What I'm Reading

Nerd days re-re-revisited

Every so often, I am consumed with the desire to revisit those nerd days, or nerd-reading days, not kidding ourselves about our dialectical relation to nerdiness today, and devour some...well, what I used to be nerdishly clear about reading was science fantasy, which was sort of a specialized subset of both genres: barbarians vs. ray guns, that sort of thing. (From what I can tell now, the present-day analogue is these 9-book, 900-page-novel series people keep writing, which surely has some Internet-age atavism to it.) I recall liking L. Sprague de Camp a lot, though I think I could name maybe one of his books now. Am not sure that any other genre is any less boundary-policing (cozy mysteries, historicals, hard-boiled, procedurals; or the various declensions of the romance novel, all distinguished by explicitness), so maybe it's the nerdish fervor you see here about what goes, and doesn't go, in which category that's distinctive.

Anyway, so I saw this latest Neil Gaiman collection, Fragile Things, I think first when we were stuck at JFK for like 4 hours, and thought, hey, that looks like fun. S. noted that he has one of the all-time worst names to have in middle school, though maybe marginally less so in England. (Whereas if he'd been Neil Poof...) Made me wonder about the whole chicken-and-egg aspect, since the kind of writer you're going to get laughed at for carrying around in middle school has precisely the sort of name that's going to get laughed at in middle school. Maybe there's some sort of genetic determinism at work. Nobody named Buffo McBully writes SF or whatever 12-year-old nerds read; nope, they're named Gaiman or Moorcock. Or Lovecraft. Seriously, it's like you're just not allowed to publish unless your name can be somehow rendered snickeringly sexual.

Soo...found a copy used, read it, and loved it. Gaiman's genius is to take one-liners as story ideas (dotty old bat finds Holy Grail, Sherlock Holmes vs. Lovecraft monsters, Grendel in the Scottish highlands, Snow White as a vampire [she does, after all, look pretty damn pale]) and really think them out past the gimmick; it's as if the idea of the backstory that could result, and the world it implies, entices him as much as the conceptual bridge built by x-plus-y. Not as easy as it looks, either: the first story in the collection, "A Study in Emerald," was for a Holmes-meets-Lovecraft anthology, which I duly got from the library, having spent considerable time in both vineyards. (Speaking of which: Cthulhu cakes! If only one could bake a non-Euclidean pastry.) And his story stands out considerably there, too, since it's really the only one that goes anywhere beyond the narrative proposition, "Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a giant cross-dimensional gibbering mind-sucking non-Euclidean entity!" Makes you realize how thin are the metaphorical resources HPL offers you, though Gaiman turns his baddies into the eternal Euro ruling class, which is a nice little inbred-royalty joke as well.

So then there had to be more Gaiman. And it came to pass. Also liked his first collection, and really loved Stardust, the movie, which has the whole Princess Bride snarky-fantasy thing going on. (Recommended it to several conveniently-located teenagers, at least one of whom pronounced it "pretty rad," in only a semi-ironic way.) Then, really getting into the spirit, read China Mieville's Un-Lun-Dun, which had gotten several positive reviews, and had quite a good time. The heroine's not who everyone thinks she's supposed to be, the invention is ceaseless and owes more to Lewis Carroll than JKR, and there's a neat environmentalist theme as well. (Plus some well-plotted visions of tolerance for the different, the creative, and the socially-constructed.) Which is of course what novels nerds like say, right?

Leonard, The Hot Kid

After reading gamely through two painful Civil-War books (not bad, just lots of dying and pain, and lots and lots and lots of soldiers' newspapers), time for a break. So read some Elmore Leonard. Like butter. Like silk. Like breathing. It's hard to recall which ones I've actually read and which I haven't, since they're kind of all the same--though I suppose I should read Killshot, which the bracketology book says is his best novel. This one does the Southwest in the early Depression, and well, to my mind. Not to the mind of BR Myers, whose pretty persuasive review points out a whole host of moral and stylistic problems with his work in general and this one in particular. But I love the whole setting (there's some sort of Kansas/Oklahoma-crime-novel genre, half Western and half crime story--the Southwestern?--wringing dirt and pain from isolated farms, savage gunplay, and cars speeding through open spaces to and from desolate, mulchy native-descended names like Okmulgee and Muskogee--think Capote's In Cold Blood, Stephen Hunter's Dirty White Boys, the entire career of Pretty Boy Floyd, like that), the time, and the yeasty dialogue. The efficiency, too--man can tell a story or set a scene in a line or two. So it was a nice little break.

