MARLENE ZUK

on the beekeeper’s Faustian bargain.

“bee?” © Mark Hanauer http://bit.ly/mSjmaq

Hannah Nordhaus
The Beekeeper’s Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America
HarperCollins, May 2011. 288 pp.

Honeybees are like starlings and chickens and thistles and wheat; they do not belong here in North America. Sure, they have been here, by way of Europe, since 1620, but their origins are African, western Asian, and southeast European — criteria by which many of us also lack native legitimacy. In The Beekeper’s Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America, Hannah Nordhaus reminds us that honeybees are not indigenous wildlife that have been gingerly tamed, or whose natural proclivities we tweak and observe. Instead, they are more like miniature cattle, which are charming in small numbers as a backyard hobby, but when used commercially can lead to stench and group exhaustion.

The Beekeeper’s Lament is not only about bees, or the people who make a living off of them, fascinating as both of these subjects are. It’s about the dying of rural America, the way we grow and sell our food, the reason people take risks, and, ultimately, about loving, as Nordhaus puts it,

something that can’t love you back, that is just as happy to hurt you, that lives without concern for its keeper or his profit margins or his pride, and that dies with astonishing indiscretion — that simply does what it was born to do.

It is a poignant and keenly observed narrative of almond orchards and a beekeeper’s Faustian bargain. And the story is particularly Californian.

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JOSEPH CAMPANA on Marjorie Garber, Helen Vendler,
Marjorie Perloff, and Harold Bloom

and WILLIAM FLESCH on Stanley Fish and Robert Pippin.

Fox writing with a quill pen (1852) Courtesy of The New York Public Library 

JOSEPH CAMPANA
Harold Bloom
The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life
Yale University Press, May 2011. 368 pp.

Marjorie Garber
The Use and Abuse of Literature
Pantheon, March 2011. 336 pp.

Helen Vendler
Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill
Princeton University Press, March 2010. 176 pp.

Marjorie Perloff
Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century
University Of Chicago Press, December 2010. 232 pp.

The Renaissance courtier and author Philip Sidney described poetry as “that which, in the noblest nations and languages that are known, hath been the first light-giver to ignorance, and first nurse, whose milk by little and little enabled them to feed afterwards of tougher knowledges.” The four centuries between the publication of his Apology for Poetry and the present day might as well be four millennia. It’s easy to argue that poetry, which for Sidney referred broadly to literary activity, has been under attack since at least Plato and always seems to survive and even thrive in the face of resistance. Some even look to a brave new world of possibility for literature in a digital age. Still, it’s hard not to be discouraged in the face of an intensifying crisis of faith in the value of both literature and education. What can be said about the importance and function of literature in what seem, to many, increasingly bleak times?

Few literary critics achieve or maintain the kind of cultural visibility that Harold Bloom, Marjorie Garber, Marjorie Perloff, and Helen Vendler have sustained for decades. Bloom has taught for most of his career at Yale, Garber and Vendler at Harvard, and Perloff at Stanford; each publishes with a major commercial or university press. All make claims for the potency and primacy of the literary, if often in radically different ways. Bloom and Vendler champion the poetic tradition approached through close textual analysis, though Bloom prefers grand narratives and Vendler taxonomy. Like Bloom and Vendler, Garber values the tradition, but for her, literature offers problems not just for interpretation, but for public policy. Bloom and Perloff are enthralled by genius and the importance of artistic legacies, though Bloom’s veneration of classic literary works seems at odds with Perloff’s preference for the latest forms of innovation. These publications function as summations of these influential critics’ careers; the inadvertent cluster they form also provides a snapshot of our tenuous moment in the history of literature.

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Recent encounters:

A Conversation with Deborah Eisenberg by Tony Perez: “It wouldn’t seem to be much to ask of a reader, but actually, it turns out that a lot of people like — and expect to be able — to read fiction while they’re half asleep.”

Geoff Nicholson on The Ecstatic: “I’d been aware of the band for a while. From the reviews and descriptions – ‘Japanese psychedelic freak out noise terrorists’ was a typical attempt to summarize – they seemed to be a band I ought to check out…”

“The Education of Tao Lin” by Kaitlyn Phillips: “Much of his success, however, is not literary, rather it is his ability to maintain two things: his fan base, the cultivation of which is an operation facilitated primarily by his Tumblr (and now Twitter), and relevancy to the fickle media machine of literary New York. Lin plays impressive hardball.”

Superchunk’s Jon Wurster on R.E.M.’s final bow: “As I teeter between consciousness and unconsciousness, R.E.M.’s ‘Sitting Still’ comes through my headphones. I flash back to that Easter weekend road trip and then to that hot August afternoon at JFK Stadium. I look at the guy asleep in the front passenger seat. I shake my head in amazement. If this isn’t a perfect example of life’s (or ‘lifes’) rich pageant, I don’t know what is.”

”Dr. Don: The life of a small-town druggist” by Peter Hessler: “He is, by the strictest definition, a bad businessman. If a customer can’t pay, Don often rings up the order anyway and tapes the receipt to the inside wall above his counter. ‘This one said he was covered by insurance, but it wasn’t,’ he explains, pointing at a slip of paper on a wall full of them. ‘This one said he’ll be in on Tuesday. This one is a patient who is going on an extended vacation.’ Most of his customers simply don’t have the money.”

In the print and access restricted interether, two books:

American Idyll: American Antielitism as Cultural Critique by Catherine Liu

The Dominion of the Dead by Robert Pogue Harrison.

JONATHAN LETHEM

on his obsession with an immortal literary character.

Norman Mailer Reads Norman Mailer 1969 Prestige Lively Arts Catalog # LA 30009 

Advertisements for Norman Mailer:
Salvage from an Infatuation

1.

There once was a boy who fell in love with Norman Mailer, a writer who called himself “Aquarius.” Call this boy Aquarius-Nul, then. The name suggested all utopian possibilities the boy had glimpsed, born in the middle of the ’60s to avidly countercultural parents. Their world, which he’d take for the world, was a show that was closing: the dawning of an Age, but no age to follow the dawning. This boy’s own stories, when they came, painted his parents’s tribe as a withered race of superheroes, Super Goat Men and Women, who’d at least been large once in their lives. Aquarius-Nul’s uptight cohort sometimes seemed inclined not even to try, only to mock such attempts. (Aquarius-Nul was as uptight as any of them. Call him A-Nul, maybe.)

2.

When Aquarius-Nul, who favored outlaw or outcaste identities (the Beats, the science-fiction writers), glanced at the then-present Mount Rushmore of U.S. writing, made of the Big Jews and Updike, Mailer was the only alluring prospect. For the teenage Aquarius-Nul, a major American novelist bragging of interest in graffiti, underground film, marijuana, and space travel was irresistible. Even better, Mailer was the only head on that Rushmore who nodded to the value of the outlaw or outcaste identities (the Beats, and science fiction). That Mailer was further a Jew and a Brooklynite yet had shrugged off those legacy subject matters made him, for Aquarius-Nul, who’d want to believe he could do the same, too good to be true. In fact, others on Rushmore would sustain Aquarius-Nul’s interest before long. But not before Aquarius-Nul had burned through Mailer’s whole shelf, sometimes in delirious wonder, sometimes guiltily bored, and, strangely, often both at once.

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As the author of the perennially protested Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich knows a thing or two about being banned. But as Ehrenreich helps us wrap up Banned Books Week on the LARB blog, she clues us in to the cold, hard truth: getting banned isn’t always so easy.

To judge from the gleeful responses of my publisher and literary agent, being banned is not bad for book sales. The first attempt to “ban” my book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America occurred in 2003, when it was assigned as required reading for incoming students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. When conservative students and state legislators protested this choice — with, for example, a full-page ad in the Raleigh News and Observer — I was deluged with interview requests from that state, and relished the opportunity to discuss itsappallingly low wages and high poverty rate. Nickel and Dimed’s recent ascent to the list of the top ten banned books in the United States has generated fresh interest, which has not, so far as I know, harmed sales.

So the question is: How do I get more of my books banned? In particular I would like to draw the attention of would-be censors to my two most scholarly books, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War and Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, both of which were admiringly reviewed but, by the standards of Nickel and Dimed, only scantily read.

My case for banning these more erudite books is as follows: The most common and apparently heart-felt argument against Nickel and Dimed has been that it “bashes” Jesus and is in other ways offensive to Christians. I will not offer a full refutation of this charge, except to mention that the book has won high praise from some Christians — apparently of the “social gospel” persuasion — and led to numerous opportunities to speak at churches and in other Christian settings. My point here is that Blood Rites and Dancing in the Streets contain far more material that is potentially offensive to Christians, as well as to adherents of other religions.

After all, the most offensive statement in Nickel and Dimed is my description of Jesus as a “wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.” On the vagrancy and socialism there can be no question; Jesus was an itinerant preacher who demanded an immediate redistribution of wealth to the poor. As for the “wine guzzling,” I offer a much fuller explication in Dancing in the Streets, which draws on many respected academic sources to draw a parallel between Jesus and the Greek deity Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy. Both offered eternal life to their followers, renounced material possessions, avoided romantic entanglements, and had a special affinity for women and the poor. Most relevantly, Hellenic culture associated both with viniculture.

For a truly lurid assessment of religion though, censors are referred to Blood Rites, which argues that the original deities venerated by humans were animals: in fact, dangerous and carnivorous animals like lions, leopards and jaguars. Humans have always had reason to fear these animals but, as scavengers, the earliest humans, or hominids, also depended on them as suppliers of meat. The combination of terror and occasional gratitude inspired by predatory animals was, I argued, the basis for the religious feelings later directed toward both anthropomorphic and abstract deities.

My censorious fellow citizens, then, would be well-advised to cast their net a bit wider and consider banning Blood Rites and Dancing in the Streets. They are much denser than Nickel and Dimed, and encrusted with endnotes, but the reader will be rewarded with a rich trove of heresies – enough, I hope, to keep these books in print.

Barbara Ehrenreich is a Contributing Editor to the Los Angeles Review of Books and the author of all the above books, plus Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation, and many others. Her most recent is Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America.

Today the LARB Blog concludes its weeklong focus on censorship in the world of young adult and tween lit with the unmistakable voice of Lauren Myracle. Thank you to the remarkable list of writers who joined us, including Ron Koertge, Ellen Hopkins, Susan Patron, and Sonya Sones. As was noted at the beginning of the week: it’s a confidence game. People either have the confidence — in their ideas, in the right of others to express different ideas, and in the general societal health of this distinction to coexist — or they don’t. If they don’t, it’s often authors like Ron, Ellen, Susan, Sonya and Lauren (and their books) that truly feel the heat.

Tomorrow, Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the oft-challenged Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, rounds out the ALA’s National Banned Books Week with a modest proposal. And for a look back at the history of literary censorship, see Loren Glass’s piece on Grove Press in the 1960s on our main site today.


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Sometimes a Book Is Not a Cigar
by Lauren Myracle

Photo courtesy Lauren Myracle.

In fact, rarely is a book a cigar. What, then, is a book, and who decides? I believe that sometimes a book is a work of art, sometimes it’s a piece of crap, and, well, sometimes a book is just a book. This diversity creates an incredibly nuanced continuum of beauty and ugliness, significance and silliness, but at the end of the day, I’ll take the whole, messy construct and hug it tight. I can’t conceive of a life without books, which is why books claim the number three spot in My Grand List of the Universe’s Greatest Gifts. (Number two? People. I really, really like people, especially those who reside in my heart. Number one? The connective tissue of life—mysterious, compassionate, wild, and loving—which I choose to call God.)

Of late, however, my book-loving revelry keeps getting interrupted. Hate it when that happens. But hate it or not, people sure do get worked up about books. Adults, in particular, seem to get worked up about books, and certain adults get extremely worked up about certain books written for children, though it’s worth noting that “children,” in this context, tends to be used as an umbrella term for teens, tweens, and the grade school set alike.

In response to the legions of adults who try to MAKE BAD BOOKS GO AWAY, the American Library Association founded Banned Books Week, an annual campaign born from the desire to celebrate our freedom to read. I am so with them in that desire. I celebrate my freedom to read, your freedom to read, and the freedom to read that teens, tweens, and the grade school set have as well, in accordance with my, your, and their First Amendment rights to free and open access to information. And yes, the First Amendment does apply to minors, as per Theresa Chmara’s article, “Minors’ First Amendment Rights to Access Information”: “It was well established in the landmark case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District that students do not ‘shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.’”

Of course there are plenty who disagree with my stance on intellectual freedom, and just as many who disagree with those who disagree. We all know the drill: First, upset adults condemn me (and other authors) for writing books they see as lurid, depraved, and appalling. When I (and others) protest, the book challengers raise their voices and tell us to shut our flipping pieholes. Undeterred, authors and other freedom-fighting folk raise their voices right back, whipping their hands before them in their best side-swiping stop sign fashion and crying, “Oh no you didn’t!”

But they did (and do), and we did (and do), and frankly? The debate has lost its downy freshness.

We know that adults who care about what their kids read aren’t the bad guys.

We know there’s a difference between a parent telling his child that she can’t read a given book and a parent demanding that NO child should be able to read a given book.

We know, or generally tend to agree, that parents should be allowed to dictate what their own kids read…although of late, I’ve started pushing a little harder on that one. (As in, yes, parents should construct loving boundaries for their kids, but their love shouldn’t stem from fear or ignorance. Likewise, parents have the right and the responsibility to protect and guide their children, but teens, to my mind, aren’t children. Teens need opportunities to reflect and think critically about their world, and they need models for this. Ideally, this modeling would come in part from seeing their parents read, as books are a safe way to explore uncomfortable material.)

Regardless of which side of the debate we align ourselves, we also have at hand ready and familiar responses to the arguments most frequently put forth. For example, if kids read books about cutting, will they go on to cut themselves? Some might, perhaps, but it’s likely that those who do have other things going on in their lives that make them crave the semblance of control that accompanies such a self-destructive behavior. Which is to say that most kids won’t, because reading about cutting (or anorexia or bullying or suicide, pick your poison) doesn’t make a kid run out and do whatever they’ve just read about. Give kids some credit.

Or take these tried-and-true attacks and counter-attacks: Should school libraries be a free-for-all buffet of content, complete with subscriptions to Hustler and manuals for how to build a bomb in three easy steps? No, and that’s why librarians are trained to build collections appropriate for the specific populations they serve. Do all professionals who work in the realm of kids’ books have kids’ best interests at heart? No, and it would be naïve to think otherwise. Does the bottom line of profit come into play in the decisions some writers, editors, and booksellers make regarding what books to push or not push? Sure seems likely, doesn’t it?

And so the rhetoric goes, blah blah blah blah blah. Perhaps the biggest talking point in this year’s banned books discussions has been the question of whether or not “dark” and potentially offensive books can nonetheless offer a shining ray of hope to the novels’ young adult readers. Can reading about rape, for example, help build empathy for those who have experienced the cruelty of rape? Can reading about rape offer solace to a girl who has been raped by showing her that she’s not alone? For a great entry point into this discussion, Google author extraordinaire Maureen Johnson and her trending Twitter thread “#YAsaves.”

But even that line of justification, for me, brings the blah blah blahs front and center once again. Why? For the simple reason that it is a line of justification, and in my opinion, attempting to justify art brings art right back into the arena of black-and-white, my-morals-versus-your-morals absolutism.

Now Freud, on the other hand, might have seen the issue differently. Freud, who often saw penises where others saw cigars, might have followed the YAsaves Twitter thread and seen a really big and awesome penis (because penises, for Freud, were usually GOOD and ENVIABLE THINGS). The reason I say this is because Freud believed in Aristotle’s “art as catharsis” stance. If a book can help a single reader work through pain, then voilà! No need for further intellectual grappling, as the book’s worth has already effectively been established.

Well…not so fast. I’d argue that even if books do save readers (and sure, I think there’s truth in this claim), to burden books with such an expectation is a dangerously limiting stance. Can’t a book just be a really good book? Or a moderately good book, or even a sucky book? Call to mind, if you can, a sucky book that doesn’t save, edify, challenge, or inform a single reader. Does such a book still warrant the fierce oh-no-you-didn’t defense of intellectual freedom supporters?

After thinking far more about this topic than I ever imagined I would, I’ve come (for now) to this conclusion. Books are art. There is bad art and there is good art; there are bad books and good books. Nonetheless, every book deserves a fair shake, regardless of its perceived moral stance, its alleged ugliness or depravity, or the number of lives it has or hasn’t saved. More to the point, every reader should get to decide on a case-by-case basis whether to put down a given book or keep on reading.

William James claimed that absolutism—the idea that there exists in our world truth with a capital T, and values with a capitol V—allows people to take a moral holiday, because if everything is black or white, right or wrong, then no soul-searching is needed when the time comes to make a moral judgment or take a moral stance. Stephen Colbert argued a similar point by satirically coining the term “truthiness,” which he defined in an interview with The Onion as follows: “What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true. It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true.”

He went on to explain (in an uncharacteristic moment of seriousness) that such a stance is inherently selfish, because the underlying assumption of truthiness is that only the person holding the magic conch shell can speak the truth, and even she speaks the truth only while the conch shell is in her hands. When the conch is passed along, so, too, is its truthiness.

This idea of selfishness is a good place to end, because that’s what attempts to limit intellectual freedom come down to. As my brilliant editor, Susan Van Metre put it, “When a critic of adult books says, ‘Don’t read this,’ the adult reader still gets to make up his or her mind whether to read it or not. When a critic of books for children says to adults, ‘Don’t buy this for your teen or tween or child,’ the would-be-reader gets cut out of the equation altogether.”

And that’s not cool, because teens, tweens, and kids aren’t pets. They’re people. They may be shorter than us (or not, in the case of my thirteen-year-old), but they still deserve the chance to discover their own truths (with-lower-case-t’s), and to transform those truths—or not—day after day, year after year, book after book after marvelous-terrible-goofy-wonderful book.

LOREN GLASS

The second installment of Glass’s history of
Barney Rosset’s legendary publishing empire.
[Read Part I here]

Evergreen Review Issue No. 25, Courtesy of Barney Rosset, © Evergreen Review

“You treat Grove as if it was a real publishing company!”

I’m sitting at a coffee shop in the Farragut neighborhood of Brooklyn with Fred Jordan, Barney Rosset’s right hand man and managing editor of the Evergreen Review throughout the sixties, and his son Ken, publisher of the online magazine Reality Sandwich. I had sent them a draft of the introduction to my book on Grove Press, and they didn’t like it. “If you take a publishing company to be a commercial enterprise, Grove never was,” Fred complains. “It wasn’t a business,” his son interjects, “It was a project driven out of passion, which Barney completely self-identified with.”

