've got to really illustrate "terrible" in this genre; there are a few doozies.

The Wordy Shipmates

2008-10-01T13:14:00.001-05:00

The publishers of Sarah Vowell's new book forwarded an advance copy to me to read, along with this lovely top-quality image, rather than my usual mellow-mood-lit photograph of the book.

I have read Vowell's three previous books--Take the Canoli, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, and Assassination Vacation, which were published in that order. Vowell's first two books were structured in vignettes, and had a stronger bent towards the memoir style (the reason that the bookseller recommended Vowell to me in the first place, when I was buying a David Sedaris book). They were also generally looser books. Take the Cannoli doesn't have any unifying theme, beyond the subtitle of "Stories from the New World." The topics range from her father's gunsmithing to staying at (and interpreting the cultural significance of) the Chelsea Hotel to attending a fantasy rock camp. Vowell's second book is much more focused on Americanness manifest in U.S. politics and history, with a few (very few) pop culture detours that still communicate how Vowell thinks of her status as American. The stories involve less memoir, too, although they still emphasize Vowell's personal take on the material, and how her experiences influence her thinking process. That sounds drier than I meant it too, espeically when the point of her approach to these topics is that she isn't writing dry punditry or pseudo-objective history. The stories are very engaging, and Vowell's own biases and personality are crucial to understanding her conclusions.

Of Vowell's first three books, Assassination Vacation was the one I liked best; it abandons the vignette structure and instead focuses on the theme of presidential assassinations--those of Lincoln, Garfield and McKinley. Vowell is still a strong presence in the narrative, given her compulsions as a tourist of history, but her writing style benefits from the narrower theme that enables--but also limits--tangents from the central point.

The Wordy Shipmates is written very much in the same style as Assassination Vacation, and if I liked it a little less than the previous book, it's nothing to do with the writing, and more to do with the subject matter. Assassinations are inherently a little more thrilling than 17th century colonial American settlements. Vowell herself acknowledges the problems of the attractiveness of her subject matter, noting that

I was often asked at parties by my fellow New Yorkers the obvious question, "What are you working on?" When I would tell them a book about Puritans, they often would take a swig of the beer or bourbon in their hands and reply with either a sarcastic "Fun!" or a disdainful "Why?" (Page 51 in the Advance Copy)

On the same page, she acknowledges her own "fondness for sermons as literature," which is a bigger stumbling block for me than the Puritan subject matter; I am not convinced that I ever got through one of the most popular sermons-turned-literature, Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," when it was assigned for my Intro to American Literature course. Because Vowell's subject is early Puritan settlers (settlers who predate Edwards by about one hundred years), a "wordy" lot given to documentation of their spiritual status, their sermons, and the basic accounting necessary to keep a new settlement afloat in the Americas during King James's reign, Vowell ends up quoting a lot of material direct from the pens of those wordy settlers. Much of that material derives from sermons, including the much-cited "A Model of Christian Charity" by John Winthrop. It sounds awful, when I say I have trouble focusing on messages of Christian Charity, but it's a plain fact: I am a much less than ideal reader of sermons.

This thorough and consistent use of primary materials from the likes of Winthrop and Roger Williams means that Vowell-as-participant-in-her-narrative plays a much smaller role in this book than in any of her previous books. She is still in the book of course, even if she weren't choosing which passages to quote where, but her description of her own experiences simply has less of an impact on the material of Puritan colonial history. Vowell herself did not grow up on the East coast, so that colonial history was never a factor in her surroundings as a child. At one point, she explains "as a child I learned almost everything I knew about American history in general and British colonials in particular from watching television situation comedies" (AC 17). Nor does colonial history have as visceral or an immediate impact on her consciousness of her family, as demonstrated in her discussion of the Trail of Tears elsewhere--the displacement of the Cherokee from their own territory included her own ancestors. She does enter the narrative in her trips to the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and to Plymouth's various tourist attractions, but such trips supplement the main point, rather than form the core of the book the way they did in Assassination Vacation. The Puritan history that interests Vowell is in texts rather than in (ersatz) artifacts, especially when modern Boston and Providence now loom on the spots that formed the colonies of Massachusetts Bay and Rhode Island.