city of the century

There's probably a great cultural history to be written about the role of Seattle, 1988-2004 or so. Consider: Microsoft, Starbucks, grunge, Amazon.com--the tech frontier, the cultural frontier, and then their containment/assimilation into the suburbanization of the nation. Taylor Clark's dumb-ass Starbucked (maybe 50 pages of good material, drowning in bad jokes, repeated tropes about 4-dollar coffee, and restatements of his main thesis: much like a famous chain's big lattes, come to think of it) doesn't get there. Michael Azerrad's Come As You Are covers the rock scene there adeptly, and I would bet his indie-band survey does too. So those are some starting points. And of course all the computer-world histories, though I don't recall much from those I had to read that one summer at the Smithsonian that explained why Seattle, of all places. Maybe it was just where people happened to be from, since the early companies were all over the country.

Anyway, the posturing has to start with the title. It just needs to. You could call your Seattle history...I dunno, Even Flow or use some unfamous Nirvana lyric, or, to be properly indie, some obscure lyric from a Mother Love Bone song, so people in the know could get that whole warm feeling of being hip once more. (Knowing the hipster-cred grading scale, I get like a C+: I know of MLB and know their lead singer OD'd before they got big and some of the other guys then formed Pearl Jam, but don't know any MLB songs, much less lyrics.)

But conscious hipness is not at all James Marcus's problem. Written more in sorrow than in anger, Amazonia zooms him from edge-of-poverty desperation (multiple credit cards maxed out, ratty car) to I-coyly-won't-say-how-much money from being employee 8 at Amazon (but less than you think, apparently: reminds me of a friend who worked at AskJeeves after grad school and was a millionaire for 10 minutes when it went public). He really thinks Amazon can be a force for good in the lit world (keeps quoting Emerson to suggest how) and keeps pushing to promote good stuff, but commercial exigencies shove that to the side, and then automatized reviews and recommendations take over, and the poor guy ends up with not much of a job. Amazon creator Jeff Bezos comes off as a pretty decent guy, and there aren't too many absurdist tales; in fact, he's not too good at it--the one composite character whose villainy we're supposed to boo comes off as a fairly typical managerial type. (Also, cameo by the younger version of one of the Moms of my son's classmate in preschool, which is somehow slightly reassuring. Don't really know her, but she seems nice enough. Wonder if she knows any Mother Love Bone lyrics?
...Damn. Looked her up, and her husband used to be the CEO of a major internet travel site. They can probably afford private school just fine.)

As a story of grotesque dotcom excess, Marcus's book is pretty restrained, which is perhaps, on reflection a kind of testimony to Jeff Bezos, among others. There are a few over-the-top, or near-the-top, retreats, but no $6000 shower curtains, which always strike me as THE anecdote to retail in re: dotcom excess, much like Diamond Jim Brady eating his stomach four inches to the table in the Gilded Age. (OK, who DID write the definitive dot-com excess book? Maybe one of the Enron studies?) But as a serious-minded tale of the literary/commercial life now, it's useful, and not as scary as I might have feared.

Kennedy, Rock On

Irritating. Kennedy got a job at Atlantic Records in 2001 or so, and the place was most definitely NOT rockin'. He works there 18 months, then gets let go when it gets bought out. Some good stories about office etiquette (great bit about how hard it is to talk to bosses' dogs with the correct marriage of friendliness and formality) and having to write copy celebrating the achievements of Phil Collins, but the whole attitude is really problematic: it's like he's too cool to really want to do a good job, so he has to mock the place; but of course that sort of irony is itself the kind of thing he's supposed to be outgrowing, so he has to be sincere and really, you know, care about rock, except not in some sort of dorkily sincere way, which is the problem of the old-fart blow-dried guys he works with. So, if you're keeping score at home, he's ironically ironizing his irony, or something, since he's afraid of caring about his job, afraid of simply being snarky, and also afraid of having an attitude that requires only a single degree of adjustment to understand. It's bit tiring to juggle that collection of attitudes, for the reader most of all. Couldn't he just, you know, stop checking the mirror?

