Squeal sheets

At the NYRB, Robert Darnton ponders the instabilities of information. Some particularly interesting reflections there on Google Books, including a strong case for the continued relevance of the old-fashioned research library. His conclusion?

[S]hore up the library. Stock it with printed matter. Reinforce its reading rooms. But don't think of it as a warehouse or a museum. While dispensing books, most research libraries operate as nerve centers for transmitting electronic impulses. They acquire data sets, maintain digital re-positories, provide access to e-journals, and orchestrate information systems that reach deep into laboratories as well as studies. Many of them are sharing their intellectual wealth with the rest of the world by permitting Google to digitize their printed collections. Therefore, I also say: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns. As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.

Amuse-gueule

At the Guardian, John Campbell on Gore Vidal. An interesting side note here:

In both his volumes of memoirs (the second, Point to Point Navigation, was published in 2006), and repeatedly in conversation, Vidal makes the claim that he was forced into writing for big and small screens, and for the stage, because of a deliberate campaign on the part of the New York Times to obliterate him as a novelist. The policy began when he revealed himself to be what he ironically calls "a degenerate", by writing The City and the Pillar (1948), one of the first American novels to have homosexual longing - Vidal's preferred term is "same-sex" - at its centre.

"If you didn't appear in the daily New York Times, you were non-existent. Every other journal, including Time and Newsweek, followed its lead. And that is what drove me into television, Broadway and the movies. It is fascinating how few people believe that the Times would do such a thing." Norman Mailer, he says, suffered a similar neglect. "That's why we were friends at the beginning, though we didn't remain so. I think he affronted them much more than I did, because it is a Jewish newspaper and he was one of the glories of Jewish literature at that point. But they were so prissy. They just savaged him." Vidal got his own back by writing three popular mysteries under the name of Edgar Box, "that were glowingly reviewed in the Times".

Many people have doubted Vidal's claims about the Times - one reason why he continues to make them - but a senior source connected with the literary side of the paper, who wished to remain anonymous, told me: "I think this particular claim of Vidal's - unlike many - is entirely plausible. All through the Rosenthal era [AM Rosenthal was executive editor during the late 70s and 80s], the Times did indeed pursue secret agendas when it came to writers, blacklisting some, unreasonably favouring others."

Also: Robert Chalmers has a rather mesmerizing long interview with Vidal at the Independent.

Faded?

Stephen Elliott sends a list of his forgotten books:

I'm a compulsive recommender of overlooked books. . . . These are all books that are, to me, the very best of their kind but never got the mainstream recognition they deserved. I mean, some of them were best sellers for a while, but they've all kind of faded and might be hard to find on some store shelves. They're all at least a couple of years old and, except for Peter Orner, written by people I don't know, or at least didn't know when I first read the book.

I'm going to avoid saying Desperate Characters by Paula Fox, because as much as I love that book, it's starting to become cliche as a recommendation. Desperate Characters might actually have graduated to that next level of books, books you don't need to recommend.


NOVELS

The Car Thief, by Theodore Weesner
Stoner, by John Williams
Good Morning Midnight, by Jean Rhys
Valencia, by Michelle Tea, sometimes called a memoir
The Beggars Shore, by Zak Muncha
The Second Coming Of Mavala Shikongo, by Peter Orner


MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY

Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick, possibly the best memoir I have ever read
Another Bullshit Night In Suck City, possibly the only memoir good enough to be compared with Fierce Attachments
Edie: American Girl, by Jean Stein
Waiting For Nothing, by Thomas Kromer


CREATIVE NON-FICTION

Seek, by Denis Johnson, in my mind the only book by Denis Johnson that actually rivals Jesus Son

"I'm really rather lumbered with the library"

Catherine Moye has a rather delightful piece at the FT on the difficulties of caring for an ancestral collection of books, weapons, etc.:

As fixtures and fittings go, half a dozen suits of armour, a couple of cannons and an executioner’s sword are not what most people expect to acquire with a property. But along with the lights and the central heating boilers, Prince Carl-Eugen Oettingen-Wallerstein is offering one of the world’s most important private armouries for sale with Baldern, one of his five castles in the heart of the German province of Bavaria, Germany.

