SEAN SINGER

Abstract by Charles Alston

Harmony Holiday
Negro League Baseball
Fence, July 2011. 88 pp.

In Negro League Baseball, her debut volume of prose poems, Harmony Holiday wrestles with the perplexing question of how a black artist can live and work without drawing attention exclusively toward race, while returning regularly to the death of her father, the soul singer Jimmy Holiday. In an afterword, Holiday tries to explicate some of what she was attempting in this beautiful, confounding, and at times perilous book:

It is reconciliation without reconciliation. I had to invent an impossible/mythorealistic space wherein [my father] and I could have and insinuate the conversations he and I never got to finish in this realm, a place not too drastic, but not too casual either.

Not too drastic, not too casual: a place of simultaneous freedom and constraint. Here as elsewhere, Holiday has inherited her father’s musical legacy: the intensity, rigor, and playfulness with sound in her poetry is immense, as loving and complex a tribute as a parent can imagine. I quote one exemplary passage, from “Death by Then”:

A wizening, a new shrewd issuing sing, for him. I’m listening green, not like splendor, like latitude, for you a cleft gruesomeness treading itself scentless poppies seeping us noxious, my favorite hue and the context you care in, the color you carry the color, cousin the color, cousin and color, for lust towards husk sounds, carboned around the paranoia of ignoring a lever and a mother and a sister as inert glimmers of family grow vulgar or oliver, vinegar green, I’m thinking of two passings growing back, growing one verde arrogate, thinking it irritates me to pursue a canyoned longing to rural green renewal, drawl green, Iowa wasn’t green, shag carpet green, still thinking the grass which grows out of tar shoulder, the carved shrug toward our such slick road. I’m last green of an August funeral, struggling to depict what’s kept thinking.

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ERIC GUDAS

John Ashbery and James Schuyler Writing “Nest of Ninnies”
Fairfield Porter, 1967. Betty Cuningham Gallery

James Schuyler
Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems
Edited by James Meetze and Simon Pettet
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. 220 pp.

“Somebody loves us all,” promises Elizabeth Bishop at the conclusion of her poem “Filling Station.” Since his death in 1991 at the age of sixty-seven, James Schuyler’s poetry and prose have been loved by enough of us that publishers have brought forth his Collected Poems, compiled selections from his diaries, letters, and art criticism, and reprinted his two indispensible novels, Alfred and Guinevere and What’s for Dinner? The latest posthumous addition is Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems, edited by James Meetze and Simon Pettet. Meetze and Pettet gather 200 pages’ worth of Schuyler’s unpublished poems, and their devotion to their subject recalls Schuyler’s own devotion to W.H. Auden. As Auden’s secretary in the late 1940s, Schuyler “fished his drafts of poems / out of the wastepaper basket.” Meetze found the poems that comprise Other Flowers not in the wastepaper basket but in the Archive for New Poetry at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Special Collections Library. Poets who don’t want their unpublished poems to see the light of day should — as Schuyler reports that Auden did once he discovered what his secretary was up to — take to “burning them.” In the 1980s, Schuyler himself contemplated the survival of a notebook full of his own “stinker[s]” with discomfort:

                I’ve got to find that
notebook and tear it, when I’m dead some creep
                will publish it in a thin
volume called Uncollected Verse.

Despite its subtitle, Other Flowers isn’t the book that Schuyler anticipated. Meetze and Pettet play fast and loose with the term “uncollected,” which in a strict sense denotes work published in a journal or limited edition, but not republished in book form; the editors neglect some of these while including some never published. Readers intrigued by Schuyler’s poem “Along Overgrown Paths,” which appeared in The New Yorker in 2000, for instance, won’t find it here, but what they will find, mingled with the “stinker[s],” are enough indisputably fine poems to make Other Flowers essential reading for anyone interested in American poetry after 1950.

In one of Other Flowers’s best poems, “A Blue Shadow Painting” (1961), Schuyler “ache[s] to have the gift / for dusting off clichés: / Not Make it new, but See it, hear it freshly.” Schuyler’s fans — whose ranks Meetze and Pettet aspire to increase — will welcome these lines’ combination of gee-whiz guilelessness and Romantic ardor as one greets a long-absent friend. Here, as in so many of his more familiar poems, Schuyler eschews the Modernist poets’ vatic dicta in favor of a less ambitious, homelier aesthetic rooted in the everyday world where even “an earthworm’s crawl / has a familiar friendly wriggle.”

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JACOB SILVERMAN

The Church of St. Gregory of Tigran, Honents, Turkey
(cc) Marko Anastasov [link]

Mathias Énard
Zone
Translated by Charlotte Mandell.
Introduction by Brian Evenson.
Open Letter, December 2010. 517 pp.

Any consideration of Zone — the first novel by Frenchman Mathias Énard to be translated into English — must contend with one central fact. The novel is, as its jacket copy promises, composed of a single sentence stretched across 517 pages. This scheme means a lot and little to the novel. Énard’s formatting of his story is deceptively simple (he generally exchanges periods for commas), which makes the book highly readable, but this gargantuan sentence also charges the book with a peculiar rhythm: manic, propulsive, intentionally repetitive, an endless string of staccato drumbeats. Here’s a taste of Énard’s style, which can transmute the horrific into something sublime:

… in Iraq the heat was incredible, a damp vapor rising from the slow Tigris bordered with reeds where from time to time corpses and decaying carcasses ran aground like the Sava River in 1942 without perturbing the American patrols who were still strolling about like Thomson and Thompson in Tintin a blissful look on their faces as they observed around them the country they had just conquered which they didn’t know what to do with, Baghdad was drifting, ungovernable like Jerusalem or Algiers, it was decomposing, an atom bombarded by neutrons, hunger, sickness, ignorance, mourning, pain, despair without really understanding why the gods were persecuting it so …

Zone is the story of Francis Servain Mirkovic, a French intelligence agent who, prior to his entering the secret services, fought alongside Croat forces during the Yugoslav Wars in the early 1990s. Middle-aged and profoundly shaken by his years of working in and studying the violent history of the “Zone” (the Mediterranean region and some surrounding countries), Mirkovic has assembled a briefcase of secret documents culled from his intelligence work. Some of these documents describe war crimes in various conflicts; others, such as a file on a low-ranking SS officer, are simply information gleaned to satisfy his fixations. Mirkovic plans to sell the briefcase to an official at the Vatican for 300,000 Euros and run away with Sashka, his latest girlfriend, whose enduring presence in Mirkovic’s life owes itself only to the fact that she has not yet uncovered his disturbing past — his “barbaric side” — nor the nature of his unshakeable obsession with history’s most heinous crimes.

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JEET HEER

Illustration by Ben Katchor

Ben Katchor
The Cardboard Valise
Pantheon, March 2011. 128 pp.

Ben Katchor is the Joseph Mitchell of contemporary comics. Mitchell, along with his close friend A.J. Liebling, was a pivotal early New Yorker reporter who famously made a speciality of describing the peripheral rascals, layabouts, and oddballs of the Big Apple, ranging from the denizens of McSorley’s saloon to Joe Gould, the often homeless bohemian who claimed to be working on an “Oral History of the Contemporary World.” With their cockeyed street-level view of New York and propensity for profiling loopy souls, Mitchell’s works were important precursors to the early Katchor who, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, meticulously chronicled the wanderings of “Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer” in the pages of the New York Press (and, later, syndicated in alternative weeklies across the country). The Knipl strips were mournfully muted surveys of a New York where you could still feel the ghostly presence of the older city described by Mitchell in the 1930s and 1940s.

In his new book The Cardboard Valise, Katchor pays direct tribute to Mitchell’s “The Mohawks in High Steel,” published in the September 17, 1949 issue of the New Yorker. In that article, Mitchell regaled readers with lore about the Caughnawaga Mohawks, “the most footloose Indians in North America,” many of whom worked as riveters building skyscrapers all across the continent. The Mohawk affinity for highrise construction can be traced back to the building of a cantilever bridge across the St. Lawrence River near their Canadian reservation in 1886. Mitchell quotes a letter from an official from the Dominion Bridge Company who noted that

as the work progressed, it became apparent to all concerned that these Indians were very odd in that they did not have any fear of heights. If not watched, they would climb up into the spans and walk around up there as cool and collected as the toughest of our riveters … These Indians were as agile as goats.

Katchor’s version focuses instead on “ceiling workers.” It opens with a paean to the music of shopping malls and elevators. “Today, no business can be conducted without a decent sound system,” the narrator informs us, and the group whose labor makes this Muzak possible, “the men who scale these high ladders to install our modern speaker systems all come from the village of Tufarwan in North Western Slippur.” An off-panel voice offers dubious anthropological explanations as to why Tufarwanians dominate this trade: “In addition to being fearless ceiling workers, they are completely deaf to the charms of western music.” Like their Mohawk counterparts, the Tufarwanians are nomadic craftsmen: “Most leave their families behind and live in the company of their fellow tribesmen in short-term studio apartment sublets.”

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LOUISE STEINMAN

Spring in Gościeradz by Leon Wyczółkowski [link]

Jacob Glatstein
The Glatstein Chronicles
Translated by Maier Deshell and Norbert Guterman
Edited by Ruth R. Wisse
Yale University Press, November 2010. 432 pp.

On my trip to Poland this past winter, I brought the perfect book as my traveling companion. The Glatstein Chronicles was written in 1934, after the author, celebrated American Yiddish poet Jacob Glatstein, was summoned home from New York to his dying mother’s bedside in Lublin, Poland. Recently retranslated, edited, and published in English by Yale University Press, the poet’s travel narrative is both first-rate reportage and a fever dream of Europe on the brink of disaster.

Glatstein (named “Yash” as the book’s narrator) travels back to the Old Country by trans-Atlantic steamer. “The ship seemed to be carrying me back to my childhood,” he writes, “as though we were sailing back in time.” His is a half-forgotten, mythical childhood, where, “in the center of the synagogue, the fearful shadow of a hanging lamp swayed back and forth, like a body dangling from a rope.” These sometimes ominous, sometimes joyous memories are both interruption and counterpoint to Yash’s encounters with an international cast of characters as he crosses the ocean and travels across Europe by train.

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It started on the fourth day in Buffalo. I noticed spots out of my left eye that I’d never seen before. I didn’t pay too much attention at first. Either I was more weary than I thought or I had been staring too long at the sun. I didn’t tell anybody, figuring the spots would disappear. Little things like that came up all the time during training and were gone in a day or two. When I did tell a few people in camp, they told me not to worry. Everybody gets these spots…Except that the spots, known more commonly as floaters, did not go away, and of greater concern was that my eyelid began to feel like a curtain that was slowly closing, my visibility becoming less clear.

From The Big Fight: In and Out of the Ring by Sugar Ray Leonard

Sugar Ray Leonard appears at Eso Won bookstore today as part of the 5^th Annual Leimert Park Book Fair, signing copies of his autobiography, The Big Fight. Leonard’s revelation that he was sexually abused as a teenager by an unnamed coach has stirred a fresh round of debate over the legitimacy of abuse claims. And while the fairness of the debate itself is debatable, Leonard’s story flips the lid on any number of persistent stereotypes associated with rape victim credibility.

