The Elegant Variation

BACK IN TOWN

We're back from our respite, which was briefer than we'd have hoped but restorative nonetheless. While we were sleeping, a few things of note came our way:

* Maud's much-linked-to short story Post-Extraction is very much worth your dropping everything and heading over that way, if you haven't done so already. Even if its opening line is a spot-on rendering of one our deepest and darkest (and thoroughly unfounded) fears ...

* Robert Birnbaum points his mic toward Michael Lewis, and they discuss "the Charlie Rose Show, Meeting Tom Stoppard, Lewis' niggling insecurities, his NYT Magazine piece on his high school baseball coach, the NYT Magazine versus the New Yorker, baseball's conservatism, Billy Beane (of course), the Boston Red Sox fans, Steve Bartman, what Lewis might have written differently, Jeremy Brown, New Orleans, screenwriting, writing what you want, declinist theories, writing programs, the climate in magazine publishing, and other stuff." We were particularly interested in the Stoppard mention:

ML: Last night I was in the green room. I taped with Tom Stoppard. He was on before me.

RB: That’s some combination.

ML: It was very funny. He and I sat there in the green room and he had a couple of people with him. And I saw him and instantly recognized him. And I thought, “I’m not going to bother him. I’ll sit here with my eyes averted, staring at the floor.” And we did that for five or 10 minutes. Finally, he very politely looked up and asked, “Are you a guest?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “What’s your name?” I introduced myself and he asked, “Did you write The New New Thing?” My God—I said, “Yes, I did.” And he liked the book. I couldn’t believe Tom Stoppard had read something I had written. Then I gushed—

RB: [laughs]

ML: “You’re a genius. I read all the plays.” I think he was on last night. They taped his [segment] and they aired it.

I've always waited for the moment to tell the world that I went to NYU with his wife, Tabitha Soren, when she was still Tabitha Sorenberger. I do have stories. Just ask me.

* Jim Ruland's final Bloomsday dispatch is in. My recent hankering for an endless stream of Guinness makes sense to me at last.

And finally, since we just can't help tooting our own sad, little horns, we wanted to thank Slate's Ben Williams for linking to our BEA coverage as part of his round up of Hatchet Jobs reviews. It's always a relief to know someone is reading ...

FOUND OBJECTS

A number of people have already linked to this WSJ article about the interesting bits and pieces found between the pages of used books.

"I'd always have a book with me when I got arrested," said Richard Ryan on being told that his 1985 rap sheet had fallen out of a book at the Strand, a store on Broadway in Manhattan where anybody can flip through a heap of two million volumes. "Books end up as filing cabinets," Mr. Ryan says, remembering his days as a student apartheid protester. "I'm sure I got my arrest ticket and filed it in the book."

Clearing his shelves years later, he unloaded a few hundred hardbacks -- rap sheet inadvertently included -- into one corner of the book business that has lately been doing well. Americans bought 150 million old books last year, reports Ipsos BookTrends. Online used-book sales, Forrester Research predicts, could double and hit $2 billion by 2007. The more books people dump, the more tittle-tattle they pass on to strangers.

Which is how the Strand's staff came to know that William Richard Ryan, at the age of 23, was charged with criminal trespass for a sit-in at Cornell University on Nelson Mandela's 67th birthday. He was acquitted, but his arrest record, with a nice set of fingerprints, still wound up on a pile of book-borne scraps at the Strand's information desk.

So since everyone's covered it, why the link, you must be asking yourself. Because I do have my own found object story, also from a book purchased at the Strand. It was a used copy of Gatsby, and when I got home with it, a copy of a letter floated out, which I reproduce in its entirety here:

June 1, 1965

Dear Mr. Nathan -

I would like to thank you for the nice hair dryer. The lady at the Salvation Army gave me your name and address so I could write and thank you. I am 64 year old [sic] and have been at the old ladies home since 1956 - The lady in the next bed has had a hair dryer for 4 years, but she never let me use it. Last night her hairdryer fell off her table and now it dont [sic] work. Today she asked me to loan her my hairdryer and I said fuck you.

God bless you for giving me the hairdryer.

Yours truly,
Mrs. Anna Habicken.

I've learned since that the letter is a fake - there are other versions of it floating around out there - but I still keep it framed on my desk, and for years I told people it contains everything one needs to know about good storytelling.

L.A. READING - GAYLE BRANDEIS

L.A. area novelist Gayle Brandeis, whose The Book of Dead Birds we picked up at BEA (intrigued by both Toni Morrison's endorsement and its having won the Bellwether Prize - about which I plan a more detailed posting in the near future) will be reading this Saturday as part of the L.A. Writers Series at Antioch University.

The reading will be held at 7 p.m. at the Culver City location, 400 Corporate Pointe, Room A1000 and admission is free. We're hoping to check it out ourselves if we can manage our time this weekend. If you'd like to check out some of her work, we're told she has a new story up over at Vortical Magazine, called The Hurricanes of 2000 Come to Me as Lovers.

FOUL IS FAIR

The deVere knuckleheads are at it again, using the 400th anniversary of his death to try once again to grab the credit for Shakespeare's plays ...

The de Vere Society alleges that Edward de Vere penned the 37 plays officially attributed to the master playwright.

"He had the education and did the traveling, which Shakespeare did not," said society secretary Richard Malim of de Vere.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in William Shakespeare's hometown of Stratford-Upon-Avon was dismissive of the claim.