Vowell's voice is also downplayed slightly in light of all the input direct from the Puritans themselves. Her voice is still there, however, as when she notes

Winthrop writes down instructions for making gunpowder, putting up a chimney, and building a small boat. He makes lists of the provisions for the voyage, including thirty bushels of oatmeal, forty bushels of peas, two wooden bowls, tow barrels of cider, the equivalent of ten thousand gallons of beer, and "11 Ferkins of Butter," a ferkin (or firkin) being a "unit of capacity," according to my dictionary, "equal to half a kilderkin." (That clears that up). (AC 82)

It's kind of an obvious joke, but I like it because it indicates the difficulties she must have come up against in researching this book. She includes a "Note on Language" at the end of the book to acknowledge that she has had to normalize spelling; some of the original documents she dealt with may have been hand-written, and some of the books may have used old and surprisingly difficult to read orthographic conventions like the long S. The writing style of some of her sources may have left much to be desired. She mentions twice that Roger Williams referred to his own writing as difficult--desnse and over-packed. The above quote indicates that English writers had not yet gotten over the habit of detailing certain quotidian processes in excruciating detail (a habit still in evidence in Daniel Defoe books set on boats, which take periodic breaks to catalogue all of the edibles taken on board ship, before resuming the narrative).

Little lines like Vowell's reference to the dictionary suggest just how much work she has done to make an interesting story accessible, out of the pile of (often dull or difficult) material on the subject. The book doesn't draw attention to her work very often, but it's certainly there, and in the end I probably would not have read a text on this topic if Vowell weren't the author.

That said, if the book starts a little slowly (for someone who's not a fan of sermons, remember), it gathers steam throughout the book, culminating in a rather intense description of the trade-related wars that errupted among the English, Dutch, Pequot, Mohegan, and Narragansett--and how the actions undertaken during that war reflect on the Puritans' consciousness of their status as the Chosen and as sinners. Again, it's maybe not subject matter than I would have chosen to read, but I wasn't regretting reading this (despite getting a little bogged down on the sermons now and then). Vowell's gift is making sometimes difficult history and historical relationships accessible and comprehensible.

Faulkner Covers

2008-08-18T10:19:00.037-05:00

My Faulkner paperbacks tend to feature unsavoury cover images.

The editions that slap a nice harmless photograph of the author on the cover strike me as the most successful covers, aesthetically. Faulkner looks good and literary, with his sweater-and-suit outfits, his pipes, his dashing hair and moustaches. The off-putting Faulkner covers arise when designers attempt to illustrate the concepts or themes strongly associated with his work--the stagnant South, family secrets, racial tensions, fraught inheritances, etc. These are all excellent and worthy concepts, but "Southern Gothic" isn't something easily illustrated without being laughable. I own five Faulkner novels, and my editions of his books have uniformly bad covers. Faulkner's books seem to pose a particularly difficult challenge to book cover designers, however. Not many current editions of his books have covers that'll knock your socks off; many of Vintage's more recent trade paperback covers aren't much better than the ones on my crappy old mass-market paperbacks. In fact,the newer book cover for Sanctuary bites its concept from the 1970s-era Light in August pictured here.

The current Vintage cover series seems to have opted to illustrate the environmental Southernness of the books. These covers display window panes with condensation, massing storm clouds and lush Southern greenery, usually in a bruised yellow / purple colour palette that could be an indirect indication about the "sicknesses" that emerge in those settings. Someone clearly put some thought into how to indicate the books' contents while also developing visual themes usable on all of the Faulkner books, regardless of the indivual text's content. As a result, on the one hand, the storm cloud cover for The Sound and the Fury seems to indicate that the designers asked themselves "What is the easiest way to illustrate that title?" and called it a day. On the other hand, the cover for Go Down, Moses is appealing and historically specific in ways that work much better than some of the vague, "atmospherically" Southern imagery. (After a quick search, I found that E udora Welty took that photo, I'm guessing during her stint with the WPA, which means that the photo probably shows a scene more or less contemporaneous with Faulkner's writing).

My books' covers, pictured above, are for editions issued over a range of decades (as far as I can tell--the dating is imprecise in some of the older mass market paperbacks). The Sound and the Fury cover is from the 1950s, the Sartoris from the 1960s, the Light in August from the 1970s, and the As I Lay Dying from the 1980s. Only the Sartoris is a non-Vintage edition. The problem with most of these is not so much the design concepts, but the bad art plugged into those designs. The cover concept for Sartoris is fine, but the smudgy execution is not so hot. As I Lay Dying is cartoony and lurid, which isn't exactly incompatible with Faulkner's literary aesthetics, I guess, but it doesn't make me want to read the story that image illustrates. The Sound and the Fury cover makes more sense after you've read the book. However, at first glance, I thought it illustrated mis-matched convicts escaped from prison and fleeing the law while still shackled together. The cover colour is also awful. My Light in August has an okay cover that is actually more clever than I realized at first glance--it's the old condensation-on-the-window-pane image, but shot at an angle that makes the blind pull also suggestive of the gallows. However, the image in and of itself is kind of boring.

Nonetheless, it's better than this: I really don't understand what sold this cover aesthetic to the people at Vintage.