But The Big Fight, for the most part, is about just that: classic bouts so classic that even the most pugilistically ignorant will appreciate the names (Hagler, Duran, Hearns) and shudder at some of the scary results that come from decidedly tough human beings raining blows upon each other for sport (e.g. detached retinas — the ultimate reason for those floaters Leonard was seeing in Buffalo).

A place we should all want to see is Leimert Park, where Eso Won serves as the literary anchor for this historic neighborhood. Designed in the ’20s by the Olmsted brothers — sons of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted — Leimert Park (or Village as it’s sometimes called) is a leafy, tree-lined example of the urban planning models largely ignored by LA’s Boosters of Sprawl. It is also a nexus of the cultural community in South Los Angeles, a scene buoyed by jazz clubs, poetry and activism. President Obama has visited twice, which is exactly two times more than most Angelenos. Visit the Leimert Park Beat for more information.

TOM LUTZ

Reading Room, New York Public Library.
Glass Slide Image courtesy of NYPL

Yesterday, with great pleasure, I read the epigraph to Elizabeth Gumport’s short essay on book reviews in the already venerable n+1, the literary magazine out of Brooklyn. The epigraph is from an 1807 editorial in the long gone, but once venerable Monthly Anthology and Boston Review:

The office of a reviewer is, in a republic of letters, as beneficial and necessary, though as odious and unpleasant, as that of an executioner in a civil state.

This is fun, of course, as long as we don’t have to think too seriously about the death penalty or about book reviewing. There is, I’ll admit, something unpleasant enough about the business — all of us who have received bad notices know it, and we at the Los Angeles Review of Books are aware of it every day, now that we’re editing a bunch of reviews, worrying about our multiple responsibilities to writers, critics, readers, the record. But one thing I’ll wager: being reviewed does beat being executed.

Comparisons are odorous, as Dogberry says, but comparisons, however implicitly made, are the sturdy vein of book talk. I went to graduate school when it was considered elitist and therefore immoral to argue that some books were better than others, when the capital L in Literature was under a fairly strenuous ban, so I know how to avoid evaluation; in those years we all learned how to get by without it. Under the sway of the Death of the Author and what we might call the Deconstructive Fallacy — the idea that since a text can implode under enough analytic weight, it is “always already” imploded — we came to a conclusion not unlike Gumport’s: reviews are “pointless and boring — as unread as they are unreadable.”

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JONATHAN PENNER

Jimmy McDonough manning the slate
for Andy Milligan’s Monstrosity.
Flash frame from dailies, 1987.

I’d never heard of him. Found his book, The Ghastly One, on sale at Skylight Books; a whole volume on Andy Milligan, the Staten Island schlockmeister usually referred to as the more prolific, “worse” Ed Wood. I knew enough about Milligan’s awfulness to be intrigued and found Jimmy McDonough’s paperback unforgettable, moving, and brilliantly put together. I sought out his other three books and they were all funny, compulsively readable, staggeringly well researched and ragingly well written. What kind of gutter-dwelling genius would write not only The Ghastly One, but Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography, a vast, fevered journey through the life, times and music of the infuriating icon; Big Bosoms and Square Jaws, the tragicomic biography of sexploitation auteur Russ Meyer, soon to be a major motion picture from David O. Russell; and Tammy Wynette, Tragic Country Queen, a bittersweet, evenhanded appreciation of a singular talent most simply worship, deride or ignore? Who was this Jimmy McDonough, who had bushwhacked a course through the night traps and neon thickets of America’s postwar counterculture? I had to know. I requested an interview and got a “yes.” Learned he lives in Portland. Drives a Dodge Dart. Loves rayon shirts, Casino and Eyes Without a Face.

But he wouldn’t or couldn’t meet me. Or even talk on the phone. He agreed to field questions lobbed in over the Internet and returned answers honed to an off-handed perfection.

Maybe it’s that he’s a reclusive crank; maybe he’s just a control freak. Or maybe it’s that Jimmy McDonough knows how to get a subject to come alive on the page; that getting prose to read like a person’s talking, requires prose writing, and not just talk transcribing. “I’d like it to be accurate,” he says. “Other than that, bombs away!”

Jimmy McDonough

My first profile was on the honky-tonk singer Gary Stewart for The Village Voice in the mid-’80s. He was hiding out in a Florida trailer with the windows painted black. Much to Gary’s surprise I conned my way into that trailer by finding an old 45 he’d been searching for. Gary was maybe the most talented person I ever met. He just didn’t give a shit about fame. He was happier at home on the couch, watching Bronson in The White Buffalo for the 400th time. Gary had great country hits in the mid-’70s like “She’s Actin’ Single (And I’m Drinkin’ Double)” before falling off the face of the earth. I wanted to find out what happened to him, tell the world how great he was.

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CULLEN GALLAGHER

La Main Dans le Sac (CC) F. Moreno

Damn Near Dead 2: Live Noir or Die Trying
Edited by Bill Crider
Busted Flush Press, November 2010. 400 pp.

By Hook or By Crook, and 30 More of the Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year
Edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg
Tyrus Books, Novermber 2010. 600 pp.

The Best American Noir of the Century
Edited by James Ellroy and Otto Penzler
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, October 2010. 752 pp.

The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories
Edited by Otto Penzler
Vintage, September 2010. 1136 pp.

Though only a handful of mystery magazines remain in print, short form crime fiction continues to thrive. The genre has found a new lease on life through an ever-growing number of websites and a steady stream of “themed” print anthologies. Dozens of these anthologies — some reprinting older stories and others consisting entirely of new material — crowd the shelves of major and minor bookstores across the country.

Among the most unusual of the original anthologies is Damn Near Dead 2: Live Noir or Die Trying, a collection of twenty-eight tales in the self-defined niche of “geezer noir.” Edited by Bill Crider and published by the small-but-ambitious Houston-based Busted Flush Press, this follow-up to 2006’s original Damn Near Dead, manages to avoid the trappings of “gimmick” anthologies. The contributors clearly have fun with the “geezer” theme, but they focus on the story rather than the shtick. Stories range from the satiric — Joe R. Lansdale’s pithy “The Old Man in the Motorized Chair,” about a grumpy, retired detective who solves crimes between commercial breaks — to the tragic — Ed Gorman’s “Flying Solo,” about two terminally-ill cancer patients whose turn to violent vigilantism reflects their deeply rooted social and personal discontent. Anthology-opener “Sleep, Creep, Leap” by Patricia Abbott, a clever slow-burner about neighborly good intentions gone wrong, evokes the patient plotting and redolent characterization of Margaret Millar. Gary Phillips’ “The Investor” points to new directions in socially conscious crime fiction by fusing classic genre elements — mob corruption and hitmen — with timely economic and environmental concerns. And James Reasoner’s “Warning Shot” mixes pathos and action, as a Depression-era night security guard copes with the emotional and tangible consequences of an accidental shooting. Happily, Damn Near Dead 2 does without nursing home pastiche and cranky cane wielders.

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DAN FANTE

Pink’s Hot Dogs © Kaszeta on flickr

P.G. Sturges
Shortcut Man
Scribner, February 2011. 224 pp.

It’s ten thirty in Los Angeles on a Thursday night. Your buddy, who’s been a friend since your Berkeley days and still lives in Oakland, is in for the weekend visiting an old girlfriend. He’s strictly a San Francisco Bay Area cat and has never really been into Los Angeles, and you’ve decided to give him your version of a mini-tour. Now you’re headed west from Skylight Books on Vermont. You tell your friend you’re going to buy him a chilidog at a place called Pink’s on La Brea, and you’ve been talking about it off and on between side trips — pointing out Bukowski’s old apartment and where Nat West lived near Lafayette Square. Except when you get to Pink’s, it’s closed because some knotwad in a ’94 Astrovan just T-boned the side of the joint, and you’re left sitting there, parked across the street at a meter with fire hoses on the pavement and emergency lights going off everywhere, trying to explain to this old friend the sensation of eating a Pink’s chilidog, with extra onions. Well, reviewing P.G. Sturges’s rollicking new L.A. crime novel, Shortcut Man, is a bit like explaining how that chilidog will taste. You’d better just step up to the counter, plunk your money down, and let your senses roll.

Sturges and I have a few things in common (which I’m pretty sure is why I was asked to review his book here): we were both born and raised in Los Angeles, and both our fathers were in the movie business as screenwriters. Both of them are/were famous. We’ve also both written novels set in Los Angeles, and our writing careers came to us later in life. I’m a recycled drunk and, among other things, a former cab driver. Sturges spent many years in the military and still has a career as a successful meteorologist.

P.G.’s father, Oscar-winner Preston Sturges, loved the film business and parlayed his way from New York playwright to Hollywood icon, first becoming a screenwriter and then a groundbreaking director. Conversely, my own father hated the movie business — but loved Southern California and the good life. He deep-sixed an important early career as an author, then spent forty years picking up very chunky paychecks at all the major studios. After his death, John Fante was rediscovered as a fine American novelist. Most of his screenplays, however, were less than memorable.

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

Thursday, June 23^rd:

Reading from the new literary journal The Rattling Wall at Skylight Books starting at 7:30.

Grace Krilanovich and Wyatt Doyle discuss and sign The Orange Eats Creeps at Vroman’s Bookstore starting at 7:00pm.

Friday, June 24^th:

Lonesome No More! Theatre presents Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening as translated by Jonathan Franzen, at The Complex Hollywood’s Ruby Theatre staring at 10:30 pm.

Saturday, June 25^th:

Book signing with Sugar Ray Leonard’s autobiography The Big Fight at Eso Won Bookstore from 11:00am-1:00pm.

Celebrating Eric Carle’s birthday, snacks and a special storytime with some of Carle’s most distinguished storybook characters at Vroman’s Hastings Ranch starting at 11:00 am.

Will Alexander reads and signs Compression & Purity at Skylight Books starting at 5:0o pm.

Sunday, June 26^th:

Talks on Painting: Painters Beyond Painting featuring a panel of Tom Lawson, Steve Roden, Brett Cody Rogers, and Amanda Ross-Ho at the Mandrake from 7:00pm- 10:00pm.

CalArts Center for New Performance/Poor Dog Group presents their adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s Brewsie and Willie at Los Angeles Street Loft starting at 8:00 pm.