If Grove wasn’t a business, what was it? “We just called it Grove. Because it was just its own thing,” Ken replied. Jeanette Seaver had likened it to a family; Morrie Goldfischer had repeatedly used the term “team” to describe Grove’s core group. Nat Sobel told me that Rosset compared the company more specifically to a football team, adding “I’m the quarterback, and I’m calling the signals.” What about a rock band? “It’s more like a band than anything else,” Ken agreed. And then he added, “The relationship was not so much from one person to another. It was one person to Barney, and then Barney to everybody else.” And Sobel confirmed, “If we had any personal relationship, it wasn’t with each other, it was with Barney.”

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Celebrating Banned Books Week, the LARB Blog continues its focus on YA censorship with Sonya Sones, author of the recently published L.A. Times bestselling novel, The Hunchback of Neiman Marcus, as well as four award-winning young adult novels: Stop Pretending, What My Mother Doesn’t Know, One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies, and What My Girlfriend Doesn’t Know.

The “Getting Banned” series began with Ron Koertge and continued with Ellen Hokpins and Susan Patron. Lauren Myracle concludes the series for us tomorrow.

Musings of a “Sexually Explicit” Author
by Sonya Sones

Photo courtesy Ava Tramer

I’ve been a card-carrying member of the dangerous authors’ club since 2004, when my young adult novel, What My Mother Doesn’t Know, landed on the American Library Association’s list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books of the year. I was thrilled when it made the list again in 2005 and 2010, and even more delighted when it earned the 31st spot on the ALA’s list of the Top 100 Most Banned/ Challenged Books of the Decade: it’s heady stuff to share list-space with the likes of Mark Twain, Ray Bradbury and Ken Kesey.

I wasn’t always a young adult author. When I first started out I was just a young adult — a young adult with loads of rich friends who spent the summers at their country homes or at camp. But my family couldn’t afford such luxuries, so I traveled to the library instead, letting books take me all the places I wished I could go.

Then, I discovered the steamy dreamy Diaries of Anais Nin, and became an avid journal-writer, often spending more time writing about my life than I actually spent living it. Even so, I never thought of becoming a writer. Instead, when I grew up, I became an animator, and, eventually, a film editor. When I had a couple of kids of my own, and began reading to them, it was my favorite time of day: the book in my lap and an arm around each of my enraptured darlings. That’s when I decided to try my hand at writing.

I didn’t set out to write books for teens, but that turned out to be the voice that came most naturally to me. Lots of people talk about having an inner child, but I’ve got an inner teen. And she’s right there with me, whispering in my ear whenever I sit down to write. In fact, she’d probably argue that she was the one who wrote my books, without any help from me at all. And you might even believe her. She can be very persuasive. Last week she almost had me convinced I should get my bellybutton pierced. Which is not a good look for someone my age.

Despite that inner rebel of mine, I never intended to write controversial books. And I was stunned when people wanted to ban them. But I decided not to let the foolish accusations of self-righteous people stifle the voices of my characters.

Though you’ve got to have thick skin to be a banned author. Parents from all across the country have written to me to rant about how disgusting and inappropriate they think my book is, and have filed formal complaints called “challenges” to attempt to get it removed from middle school and high school libraries. Apparently, there are legions of narrow-minded folks out there who feel that if a book isn’t appropriate for their own child, then no child should be allowed to read it. It would be lovely if we could just ignore these people, but unfortunately, we have to give them the respect they don’t deserve.

When a formal complaint is made, members of the community meet to discuss whether or not to comply with the request to remove the book, following the guidelines created by the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom. Librarians, teachers, students, and parents present their arguments in an open forum and reach a decision.

What’s good about these meetings is that they get people talking about important issues, like freedom of speech. What’s bad about them is that sometimes they lead to books actually being banned. And when a book is banned, everyone loses. Because, as the 2010 United States Ambassador of Children’s Books, Katherine Paterson, once said, “All of us can think of a book…that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf — that work I abhor — then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then, we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.”

Why do parents think What My Mother Doesn’t Know is so abhorrent? The Intellectual Freedom Committee cites “sexually explicit” as the reason most often given. This is pretty funny (or pretty depressing, depending on how you look at it) because nothing more than kissing happens in the book—not even the slightest grazing of a boob by a hand. I swear!

But the problem is that the people who try to ban books often don’t actually read them. They just read the juicy parts. I can’t tell you how many letters I’ve received from incensed parents telling me that they were horrified when they read “excerpts” of my book. If these people had taken the time to read the entire book, they’d have seen that when the narrator, 14-year-old Sophie, is pressured by her boyfriend to have sex, she refuses to let him push her further than she wants to go. In fact, his sexually aggressive behavior is the main reason that Sophie stops dating him.

This past year, there was a new complaint about my book. The Intellectual Freedom Committee cited “sexism” as one of the reasons it made the cut. How very weird and disturbing to be accused of such a thing… My theory is that the parent filing the official complaint checked off the word “sexism” because it had the word “sex” in it and that made it sound nasty. And, of course, she knew, from the two pages she had read of What My Mother Doesn’t Know, that my book was indeed nasty. Just a theory, of course.

In truth, whenever the annual Top 10 list is published, I keep my fingers crossed that my book will be on it again. Not because this will increase sales (though it does) and not because it will lead to more teens discovering and reading my book (though it will). The reason I love being on the list is that when I am, I get invited to speak at schools about why books shouldn’t be banned. Which is wonderful, because there is still the possibility that I can lead a child in the right direction, before they’ve been dragged too far down the wrong path by a misguided parent.

The last time I spoke on this topic, at the Pegasus School in Huntington Beach, I told the kids about the controversy that arose in Houston when Ellen Hopkins was uninvited to their YA Lit Festival after a parent complained about the content of one of her books. I explained that some of the other authors who were asked to speak at the festival decided to stay home, in order to show their solidarity with Ellen. Then, I asked the students what they would have done, if they’d been one of those other authors. A student instantly raised her hand and said, “ I would have accepted the invitation, but when I got there, instead of reading from my own book, I would have read from Ellen’s.” How magnificently devious!

But if being devious is what it takes to protect our right to read the books we choose to read, then so be it. We are, after all, living in a world where William Steig’s illustrated story about a horse, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, was banned because the police happened to be depicted as pigs. ‘Nuff said.

I think the great Irish playwright and critic, George Bernard Shaw, summed it up brilliantly: “Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.”

Sones’ first novel for grown ups, The Hunchback of Neiman Marcus.

JOSH LANGHOFF introduces CHUCK EDDY,
the man with more voice per square inch than any other rock critic,

and MICHAELANGELO MATOS finds out what makes him tick.

Chuck Eddy © Lalena Fisher

JOSH LANGHOFF

Chuck Eddy
Rock and Roll Always Forgets: A Quarter Century of Music Criticism
Duke University Press, August 2011. 335 pp.

Rock critic Chuck Eddy is one of the world’s great music fans. For the past 25 years, his writing for The Village Voice, Creem, Rolling Stone, Spin, and other outlets has kept Eddy at the center of pop music conversations. He’s been an obstinate champion of overlooked genres like teen pop, country, AOR, rock en Español, and metal, and many record collections would be poorer without him. Eddy’s quintessential record review, though, had nothing to do with any of those genres. Rather, it’s a meditation on Michael Jackson in the form of a review of Jackson’s 1991 Dangerous album for the Village Voice titled “Michael Jackson Loves the Sound of Breaking Glass.” A hectoring invocation — “Hey, so how come nobody’s compared the fucker to There’s a Riot Goin’ On?” — sets us off and running for 2,500 words that reek of Eddy, the cranky old man, tracing Jackson’s “fear and loathing” not just back to Sly Stone, but to Robert Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway.” He evokes rock as much as pop and R & B, including his faves Slade and Kix and the snide trinity of Dylan/Rotten/Axl. And then there are the mannered devices: alliterative rhymes (“bopgun pops and bumblebeed beats”), lists (“electrogrunge/Burundi/square-dance/parade-music”), and holy-shit hyphenates (“crawl-on-your-belly-like-a-reptile throb”). Reading Eddy’s new anthology, Rock and Roll Always Forgets, you learn to either welcome these devices like old friends or, if they start getting on your nerves, to simply skim over them.

Most striking is the tone of confrontation. Eddy also loves the sound of breaking glass, and he uses Michael Jackson to rail against whatever stones he finds in his own passway. Racing through a secret history of aggressive Jackson lyrics, Eddy challenges, “But who noticed? We were too stupid to understand the subtlety he’s been shoving in our face for the last 21 years.” Regarding the album’s sound, he asks, “If there’s nothing new happening on this record, as certain fools have claimed … how do they explain all this noise?” Critical darlings suffer similar scorn: “And if Living Colour and Fugazi, neither of whom know the first thing about music-as-pleasure, can get away with piles of protests about not a damned thing we didn’t already know, why shouldn’t the most popular entertainer in the world be allowed the same courtesy?” Eddy Bugbear #1 is Lazy Critical Consensus; the most recent piece in this anthology is entitled “The Year of Too Much Consensus.” For Eddy, other criticism is as surefire and entertaining a foil as Harold Bloom’s School of Resentment, Paul Krugman’s Very Serious People, or Pauline Kael’s Auteur Theory motherfuckers. Eddy’s spirit of confrontation fits his Michael Jackson review like a crowbar fits a windshield. It’s magnificent.

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PIOTR FLORCZYK and JACOB SILVERMAN

on new translations from Central Europe: Andrzej Stasiuk’s travels into the past and Imre Kertész’s pre-Nobel Prize novel of “eternal forgetting.”

Babie lato, by Jozef Marian Chelmonski, 1875 National Museum of Warsaw

PIOTR FLORCZYK

Andrzej Stasiuk
On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe
Translated by Michael Kandel
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June 2011. 272 pp.

If you wish to see the Romanian town of Babadag, get in your hot air balloon, with a nice cup of coffee. Glide past the convenience store on the corner of Venice and Sepulveda, which isn’t too far from where I am writing this now, and over the toothy mountains and frothy seas you know from postcards. Eventually, you’ll find yourself in Europe. Avoid the flashy capitals. Europe can be overwhelming, so think of it as East and West — there is nothing wrong with following in the footsteps of finicky, divisive political history. Heading east through Germany, pay attention to how the neatly ordered villas give way to Soviet-style apartment towers. Once you cross into Poland, you’ll see how the race toward modernization and beautification (the Poles tucking in their shirts for a seat at the big boys’ table of Europe) has gone into overdrive; don’t ask questions when locals remind you that you’re in Central — not Eastern — Europe, which, as far as they’re concerned, is some other place altogether. You’ll hear about Sobieski, Chopin, Mickiewicz, Miłosz, Wojtyła, and Wałęsa, or about how Marie Curie’s maiden name was Skłodowska, and that she was born and raised in Warsaw, not far from where you’re standing, facing the skyscrapers and the national stadium going up in the shadow of the spruced-up Palace of Culture and Science, that was gifted to the Polish people by Stalin and company.

But if you wish to see Andrzej Stasiuk’s Poland, where Warsaw’s traffic and designer boutiques end, where you are not following the ancient amber trade route so much as the needle of a compass held by one of Poland’s most engaging writers (whose popularity in the English-speaking world is on the rise), you must, necessarily you must, point your balloon south. You’ll need to see Kraków, the country’s cultural heart. From there, it’s a mere stone’s throw to the small village in the Beskids where Stasiuk lives and writes, having abandoned many modern luxuries in favor of a house in the foothills, herds of sheep, and an occasional horse-drawn carriage. “My Europe is full of animals,” he announces, not unironically, in his book On the Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe. In this collection of 14 travel essays, Stasiuk travels more or less along the 24th longitude, through Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Albania, and Moldova.

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Celebrating Banned Books Week, the LARB Blog continues its series on censorship with Newbery Award-winning author Susan Patron.

Susan is the author of The Higher Power of Lucky, for which she won the Newbery. It is the first of the Hard Pan Trilogy that also includes Lucky Breaks and Lucky for Good. She is also the author of the ALA Notable book Maybe Yes, Maybe No, Maybe Maybe, and a historical novel, Behind the Masks, which will be published in January 2012. She was a youth services librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library for thirty-five years before retiring in 2007, and currently serves on the board of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

The series began on Monday with Ron Koertge, outlining the case(s) against him, and continued yesterday with Ellen Hokpins confronting the fear at the heart of the matter. Yet to come are Sonya Sones and Lauren Myracle. Stay tuned!

Thoughts on Joining the Dangerous Authors’ Club
By Susan Patron

Photo courtesy of Sonya Sones

My most recent project, a novel for Scholastic’s “Dear America” series, takes place in the Wild West town of Bodie in 1880, at the height of its gold rush. I set out to write about the life of a middle-class girl, a lawyer’s daughter. As soon as I began researching the other characters, I discovered that women constituted only a fraction of the town’s population, and most of them were prostitutes. As a writer, I’d encountered controversy and challenges to my work before, and had a fair idea what the response would be, in some quarters, to a middle grade story with prostitutes as characters: not good at all.

I knew I could save myself a lot of trouble by avoiding the subject of prostitution. Conflicted, I lost days of writing time while thinking about my choices and how best to tell this story. Censorship can begin with the author herself, being cautious and concerned.

In its official capacity, the American Library Association tracks occasions in which people or groups try to obstruct intellectual freedom and the right to read. The most common way this happens is when a book or other material in a library is challenged; the other is where it is banned by such an outside party. If the institution agrees with the challenge, a ban may occur. By the ALA’s definition, “A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material from the curriculum or library, thereby restricting the access of others.”

The ALA keeps track of all challenges and bannings. We can go to their website and find out when, where, and how often a particular book was challenged. But censorship is not always committed by the usual suspects.

There are also occasions when librarians censor books, in subtle ways that may not be consciously intended and may never be noticed. They may simply choose not to purchase the controversial books in the first place. Or they may limit the target reader’s access to the book. For example, the librarian shelves and catalogs a middle-grade book — a novel with, say, a ten-year-old protagonist, recommended by the publisher and review journals for ages 9 to 11 or 10 to 12 — in the young adult section. Why? Fewer complaints, less chance of confrontation, a way of avoiding having to defend the book should a parent object. In short, this person acts out of fear of an anticipated challenge, not an actual one.

The Higher Power of Lucky

Which gets us back to the disreputable women of Bodie. Well, fine, I’ll just leave out the prostitutes, I thought. Undoubtedly my editor would be grateful, my publisher would be grateful, teachers doing units on the westward movement who might want to assign the book would be grateful, parents finding themselves in the position of having to explain about men paying money to have sex with women would be grateful. Hell, I myself would be grateful when reviewers evaluated the book on its literary merits rather than on words or topics they considered inappropriate in literature for young readers.

But then I read about one of Bodie’s “soiled doves,” as prostitutes were called circa 1880, who married an upstanding butcher and wanted to integrate herself into “decent” society. Nope, the proper ladies of Bodie weren’t having it; they rejected her. When she died, they didn’t even want her to be buried in the consecrated section of the cemetery.

The whole question began to give me pause: How often do writers shy away from language, customs, historical fact, and bad behavior on the part of characters because these issues may cause discord, negatively affect sales, or make people uncomfortable? Are we watering down our prose or subverting our history out of fear of controversy? If a character parodies, say, a Catholic nun, do we delete the scene because Catholic schools may decline to purchase the book? If the course of our plot leads to an act of violence, do we remove it to appease parents with anti-violence agendas? Are any characters other than really, really bad guys allowed to commit immoral acts in children’s books? They certainly do in real life. Is the literary landscape we offer children one that should hold up a mirror to what we call life?

I knew I had to use this piece of history as an element in my novel; it was too good a story, and it was true to the times; in some ways it defined the times. Rather than go the safe route and water down or ignore this aspect of life in the mining town, I told prostitute Lottie Johl’s story, forcing my protagonist to confront the hypocrisy and exploitation to which these “fallen women” were subjected. I decided to trust young readers to work it out for themselves, to ask questions or do further reading. Or skip it altogether, if they weren’t interested, going on to follow the main thread of the story or choosing a different book. Otherwise, if I didn’t trust that middle-graders could handle a significant aspect of the history being described, I’d have to choose some other period of history. But if you think about it, no historical or contemporary period is devoid of terrible stuff from which someone will want to shelter children.

It’s crucial to note that a parent has every right to shelter his own children, to guide and advise on their reading. But he does not have the right to limit other children’s reading. This also leads to larger ethical question: Do we writers confuse our job with that of teachers, religious leaders, parents? Their job is to set examples, establish limits and rules, teach good manners, pass along moral values, exercise sound judgment, and model appropriate behavior for children to imitate. The job of writers and other artists is to prod and poke, to provoke questions, to challenge assumptions, to lift that corner of the rug and give readers a look at what’s been swept underneath. Our job is to respect readers of any age, which means to be honest with them. As the world struggles along, gasping from wars, death, evil, and inhumanity, it is no favor to children to hide or ignore or soften the human condition. They witness it every day on the web, on TV, at the playground, and in their own living rooms.

Lucky Breaks

If our goal is only to tell a good story but not to teach or improve the reader, or to provide good role-models, doesn’t that undermine the power of literature itself? No, for as anyone knows who has cried over the fate of a fictional character, or who has felt in her own heart the struggle of a character making a decision on which so much depends, books illuminate the dark corners. They allow us to test our own values, to nurture our capacity for empathy, to see subtleties of right and wrong, to understand moral ambiguity. Books help us, in other words, to be more human.

And, almost magically, good books that speak to our deep inner desires, fears, and hopes create a hunger for more books. Books are good for us; they are good for children, and they will not harm the reader.

I’m here on somewhat false pretenses. Though I have been banned, I’m not a YA author. I write middle grade books that are, in some libraries and bookstores, sometimes shelved with YA books. I believe in using correct anatomical terms for body parts, including a dog’s scrotum. I believe we can be straightforward with readers and they will be grateful for it.

When I was ten, I read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and discovered something horrifying about the world. Anne left us the great gift of her own humanity; her story informed my heart in ways I understood but could not have articulated. The book has been banned and is still challenged repeatedly, so I guess Anne is one of the founders of the Dangerous Authors’ Club. I’m honored to be a member.