“I can’t keep it: I don’t have anywhere to display it,” the prince says of his 800-piece historic weaponry collection that includes chain mail, helmets, flintlocks and battle and hunting weapons dating from the 15th century to the 18th century. “I just hope that whoever buys the collection will keep it all together.”

Ideally that would be at Baldern, where it has been on public display since 1930, though that is by no means a condition to the sale. The castle was constructed between 1718 and 1737 on the old foundations of an 11th century precursor and the armoury, which fills two rooms on the ground floor, has been especially designed to display the items to their best advantage. It is in the same league as a traditional gentleman’s outfitter in St James’s, London, for standard of presentation.

“See that,” says the prince, pointing at a rather holey piece of webbed head-gear. “It’s a medieval tournament mask. It’s one of only three left in the world and one of the most valuable things in here.” You wouldn’t stop and pick it up off the street but on closer inspection it is somehow awe inspiring.

Organ recitals

At Bookforum, Wendy Lesser considers Frigyes Karinthy's A Journey Round My Skull and Sarah Manguso's The Two Kinds of Decay:

Both Karinthy and Manguso use the occasions of their illnesses to take a deep look at their own characters. Sontag blamed society (along with its outgrowths such as literature, opera, and film) for making patients with cancer and tuberculosis feel as if their disease were somehow their own fault. But we do not need society to make us feel this. It is natural, when the body has turned against us in this way, to imagine that some inner and largely inaccessible part of the self is sabotaging the rest of the enterprise, and no amount of rational medical talk can entirely do away with that feeling.

Karinthy’s is finally the better book, I think, in part because it looks outward as well as inward—and looks inward with the knowledge and intelligence of a person who has already spent sufficient time looking outward. But Karinthy is from the past, and they do things differently there. For a modern-day American, and for such a young American at that, Manguso has addressed her illness with a surprising degree of sharpness and style. Hers is not an inspirational work, nor is it a medical thriller; its appeal lies elsewhere, in the realm of poetry set to prose’s rhythms and coping with prose’s concerns. That she is immensely talented is never in doubt, and that her illness is itself one source of this talent only adds to the book’s many ironies.

Oliver Sacks' introduction to the reissue of Karinthy's book (published in the New York Review of Books earlier this year as a self-standing essay) is well worth reading. I must get that book and read it....

2,000 words a day

At the Times, Peter Kemp interviews Sebastian Faulks on what it was like writing the new Bond book. A great bit here:

Subject matter apart, I wonder how easy Fleming’s not very individualised style was to emulate. Faulks’s reply reminds you that, like Fleming, he spent years working on newspapers. “I think it’s standard journalistic: no semicolons, few adverbs, few adjectives, short sentences, a lot of verbs, a lot of concrete nouns. These are the tools, and that’s literally the style.” More distinctive, he points out, is the tone, “a sort of slight hauteur that was a little bit harder to catch – a little bit cold and a little bit superior in places”. To capture its cadences of “I’m more worldly than you”, Faulks “sometimes imagined myself sucking on my teeth, with perhaps a cigarette-holder”.

Another stimulant was a magazine piece Fleming published in 1962, How to Write a Thriller. It’s an article, I find, on reading it after the interview, in which Fleming is almost startlingly forthright about his intents as an author: “The target of my books... lay somewhere between the solar plexus and, well, the upper thigh”; “They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes or beds”. But it offers, Faulks stresses, a pro’s invaluable advice, namely: “You’ve got to do it all quickly. You give yourself six weeks. You write 2,000 words a day and that will give you the required length. Don’t stop. Don’t agonise. Don’t try to correct your prose as you go along. Don’t worry too much about the details. You can always revise them later and get it checked by experts.”