A tangential point: when it comes to Southern Gothic, I prefer Flannery O'Connor to Faulkner. I don't see her books as often, though, so I don't have the impression that her covers are doing a disservice to her books. Nonetheless, given her eschatological / Catholic apocalypticism, I'd expect more Christian-style iconography on her books; however, beyond the occasional patterned cross, the more dominant imagery for her book covers tends to be bird imagery (birds and peacock feathers). That more specific unifying imagery seems better than the rather generic imagery of "the South" used on the covers of Faulkner's books.

Dahl Covers

2008-08-08T10:38:00.017-05:00

Roald Dahl was either my favourite or second-favourite writer when I was a kid (he and Judy Blume would have been jockeying for the top spot). I obsessively checked and re-checked his books out of my grade school library, but owned few of them. Since then, I've managed to pick up seven of my own--two are adult titles (Switch Bitch and a short story collection), but the other five are children's books, most of them second-hand.

This is what the Roald Dahl books looked like when I was little--brightly colored border, white frame, a cover illustration inset that looked like the drawings inside the book. This is pretty much the exact version of the book my grade school library had. Danny, Champion of the World was not one of my favourites among Dahl's books, though, and I probably wouldn't have bought it, not even second-hand, if it hadn't been this particular copy, and if it hadn't been very cheap. The plot was more grounded in reality than most of Dahl's books, and the poaching part of the book just didn't make much of an impression on me. What really stayed with me was Dahl's rapturous descriptions of the oddest food--e.g. "It was a cold meat pie. The meat was pink and tender with no fat or gristle in it, and there were hard-boiled eggs buried like treasures in several different places. " I'm not sure that description made me want to wolf down a cold meat pie, but I definitely had the impression that Dahl had dreamed about them at some point.

My two Charlie books are not so good. My Chocolate Factory isn't terrible, especially when I have always preferred books with solid-colour borders to the ones with illustrations making up the entire cover. My quibble is with the particular image. Grandpa Joe looks all wrong in his old man's checked jacket, Willy Wonka's a little too fey, and the children are all apple-cheeked and look very (too?) young. Charlie looks like a background character in Newsies who is about to join the big dance number. I think Veruca doesn't really look right here, either--more prissy than rich, and way too pink. I almost always dislike this photo-realistic style of drawing for covers, though, because it tends to date the book as much as a photo would, and can potentially limit the ways I can picture the characters. Mostly, though, I keep looking at it and noticing all these 'incorrect' details, and I wonder why, if they are in the room described at the very beginning of the tour, Violet and Augustus are missing from the scene. This copy at least has the Schindelman illustrations, which are the only ones I really appreciate , and which seem particularly integral to the story, as when Charlie is introduced with a nice little headshot of him inserted into the text.

The Great Glass Elevator copy I own is so dreadful that I kind of regret buying it, though. Ugh. If Grandpa Joe is bad on the Factory cover, he is alarmingly bad on here, with his double-breasted denim jacket, jaunty neckerchief, and inexplicable Colonial American sideburns with bangs. Charlie looks like a text book illustration of a dork, in his brown suit and matching shirt-and-socks. Plus, on the cover, at least, he looks too old. And I don't have the faintest idea why Charlie's parents are dressed like Eastern European peasants. This cover is probably from 1975 (the first Puffin date inside), and it looks it.

The Oompa Loompas aren't as terrible as they could be (and there's at least one kid out there who was thrilled that the cover of the book included bare bottoms), but they lack the character of the Schindelman Oompa Loompas. They're just shrunken semi-nude muscular people here. And I think the illustrator's approach to the sky was a bit misguided here, since this is supposed to be a room inside the factory. Oh, I just don't like anything about this 'interpretation.'

The inside illustrations are the same as the cover illustrations, so all my clothing critiques still hold, plus the illustration style itself is really busy with cross-hatching all over the place. The more abstract stuff--the space hotel, the knids--looks all right, but in a scenario with multiple characters and a bit of furniture, the eye doesn't know what to settle on.

Look at this:

I guess the babies are supposed to be the focus here, but the perspective is all off, and they've been plunked onto a quilted duvet in front of crumpled pillows (judging by the cross-hatching). Charlie's face is half behind the bed railing for no good reason, and Mrs. Bucket looks like she wandered into the scene from The Scream and is just starting to relax now. Colonial Grandpa Joe looks sad and Eastern European Mr. Bucket looks happy, which is just about the only decision here that makes sense, since those emotions are described in the text itself.

Anyway.

