A cool NYT article

about the new Gretchen Worden room at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia. If you've never visited this museum, you're missing out: it's amazing. (I remember when I was working at Let's Go a million years ago as an assistant editor trying to persuade the real editors that one of the "Did you know . . .?" blurbs on the back of the USA guide should be "Did you know that you can see the tumor removed from President Grover Cleveland's jaw for [an admission price of some modest kind]?" However this was not the Let's Go sensibility, the suggestion was greeted with horror and dismay.) Thanks to Lynn for the link.

Interesting piece

at Inside Higher Ed, on two bloggers turned down for tenure at the University of Chicago. (Neither of the bloggers is suggesting that the blog was a crucial reason for denial of tenure, BTW.)

I made a massive incursion

this afternoon on Widener Library, having realized that I will not feel at home until I surround myself with a much, much larger number of books than I initially brought with me to the sublet-of-mushroom-colored-walls. A lot of books about Fielding for work, but a collection of others for immediate reading, most pressingly Jonathan Lethem's collection of essays The Disappointment Artist, which I have just finished reading. I really, really liked it--I'd read "13, 1977,21" and "The Beards" in the New Yorker, and these remain the two richest essays for me here, but the essay on Philip K. Dick is excellent (it's called "You Don't Know Dick," and it includes the useful irv as an alternative for oeuvre) as is the piece titled "Lives of the Bohemians."

And yet as much as I liked every single piece in here (with the possible exception of the essay on Cassavetes), I would have to say that Lethem is finally a novelist rather than an essayist. I love various novels by (for example) George Orwell and James Baldwin, and yet reading either man's essays you see that for this particular writer the essay is the perfectly suited form for the maximum distillation of intelligence and voice and humanity, the novels always falling slightly short of that standard. Lethem is the opposite: it's not that I wasn't moved by various revelations in these pages, I was, but The Fortress of Solitude does things of which these essays are wholly incapable. Interesting.

What I like most here--it's personally very compelling to me, and part of what I'm trying to work out as I revise my novel-in-progress--is the force of the reflections on the appeal of what Lethem calls "dripless, squeakless art" (JL as a kid asks his mother why there are drips on his father's paintings, and she offers the analogy that the paint drips are like the squeak of acoustic guitar strings audible in folksingers' recordings) to the adolescent in the grip of unbearable feelings. In "The Beards" Lethem describes himself asking works of art "to be both safer than life and fuller, a better family," then plumbing them so deep that "many perfectly sufficient works of art would become thin, anemic":

This was especially true of anything that assumed a posture of minimalism or perfectionism, or of chilly, intellectual grandeur. Hence my rage at Stanley Kubrick, Don DeLillo, Jean-Luc Godard, and Talking Heads. The artists who'd seemed to promise the most were the ones who'd created art that stirred me while seeming to absent themselves from emotional risk--so these were the ones capable of failing my needs most violently. When I discovered their imperfections, my own hope of absenting myself from emotional risk seemed imperiled. It was as though in their coolness these artists had sensed my oversized needs and turned away, flinched from what I'd asked them to feel on my behalf.

Banville wins the Booker Prize

This is very cool. I was rooting for Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, which I adored (and in my oft-stated and dogmatic personal opinion, Ishiguro is probably the best novelist writing in English today), but Banville is a great writer too. Haven't read this one, but I especially liked his recent thoughtfully negative review in the NYRB of Ian McEwan's latest; my favorite novel of his is the altogether excellent The Untouchable, I've read three or four others that I'm not so crazy about but there is no doubt that Banville is a superb stylist with an interesting and distinctly intellectual sensibility which I approve of without necessarily always enjoying. It was a good short-list, too.

I am determined next year to do a Booker long-list stunt-blogging thing (someone did that this year and I was consumed with envy, I can't seem to find the link though). It would take someone helping me get all the books, it would cost a fortune to buy them esp. since a number are either published only in England or else not yet published, but if I didn't have to do all the footwork obtaining them I would definitely be up for reading everything on the longlist between the first announcement and the shortlist one. You know, you could read a few things in advance on spec, that sort of thing (probably about half the list can be predicted in advance, most years). It is one of my not-so-secret ambitions to be a Booker Prize judge one day, wouldn't it be fun? (Of course I would also like to write a novel that would make it onto at least the longlist, but that seems a more vainglorious ambition. Both are probably equally unlikely.)

I have just lost

a long post titled "Sunday-evening spleen," a rant that I cannot now be bothered to reconstruct (especially as I am now more annoyed than ever; I have hardly had any blogger-related problems, but when something does go wrong, of course it's quite maddening). The long amplified-and-cleaned-up version vanished and I was left with only the bare links and a few relatively calm sentences.