A daily task

At the Guardian, Hilary Mantel has a very interesting piece (the occasion is the 30th anniversary of the Virago Modern Classics series) on what she did when she realized her draft of a novel about the French Revolution had no substantial female characters.

"I don't think he let anybody in the shed"

Quentin Blake on the room Roald Dahl wrote in.

Gone but not forgotten

Patti Abbott has asked me to contribute to her Friday book recommendation series. Here's her description of what she was hoping for when she began it:

recommendations of books we love but might have forgotten over the years. I have asked several people to help me by also remembering a favorite book. . . . I'm worried great books of the recent past are sliding out of print and out of our consciousness. Not the first-tier classics we all can name, but the books that come next

I am slow off the mark this morning--just got back from Florida, where I did my first triathlon and also ate an ice cream in the shape of Mickey Mouse. It was an utterly delightful trip.

Book recommendations? I am always so full of 'em that I hardly know what to say!

The older novel that I am constantly recommending (it is my favorite novel of all time) is Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows. But I am thinking for today that we want the great books of the more recent past. I am not sure I am really doing anything very complimentary by singling out people's books as slightly forgotten! Novels that received some considerable attention, then, but that deserve to remain front-and-center in the readerly imagination: Stephen Elliott's Happy Baby; Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name; Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai. Jo Walton's Farthing books also, and Charlie Williams' Deadfolk and sequels...

But I think the novel I will particularly single out for passionate recommendation is Cintra Wilson's Colors Insulting to Nature. I see she has a truly demented-sounding book coming out this fall--hmmm, better get hold of a copy of that one...

I do not actually have this novel in my possession; I have had several copies, but they have been pressed into the hands of other readers. So I can't give a great excerpt or description here. Here, though, are the previous Light Reading mentions; and here is where I really delved into it.

Nico and I continue to have regular e-mail exchanges where we foam at the mouth with excitement at the appearance of the latest Critical Shopper column...

The truth versus the facts

More from Rosanne Cash at the New York Times:

The table where you found the suicide note, the cup of coffee that turned cold because you were distracted in a painful reverie staring out the old wavy-glass window at the rain dripping off the eaves, the seashell left in the coat pocket from the last time you were at that favorite spot at the ocean, when it all came clear that you were at the right place with the wrong man, the letters, the photos, the marbles and jewels — all these physical, material, real-world artifacts carry poetic weight and should be used liberally in songwriting. These are the facts that convey truth to me.

The exact words he said, who was right or wrong, whether he relapsed on the 7th or the 10th, why exactly she does what she does, the depth and weight and timbre of the feelings, whether Love Heals Everything — these aren’t facts, these are ever-changing blobs of emotional mercury, and when you are working in rhyme, it can be much more powerful and resonant to write about the shards of the coffee cup than about the feeling that caused him to throw it across the room. You are better off moving the furniture than you are directly analyzing the furniture maker. This is to say nothing of the fact that the lyrical content of songs is by definition wholly entwined with melody, rhythm, tone and possibly a backbeat, and these carry their own authority.

....

My friend Joe Henry says that songwriting is not about self-expression (ewwww), but about discovery. I am of entirely the same mind, which is why I recoil against the attempt to categorize “personal” songs of mine as diary pages and why I resist that niggling insistence on the facts. Self-expression without craft is for toddlers. Real artistic accomplishment requires a suspension of certitude. E.L. Doctorow said that “writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” He may not have been referring specifically to songwriting, but it applies. Great songwriting is not a poor man’s poetry, or a distant cousin to “real” writing. It requires the same discipline and craft. Bright flashes of inspiration can initiate it, but it cannot be completed that way. (That is not to say that all songwriting is important and good, just as not all fiction is important or good. I don’t think anyone would put “Like a Rolling Stone” or my dad’s “Big River” (a truly great piece of American poetry wedded to a wicked, swampy backbeat) in the same category as The Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” (it is what it is).