Today’s article by F.X. Feeney, on the first two entries in Soft Skull Press’s new Deep Focus series, comes with coming attractions. Here’s the 1974 trailer for Death Wish:

And one from 1988 for They Live:

F.X. FEENEY

Christopher Sorrentino
Death Wish
Deep Focus/Soft Skull Press, November 2010

Jonathan Lethem
They Live
Deep Focus/Soft Skull Press, November 2010

“Is Death Wish a good movie that ultimately fails, or is it a bad movie that succeeds brilliantly from time to time?” Christopher Sorrentino asks this at the outset of his brief study of the 1974 film, before turning to wrestle with a more lawless possibility: “Could it be both?” Such questions may prove over time to be the running theme of Deep Focus — a paperback series launched in late 2010 by Soft Skull Press, of which Sorrentino’s Death Wish is the second, following Jonathan Lethem’s provocative look at John Carpenter’s They Live (1988).* The approach in both is lively and heretical. “I’ve never seen a Carpenter film in a theater except Memoirs of an Invisible Man,” Lethem tells us by way of introducing himself. We are in the newfangled realm of criticism post-cinema:

A Netflix copy of They Live plays behind these words as I type. Not a television screen in the same room, but the computer’s, on which my document also appears. Thanks to contemporary technology — not just DVDs, but YouTube excerpts, available via wireless signal in the café where I write sometimes, if I’ve forgotten to bring the disk — I’m Pauline Kael’s ultimate opposite here: I’ve watched the entirety of my subject film a dozen times at least, and many individual scenes countless times more (Kael used to brag of seeing each film only once).

Improbably close readings of questionably canonical texts are the order of the day in these books, and the authors — both of them novelists — are clearly aware of the willed incongruity of what they’re doing. Sorrentino quotes Herman Melville’s description of the “Indian Hater” from The Confidence Man — “He commits himself to the forest primeval; there, so long as life shall be his, to act upon a calm, cloistered scheme of strategical, implacable, and lonesome vengeance” — in order to illuminate the peculiar magnetism of Bronson’s death-dealing vigilante.

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IBRAHIM N. ABUSHARIF

Omar Al-Mukhtar, captured by the Italian forces, September 1931. Omar Al-Mukhtar is celebrated as a resistance hero throughout the Arab world. His final words were the Quranic verse: Innā li-llāhi wa innā ilayHi rāgi ūna (To Allah we belong, and to Allah we return). Many cities throughout the Arab world have a street or a square named after Omar Al-Mokhtar. The Libyan 10 dinar note has long carried his image.
—Chez Chiara.

Knud Holmboe
Desert Encounter
[1931] GP Putnam, 1994. 296 pp.

Just before he was murdered under mysterious circumstances, Danish journalist Knud Holmboe let loose a damaging eyewitness account of European colonial rule in North Africa. First published in 1931, Desert Encounter (Ørkenen Brænder) became popular in Europe (though banned in Italy) and received favorable comments in European newspapers. It was less popular in the United States, but a 1937 New York Times review of the English translation said the narrative was a “dreadful indictment … not only because of the injustice and cruelty and oppression which it portrays but because these things are shown to exist behind and beneath so vainglorious a spirit of conquest, so glittering and meretricious a superstructure of material ‘progress.’”

Holmboe’s book brought to light the violent grip of Mussolini’s new “Romans” in Libya. During his stay in Cyrenaica, the eastern region of the country, he wrote, “[T]hirty executions took place daily, which means that about twelve thousand Arabs were executed yearly, not counting those killed in the war.” Bedouins also saw their wells cemented useless by the Italian military and livestock mowed down by machine gun fire, which forced the desert-dwellers by threat of privation to choose either slow death or humiliation in decrepit encampments. “The land swam in blood,” Holmboe wrote. In the densely populated and well-guarded encampment:

The Bedouins gathered round us. They looked incredibly ragged. On their feet were hides tied with string; their burnouses were a patchwork of all kinds of multicolored pieces. Many of them seemed ill and wretched, limping along with crooked backs, or with arms and legs that were terribly deformed.

The executions were held in public, and Holmboe was close enough to describe the faces of the condemned and learn of their preference for a bullet or a noose over Italian rule.

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ERICA WETTER

Tumble © Rachel Whiteread, 2007-2008 

Meghan Daum
Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House
Vintage paperback, June 2011 (256 pp.)

For many years, the Google Earth map of Escalada Terrace in Los Angeles included an aerial shot of a small house with an old mattress in the yard. This is LA Times columnist Meghan Daum’s house, and in her wise and funny memoir she recounts the nineteen moves, fourteen roommates, two dogs, and the one, possibly two, live-in boyfriends who lead her — and her mattress — to it. “Few sentiments are at once as honest and as absurd as the one that moves us to declare: ‘Life would be perfect if I lived in that house,’” Daum begins, thus launching a recounting of what is truly an absurd number of moves over the past fifteen years. This story of “a very imperfect life lived among very imperfect houses,” she declares, is written in homage to the wistful yearnings that have fueled her “lifelong game of house.”

Daum’s relentless search is an inherited one, she says, and can be traced back to her parents and their preoccupation with shedding the residue of their humble, coal-mining-town origins. But moving up in the world, as it turns out, means moving around, and with Daum in tow, they travel from Palo Alto, California, to Chicago, Illinois, to Austin, Texas, and then to Ridgewood, New Jersey. Even once they’ve settled in New Jersey, weekends are spent attending open houses.

Predictably, Daum absorbs her parents’ “perpetual curiosity about what possibilities for happiness might lie at the destination point of a moving van.” Once she hits college, she’s out the gate. After staying put in the same dorm room for the entirety of her freshman year at Vassar (she was told she had Meryl Streep’s old room), she goes on to move once every semester, from different dorm rooms, to off-campus housing, to New York City. She moves so many times that she stops dismantling her speakers from her stereo. By the time she graduates, she’s lived in ten different places, managing “to major in English but also to minor in moving.”

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The Los Angeles Review of Books will publish letters to the editors on Saturdays.

Jan Reymond, La Thésarbre, photo by timtom.ch.

This week, letters from David Livingstone Smith and Jon-Christian Suggs.

¤
To the Editors:

It is difficult for an author to respond to a review without sounding churlish, but at the same time, it is incumbent upon an author not to allow misrepresentations of his or her work to go unchallenged. It in is this spirit that I am moved to respond to Barbara Ehrenreich’s review of my book Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others.

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Policeman: Excuse me, sir. Would you mind telling me what you are doing?
Slinkachu: Oh. Er… I was just gluing down this little plastic person.
Policeman: Eh?
Slinkachu: Here, look. It’s an… Er… An art thing. Kind of. I take photos of these little people. Then leave them.
Policeman: Oh, ha! Cute! Sorry, I thought you were sniffing glue, what with that super glue. We get a lot of that around here.
Slinkachu: Yeah. Ha…
Policeman: Yeah, this is cute. Ha, a little car too! Sweet. My kids would love this!
Slinkachu: Yeah… It’s, er… A little prostitute. And a punter. In the car.
Policeman: …Oh…. Oh, well, er…. carry on.
Slinkachu: Er, yeah… thanks.



From Little People in the City – The Street Art of Slinkachu 



Banksy is sponsoring free Mondays for the duration of Art in the Streets at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. You should only have to pay for graffiti, he says, if you want to get rid of it. But even with all this consideration for the little people, something remains conspicuously absent from the MOCA’s show catalogue: Slinkachu. Banksy’s British colleague in the street arts hasn’t been around for that long, but his actual little people feel like an encounter with an old friend you haven’t heard from in a while, telling you about an old friend you haven’t heard from in an even longer while. If Banksy smacks you upside the head with ironic commentary, Slinkachu is his gentler, slightly more complicated, little brother.

Excerpted above is the entirety of Slinkachu’s introduction to his 2008 book of photographs, Little People in the City, with a foreword by Will Self. Your local independent bookseller is here.
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DIANA WAGMAN

Day (Truth) , Ferdinand Hodler, 1896-98
Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago

Margaux Fragoso
Tiger, Tiger: A Memoir
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011. 322 pp.

We drive by a car accident and crane our necks. We want to see the worst: the mutilated passenger, the driver crumpled against the wheel. If a director suddenly appeared and shouted, “Cut!” — wouldn’t we all feel a little disappointed? “It wasn’t real,” we’d say, “so it doesn’t really matter.” We want the truth, the more gruesome the better. We are transfixed by the image of a house blown over, crushing the inhabitants, or the spot of sidewalk where a little girl was shot, or a family photo of a father who raped and murdered twenty co-eds. We cannot get enough.

This is the tide all novelists swim against. Why would any reader choose to get their tragedy from fiction when there are so many stories of addiction, abuse, schizophrenia, widowhood, or dismemberment that really happened! Talk shows, radio hosts, and newspaper columnists are anxious to speak with the memoirist who has truly suffered. Forget the novelist who spent years researching a topic and creating a complex story and struggling to attain just the right perspective. There is nothing titillating there. Memoir is like the car accident; we experience a dollop of Schadenfreude with our measure of blood and guts. In our culture of endless self-reflection coupled with plausible deniability — my mother was crazy and my brother was handicapped and my father was gay and that’s why I’m fat — the memoir reigns as queen of the genres. The more sordid the author’s revelation, the better. In an interview with Sophie Roell at The Browser, Calvin Trillin agrees:

There’s been an unfortunate atrocity race in memoirs in the United States. You’re meant to reveal some hideous secret in your memoir if you expect it to go anywhere. Probably at least incest or bestiality or something like that.

And it’s not enough to expose the dirt; the author has to have triumphed over it to become a better person, to find true love, to open a store that imports textiles from India. Women who are still being beaten by their husbands do not write memoirs. No, these are survivor stories: I endured this and now I have a house at the seaside. It is literature as catharsis, orchestrated by Oprah: publicly purge and find love, support, and success.

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LA’s “June Gloom” sent tendrils of mist through the mountains and a canopy of clouds over my early morning walk in the Santa Monica Mountains today — enough Irish-type weather to remind me that June 16^th is Bloomsday, the day Leopold Bloom and two other characters meandered through Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

With the spin of the earth and time differences, that means pilgrimages have already been made in Paris to the Shakespeare & Company bookstore, named after the original epicenter where Sylvia Beach published Joyce when others lacked the audacity and vision.

Dublin is already in full celebration swing. Joyce’s name is on people’s lips and pillows, from the multiple pubs that have Joycean claims to the lavish Ritz Carlton Powerscourt Hotel’s turn-down service with Joyce quotes this week. Dublin’s James Joyce Center, the Writer’s Museum, and the Literary Pub Crawl all have tributes, and there are special readings and literary walks.

What other gatherings in the world focus on a single author, a single place, and a single day? Back in my college days, I dove into an entire book focused on a single day, but it was Mrs. Dalloway, not Ulysses. Published in 1925, just three years after Ulysses, the novel threaded a different social setting and scope. I don’t know of any Dalloway Days celebrated in the world.

After college, my engaging first job was company-managing theater shows in San Francisco, which meant I participated in the SF opening of a show called James Joyce’s Women, starring the show’s creator, the talented Fiounulla Flanagan, with her husband Dr. Garrett O’Connor. The tour-de-force performances of Molly Bloom and other Joyce females were staged by Burgess Meredith, a theatrical hero.

James Joyce’s Women played to full houses. I would like to think it was the scintillating blend of great acting, superb subject, and sensual language, but it was perhaps the collective crowd’s gasp when Fiounulla appeared in a bed naked that created the buzz.

Life galloped and sauntered in many directions since then, but this past spring, an invitation to Ireland awakened my dormant interest in Joyce. I would be heading to Dublin, a “UNESCO City of Literature,” with its Writer’s Museum, the Long Room of books at Trinity College (a bibliophile mecca), and, yes, the cobblestoned pathways walked by Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Yeats, Jonathan Swift, and James Joyce

I found my annotated copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and picked up Dubliners at the Agoura Hills Library, and proceeded to devour it in two sittings, transported through time and place.