Suffice it to say that I just finished reading The Enemy of God by Robert Daley. Not bad, rather humorless (and the last bits of plot at the end COMPLETELY implausible), but by the last hundred pages I was going crazy with irritation and swearing that never again would I read a novel about manliness and choices and male friendship. Of course there are lots of good crime novels in this vein, I am thinking for instance of ones by Pete Dexter and S. J. Rozan and more broadly it could describe some particular favorite books of mine like David Copperfield or Baldwin's Just Above My Head or Lethem's Fortress of Solitude. But I actually hated Lehane's Mystic River (heresy in crime fiction circles) and generally respond badly to this kind of book when it takes itself too seriously.

It's published in Otto Penzler's new Harcourt imprint, and I think I just have to mark a huge difference of taste here. Here's Penzler's picks, a list of his favorites for 2004 (I won't link to each book, partly because I'm lazy but more because I wouldn't recommend most of these myself):

Night Fall - Nelson DeMille
At Hell's Gate - Ethan Black
The Bookman's Promise - John Dunning
Best American Mystery Stories 2004 - Nelson DeMille
Take Me, Take Me With You - Lauren Kelly
Double Play - Robert B. Parker
Hark! - Ed McBain
Wolves Eat Dogs - Martin Cruz Smith
The Road to Ruin - Donald E. Westlake
Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality (reissues) - John le Carre

I actively dislike the novels of Nelson DeMille and John Dunning; I've read 2-3 by each and find them wanting in terms of character and voice, my two top criteria for all fiction. Ethan Black is entertaining but lightweight (the sheer implausibility and wish-fulfillment-ness of the Voort books just gets to me). Robert B. Parker and Ed McBain are classics but these particular ones are far from great books (actually I haven't read the Parker, so this is prejudice rather than the authority of first-hand experience--it has been several decades in my opinion since he wrote a really good book). Haven't read the Martin Cruz Smith, liked his earlier ones, same for Donald E. Westlake, but taken with these other names it all starts sounding incredibly unimaginative in terms of choices. Particularly you sense that these are books written by people reproducing old successes & not really writing at the top of their game.

John le Carre is highly overrated; I reread a few of his early novels several years ago (including A Murder of Quality) and don't think they're great, and his more recent ones are marred by incredible pretentiousness (I think The Night Manager was the worst, but The Constant Gardener was pretty dreadful too; he is second only to P.D. James on my list of most embarrassing writers, a few of her earlier ones are classics & amazingly good--esp. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman--but the last few Dalgliesh novels are almost unreadably stiff and pretentious, not helped by the fact that Dalgliesh should really be in his 70s by now). Haven't read the Lauren Kelly but very much want to, as I only recently read an article in which I learned that this is a new pseudonym for Joyce Carol Oates, whose Rosamond Smith books I adore.

But the feel of the whole list is backward-looking, cautious, inattentive even to the great popular/mainstream names I expected to see here--Lee Child, Laura Lippman--let alone to the demented and brilliant writers who make me so excited about the genre (James Sallis, Charlie Williams, Ken Bruen--yes, I don't really expect to see a list like this one representing the demented writers I love most, but still...).

Now I must go and see if I can find something to read that will either make me happy by being completely delightful or make me even angrier by stoking the flames of my taste-disapproval. (The latter is more what I'm in the mood to do, and also more immediately attainable--another Penzler-edited book is sitting right here next to me!--only then I will never be able to go to sleep, I will be so consumed with aesthetic self-righteousness.)

Superhuman Tinkerbell energies

I have just read a most absurdly excellent novel, Cintra Wilson's Colors Insulting to Nature (that's the BARGAIN Amazon price of $6.99, or else if you prefer you can get the paperback). I had vaguely heard of this when it came out without really registering it (here's a page with book review links). Then Nico e-mailed me to ask me whether I'd read it. (Nico has a very cool style-related event coming up that everyone in NY should come to if they're free that night, BTW.) I said I hadn't read it, and should I? This was his response (e-mail dated 26 Sept. 2005, quoted entirely without permission):

Jenny Oh my god. You must read it like immediately. It had never crossed my radar before ever, and a friend gave it to me for my birthday, and I started it on the train, and literally was convulsing with laughter and had to put it down. When I alighted, a man came up to me and was like, 'is that a funny book' and I couldn't even speak to tell him that it was I was laughing so hard.

Not often that happens!