"It's all nonsense. Edward de Vere did not write the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote the works of Shakespeare," said Stanley Wells, the trust's chairman. "There is ample evidence from his own time that Shakespeare was a very well-regarded writer, especially playwright."

I've always found the deVere camp to be only slightly more ridiculous than the Marlowe camp. The second script I ever wrote, back in 1985, and mercifully unproduced, was called Foul is Fair and was an action-adventure tale revolving around the question of Shakespeare. Yeah, you read that right. But I remember thinking how amusing it would be to have a bunch of Oxford dons running around the world trying to kil each other 007 style. The Three Sisters from Macbeth make cameos and it actually was optioned for a few years. Now it sits in a drawer, where it rightly belongs ...

THE GREAT SUMMER READ

Publisher's Weekly (by subscription only) reoprts that the New York Times will serialize for books in their entirety for something called "The Great Summer Read". Here's the relevant section:

Each book will be published in its entirety, in seven installments that will begin on a Monday and culminate the following Sunday. The daily excerpts will appear in a 16-page newsprint supplement similar to the New York Times Book Review. It will launch on July 12 with The Great Gatsby, followed by, at two-week intervals, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Like Water for Chocolate and The Color of Water.

You know, it's a nice enough idea - we're for anything that gets people to read - but how serializing new, or better yet, unknown fiction?

PECK V. BABE

It's been linked to elsewhere, but the recent Dale Peck Q&A; with Book Babe Margo Hammond is one of the more risible pairings imaginable and the results do sort of speak for themselves, with each side sticking to their usual preoccupations and practiced lines - Margo's that book reviewing is too rarefied, Peck's that he only expected fifty people to read his Rick Moody review.

So why risible? Because for all his posing, I still believe that Peck cares about literature with a capital "L", whereas Margo is the embodiment the middlebrow, a walking, talking mediocrity. And for all of Peck's willingness to defend commercial fiction, there's not a single commercial title reviewed in Hatchet Jobs, with the possible exception of Terry McMillan. Which in and of itself might not mean much, except that Peck has called for revitalizing the form, a cri de coeur that is absent from this Q&A.;

Dale, after I've written up my reviews of Hatchet Jobs, if you'd like to conduct a real Q&A;, please do let me know. I'm at your disposal.

THE NAME IS FLEMING. IAN FLEMING

The New Statesman takes a look at the Bond books, which have been largely overshadowed by the Bond films.

The Listener wasn't the only posh paper to praise Casino Royale. The TLS called it "exciting and extremely civilised". With his indifference to character and his casual fascination with cruelty, Fleming was arguably the first modern thriller writer - as revolutionary, in his own way, as Erskine Childers half a century before. No wonder it took him so long to sell the film rights. Fleming was old-fashioned, but Bond was avant-garde.

If Fleming was born when the British empire was at its apex, Bond was born just as its power began to wane. Bond pandered to Britain's inflated and increasingly insecure self-image, flattering us with the fantasy that Britannia could still punch above her weight. Bond may have been a one-man band, but as he toured the colonies that Britain had ceded to America, readers at home were reassured that at least we'd retained our sense of style. He epitomised the cosy fiction of the lopsided Anglo-American alliance. The Yanks might have become the masters, but only the Brits really knew how to behave.

The article does contain at least once factual error, however. Fleming died in 1964, and thus would have been alive to see both Doctor No and From Russia with Love.

In related 007 news, Miramax has purchased the film rights to the first two Young James Bond novels.

Film rights are not part of the deal between Miramax and Ian Fleming Publications, the company founded by Bond creator Ian Fleming and wholly owned by the Fleming family. The acquisition was announced by Miramax co-chair Harvey Weinstein and Miramax Books president & editor in chief Jonathan Burnham. The deal's price tag was not disclosed, but was understood to be in the six-figure range.

JIMENEZ IN TRANSLATION

The poems of Nobel Laureate Juan Ramon Jimenez are about to be translated into Persian.

Azin said Jimenez’s poems have already been translated from German to Persian but the translation of the delicate Spanish into German and then into Persian weakens the Persian text.

We're reminded of the annoying frequency with which Hungarian authors are translated into English via German.

Si usted habla espanol, you can visit the home page of the Jimenez Foundation. If, however, Ingles is all you've got, you can read up on him here.

CHAON V. CLINTON

While the madding crowd lines up for the Clinton signing tonight in Century City (if we were going to get a signed copy - which we're not - we'd opt for tomorrow's signing at the Baldwin Hills independent bookstore Eso Won), trot on out to Vroman's in Pasadena and check out Dan Chaon's reading. Click here for the details to these and other events this week.

BURGESS SHRINE

Droogs rejoice! A shrine to Anthony Burgess is about to open, containing a "treasure trove of memorabilia including original manuscripts and personal artefacts."

Burgess wrote more than 30 novels, including Earthly Powers, the Enderby Series, and most famously, A Clockwork Orange.

He also penned screenplays and musical pieces, including three symphonies. The Anthony Burgess Foundation will be based in a three–storey Victorian house in Withington and is the only dedicated museum to the author in the UK. Liana has donated her late husband’s typewriter, writing desk, books from his library and personal gifts exchanged between the couple.

There will also be musical instruments, scores and hundreds of manuscripts on display.

In one of those fortuitous convergences that makes a blogger glad to be alive, TLS runs with Zinovy Zinik's reminiscences of a visit with Burgess.