Maybe Yes, Maybe No, Maybe Maybe

For Banned Books Week the LARB Blog is featuring banned authors weighing in on the experience of@font-face { font-family: “Calibri”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }—you guessed it@font-face { font-family: “Calibri”; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 10pt; line-height: 115%; font-size: 11pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1;—being banned. The series began yesterday with frequently challenged YA novelist and poet Ron Koertge, outlining the case(s) against him. Tomorrow, Newbery Award-winning author Susan Patron will join us, followed by Sonya Sones on Thursday, author of one of the top 100 most challenged books of the decade.

But it continues today with Ellen Hopkins, a poet and award-winning author of eight top ten New York Times bestselling young adult novels, including her just-released Perfect. Hopkins’ first novel for adults, Triangles, hits bookshelves in October. She lives with her husband, teenage son, two dogs, one cat and a whole bunch of fish near Carson City, Nevada.

On Censorship, Fear and Truth
by Ellen Hopkins

Photo courtesy of Sonya Sones

I hear it all the time from other writers: “I wish my books were banned. Imagine the sales!” As the most challenged author in 2010, according to the American Library Association, I can tell you that I have never written a book hoping it would be challenged. Neither did I come to writing for young adults expecting fame and fortune. That I have gained a small measure of them was all about the need to tell a story. And I was determined to tell it candidly. I became a New York Times top ten bestselling author by writing truth, disguised as fiction.

Censorship is fear-based. People fear what is different, another color or religion or sexual identity they don’t recognize as consistent with their own. Why look deeper for understanding when it’s easier to excise some “other” from your existence? And if you can’t delete them from your country or state or neighborhood, at the very least, why not remove them from your library? Upside: you don’t have to try to explain to your kids why you’re frightened, when you’re not really sure yourself. Downside: the fear remains, and it grows exponentially, generation to generation.

In October 2008, a young woman, hounded relentlessly by a pack of teenage girls, hung herself outside her bedroom window, displaying her pain in clear view above the front lawn. At her funeral, the girls who were largely responsible for her death walked up to the casket and laughed. The reason they made fun of her? Her family had emigrated here from Bosnia, and she had a “funny accent.” Fear bloats into hatred. Children are bullied, and children become bullies, and some children commit suicide while some children cheer.

How might books be able to change this? By opening young readers’ minds to the idea that we are all, in fact, human; that we share this planet by some design, and that we all belong here. We all search for love, we all suffer pain, and we all, in ways big and small, need each other. It is imperative that we develop empathy and understanding for those whose life experiences are different than our own. The place to begin is with our children, by allowing them to read broadly. Diversely. Fearlessly.

My young adult books write the teen experience, and they don’t sugarcoat. My first novel, Crank, was the fourth most challenged book in 2010. While I chose to write it as fiction, it was inspired by the very true story of my own teen daughter’s addiction to crystal meth: a story she and I both lived. It was our story, but also one shared by tens of thousands of families in this country. My daughter was a brilliant, beautiful child with dreams that will never come true now, because of the damage the drug inflicted on her. I wrote Crank to illustrate how one bad choice can change a life forever. But I had to write it with unflinching honesty, or risk being called a fraud by someone who has walked this path themself. The first time the fictional Kristina does crank, there is no hiding the truth: it’s fun. So she does it again. Before long, it’s not fun. It’s necessary to feel good. Then it’s necessary to feel okay. Then it takes more and more to feel okay, and this is addiction.

The sequel, Glass, explores the deepest part of her addiction, and the final book in the trilogy, Fallout, moves into the perspectives of Kristina’s three oldest children, who have largely lost their mother to the addiction. Kristina is not an altogether sympathetic character. Some readers love her, others definitely don’t. But they all want to know the outcome of her decisions. Perhaps, when faced with this choice, they themselves will run the other way. Reader letters tell me this is so, and for that I am sincerely grateful.

Crank has been challenged because it contains references to drugs (uh, yeah), explicit sexual content, and offensive language. Yet terms like “explicit” and “offensive” are rather subjective. There is sex in the book, including a rape, but I was keenly aware of my teenage audience, and wrote those scenes with them in mind. The sex is neither pornographic nor even erotic, and there are no descriptions of body parts. These scenes are there to portray Kristina’s deteriorating sense of morality, and how far she is willing to go to feed her addiction. They show outcomes to the original choice she made to try crystal meth that first time. And they are truth.

As for offensive language: well, which words exactly, and offensive to whom? Some people are offended by “damn” or “hell” or “bitch.” All are in the dictionary, and not as expletives. As for the all-scary F-word, I use it twice in the book, and purposefully. There is a scene where Kristina, who has always been close to her mother, looks at her mom and for the first time in her life says, “Fuck you.” Her mother, who has denied the signs of her daughter’s slide, in a moment of recognition, slaps Kristina — also a first. It is a powerful scene because it signals a rift that will take many years to repair. And it is the truth.

My other novels touch on physical and sexual abuse, teen suicide, teen prostitution, coming out, questioning faith, teen pregnancy, and other issues that affect young adult lives every single day, at home, at school, at church and on the street. I don’t write to offend. I don’t add graphic scenes that don’t inform the story. Yes, there is sex in my books. Teens have sex, or think about having sex, or have sex forced upon them. There is strong language in my books. My teens say “damn,” “hell”, “bitch” and, yes, “fuck.” Not every character in my books says any of these words. Some kids never would. I write those kids, too. Because always, always, I write people: the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful.

My latest novel, Perfect, is about the drive for perfection, an unattainable state of being, because no two people see “perfect” in the same way. It looks at beauty ideals force-fed to women at a very young age. It examines athleticism, and how far a young man might go to attain his goals. And it also shows how some parents’ all-encompassing pressure to succeed can force a child to become someone they don’t want to be. Maybe even away from who they were destined to be.

Such parents may very well believe they are only doing what’s best for their children. Most would-be censors probably believe they are protecting innocent minds from corruption. I steadfastly maintain that the truth isn’t corrosive. But fear is. And truth is a formidable weapon against fear.

STEVEN J. ROSS

on J. Hoberman’s history of movies in the age of McCarthy.

I Married A Communist, RKO Pictures (1949) Lobby Card

J. Hoberman
Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War
The New Press, March 2011. 432 pp.

In March 2003, shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I was interviewed by a Fox TV news anchor whose first question was, “Don’t you think that Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon are traitors for opposing the war?” When I suggested that the Constitution gives every citizen — be they a president or an actor — the right and obligation to voice his or her opinion about the future of the nation, the reporter looked at me in disbelief. In her mind, patriotism equaled whatever the leading Republican said it was. The idea that two movie stars could openly oppose the president was simply scandalous.

In Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War, J. Hoberman, the Village Voice’s longtime movie critic, raises the question of what it meant during the Cold War years to be a patriotic American, and in particular what it meant for the movies. This is part of a three-volume study that will chronicle “American politics from 1945 though 1990, as filtered through the prism of Hollywood movies — their scenarios, back stories, and reception.” What is chronologically the second volume in this trilogy, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties, was published earlier, in 2003. This book, in effect the prequel to that volume, covers the years from 1945 to 1956.

The Cold War was not the first time movie industry leaders courted or clashed with politicians. Studio leaders have always been afraid of Washington; afraid that politicians would one day heed the cries of cultural conservatives and establish tight federal censorship over the industry. Industry heads responded by gathering powerful political allies. As early as 1916, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association gave money to any politician — Republican, Democrat or Socialist — who openly opposed film censorship. Louis B. Mayer took the Hollywood-Washington connection a step further in the late 1920s by fashioning the first permanent relationship between a studio (MGM) and a party (Republican). In the 1930s, Warner Brothers curried favor with the Roosevelt administration by producing films sympathetic to FDR’s agenda. During World War II, Hollywood showed its loyalty — and staved off a long-lingering federal antitrust suit — by making films that fueled domestic patriotism and planted the seeds of the myth of the “Good War.”

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SCOTT ESPOSITO

Jesse Ball, publishing dystopia, and the triumph of marketing.

The Beginning of the End
© Lisa Jane Persky

Jesse Ball
The Curfew
Vintage, June 2011. 208 pp.

By now, dystopian fiction has been served up just about every way possible. To my knowledge, one of the few ways it hasn’t been attempted — or, at least, well executed — is in the realm of minimalism. That brings us to The Curfew, the third novel by Jesse Ball, a writer who in the past few years has carved out a quite visible and enviable place for himself as an experimental fiction writer, and as a poet and artist. The Curfew’s shortcomings perhaps demonstrate why the minimalist dystopian novel has yet to find a successful practitioner, and for me they speak as well to the nature of authorship in our somewhat dystopian publishing moment.

All Ball’s work tends to the minimalist. His sentences are short and direct, his paragraphs too. His novels have plenty of white space — both literally and metaphorically — and they stick very close to their central character. Like Ball’s previous work, The Curfew’s small confines are packed with sparse exchanges of dialogue. There are very few details, the clipped narration used for utilitarian scene-setting. Rarely does the language venture into the abstract.

The book is about a man named William and his daughter, Molly, who live in a totalitarian regime. The overthrow of the previous regime is handled so briefly as to essentially be a parenthetical — at some point in William’s past the country wasn’t totalitarian, then things changed very quickly — and now William lives a dual life as a writer of epitaphs (or “epitaphorist,” in Ball’s coinage) for gravestones and a member of the sect-like insurgency against the regime. The narrative focuses upon him, his wife, whom he lost tragically, and his daughter, who cannot communicate via spoken language.

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For Banned Books Week the LARB Blog is featuring — you guessed it — banned authors, weighing in on the experience of being banned, including two novelists whose books made the American Library Association’s 2010 top ten list for most frequently “challenged” titles. It should come as no surprise that they are all YA authors: a category of writer who, perhaps more than any other, is on the front lines of today’s censorship battles.

New York Times bestselling author Ellen Hopkins and Newbery Award-winning author Susan Patron will be writing here on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively, with Sonya Sones, author of one of the top 100 most challenged books of the decade rounding out our “Getting Banned” series on Thursday.

The series begins today with frequently challenged YA novelist and poet Ron Koertge, outlining the case(s) against him. His latest YA novel is Now Playing: Stoner & Spaz II (Candlewick Press) and his latest books of poems are Indigo and Fever (Red Hen Press).

Hazardous Material
Ron Koertge

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Photo courtesy of Sonya Sones

Oh, I’m banned all right. I’ve been in the Kid Lit business for more than thirty years, and I’m regularly criticized, reviled, and consigned to the Challenged Shelf. Aren’t they used to me by now? I’m also cosseted and praised and handed awards. Guess which one I like best.

Exhibit A: Shakespeare Bats Cleanup. Not that Shakespeare. Will isn’t about to put down his quill, slip out of his tights, and step into the batter’s box. My Shakespeare is a fourteen-year-old boy, Kevin, who loves baseball and poetry. SBC is a novel-in-verse, and, in one free verse poem, the Kevin wonders about the sports metaphor still prevalent in middle school: getting to first base with a girl, second base, third base, home run!

Out of the blue, someone in Texas, a mom, writes to my publisher and complains about inappropriateness. My editor writes back. Ruffled feathers are realigned. The book goes onto a special shelf. The Challenged Shelf. The one in the corner. With the yellow caution tape around it. Sometimes Alice Walker is there waiting for me, or Harper Lee. Did I feel banned? Not particularly. I like parents who show an interest in their kids. Is it likely the child in question couldn’t wait to finish the book? Absolutely. Censored and adored.

Exhibits B and C: Stoner & Spaz and its recent sequel Now Playing: Stoner & Spaz II. My editor at Candlewick Press and I agreed that we’d get in trouble with these books. One of the main characters uses drugs and swears a blue streak. S&S was challenged all over the place, often for “advocating drug use and foul language.” I’ll let you in on a closely held YA author’s secret, which is our standard response to this particular concern: Are you fucking kidding me? The novel is, among other things, a cautionary tale. I’m a novelist, okay? Not a polemicist. But nobody in her right mind would use Colleen, putative heroine of the novel, as a role model.

Still, the challenges were expected and S&S went onto the shelf alongside Alice Walker and Harper Lee. Candlewick fielded most of the letters from parents; I answered the ones from kids who loved the book and from librarians who wrote to say it was one of the most purloined books in their collections. It seemed to whisper, “Steal me” from its place in the dark. Does S&S deserve to be challenged? Absolutely. It’s not for everyone. It’s a book for older kids. Should it be banned? Now we’re in the weeds. I was once asked to answer that question, but I’ll save that little story for last.

Let’s turn to exhibit D: The Arizona Kid. This YA novel of mine has to be at least twenty years old. Candlewick reprinted it a few years ago because it’s a good book. Its story—about a young man encountering and coming to terms with a strange new environment—never gets old. Billy (the sixteen year old narrator) goes to Tucson, Arizona, for the summer and stays with his uncle Wes. Billy gets a job at a local race track and meets a cute exercise rider, Cara Mae. They like each other. They’re also from different worlds. Billy’s home is loving and tolerant. Cara Mae’s is rough-and-tumble, hand to mouth. So far, so good. But wait! Uncle Wes is gay. That’s right: a sixteen-year-old boy is staying with a forty-two year old gay man. Call the cops.

It goes without saying there’s not a hint of impropriety between Billy and his uncle. Wes has been out for decades. He’s visited Billy’s folks many times. There’s no secret. That summer, Wes is honest and frank with Billy about everything. Going to work on time, cleaning up after himself around the house, being considerate with Cara Mae, and, here it comes: what it means to be gay. In an oft-quoted passage, Billy tentatively asks his uncle, “How can you kiss guys?” Wes replies with a shrug, “How can you kiss girls?” They agree that some differences are baffling, but there they are.

One of the charges leveled against The Arizona Kid is that it contains a hidden homosexual agenda. Really? Well, God forbid gay men and women should be large-hearted and kind. Or that their relatives should like to be around them.

Years ago I agreed to sit on panels about censorship. After all, even in my fifties I was still the Bad Boy of Young Adult fiction. And here’s what I noticed: at the end of the evening nobody had changed his or her mind. In fact, most of the debaters were more firmly convinced of their rightness than before. It was a phenomenon I’ve learned to call Hardening the Collective. Nobody had a good time, nobody laughed, nobody went out afterward with the opposition and had a drink. I’m glad there are people who are willing to go to those forums and fight that fight. It isn’t for me. God (or the gods or the Source or the Divine Mind or the Great Pumpkin) gave me a little gift, and it’s not a gift for disputation. I’m a poet and a storyteller. I like to fool around with words all morning, go to the race track in the afternoon, then have a drink with my wife and count the money I’ve won.

I also know that somewhere in the U.S. a kid is smuggling one of my books past his mother. And that’s good enough for me. p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }

This Thursday, we sat down with Touré before his reading at Book Soup to talk about his newly released Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?, which collects interviews with 105 influential African-American thinkers, including Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Malcolm Gladwell, all examining what it means to be Black and American in the age of Obama.

A veritable polymath, Touré is a music journalist, novelist, contributing editor at Rolling Stone, MSNBC correspondent, and host of Fuse TV’s Hip Hop Shop. The list goes on: Some fans at the reading referred to him as a “professional tweeter”; his account @Toure has over thirty-seven thousand followers, and he uses the platform to spark daily discussion, responding to and posing individual questions, retweeting invective alongside the hosannas. He’s just as engaging in our interview, discussing his recent book while also touching on the elusive import of a Liberal Arts education, his formative dust-up with the New Yorker, the insidious nature of modern racism, Prince’s sexual legacy, and the worthwhile struggle of wading through Infinite Jest.

Interview and photo: Michael Goetzman

¤

Starting with your early career and working forward: You dropped out of Emory University with a semester left to go. In hindsight, do you chalk that up as last-ditch adolescent impulse, or was there a clear aim in mind?

There’s no doubt it was impulsive, but I knew that I wanted to write; that was the goal. I had already been there for three years, and I stopped understanding why we were doing the whole exercise and what it meant to have a Liberal Arts degree, how that led to a career, and no one could quite explain it. I asked administrators, older students, and graduate students. I needed an answer to “Why are we all doing this march?” And no one could tell me. And I don’t tend to do things when I don’t understand why I’m doing them.

So, I went to New York, got a little apartment, got a little job, and started trying to write for magazines. And when fall came around, and I didn’t go back to school, my parents were like, “What the hell are you doin’?” Luckily, I landed a little internship at Rolling Stone, which eventually lead to me writing for them. I also met someone at the Village Voice, which led to some writing for them, and I just slowly built this momentum over many years.

What did you learn about writing out there in New York? What advice would you give today’s aspiring writers?

I learned to take every moment very seriously. When I had little assignments I took them very seriously. I didn’t take them any less seriously than I took the bigger assignments, and I think that helped the editors around me think, “We should take him seriously, because he even takes the tiny things seriously.”

I also learned to always, always consider my audience. As a music writer, I was constantly reminding myself that I was a representative for the people, trying to keep in mind what the people want to know, and if the people want to know something the artist doesn’t necessarily want to answer, well, it’s my job to make [the artist] answer it, you know? You’re not on the artists’ side; you’re on the fans’ side.

I also tried to always make every story really interesting, as if it were an event for me and the readers, and never let myself be like, “Oh, well … this is just sort of a ho-hum one.” People always ask, “What’s your favorite story?” And I always say, “The next one,” because even if you don’t love the group yourself, you have to find a reason to say, “This is the most interesting and valuable story I’ll ever write” And, I mean, it will be, to the fan that reads it.

It sounds like it all went off without a hitch. Were there any cataclysmic moments of doubt that made you reconsider the whole thing, or was it pretty much smooth sailing?

Well, in the years between dropping out of Emory and applying to grad school at Columbia, I was writing, moving up the ladder, trying to meet people. I eventually met someone at the New Yorker and, after many attempts, finally came up with an idea for a “Talk of the Town” piece. Those are harder work than anything, because you really have to microscope every choice and every word and finally got one of those in there and then got three or four more in, and wrote a couple that didn’t get in for whatever reason. A lot of the time they over-assign, so you may write something great, and they just won’t use it, because others are more timely or whatever.

In any case, after a while I really wanted to do a feature for them. I found an idea, pitched the hell out of it, and they accepted it. It was a piece about a massive record executive that lived here in L.A. So I ended up spending about two or three weeks living here, just talking to the guy. At first he didn’t want to do the story, and then he sort of embraced me to do it, and the whole thing was really an epic sort of hangout, just writing about him.

And I don’t know what happened. I thought it was good. I thought it was good enough. But… the editor didn’t send it back. I did a total rewrite, and it still wasn’t good enough. A third rewrite and it still wasn’t good enough. I had never encountered that, and finally the editor was like, “Look, this isn’t working out. We can’t keep going back and forth. I’m sorry.” And I was baffled. I’m looking at the story and I’m like, “This looks good to me. I read the New Yorker and this looks like a New Yorker story to me; I don’t understand what happened.” And it really bothered me that that had happened and I wanted to make sure that it never happened again, so I started thinking about applying to Columbia graduate school for creative writing.