But now I have returned from a very recommendable trip to Ireland, and it is June 16^th, and I still have not read Ulysses (despite being allowed to check “college-educated” on forms). This morning, I downloaded Ulysses to my iPhone, for my next transatlantic flight, traveling light with heavy reading. In the palm of my hand, I began: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and razor lay crossed.”

June 16^thin LA was immediately less gloomy.

Happy Bloomsday.

Lisa Sonne is a 4th generation Angeleno, and award-winning writer, photographer and filmmaker. Visit her website here.

For your viewing pleasure, we offer a few additional paintings by Patricia Patterson that we didn’t have room to reproduce alongside Robert Polito’s wonderful essay on the Tumblr today:

Mary Alone

Cóilín Lighting a Pipe

A retrospective of her 50-year career, Patricia Patterson: Here and There, Back and Forth is showing at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido, CA until September 3, 2011.

And for good measure, here’s a clip of Talking Heads’ “Television Man,” a song referred to multiple times in Polito’s review:

ROBERT POLITO

Cow Shingle Beach © Patricia Patterson

1. Stein & Limits
Gertrude Stein eventually called her lecture Composition as Explanation, but as she worked through the repetitions and variations for the 1926 Cambridge Literary Club audience, “composition” proved the stuff not only of writing and painting but also of everyday life. “The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living in the composition of the time in which they are living,” Stein submitted, and any neat “explanation” immediately atomized into restive self-examination:

Beginning again and again and again explaining composition and time is a natural thing … Composition is not there, it is going to be there and we are here … Just how much my work is known to you I do not know. I feel that perhaps it would be just as well to tell the whole of it … It was all so nearly alike it must be different and it is different, it is natural that if everything is used and there is a continuous present and a beginning again and again if it is all so alike it must be simply different and everything simply different was the natural way of creating it then.

Patricia Patterson’s performances over the past five decades, whether paintings, murals, or installations, landscapes or portraits, and however scrupulously, even radiantly observed, insist not on explanation but on sustaining only speculation and questions — her smart, resistant probes are, like Stein’s, as much for the artist herself as about the world. Her panache at invoking the people, vistas, and interiors of the Aran Islands, which she first visited in 1960, returning often over subsequent decades, advances an unsettling mix of autobiography and ethnography, representation and high concept, as does her work based in Southern California, where she and her husband, painter and film critic Manny Farber, moved in 1970. Her performances, too, spring from a propulsive vision of daily life as itself inherently composed, as theatrical.

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PAUL MANDELBAUM

Trust Me (cc) Steve Lambert

Mona Simpson
My Hollywood
Knopf, 2010. 384 pp.

As storytelling’s lifeblood is compassion, satire feeds off rage. Most Hollywood novels get their sustenance from both, though tend to binge on the latter. There’s a great deal to mock, obviously. It may in fact be so obvious, feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph. But in case you’re new to the genre, the Hollywood novel often fashions itself as a reality check against the illusory world of show business, whose woeful denizens scurry after easy fame and fortune. It calls out these poor souls on their materialism and shallowness, their desperate need to appear successful, and of course their faltering grip on virtue. The worship of youth — as well as beauty of a plastic order — ranks high among the town’s false idols in need of a good smashing; though really, what’s mockable about Hollywood is an exaggerated version of what’s mockable about America, just with nicer weather. That actual human suffering flourishes against such a balmy, not to mention glitzy, backdrop provides a facile irony few authors who have ever set foot here can resist.

Of all the tempting targets presented by Hollywood, most deserving of satiric rage remains the exploitative nature of the place. How quickly and in what manner will each new protagonist, often just arrived from the East or Midwest, become abused and degraded before abusing and degrading others? To read about all this can be edifying, but the pleasures — rueful chuckles and knowing winces, typically — are dark ones, not to mention kind of elitist, since satire entails a distant, critical perspective. From the anthropological obsessions of Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) to the balls-out insanity of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge (1968), the Hollywood novel invites our awareness of its author, sniping from the palm trees.

Mona Simpson’s My Hollywood — “at turns satirical and heartbreaking,” according to its jacket copy — provides a welcome expansion of the genre, and to some extent even a departure, which its title seeks to emphasize right from the get-go. “My” in this case refers to a narrator outside the Hollywood mainstream, actually two alternating narrators, neither of whom work in the entertainment industry. Nonetheless, they are both supported and victimized by it, situating My Hollywood very much as a novel about the town’s heartless exploitation of those who would dare seek their happiness here.

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GRAHAM HARMAN

From Tweets from Tahrir © Sarah Carr

Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle, editors
Tweets from Tahrir: Egypt’s Revolution as it Unfolded in the Words of the People who Made It
OR Books, 2011. 160 pp.

On Tuesday, January 25, 2011, Egyptians were scheduled to enjoy a national holiday: Police Day. But rather than being fêted by a grateful populace, Egypt’s police spent January 25 facing the greatest challenge to their authority in living memory. In accordance with a pre-arranged strategy, citizens began protesting at scattered sites across the city and attempted to converge at Tahrir Square in the heart of downtown Cairo. A sufficient number reached Tahrir that the police were thrown into a defensive posture from which they would never recover. Egypt’s so-called January 25 Revolution had begun, and its first stage would end less than three weeks later with the stunning resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. As a long-time resident of Egypt (I’ve taught philosophy at the American University in Cairo since 2000), I was astonished by these events. But I witnessed them primarily from abroad, having left for India via Bahrain on January 12, on a badly needed winter vacation. For this reason I, like most Americans, followed the events of this Internet-triggered revolution largely on the Internet itself.

Seldom do books have titles as informative as Tweets from Tahrir, a new edited collection by Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle. The book is exactly what the title suggests: a collection of real-time Twitter reports from the Egyptian Revolution. At just over two hundred pages the book offers a brisk read of unedited tweets, with all misspellings, abbreviations, and curse words left unchanged. For reasons explained in the editors’ preface, the volume focuses on a small number of Twitter “stars” who reported in English from Cairo, all of them apparently Egyptian, many exposed to direct personal peril. Anyone reading the collection quickly gains a sense of the personalities of such recurring figures as 3arabawy, Ghonim, GSquare86, ManarMohsen, Salamander, Sandmonkey, and TravellerW.

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

Tuesday, June 14^th:

We Are Here: We Could Be Everywhere: Media, Arts and Activism in Los Angeles and Beyond. Panel discussion with Aniko Imre, Henry Jenkins, Reed Johnson, and Fabian Wagmister at the Mark Taper Auditorium-Central Library starting at 7:00pm.

!Women Art Revolution screening revealing how the feminist art movement transformed our culture followed by Q&A with director Lynn Hershman-Leeson, and artists Kathe Kollwitz and Judy Baca at the Hammer Museum starting at 7:00pm.

Wednesday, June 15^th:

German writer Helene Hegemann discusses Axolotl Roadkill followed by a screening of a scene from Hegemann’s film Torpedo at Skylight Books starting at 7:30 pm.

Thursday, June 16^th:

Poet Ron Koertge discusses and signs his book Indigo at Vroman’s Bookstore starting at 11:00 am.

Simon Reynolds and Bruce Sterling in conversation at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, starting at 7:30 pm.

Friday, June 17^th:

Over the City and Through the Woods art opening, with works that focus on the organic within the context of the urban landscape, at the Statler Waldorf Gallery starting at 7:00pm.

Saturday, June 18^th:

The Poetic Research Bureau presents Dodie Bellamy and Sara Wintz at the PRB @ The Public School, starting at 8:00pm.

Part I of a series of pieces responding to
Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature?
(Harvard University Press, 2011)

Today, essays by
Walter Benn Michaels, Erica Edwards, and Aldon Lynn Nielsen.

Phillis Wheatley by Scipio Moorhead (c. 1773)

CLASS Walter Benn Michaels
One way of understanding Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? is as a book about literary history, about a period, now over, in which writing by black people was oriented toward a response to the conditions of Jim Crow. In an exchange between Warren and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Warren himself suggests this approach when he says that he could have called it What Was Negro Literature? To which Gates replies “The end of Negro Literature? I like that.” But for precisely the reason that Gates wishes he had, Warren didn’t call it What Was Negro Literature? Negro literature — the negro himself — is comfortably a thing of the past: Gates and Warren are professors of African American not Negro Studies; there are hundreds of universities and colleges that grant degrees in Black or African American studies, but not one that grants a degree in Negro studies. Warren’s point in insisting on “African American” is to insist that, even while eagerly putting the Negro behind it, African American literature has just as eagerly hung on to the legacy of Jim Crow, has mistakenly continued to understand racial disparity as the lynchpin of American inequality and thus, to put all his cards on the table, has become a force that works against rather than for the equality it imagines itself to seek. (And to put all mine on the table, Warren, Adolph Reed and I are working together on a book, You Can’t Get There From Here, about neoliberalism and the current politics of race.)

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HOWARD A. RODMAN

I’m writing this because I just found out that my favorite bookseller in the world, Michel Roethel, is dead.  He was mysterious and his bookstore obscure.  It was on the Rue Lagrange in Paris.  It sold the works of only one author.  And its proprietor didn’t like selling books at all: M. Roethel always seemed unhappy when a book managed to leave his shop. 

Some years ago — it might have been in 1984 — I told a friend of my growing delight in Jules Verne, and how I’d so much like to own one of his books in its original format. Verne’s novels were first published in the middle of the century before the one before this one. The series was called Voyages Extraordinaires. The publisher and editor was Verne’s dear friend Pierre-Jules Hetzel. The bindings were intaglio’d with globes and alembics, elephants and balloons, harpoons and astrolabes. Though they were tooled leather, they gave the sense of dark wood, of hand-turned brass. They seemed not just of another era but of another world. To run your fingers over the cover of a Hetzel octavo was to go on an extraordinary voyage, a Braille of wonder.

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We were given permission to use more pictures for Howard Rodman’s beautiful memorial to his favorite bookseller than we could use for the story, including this, by the photographer sansplans: Jules Verne Bookshop, March 16, 2011 © sansplans

The first wedding I ever did was in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It was a humble Quechua couple, and the Mass was in the main Jesuit church in the center of town. Standing room only with Quechua Indians in their absolute finest clothes. Quechua cholas in brightly colored hoopy skirts and shawls, with tiny bowler hats perched at a tilt, on top of their pinched-back hair. Men in suits with white collars, unspeakably wide and starched, craning their necks beyond what seems natural. Communion times arrives, and I go to the couple.

They refuse to receive communion. I beg them. They will not budge. I go the congregation and invite them to receive communion. Not one person comes forward. I beg and plead, but no one steps up. I discover later, with the help of some Jesuit scholastics, that the Indians’ sense of cultural disparagement and toxic shame was total. Since the time of the Conquista, when the Spaniards “converted” the Indians, they baptized them, but no roofs ever got ripped open. This was to be their place — outside of communion — forever.