The Dahl book covers changed at some point in the nineties, differing just slightly from the template featured on my Danny, Champion of the World. The coloured border is mostly gone, with just a strip of colour around three sides, and Quentin Blake provides cover illustrations (and, in fact, it looks like Blake's illustrations replaced even the interior illustrations originally done by other artists). This series' design is fine--nothing special, but not awful. I do prefer the latest versions of the Dahl covers, which tend render Dahl's name in a more stylized font and provide backgrounds in bright colours, rather than the featureless white waste that looms behind the witches here on my example.

L.M. Montgomery

2008-07-07T18:24:00.017-05:00

Back in the 1980s, Lucy Maud Montgomery's books all featured the same cover template, with fake-script lettering and photo-realistic(-ish) cover illustrations. Frequently, the heroine stands in tall grass in some sort of meadow, looking wistful. While I currently have a few of her books on my shelves, they are not the best examples of the mooning-in-a-meadow cover style, but it was rampant for the designs on books I originally acquired in the late eighties.

This copy of Anne of Green Gables is only about ten years old. I bought it for a university course I was taking, knowing that my original copy was a) an eight-hour trip away from my school and b) in lousy shape, the cover having pulled off years earlier. My original copy (from Scholastic) had a photo from the 1985 mini-series, but showed a nearly identical scene to this illustration--a kid, in a hat, clutching her carpet bag at the train station. (Although, Megan Follows may have been sitting on the bench that is behind illustration-Anne, here.)

This isn't a bad or cheesy cover, and probably would have solved some of my childhood puzzlement over what a "carpet bag" might be. Looks like what I imagined wasn't too far off (i.e. a bag made of a rug).

This cover is closer to the standard Montgomery cover-concept I described in my first paragraph: costumed girl in the foreground, a building of some kind (school house or beloved family home, usually) in the background, a prominent tree or treeline, a field in which we find our heroine knee-deep. Usually, the heroine is a little further back than Anne, here, more indistinct, and certainly not looking directly at the reader.

This setting does suit the character of Anne. It starts getting absurd when it is slapped on any female character Montgomery every wrote. See: Pat, Valancy, etc. This is, however, one of the worst illustrations of Anne I've seen on these books. That nose just isn't working for me.

This is a copy of a Montgomery book that I 've had since I was a child, and it seemed pretty unusual to me at the time, both because of the relatively abstract cover illustration, and because of its size--trade paperback. At the time, I don't think mass market trade paperbacks were all that common. It seemed like that format really caught on about ten years later.

I honestly didn't like this cover when I was a kid. The colour scheme is a bit garish, and of all the possible characters that might have been used to represent the book, I didn't understand why the artist settled on Gay Penhallow (I think--at least, Gay's the only character who could be described as girlish, like the young lady picture here), whose story I found both dull and aggravating. I liked Donna and Peter's story best.

This book was second-hand, so I can't take all the blame for the fact that it's held together with a rubber band. (The damage is to the spine, so the book is in two hunks). This is the best of the covers, I think. It's original compared to the photo-realistic Anne of Green Gables, and the illustration is suggestive of the book's content. As a bonus, the colour may be lime(ish)-green, but it's hasn't reached the 1970s level of garishness of my A Tangled Web's orange.

It's also probably the book I like best now, as an adult. It's contrived to the point of goofiness but it's a very charming story. Valancy is a more interesting character than Anne, and a little less annoying than Emily sometimes could be. (After the first book in her series, Anne could be a little too good, and Emily is sometimes embarrassingly intense in the way of self-consciously artsy girls in any era.)

Lolita Covers

2008-07-03T13:43:00.011-05:00

I have multiple copies of only a few books. Usually, I buy the second copy by mistake, for about a dollar, from the bargain bin of a second-hand bookstore. I have consciously purchased more than one copy of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and this is a big reason why:

This is the first copy of Lolita that I bought, at a Library sale in a very small town, when I was fourteen or fifteen years old. The cover was intact when I first got it; the front cover has since detached, and started flaking off towards the centre. In another 10-15 years, it will be down to Nabokov's name and the sunglasses.

The publisher of this edition is Corgi, which I think is a British publishing house. I don't own a single other Corgi book, at any rate. This copy is roughly 40 years old, being a 1969 reprint of a 1961 edition.

This was the second version of Lolita I bought, because I am a sucker. Obviously, it's The Anchor Review, not Lolita per se, although there's about sixty pages of the text plus the Nabokov-writing-as-himself addendum about the book that appears at the end of my Corgi copy of the book. This is supposedly the first version of the book that ever appeared in North America. The Olympia Press 2-volume edition was published in 1955, and this was issued in 1957. Putnam published the first American edition a year later.

I haven't actually read anything in this copy (Auden!) and I dropped a whole eight bucks on it.

And this is my current reading copy of the book. The annotations are especially helpful for glossing sentences written in other languages (mostly French). I am particularly fond of the inclusion of an ad that is described in some detail in the book itself--I assumed it was made up for the puposes of the story, but there it is in the end notes.