Liebling, The Telephone Booth Indian

I have the North Point ed., and it was reissued in the Library of Larceny series, which I reviewed in 2003, and which, sad to say, seems to have ceased publication soon thereafter. Not because of me, I don't think.

So in several ways, they don't make 'em like this anymore. Some of that is probably a good thing; as this article by Jack Shafer points out, Liebling made stuff up. Which is sorta disappointing, but also not that surprising. I'm not sure anyone, not even the promoters and shysters and scammers Liebling profiles here, could be as consistently quotable as they are here. And I don't care much, even though Shafer's article makes a bunch of entirely convincing arguments that I should. I guess I think of this as just as much a collection of short stories about NYC roguery as a set of journalistic profiles of real people. They're still great pieces about life at the margins of respectability, in the whole NYC demimonde of the 30s. I always picture this era in black-and-white when I imagine living there, which is both understandable and dumb of me, with a swing soundtrack. And this furnishes the laugh track, and the street smarts, and all the ways I'd know to make a dollar, as they say.

Read it two or three times: once for the plot, again for the zesty language, and again for the sheer joy Liebling takes in constructing and living the pieces. Even if they're not, you know, totally true.

Bolano, Nazi Literature in the Americas

If he writes it, I'll read it. Still, the ways he gets published here are a little confusing. As one other review points out, the publication order in this country is a little off, so this one comes out AFTER a lot of his later stuff, including a later novel, Distant Star, that expands this book's last chapter into a short novel.

It's no stretch to say that he turns all of his fascists, Nazis, and traditionalists into Bolano characters--they're uncomprising avant-garde poets, stubborn pulp fictioneers, scrubs from the provinces trying to eke out a win in yet another of those minor literary contests Bolnao so loves...indistinguishable from his heroes in The Savage Detectives or similar figures in the stories in Last Evenings on Earth, which raises the question of what we do (and what he's doing) with such misdirected artistic urges. (Because he's really not mocking them, any more than he mocks any of his other marginal artistic types: maybe a little chiding, but mostly love and shared values.) Surely, as such an engagé writer, Bolano doesn't believe that politics are immaterial; precisely the opposite. So then the imagination of an entire cosmos of such writers has about it something of the odor of...charity, in that he grants the sincerity, though monstrous wrongness, of their beliefs? ...of belated struggles with history, in an attempt to understand what happened in Latin America in the 60s and 70s, how such appalling ideas got smuggled South and then reanimated?...a political sense that BECAUSE extreme right-wing ideas partake so much of fantasy both personal and collective, we need to understand and counteract, or counterprogram, those same urges?

I'm not sure he's worked this out yet. His main character in Distant Star, a sort of concrete poet of torture, more powerfully poses the whole question of art in a dictatorship. These seem more like gestures, attempts in the direction of understanding the whole corpus of ideas rather than the kind of finished, if ambivalent, artistic manifesto we see presented in, say, The Savage Detectives.

Still, it's not a bad introduction to his aesthetic, which strikes me as absolutely unique--can't think of a single writer with his stupefying imagination and capacity for narrative play (almost every one of his novels seems to be arguing, why can't every book contain as many styles and models as you want? note that, for instance, Distant Star throws in TWO utterly superfluous locked-room mysteries in its final pages, for no other reason than that he felt like it), flair for, and love of, so many genres in enormous detail (one of his pulpsters sounds like H.P. Lovecraft, another writes these bizarre post-apocalyptic macho gunplay fantasies that recall the grocery-store Mack Bolan thrillers, particularly well analyzed in James W. Gibson's Warrior Dreams), all combined with a relentlessly avant-garde sense of literature and an earthy grounding in bodies and sweat. Definitely worth a read, if not reaching the greatness of his best stuff so far.