Only a few minutes into our meeting, Burgess noted that the Russian word dom (home, house) originates from the Latin. I told him by way of reply that the English house sounds like chaos to a Russian ear. Could this possibly be the reason for the permanent sense of unease that Russians feel towards the Latin world, where the unattainable prototype of our home sweet home lies? Note also that the Russian golos, voice, goes back to the Greek. Thus, the Russians have neither a home nor a voice of their own. The split nature of the Russian mentality is not fortuitous and was originally caused by the schism between Eastern and Western Churches, in the sense that Russian Orthodox Christianity comes from Byzantium, while civilization has Western roots. (This is also the reason why Russia was inevitably left out of all the recent European Union rearrangements.) Yet any Englishman will tell you that such a state of fission is by no means unique or specific to Russia. Since the Normans invaded England, the language has been divided: the dish on the table has a French name (pork, say), while the livestock remains a plain old Anglo-Saxon pig.

LISA GLATT PROFILE

Lifestyle U talks to L.A. author Lisa Glatt about her new novel A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That.

Glatt began writing "A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That' about 8 1/2 years ago, when her own mother, Iris Stanton, was battling breast cancer. The title story was published shortly before Stanton died five years ago.

"My mom was alive to see that story, and was so excited about it," Glatt says. "I had wanted so much to finish the book before she died, so when she did, I kind of put it away for a while."

MORE GODDAMNED ANNIVERSARIES!

Well, apparently it's also the bicentennial of Hawthorne's birth. The fesitivities be comin', because hey, N.H. was a load of laughs, right?

He attended Bowdoin College along with a future poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and a future president, Franklin Pierce. Even then, Hawthorne was an enigma. "I love Hawthorne," said a fellow student. "I admire him; but I do not know him." Hawthorne remembered himself as "an idle student ... rather choosing to nurse my own fancies."

Actually, to be fair, I was recently charmed by the NYRB-reissued Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny by Papa.

READING REMINDER & HOUSEKEEPING

First and foremost - if you're within striking distance of L.A.'s westside tonight, we're hoping that you'll stop in at Dutton's in Brentwood and attend FOTEV Leslie Schwartz's reading of her second novel Angels Crest. (She's also got readings on June 29 at Vroman's in Pasadena and on July 10 at Skylight in Los Feliz, but we'll remind you of those as they draw closer.)

We'll be at one of the other two because we're taking a much needed recovery day, and going to recoup a little bit in a quiet spot down on the water - not nearly as exotic or restorative as Nova Scotia, but we're hoping it will do the trick. As a result, there'll be no update tomorrow but we'll be back Friday for a wrap up.

BALLARD Q&A;

As most of my readers know, I infrequently link to the Guardian these days - so many other folks seem to get there first - but this Q&A; with J.G. Ballard is the sort of thing which rouses me from my stupor, wherein he discusses "waiters, globalisation, politics and the role of the arts (literary and visual) in the twenty-first century."

JB: The majority of your novels can be read as provocative celebrations of the transformative and transgressive powers of the imagination. In Millennium People, however, the imagination is spectacularly lacking. Your cosy phrase "the upholstered apocalypse" gestures, rather worryingly, towards an imaginative and critical impasse of sorts, doesn't it? Is this decay in the life of the mind a terminal state of affairs?

JGB: Nothing is ever terminal, thank God. As we hesitate, the road unrolls itself, dividing and turning. But there is something deeply suffocating about life today in the prosperous west. Bourgeoisification, the suburbanisation of the soul, proceeds at an unnerving pace. Tyranny becomes docile and subservient, and a soft totalitarianism prevails, as obsequious as a wine waiter. Nothing is allowed to distress and unsettle us. The politics of the playgroup rules us all.

The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change. When Markham (not JGB) uses the phrase "upholstered apocalypse" he reveals that he knows what is really going on in Chelsea Marina. That is why he is drawn to Gould, who offers a desperate escape.

"Upholstered apocalypse" is a definite keeper.

DANTICAT Q&A;

It's Q&A; day everywhere, it seems. The Atlantic runs this brief Q&A; with Edwidge Danticat.

Do you see any hope for eliminating Haiti's beasts?

I have hope. We have to have hope, because whether it's worse than the past or a little better, the future is going to come no matter what. My hope is in the people of Haiti. If given an opportunity, I think Haiti's people can really thrive. It's just a matter of getting that chance. This year is the bicentennial of Haitian independence. It's a symbolic moment for renewal and hope. When you think about it, our ancestors, who were slaves, had an even greater battle to fight than we do now. So from that we can take some hope.

What do you think of Haiti's new acting Prime Minister, Gerard Latortue? Do you think his background with the United Nations and as an economist will help him make significant changes?

I hope he can make a difference. But I think in some ways, he's in a position where he has to do whatever the United States or other large powers ask him to do. He has inherited a great burden and responsibility, and I don't know how independently he can act.

JIM HARRISON ON ... MONEY?

OK, this is just one of those oddities that the TEV mailbox seems to attract. It's an interview with Jim Harrison, which is not, on the face things, odd except that it's conducted by Bankrate.com, a financial website, and deals almost exclusively with the financial side of his career.

Bankrate: Did you at some point emerge from the fog and knuckle down to some financial planning?