On a wholly unrelated note, but it's been nagging at me for some time now--what are the origins of that phrase "it is what it is," and when did it become so popular?!? Hmmm, here is a link--it makes sense to me that if it emerged from the world of sport its origins would be effectively shrouded in mystery to me ... and here is the Safire link given in the Slate piece.

Man-of-letterish qualities

At the TLS, John Gross appealingly brings to life an aside in Stefan Collini's new book:

An otherwise admirable account of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is perhaps a shade too chummy (“I feel no inclination to ‘nag’”), but to compensate for this there is a hilarious excursion of several pages in which Collini recounts his adventures tapping selected phrases into the ODNB’s online search engine – “forceful personality”, for example, or “insufferable bore” – and seeing what comes up. He has virtually invented a new computer game.

Discretion

Posting will continue light through the end of the week--but in the meantime, you might go and read Alice Boone on Nicholson Baker and the question of what it means to write history in small chunks.

Logbook poetry

At the Guardian, Veronica Horwell has a lovely piece on Margarette Lincoln's Naval Wives & Mistresses:

True, the upper strata of society and the service were habitual letter-writers in the period of her book, the mid 18th century to the end of the Napoleonic wars; although what survives tends to be incomplete correspondence, a single voice of a duet and not always private, since the gold-braided classes jostled in social networking. Lady Amelia Calder, wife to a rear admiral, fluttered at the Admiralty: "I do desire that you will not be such Savages tomorrow as you have been hitherto, and let us have proper letters by Tuesday's Post." How Lady Elizabeth Collins badgered for her son's advancement can be deduced from the First Lord of the Admiralty's reply: "Madam, It would be very gratifying to me if I had the power to comply with the innumerable applications that are made to me for promotion, and particularly so with your Ladyships . . ." It wasn't that the spouses of the grandest had little to do but chivvy for glory, since many had to manage estates while their husbands were on the far side of the world and the furthest end of a fouled chain of mail deliveries for years at a time. Admiral Codrington dispatched what sound like Post-it notes to his wife instructing her when to paint the garret floors; Mrs Admiral Boscawen filed business reports to her husband (her barley was the best in the parish) and remembered to send a framed print of him to the Corporation of Truro. This was the Penelope side of being "a hero's wife", interrupted on no notice when she had to set out in a chaise in hope of a short port rendezvous. Often enough, the beloved had already heaved off with the tide and the hamper of tender provisions never reached him.

But aside from Admiral Rodney, whose financial worries were legendary, status and money were not the nagging concern in the highest echelons that they were among the middling sort, for whom going to sea as an officer in this period was one of the few possible fast tracks not just to income but prize money, everything that Sir Walter Elliot sneered at in Persuasion as "the means of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction and raising men to honours which their father and grandfathers never dreamt of". Fictional Captain Wentworth came back from the wars with £25,000 to rescue Anne Elliot and Jane Austen's plot, but nonfictional rewards were less sure; Austen's brother Charles didn't do that well from prizes and he shipped his family aboard to live economically, which likely caused the death of his wife after childbirth. Finance niggles through the middling stories, the prospect of reduction to half-pay come peace or illness; even in fighting-fit years, a man's shipboard expenses could absorb so much income that a couple might not be able to afford to meet or to pay postage. William Wilkinson, ship's master, told his Sally that everything he owned was hers, and sold his flute for two and a half guineas to settle their bills until the Copenhagen prize money should be paid out.

"The body is female"

At the Telegraph, Matt Ruff is skeptical about Richard Baer's account of a patient with multiple personality disorder.

The classics

The literary tastes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Hmmm, lots of overlap there with the Davidsonian shelf...

Sentence I most whole-heartedly endorse (on Raymond Chandler): "I often re-read his novels when I don’t have any new materials that measure up"!

(Courtesy of the proprietor of the Dizzies, whose novel Personal Days can be ordered from Amazon!)