This is completely and literally true. Funniest book I've read for years, funnier even than my favorite very funny books of the past year or so, Charlie Williams' Deadfolk and its sequel Fags and Lager and Anansi Boys by the #1 NYT bestselling novelist Neil Gaiman. (Terry Pratchett is also of course ridiculously funny, but this has been known for some time.)

Most of this stuff won't work being quoted out of context, so I won't. Also it's incredibly raunchy. (It's really nothing like it, but for some reason I was very much reminded of a particularly favorite novel of mine, Geek Love by my hero Katherine Dunn.) Go to the Amazon link for the plot summaries. But I don't especially like picaresque or post-modern or satirical novels so I might have been put off by those descriptions; and I would have missed out on one of my favorite books ever!

The funniest thing in the book is the series of scenes describing the Normal Family Dinner Theatre's production of The Sound of Music. This you will really just have to read for yourself; the second half of the novel gets more moving and less laugh-out-loud funny and that seems entirely suitable. But here's a random taste of the style of the prose, which may well be off-putting taken like this but is genuinely hilarious and heart-warming and painful in context.

Liza Normal and her friend Lorna get wrapped up in a theatrical project sponsored by the Cock-A-Zoids called Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! in which Joan Crawford (played by a transsexual called LaTuna Canyon) is "a nymphomaniacal motorcyle-hellcat . . . who sexually brutalized big Hollywood moguls in order to secure film roles" ("Liza's mandate was to act like she relished being beaten by her famous mother. 'Look, Mommie Dearest! I used a wire hanger to hang up my beautiful clothes again,' Christina would provoke, writhing with perversion"):

At Cape Horn, Liza and Lorna found a play zone in which everything ordinarily considered to be depraved, criminal, or depressing was hysterically funny, including them. The Cock-A-Zoids were loud and tragically amusing people, who lived action-packed crisis-fueled lives filled with squalor, drugs, betrayal, mild violence, evictions, injustice, promiscuity, theft, and vermin, glossed over with cheap makeup and clad in loud, oversize banquet-wife finery from Thrift Town. The tiny backstage area was a breeding ground for the most hair-raising gossip Liza had ever been exposed to, either in life or on television: a nonstop Tijuana opera of jealous rage provoking hypodermic stabbings, perpendicular 'T-bone' auto collisions, cosmetic surgery malfeasance, and sectional couch arson.

And in a follow-up to my previous post

here's a very cool essay by Peter Weiss about Feynman diagrams. And David Kaiser's book Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics also sounds curiously appealing.

I run hot and cold

on the New York Review of Books; sometimes it's great, and then there are weeks and weeks where it's this to-me-completely-offputting-heavy-duty-only-male-authored-mostly-foreign-policy-related thing and the issues pile up and greet me reproachfully as a reminder of my own frivolity. I am more the TLS type--I like the combination of eclecticism and eccentricity and sometimes misdirected intellectual firepower you see in their pages--but both tend to pile up in any case, to tell the truth.

The latest NYRB, though, is a particularly rich and enjoyable one from the literary-and-humanities-and-science point of view. I found almost everything grippingly interesting as I read through it earlier this evening at the laundromat: Joyce Carol Oates on Cormac McCarthy, and an interesting essay by Alma Guillermoprieto about Hugo Chavez, and John Leonard on Joan Didion's new book (I'm not a Didion fan but the book really sounds heartbreaking), and Richard Lewontin on a book by Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd called Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution that I'm dying to read--just shopping-carted it, could swear I'd already bought a copy but evidently not, or if I did it's locked away from me in my temporarily unavailable NY apartment--and a good piece by Avishai Margalit about Stuart Hampshire's last Spinoza and Spinozism book.

But the most engaging essay by far--and the book I most immediately want to read, it sounds completely amazing--is Freeman Dyson's piece on Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman. Here's Dyson introducing one particularly excellent quotation from Feynman:

Every one of the letters is personal. He responded to people's personal needs as well as to their questions. As an example of his personal response, here is the last paragraph of the letter to Koichi Mano which I have already quoted. Koichi was unhappy with his life as a scientist because he was not working on fundamental problems. Feynman replies:

You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself—it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of the naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher's ideals are.

Best of luck and happiness.

Sincerely,

Richard P. Feynman

Good, eh?

And this

show of spirit photography at the Met is the other thing I must see in NY later in the month, I really can't wait (the slideshow there gives you a taste of it, there was a good one in the Times last week too). It even counts as professional research, in a way, since I've got a whole spirit photography sequence in my novel.