Jim Harrison: Yeah, I had to when I was in my 50s because I didn't have any retirement. So then I got pretty smart. It was just this gradual feeling as I got older that I wanted to make sure that my wife and two daughters had some sort of benefits from the fruits of my labor. I got an adviser and entered one of these plans, which is a bitch where you have to save so much every year. Sort of like an inflated IRA. I had to meet this mark for six years. It was ghastly, but I did it.

Bankrate: What were your major expenditures?

Jim Harrison: Oh, wine and food. Drugs for a while, but I quit that almost 20 years ago, almost without thinking about it. I'd lucked out and had been researching a film on Brazil for a month. After being in Brazil, there was never any point to touching American cocaine again, so I never did. But it was simply the sense that you're aging and now is the time to save up for later.

SPEECHLESS

A $2 million dollar novel about vampires. And it's all we're going to hear about for the next year and a half.

I pretty much quit right now.

GOLDSMITH UPDATE

The official cause of death in the Olivia Goldsmith case is in - cardiac arrest, a "known complication" of anesthesia.

Goldsmith's cause of death was cardiorespiratory arrest during facial cosmetic surgery under sedation with four drugs - meperidine, promethazine, propofol and fentanyl - said Ellen Borakove, the spokeswoman.

OUR INVITE, PRESUMABLY, WAS LOST IN THE MAIL

There's dish, and then there's British dish, the tone of which is pretty tough to beat ...

The alcohol was flowing at Penguin's headquarters in the Strand on Wednesday evening as the great and the good celebrated Viking's 20th birthday. However, those responsible for giving Rageh Omaar £800,000 to write about his experiences of the Iraq war in one book and growing up in Somalia in another were drowning their sorrows. The former BBC reporter's first work, Revolution Day: The Human Story Of The Battle For Iraq has sold a mere 6,800 copies since it was published in March. The Scud Stud seems to have misfired.

TAKE THE "A" TRAIN

No, we're not likely to read My Life, but we do like that Clinton chose to make stop number two in Harlem - and he's not even running for anything any more.

The scheduled booksigning has created a buzz in the historic black neighborhood for two weeks, with curious residents from all over New York City trekking to the store to get details and, in many cases, obtain a printed yellow ticket for a place in line. As of yesterday afternoon, all 2,000 available tickets had been given to advance buyers of the book.

"This is so exciting," said Steven Simmons, a manager of a Harlem clothing store who also lives in the neighborhood. "He didn't have to come to this little store. He could have gone to Barnes & Noble, and that could have been it."

GERMAN NOVEL HALTED

The Scotsman reports that a German court has halted the publication of a German novel in which a German chancellor is murdered in Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's hometown.

Publisher Betzel Verlag disputed that finding, arguing that the novel does not mention Schroeder by name. But its manager, Dietrich Reinhardt, said the publisher would obey the court ruling.

The book tells the story of a ruined chemist who shoots the chancellor outside a rail station in Hanover, Schroeder’s home city, because he blames politicians for his bankruptcy.

OK, we've got an idea for a book about this amiable but dangerous clown from Crawford, Texas ...

ALGONQUIN RESTORATION

I was delighted when, in a recent e-mail, Robert Birnbaum suggested that the blogosphere is emerging as a sort of 21st century Algonquin round table. (I call Benchley!) So it warms my heart, as it should yours, to learn about this planned renovation of the historic site.

The hotel will close for about a month starting June 27 to complete renovations of its public spaces and guest rooms, including the famed Oak Room cabaret and the Round Table room, where Dorothy Parker and other literary sophisticates held court for years.

We'll meet you there for the reopening; the first round is on us ...

NORTH KOREA LOOSENS UP?

Time Magazine suggests that there's been a slight loosening of the North Korean literary "scene," even if the reins do remain firmly in Kim Jong Il's hands.

Last week, Pyongyang said it would host a meeting of South and North Korean writers, the first such get-together in nearly 60 years. And to the surprise of foreign observers, new topics are appearing in North Korean fiction: poverty, starvation, even the hint that not all officials are paragons of virtue. In 2002, state presses released Hwang Jin Yi, a ribald historical novel by Hong Seok Jung, which will be published in South Korea in September. The heroine is a courtesan who encounters starving masses, corrupt officials, and a governor "completely immersed in booze and women." The story is set in the 16th century, and there is no reason to suspect that the author is anything but a loyal subject of the Dear Leader. Still, when reading the book, it's hard not to make the connection to Kim's lobster-and-Bordeaux lifestyle in a country where at least a million people have died of starvation during his rule. "I read some parts with my jaw hanging open," says Brian Myers, an expert on North Korean literature at Korea University in the south of Seoul. "The parallels to the current political situation are really just too obvious even for the most obtuse, literal-minded reader to miss."

42

I've written before about my fondness for Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker "Trilogy". Now the Scotsman reports that, via the marvels of digital technology, we'll have a chance to hear Adams' voice one more time in an upcoming radio adaptation.

The author recorded the part of Agrajag at his home studio 18 months before his sudden death in 2001, at the age of 49.

Now producers have used digital technology to bring his voice back to life in the dramatisation of the final three Hitchhiker books: Life, The Universe and Everything, So Long and Thanks For All the Fish, and Mostly Harmless.

The satirical and iconic sci-fi story, which centred on the search for an answer to the meaning of life, began as a radio broadcast in 1978.

Five of the original radio cast - including Simon Jones as Arthur Dent and Geoffrey McGivern as his alien travelling companion, Ford Prefect - are in the new Radio 4 series, which will be broadcast in 14 parts starting later this year.

INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLERS

NPR steals my BEA post and talks to some independent booksellers about what they're reading. But we're fans, so we forgive them ...

June 21, 2004 -- Before vacationers head to the beach to laze away their hot summer days, many will head to the bookstore to pick up some summer reading. NPR's Susan Stamberg talks to three independent booksellers about their suggestions for the leisurely months ahead.

(Streaming audio required)

MORE SHAKESPEARE & CO.

There seems to be no shortage of pieces about the Paris bookstore Shakespeare & Co., but as with all things Paris, we never get tired of them. If you do, just skip this link. But you'll miss an awfully nice picture of the front of the store ...

Little seems to have changed over the decades at Shakespeare & Company, a wonderfully chaotic warren of books in a 17th-century building on the banks of the Seine River.

The bookshop's half-dozen small, wood-beamed rooms still are crammed with new and antiquarian books, spilling out of the shelves onto the floor, chairs, counters. A multi-national tide of book lovers keeps flowing through. Out the windows is the same splendid view of Notre Dame cathedral, directly across the river. And Whitman, still spry, remains the ruler of this dusty, literary wonderland.

As if that's not enough (what pleasure we offer you!), there's even a virtual tour of the bookshop, where I've spent many a happy hour ...

MULTICULTURAL DEFINED?

The ongoing discussion between Jeffrey Eugenides and Jim Lewis over at Slate, which started around Ulysses, culminates with an examination of the "multicultural" novel.

For the benefit of the rigorous Goan, let me define what I mean by the term "multicultural novel." I do NOT mean fiction written in foreign languages. I do not mean Urdu literature or Japanese literature or Nepalese literature. By multicultural I refer to novels written in, say, English, and originally published in the United States or the United Kingdom that deal primarily with characters who are not living in the United States or the United Kingdom, or novels that examine the lives of an ethnic group hermetically insulated from the—and here comes another so-called—dominant culture. I do not mean White Teeth. I do mean Waiting by Ha Jin. I mean writing in a 19th-century manner about characters living in the 20th or 21st, and calling this new because the names of the characters are Hassan or Chen rather than Emma or Mr. Darcy.

You can spot a multicultural novel of this sort very easily. It is written in English but sounds as though it were translated.

Not sure that I'd exclude White Teeth , and the capping sound bite is perhaps more entertaining than accurate, but the dialogue continues to be an interesting one, worth eavesdropping.

MONGREL GLORY, INDEED

We're not huge Dylan fans around here - Sacrilege! We know! - but it seems time to stop ignoring the coverage of Christopher Ricks' latest. Yesterday's review in Slate finds the tome heavy going, even for Dylan diehards.

Ricks elevates an old prejudice—ranking the poet above the songwriter—to dizzying new heights: He repeatedly reminds us that Dylan's words are heard rather than read, but the words on the page are really his main concern. For all the smarts he brings into play, Ricks has no interest in Dylan's rock 'n' roll context, his epic interaction with his audience, or the serrations of his perplexing career. Dylan's "poetry" all boils down to his text. The problem is, Dylan's rock 'n' roll mowed down these assumptions long ago: The recordings are the new text, and separating the persona from the material, especially with Dylan, is misleading at best. Even though Ricks has listened closely to the records and been to plenty of concerts (although apparently no bad ones), the mongrel glory of Dylan's style eludes him.

PARANOID KNOW NOTHINGS

There's an ugly term that's making the rounds out there - ugly but essentially accurate - called blogfucking; it's a coarse designation for the intramural linking that goes on around between blogs. On the one hand, one tries to remain sensitive to criticism of clique-ishness and the rest. Further, one seeks to maintain critical credibility, which can sometimes be called into question by ongoing mutual admiration and backslapping. (Brief side story - In my pre-blog days, I posted a comment on The Antic Muse that was vaguely dismissive about critic Alan Cheuse. To my enormous surprise, I received an e-mail from Cheuse a few weeks later, asking me to explain to comment in more depth. After I got over the surprise that anyone cared at all about what I thought, I explained that I was suspicious of reviewers who seemed to like everything; without a sense of their dislikes I found it hard to gauge their tastes. It led to an interesting discussion which culminated in my revision of the original post.)

And yet, there are blogs out there which manage to take an otherwise unremarkable Monday morning and turn it into something to savor. I've often described Maud's site in that light; Carrie's new effort promises much of the same. But it's Dan Green's The Reading Experience that I'm writing about this morning. I know I've been immoderate in my praise of Dan's work, and that can lead to a bit of justified suspicion or accusations of said "blogfucking." But the fact remains that even when I don't agree with Dan's ideas - his James Wood posts, for example - there's always something to chew on. Today's post in which he shines the cool, clear light of his criticism on the bottom dwellers over at ULA is a model of the form, and a reminder at least to me, about how blogs might be used.

In a fairly lengthy post, Dan dissects the intellectual shallowness of these self-appointed everyman literary guardians.