2666, when are you coming out? I need you.

tigers are not to be messed with

Seriously.

Dang.

greatness of Gene Hunt

The faboo BBC detective series Life on Mars just concluded (over here, at least) and explained all. Fairly satisfactorily, too. American version, with all the same character names and Colm Meaney as DCI Gene Hunt, coming soonish.

Along the way, it contained (season 2, episode 7), the greatest insult of all time. See?

Don't believe me? Check here or here or here. Or here.

Want more Gene? Turns out he's got a whole set of vids on YouTube. Of course he does. Introducing Gene. Being a 1973 man. He's more right than you.  He deals with the threat of being shot by accident. He reveals excellent investigative technique. Animated Gene--a parody of this series, which you can watch.

Perrotta, The Abstinence Teacher

OK, so long backstory here: first read Tom Perrotta in the extremely excellent pb original Bad Haircut, which I was hip enough to teach in a class in the 2000-01 academic year (NY in lit, trying to make a point about the suburbs and Jersey and their relation to NYC, particularly through the mega-boss story "The Wiener Man," whose hero is a guy dressed up as a hot dog, which probably made no sense to 16 California teenagers) and have read him eagerly ever since. (That was apparently his first published story, according to his website.)

So anyhow (part II of long backstory), I once subscribed to New York magazine, in high school. Why, I have no idea. I mean, I had no intention of being some midtown yuppie, which was what the mag was selling back then. I don't even think I got the whole Jay McInerney shtick. Fast-forward more than, yeesh, 25 years, and I'm home for the summer break for a little bit, and my parents have New York around the house. Which is odd, since they're blessedly indifferent to the kind of insistently hip craziness the mag still sells--it seems to have picked up some of the worst snarko habits of the old Spin and Spy (maybe we should call it Spew York, just to keep with the theme), like charticles with hiply knowing little ideas whose main point is how much you don't know, or need to pretend you do know, so your cool friends won't think you're uncool. And one of their bits about forthcoming fall culture was about how great the new Tom Perrotta novel was, in exactly the same ways Spin used to rhapsodize about, say, the upcoming Outkast record, which they had an advance of and you didn't.

So I had this sort of idea about the new Perrotta being life-changing, or something. And then saw some reviews that said, ehhh, and forgot about it, before deciding, about two months ago, to reserve it from our lovely public library. Got it yesterday and read it last night and today: ehhh. A well-meaning take on suburban religion and megachurches, plus youth soccer and sex ed, but with no real point of view besides that people are complicated and don't really fit comfortably under the kinds of labels they like to manufacture for themselves. Likable humans, as usual, with real-world problems and a refreshingly undogmatic take on human weakness and fraility, but not much dramatic momentum. An honorable not-quite failure, I suppose, but not quite a success, either.

And New York totally oversold it. But maybe the cool people read it, and I'm always in favor of anyone reading anything. Or, irritatingly, maybe I misremembered: according to this, their preview wasn't crazy about it either. But somebody, somewhere was raving hiply about it. I'm sure of it.

Faust, Money Shot

Now that's what I'm talking about. A sleazy, nasty little noir set in the porn industry...which is probably redundant. Now, if it was "a romantic, multigenerational magic-realist saga covering one family's experiences across a century in the porn industry," or "a breezy piece of chick-lit featuring a lovable single mom, her adorable but difficult kids, and her best gal pals, set in the porn industry," that would be unexpected. (Come to think of it, it would be kind of cool to read something about, say, the 1950s porn industry, outside of James Ellroy's novels, which are nasty big noirs, etc., or that Bettie Page film, which felt sort of airbrushed, so to speak. I mean, could the porn industry ever be that innocent?) But for now, this will do: our heroine gets punched, raped, shot, and left for dead in the first 40 pages. She survives and later gets to shoot one guy, duct-tape another to death, and rescue some enslaved Romanian sex-trafficked women ("Natashas," they're called). Heartwarming, really.