So that was when you chose to fully embrace writing?

Yeah, exactly, that failure. The thought was that, if I’m going to commit to this, then I need to understand as much as I can about writing, because I don’t want to have this feeling ever again: the feeling that I was confused, or even the feeling that others knew more about writing than I did. So I went there, chose a concentration in nonfiction, and learned a lot. But after graduating you ended up writing a fair amount of fiction. Right, you had to take a class outside of your concentration, so I took a basic fiction class and they gave me some basic tools about how to write a story, and I ended up writing a story that began the journey toward my first book of short stories.

Is the story you’re referring to “The Sad Sweet Story of Sugar Lips Shinehot and the Portable Promised Land”?

Haha, yes, Sugar Lips Shinehot, yes.

And The Portable Promised Land became the title for your collection of short stories.

Right. I mean, the subtheme of the story is that young writers need encouragement because writing is filled with doubt and you have to find the confidence somewhere. Getting published gives you confidence, but if you’re not getting published yet, how do you get the confidence? I wrote two stories while I was at Columbia, and after I left I submitted one to this contest for Zoetrope All-Story, Francis Ford Coppola’s magazine, and I won the contest. So I got this two-week trip to Belize for a writer’s workshop. While I was there, the editor of Zoetrope was like, “You’re good. You could actually do this … as a job.” And I was pretty blown away. It was really nice to hear. I was like, “I kind of thought that; I know of hoped someone else thought that, but for you, a person that’s actually doing this to say that…” So that launched me into writing a bunch of short stories that would end up as Portable Promised Land and then my first novel Soul City.

So how would you say these two previous books informed Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? Or do you think of it as a departure?

It’s a departure in that it’s narrative nonfiction. I mean, I have typically liked to look at what is means to be black, and I think you see that in The Portable Promised Land and Soul City in various sort of exaggerated, surreal, and imaginative ways. I used magical realism in those stories because when you encounter narrative as an adult, you kind of know what’s going to happen the first time you see the boy and the girl make eyes, you kind of know that they’re going to end up together, because you’ve already absorbed a million stories. But when you first receive a narrative as a child, of course, you don’t know what’s going to happen, and it’s a much more pure and exciting journey filled with “And then what?”s. “Well, Jack climbed up the beanstalk.” “And then what?!” The thought was that if you use these imaginative, almost childlike elements, you begin to embrace the wonder of not knowing what’s going to happen. One of the things that I ended up finding, however, is that [magical realism] distances you from the reader, because it’s so fantastic and such a leap outside of people’s lives. So I had a desire to write more realistic fiction, with people with real problems instead of these sublime people.

And then I started to feel like fiction is great, but it’s still a trip into another world, whereas nonfiction is a trip into your own world; you choose to read a nonfiction book because you think it will inform your world in some way. And, with fiction, you can’t really share it with your friends unless they’re reading the same book pretty much at the same time. You know, I just read Simon Reynolds’s Retromania, and there are so many moments and ideas that you can pull out and discuss with people who haven’t ever read it. They don’t really need to have read it to engage with it; whereas with fiction, it’s difficult to talk about. So I started to get more interested in the power of nonfiction.

So with nonfiction as the chosen genre, what motivated you to begin working on Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?

When Barack Obama started winning all the caucuses, thirteen in a row, and it was clear that he was going to win the primary, I, along with the rest of the black community, was awestruck. Before Iowa, most optimistic black people would tell you that white America isn’t ready for a black president. Well, it became very clear that they were ready. “When did they get ready? We didn’t know that they were ready.” Something has changed in the country, and that was really the moment where I thought I should put up a thermometer and see where we are and what else has changed in America. Obama is a harbinger of change; the change has happened, and my aim was to explore what that change is.

One of the main concerns of the book is making clear the difference between a “post-racial” society, a phrase that was thrown around a lot after Obama was elected, and a “post-black” one, a term from the art world that you’ve adopted to describe our current political condition. Right. I reject the idea of a “post-racial” society. We’re simply not in one. The word is thrown around a lot, and I’m not even sure what the exact definition is supposed to be. I think it means a society in which race distinctions don’t exist or aren’t acknowledged as meaningful. But race still matters in America, and still affects pretty much everything. With “post-blackness,” I’m talking about something completely different: I’m talking about a concept that comes from the art world, that was used to define artists that attempted to be rooted in but not constrained by their black identity. I’m trying to attack and destroy the idea that there is a correct or legitimate way of doing blackness. Black artists in the 80s and 90s exemplified that. They are coming from black traditions; they might want to paint black people, but then they may not; they may want to relate to European traditions or South American traditions. They want the freedom to transcend their black identity to explore other parts of their identity. Black artists, like other professionals, now feel free to pursue any interest they like, and are no longer burdened with the requirement to represent “the race.”

And, as you said, I started to see this in the real world, which isn’t to say that we’re in a post-black era, where those freedoms to be black however you want to be are open to everybody; it doesn’t mean that racism won’t happen to you. In fact, I spend quite a large part of the book talking about the impact of racism on us and how racism has changed from my grandparents’ time to now, how it is still a central part of how we are formed and shaped. It’s never some incidental thing; it is a seminal thing that shapes how you grow and who you become. A lot of people have said, “This is the most racist thing that ever happened to me, and that moment is a direct link to the person I would end up becoming.”

In the book Henry Louis Gates calls that moment the “scene of instruction.”

Right, and he coined that after seeing that moment a lot in black memoir and literature. Paul Mooney calls it a “nigga wake-up call.” It’s that trauma where society basically informs you, “Hey, this is what being black means. It means a lesser humanity, a lesser intelligence, a lesser worth, a lesser value. You’re a cut below.” One of the things I found in doing research for the book is that the motivations behind old-school racism versus modern racism are exactly the same: it’s spirit murder, a desire to say that you are of lesser value and worth and importance. The difference now, with modern racism, has to do with when it happens and how it’s conveyed. For my grandparents, they saw it coming, and it was very binary and clear; there were racist laws, and it was all very obvious. Now we have all this jargon; we have glass ceilings, stereotype-threat, micro-regressions; we have redlining; we have all these different sorts of racism, which makes it a sort of slippery, amorphous thing, and a lot of the time its like fog: I know it’s there but I can’t quite touch it, and if I tried to explain it to someone they may be like, “Well, aren’t you being a little sensitive? He’s well-meaning.”

Many people you interviewed made the point that modern racism is so insidious precisely because it is often so tacit and covert; they spoke about how the most racist moment of their lives was most likely something they never even knew about, like an opportunity they didn’t even know they had lost.

Exactly. Most of them talked about how the most racist thing that ever happened to them was unknowable, and it’s very complicated to walk around knowing that that there is this ghost in the machine. Elizabeth Alexander, a professor at Yale, talks about the continual underestimation and miscalculation of black intelligence, though it rarely makes itself plain. So this is the danger of “post-black” society; racism becomes covert, and is nonetheless a constant shaper of who we are and how we are.

Do you think you’ll use this book as a jumping-off point for another nonfiction project, or do you have something different in the works?

I do know what my next two or three books will be, but they’re not coming out of this. I toy with the idea of going further into concepts on race, because I think it’s really productive and it really feeds people; they want to talk about it and examine it, but I think I might’ve exhausted it with this book. For my next project, “Skip” Gates asked me to do a lecture series at Harvard. So I’m going to talk about Prince and his relationship to Generation X: how he became an icon and how he fits the longing and desires of Gen X, the idea being that icons don’t become icons simply because they make the best music — it’s not a meritocracy — but because they are saying something that the generation wants to hear.

It’s not coincidental, for example, that Prince’s popularity explodes at the time AIDS explodes. Here’s this hypersexual person at a time where anxiety about sex is greater than ever. I was a virgin at the time I learned about AIDs and about Prince, and yet I still felt that anxiety. You’re a young teenager; you know you’re going to have sex eventually. You’re like, “Shit, you could die from having sex? This is the worst time in the history of the world to be fourteen!” And here comes this guy who’s allowing you to vicariously have amazing, wild, erotic experiences, who looks like he was far more experienced than you could ever be, and it was this crazy Casanova cross-dresser. So he’s doing all this sexual stuff, at home and on stage while the generation is freaked out about sex, and you can put your sexual energy into him just by vicariously experiencing him or wanting to be with him. The published lecture will be out sometime next year, I imagine.

And after that, I’m going to do Nas’s autobiography. He and I just started working on that; we did one chapter and just announced the deal.

And last question, the required one seeing as that you’re dealing with the Los Angeles Review of Books: What are you reading?

I’m glad you asked, because I just made a commitment to myself to try to read Infinite Jest this year; I just started on the plane. I like it; it’s heavy, but I love David Foster Wallace and, you know, whenever I travel I always have a back-up book for whenever my main book starts to flag or bore me or we don’t have a good relationship. So I’m doing this David Foster Wallace thing; I brought Consider the Lobster as my back-up book, but I want to keep pressing on with Infinite Jest. It’s probably one of the few great modern novels that I haven’t read.

Well, I think you’re in good company.

Right, but all the people who have read it are like this is amazing, so I’m stickin’ to it!

Image: Strata © Stanford Kay

The second installment of SUSAN SALTER REYNOLDS’s regular column.

This week, Ben Loory, Mary Jane Nealon, Frances Moore Lappé, and Henri Cole.

Ben Loory
Stories for Nighttime and Some for Day
Penguin, July 2011. 210 pp.

Strange, gorgeous fables — the reader isn’t sure if she has dreamed them or read them. A homesick octopus with a collection of spoons drinking tea in his tidy apartment? A duck falls in love with a rock? UFOs, sharks. Some of these small stories are like opening a door, entering a room. Some are nightmares — a long tunnel; death approaching on a road. Some feel like being on a rickety ride at an amusement park; objects float by — a lacquered box, a spoon. Some are full of fear and anger — a woman who buys a book with no words, the angrier she gets, the higher the book climbs on the bestseller lists. All have that Italo Calvino sparkle; all unpack reality, peel it back, step politely over it. “And then, finally, on his dying day, the man gets up and goes into the yard. He stands gazing up into the sky. Overhead, the stars twinkle down. It was worth it! The man cries. It was worth it just to know you! It was worth it just to even know your name! And in response, the sky explodes. The gates of heaven open in flame.” It’s a flea market, this collection, an endless avenue of story stalls. How did he create this romper room, this free zone, and then give himself permission to play on paper in ways that are not only accessible to the rest of us, but give us permission, too? I see only two clues in his bio and they are not substantial: He lives in L.A. On top of a hill.

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Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.

Friday, September 23^rd: Justin Torres discusses and signs We The Animals at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00pm.

Leslie Stein signs and discusses her new graphic novel Eye of the Majestic Creature at Secret Headquarters in Silverlake, beginning at 7:00 pm.

Moving Images: A Conversation with Laurie Simmons and Lena Dunham at USC’s University Park Campus, moderated by LARB Contributing Editor Howard Rodman, beginning at 7:00 pm.

Alex Shakar discusses and signs Luminarium at Book Soup, beginning at 7:00 pm.

Saturday, September 24^th: LARB Contributing Editor Aimee Bender and Jordan Crane present and sign James & The Giant Peach at Book Soup, beginning at 5:00pm.

LARB Poetry Editor Gabrielle Calvocoressi reads at Paper or Plastik Cafe, beginning at 7:30pm.

Sunday, September 25^th: Jeff Garlin’s Book Club meets to discuss Sara Gran’s Dope at Book Soup beginning at 4:00 pm.

Thursday, September 29^th: LARB Contributing Editors Aimee Bender and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum present and sign Fantastic Women at Book Soup beginning at 7:00 pm.

JERVEY TERVALON, SUSAN OLDING, BRIAN ATTEBERY,
RACHEL NEWCOMB, and JAYNA BROWN with short takes on five new books.

Image from The Adventures of Unemployed Man by Erich Origen and Gan Golan
Courtesy of Little, Brown and Company

JERVEY TERVALON
Erich Origen and Gan Golan
The Adventures of Unemployed Man
Little, Brown, October 2010. 80 pp.

Let me tell you, nothing focuses one’s attention on the plight of the unemployed like humiliating, disorienting, emasculating unemployment, even if, now, the sting of it is mitigated by its sheer commonness. Who doesn’t know of horrible stories of rejection, tales of wholesale destruction of careers? For the last few years I’ve watched the slow-motion slaughter of the careers of my journalist friends, many of whom lost their jobs because of the super villainous machinations of one of the most despised men in journalism, The Zell, CEO of our dear, bankrupt hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times. Who among us, newspaper readers all, has not wanted to punch Zell in the kisser? And even so, he’s only a sidekick to the most evil of the bunch — Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch, the Darkseid of CEO’s — overseeing a ghoulish army of merciless minions impersonating journalists. As our time descends into economic chaos and general mayhem, the world often seems like an outsized comic book. And those who speak with the loudest and most hysterical voices seem as determined as any supervillain to set the entire country aflame.

The Adventures of Unemployed Man, by Erich Origen and Gan Golan, looks at the current economic tragedy with a comic book sensibility and a populist world view, bringing to mind the inventive genius of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, with a 1960s underground-comic vibe, wit, and good nature. It tells the story of the economic decline of the United States through the travails of the vainglorious Ultimatum, a Batman-like character, who is at first a defender of the status quo, branding unto the foreheads of the unfortunate a reminder in the shape of a U that they are solely responsible for their economic misfortune, but a moment’s painful awakening reveals his naivete and how rigged and unfair the economic system is, and everything is torn from him — including his standing in his father’s former company, his palatial estate, and his fortune. He becomes the Unemployed Man! Beaten and bested at every turn, he finds refuge among the denizens of Cape Town, penniless superheroes who have formed a squatter’s camp. Eventually, Unemployed Man finds himself in the middle of rebellion against the unmitigated greed of Just Us, a villainous super group of CEOs, hedge fund operators, and Wall Street brokers.

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LARB correspondent Kate Wolf reports from this year’s Los Angeles Road Concert.

Sunset Boulevard: the most infamous thoroughfare in all Los Angeles? Its 24 miles run from the outer core of downtown head first into the Pacific, passing disparate pockets of poverty and opulence, chintz and trash, from bohemian enclaves to Dianetics’ baby blue hub, from the Dome to the Strip to the towering hedges of Bel Air, the shade of Rustic Canyon eucalyptus, the provincial lure of the Palisades and on to the abyss; its fabled drugstores, where the stars were discovered, its pavement where one tragically expired, and its mansions where another, a fictional has-been, planned her glorious return to the screen.

Last Sunday, the myth and the street came together to play host to the Third Annual Los Angeles Road Concert, a project started by writer, musician and performance artist Stephen Van Dyck in 2008 (San Fernando Road and Washington Boulevard were the previous Concert locales). This year, responding to an open invitation, a group of over 100 artists staged site-specific performances, installations, happenings and concerts on spots dotted along Sunset’s entirety, proving at times just how much one can get away with in the numerous sections of ignored or disused public space that make up the sidewalks of this city.

A sampling of events began at the intersection of Figueroa and Sunset around 2:45 pm when I was presented with a handmade carpooler badge by the artist Miggie Wong and directed to a newspaper dispenser filled with maps of “Places to Shit On Sunset Blvd,” compiled by John Burtle and thoughtfully accompanied by a piece of toilet paper (nearest place listed at that moment: the CVS across the street). From there I drove west to Portia and Sunset where, along a fence, artist Billy Kheel had set up dozens of pennants for nonexistent teams: the Pigs, the Gliders and Fruit. The flags, silkscreened by Kheel himself, combined recognizable color combinations (Lakers purple and gold, etc.) and were named in reference to three iconic cult families: Manson, Source, and the Children of God.

Near the Brite Spot I saw a low shack made of palm fronds and a pair of legs emerging from it. Though intrigued, I kept driving. I pulled over to a VW Jetta parked at Sunset and Golden Gate advertising itself as a “Video Art Taxi” but, sadly, found it abandoned at that moment. If Niko Solorio had been present, I would have been able to view works by L.A. artists such as Marnie Weber, Trulee Grace Hall, and Zachary Drucker, among many others, all from the comfort of a backseat.

At the little triangle park on Sunset and Edgecliff, Jonathan Gomez had assembled a Dog Disco out of sheets of colored plastic, complete with a mini disco ball, meant to bring together the cruising potential of both dog parks and dance clubs. In just twenty minutes, the disco had already hosted a German Shepherd and Cocker Spaniel.

A performance by the band Comfort Zone and a troupe of dancers all dressed in black at the Sunset and Vermont metro stop actually seemed to halt traffic, drawing various onlookers. From my car, I caught the last moments, as the dancers strut into the metro’s elevator and disappeared underground. Next I went over to Normandie and Sunset where Los Angeles Times music critic and fiction writer Margaret Wappler had set up a typewriter on the street and was handing out Los Angeles Birth Certificates. Some questions necessary before becoming a citizen: Where is your favorite strip mall, and why is it your favorite? What is the first distinctly L.A. sound you remember experiencing? Write down three emotions that succinctly capture your feelings toward palm trees.

Across the street Kate Durbin had just arrived and was beginning her Pile of Panties performance. In the fading afternoon light, she ripped open plastic bags filled with used underwear sent to her from women all over the world and piled them up into distinct little mounds of cotton and lace. Durbin herself was barely dressed and, after a while, some guys from across the way at the 7-11 finally realized what was going on and turned to watch over passing traffic.

On “Guitar Row” I heard someone starting up a rendition of the Doors’ “Break On Through,” and pulled into a red zone. Outside the Sunset Grill, seasoned performer Artie Vegas was playing with his band and special guest Tequila Mockingbird, and playing loud at that. “They’re fine with it — they asked us to do this,” Vegas said of the restaurant’s management. At last, outside the Grill, I crossed paths with Van Dyck, who always surveys his Road Concerts from the back of a motorbike, wearing a gold football helmet à la Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider. Currently his driver was inside, getting a soda. “This is the best day of my life,” he said. Surprisingly there had yet to be a hitch in almost six hours of events.