Thus the ULA is the latest in a long line of advocates of the notion that literature is a matter of "saying something," preferably in the least embellished and ambiguous way, of using fiction or poetry for doing "something relevant to American people’s lives," as another of their pronouncements has it. But "saying something" almost always turns out to be itself a matter of saying something that's been said many times before, or something everybody already knows, or something of great interest to the writer but of no conceivable interest to any readers, or something with which those readers already agree, or something that seems of burning urgency today but tomorrow will seem as prosaic as the newspaper article it was taken from, or something as tedious and doctrinaire as almost all "revolutionary" statements ultimately are. Gilbert Sorrentino once wrote of the act of "saying something" in a work of literature that "A writer discovers what he knows as he knows it, i.e., as he makes it. No artist writes in order to objectify an 'idea' already formed. It is the poem or novel or story that quite precisely tells him what he didn't know he knew: he knows, that is, only in terms of his writing. This is, of course, simply another way of saying that literary composition is not the placing of a held idea into a waiting form." In this context, the ULA approach is, quite literally, an abandonment of art, a rejection of what makes literature literature.

Dan continues on with a look at ULA exemplar Jack Saunders (whose work suggests to us an E! Entertainment version of David Markson), and with this utterly appropriate rebuke of head wingnut King Wenclas:

Apparently King Wenclas, the ULA's reigning royal, took an interest in the recent contretemps between Dale Peck and Sven Birkerts as discussed in Birkerts' recent essay in Bookforum. (Apparently as well the King has it in for Bookforum in general, describing it as a bastion of "pseudo-intellectual cultural snobbery.") The level of intellectual discourse of the ULA sovereign's analysis is captured well enough in this passage, attacking Birkerts: "The history of his writings has been a BOOKFORUM in miniature with a heavy dose of reviews of foreign authors no one was reading and after his reviews still no one was reading them. (Can one be more intentionally irrelevant to his own time and place?) What was important to the Birkerts career as establishment critic was not his unremarkable unmemorable essays, but the career itself, the pose of 'critic' formed after prep school by working in a bookstore egregiously sucking-up to Joseph Brodsky living in the woods reading a lot of books announcing in his life and the dry torpor of his words 'I am an intellectual!'" Anyone who has read some of my previous posts knows that I have some admiration for Birkerts as a critic, but even as someone inclined to defend him I find it hard to take this passage very seriously. One hardly knows what the King's real problem with Birkerts's criticism actually is, since here (and in the rest of the piece) all we get is petulance, fake iconoclasm ("sucking up to Joseph Brodsky living in the woods reading a lot of books"), and ad hominem attack. As an attempt to rabble rouse against the literary establishment, it's pathetic.

As Dan suggests early on, it's hard to be entirely unsympathetic with some of what ULA stands for; one merely wishes that the message was in the hands of those better suited to the job.

JOE BLOGGS REVAMPED

Do pop over and check out the delightfully legible redesign of Joe Bloggs. (The old site gave us headaches but we've already been accused of being old cranks and didn't want to add fuel to the fire.)

As if a new look isn't enough, they're also announcing a new fiction project.

We would like to compile a series of works from writers whereby each fiction piece's title is that of a song. The piece doesn't have to reflect the band or song concerned, though we leave that option open.

HATCHET JOBS REVIEWS

Dale Peck's Hatchet Jobs is beginning to draw its fair share of ink in the review pages. First up, The Chicago Sun Times takes a look , and the view is decidedly mixed.

Peck is a solid analyst. He's the kind of guy you want to have on hand to look over the papers at a mortgage closing or the blueprints for a house. He's very good at form and structure, whether scoring Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days for "drowning in a swamp of extraneous material" or knocking fiction by Julian Barnes, a "terribly, terribly skilled" but "soulless" writer, for being "more concerned with telling than tale." He brings valuable context to his reviews, recognizing Philip Roth as "the only one of our anointed writers still willing to reinvent himself and his writing," and refers to materials as diverse as Sidney Sheldon's novels and The Illiad.

But for all that, unfortunately, Peck isn't much fun. For a man with his reputation for whacking reputations, you expect at least some of the acid pleasures provided by such ranking masters of critical bile as Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and James Wolcott. You expect someone who regards himself as such a guardian of the written word to provide linguistic spark himself.

But there's no lift to Peck's pronouncements, no real sizzle or sass. If Terry McMillan's How Stella Got Her Groove Back is "the most lazily written book I've ever read," Jim Crace's The Devil's Larder exposes that British writer as "the Betty Crocker of contemporary novelists" and Ian McEwan's books "smell worse than newspaper wrapped around old fish," dismissals like these hardly make Peck the Edmund Wilson of 21st century pundits.

Scott McLemee's write-up in Newsday is considerably less kind, although he spends a bit too much space rehashing the whole Snark Saga.

As little as Julavits and Birkerts might have in common, they could agree that Peck's transformation of criticism into a form of insult comedy was destructive. Now, it would be convenient if at this late stage of the dispute I could strike a contrarian pose and pronounce both of them utterly mistaken.

Unfortunately, I can't quite do that. If Julavits prefers commentary on books to be the finger-painting of the mind, while Birkerts wants culture to be as sober and edifying as an adult-education course, Peck seems to split the difference - making it a gesture of adolescent self-definition, an effort to get as many eyes as possible in the shopping mall of American culture turned in his direction, if only by name-calling in a loud voice. Even when this is entertaining rather than just annoying, the last thing you want is for anybody else to imitate it.

The San Francisco Chronicle offers the most thoughtful and nuanced look thus far, finding value with the book without letting Peck completely off the hook for his excesses.