Maybe we call this the opposite of God.

— Gregory Boyle, from Tattoos on the Heart

Yesterday, Greg Boyle’s Homeboy Diner opened on the second floor of Los Angeles City Hall. Where else? Boyle would probably ask. The marginalization of the Indians he first met in Bolivia changed something inside the young priest. When he returned to Los Angeles thirty years ago, and found himself assigned to a parish with the highest concentration of gang activity in the city, he recognized the “toxic shame” of the Quechua in the homies.

Consider Boyle a man with a great eraser slung over his broad shoulders, rubbing at the margins keeping people (and their voices) in open-air isolation. His book, recently out in paperback, documents thirty years of work with the gangland homies of East Los Angeles. The book’s questions, however, are for the reader as much for the homie. Why is the world relevant to us, and vice versa? Who helps us? How do we help ourselves? A Jesuit priest, Boyle doesn’t look upstairs for answers. He looks people in the face.

Boyle is widely read, and cites a wide range of philosophers and poets in his book. In the end, it is about consciousness. Consciousness as a podium with one topic up for discussion: relevance. Everyday we confront life with slight adjustments, alterations and patches to what we believe matters. Depression, it would seem, occurs when this internal dialectic fails and the platform tips. The abyss does the rest. A singular insight in Boyle’s book is that the homies — and it seems to be truer the more menacing they appear to be — are catastrophically depressed. With second or third generation gang members, the platform was tipped from day one. The trauma is disastrous. Greg Boyle’s efforts amount to the work of a coast guard after a hurricane.

Find Tattoos on the Heart at your local bookstore, then visit their web site to order the book. Or visit Homeboy Industries directly.

JEAN STEIN

Larry Flynt by © Corey Cooley 

Good morning, I am your worst nightmare come true: a fabulously wealthy pornographer with the courage and willingness to spend my last dime to expose how you are perverting the Constitution of this great land. Now let’s get down to business. — “Larry Flynt for President” campaign ad, Nov. 1983

Dennis Hopper

I decided I was going to blow myself up at the Big H Speedway — something I saw at the rodeo when I was a kid. They called it “the human stick of dynamite.” I was convinced that somebody was trying to make a hit on me, and it would be easier to kill me if I was doing this. If I lived through it, then I was destined to live for a while. The stunt man who helped me put the thing together said, “You’ll be disoriented for a few weeks.” Little did he fucking know. A week later I was in Mexico and I really flipped out. I was on location for a film. They’d asked me to play the head of the DEA. I thought it was just a plot and they were going to get me. Next thing I knew I was walking through the jungle naked. I was convinced everybody understood everything I was thinking.

I ended up in Studio 12, where they took me to recover from the alcohol and drugs and so on. I got an offer from Larry Flynt to do the first celebrity shoot for Hustler. I was so out of it, I thought it was some sort of code. It sounded really interesting to me. So Flynt moved me into his house and I became like his top advisor. And here I was, just out of a fucking mental institution. I’d agree with anything he said. “Oh yeah, run for President, sure, why not? Wish I’d thought of it, Larry.” In the beginning, I thought he was kidding about running for President. Then he suddenly wasn’t kidding. All these ‘60s radicals started showing up: Stokely Carmichael and what’s his name, Rap Brown would come in. And Russell Means would be downstairs. He was Larry’s Vice Presidential candidate. And Terry and Leary and myself, just the most radical people.

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

Wednesday, June 8:

The writings of Paul Thek as read by Thomas Jane at the Hammer Museum starting at 7:00.

Thursday, June 9:

Hammer Readings: New American Writing with Heidi Julavits and Vendela Vida at the Hammer Museum starting at 7:00.

Ramsey McPhillips, Lynelle White, and a special surprise guest to discuss the life and work of Mark Morrisroe at ARTBOOK @Paper Chase from 7:00-10:00.

Jonathan Gold, Colin Dickey and Carson Mell read at Atwater Crossing starting at 8:00.

Saturday, June 11:

Mary Mallory signs Hollywoodland at Chevalier’s Books from 1:00-3:00.

Art exhibition reception: Blithe Spirits, a joint art show featuring Sean Chao and Ines Estrada at Giant Robot 2 from 6:30-10:00.

Sunday, June 12:

Reading of Boom: A Journal of California followed by discussion at The Autry in Griffith Park from 2:00-3:30.

Larry Bell talks with Robert Irwin at LACMA from 4:00-6:00.

Steve Almond reads and signs his self-published books at Skylight Books starting at 5:00.

CHARLES HARPER WEBB

Still from Trouble in the Image © Pat O’Neill

Bob Hicok
Words for Empty and Words for Full
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. 96 pp.

Bob Hicok is that rarity, a cheerful contemporary poet — if not completely happy, still hopeful and celebrative: “there are stars / inside your thumb, your breath, / and how you say yes or no is how they shine / or burn out,” he says near the beginning of his new book Words for Empty and Words for Full.

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SIOBHAN PHILLIPS

Photo © Lisa Jane Persky

Matthew Zapruder
Come on All You Ghosts
Copper Canyon Press, 2010. 96 pp.

Matthew Zapruder will speak to you. This isn’t a metaphor, or a mere recommendation: it’s a description of method. In “Come On All You Ghosts,” the title poem of his third and latest volume, Zapruder calls directly to whomever might be taking in his lines at that particular moment: “Reader,” he writes,

it doesn’t seem
very strange to be
here in this apartment

thinking of you
and how we will someday
(right now!) be together.

The tone here is characteristic, a blend of matter-of-fact candor and theoretical curiosity.

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A few years ago I took a MediaBistro crash course in newspaper writing and learned the term “evergreen.” My instructor promised us that our clips were evergreen — that is, if we ever wrote for a paper, it didn’t matter if our piece was a week old or five years old: it could still get us our next job.

It turns out that certain topics for newspaper stories are evergreen as well. (The most obvious is Christmas. Literally evergreen. You can write about it every year.) In America, these stories often focus on teenagers, which makes sense because teenagers are a renewable resource and a convenient canvas for adult fears.

Teens occupy the position in our culture that women occupied in Victorian England. Back then it was understood that a woman should not show her ankles because it might prompt men to rape her. Today, it’s understood a teenager should not play Grand Theft Auto because it might prompt him to become a rapist. Teens are paradoxically dangerous and helpless, over-sexualized and in need of protection, and they’re who we talk about first when we talk about our problems.

So it’s not surprising that sex and violence, perennial American pastimes, inform two popular evergreen teenage stories. One is the “kids are having wanton sex” exposé (examples: “Unsettling New Fad Alarms Parents: Middle School Oral Sex” from July 8, 1999; “Why Learning About Sex From the Web Comes With Drawbacks” from January 30, 2011). The second is the “teenagers corrupted by media” story, of which the Wall Street Journal essay that sprouted the #YASaves phenomenon is an example.

#YASaves is a big moment for young adult literature (we were a trending topic on Twitter, yo!) but in many ways the WSJ essay is the most credible and legitimizing aspect of the controversy. Prior to the 2000s, YA lit was simply not important enough to warrant WSJ attention. To find a “teenagers corrupted by media” story with a literary angle, one had to turn to academic publications. (The New Yorker found a great one in a 1985 issue of The English Journal.) The story was more widely applied to teen media that was actually popular: Judas Priest’s allegedly suicide-inducing music, for instance, or the damnable antics of gangsta rappers.

But two books were published in 1999 that changed YA: Walter Dean Myers’ Monster and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak. Each tackled an issue both hot-button and evergreen (urban violence and sexual assault) with the clarity and explicitness of literary fiction. The same year, Harry Potter hit bestseller lists in the US.

It’s not often that an industry awakens artistically as it explodes commercially (rock and roll in the 60s comes to mind) but that’s exactly what happened to YA in the 2000s. The fantasies of Harry Potter begat Twilight and The Hunger Games just as the realities of The Burn Journals and Tyrell changed an industry known in decades past for The Hardy Boys and The Babysitters Club. You had to go back to Judy Blume’s Forever, or all the way to Catcher in the Rye, to find works that similarly challenged teen audiences in terms of language and content.

Those of us who were in the YA field during this time remember two iterations of the “teenagers corrupted by media” story. The first was in 1999, following Columbine, when media outlets questioned whether Harry Potter’s relation to the occult had infiltrated the minds of the Trenchcoat Mafia. Then, in 2005, a book called The Rainbow Party was condemned as obscene for purporting to chronicle the phenomenon of teen oral sex parties.

The WSJ attack on YA books is different. After Columbine, everyone from Marilyn Manson to Magic: The Gathering was a target, so it’s no shock that some school boards tried to lump in Harry Potter and newspaper editors picked up on their antics. As for The Rainbow Party, the book itself was a naked attempt to drum up publicity; the shameful thing is that it succeeded, no matter how fleetingly. (Rainbow parties remain an urban legend.) The WSJ piece, on the other hand, comes out of nowhere, brought forth simply by the popularity of YA literature.

For anyone who cares about young adult books, this is a time for celebration. For the last decade, as the adult book business has flatlined, YA has continued to challenge itself topically and grow financially in the face of video games, comic-book movies, and the internet. Now it has earned the kind of evergreen criticism that dogs pop stars and filmmakers.

I’m reminded of Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the evergreen Super Mario Brothers, quoted in defense of his chosen art form in a 2010 New Yorker profile: “Video games are bad for you? … That’s what they said about rock and roll!” The WSJ piece has the shrill tone of a jazz DJ smashing an Elvis record, so congratulations, YA authors: you are now rock stars.


Ned Vizzini is the author of three acclaimed young adult books: It’s Kind of a Funny Story (also a major motion picture), Be More Chill, and Teen Angst? Naaah…. He has written about YA for the New York Times and the L Magazine. He recently contributed to the nonfiction Hunger Games collection The Girl Who Was on Fire and an essay of his will appear in Triumph of The Walking Dead: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Epic on Page and Screen (Nov. 2011). His next novel, The Other Normals, will be published in fall 2012.

JANE SMILEY

Map courtesy of the Library of Virginia

Sheri Holman
Witches on the Road Tonight
Atlantic Monthly Press, March 2011. 400 pp.

Sheri Holman has an imagination that is both capacious and meticulous, and by turns somber and antic. It is a strange combination, rather like the flavor of, well, maybe burdock leaves. She has written about the 15th century (in A Stolen Tongue), the 19th century (in The Dress Lodger), about plagues, prostitution, holy relics, dissection, still births, and dairy cows. Her new novel, Witches on the Road Tonight, set in our own day, seems slightly less ambitious and slightly more fanciful than her three previous ones, but that is just one of its illusions.

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JESSICA FREEMAN-SLADE

Snowy © Dina Goldstein

Kate Bernheimer, editor
My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales
Penguin, 2010. 608 pp.

Adults who were once children tend to agree: we are who we are because of fairy tales. Once upon a time, they were the clearest — and most just-seeming — of all narratives, even if they weren’t entirely real. People got what they deserved. Actions led to results. The wicked were punished; the good were rewarded. The young, beautiful princess was intrinsically good; the old, gnarled crone was irrefutably evil. These stories were more than mere guides to the world as we saw it; they were totemic and prophetic.