I left the Grill to try and catch the last bit of a performance below the Chateau Marmont by the musicians Corey Fogel and Jonathan Silberman. I arrived too late but had a pleasant chat with West Hollywood council member and double CalArts alum (Van Dyck and many of the Concert’s other participants also attended CalArts) John D’Amico, who had set up a welcome desk right at the border of Los Angeles and West Hollywood. “Welcome to West Hollywood,” he greeted unwitting tourists once they had passed the line. D’Amico, who received an M.A. in Aesthetics and Politics from CalArts in 2009 and also works as an architect, said he moved to West Hollywood in the 80s. Since then he had experienced the city changing for the worse, “misremembering its future.” He likes to think of West Hollywood as “an exciting, idiosyncratic place where people can come and transform their lives.”

So far during his time in council, D’Amico’s already established “Go-Go Dancer Appreciation Day,” as well as something called the “Groovy Guy Contest,” and he’s interested in art as well. When he takes his turn as mayor next year he plans on starting an initiative of 365 days of art in the city and of course getting Van Dyck involved. So, though I had reached the end of my road (festivities continued West, culminating with a naked photo shoot on the beach at sundown), talking to D’Amico I felt pretty sure something else was just beginning.

All photos courtesy Kate Wolf.

SUSAN STEWART

on Michel Serres’s ecological philosophy.

It Runs in the Family © 2010 Joshua Dildine

Michel Serres
Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution?
Stanford University Press, September 2010. 104 pp.

If only the magical etiologies of consumerism were true — oranges grow in the produce aisle, milk flows from the dairy case, shirts and shoes emerge online. However, a deeper look into the origins of these products is sure to darken your view. Take, for example, the cell phone. Its battery and other parts have likely been manufactured in the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen, China, an area once known for its fertile, hilly farmland. The Shenzhen landscape has been bulldozed flat; the rain runs black with acid and, despite recent experiments with electric taxis, and state propaganda promising the greening of the city, it is often not safe to breathe outdoors. The air inside the enormous complexes, where cell phones, tablets, and other electronic devices are assembled for a variety of brands — including Apple, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Motorola, and Nokia — likely isn’t any safer. Migrant workers from the countryside reside in company-provided dormitories. Their performance is measured in seconds. The only way they can make a living above a subsistence level is by taking on illegal amounts of overtime. One worker perished of exhaustion after a 34-hour shift. At least 17 workers committed suicide in 2010 and 2011; one, as I write in late July, as recently as a few days ago. China’s overall suicide rate is high compared to other countries, but the factory owners’ decision to string nets around the upper stories of these industrial complexes indicates a different kind of business as usual.

Beyond this grim point of origin, your phone is likely to have a troubled afterlife. Use it in public in confined spaces and you’ll be sure to get attention from other people: you’ll be keeping them distracted when they would like to concentrate and awake when they would like to rest; your conversations at a distance will take precedence over their face-to-face conversations. Even if such “mental pollution” does not trouble you; your physical health will be answering to your phone. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology issued a report this spring describing how cell phone signals can disorient bees and may be the primary cause of the widespread catastrophe of colony collapse that has been progressing since the 1970s. Sad for the bees, you might think, and you may even realize it has been a while since you have seen a honeybee. Some might argue that constant non-ionizing radiation next to the brain does not conclusively cause brain cancer or change brain glucose metabolism (counter to a recent announcement from the World Health Organization), but you and your fellow animals nevertheless need to eat to live: honeybees fertilize 70 percent of the 100 crops most often used for human food.

Finally, when a cell phone is traded in for a new one, consider where the plastic, lead, and lithium of the old one will go; someone is going to arrange for the outdated phone’s disposal — you may even yourself take the time to deliver it to a recycling center, but where and how will the recycling come about? If you take your old phone to a responsible organization, you could help reduce the disastrous environmental and human consequences of mining throughout the world; if you let it fall into less scrupulous hands, it may end up dumped in Nigeria or back in China.

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The Ether is not what it used to be. Our voices often skip state lines and time zones and traverse international waters before they ever encounter a legit conversation back home. For this, the Ether is becoming a congested and busy place with lots of pedestrian traffic (in a non-pejorative sense). Here’s who we’ve bumped into lately:

David Bezmozgis “On Literary Love,” an essay about writer Leonard Michaels: …if you were a writer, you were a fool or a heretic to say anything about your deepest and most fundamental influence. No matter what you said, you would never get it right, you would unmask yourself, and you would — quite justifiably — suffer the shame of profaning a sacred thing…

Kabi Hartman diagnoses the “The Talking Cure at Work in Contemporary YA Fiction”: In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, Marcia Angell explores the “shift from ‘talk therapy’ to drugs as the dominant mode of treatment” for mental illness. Nevertheless, fictional teenagers are still talking to therapists for pages on end. Having now read a growing pile of novels, I can vouch for the fact that teen protagonists are actually having insights and getting better. In fact, the majority of these novels depict psychotherapy as transformative.

Lijia Zhang disagrees with Ai Weiwei’s assessment of Beijing: Every day I chat and crack jokes with my neighbours, who always lend me a hand when I drag my heavy electric scooter in and out of my house. Joaquin, a friend stayed with me recently, grew up in Latin America. He described the neighborhood like “a slum in Venezuela without the violence or danger.”

Michael H. Rowe anatomizes “9 Ways of Looking at a Single Paragraph”: It was during the summer of 2009 that I first read the opening paragraph to German novelist Peter Handke’s 1970 novel, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. It remains the most tantalizingly confusing paragraph I’ve ever read…

In Canteen, our own Matthew Specktor asks the time-honored question: “Why Don’t They Drop the Bomb on L.A.?”: Some years ago, I was interviewed by the BBC in New York. The topic was “Books Abroad,” focusing on the fractious relationship between literary publishing and Hollywood. At the time, I was a senior studio executive stationed in Manhattan. I was supposed to know something about how and why certain books became movies, what motivated a producer to pay three million dollars for an unwritten novel, why other adaptations got stuck inside development hell — in short, why Angelenos were so stupid, or at least why the movie business was so venal and corrupt as to treat publishing (or, more specifically, writers) like chattel.

In the print and access-restricted Interether:

Elif Batuman at Harper’s, “A Divine Comedy: Among the Danteans in Florence”: Truly, Google is like Dante’s afterworld: the celestial rose that reclaims and restores all things, placing them in their true positions; a many-tiered hierarchical world where nobody is lost and everyone is found, and where we have all already embarked upon eternal life, divested of our still-living bodies — much as the soul of Branca d’Oria writhes in the Inferno while his body, on earth, continues to eat, sleep, and wear clothes.

And finally, poet Dorothea Lasky at Tin House (from the “Ecstatic” issue):

“I like weird-ass hippies
And men with hairy backs
And small green animals
And organic milk
And chickens that hatch
Out of farms in Vermont
I like weird-ass stuff…”

Photo credit: C.P. Heiser

GEORGIA JEFFRIES on Luke Rhinehart’s The Dice Man

and WILLIAM MARLING on the latest vogue for James M. Cain

Hands with Dice © 2010 Emily Eveleth

GEORGIA JEFFRIES
Amateurs

Luke Rhinehart
The Dice Man
Overlook Press 1998 [originally published 1971]. 324 pp.

“It’s like being in the middle of a movie I’ve never seen before … where I’m the star.”

⎯ A “dice student” singing the praises of his mentor, Dr. Luke Rhinehart

A few days before Jeff Parker was shot to death on his mother’s doorstep, we talked over lunch at a patio café in Newport Beach. I wanted to write a book about what happened on April 30, 1983, and he wanted people to know he wasn’t the monster they read about in their morning papers.

Three months had passed since a San Francisco businesswoman named Joan Mills collapsed in a Beverly Hills hotel room after a night saturated with sex, champagne, and high-grade cocaine. The man she had met only hours before, panicked and coked out of his mind, was trying to administer CPR to her battered body when the paramedics arrived. As soon as Mills was pronounced DOA at the hospital, police arrested her new companion, Jeff Parker. Pictures of the victim and the accused made the front page – and why not? Both were young, blond and beautiful, seemingly successful, the world at their feet until a one-night stand went wildly wrong. “L.A.’s Mr. Goodbar Murder” captured headlines up and down the California coast.

Freed on bail, Jeff agreed to meet with me because I was a family friend. “The accident,” as he called Mills’s death, was simply a bad reaction to the drugs he had generously provided. The tragedy for both of them, according to this self-described all-American boy from Minnesota, was simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. His only regret seemed to be the embarrassment he caused his mother and sister.

An optimist by nature, he hoped to be cleared of murder charges and make the most of prison time for drug possession by writing stories for his favorite TV series, Cheers. After all, he could spin comic banter with the best of them. He asked if I might be able to get him a copy of a sample script from my new agent, and I promised I would. Pleased, he wanted to give something in return. As we walked out, he opened the trunk of his sports car, pulled out a cherished hardcover edition of The Dice Man, and handed it to me. This book, he said, is hilarious. More than that, it can change your life. Read it.

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Want to follow the LARB’s proliferating contributors, editors, and contributing editors on Twitter? Here’s a useful, one-stop resource. We’ll be updating this list as our ranks continue to swell, so please bookmark this page and check back frequently.

rezaaslan Reza Aslan, Contributing Editor; author, “The Fire This Time”

Mojojohanna Johanna Blakley, Contributing Editor

misscecil Cecil Castellucci, YA Editor

marc_cooper Marc Cooper, Contributing Editor

ScottEsposito Scott Esposito, Contributing Editor

danagoodyear Dana Goodyear, Contributing Editor

chanceofraincom Emily Green, Contributing Editor, author, “Cut and Paste and Run”

eahanks E.A. Hanks, Associate Editor

evankindley Evan Kindley, Managing Editor

LailaLalami Laila Lalami, Contributing Editor

DMattin David Mattin, Contributing Editor; author, “Exile on Fleet Street” and “Lost in the Supermarket”

kembrew Kembrew McLeod, Contributing Editor

lisajanepersky Lisa Jane Persky, Art Director/Editor-at-Large, author “Skin Deep”

VanessaPlace Vanessa Place, Contributing Editor

david_j_roth David Roth, author “Household Saint”

chrisricewriter Christopher Rice, Contributing Editor, author “It’s Good to Be King”

benschwartzy Ben Schwartz, Comics Editor

_DavidShields David Shields, Contributing Editor, author “Life is Short; Art is Shorter” and “Still Hungry”

encurtido Mark Haskell Smith, Contributing Editor; author, “Year of the Fire Cock”

matthewspecktor Matthew Specktor, Senior Editor

jwassers Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Asia Editor; author, “Hot Dystopic: Orwell and Huxley at the Shanghai World’s Fair”

EllisWeiner Ellis Weiner, Contributing Editor; author, “Stephen Potter: Life Among the Acquaintances”


And then, of course, there’s this:

LAReviewofBooks Los Angeles Review of Books
That should get you started!

JENNY HENDRIX

on two fictions of excess.

The Ghosts of Liberation © Terry Rodgers 2010 Oil on Linen, All rights reserved

Nicholson Baker
House of Holes
Simon & Schuster, August 2011. 272 pp.

DBC Pierre
Lights Out in Wonderland
W.W. Norton & Co, August 2011. 350 pp.

It is a dangerous thing to take up the language of excess. Prose, in its purpling, can draw attention to its artificiality so fully as to outshine its ostensible subject. This is true even if the subject is excess itself. As DBC Pierre writes in his new novel, Lights Out in Wonderland,

Surely to throw light on a decadence we have to step away from its lingo, twisted as this has been to sanction outrage. Because isn’t language the buttress of civilization? Honed to explain quirks and crimes in all subtlety, without margin for error or escape?

Perhaps writers have taken this caution to heart — because while there is no shortage of dissolute or decadent characters in recent fiction, the style of decadence itself has receded over the past several decades in favor of a more workmanlike prose that describes contemporary life without tunneling into its spirit with twisted lingo or approaching it obliquely through symbol and myth. Few mainstream contemporary writers actually allow their language to be infected by the wild, baroque, and unreal. Perhaps, in a time like our own, the straightforwardness of newsprint seems hallucinatory enough. Still, artifice has to be part of the conversation: superficiality, extravagance, and the whole aesthetic spectrum between pleasure and obscenity are undeniably part of the Way We Live Now. And as two new novels — including Pierre’s — prove, there are still writers nuts enough to risk engaging with too-much-ness in its own vernacular. By turning contemporary decadence into a style, they demonstrate the truth of Oscar Wilde’s maxim that “nothing succeeds like excess.”

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Iris I © Mark Hanauer All Rights Reserved

L.A. Photographer and LARB contributor Mark Hanauer presents “Personal Nature,” a photography exhibition at the Huntington Botanical Gardens through November 1st.

“I love to look inside of things and discover the typically unseen details that comprise the whole. These images are meditations on beauty — a metaphor for how I want to live my life. After years of operating at warp speed as a commercial photographer, I stopped to smell the roses and take a look within. What I found took my breath away.”

Visit the Huntington or see more of Mr. Hanauer’s work here.

SARA MARCUS

on Ellen Willis’s escape from the music ghetto.

© Nona Willis Aronowitz 2011
Courtesy of University of Minnesota Press

Ellen Willis
Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music
University of Minnesota Press, May 2011. 272 pp.

For a universal language, music can feel downright limiting sometimes. When I was 26 and reviewing records for Time Out New York (the weekly magazine’s pop section was then in its golden age) and The Advocate (the gay one) and a few smaller rags besides, my then boyfriend, a noise guitarist, bought me a copy of the writings of Lester Bangs. “You can’t be a rock critic without reading this,” he decreed.

I had never meant to become a rock critic — my bandmate and I moved to Philadelphia after college, and when I presented myself to the alt-weekly there as an aspiring political journalist, the editor-in-chief zeroed in on the two record reviews in my file of clips and shunted me over to the music section. In the four years since that development, I had read Greil Marcus’s (no relation) marvelous postpunk reviews, collected as In the Fascist Bathroom, and not much other music journalism at all. It seemed to me that most contemporary rock magazines were propagating an artless scorecard-genealogy version of criticism, treating music in isolation from other art, culture, and political realities. And I had certainly never read Bangs, whose irascible, rambling rock-crit from the 1970s many considered to be classic examples of the genre. I gave him a solid try, but every page I opened to just turned me off. This was the canon? If all those dudes at Rolling Stone and Spin were taking their cues from a nihilistic, homophobic, apolitical speed freak, it was no wonder the whole game left me cold.

Shortly afterward, I visited the apartment of a friend of a friend, an older critic of some renown, to take a bunch of old jazz cassettes off his hands. He asked me what I wrote. Mostly record reviews now, I told him, but I planned to expand my purview, write more about politics, teenagers, women…

The critic gave a small snort. “Good luck getting out of the music ghetto,” he said.

His tone spooked me. I took my plastic spork and started digging an escape tunnel right then. That tunnel led to the writing of my first book, Girls to the Front, a history of Riot Grrrl, a feminist movement of young women. It always gets shelved in the music section.

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Still from trailer for The Big Combo (1955) Allied Artists
John Alton, Cinematographer

The first installment of LARB’s new monthly crime fiction column.
Duane Swierczynski
Fun & Games
Mulholland Books, June 2011. 304 pp.

Jason Starr
The Pack
Ace Books, June 2011. 352 pp.

Megan Abbott
The End of Everything
Reagan Arthur Books, July 2011. 256 pp.

Sara Gran
Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June 2011. 288 pp.

Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins
Kiss Her Goodbye
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 2011. 288 pp.

2011 is turning out to be a banner year for crime fiction. Despite all the hubbub over the encroaching death of the publishing industry, crime lit continues to flourish, branching out like so many rivulets from an endless pool of blood. First-time authors and beloved mainstays have found homes with new publishers of various sizes. Among the most welcome arrivals is Mulholland Books, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. Still only a few months old, their roster already boasts such fine writers as the backwoods bard Daniel Woodrell, with his astoundingly atmospheric The Bayou Trilogy, as well as Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Lawrence Block and his A Drop of the Hard Stuff, a dark (and sober) night of the soul featuring series favorite, Matthew Scudder. On the indie scene, New Pulp Press is still going strong in its third year, ushering in several noteworthy debuts, including Heath Lowrance’s The Bastard Hand (a wicked good “Bad Preacher” story: Gil Brewer meets Night of the Hunter). Four of the summer’s most anticipated novels come from rising stars poised to break into the mainstream: Megan Abbott’s The End of Everything, Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, Jason Starr’s The Pack, and Duane Swierczynski’s Fun & Games. This summer also marks the return of the legendary private eye Mike Hammer. In Kiss Her Goodbye, the late Mickey Spillane and his co-author, Max Allan Collins, have a few new tricks up their sleeves for the gat-wielding shamus. Each of the authors above take bold steps in new directions. Their risks pay off on the page, resulting in some of the finest novels of their respective careers.

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ISTVAN CSICSERY-RONAY

talks to Kim Stanley Robinson about his Three Californias trilogy,

and MARK BOULD reviews Robinson’s latest collection.

Storm No. 2 © Ran Ortner 2009 All rights reserved

Kim Stanley Robinson is best known for his monumental science fiction trilogies about the terraforming of Mars (1992-95) and reversing the global climate crisis (2004-07), and his most recent, Galileo’s Dream (2009). Yet back before the mainstream culturati granted science fiction their seal of approval, Robinson produced one of the great achievements not only of the genre, but of modern California writing. In Three Californias, science fiction, adventure, ecofiction, utopian dreaming, and social realism mesh in a Zen-inflected political vision distinctively Californian. Each novel tells a different version of the future of Orange County. In The Wild Shore (1984), historical development has been reversed by a massive neutron-bomb attack on the U.S. The Gold Coast (1988) depicts a barely displaced extrapolation of 80s development. Most of the region has undergone hyperdevelopment, freeways are built in complex stacks, and only the rich have access to open undeveloped land; the local economy depends on defense industries and drug trafficking. In the final piece of the triptych, Pacific Edge (1990), citizen action has produced laws limiting the growth and influence of corporations; localities establish codes and customs to reclaim previously developed land and to manage natural systems with rational, democratic trade and governance. Utopian social arrangements are in place, a ceiling is placed on income and exploitation, work and politics are based in face-to-face relationships, and daily life revolves around mundane, un-heroic activities like community softball. Each book involves subtle echoes of the others — some characters and events appear in each — but each future has its own sharply distinctive style.

       — Istvan Csicsery-Ronay

Out the window is the single stretch of California’s coast left undeveloped: the center of U.S. Marine Camp Joseph H. Pendleton. Dark hills, a narrow coastal plain cut by dry ravines, covered with dark brush. Grass gray in the moonlight. Something about it is so quiet, so empty, so pure…. My God, he thinks… The land. A pang of loss pierces him: this land that they live on, under its caking of concrete and steel and light – it was a beautiful place once. And now there’s no way back.