Having read most of the pieces in "Hatchet Jobs" before reading this collection, I didn't always agree with Peck's conclusions, but I always found myself at least rethinking my views of his subjects because Peck always makes you work and he always makes you think. And that's what he does in the 11 reviews here (not all of which, by the way, are pure nastiness: He has nice things to say about Michael Cunningham, Rebecca Brown and ... Danielle Steel?). Peck also makes you work and think when he talks about negative reviews and why he won't write them anymore. He just doesn't make you work and think hard enough

Watch this space for my own upcoming look at Hatchet Jobs as part of my 1000 Words series of reviews. I plan to take a slightly different approach than any of the reviews I've yet seen and I suspect that, minimally, I'll blow the 1000-word mark ...

LIGHTEN UP, RAY

Jesus Christ. We guess being one the grand old men of SF entitles you to make an absolute raging idiot of yourself. We're disappointed by the foolishness exhibited by the formerly admired Bradbury.

Fahrenheit 451 author Ray Bradbury has said director Michael Moore did not ask to use his title for his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.

"That's not his novel, that's not his title," he said, adding that the film should now be renamed.

Gee, do we really need to state the obvious? That the book is not, in fact, called Fahrenheit 9/11, and thus Bradbury can't consider it his title? And there's this thing called, um, satire? And on and on. We wish Ray's loved ones would quiet him down and spare him further embarrassment.

JAMES WOOD ON RUSSIAN PAINTING

James Wood steps out from behind his books to review the latest National Gallery exhibition, Russian Landscape in the Age of Tolstoy.

Only in Russia, one feels, would art and literature have worked so naturally together. It was Russian nationalism that provided the glue of amity. Russian writers, painters and musicians felt that they were involved in a common project, that of renovating the country's soul. You could be a westerniser like Turgenev (ie, one who felt that Russian needed to turn towards Europe for its model and salvation), or a Slavophile like Dostoevsky (ie, one who felt Russia must find that salvation in its Slavic roots), and yet the common bond remained, which was how to perform spiritual resuscitation on the motherland. This produces the marvellous paradox in so much Russian art and writing of the second half of the 19th century, of a bashful nationalism: an eager patriotism that does not offend, but on the contrary attracts us because it is so full of anxiety and melancholia. These paintings manage to be both anti-idealistic and grand at the same time, at once flatly real and majestically spiritual.

GOBSMACKED IS THE NEW NEW BLACK

We remain quite excited to check out David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, this equivocal review from the Age notwithstanding.

There is no denying Mitchell's flamboyant talent. Each protagonist has its own voice, each story its own style. From the historically traceable language of voyagers' diaries, to that of crime thrillers and confessional narratives of the late 20th century, to Sonmi ~ 451's sci-fi corporate talk, and Zachry's futuristic pidgin, Mitchell's skill will leave you gobsmacked. The individual stories are so strong that they could be read as such. And perhaps they should. As a whole, there are moments when the experience of reading Cloud Atlas would benefit if the protagonists would engage more with one another, if there was more of a narrative focus.

Folks whose word we take unstintingly have advised us to run, not to walk, to Amazon UK to get our copy, and it remains very much high up on our radar.

A NON-MEMOIR MEMOIR NON-DENIAL DENIAL

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (via the Baltimore Sun) takes a look at the new non-memoir by longtime Merchant/Ivory screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

In her brief “Apologia” prefacing “My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past,” Jhabvala calls the book “potentially autobiographical” and muses, “I may have been trying out alternative destinies.” More coy than cagey, Jhabvala declines to specify the degree to which the stories in this volume borrow directly from her own colorful young life.

But the stories are so inviting and alive, it would take a pedantic reader indeed to ask just how organic their ingredients are.

These absorbing tales feature cosmopolitan women chasing their destinies across continents and cultures in the mid-20th century. Arriving with, as one character puts it, “so much to confide, such an unspecified pressure on my heart,” these women are ripe for seduction. They fall for a charismatic felon, a rising political star, a gimcrack guru – not men with whom to live happily ever after. But Jhabvala’s characters narrate these romances from a distance of age, when time and life have sanded away the sharp edges of experience, leaving memories like smoothly gleaming stones.

CHEKHOV WORKS

We've never met a centenary we didn't like - in addition to Bloomsday and Singer, we're closing in on the anniversary of Anton Chekhov's birth. To commemorate, the Scotsman looks at some of the new offerings, which include a biography, a letters collection, and a collection of stories.

ON JULY 15 it will be exactly 100 years since the death of Anton Chekhov. The anniversary is being marked by the publication of three books by and about him. Among them is a new biography by Rosamund Bartlett, the Russian scholar who is also responsible for updated translations of Chekhov’s major works. Drawing on a wide range of manuscripts, photographs and the previously unpublished full texts of the playwright’s letters, Bartlett’s book promises to give us a fresh angle on this most enigmatic of Russian writers.

FORD'S WOES

Richard Ford is working on his new novel and having a rough time of it, it seems.

"The one thing that is true about doing this all my life is that I do understand that when things are hard and words are not coming easily to the page and you are having to dig and to figure things out and you think to yourself, `I'm making a dog's breakfast of this', well it's not always the case that you are."

Ford, who lives in Maine in the northeast United States and has been a writer for more than 30 years, claims his "particular genius" is to know how long a book will be once he has worked on it for about a month. He says he has now completed 380 typed pages - "about half" - of The Lay of The Land .

He adds it's a big undertaking but he is not complaining about it.

"It's a little bit like being the manager of a football team - you have to deal with a lot of players who are not only swinging in different directions but also have to be kept heading towards the one goal.

"That part's kind of fun in a way if you can keep from giving into the dread that you are doing it badly."