I remember a beautifully illustrated anthology, its cover embossed and its pages thick and important — remember feeling there could be no more important text in the world. It would tell me everything I needed to know about how I should behave, and what would happen to me if I didn’t. When I grew up, my faith in fairy tales was punctured; the tales’ true meanings struck me like slaps to the face. “Little Red Riding Hood” was not about the threat of strangers, but an allegory about menstruation; the intimations of class warfare in “Cinderella” shatter the romance of glass slippers; Snow White’s tortured relationship with her jealous stepmother could make any child distrust a future step-parent. The world of adult experience begins to cloud our readings of even the loveliest and lightest of fairy tales — until we remember that these stories have always been written by adults who’d come to know the world’s shadows, its imperfections, its disappointments. After all, the life stories of Hans Christian Andersen, the Grimms, and Charles Perrault were anything but fairy tales.

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Maria Bustillos responds to Sven Birkerts’ “The Room and the Elephant” (an essay which, she nicely says, gives her “a rather Eliza Doolittle-like feeling, like being invited to dance by the prince of Transylvania”) over at The Awl.

SVEN BIRKERTS

Man with Cuboid, M.C.Escher

Every so often something will break through the stimulus shield I hold up whenever I go online, which I do far too often these days, we all do, and for various reasons, one being, I’m sure, that the existence of the medium has created an unremitting low-intensity neural disquiet that we feel only the medium can allay — even though it cannot, never has. But it is an attribute of the Internet to activate in me, and maybe in all its users, a persistent sense of deferred expectancy, as if that thing that I might be looking for, that I couldn’t name but would know if I saw, were at every moment a finger tap away. That is the root of the addiction right there — and it is an addiction, sure, if only a lower-case one. To bear all this, therefore, to proof myself against the unstanchable flow of unnecessary information and peripheral sensation, I make use of this shield, which is really just an attention-averting reflex, a way of filtering almost everything away, leaving just the barest bones of whatever I happen to be looking at, and these only in case some tell-tale name or expression requires me to peer a bit more closely.

I practice this defensive, exclusionary scanning not only with the incidental flotsam I encounter — the inescapable digests of happenings in the world, celebrity divorces, killer storms, and so on — but also, more and more, with texts about subjects that ostensibly concern me. A recent case in point — I have it handy now because I finally printed it out — is an article I found online at The Awl called “Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert” by Maria Bustillos (posted on May 17, 2011). It came to me via several clicks at one of the so-called “aggregate” sites I sometimes visit to keep myself “informed.” I scan a great many articles in the course of my daily tours, but I am not avid. More often I scroll my eyes down the screen with a preemptive weariness — which is an angry and defensive posture, I agree — as if nothing truly worthy could ever be found online (I know this is not true), as if I will have conceded something to the opposition if I were to fully engage the Internet and profit from the engagement.

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In her Wall Street Journal article “Darkness Too Visible,” Meghan Cox Gurdon rails against the scourge of publishers who “use … fundamental free-expression principles to try to bulldoze coarseness or misery into their children’s lives” through current Young Adult literature. No. Nuh uh. Nope. Let me register my disagreement right here.

As Gurdon correctly points out, the YA genre wasn’t fully realized until the publication of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders in 1967. You know, the book where (SPOILER ALERT) strife between socioeconomic factions leads to a boy’s murder? The book where (FURTHER SPOILER ALERT) teens are so lost, abused and abandoned, they go on the lam to avoid murder raps, toting guns and ill-gotten money? Remember the part where (ULTIMATE SPOILER ALERT) Johnny is horribly burned rescuing some children from a fire, proving he’s more than just a killer who’s a product of his upbringing? But Johnny winds up dying and his BFF Ponyboy is changed forever? It was all in that slim YA novel, written for teens, by a teen, forty-four years ago.

Gurdon mentions YA classics like Go Ask Alice (about a young drug addict) and Sarah T: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic and notes that Robert Cormier is “generally credited with having introduced utter hopelessness to teen narratives” with books like I Am The Cheese (about an adolescent, witness protection, parental murder, madness, etc.). I read ‘em all. I read Killing Mr. Griffin (about bad kids KILLING a TEACHER!) and Avalanche (about a nice kid, an avalanche, and eating raw birds). I read Stephen King paperbacks poached from my dad, as well as Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret? and all things Judy Blume. I devoured everything I put my hands on. Why? Because I needed to. As much as a young body should consume proteins, grains and greens to grow, a young mind should consume comedy, tragedy and fantasy to thrive.

By the time I was twelve, my life had already been affected directly by sexual abuse, addiction and death. I’d witnessed domestic violence with my own ‘tween eyes. I was overweight, isolated, smart, and sad. Sometimes I read to know I wasn’t alone. Sometimes I read to try to put my life and troubles in perspective, compared to the lives and troubles of fictional friends. And while I sometimes read freaky geeky science fiction or gruesome bloody paranormal as a means of transporting myself somewhere else, I also sometimes read to escape to a place where summer camp was affordable and the biggest problem was a bat flopping around bunk five. It was a balance I was able to achieve pretty effortlessly, guided by my own developing tastes and budding instincts.

We know that, to be good, a story needs conflict, struggle and resolution, with a hero emerging, somehow changed. Even books we read to our youngest are fraught with peril. Will Horton save Whoville? Will Charlotte deliver Wilbur from his fate? Even in their footie jammies, every little brain knows what’s gonna happen to those Whos and that pig if things go awry. That is why they listen, rapt, and ask us to read it again. That is why, in six years, they’ll seek out good dystopian fiction like Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, which contains as many acts of gentility as it does violence. It’s why they’ll read good realistic fiction that will be rough, but also – as promised – real.

Is this cause for alarm? No. Because while Gurdon says that “it is possible — indeed, likely — that books focusing on pathologies” like Jackie Morse Kessler’s Rage “help normalize them and … may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures,” she does not cite a single example of that actually happening. In a cursory search of warning signs for self-harming teens, “reading” was not on any list of potential triggers that I found. Talk about pulling up your petticoats and shrieking, Ms. Gurdon!

Gurdon says that what parents might call “judgment or taste,” the publishing industry calls “censorship.” Again, nuh uh. As a parent, it’s my duty to provide guidance in all matters of media consumption for my child. That’s a whole different kettle of fish than someone determining a book shouldn’t be available to ANY young person because it may not be right for some young persons. That IS banning. Which is frighteningly close to burning, no?

Everybody, take a breath. We’d do well to remember that books don’t put darkness into children. Books are what switch on their lights.

Caissie St. Onge is an Emmy-nominated television writer and producer who never joined a gang, turned to a life of prostitution, or became a murderous clown despite what she read in her formative years. Her debut YA novel Jane Jones: Worst. Vampire. Ever. is currently available from Random House/Ember.

Check back tomorrow for a final response to Gurdon’s article by Ned Vizzini.

WSJ Newsflash: Some Old People Don’t Like What

Some Young People Are Reading!

It sounds like an Onion headline. But it’s true; on Saturday afternoon, the WSJ (Media Translation: Old People) published a sweeping, genre-wide condemnation of the YA genre, inked by Meghan Cox Gurdon. By Saturday evening, YA’s unofficial Ambassador @libbabray (among others) took to the Twittersphere (Media Translation: Young People) to respond. Vice-Ambassador @maureenjohnson was right there with her, creating the hashtag #YASaves to encourage YA readers to share positive experiences with the genre as a counterpoint. That evening, #YASaves became the third-highest trending topic in the country, and interestingly, the world. The responses number in the thousands and are still coming; you can still read them today and I suggest you do. Some speak of reading as they question sexual or personal identity, or struggling to find a place in their families, relationships and the larger world. Others talk about turning to books to survive rape, divorce, incest, eating disorders, loneliness and depression. Some just love to read.

#YASaves is the real rebuttal to Ms. Gurdon’s editorial, and truthfully, though you should also check out what @libbabray, @hollyblack, @maureenjohnson @LizB, and @PersnicketySnark have all written on the subject, there is nothing more powerful than the voice of the readers themselves. On Saturday, YA readers felt personally affronted, as did YA writer/readers; as one of the latter, I can tell you we aren’t so different. We write the books we write because we need to, even these many years later — as Holly Black tweeted on Saturday, “Honestly, @wsj, do you think we just make this stuff up? The darkest parts of many of my books came directly from my teenage life. #yasaves”

The WSJ sort of attack is, as @cecilseaskull pointed out on this blog yesterday, nothing new – but, then again, this was the Wall Street Journal! (Growing up in my house, where my father was both an Investment Banker and a Mormon Bishop, there was the WSJ and the Bible, and the distinction was negligible.) And it wasn’t just that; within the article itself, the YA genre was characterized with soapbox-your-ears words I haven’t seen since researching the James Joyce obscenity trials as a grad student at Stanford.

Let me do the word cloud for you: Depravity! Lurid! Explicit Abuse! Violence! Pederasty! (“What’s Pederasty,” my now interested teen asks, reading over my shoulder) Pathology! (“So it’s a disease?”) Brutal! Hideously Distorted! Funhouse Mirrors! (“Wait, are we still talking about books?”) Damage! Horrendous! Smut! Objectionable! Grotesque! In other words, as Kurtz would say, the Horror, the Horror!

There is much to take away from conversations like these, particularly, though it didn’t start out as a conversation, the speed with which it became one. While the WSJ article took the form of a depersonalized, one-way transmission of contempt – a writer who doesn’t seem to care for YA reporting second-hand that a mom who hadn’t read YA couldn’t find the right books while a BN worker who hadn’t read them either couldn’t help – it was rebutted in an open-ended, inclusive fashion by thousands of details offered from individuals to whom the genre spoke personally, specifically, and successfully. And while comments attached to the original WSJ article remained largely from people who didn’t care to read the depraved stuff either (you had to register with the WSJ to comment) it was left to Twitter to explode with the other half of the conversation.

Explode it did.

The article itself doesn’t merit a point-by-point rebuttal; in tone, it was reminiscent of a younger student before coming to office hours. I could almost hear myself saying “Depravity? Really? Can you support that? Do you think you need to temper that language just a bit?” But, if you insist on talking about depravity, let’s talk about the depravity of a world where, as more than one twitter voice said, so many people are hurt in so many ways so much of the time — but instead of talking about how to keep these things from happening, we’ll talk about how to not talk about them. Let’s talk about the depravity of firing librarians and cutting teacher salaries and eliminating all the many knowledgeable voices who could have helped that mother discover what powerful stories were available to her child.

But you want to know what’s really depraved? According to my teen, “when old people like your stuff. That’s seriously creepy.”

So thanks, WSJ. Like rock n’ roll, pants, and my right to work and vote and drive, you’re paving the way for my daughter’s generation to still think reading is SMUT, I mean, cool.

Hate on, if you don’t mind. I’ve got two more daughters to go, and I’d really like to keep them reading?

Why?

Because #YASaves.

Stay tuned for YA authors weighing in on this issue on the LARB blog all week.

