What I'm Reading

year in review, part II

Additions, remarks, and odd things I learned this year:

Harvey Milk was essentially an old-style ethnic politician, just with sexual orientation as his organizing principle. Loved the film, but what Milk skimps on is how much hardball Harvey could and did play--there were a lot of gay dollars around SF in the 70s, and he knew what to do with them to win political representation, union jobs, and a seat or two at the table. He also was a Goldwater Republican who in some ways never really changed his political colors. (Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street)

Max Allan Collins gets to write too many novels for Hard Case Crime. I like pulp as much as the next person, I really believe that, but he writes the same damn thing every time. Almost exactly. I think this is taking the whole verisimilitude bit too far.

Gloria Steinem took CIA money as a student activist in the 50s, as did Richard Wright and Nina Simone. A bunch of former Communists put on the payroll, though, were pretty unsatisfactory employees, as they took the agency's money and continued on a campaign of factionalism and plunder of anyone who did not share their exact strain of beliefs. (Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer)

being a 19th-century criminal was really not fun: talk about nasty, brutish, and short. And once you talked to the cops, you were pretty much dead meat on the street. And the prisons were even worse. (Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket's Tale) Also, running a gang is hard, particularly as regards the question of punishment and deterrence--how hard do you discipline people? when do you need to lay down the law, and when can you outsource? when do you just let things go? (Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day)

Jacob Riis pretty much invented the multimedia presentation, touring with his photos of NYC slums in the 1890s, and made a pretty good career of it as well (Yochelson and Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis)

Thomas Jefferson was attacked as a dangerous atheist, and John Adams as a religious fundamentalist who would turn the US into a theocracy in the election of 1800 (Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe)

you can tell how hard farm people in the 30s worked by their recipes, which all seem to call for massive amounts of soaking and cooking in cream. Either that, or they were all really fat and this has been excised from photos (Kalish, Little Heathens)

intellectual stunt-journalism books are harder to pull off than it looks: Jacobs' The Know-It-All, where he reads the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, is funny most of the way through, but can someone with a Brown BA really be as ignorant as Jacobs sometimes shows himself to be?or is that part of the shtick? Shea's Reading the OED, where he, well, reads the entire OED, is basically a bunch of odd words with a few pages of OK rumination dressing them up. He sounds like a nice guy, but it's a thin book. Honestly, Ken Jennings' autobiography/apologia/trivia-nerd defense, Brainiac, which is far better than it has any right to be, remains the cream of the crop for me.

you can draw some interesting homologies between dominant modes of social experience and sports--football, with all of its regimentation and military lingo, was of particular cultural centrality in the 60s and 70s, when those experiences had formed a central part of the lives of many Americans (Mandelbaum, The Meaning of Sports)

people were making waterboarding jokes, in a satirical context, 100 years ago, given that the tactic was being used in the Philippines--and thus it must have resided at least somewhere in the collective consciousness. What happened in the interim? (Crosby, Captain Jinks, Hero: from the NYT review, Aug. 30, 1902: "A good American sitting among his broken idols and ruefully rubbing the welts and bruises his patriotism receives from the bastinado which Mr. Ernest Crosby wields in Captain Jinks, Hero, may, nevertheless, find balm in the thought that he wrote it in six weeks -- as his publisher announces.")

the Inquisition pretty much invented every tactic of spy agencies and tribunals, including agents provocateurs, going after financial assets, forcing accused people to denounce others to survive, and using secret evidence (Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual)

someone could make a great movie about Venice Beach around 1980-81, when steroids were making their way into bodybuilding culture with what can only be called great bursts of energy. The whole revolution of everyone and everything around Arnold, and the shady dudes prescribing everywhere the informed eye knew to look, would be one of the cooler and mostly unexplored subcultures to put on the screen (Assael, Steroid Nation; see also the excellent documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster*)

Abraham Lincoln came into office with no knowledge of military affairs, so, in order to prevent his generals from steamrolling him, he gave himself a crash course in military history. George McClellan, who had graduated from West Point at 20 ranked #2 in the class (the famous class of '46 that also included Stonewall Jackson, Pickett, and 20 other Civil War generals), had had so many experiences of early success that all he would do was sit around and whine about how Lincoln never gave him enough troops. Reason #50 why Lincoln rocks. (McPherson, Tried by War) When McClellan ran as a Peace Democrat in 1864, he was actually more pro-war than some in his party, who were openly rooting for a Confederate victory; there were significant disturbances and attacks on military recruiters in places like Ohio (home of exiled congressman Clement Vallandingham), which does at least make me both defend and worry about the kinds of civil-liberties measures Lincoln chose to win the war (Weber, Copperheads)