It's not a cover to write home about, though. The light's a little to mellow to really show that it apparently consists of illustrations of index cards and note paper. I've yet to see a cover for Lolita that I really like, though, even though Vintage got it very right with some other Nabokov books.

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union

2008-02-29T13:28:00.008-05:00

I am still thinking about what I think about this book. I can say I wasn’t blown away.

I’ve only read one other book by Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and I enjoyed that story more. It wasn’t perfect, either. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to know/understand about the nature of the golem, and I found the way that Sammy’s story ends was…I don’t know. Imperfect. It didn’t quite square with what I expected of Sammy’s character, but I felt that I never fully understood the character that he was given in the latter part of the book. The book was very close to Sammy at first, and then he receded, and although that later distance made sense for the plot’s resolution, I had the impression that Chabon abandoned Sammy to force that resolution. On the plus side, I loved Sammy throughout most of the book, and I do find Chabon’s writing to be really lovely. He is capable of a clarity that I don’t see a lot in contemporary literary fiction.

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union may just have had too much going on. It's a hard-boiled detective narrative, but the detective was part of an actual police department. Genre-wise, that means that Chabon may have to juggle with conflicting conventions from two different kinds of detective stories: the hard-boiled detective and the police procedural. Admittedly, it is not impossible to plop your hard-boiled detective into a hierarchical department structure; it is precisely that combination of factors that has created so many of what a Vice Magazine article once referred to as ‘badge-and-gun’ scenes, where the rogue (righteous) cop is forced to hand over the tools of his trade to his superior officer. Since the era of Dirty Harry cop action movies, that particular rogue cop vs. tight-ass desk cop conflict seems much, much more common in TV and movies than in books, but that may be my biased perception. I read mostly pre-1970s detective fiction, so my idea of hard-boiled is the loner private detective, like Marlowe and Spade, rather than the rogue cop fighting his corrupt or just plain lame deparment. And, in fact, many of Chabon’s writing choices suggest that the reader should be thinking of those first-wave hard-boiled detectives. I’m not alone in making these associations with the earlier genres of hard-boiled detectives; in her review of this work for The Washington Post’s Book World, Elizabeth McCracken refers to the book’s “dimly lit 1940s vibe” and its “Chandlerian” prose.

The “mystery” plot itself, however, seems closer to international espionage thriller stuff than the usual hard-boiled mystery. In Chandler's Marlowe books, for example, the specific crimes of murder, or blackmail, or racketeering are bad enough, but they really matter because of the ways they are symptomatic of bigger social sicknesses. The mystery of Chabon's book is already on such a grand scale that it doesn't lend itself to that kind of metaphor. I perceive this plot to be a problem beyond the genre convention issues, though. As I read, I was aware that Chabon was providing answers to his mystery, but as soon as I finished the book, I completely forgot how he resolved it. I remember key, very dramatic events that took place toward the book’s conclusion, but I can’t really remember the last thing I learned about who the “culprit” was. That resolution was not a key to the story. So, sure, maybe Chabon was deliberately refusing to conform absolutely to convention, but given the loving detail that went into creating this hard-boiled character, his world, and his storyline, that sort of refusal seems pointless when contrasted with Chabon’s obvious love for the way the world of this genre works. If it’s undermining convention, it’s half-assed, and to no obvious purpose.

Finally, I really loved the premise of this book. I seem to have become a fan of these mildly tweaked alternate world / alternate history narratives, and I thought the setting, the Jewish-Alaskan settlement developed after the failure of Israel, was compelling. The coherence of Chabon’s Sitka was very impressive. I was disappointed that the fate of Sitka was such a key factor in the story, though, and would have preferred it as a fully realized setting, and nothing more. That’s my personal quirk in liking these alternate histories, though—I want them to be a done deal, and not something that plays out or can be resolved within the particular narrative that I am reading. Other readers would definitely disagree on this point.

I notice that the Amazon ratings for this book have a surprisingly wide spread for Amazon ratings. At the time I’m looking at the little reader-rating chart, there are 85 five-star, 55 four-star, 33 three-star, 19 two-star, and 30 one-star. Usually, when it comes to a potentially polarizing book, one rating is the clear leader e.g. Infinite Jest currently has 187 five-star ratings, and the other four categories combined add up to 147 ratings. I would imagine that as time goes by and the first flurry of folks reading the new Michael Chabon has passed, the people who are really interested in the premise and subject matter will end up increasing the five- and four-star ratings considerably. I was interested in the premise and enjoy the genre very much, but I would probably slap a three-star rating on this book, if pressed. I was impressed with various aspects of the book, but am still not convinced that Chabon really brought it all together, and don’t really believe that his intention was to bust up the conventions and leave the book loose and unresolved.