— from The Gold Coast

Kim Stanley Robinson: It began with a single notion: I was driving from UC San Diego to Orange County in 1971, having recently discovered science fiction. As I drove through Camp Pendleton I was struck by how empty the land there remained, and then when I hit the border of Orange County, San Clemente suddenly surrounded me, and I saw that different histories do different things to the land. It occurred to me that if I set three science fiction novels in Orange County, I could show how the land was different as a result. Three obvious future history forms were the utopian, the dystopian, and the after-the-fall (I had just read Earth Abides, A Canticle For Leibowitz, etc.). Then it occurred to me that one character could live in all three futures, and have three completely different lives, visible to the reader but not to the character.

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Art by J. Michael Walker, featured on Thursday, September 15th event

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this week, for your potential enjoyment.
Thursday, September 15^th: Alexandra Fuller in conversation with Louise Steinman at the Mark Taper Auditorium-Central Library beginning at 7:00pm.
Libros Schmibros – Westwood will host artist J. Michael Walker and Glen Creason for discussion about LA maps at Hammer Museum from 5:30-7:00pm.
Friday, September 16^th: Janet Reitman discusses and signs her book Inside Scientology at Skylight Books beginning at 7:30 pm.
Saturday, September 17^th: Special opening event: Hal Glicksman at Pomona, with Mowry Baden and Thomas Crow at Pomona College Museum of Art beginning at 4:00pm.
L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints publication launch and signing at Roberts & Tilton beginning from 5:00-7:00pm.
Writer Laurie Ochoa turns the Hammer Museum into a clubhouse for Slake LA, featuring readings of various writers’ work from 2:00-6:00pm.
City Lights presents: Micah Ballard and Will Alexander at Beyond Baroque beginning at 7:00pm.
Tuesday, September 20^th: Words in Public Spaces: An Evening with Jenny Holzer at USC Fisher Museum of Art beginning at 7:00pm.
Wednesday, September 21^st: Denise Hamilton discusses and signs Damage Control at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 7:00pm.

DAVID ROTH

on Wilfred Santiago’s life of Roberto Clemente.

Roberto Clemente Topps™ Baseball Card 1971

Wilfred Santiago
21: The Story of Roberto Clemente
Fantagraphics, 2011. 200 pp.

Roberto Clemente died on New Year’s Eve, 1972, when a small plane carrying Clemente, four other men, and 16,000 pounds of aid bound for earthquake-wracked Nicaragua disappeared into the waters off Clemente’s native Puerto Rico. This made it that much more peculiar when, a few years ago, Clemente started showing up on the subway in New York City. Not the man himself, of course, but his image, which turned up in the subway advertising for a sketchy-seeming law firm: sketchy in that the phone number listed on their se habla Espanol-minded advertisements was, confoundingly and perhaps a little offensively, 1-800-MARGARITA. Straphangers were left to ponder the connection between a baseball player and the cash settlements (hard against Clemente’s image, in garish red numbers) won by the aforementioned ambulance-chasing concern for victims of lead paint or asbestos. So what, exactly, was the great Roberto Clemente doing there on the 4/5/6, besides corkscrewing through the follow-through of his still-familiar right-handed swing, wildly wide of the multiple contexts in which he existed during his life?

Roberto Clemente is a sainted name and image explained partly, at best, by the anodyne words and small-print statistical code on the back of his baseball cards, or those on his plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame. It says something about the law firm’s shamelessness that they would choose a “this is what those guys like, right?” phone number while hitching a ride with so significant a figure, but it also says something about their canniness. Clemente is a symbol of altruism, righteousness, and Boricua pride potent enough — or so our personal-injury lawyers must have hoped — to add something fine to their shabby subway come-on. The very permanence and vagueness of Clemente’s legacy — he was good and he was great and that is about that, forever and ever amen — makes such a tacky tribute possible.

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Marvin Mudrick in his office in the 1970s. Photo courtesy the Mudrick family.

In the third installment of LARB’s Writers on Teachers series, former students Bob Blaisdell and Jervey Tervalon recall the best American literary critic you’ve never heard of, Marvin Mudrick, with some input from the man himself.

Marvin Mudrick created the College of Creative Studies at U.C. Santa Barbara in 1967, and was its provost until two years before his death in 1986. His book, Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery, remains a key text in the criticism of Austen. He was a prolific essayist and frequent contributor to the Hudson Review, The New York Review of Books and Harper’s. Bob Blaisdell’s memoir Well, Mr. Mudrick Said… appeared this summer, and all selections from Mr. Blaisdell are from the book, which was reviewed in July on the Madeleine Brand Show. Transcripts of Mudrick’s Narrative Prose class also appear in Mr. Blaisdell’s memoir, and are excerpted from Mudrick Transcribed: Classes and Talks by Marvin Mudrick, edited by Lance Kaplan (Santa Barbara, 1989).

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Blaisdell: That first quarter of the College of Creative Studies at U.C. Santa Barbara, the spring of 1978, the end of my freshman year, besides finding Louise and falling in love with her (though she had a boyfriend back home in the Bay Area), and working in the library, and missing San Francisco, I found Marvin Mudrick’s Narrative Prose class. It was his policy to enroll all first-quarter CCS students in his class (“So I can get to know you—and you to know me”), and in describing the class he probably said something like, “You write stories, and I read them and we talk about them.”

I realized when I showed up the first day that I had not accurately imagined the class. I thought we would sit at our desks and write stories, and he would walk around, looking over our shoulders, and make comments. No, into the big, wide, well-lit Girvetz 1115 (this was his usual classroom, close to his South Hall office; to have class with him elsewhere became weird and amusing: this isn’t his classroom, we’re just visiting!; his real classroom is … well, you know!), he came in and sat down at the table in front of the class, and, sometimes — though never at the first meeting of the quarter — without even a hello or nod, picked up a story from the pile of stories that had been left on his table, and, not naming the author, read it aloud. Sometimes he would stop and point out something good or bad in the story, and sometimes, but less often, he would just read through the story until he got to the end. Then he usually asked us for comments. We were cautious, as if stepping out onto thin ice.

Tervalon: He read our stories cold and anonymously; and it seemed humane and perfect with none of that weird hot-house drama of fiction workshop in graduate programs where everything is political and calculated as a dozen or so writers sit about a round table, sweating about their future careers as the next Jonathan Franzen or Michael Chabon.

Mudrick: “The class is conducted very simply. You turn in stories, and I read them aloud — I don’t identify the author. One of the nice things about having a fairly sizable class is that it takes a long time before you figure out who’s writing what. These wretched little cozy classes in which you have five or six people, and after a while you know — I mean as soon as the first word is read you know who wrote it. And then you begin being very careful, you walk on eggshells, you don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings because you don’t want them to hurt your feelings, and it’s just a pain in the ass. The great virtue of a class of this size is that it really is anonymous.

“So you’re not going to get at least personally offended by having your incapacity to write exposed to public opprobrium. That doesn’t help too much — I’m aware of that too. Because oddly enough, even though you’re not identified, you know who you are. And if you are — if your story is being made fun of, then you will take it that you’re being made fun of: your feelings will be hurt, you’ll be outraged and crushed, humiliated, depressed, and so on.

“And there’s nothing I can do about that. I know there are a number of things that you want me to do. I mean you want me to be (as you might say) kind. The trouble with kindness is that it takes a long time. That’s really my only objection to kindness. If it were possible to be kind as quickly as it is possible to be cruel or funny, I would be kind all the time…”

Mr. Mudrick and Jervey Tervalon circa 1980 (Photo: Landon Villavaso)

Tervalon: It was Mudrick’s Chaucer course and we were discussing Troilus and Criseyde on a Tuesday afternoon where I would look outside and see beautiful women walking under the Jacaranda trees. I tried to keep a low profile in that class because everyone seemed able to easily read Middle English except for me. I tried to hide my parallel translation from prying eyes, like anyone cared but me. Though I didn’t always follow what was going on in his courses — it was quick-paced to say the least — I recognized that love was a constant theme and I was very interested in romantic love at the time. Mudrick talked about love enough that I expected it to surface at each meeting of his class. When it finally did, he could be insightful or coarse but it was never dull, always entertaining.

Thing was, I was in love, and it wasn’t going well. My girlfriend, a year behind me in high school, had arrived on campus and discovered to her great joy that being skinny was really appreciated at UCSB in a way that was inconceivable back in south Los Angeles, where skinny was bony — something a woman shouldn’t be. She was now popular among her freshmen peers and white guys were into her, the thin and exotic, café-au-lait girl who could throw a Frisbee better than most of them. She was tired of me and my set of parlor tricks worn thin. I had gone to the well too many times and there was nothing left to impress her with: I had already shown her how to throw a Frisbee and how to print photos in my makeshift darkroom, which just happened to be conveniently located in my bedroom so that we could make out among the romantic odors of Fix and Developer. She was sick of my ass and wanted out. I knew this but couldn’t stand the idea of it, so I clung to the delusional hope that she would love me again.

That day in the Chaucer class, Mudrick’s words pierced my thick skull as he spoke about the difficulty of maintaining intimacy in a relationship: “That the problem between Troilus and Criseyde is the problem that we all face; that try as we might, it’s the inevitable diminishment in love that we face, and there’s nothing that we can do about it but endure it.”

His words overwhelmed me. It was exactly what I felt. Words that so precisely described my emotional state that I thought it possible Mudrick was staring inside of my head; that he had been spying on me. I sat there in my desk, crestfallen, sure that he was absolutely right about the state of my personal life. And still I would not accept the truth of his words. When the class ended I rushed to her dorm room and knocked on the door and she was on her bed, studying. I sat next to her, waiting for her to regard me, which she did only reluctantly. I tried to kiss her and she turned her head. That was that, I accepted it was over, and in that moment I wondered about Mudrick’s penetrating trick; how he knew what was going on with me better than I did. Later, when he decided I was a serious writer, he mentioned how he was surprised that romantic love had become my subject matter. He didn’t say, but I knew he approved and that made me happy.

Mudrick: “What I’m going to say now is of the highest importance. I would not tear papers apart – say they’re no good and say they don’t work – unless I believed that all of you are capable of writing good fiction. I do believe this. I think there are some of you who have taken this class about six or seven times and still don’t believe that I believe this, but I do. That is, I do think it would be cruel to – I mean it’s like attacking a paraplegic for not doing a marathon. If you can’t do something you just can’t do it, and it’s wrong for people to make fun of you if it’s physically or mentally or morally impossible for you to do something.

“But that’s not true. For me the most interesting fact about the writing of fiction, and I think this is not true of any other artistic medium: you are all experts. You don’t know it but you are. And you’re experts for a very simple reason – because you’re in command of the medium, which is ordinary colloquial speech. I mean that’s where it all comes from – you’re all masters of that. You don’t know it, in part because you very seldom allow yourself to speak your own language. You’re usually speaking somebody else’s language. You’re usually sucking up to somebody else, you’re trying to speak formal English, you’re trying to evade some responsibility, you’re trying to ingratiate yourself to your parents or your superiors – something like that. Or, for that matter, because don’t get the idea that what I’m saying is that street speech is the real speech – very often it’s the phoniest speech of all. Like locker-room male speech, which is the phoniest and most disgusting of all phony speeches. I mean fuck, shit, piss, and so on – very very boring, very dumb, and completely inexpressive of anything except male limitations.”

Blaisdell: When Mr. Mudrick picked up my story – recognizable to me from the back of the classroom by its curled, handwritten pages, and announced, “Hot Mush,” I was so prepared for his amazement that I had probably already written the enthusiastic review of it in my head. I was surprised, then, when a page or two into the story Mr. Mudrick remarked that this character “Steve” was an imbecile, and that anybody but an imbecile would know what the girl’s actions meant. The class laughed a lot at this. The more serious problem, he said, was that the author didn’t seem to know that Steve was an imbecile. Someone later told me I turned red during this discussion.

Later, it might have been in that first quarter, but possibly not until the fall, I wrote a story about my friend Pete from San Francisco, and how he had spent the night with his wild new girlfriend, who was Jewish, whose father was a college professor who didn’t like non-Jewish boys dating his daughters, while he, “The Schnozz,” was the Roman Catholic son of a recent East European immigrant. Mr. Mudrick liked “Schnozzola.” He might have even said immediately afterward, shrugging, setting the story down on the have-read pile, “I like it.” (Sometimes he let the story and its reading be its own commentary, and a one-word or one-line remark would be the complete and final discussion.) In any case, I remember it as my first success! I had written a good story, and now I could die happy.

Mudrick: “From time to time you’ll see evidence of it in what comes out in the class. Somebody will come up with maybe a paragraph or a sentence or a whole story which will be absolutely amazing. It will come from nowhere and very often from a person who has turned out the most awful nonsense before.

“So I would be very grateful to you if you would grant me – if you would make that concession, that possible concession: In spite of what he says, in spite of how rude, cruel and unfunny he is, that he does believe that. He keeps saying it, so until he has proved it beyond any possible doubt, I’ll believe that he believes it. I do believe it.”

Blaisdell: I have always associated Anna Karenina with Mr. Mudrick, and Tolstoy has always been the literary colossus with whom I associate my personal colossus. They were authoritative, they were moralistic, they were interested in discussing everything about human beings, never mind whether it was a literary topic or not; they were headstrong, they were independent and accustomed to upsetting the apple-carts of literary and pedagogical convention. While I am usually mild-mannered, they were not. They would have their say. I was a mouse, and they were my champions.

So from the first quarter in Narrative Prose, I understood Tolstoy as Mr. Mudrick’s touchstone. He did not say, “Jane Austen couldn’t have written that better!” He did not say, “Chaucer could not have written that better!” His customary comparison of sublimity was, as he laid his hand atop the story that one of us had written, “Tolstoy could not have written that any better!”

Tervalon: Outside of love, my experience of mystical revelations—epiphanies that reveal startling truths about my existence—are more comic than enlightening. Once, a girlfriend invited me to see a popular psychic at the Biltmore in Santa Barbara. I wore a suit with a purple muscle-shirt and sported a full beard; I didn’t think the psychic, a blind fellow with an English accent, would mind. He worked a very crowded room making very precise statements that seemed to demonstrate knowledge of their lives; he would say in a shrill voice: “Madam in the pink dress, your aunt on the other-side says all is well and that the real estate transaction will happen soon,” and “Sir, in the tweed jacket, your loving mother lost to you for so very long, says that the lost silverware is under the couch.” It went on like that endlessly, and I wanted to leave as I usually would when at church, but most everyone seemed to want their money’s worth of the psychic’s attention except for me. Then the psychic pointed in my direction: “The lady in mauve,” he said, and I thought he might have meant my girlfriend, but she was wearing white. “You have a message from the other side. Do you want to know what communication is being directed to you?”

Suddenly, everyone is looking at me, and I’m shrugging, wondering what to do. “If the lady in mauve is not interested in learning what information there is for her, then we’ll move on.”

The crowd began to laugh as I stood there awkwardly, wondering how even a blind man could mistake me for a woman. That’s how it usually works — I don’t respond to inspirational speeches; or those who profess secret knowledge. I don’t easily invest emotionally or intellectually; and even being near people who do is often just uncomfortable. I assume I was born that way, with a surfeit of natural cynicism, or maybe it was because I was raised in a working class black neighborhood; and having emotional control was the difference between getting hurt or walking away with all your limbs intact.

Writing instruction is about trust; trusting yourself and trusting that those that you respect will tell you the truth about your own work. Once, in his office, Mudrick said being a novelist is an incredibility difficult thing to do, that it’s a minefield; so many things can go wrong. I said, without thinking, “I can do that.” And a split second later I realized what an arrogant a thing I had said, but Mudrick just paused for a moment and said — without sarcasm in his voice, or caution about the difficulty of the task of being a good novelist — he smiled and said, “Then you should do it.”

Bob Blaisdell, aged 21, in 1981.

Bob Blaisdell teaches English in Brooklyn at Kingsborough Community College. He is a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and Christian Science Monitor and the editor of more than three dozen anthologies for Dover Publications. Email him at Robert.Blaisdell@Kingsborough.edu.

Jervey Tervalon has a new novel, Hope Found Chauncey, that should be out soon. In addition, he runs the Literature For Life project and drives his daughters to school endlessly.

DAVID KIRBY

on Yusef Komunyakaa, chameleon.

Stack 52 © Boris Ostrerov http://bit.ly/prtJRM

Yusef Komunyakaa
The Chameleon Couch
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2011. 116 pp.

I won’t lie to you — the day I started reading this book, I was tripping. In Book IV of The Odyssey, as Menelaus and Telemachus weep over their fallen comrades, Helen slips into their wine a drug that undoes “every grief and rage” and dries a man’s tears though his brother or son be slain before his eyes. Called nepenthe by poets, it’s known as oxycodone to us moderns. Helen got hers from Egypt, but I got mine from Walgreen’s. I’d just had dental surgery, so naturally I reached for two things that always make me happy, an opium derivative and poetry. They work even better in combination; just ask E. A. Poe.

Not that, in this instance, a pharmaceutical boost was needed. I liked Yusef Komunyakaa immediately when I read Dien Cai Dau (1988), fell hard for him with Neon Vernacular (1993), and decided I wanted to be him when I grew up after Talking Dirty to the Gods (2001). So, naturally I swam, through ebbing pain and growing bliss, toward The Chameleon Couch, his thirteenth book of poems.

As I read, though, I thought, dang, this is hard. And beautiful as well, and often funny. Thus the poem “Grunge” begins:

No, sweetheart, I said courtly love.
I was thinking of John Donne’s
“Yet this enjoys before it woo,”
but my big hands were dreaming
Pinetop’s boogie woogie piano
taking the ubiquitous night apart.
Not Courtney.

Ha, ha! His sweetie doesn’t get it, so the poet explains himself. But somehow the explanation shades over into a boxing metaphor (“But I’ve been shoved up against / frayed ropes too, & I had to learn / to bob & weave, to duck & hook”), and then a show-biz one (“sometimes a man wants only a hug / when something two-steps him / toward a little makeshift stage”), and ends this way:

Somehow, between hellhounds
& a guitar solo made of gutstring
& wood, I outlived a stormy night
with snow on my eyelids.

See what I mean? Beautiful and hard, too. Hard on its shiny, crystalline surface; harder still in its depths, in a darkness that ends the devil knows where. Days later, when I was off smoothies and on solid food again, I read and reread these poems, and they remained difficult.

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Selected random clicks for this week:

Quinn Latimer conjures “Kalifornienträumen: Bertolt Brecht’s Los Angeles Poems and Other Sunstruck Germanic Specters.”