it's far too easy to buy your way into college. When I read about, say, the Olsen twins or whoever going to NYU, I thought, well, maybe they're actually smart. Or maybe not, since there are all sorts of loopholes to let dumb children of the rich and powerful, or famous people with no particular academic distinction, into prestigious schools, no matter how horrid their academic records. This has been going on overtly for most of the century, and semi-covertly for the past 15 years. Duke has more or less leaped two levels in reputation over the past 30 years on the backs of such development admits (Golden, The Price of Admission; Karabel, The Chosen)

it is not so dangerous to attend soccer matches in England now, partly because you can't buy tickets to matches unless you have a previous history of ticket-buying. Also, there are lots of police stationed everywhere, and a lot of the louts have been priced out. (Culpepper, Bloody Confused!)

Year in review 2008

Faithful reader E.G., whom I ran into on the street pretty much in front of the house, asks if in fact I have read anything since October. Well, yes. So, to get back on the horse, here we go:

books read last year: 210
minutes of exercise: 21,260 (took the last week-and-a-half of the year mostly off, so I missed my compulsive goal of an hour a day by 640 minutes, or a mere 1 min. 45 seconds per day).
Evidence that I am not alone in this comes from my gym, which has installed these crazy bikes that have courses you can race on and even a lame game where you ride through dragons. You can create a login and then track all of your progress (average mph, calories, distance ridden) and graph it against everyone who's registered, break down the data by age and sex, club, bike type, and region. So there--I am clearly not the only one. If they had something like GTA on there, except you had to pedal your car, I would be Lance Armstrong.

Actually, not--they give you the mph rating at which you're pedaling, and I've been up to about 27, but not for long (did 1 mile in 2:26, which works out to 24.65 mph). I think the guys on the Tour de France regularly pedal at like 30+, for hours. According to this, in 2005 Lance Armstrong averaged 25.82 mph over 86 hours, with a top speed of 35.54 mph (that's an average, too, which means he did this for more than an hour) for a 41.85-mile time trial. Dang. Still, it would kick butt if you could ride around and shoot things.  Since you have to, you know, stay on the course, that has cut down on my reading a bit. But it's more fun than I would have expected.

Anyway. Best however many of the year, in fiction:
Gruber, Tropic of Night--African shamans and folklore, taken seriously and exported to Miami, where they enrich the tropical stew. Reminds me of those paranormal George C. Chesbro mysteries I ate up as a teenager. Pretty dang literate, and suspenseful. His last book made it into trade pb, which is a nice step up.
Faust, Money Shot--the best hard-boiled mystery I've ever read set in the world of porn. Also the only hard-boiled mystery I've ever read set in the world of porn.
Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas--funny and compassionate, in an odd way: even his Nazis are compulsive writers who submit their work to endless contests, found minor journals no one reads, create weird personal mythologies that only other obsessives follow, and carry on with little compunction about their horrendous beliefs. Bought 2666 the day it came out and am stuck on p. 60 or so, but will get back in there slugging soon.
Gaiman, American Gods--mythology, confidence games, gods fighting, a prison novel, end-times prophecy: pretty much every genre there is mashed together, and it all works astonishingly well as a story; you don't just sit there and admire how well he mixes it all. A heck of a trick.
Park, Personal Days--or Ferris, And Then We Came to the End, both of which concern politics, office politics, and relationships, and how weird work is in general. Hard to separate what exactly happens in each, though Ferris's collective narrator captures something scarily essential about office culture
Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude--WWII fought out within the confines of an English rooming-house. Dry, hilarious, mean. Particularly recommended to Eoin.
O'Neill, Netherland--Gatsby as a post-9/11 West Indian named Chuck Ramakissoon, and cricket as a grand metaphor for about 15 things. Which reminded me that I know two people who are actually really interested in cricket, and who showed me cricket videos on YouTube.
Hemon, The Lazarus Project--history and the usual hilarious black-comic Balkan self-loathing, mixed in with photos and a reimagined story about an immigrant killed by Chicago's police chief for what may have been anarchism or just simple confusion. What Everything Is Illuminated should have been. (Reminds me of the people I got stuck next to on the flight back from NY--out-of-the-catalogue twentysomethings: he had the hobbit beard, sagged pants, chain wallet, hoodie, and she was reading, yes, Everything Is Illuminated. Couldn't tell if they were friends with benefits, just friends, a couple, or what. Ah, these young people.)
Gran, Dope--mean, twisty, bleak little female-centered noir set in 50s NYC. Lives up to the Jim Thompson comparisons by reviewers.
Bloom, Away--who knew she had it in her? After writing some great New Yorker fiction (not exactly an insult, but definitely a genre), Bloom here presents a brutal, unsentimentally funny, vivid take on Jewish NY in the 1920s, along with a semi-tall tale about a real-life woman who tried to walk to Siberia to get her child back. A powerhouse of a story, told with color and a drive I had no clue she could muster.