Margaret Stohl has a MA in English from Stanford, and is the co-author of the Beautiful Creatures Novels (with Kami Garcia). She lives with her smutty! husband and three joyously depraved! daughters in Santa Monica, in a house with two highly objectionable! beagles yet sadly no funhouse mirrors! at all.

BARBARA EHRENREICH

Jack Kirby from Alarming Tales #1, September 1957

David Livingstone Smith
Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave and Exterminate Others
St. Martin’s Press, 2011

Dale Peterson
The Moral Lives of Animals
Bloomsbury Press, 2011

Paul A. Trout
Deadly Powers: Animal Predators and the Mythic Imagination
Prometheus Books, 2011.

Jason Hribal
Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance
AK Press, 2010

John Vaillant
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
Knopf, 2010

In the last decade, human vanity has taken a major hit. Traits once thought to be uniquely, even definingly human have turned up in the repertoire of animal behaviors: tool use, for example, is widespread among non-human primates, at least if a stick counts as a tool. We share moral qualities, such as a capacity for altruism with dolphins, elephants and others; our ability to undertake cooperative ventures, such as hunting, can also be found among lions, chimpanzees and sharks. Chimps are also capable of “culture,” in the sense of socially transmitted skills and behaviors peculiar to a particular group or band. Creatures as unrelated as sea gulls and bonobos indulge in homosexuality and other nonreproductive sexual activities. There are even animal artists: male bowerbirds, who construct complex, obsessively decorated structures to attract females; dolphins who draw dolphin audiences to their elaborately blown sequences of bubbles. Whales have been known to enact what look, to human divers, very much like rituals of gratitude.

The discovery of all these animal talents has contributed to an explosion of human interest in animals — or what, as the human-animal gap continues to narrow, we should properly call “other animals.” We have an animal rights movement that militantly objects to the eating of nonhuman animals as well as their enslavement and captivity. A new field of “animal studies” has sprung up just in the last decade or so, complete with college majors and academic journals. Ever since the philosopher Peter Singer’s groundbreaking 1976 Animal Liberation, one book after another has attempted to explore the inner lives and emotions of nonhuman animals. Bit by bit, we humans have had to cede our time-honored position at the summit of the “great chain of being” and acknowledge that we share the planet — not very equitably or graciously of course — with intelligent, estimable creatures worthy of moral consideration.

But it will take more than a few PETA protests or seasons of the Discovery channel to cut humans down to size. Contempt for animals is built into our languages: think of the word “bestial” or fressen, the German word for the distinctive way animals are thought to eat. In the great monotheistic religions, human superiority is as much taken for granted as the superiority of God over humans. Nonhuman animals were created in the service of humans, as if the deity wanted to leave us with a fully-stocked refrigerator. They offer up their flesh, their pelts and often their labor, and that, as Immanuel Kant saw it, was their mission on earth.

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Here we go again. Every once in a while someone writes an article insinuating that YA Authors are purposefully writing dark books with inappropriate subject matter for teens. On June 4^th, 2011 it was the Wall Street Journal that published an article by Meghan Cox Gurdon about the Darkness of YA books.

We’ve been down this road before. Every time a book is banned in a library or from a school. Some of those books are good and some of them are bad. But here’s the thing: a good book is never bad for you.

Gurdon’s article starts off with a 46-year old mother wandering around a book store. She can’t seem to find a single book for her teenager that isn’t rife with “dark, dark stuff” like “vampires and suicide and self-mutilation” and walks out empty handed. Really? Ms. Freeman couldn’t find a single book? I bet she could have.

I hang out at my local indie bookstore Skylight Books a lot. Every Christmas I wrap presents for them for charity (I wrap for the Jenesse Center). The wrapping station this year was by the YA section so I ended up bookselling, too, because people mostly just stood around the YA section not knowing what to get. So I’d politely ask if they needed help. And they’d say, “Yes.” My first question was always, “What kind of kid are they?” Some adults would get that question. They’d say “Oh, they like this” or “They read way above their age” or “Their parents are crazy hippies so they’ve been exposed to everything” or “These are their favorite books.” Other adults would say, “Well they like this, but I want to get something that is good for them.” I can tell you which kid was happy with the book they got for the holidays and which kid unwrapped their present and never wanted to read the book they got (or maybe any other book ever again). A shame really, because putting the right book in the right kid’s hands is kind of like giving that kid superpowers. Because one book leads to the next book and the next book and the next book and that is how a world-view grows. That is how you nourish thought.

Yes. Let’s admit it. There are dark books in the YA section. But there are also just as many that cater to different tastes. There are many kinds of YA books, just as there are many kinds of authors and many kinds of readers.

Look, YA authors get it. We get that some kids are not ready for this or for that. We get that not every kid is alike. We get that.

But YA authors are not deliberately trying to write something that is horrible, or shocking, or going to get banned. YA authors are writing books the same way any other author does, word by word, in order to tell a story that wants to be told. Sometimes we even feel like the story needs to be told. Maybe it’s personal. Cheryl Rainfield of Scars is telling a personal story. And those scars on the cover of her book are her scars. That’s her arm pictured on the cover.

YA authors understand that parents are trying to protect their kids. YA authors love that you are all good parents. That you care. That you get in there. You know what, taste is a funny thing. What might be to your taste might not be to mine. But you can’t CHOOSE what my taste is. (I like caviar. I hate pineapple on pizza.) And teenagers have their own tastes.

Gurdon’s article in the WSJ seems to imply that these kinds of dark books should be cleared off the shelf and that good clean books with less objectionable content should be there instead. And that the publishing industry, in the name of sales, pushes these kinds of books to pervier and pervier extremes and then cries censorship if called on it.

This week I’m going to be lecturing at UC Riverside’s Low Res MFA program talking about writing for young adults. One of the questions that I get asked all the time is “What can’t you write about in YA?” And I say, “You can write about anything.” “Anything?’ “Anything.” People look at me incredulously and then just to say something I say, “OK, maybe you can’t write about shitting on someone’s face.” But actually, you could totally write about shitting on someone’s face. The point is you can tell whatever story you want to tell.

I wonder how many times adult writers get these kinds of questions. Oh wait, I think they don’t. They just do like we YA writers do, they write books. I don’t think that they ever think about what they can or cannot write.

A few weeks ago, Sarah Ockler and Bennett Madison had great blog responses to a review in the New York Times which started with this sentence: The purpose of young adult literature is often twofold: to tell a story, and to send a message, usually in the form of a much-needed lesson. There is this underlying idea that YA literature has to be good for you. That it has to be sanitized in some way. That it has to have some kind of message or adhere to some kind of moral code. The thing is that one person’s idea of OK is often different than another’s.

Teenagers (and children) live in the same world that we adults do. And no matter how much we try to protect them they see the same current events, they live through the same havoc wreaked by floods, tsunamis, murders, rapes, beatings, hurricanes, abuse, tornadoes, terrorist attacks, nuclear accidents, climate change, and more.

And if they don’t, they might have family members who do or have. Or they read about it in the paper or see it on the news or the internet and they seek to understand the incomprehensible. They struggle just like adults do to understand and make sense of the world and of what it means to be human.

I’ll freely admit that Andrew Smith’s The Marbury Lens (which Gurdon talks about in her article) scared me and I could only skim it. I told Andrew, who is an acquaintance, to his face that I couldn’t get through his book. I also told my friend Kevin Greutert, who directed Saw VI, that I could never see his movie. Guess what, those kinds of stories are the kinds of stories that some people love. They are just not for me.

One of the things that is remarkable about kids is that they will read what they are ready for and what they don’t get, they skip over.

I read Judy Blume’s Deenie when I was 11. Deenie was always touching her special spot that made her feel good. I had no idea what or where that spot was. But I thought having a special spot was a good idea. So I picked one on my body. It was right above my right hip bone, like where my appendix is. Sometimes I’d touch my special spot. Now I know that Deenie’s special spot and my special spot were totally different spots.

I think that we underestimate teenagers and young people in general. Because it’s not that they become desensitized to violence or anything bad when they read these things in books. It’s that they are growing their world. And oftentimes they only understand what they are ready for. And no one, not me, not you, not anyone, can ever dictate what someone is or isn’t ready for. Or what they might need to find their way. Sometimes darkness leads to light. That is what is so great about all young adult fiction.

And for the record, not all contemporary YA fiction is dark. The WSJ article would lead you to believe that all of it deals with dark subjects. But it doesn’t. But it is fantastic news for all of us that some of it is. I like to look at some of the hard things that are being written about as opportunities for conversation. What one child is ready for is not necessarily what another child is ready for. Teenagers, like adults, come in all different shapes and forms. They also have different tastes. I don’t argue with that.

But that doesn’t mean that you deny a book that some kid might need. Some kid might need Shine. Or Scars. Or Marbury Lens. Or Hunger Games. Or Rage. Or any other book that might seem at the outset to be too dark. Why not talk to them? Why not figure out why they are attracted to whatever it is they are reading?

For Ms. Gurdon to say that the YA publishing industry “pulls up its petticoats and shrieks ‘censorship!’” is ridiculous. If you are saying that books should be cleared off shelves because they are not to your tastes, then we cry censorship because it is censorship. Children and YA books are banned because adults try to decide what is appropriate or not for a child. But the thing is, you don’t know what is appropriate for every child. You don’t know what book a kid’s life might well depend on.

Because YA books with hard topics and uncomfortable subject matter do save lives.

Authors like Andrew Smith, Lauren Myracle, Cheryl Rainfield, and all the others who go to the edge and into the dark are spelunkers of the human condition and I salute them.

I don’t want to silence them and neither should you.

So, here is my proposal. Buy a book. Pick one — perhaps one from that WSJ article, or from the following list, or maybe a book that saved your life. Buy it and donate it to your local library, or to your school, or buy it for a kid in your life so that all kinds of stories are available for young adults and adults alike. Let’s make more books available.

Stay tuned for YA authors weighing in on this issue on the LARB blog all week.

The Los Angeles Review of Books highly recommends all the books name checked in the WSJ article:

The Marbury Lens by Andrew Smith

Rage by Jackie Morse Kessler

Scars by Cheryl Rainfield

Shine by Lauren Myracle

The Absolute True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

A random selection of great contemporary YA novels from my bookshelf that are about maybe some hard things but which, as YA Editor at LARB, I can highly recommend:

Identical by Ellen Hopkins

I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone by Stephanie Kuehnert

Story of a Girl by Sara Zarr

Wild Things by Clay Carmichael

Rules of Survival by Nancy Werlin

Lessons from a Dead Girl by Jo Knowles

Under the Moon, Under the Dog by Adam Rapp

Claiming Georgia Tate by gigi amateau

Boy Toy by Barry Lyga

Empress of the World by Sara Ryan

Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

Love is the Higher Law by David Levithan

Stained by Jennifer Richards Jacobson

The Orange Houses by Paul Griffin

Tyrell by Coe Booth

Some “dark” books I read as a young adult between 11-18 and I turned out no worse for wear:

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

The Outsiders by SE Hinton

Christiane F

Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews

Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Candide by Voltaire

Deenie by Judy Blume

The Thornbirds by Colleen McCullough

Letter to An Unborn Child by Oriana Fallaci

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

The Stand by Stephen King

Wifey by Judy Blume

Ruby Fruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown

Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

The World According to Garp by John Irving

All the Dune books (even those weird last ones) by Frank Herbert

Logan’s Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson

Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins

Scruples by Judith Krantz

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The Trial by Kafka

I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier

Cecil Castellucci is the Young Adult Editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. She writes contemporary YA fiction which is darker than some and less dark than others: Boy Proof (obsession with apocalypse); Queen of Cool (some hand jobs); Beige (drugs & recovering junkie parents); The Plain Janes (terrorism); Rose Sees Red (friendship abuse/anti-war); and the upcoming First Day on Earth (trauma and alcoholism).