As we've noted before, we're not huge Ford fans, but it is vaguely reassuring to know that we're not the only ones grappling our way toward the end. Oh, we have no genius for anything but expect to come in at around 400 pages. It's an attention span thing ...

UPDATE: FOTEV Robert Birnbaum - who has (natch) done his own interview with Ford - writes to inform that the link isn't working properly. Since there's no permalink offered by the guys at the Otago Daily Times, here's the whole piece:

Writing novel worth the struggle Richard Ford has written about half of his new novel, The Lay of the Land , and as he tells KEVIN KANE, of NZPA, he is pleased it has been hard going.

Richard Ford's last novel, Independence Day , won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

One of its predecessors, The Sportswriter , was hailed by the critics and picked as one of the best books of 1986.

Ford has also written three other well-received novels, several short story collections and has contributed numerous articles to magazines such as the New Yorker .

Yet, he still struggles with writing.

"The one thing that is true about doing this all my life is that I do understand that when things are hard and words are not coming easily to the page and you are having to dig and to figure things out and you think to yourself, `I'm making a dog's breakfast of this', well it's not always the case that you are."

Ford, who lives in Maine in the northeast United States and has been a writer for more than 30 years, claims his "particular genius" is to know how long a book will be once he has worked on it for about a month. He says he has now completed 380 typed pages - "about half" - of The Lay of The Land .

He adds it's a big undertaking but he is not complaining about it.

"It's a little bit like being the manager of a football team - you have to deal with a lot of players who are not only swinging in different directions but also have to be kept heading towards the one goal.

"That part's kind of fun in a way if you can keep from giving into the dread that you are doing it badly."

He says this dread comes along at the most predictable of times "when things seem to be going smoothly".

"It is also my fear, I guess it is a fear, that when things are going along swimmingly that I'm blithely ignorant of something I'm missing," he chuckles.

The Lay of the Land is the third book in the trilogy - The Sportswriter and Independence Day being the first two - narrated by protagonist/hero Frank Bascombe.

Frank was introduced in The Sportswriter as a 38-year-old who had abandoned a promising writing career to work as a sports reporter for a glossy magazine.

Set in the fictional town of Haddam, New Jersey, the story took place over the weekend of Easter 1983 and told the story of Frank's attempts to come to terms with the death of his son four years earlier, his divorce and his life in terms both wry and poignant.

Its successor, Independence Day , found Frank back in Haddam but now a real estate salesman who over the course of an Independence Day weekend attempted to rebuild a relationship with his second son on a disastrous trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The Lay of the Land, in common with its predecessors, is set over a holiday weekend, in this case Thanksgiving 2000, 10 months before the events of September 11, 2001 and Ford says it is a book concerned with "permanence".

But the book is also inspired in a way by the events of 9/11.

"The events of that day never occur in The Lay of Land but the book examines what went before and how they might fit into what happened," Ford says.

He says the optimism of his everyman Frank Bascombe, which contrasts with the often bleak portrayals of the possibilities for long-term happiness enjoyed by many of his characters, was deliberate.

"In a way all three of these books are long extenuations of what my wife said to me before I started writing The Sportswriter back in 1982.

"She said `why don't you write about someone who is happy' - and this is the only way I can do it.

"I have equipped this person with a rather indomitable sense of grudging optimism and then placed in his way all kinds of stumbling blocks for which he has to try to imagine an optimistic vocabulary."

EAT THAT, ESTHER

Well, maybe Madonna can no longer sell out the Garden, but Muriel Spark's Book Festival appearance in Scotland sold out in two hours.

Organisers today said that news of the notoriously reclusive writer’s visit to the Capital provoked a "box office frenzy".

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie writer is due to make a rare visit to Edinburgh from her home in Tuscany to headline the festival.

LAST JOYCE POST - PROMISE

We wouldn't link to any more Joyce pieces, except that this one posits a Hungarian connection so, of course, it's interesting to us.

Leopold Bloom was modelled on Lipot Virag, the son of a Jewish Hungarian horse trader, to whom Joyce had taught English at the Berlitz school in Trieste in the first decade of the 20th century.

Bloom was a literal translation of Virag, who was taught English with his four sons by Joyce when he was giving lessons in Trieste and the naval town of Pola on the Adriatic.

Joyce himself offered a possible explanation for the transmogrification of the Magyar Virag into the Dubliner Bloom. Talking of his “stream of consciousness” novel, he said: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.”

Joyce aficionados have been meeting in Virag’s home town of Szombathely, in south-western Hungary, in mid-June every year to savour the events of Bloomsday, June 16, 1904 – the day upon which the events in the novel take place – and celebrate the genius of Joyce.

Minor quibble, but "virag" (pronounced VEE-rahg) actually means "flower" - if the word were used in everyday conversation, that would be the most common association.

(OK, we lied - one more, an oddity. Amiya Chakraborty writes about his actual meeting with Joyce.)

BREADLOAF PRIZE

The Bakeless Literary Publication Prize for fiction, sponsored by the folks at Breadloaf, has gone to Michael Guista.

Guista's book, Brainwork: Stories in Search of a Soul, centers on the quest for the soul in a scientific universe. The stories, which took him about 10 years to write, have been published in American Short Fiction and The North American Review, among others. The characters-psychiatrists, college professors, and religious figures-suffer from head injury, Parkinson's, OCD, masochism, loss of faith, and other ailments.