In nonfiction:

Kaplan, When the Astors Owned New York--and boy, did they. I think I'm supposed to call this "delicious," which may presume a higher interest in antique society gossip than you or I possess. (Also makes me ponder the continued career of Louis Auchincloss, who seems to turn out a small, elegant, [and totally uninteresting to me] novel every year or so about latter-day NYC WASPs. I guess someone reads them--maybe the adult version of whoever reads Gossip Girl novels? I begged one from a student--"I won't be your enabler," she protested, before giving in to my whining--and my soul felt maimed afterward. I tried Twilight, too, but the first page was so horrid that I couldn't do it. Susan kinda liked all four, though, so your mileage may vary.)
Dalrymple, The Last Mughal--vivid, thoughtful, wonderful look at the 1857 mutiny through the eyes of actual Indians as well as Brits, with a full ration of savagery and imperial brutalism. Later, it turns out that someone we knew is a descendant of the Mughals and had read the book, which was awesome. She also loves (and even slightly prefers) his White Mughals, which I got about a quarter of the way through but will pick up again in deference to Priya.
Faust, This Republic of Suffering--about how the Civil War instituted an entire new regime dedicated to managing suffering, which relates not just to the world of emotions but to refrigeration, cemeteries, and pensions. A powerful and resonant book. Also, Dray, Capitol Men, about the impossibly courageous African-American politicians who made Barack Obama possible.
Mendelsohn, The Lost--another of those people I would be if I were way smarter. Mendelsohn traces the members of his family lost in the Holocaust while also considering the story of Genesis as a way of understanding why the world is and people exist in the first place. Paul R. suggested that he was probably sleeping with all of his translators, too. If so, more power to him.
Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire--calls the entire course of the Vietnam War, in about 1963. Also some amazing stuff about how hard the Kennedy and Johnson White Houses strove to get him silenced or pulled from the country.
Gourevitch, Standard Operating Procedure--or Mayer, The Dark Side; or Lichtblau, Bush's Law; or Filkins, The Forever War--at some point, I got tired of all the malfeasance (couldn't read the Cheney biog, though Lisa R-S recommended it), but before that, got as much chapter-and-verse as I needed. Filkins' take on the war rewrites Herr's Dispatches in ways that are chilling, immediate, and horrific; he really shoves your face in what it's like to be older and under fire and protected only by massively-armed 20-year-olds. It's not a good feeling.
Perlstein, Before the Storm--the definitive Barry Goldwater book, I'm sure, and one not weighed down by the overly large historical claims made in Nixonland, which I think is a little too much a politics-junkie's book: every story gets told (admittedly, some of them great, as when Jack Germond jokes that George Romney, Mitt's dad, is such a maladroit communicator that "the Governor later clarified" is a key on his typewriter), whether or not it ultimately mattered, and I think the result mistakes overheated rhetoric for real political commitments. What's now particularly interesting to me about the Goldwater book is what it will show in 10 years. If the republic actually elects President Palin (the Repubs, Perlstein points out at length in both books, were essentially written off by political scientists as a permanent minority party after LBJ crushed Goldwater in 1964), then it's going to be really, really scarily relevant. I'm rooting for historical curiosity instead.
Fatsis, A Few Seconds of Panic--it really sucks to play pro football in a lot of ways, and the players grasp most of them. In a surprising way, a great book about a modern American workplace. Also mentions born-again kicker Jason Elam's Christian thriller Monday Night Jihad, which I saw at JFK airport and briefly considered reading. But I read Left Behind, and that was crap (though I am still rather a large fan of LB II the film; III sucked, even with Lou Gossett), and I'd rather someone with those politics not get my money. (Sounds more decent than you'd expect, though. From the PW review: "Rich details about life as an NFL player invigorate the story; the details become problematic when the story gets wordy (as in one long and unnecessary chapter toward the end of the book). Although the final [...] plot twist is too easy, unexpected humor helps leaven the serious themes, and the sparks of romance that fly between Riley and an American Muslim woman will pique readers' interest.")
Page, The City's End--several hundred years of fantasies of the end of NYC. Amazing a) how many people have wanted it destroyed b) how hopeful these visions can be for a new future. Introduced me to a fascinating WEB DuBois story about the racial possibilities of the city's end that I'd never known of. (Here's an interesting review in an SF mag.)
Hajdu, The Ten-Cent Plague--poor old EC comics, beaten down by the forces of, well, the usual. A great bit of comics history, enlivened in particular by interviews with those who did the burning as well as those who got burned. Plus that great bit from Gaines' congressional testimony:
            Mr. BEASER. There would be no limit actually to what you put in the magazines?