Rating Books

2007-12-18T16:45:00.005-05:00

I'm not good at reviewing works in ways that will be useful to other people.

I think that problem's pretty widespread, however. I do tend to glance at Amazon's ratings of a book, but at best those are a loose index to how good a book is, and whether or not the book is a "genre" piece is going to skew the rating as well i.e. Patricia Wentworth never wrote a remarkable book in her life, but if you want a cosy-style mystery (complete with a Nice Young Couple who need to be engaged and/or reunited by the last chapter), she's your writer, and a very competent one at that. In fact, she's very good at establishing characters with efficiency, and maintaining that characterization, even when the story is kind of silly. (Wentworth sometimes has to work very hard to get her spinster detective, Miss Silver, involved in the narrative, and tends to skim over the more ludicrous set-ups so she can get on with the mystery). So, as mystery novels, I would tend to rate hers as three-to-four stars, depending on how plausible Miss Silver's entrance into the story is, and how well she handles the crime. As books, though, I would tend to rate most of her stories three stars, with some of the lazier books at two stars. She's never a terrible writer, but she does get rather workmanlike from time to time.

So, I rely on comparisons, often trying to articulate why one novel works or fails in comparison to other novels in the same vein. I have been reading David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System, and while I enjoy it, I also would describe it as "trying too hard." There's too much cleverness going on, especially too many punny names that draw attention to themselves. Too many of the male characters have started lusting after the protagonist by the mid-point of the novel. The tone changes radically after the first chapter, although the style doesn't. All in all, Broom owes a heavy debt to Pyncheon's The Crying of Lot 49; my library copy of Broom, a hardcover with a really dreadful late-eighties cover illustration, pushes 500 pages. It's possible that the accretion of outrageous characters and details just taxes my patience around the 200 page mark. Of course, that statement probably should include a definition of "outrageous," in the context of a narrative not exactly committed to verisimilitude. Put "outrageous," "silly" and "patience" together, though, and you'll get an idea.

[Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics was similarly show-offy and pleased with itself, so to speak, but more coherent as a story. As a first novel, it's probably a little better than Wallace's Broom, so I will be interested to see how her second novel turns out.]

That said, I do see lots of evidence of the things I really really liked about Infinite Jest. I want to say that Wallace isn't really committed to the reality of the book's Cleveland, with its "rotting mayonnaise" Lake Erie, whereas he took his near-future Boston seriously and thought of it as real. Infinite Jest can also be a very silly book, but I would describe it as more grounded.

Horror for Young People

2007-11-08T13:38:00.001-05:00

When I was in grade school, I was a fan of Urban Legend books, of true crime stories, and of those ghost story anthologies aimed at, say, 8 to 10 year olds—Alvin Schwartz’s books are a good example of the genre (and I notice they are also on the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books List of 1990-2000.)

I can’t recall if Schwartz’s books were strictly fiction or if they were marketed as “True Ghost Stories.” I read more than one of the "true" ghost story type, running into the same eight or nine ghosts that could be "proved" somehow, e.g. The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, whose name is imprinted in my brain forever because of seeing that same photograph a dozen times in different scary books.

I was too old to have much interest in R.L. Stine—his Goosebumps books got hugely popular when I was already reading Stephen King and Dean Koontz and similar popular adult horror novelists' works. I did read a few of his teen-oriented Fear Street books, but even they seemed "young" for me before I started high school. I couldn't name a single title or storyline from book in the series now. In grades seven and eight I was reading other one-off young adult titles by a variety of authors, usually the ones issued with similar cover templates by Scholastic, circa the late 1980s. (This page on Amazon shows the kind of cover I remember, but if you try the “Closer Look” option, it reverts to the more recently issued covers.) The design decision was a smart move on Scholastic’s part, because I was always willing to give a book with that kind of cover a shot, even though I knew nothing of the author or plot.

I’ve forgotten most of those books, with the exception of the Christina series by Caroline B. Cooney, which were very oddly written compared to most of the teen horror books circulating around that time—Cooney was working hard to develop atmosphere and a specific setting in detail (coastal Maine), and the books include some passages that were practically experimental writing, to the eyes of a twelve-year old. I do also remember the book Prom Dress by Lael Littke, which is, of course, about a cursed prom dress. Even on my first reading of that one, the premise didn’t strike me as all that terrifying—it’s a dress, not a vampire. Put it in a bonfire if you really think it’s cursed. Job done. I recall that book mainly because one scene involves a badly injured girl, still in the (cursed) dress, arriving at the hospital, whereupon a nurse—a grown woman—is so overcome with the (cursed) beauty of the dress that she takes care not to cut it off the injured girl. Then she steals it. There’s a lot of dress-stealing in that book.