From the NatGeo desk: “Extreme Classics: The 100 Greatest Adventure Books of All Time.”

Mike Dash asks “Who Was Pablo Fanque?”

Rikki Ducornet on “War’s Body.”

Rana Mitter reviews The Opium War by Julia Lovell.

Barbara Demick examines the tightrope walk in Chinese state media.

ALEC ASH

on Ai Weiwei’s electronic provocations.

Collage by Lisa Jane Persky includes an image by stunned (CC)

Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009
Edited and translated by Lee Ambrozy
MIT Press, April 2011. 241 pp.

On May 28, 2009, the readers of artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s blog — hosted on Sina, a popular Chinese internet portal — logged onto blog.sina.com.cn/aiweiwei to find the message “This blog has already been closed. If you have queries, please dial 95105670.” That message is still there, although the number has changed. Dialing it takes you to an unfolding origami of recorded options that would frustrate the most hardy call center veteran. When human contact is finally made, an explanation as to why the blog was shut down is not forthcoming. Nor, for those who’ve been following Ai’s career, is it necessary.

Ai the artist wooed controversy long before he became known as a political activist. Son of the poet Ai Qing — a prominent literary figure in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) before he was denounced as a rightist in 1957 — Ai Weiwei has been on the fringes of free speech and democracy activism since the late seventies. In Beijing, he made a name for himself as a counterculture artist and architect, co-curating one exhibition with the English title “Fuck Off.” In October 2005, as one of Sina’s first celebrity bloggers, he found a new means by which to rock the boat.

In the months before his blog was censored, Ai used it to popularize a “citizen investigation” that aimed to document the names of the thousands of students who died in the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, many as a result of “tofu dregs” construction that saw schools collapse while cadres pocketed the surplus from skimped building costs. Given the blog’s loudmouthed criticism of Chinese authorities across a range of other issues, and the routine censorship of other internet sites, it was no surprise that Ai’s platform got the axe.

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Image (above) courtesy of  Darren Allison http://theclinteastwoodarchive.blogspot.com/

A few thoughts on Clint Eastwood’s relentless career

from LARB film editor Jonathan Penner.

Cool interview on the site today from Conversations with Clint, Paul Nelson and Kevin Avery’s new book on Clint Eastwood, a collection of “lost interviews” now found, about starting out as a young actor. Another new book, Cahiers du Cinema’s big and beautiful Eastwood on Eastwood, focuses on Clint the director, one of the oldest still working in Hollywood — an icon and indefatigable. This fall he has a new biography of J. Edgar Hoover coming out, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

I read the interview and I suddenly started thinking: how does an 80-year-old get to direct this Oscar bait epic after committing Invictus, Sands of Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers, Changeling, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Hereafter (known without affection in my house as Hear Laughter)? Though also period pieces of some ambition and with some basis in fact, all were financial disappointments, and only the one filmed in Iceland in Japanese was critically praised. True, Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby and Dirty Harry Dies (aka Gran Torino) count for a lot, but those credits alone wouldn’t sustain him at this point in his career; many other Oscar winners as well as greater raw talents than Eastwood have long fallen by the wayside, and most of them much younger than the octogenarian Clint. How does he keep getting the top scripts, budgets and casts?

I found the answer looking at him alongside his career doppelganger since the mid-sixties, the only other director still taking as many shots and putting out as many pictures, the East Coast writer to Eastwood’s old West rider: that’s right, Woody Allen.

What do they have in common?

Besides their disarmingly parallel life paths and their looks?

Three key qualities: dual careers as stars and auteurs; a palpable love for jazz music; and finally, and most importantly, a refusal to go the fuck to sleep. Not just the Big Sleep, thank God: actual sleep. The two of them never stop. Depression-era sharks, American Zen masters, they just get into the flow and go.

These are body-of-work guys; Stephen King, Alan Ayckbourne, Oprah Winfrey type geniuses who don’t worry about perfecting each little piece they touch. The more they do, the less significant each project becomes in the context of the whole. They know everything they handle won’t be perfect. Can’t be perfect. So why worry about it? Take what’s interesting right now, do your best and then move onto the next — tides move, careers too, it’s all a cycle, and whatever happens don’t stop. Don’t think. Just create. And eventually, even if you miss a lot of shots, every couple of years you’ll drain one at the buzzer and get another parade and a big new contract. (Of course, for them, parades are a pain: they take time and divert flow; for years, Allen wouldn’t come to the Oscars ‘cause they interfered with his Monday night clarinet gig at Elaine’s, and Stephen King writes every day but his birthday and the Fourth of July!) In other words, get the parade over with, accept the applause, thank you and right back into it. Never break the rhythm, never lose the beat.

Of course the other thing is, let’s face it, Allen and Eastwood are both big ass movie stars, too. Older and colder, sure, but the real deal and that’s the other part of their continued access to money and top talent as directors. Star power, wielded with care, has gotten them past some pretty rough patches. Remember The Rookie? Or Scoop?

But now, like the tide, they’re back again, certain to see some Oscar attention, certain to see more articles like this one. But they never stopped swimming, probably never even noticed how far they were from shore. And now they’re back near the crowded beach – maybe they’ll notice, maybe they won’t. They’re both already onto their next projects.

And here’s the thing. I love Clint even more now. Really. Because, thinking about this, I realize I see fear in there: a vulnerability in his relentlessness. Woody’s always worn his terror on his sleeve, but it’s a color Clint never shows because, well, he’s Clint Eastwood, and he doesn’t show that shit. But you know why a shark keeps moving. They must get tired a little. They must slow down once or twice just to look around, take a break. But when they do, they feel like they’re dying. Because they are dying. No air, no flow.

So he won’t let himself do that. Who wants to feel that? It’s scary, it’s dangerous. And besides, dying is just not something Clint Eastwood does.

JONATHAN LETHEM, PAUL NELSON and KEVIN AVERY

Still from Revenge of The Creature, Clint Eastwood’s film debut

The following is the foreword and two selections from the first chapter of Conversations with Clint: Paul Nelson’s Lost Interviews with Clint Eastwood – 1979-1983, by Kevin Avery, to be published by Continuum on September 22nd, 2011.

I NEVER SAT IN A MOVIE THEATER WITH PAUL NELSON

by Jonathan Lethem

I never sat in a movie theater with Paul Nelson. We watched movies he’d taped off late-night television broadcasts, from neatly hand-lettered VHS tapes. He often had two or even three old movies on a cassette, many with sequences of static, and vintage late-night commercials, intact. Later we watched laserdiscs, but those never supplanted his tapes. For Paul, I suspect that when we met — I was nineteen — I struck him as a remedial case. I liked Godard and Truffaut and Kurosawa, directors who‘d taken a lot from classical studio-era Hollywood, but I’d seen little of the real thing. My taste, shaped by my parents’ viewing habits, leaned to foreign films and counterculture ― classics like King of Hearts and Harold and Maude. The only western I’d seen was Blazing Saddles.

Fortunately, I don‘t think Paul found my prodigiously confident opinions (some, in retrospect, wrong, and some right) unworkable, but he wanted to rewind my viewing habits, like one of his treasured tapes, and start me over again. I remember that we screened Hawks’s Red River in slow motion, as Paul stopped the film at various points to describe what he found remarkable or characteristic in a given sequence, or just wanting to linger over details. We did the same thing with Welles’s Citizen Kane and Lady From Shanghai. Other movies — Ride The High Country, The Long Voyage Home — we’d just put on and watch, and I’d feel the force of Paul’s regard, the extraordinary pressure-field of his devoted gaze, guiding my own. Certain other films I never saw in Paul’s company — Heaven’s Gate comes to mind — yet no matter how long it was until I finally saw them, when I did they were enclosed in the terms with which Paul had described them to me, his projections and insights, his abiding gaze. I watched them with Paul even though Paul wasn’t with me at the time.

We never discussed Clint Eastwood. I’m guessing now, having read Kevin Avery’s terrific reconstruction of Paul’s conversations with the actor-director, that this was more than happenstance. Given the size of Paul’s engagement with Eastwood’s work, and seeing the extent and intimacy of their friendship, the way it tested the bounds of journalist-and-subject, and understanding the disappointment of the encounter’s failure to find a home in the “real world” of publication, I suspect it was too sensitive a matter for Paul to want to acknowledge by the time he and I were spending time together. There were zones of silence in Paul. Some covered what you‘d have to guess were the most important pieces of his life. I could barely get him to mention Bob Dylan, for instance. I never knew he had a son.

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BETH BOYLE MACHLAN

on buildings, plots, and mourning at Ground Zero.

Construction Phase 1971
Photo courtesy of Jane Holley Wilson, All Rights Reserved

On Sunday, March 14, 2004, the New York Times ran a story entitled “High Anxiety: Designing the Safest Building in History for the Scariest Address on Earth.” Author James Glanz described in detail the ways in which the Freedom Tower team planned to rectify the structural vulnerabilities that had turned the World Trade Center site into the world’s largest tomb; Times readers were assured by a wide range of supremely qualified professionals that the new building would never, could never, suffer the same fate as its predecessors. For the benefit of those for whom words were not enough, however, a prominent illustrated sidebar to Glanz’s piece, subtitled “Building Confidence,” provided a point by point list of the new tower’s features, alongside descriptions of how they were carefully designed to compensate for specific structural aspects of the 9/11 nightmare. The word “Elevators,” for instance, was followed by this narrative:

There will be no sky lobbies in the Freedom Tower; elevators will go straight to the ground. This will prevent scenes like the one that occurred on the 78th floor of the south tower, where many people who were waiting for express elevators died when the second plane hit.

Similarly reassuring text was attached to “The Cable Structure,” “The Core,” “Stairwells,” and “Fire Safety,” as if to provide the urban reader with a checklist of assuaged anxieties, and to cancel out the site-specific horrors that were revealed to the entire world in the aftermath of the attack, such as smoke-filled stairwells, interior infernos, and massive gashes where walls had been. In terms of color, depth, and composition, there is something profoundly unreal, almost garish about these illustrations, like a comic strip about catastrophe, a Maus for the new millennium. The most uncanny aspect of these descriptions, however, was not the artist’s renderings of the as yet imaginary spaces, but the ways in which the descriptions of the new building’s features suggested alternate endings to hundreds of the day’s most tragic stories. In these accounts, the Freedom Tower could be read not only as a replacement for the lost World Trade Center, but also as a rewriting of the tragedy that trapped its occupants, an alternate narrative that offered more than one way out.

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Check out this great event happening tonight!

The Rumpus Proudly Presents: “It’s About Time” Featuring Joshuah Bearman, Gabrielle Calvocoressl, C-Horse, Naked Kids, and Dylan Trees at Echoplex!

PETE L’OFFICIAL

on José Parlá (now showing at OHWOW Gallery in Los Angeles)
and Mark Bradford, two archivists of urban ruins.

Top: Cyclone’s Capsule © José Parlá 2011
Courtesy of © José Parlá Artist Rights Society, NY and OHWOW Gallery
Bottom: The Devil is Beating His Wife © Mark Bradford

José Parlá: Walls, Diaries, and Paintings
Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011. 188 pp.

Christopher Bedford and Hamza Walker
Mark Bradford
Yale University Press, in assoc. with the Wexner Center for the Arts, June 2010. 256 pp.

Admirers of the decaying wall, the crumbling edifice, and the forgotten ruin are many, and you can always count on a masonry enthusiast for a fancy prose style. But if you want to find a true poet of dereliction — a troubadour of the trash heap, even — you could do a lot worse than starting with Baudelaire.

In his 1851 essay, “On Wine and Hashish,” the poet wrote of a city-walker who stalks the street rather than strolling it as his dandyish flâneur might, and more out of necessity than a desire for detached, delighted observation: the rag picker.

Here is a man whose task it is to gather the detritus of a day in the capitol. Everything the great city throws away, everything it loses, everything it disdains, everything it breaks, he catalogs and collects. He consults the archives of debauchery, the clutter of refuse. He makes a selection, an intelligent choice. Like a miser gathering up a treasure trove, he gathers garbage for the god of Industry to chew over and transform into objects of use or pleasure.

Baudelaire’s attraction to the rag pickers’s daily trudge was born out of admiration. He saw their practice as analogous to the poet’s, who might spend “[an] entire day wandering in search of rhymes.” But the rag pickers’s “project” of scavenging — which of course to them was no joy, just everyday life — takes on an even deeper air of solemnity and grace when one thinks of them as archivists of urban ruins, smartly sorting the previously-owned material of life, foraging for what we’ve left behind, what has become extinct, outmoded, or unloved, finding proof of where we lived and the stories that we told about ourselves, and evidence of ways we didn’t want to be anymore or have simply just forgotten that we once were. When things fall apart, you want those who pick up after you to have excellent curatorial taste.

¤
The artist José Parlá has been called a flâneur, an archaeologist, a documentarian, a calligrapher, a historical landscape painter, an archivist, even an alchemist. His artistic admixture admits all of those designations to varying degrees, but without the specific context of the city — its walls, its neighborhoods, its histories — from which he draws his inspiration, all of them are meaningless. It is the city street that is the great subject of his paintings: streets bounded by walls that shelter and confine and eventually act as canvas, recording the shouts and whispers of those who walked them.

Parlá (whose new show, “Character Gestures,” opened yesterday (September 9th) at OHWOW Gallery in Los Angeles and runs through October 22nd) was born in 1973 in Miami to Cuban émigrés who moved him briefly to Puerto Rico and then back to Miami in the early 1980s. Growing up as a teenager at that time, the call of hip-hop — itself born in the Bronx, and bred everywhere restlessly imaginative kids could “get over” by writing on walls, spinning records, rapping over them or dancing to them — was one to which Parlá coukdn’t help but respond. It was graffiti, though, that Parlá most gravitated toward, writing the name “Ease” (which still occasionally makes its way into his work) on walls and trains and all over the precious black books that graf writers treasured and shared with each other like bibles of style.

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Donald Bracken, World on Fire, 1997

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Donald Bracken, In Memoriam

In 1997, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council gave artist Donald Bracken a studio on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower (Tower 1). The LMCC’s artist-in-residence program matched artists to empty office spaces as a means to document — through unique and individual perspectives — the ever-changing skyline of Manhattan. One morning, Bracken arrived to discover the aftermath of a minor accident in his temporary high-rise studio, the likes of which inevitably occurs in a building (and which such a building is designed to easily withstand and expunge).

The result of that accident is Donald Bracken’s outstanding painting, World on Fire, which appears today at The Los Angeles Review of Books with Reza Aslan’s essay on the long-term effects of 9/11. The painting is currently on exhibit at the New York State Museum, Albany as part of their exhibition “Before the Fall: Remembering the World Trade Center.”

Bracken says of the intensive time he spent in the North Tower, and of that morning in particular:

“The space I worked in was 10,000 square feet and faced east and north. The floor tiles had been ripped up, revealing the black mastic floor, and the ceiling had been taken, revealing the pipes and the ineffective sprayed-on fire retardant.I was very aware of the terrorist bombing in 1992. The towers seemed to always be a potential target because of their iconic nature.

I came into my studio on an early morning in May. The sun blasting through the eastern windows, sheet of burning yellow light skating across the shiny black floor that looked wet with the reflection of fire that had set off the overhead sprinklers…”

See Bracken’s work here: www.donaldbracken.com.

Some recommended happenings in the Los Angeles area this weekend, for your potential enjoyment.

Friday, September 9^th: Reading at the Hammer Museum: New American Writing with Leopoldine Core and Dinah Lenney beginning at 7:00pm.

Sunday, September 11^th: Granta 116 and Pen Center USA present a group event commemorating the 10^th anniversary of September 11^th at Vroman’s Bookstore beginning at 4:00 pm.

Panel discussion on rebel bookselling with David Kipen, Andrew Laties, and Josh Spencer at Skylight Books beginning at 5:00pm.

REZA ASLAN

on the long-term effects of 9/11.

World on Fire © Donald Bracken http://bit.ly/r05Th3

The policewoman who confiscated the unlicensed produce stand of a young street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi in the tiny Tunisian village of Sidi Bouzid could not have known that her actions would light the fuse of revolution, not just in Tunisia, but across the Arab world. The twenty-six-year-old Bouazizi was one of millions of unemployed youth who make up the vast majority of the population of the Greater Middle East. This young, educated, and severely disenfranchised generation has come of age burdened by bone-crushing poverty and marginalized by corrupt, authoritarian regimes that have been funded and armed by western governments — most notably the United States — for decades.

The unemployment rate in Bouazizi’s hometown is upwards of 30%. Like most of his fellow Tunisians — those without personal connections to the country’s long running dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali — Bouazizi survived by doing odd jobs for a few dollars a day. Yet at every point in his young life, as he struggled to scrape a living out of the most menial and dehumanizing work, Bouazizi was confronted with the stark nepotism of Tunisian society, the rank corruption of government employees, and the hard fact that there wasn’t, and would never be, anything to do about it.

That final thought — that this was the way of the world, that it could not be otherwise — must have gone through Bouazizi’s mind when the policewoman approached him on the dusty streets of this impoverished town, 190 miles (300 km) south of the capital Tunis, and asked to see his license to operate the produce stand. In Tunisia, as in much of the Arab world, “license” is code for bakhsheesh. Bribe. What the policewoman meant was that she had not yet been paid to look the other way as young Bouazizi peddled his overripe fruits and vegetables for a few pennies each.

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DINAH LENNEY

on memoirists, actors, musicians, and other cover artists.

Face to Face © Kimia Rahgozar Agora Gallery

The difference between classical music and jazz, said the well-known conductor, is that with classical, the music is always greater than the performance. He’d been invited to talk about “Vulgarization” in a lecture series called Categorically Not, and to illustrate his point, he played a recording of Beethoven’s Fifth on kazoos. Not vulgar exactly, but point taken: with the classics, we can pretty much agree that the genius at work belongs to the creator, the originator. If we’re Bach fans, it’s secondary who’s playing at Carnegie Hall; Bach is the reason to buy a ticket, and the musicians are there to serve the composer. Renowned artists like Yo Yo Ma and Midori, Domingo and Upshaw, are considered greats by virtue of virtuosity, but their real talent is for getting to the heart of the music-as-written, for somehow intuiting and revealing all that is already there.

It’s much the same for classical theater — or it used to be. Before the culture of celebrity, we went to see Shakespeare or Shaw or Chekhov or Ibsen to hear the words themselves, regardless of who was saying them, the assumption being that the actors would be up to the task. This isn’t always true, of course; musicians can ruin a symphony and actors can destroy the best plays. But when they’re talented and trained, grateful as we are, we don’t often credit interpretive artists with elevating classical material. We assume (and rightly so in most cases) that the material elevates them.