            Mr. GAINES. Only within the bounds of good taste.

            Mr. BEASER. Your own good taste and salability?

            Mr. GAINES. Yes.

            Senator KEFAUVER. Here is your May 22 issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman's head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?

            Mr. GAINES. Yes, sir; I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.

            Senator KEFAUVER. You have blood coming out of her mouth.  

            Mr. GAINES. A little.

Pelevin, Homo Zapiens

Oy, maybe the most cynical Soviet (or post-) novel I've ever read. Which is saying something. (Speaking of which: an interview with Pelevin.)  Our hero is an unemployed poet who ends up writing ad copy in post-Communist Moscow. It is suggested here that all world politics is literally the creation of admen, for reasons and purposes you don't want to know. Capitalism is analyzed sociologically and phenomenologically by a Buddhist Che Guevara through a ouija board. Horrendously cynical ad copy is imagined; is the worst the copywriter who deeply wishes to be a real Russian and thus engages in the worst kind of anti-Semitic primitivist nationalism, because all the papers tell him that's mandatory? the hero, whose greatest inspiration may be the heartwarming vignette of father and son shooting Batman with Kalashnikovs (the only actual domestic product Russia makes, it's noted)? Plus Babylonian mythology, drug abuse, advice on dealing with drunkenness by tricking your mouth, and of course all the homologies between party propaganda and consumer capitalism. (Does it all hold together? Not according to the Times.) Bleak, funny, and kind of visionary--cyberpunk crackle juicing social(ist) satire, to coin a slogan.

Wolff, Our Story Begins

Stupid Michiko Kakutani. I was reading along and loving it; the stories from The Night in Question, which is one of my favorite books ever, remain astonishing to me. But I was reading one of the early ones, about this hunting trip with three guy friends that devolves into horrific black comedy, and recalled a review that had mentioned something interesting that made me wonder if I'd missed a major idea in the story. I hate it when that happens. So I went back and read the Chronicle review, which was quite good. And no, I hadn't missed anything major. But you always worry about that with minimalists.

Then I kept futzing around and found Kakutani's Times take, with this as the particularly pertinent section:

There is something distinctly old-fashioned about many of these stories. The language his characters often employ has a dated, old-timey feel — they use phrases like “shockeroo,” “going out of my tree,” “gone with the wind” — and the narratives themselves tend to have tidy beginnings, middles and O. Henry-esque endings complete with deliberately ironic twists. These are stories in which the reader is drawn in by a quirky or intriguing premise and propelled along by the glittering little emotional and physical details that Mr. Wolff likes to scatter like bread crumbs throughout his narrative. His prose is so lively and engaging that the reader often notices the contrived nature of the stories only in retrospect.

And from then on, I couldn't help noting all of those failings as well: the too-symbolic symbolism, the little reversals, the endings where people suddenly confront their character failings. Stupid Kakutani. Maybe I am a weak reader, but it reminds me of these perception tests, where you don't see what you're not looking for. But once you do, you can't take your eyes away from that thing and suddenly wonder how it was that you ever missed it:

awareness test
second one, courtesy of Paul


Thanks a whole heck of a lot, Michiko. Now all I can see, or most of it, is what you complained about.

Hemon, The Lazarus Project

I love Hemon. Have read his collection 3 times and first novel once only. This is great stuff--retelling of the story of an anarchist, or maybe just a confused Jewish immigrant, who's shot by the Chicago police chief in 1908 and then made the center of an alleged monstrous Emma Goldman-inspired conspiracy, wrapped within the story of that retelling, by a Ukrainian writer who's sort of like Hemon in some respects and is trying to make some sort of personal/cultural/literary financial headway in America. I particularly love the language; I think there's a whole late-Soviet prose style that's simultaneously first-world and third-world (which is in itself a perfect distillation of the political/social contradictions of late-Soviet society): corrosively ironic, horrified, angry, and immensely funny, as if all the illusions have been burned away and what's left is a disenchantment so complete that it has forgone even the possibility of disenchantment's getting you anywhere. We see this particularly well in the Eastern European travel sections, where the narrator and a photographer friend wander the Burger Kings and count the gangsters. The book seems in part to be a conscious late-capitalist reversal of Hemingway's famous line about how he had to leave Michigan to write about it. Here, the narrator has to leave, feel his very salable strangeness in America, and return to Bosnia to finally comprehend its (dialectical?) relation to America and thus be able to tell its stories. As a parable about immigration, it's smart, pained, and a joy to read, even at its darkest.
 

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.

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.