“I wish the whole village could be covered and erased and finally be clean.”

Let’s be honest, we aren’t totally comfortable with our Declining Empire lifestyle. Life is hard, priorities are changing, the debt ceiling is buckling, or bursting (or whatever), and we have to do something disturbing almost on a daily basis: “face facts.” On the national level, there are a lot of facts to face, but in the facing of them there are perks. Maybe the biggest perk is the slow but steady realization that (US) American Exceptionalism isn’t an inherent attribute granted by divine right. It might not even be a real thing. And what does that mean for the economy that used to be our baby? Should we continue waffling over the “recovery” of something that might very well be lost for good, or should we begin talking seriously about a profound move - one that includes a redistribution of wealth, and planned mechanisms for a more equitable society? Or maybe we should just shut up and go see the Hangover II or possibly Bad Teacher (those are some dark billboards for light comedies it would seem).

But back to facing facts, among them being Thomas Teal’s translation from the Swedish of Tove Jansson’s novel True Deceiver, which was announced as the fiction winner for the 2011 Best Translated Book Awards. A slim volume, True Deceiver isolates issues of desire and the nature of honesty with pristine, scalpel-like cuts of language. Jansson was not only a writer, but an illustrator and cartoonist as well, and is perhaps best known for her creation of kindly bohemian trolls: the Moomins.

The 2011 BTBA comes with an unprecedented cash prize. (Yes Virginia, there are such things as “literary translation awards” with cash prizes.) The awards are organized by Three Percent, an online resource out of the University of Rochester dedicated to international literature. Amazon’s involvement with Three Percent, which takes its name from the meager annual percentage of published books that represent translated works, has allowed the program to offer $5000 to each of the winners. Yes, even the poets and their translators get the money. If this isn’t evidence of a major ideological shift in priorities, heaven knows what is. Read about the awards, other winners, and short lists here.

ROGER LUCKHURST

death at the parade © Dan Baldwin 2011

Gary K. Wolfe
Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature
Wesleyan University Press, 2011. 280 pp.

For twenty years, Gary K. Wolfe, a Professor at Roosevelt University, has written a monthly column for Locus magazine, in which he reviews a handful of novels or story collections, usually of science fiction, fantasy, or horror. Wolfe has thus been at the coal-face — near the drill-bit where it is loud and noisy, and where the good stuff is seamed with a lot of rubble — for a long time. Through Locus, Wolfe has also interviewed and befriended many of the leading contemporary writers in these related fields. Evaporating Genres, a collection of eleven essays that synthesize some of this monthly shift work into longer and more reflective pieces, is Wolfe’s chance to get up to the surface and reflect on the radical changes in the genre that he has witnessed. He has a fascinating story to tell.

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SHERRYL VINT

Golden Calf 1 © Irving Norman, 1957

William Gibson
Zero History
Putnam, 2010. 416 pp.

“The future is already here; it is just unevenly distributed,” is one of William Gibson’s most famous dictums. Zero History, his most recent novel, is perhaps best understood as science fiction of the present, a representation of this hyperreal moment in which we live surrounded by our technology, no longer — as Marxist critic Fredric Jameson laments — able to imagine a future. In Zero History Gibson, though, unlike Jameson, offers reasons for hope in this SF-saturated present, directing his penetrating powers of observation to capture the textures of this strangely familiar, uncannily alien world.

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MILES CORWIN

Edward Hopper, Excursion Into Philosophy

James Ellroy
The Hilliker Curse: My Pursuit of Women
Knopf, 2010. 224 pp.

The memoir was once a venerable literary genre — more compelling and immediate than biography, more inclusive than the novel. There was only one requirement for an aspiring memoirist: do something interesting.

Unfortunately, many of my peers violated and vitiated this edict. Spurred on by a generation-wide sense of entitlement, Baby Boomers assumed that no matter how commonplace their lives and how jejune their experiences, readers would, for some unfathomable reason, find their self-indulgent ramblings fascinating. But this isn’t really surprising.

What is surprising is that major publishers would be hornswoggled by these boring me-me-me-moirs and slam down big cash on the barrelhead for works that contain nothing original, intriguing, or important. If there’s a troubled member in your family (mother, father, or sibling), you write a memoir. If you have a baby, you write a memoir. If you choose not to have a baby, you write a memoir. If you adopt, you write a memoir. If you employ Gestapo-like tactics to get your kids to practice the piano and study, you write a memoir. If you neglect your kids, you write a memoir.

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Have we mentioned we’re on Flickr?

An Interview by VANESSA HUA

Peter Mountford is a Seattle writer whose debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, was published in April. As a child, Mountford witnessed the outbreak of civil war in Sri Lanka and spent holidays in Scotland with his father’s family; later on, he worked at a think tank in Ecuador and lived in Paris and Mexico. His time abroad helped shape his writer’s sensibility: always observing, always questioning. Mountford has turned that penetrating gaze onto Bolivia, where his protagonist Gabe, on assignment for a hedge fund, must dig up insider information about the financial plans of Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous president. The novel takes place in late 2005, and the epilogue skips ahead to 2009, deep into the U.S. recession after the collapse of investment firms such as Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. Along the way, Gabe faces off against formidable female characters: Lenka, the president’s press secretary and Gabe’s love interest; his mother, an anthropology professor at Pomona College; Fiona, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal; and Priya, his boss at the hedge fund.

Half-Chilean, half-Russian, with an upbringing in the well-to-do college enclave of Claremont, California, Gabe has looks that can “pass” depending on the situation, on the angle he’s working, and on the eye of the beholder. He’s an anti-hero born of the West Coast and the new millennium.

¤

I’m looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians.
—Henry Louis Gates Jr.

PETER MOUNTFORD: My protagonist Gabe is in a complicated situation — white and not white, Latin and Caucasian, child of communism and of capitalism, quite California and also fully New York. He’s kind of a multi-tasker in that way, and wants his identity to remain as open-ended as possible.

He grew up highly attuned to these systemic power structures as a biracial, bilingual son of a single mother who was wealthier and more educated than the parents of many of his friends. For Gabe, identity is necessarily malleable. If it’s fixed, he’s screwed, because he needs to be very different people in different instances. He grew up in Claremont, which — because of its location and demographics — exists in a very complicated place, in terms of class. It’s wealthy and academic and rather white, but it’s surrounded by the sea of the Inland Empire, which tends to be poor and Chicano.

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CHRIS KRAUS

Simone Weil‘s 1935 factory identification photo. “A modern factory reaches perhaps almost the limit of horror. Everybody in it is constantly harassed and kept on edge by the interference of extraneous wills while the soul is left in cold and desolate misery. What man needs is silence and warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium.”

Palle Yourgrau
Simone Weil
Reaktion Books, 2011. 189 pp.

Luminous, penetrating and uncanonizable, the writings of 20th-century French philosopher Simone Weil were neither originally conceived as books nor published as such during her lifetime. The dissemination of her work began with the posthumous publication of Gravity and Grace, a selection of aphorisms culled from the notebooks she’d kept in Marseilles before leaving for New York in 1942. In subsequent years, more than 20 volumes of her writings on politics, science, Greek classicism, history, geometry, philosophy, trade unionism, and theology have appeared. Weil famously died of cardiac arrest brought on by tuberculosis and starvation in London in 1943 when she was 34 years old. Gravity and Grace was published five years later.

Weil’s extraordinary life, like her writings, exemplified most of the dissonances of her age. Born in Paris to an upper-middle class secular Jewish family, her precocious, driven childhood was marked by an unusual sensitivity to the suffering of the poor, which led her early towards Marxism. Attending the elite École Normale as one of its first three female students, she was a philosopher by vocation, but apart from her lycée professorships, she did nothing to advance her intellectual reputation. She was far too absorbed in developing her ideas — a project, she believed, that could only be pursued experientially. Traveling to Germany in the early 1930s, she warned French leftist colleagues of fascism’s deep and dangerous appeal. She organized the unemployed, taught Worker’s Education, debated ideology with Leon Trotsky and, at age 25, took a year’s leave from her lycée professorship to work in a factory. Doubtful of the French left’s ability to reach, much less represent, workers’ experience, she wanted to know for herself what it means to be dispossessed.

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As a group of Los Angeles locals deeply invested in the art world, we decided to compile a weekly list of events happening in and near Los Angeles. This list will include literary readings, movie screenings, concerts, and anything else we hear of around town. If there are any events you would like us to know about, please send us an email at lareviewofbooks@gmail.com. Without further ado:

May 30 – June 6:

Book Soup:

5/31/2011: Jason Felch presents and signs Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum at 7:00pm.

6/4/2011: Harold Goldberg discusses and signs All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered pop Culture at 5:00pm.

6/6/2011: Brooke Gladstone discusses and signs The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media at 7:00pm.

Skylight Books:

6/3/2011: Paul Madonna discusses and signs Everything Is Its Own Reward at 7:30pm.

Vroman’s Bookstore:

6/1/2011: Cara Eisenpress & Phoebe Lapin present and sign In The Small Kitchen: 100 Recipes from Our Year of Cooking in the Real World at 7:00pm.

6/2/2011: Lisa See discusses and signs Dreams of Joy at 7:00pm.

6/4/2011: Frans Vischer presents and signs Fuddles at 10:30am.

LACMA:

6/3/2011: Jazz at the LACMA: Greg Reitan Trio at 6:00pm.

6/3/2011: Double feature of Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice and Corpse Bride at 7:30pm and 9:15pm.

6/4/2011: Double feature of Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks! and Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure at 5:00pm and 7:30pm.

Hollywood Forever:

6/4/2011: Screening of Harold and Maude on the Fairbanks Lawn at Hollywood Forever; gates open 7:30pm, movie starts at 9:00pm.

Hammer Museum:

6/1/2011: Hammer Screening of Beginners at 7:00pm and a Q&A with director Mike Mills

6/2/2011: Hammer Reading of UCLA award-winning poets at 7:00pm.

6/5/2011: Hammer Presents the writing of Paul Thek read by Thomas Jane at 2:00pm.

Poetic Research Bureau:

6/4/2011: Poetry reading by Jacqueline Waters and Peter Richards.

6/5/2011: Poetry reading by Brian Ang, Wendy Trevino, Dereck Clemons, and Jeanine Webb

Casey Walker reviews two new books on cities today. Over at The Browser, Edward Glaeser picks five great books on urban economics.