What’s easier to accept is that with jazz, the soloist can transcend the composition for moments at a time: he’s supposed to in fact. The individual performance — nuanced and singular — is the reward for performer and fan alike. First person narrative, memoir in particular, is like jazz; largely about the player, about where he riffs and scats, and how and why, and whether or not we come away from the material — the narrative, that is — feeling different for having read. As with jazz, the more specific and heartfelt the performance, the deeper and wider its impact. As with jazz, the composition matters, but we’re looking to see how the artist filters it, how she handles the melody line. So the memoirist shares elements of craft and compulsion — even temperament — with the performer.

We might think of memoirists, then, not as composers or creators per se but as cover artists, and memoir itself as a performance that, although grounded in actual events (or existing material), is driven by the “voice” of the writer. Memoirists “cover” the events of their lives; as writers of nonfiction in the first person, we get to play, to scat, to take the solo, to emphasize the elements that ring true for us, to slide past the ones that don’t. A writer of memoir takes on personal history — that’s her script, her score — and uses her voice to inform those remembered events and to make them her own. She’s obligated to tell the truth, and she’s obligated to tell it her way.

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LOREN GLASS

on Barney Rosset and the history of Grove Press

Grove Cover image by Roy Kuhlman courtesy of Arden Riordan

Part 1:
The Fifties, from Beckett to Rechy

On October 4, 2009, I flew from Iowa City to New York to conduct interviews for a history of Grove Press. Everyone I contacted had agreed to meet with me except Barney Rosset. In a series of emails, his fifth wife Astrid Myers had firmly but politely resisted fixing a date, telling me that it all depended on how Barney was feeling. I had made all my travel arrangements, set to coincide with the 50th anniversary celebration of the publication of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, without knowing whether I’d be able to interview Rosset, the legendary owner of Grove Press — which had published Burroughs’s masterpiece along with an entire canon of post-war avant-garde literature — and editor of the Evergreen Review, the premiere underground magazine of the sixties counterculture. I was eager to meet the man who bought the fledgling reprint house for $3,000 in 1951, built it up into one of the most influential publishers of the post-war era, and then was summarily fired after selling it to Anne Getty for $2,000,000 in 1986. I checked into my room at the Chelsea hotel, called Astrid, and succeeded in scheduling an interview for the following day.

Taking my cue from the Mad Men-era photos I’d seen of Rosset with a martini, I bought a bottle of Bombay Sapphire Gin at a liquor store around the corner from the East Village walk-up he shares with Astrid. Well into his eighties, Rosset remains spry and loquacious; though his body is bent over with age, his motions are animated and he speaks with assurance. He emerged from behind the glass brick partition separating the kitchen and living quarters from the long, narrow front room, and when he saw the blue bottle of gin it seemed, madeleine-like, to immediately evoke the past. Without preamble or introduction, he launched into a lengthy memory of shipping out from New York through the Panama Canal and around Australia to Bombay. His ultimate destination was China, where he’d received a commission, through his father’s government connections, as a Photographic Unit Commander for the Army Signal Corps. At the opening of the voyage he’d been given a blue plastic canteen, which he filled with gin instead of water. By the time he arrived in Bombay, the plastic had melted into the gin, turning it blue. He drank it anyway. It took over ten minutes for Rosset to mention Grove, and when he did it was in order to dismiss everything that had been written about it. “Something you have to understand about how Grove Press came about — nothing like what seems to be written down,” he said. “It’s really a big problem. People write about Grove — they think I came out of an egg or something.”

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Andrew Laties: author of Rebel Bookseller,
reissued this June by Seven Stories Press.

Andrew Laties (who will be visiting our friends at Skylight Books this Sunday) knows - and I mean really knows - the independent book business. He has launched five bookselling operations over a career spanning thirty years. In 2002, at the behest of the man himself, he opened the museum shop at The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts, where you can still find Laties behind the counter and among the shelves. And in 2007, as chain stores seemed on the verge of destroying the indie book business, Laties published Rebel Bookseller, a rallying cry that is quickly becoming seminal.

Rebel minced few words in identifying the enemies of local retailers (the chain stores) and in predicting their ultimate collapse. It was reissued this June by Seven Stories Press with an updated subtitle “Why Indie Bookstores Represent Everything You Want to Fight for from Free Speech to Buying Local to Building Communities” and an afterword by Bill Ayers. Not so surprisingly, it is finding a revitalized audience which Laties admits was nowhere in sight back in 2004.

With the corporate book world in turmoil, Laties sees a revival of local independents. There is no death knell, just a return to old fashioned bookselling. In a recent interview, he was asked about the Dutton’s closure, which the interviewer likened to a death in the family. Laties’ response is worth noting—his usual rallying cry tempered by a Zen acceptance of the cyclical nature of life, from which bookstores are not exempt:

“Independent bookstores have a lifespan. It may be that a bookstore is founded by somebody, and that person does it really energetically, and decades go by and the person gets older and the kids don’t want to take it over and meanwhile the neighborhood has improved, the rents are going up…. Bookstores close, and it’s very natural for bookstores to close. But what I like to tell people is that our concern is not about the death rate, our concern is about the birth rate.” In other words, book people, stay present.

As Laties goes on to point out, there are stores opening up throughout the country even as other stores are closing. Dutton’s may be gone, but Libros Schmibros in Boyle Heights and The Last Bookstore in Downtown LA are more than making up for it through sheer energy and enthusiasm. And that, Laties says, is what we need to focus on. These new operators are flexible, creative, and sometimes even mobile (see Laties’ upcoming pop-up project “You Burn It, You Bought It” or the Libros Schmibros residency at the Hammer Museum).

Along with participating on a panel discussion on this very topic at Skylight on Sunday, Laties will also be stopping by Booksmith in San Francisco, Hicklebees in San Jose, Reading Frenzy in Portland and Village Books in Bellingham, WA. For more information, click on the “tour” link after the jump.

In the next installment of our Writers On Teachers series, Geoff Nicholson recalls the daunting yet illuminating experience of having the famously inscrutable Cambridge poet J. H. Prynne as his Director of Studies.

I sometimes say that Jeremy Prynne taught me everything I know about poetry: which is why I know nothing about poetry. It’s not a bad joke, given the received wisdom that Prynne’s poetry is as impenetrable as granite, but it’s a cheap and slightly shameful one. The truth is, I learned a lot from Jeremy Prynne, but mostly not only about poetry.

My memory of first meeting Prynne is intense but full of holes. These lacunae are no doubt for my own protection. It was 1971 and Prynne was interviewing me for admission to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, to study English. It was the most thorough and scary intellectual roughing-up I’ve ever experienced.

For obvious reasons, being an 18 year old, working class, grammar school boy from Yorkshire I had never met anyone like Jeremy Prynne. He wasn’t exactly the traditional idea of the tweedy academic — for one thing he favored black velvet jackets worn with primary colored ties — but he was certainly patrician and mannered. He had an inimitable voice (boy, how people tried to imitate it) high-pitched, fluting, with a slight but defining lisp. His tautly swept back hair made him appear both sleek and austere.

I was reckoned to be “good at English,” and I wasn’t shy about having or expressing opinions. The problem was that, for most of the interview, I honestly didn’t know what Prynne was talking about. We were, at least initially, discussing D.H. Lawrence, and I knew, or thought I knew, something about the subject. Prynne would begin a long, wide-ranging and apparently free-associative monologue. There was a certain relief in this, because it meant I didn’t have to do too much talking, but then suddenly Prynne would round on me, and with sickening horror I’d realize that this monologue was actually a very, very long question and I was now required to respond to it. My “technique,” which is to say my only hope, was to pick out some random phrase of Prynne’s, one of the few that made any sense to me, and then say the first thing that came into my head; something, anything.

I am as amazed today as I was then that this worked. I was accepted by the college, and word came back that I’d done well in the interview. My best guess is that I had been, or anyway had given the impression of being, as oblique and free-associative as Prynne himself. Perhaps he’d seen me as a kindred spirit, though that surely wore off very quickly.

Having Prynne as Director of Studies gave Caius English students a certain status around the university. He was an éminence grise but also a dissenter. He had no doctorate, for instance, and he seemed to find the idea of PhDs absurd. He once suggested that potential doctoral candidates should be locked in a room and given a very long document to copy out, and accepted or rejected solely on the basis of how many mistakes they made in the copying. His mystique was only increased by the fact that he had published no substantial academic work. At that time there was perhaps less pressure for academics constantly to publish, but even so most of the English faculty were working on books drawn from their lectures. Prynne didn’t lecture much either.

But he did, of course, publish books of poetry. I have a few of them—High Pink on Chrome, Kitchen Poems, The Oval Window—unsigned alas. I still “read” them from time to time, when I feel in the mood for a little linguistic cage-fighting. Take this example from The Oval Window, a standout piece of Prynne obscurity that reaches sublime heights. Its completeness uncertain, the poem has no separate title but stands alone on the page:

Droplock to gab

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp off you steel

by wed foot

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp and fall under

fur on the gate

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp Tivoli Tivoli

and if flatter so

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp the better to win

O spite reserve

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp my mitten’s

bred sodden

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp at all given to

pad out, fill in

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp hold this piece

forth with and

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp so on go on

to the lammas

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp of forbidden let

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp red

&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp ground

Naturally there is some familiarity at this point, certain provisional readings that I’ve teased out, but the fact is I find reading Prynne today every bit as difficult and baffling as I did back then. I am not for a moment suggesting this is a criticism.

We heard that a previous intake of students had sat Prynne down and said, more or less, “All right Jeremy, what the fuck is this poetry of yours all about?” And he had explained himself spendidly: the skeptics were converted into ardent admirers. My crowd didn’t force him to do that. Perhaps we simply didn’t want to do what previous students had done, but in any case it didn’t matter. Whether we “understood” Prynne’s poetry or not, we were ardent admirers already. The obscurity was part of the appeal. And frankly I get a bit weary of those articles about Prynne being the most neglected poet in England. He didn’t seek attention but he received plenty. I’m sure there are armies of poets who would kill for that kind of “neglect.”

Prynne taught practical criticism, a Cambridge tradition and discipline that began in the 1920s with I.A. Richards. It was (and is) a sort of boot camp in reading, in how to scrutinize a text, usually without knowing its context or author. The text is allowed to speak for itself, while the reader acknowledges that the language itself might be saying something quite different from what the author intended. These ambiguities are to be acknowledged and embraced. The reader brings a full range of of sensitivities to the text, but reads without preconceptions, certainly without “theory.” This still strikes me as the sanest, and in many ways the “natural” way to read, but that’s perhaps damning evidence of the unshakeable influence of Prynne and Cambridge.

We had weekly “supervisions” with Prynne; the great man with two or three of us undergraduates. These sessions were easier than that first interview but there was still nowhere to hide. Inevitably I don’t remember much of what we read, though I think there were some Shakespearean sonnets, probably Ezra Pound’s “The Return” and definitely Yeats’s “No Second Troy.” Prynne disapproved of that last poem, and I remember our discussion turning eventually to the nature of love. Prynne said something like, “One may demand many things from another person. One may demand respect or consideration or kindness. But one is not entitled to demand love.” I know I haven’t got that verbatim, but in my head I can still hear him saying it.

The Prynne education continued outside of supervisions. There were times, say after a college dinner, when a group of us would end up back in Prynne’s study, and he’d open a couple of bottles of very good, though warm, champagne. We usually found ourselves listening to his collection of poetry on tape. Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger was a particular favorite. Prynne found this funnier and more wonderful than anybody else in the room, probably more than anybody on the planet. Tears of laughter filled his eyes as he listened to Dorn’s droll (and very badly recorded) recitation of the adventures of the gunslinger and his stoned, talking horse. Prynne could also be pretty hilarious himself. When one cocky student said he’d been reading Shakespeare’s “minor works,” Prynne replied brightly and dismissively, “Ah yes, Two Noble Kinsmen, that’s a good read, isn’t it?”

Unlike his poetry, Prynne was never inaccessible. You knew that if you walked across Caius Court at ten in the evening you’d most likely see the light on in his study, and if you felt the need to go up there and talk to him, you knew you’d be welcomed. You wouldn’t go to discuss anything frivolous (you wouldn’t dare) but when, for example, I wanted some information about the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, Prynne had not only met the guy, wasn’t only prepared to lend me some impossibly rare books by Brakhage, but he was also able to give me the man’s address, in some profoundly inaccessible region of Colorado.

Prynne also, perhaps surprisingly, tried to keep up with pop culture. He asked some students to lend him a stash of the rock albums he ought to be listening to. He diligently listened, and the word was that he enjoyed Frank Zappa, but didn’t really “get” Captain Beefheart. When Prynne learned that I’d been to London to see Heathcote Williams’ “revue” Remember the Truth Dentist, he appeared rather excited to hear that Angie Bowie—glam icon and one-time wife to David Bowie—had been in the cast. I was stunned that he’d even heard of Angie Bowie. He also did me the considerable honor of coming to see a play I’d written and was having performed. I assume he hated the experience but he was generous enough to find some positive and interesting things to say about the play; quite a task, I now see.

I would say that Prynne taught me to read as carefully and as widely as possible, but above all to pursue the things I was truly interested in, whether or not they fitted inside the accepted boundaries of “Cambridge English.” That hardly sounds revolutionary today but it was an uncommon stance within the university at the time. This went along with encouraging a deep but considered skepticism about the opinions and estimations of others. My writing has nothing in common with Prynne’s, but even so his poetry strikes me as the perfect example of writing exactly what you want in the only way you can. That hardly constitutes a philosophy, even less an imitable model, but I’m sure that Jeremy Prynne wouldn’t want it any other way.

Geoff Nicholson is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Review of Books. His books include the novels Bleeding London and The Hollywood Dodo, and the non-fiction The Lost Art of Walking. He blogs about “food, sex, obsession, and the madness of the mouth” at http://psycho-gourmet.blogspot.com. He wrote about Buster Keaton for us in April and Will Self in July.

Photo source here.

THOMAS S. HINES

on the architectural legacy of World War II.

Willow Run Bomber Plant, Michigan, ca. 1941; Architect: Albert Kahn

Jean-Louis Cohen
Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War
Editions Hazan, 2011. 448 pp.

In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of Futurism and later supporter of Mussolini, wrote in the Futurist Manifesto, “We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world…” Four years later, urging Italy’s entry into World War I, he declared coldly that “war is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages…” Yet the ghastly human and environmental costs of the First World War would pale in comparison to those of World War II, when total estimated military and civilian deaths numbered between 62 and 78 million. Even more incalculable was the war’s damage to the environment and to psychological morale. Despite, or because of, such losses, historian Jean-Louis Cohen has little doubt that it was a “just war,” given the potential for even greater destruction had Nazi Germany and the Axis powers defeated the Allies and achieved global domination.

The major precipitant of Architecture in Uniform was Cohen’s perplexed realization that historians of the subject in the last half of the twentieth century had focused almost exclusively on the war’s aftermath of reconstruction and rebuilding and paid almost no attention to the role of architecture in the war years themselves. Though Cohen’s necessarily topical approach results in occasional repetition, the book’s synchronic structure has allowed him to treat, in depth, the designing and building of massive spaces for industrial production, and variously scaled structures for anti-aircraft defense and for the administration and housing of personnel. In addition to the production of new buildings, architects were employed to reconfigure older ones and to plan the routes and accoutrements of the war’s vast transportation needs: rail, air, and automotive. Cohen’s richly documented and illustrated study was produced in connection with the exhibition he curated at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, in Montreal.

The two major combatants in the European theater, Germany and the United States, forged the most significant architectural expressions. In designing structures for producing heavy technology, the Detroit-based firm of Albert Kahn (1869–1942) was the undisputed leader. After emigrating as a child from Germany with his parents, Kahn developed his practice in both modernist and traditional modes, but his forte was the large industrial building for the assembly of automobiles for Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors. In the twenties and thirties, as his international reputation grew, Kahn also designed some 520 factories in the Soviet Union where his Moscow office numbered over 30 architects. Typical of his efforts for the American army was the gigantic, elegant concrete, steel, and glass Chrysler Tank Arsenal in Warren, Michigan (built in 1941–42). Exemplifying what would come to be called the “technological sublime,” the factory was 500 feet wide and 1,300 feet long, with the assembly line on one side fed by parts put together on the other. During the war years, the Arsenal’s 5,000 workers assembled over 25,000 tanks. Nearby, at Willow Run, Kahn’s 1-million-square-foot Ford Bomber Plant, 100,000 workers produced an average of one plane an hour.

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A roundup of articles, writers and ideas recently catching our attention:

“How To Be Good,” Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of philosopher Derek Parfit.

Brian Ted Jones’ essay on fiction and Vietnam.

Jeff Martin on the “Modern Steinbecks” chronicling our Great Recession.

Lynx Qualey considers the state of Libyan literature.

Lev Grossman on the evolution of the reading device.

Censorship in Asia grugingly cedes way to its main opponent: the global economy.

Bruce Krajewski on the 2011 mindset for university faculty (of a certain age).

Roz Kaveney on Philip K Dick’s bible.

Esquire reprints Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up”

(Photo courtesy CP Heiser)

AUDREY BILGER

on Jane Austen’s brand of sentimental education.

Les invisibles en tête-à-tête, from the series Le Supreme Bon Ton, No. 16, artist unknown; published by Martinet, Paris, c. 1810-1815 with thanks to Two Nerdy History Girls

Rachel M. Brownstein
Why Jane Austen?
Columbia University Press, 2011. 320 pp.

William Deresiewicz
A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me about Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter
The Penguin Press, 2011. 257 pp.

When V.S. Naipaul picked a fight with women writers in an interview earlier this year, citing a “narrow view of the world” as the source of female inferiority, he scorned Jane Austen for “her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world,” declaring that no woman, not even Austen, was his literary equal. “A woman,” he said, “is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing.” Women at best produce “feminine tosh.”

If Naipaul’s goal in putting down women writers was to get attention, he couldn’t have picked a better target than Jane Austen. In fact, it’s hard to imagine any other woman whose disparagement would have garnered so much notice. In a word-association game, if I say “woman author,” odds are the first name in your head would be that of the creator of Pride and Prejudice. It’s worth noting that when I tried to talk to one of my nonliterary friends about Naipaul’s remarks, his immediate response was “Who’s V.S. Naipaul?” Nobody ever says, “Who’s Jane Austen?”

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