Anthony Trollope: The Way We Live Now

2007-08-08T13:45:00.001-05:00

Anthony Trollope always comes up in a discussion of the nineteenth century novelists, but he seems to be a second-tier writer, maybe because he was so dauntingly prolific, having produced a novel or five every year, from the late 1840s to the early 1880s.

I'm exaggerating, but only a little bit. He really hit his stride in the mid-1850s, when he began churning them out like clockwork. And he did publish five books in 1882, but that number includes three novels, a biography, and a short story collection. Typically, he published between 1 to 3 books a year, and that does add up over the course of a thirty year career, and is all the more astounding because the man had a day job at the post office. (I hear he was responsible for an iconic post box colour/design used throughout England.)

Trollope's The Way We Live Now may seem inaccessible at first because it looks like a typical Victorian door stop. I quite liked it, though. What really struck me, after reading a similarly mammoth Dickens novel (Our Mutual Friend) was that Trollope doesn't contrive the hell out of his plot the way that Dickens does. There were coincidences, maybe, but a lot of them are attributable to the characters living in the same places or running in the same circles, and none of them were outrageous, or required a sudden abandonment of a long-established characterization. The narrator was much more snide than the typical Dickens narrator, and Trollope's book has characters that aren't out and out villains, but are just kind of worthless and irritating.

Recommended if you are interested in: Victorian satire, the Victorian financial world, Victorian perspectives on America, multi-family sagas, newspaper publishing in the mid-nineteenth century, country life vs. city life, low-level aristocracy, electioneering in Victorian England.

Brontë Suggestions

2007-07-07T13:48:00.001-05:00

If you had to read just one book by just one of the Brontës, you have a choice of the following:

For Charlotte: Jane Eyre (1847); Shirley (1848); The Professor (1857); Villette (1853)

For Emily: Wuthering Heights (1847)

For Anne: Agnes Grey (1847); The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

Charlotte’s Jane Eyre is probably the all-around best option if you can read only one of the seven books; its plot and themes have been the most influential in both fiction and in critical literature (e.g. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M Gilbert and Susan Gubar). Jane Eyre is also probably the most accessible of the seven books. Jane is a sympathetic and relatively open protagonist, telling her story in a straightforward fashion (and in chronological order), without withholding very much information about the other characters or her state of mind.

Emily’s Wuthering Heights is probably the second-most influential of the seven; although it is less significant to literary criticism, it has a pretty significant pop cultural footprint. The interpretations of the characters and the central romance are problematic, though, and some new readers come away from the book wondering where anyone got History's Greatest Romance out of that material. More practically speaking, Wuthering Heights is going to confuse younger readers or people who just don't read very much. It was an option for the classic books we had to read independently when I was in eleventh grade, and most of the students who took a shot at reading it gave up after a few chapters, hopelessly confused by the flashback structure and all the Cathys and Lintons and Earnshaws.

Some people lurve this book and others hate it–or are too irritated with the characters to slog all the way through. I don’t love it, myself, but it also doesn’t irritate me very much, because I strongly feel that the Heathcliff the Romantic Hero is a weird mis-reading that isn’t really borne out in the content of the book. It is a capital-R Romantic novel (i.e. influenced by the ideology that inspired the poetic movement circa the turn of that century), but not a romance. I think the interpretations of the book, rather than the book's actual content, put off some new readers of the book, although the content is dramatic and overwrought at times, too. And all of the characters other than Catherine Earnshaw really are very stupid about Heathcliff throughout the novel, considering that he practically walks about with “Evil” embroidered on his clothes.

Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is not as interesting as a narrative, and I’m not sure if anyone other than a serious fan of Victorian novels would read it for pleasure any more (the material was a bit shocking / scandalous for the 1840s, although not at all in a lurid way). I didn’t choose it when I was putting together my Nineteenth century reading list, but if I were more invested in feminist readings and Victorian social issues in general (and especially issues related to marriage), it would have been a valuable text. Anne’s book seems much, much more typically Victorian than the books by her sisters; I would tend to use it more as a document of its age than as a significant literary work, although there are certainly literary elements of the book that bear examination, as well.

Of all of the books, I like Villette best. If someone liked Jane Eyre but had some issues with the ways Charlotte went about resolving that book, then Villette would be the book for that person; it lacks some of the more absurd contrivances of Jane Eyre, and will seem like a more plausible story to modern readers. It is also a potentially difficult book, because the first person narrator is not a very confiding narrator; plus, some readers will find the conclusion frustrating. Overall, it is a more accomplished novel than Jane Eyre, although it’s much less influential.

The other three books–The Professor, Shirley, and Agnes Grey–aren’t books I have read. I do know that The Professor was Charlotte’s first book, but was published posthumously, and thus is probably more important for a student or fan of Charlotte Brontë than for someone putting together an overview of Nineteenth century literature. I read a few pages of Shirley and had the impression that it was a bit of a departure from Charlotte’s other work, but I don’t know enough otherwise to argue for or against it. Agnes Grey might actually be Anne’s better-known book, but, again, I can’t speak to its virtues or defects, other than to say that Anne is the least necessary of the three for someone surveying the century, rather than working on the Brontës. She does gain some significance if the focus is on woman writers of the century, however; she may be more important, in literary terms, than someone like Mary Elizabeth Braddon. This is where my ignorance is showing–my knowledge of Victorian studies is pretty casual. For that reason, however, I can provide a very good index to the works you need to know to survey the century or discuss the Victorian influence: I only know the Big Names.

Roald Dahl

2006-10-30T14:04:00.004-05:00

As I kid, I liked books that were a) scary, b) funny, or, best of all, c) a combination of the two. No wonder, then, that Roald Dahl was my favourite writer for years and years. I loved the two books about Charlie (and the Chocolate Factory, and The Great Glass Elevator) and James (and the Giant Peach), but I was obsessive about The Twits. It was short enough to read several times every time I withdrew it from the library, and I withdrew it from the library enough times that I distinctly remember my mom asking what was wrong with me, that I had to keep reading that same book. I probably couldn’t explain it to her. Even now, I’m not sure what I found so compelling about a story that had not a single human character to root for.

One thing I know I liked about the Roald Dahl books was the choice of illustrations. I’ve become fussy about the illustrations included in books, and usually can only like the versions I was first exposed to. So, when it comes to Alice in Wonderland, I only like the Tenniel woodcuts, and when it comes to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I’ve only ever liked the Joseph Schindelman drawings. I’m not sure if the Schindelmans are the originals—several websites (and several booksellers on ABE books) indicate that he illustrated the 1964 edition, so it seems likely. I also know, however, that the imperialist / racist overtones of the Oompa-Loompas were revised at one point—the “pygmies” were turned into tiny hippies—and Schindelman was definitely drawing cheerful little hippies in the books I read. My research skills regarding the details (rather than existence) of first editions is pretty bad, so I haven’t a clue how to confirm whether Schindelman revised his illustrations at a later date, or if the American edition took a different approach from the beginning, and only the British editions needed to be revised, etc. At any rate, I can only accept the bearded, long-haired Oompa-Loompas as the real deal, and that attitude is one reason why I never much liked the seventies movie version of the book. Everyone agrees that those Oompa-Loompas were freaky, but they repulsed me on multiple levels. Plus, I’ve never been a fan of musicals. Mom once asked me whether I liked the movie version of Annie after they showed it to us in the first grade (our school was putting on the musical that year) and I remember telling her that I thought it was okay, except for the singing. She pointed out that the singing was kind of the point of the movie, and I found that hard to believe. That Broadway-style belting made me feel embarrassed on behalf of the singers.

So, only Schindelman will do. Not even Quentin Blake’s drawings are good enough, and I loved his work in The Twits and The Witches. No one knows how to draw a filthy beard like Quentin Blake. My current copy of The Great Glass Elevator kind of sucks because of its dated illustrations—pure seventies stuff, with Grandpa Joe sporting a lame neckerchief, and Charlie as an apple-checked, well-fed young lad, despite the fact that he was nearly starving up until the morning he entered the factory.

In addition to illustrations, Dahl always incorporated a lot of descriptions of food and of bizarre places. One of my favourite parts of the first Charlie involved the brief descriptions of passing scenes as they were shooting around the factory in the elevator. I felt a little disappointed that the characters never got to actually visit some of those scenes, but if the book has fully met my expectations in that regard, it would have been about 500 pages longer. Leaving the reader wanting more was probably a better strategy.

Hubert Fauntleroy Julian

2006-10-19T19:00:00.004-05:00

According to Ann Douglas, in 1923 Hubert Fauntleroy Julian parachuted into Harlem “wearing a devil’s costume, complete with horns and tail, and playing a saxophone. He was trying, he told reporters, ‘to make the world a more fundamental place to live,’” (Douglas, in Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, page 459).

Why isn’t there a movie about Julian, one of the earliest African-American aviators, (clearly) a showman, and eventually an international arms dealer? He went up in a plane for the first time with the Canadian flying ace Billy Bishop, according to one source. Above all else, though, his explanation of the reasoning for his stunt is so cheerfully good that I would be fascinated with him for that statement alone. There is no movie, though; the lone imdb credit dealing with Julian is for his producing credit on an Oscar Micheaux movie.