In other news, I belatedly realized that I was trying to do a million too many things at once and made the tough decision to postpone novel revisions until early November. Which is frustrating but sensible--I've got a number of other projects due later this month, including an essay on this for one of these (only it's Fielding not Austen) and working out exactly what I'm going to say for this (both of these must be done by the end of October) and figuring out my title if not my actual argument for a January talk on this at Yale and dealing with an article that got a "revise and resubmit" letter over the summer from a major journal in my field. In fact now that I'm listing all of these things, I see it's no wonder that I haven't been working properly on the novel revisions--madness, really, to have even tried.

The great lesson of academia in particular and of writing more generally is to pay attention to what your body's telling you about work--if you can't settle down to something (and in my case if you fall ill with a respiratory virus that takes you out of action for days & leaves you stewing about work undone; the last time this happened, actually--not the last time I got sick but the last time I got sick in a way I could only understand in relation to a work impasse--it was on a truly massive scale and I horrifyingly got pinkeye and severe bronchitis as well as an evil cold and sanity-threatening cough, this was January 2004 but I still have fond memories of the clarity of the revelation the illness earned me: I had to have a few months of full-time fiction writing. Common sense also told me to keep the $100+ eyedrop antibiotics and asthma inhaler so that the next time I wouldn't even have to go to the doctor; the pinkeye was so bad I seriously felt like a complete pariah, it would have been better not to have to set foot out of doors), it usually means you haven't yet thought through exactly what you need to do in what order of priority. I ritually relearn this lesson every six months or so; it's never enjoyable (I pride myself on always being able to take a deep breath & pick up the piece of work at the top of the pile and plunge in without getting daunted by the size of the heap, so it is humiliating as well as painful-in-the-regular-way-of-not-doing-work), but it strikes me with new force each time.

Attractive light reading

Just finished the altogether satisfactory Dating is Murder (it jumped at me out of the PS section at the Harvard library the other day when I was looking for something else) by Harley Jane Kozak of Lipstick Chronicles fame. It's excellent, frothy & funny crime fiction but with a really likeable first-person narrator (she has an expert-knowledge-about-frogs thing going on, appealingly odd for a warmhearted six-foot-tall blond & buxom contestant on a low-budget reality-TV show called Biological Clock) and some genuinely creepy parts too.

It is ludicrous

but true that the one thing I'm really upset to be missing in NY is the Moscow Cats Theater. It's partly the name that I find so enchanting, I think I am going to borrow it for the sequel to Dynamite No. 1. Oh, I've just checked; it actually looks like it's running till the end of October, maybe there is a chance I can go when I'm in town later this month...

I usually wait

to comment on books I'm officially reviewing until the review actually runs, but in this case I'm too enthusiastic to wait. The Trouble with Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine is exactly my kind of book--lots of skeletons and weird medical-history facts, aside from its other charms. The author is Paul Collins, editor of the McSweeney's Collins Library imprint. I'll post a link to my review once it's up, but for now let's just say "highly recommended."

It is hard to believe

but August Wilson is dead at age 60.

I have only an attenuated version

of the usual light reading supply in this Cambridge apartment, I hit the shelf earlier this evening (I'm down with a wretched cold) for the least demanding thing I could find and was rightly punished for laziness with a novel so bad it wasn't even enjoyable to read (and though I've linked to it, I'm not naming it, some weird scrupulousness makes me chronicle all my non-work-related reading here but I am not such a sadist that I need to ruin in a minor way that author's day the next time she googles her own name; and you know, the Amazon reviews are absolutely glowing, though I did find one review online that said pretty much what I thought).

(The badness of this book reminds me how delighted I was to see earlier this week that Anansi Boys has made the #1 position on the NYT bestseller list. That list is often a torment to someone like me who cares about all kinds of novels, especially really entertaining ones that everyone should read: it so often has what I would call non-books on it, not to name names but a certain book whose name my late and dearly lamented grandmother misremembered as "The Leonardo Plot" springs to mind. Here's the hardcover list, which actually includes a number of quite decent books and several really exceptional books as well as a bunch of pretty trashy ones: I'm glad to see Jennifer Weiner's up at #2, I'm definitely looking forward to reading her new one although personal canons of taste mean that I wish they would stop putting women's legs on the covers.)

Chastened, I approached the shelf again and found something much more to my taste, Pardonable Lies by Jacqueline Winspear (don't click on that link, though, it gives you a truly horrifying sample of the audio-book). There are some anachronisms and minor diction glitches--it's set in England c. 1930--but it was a very enjoyable read; haven't read the first two in the series, will certainly seek them out. (I've read those Charles Todd ones, which I think are very good; this is in a similar vein. Though it's true that if you wanted a really major-literary-and-highly-readable thing along these lines, you might be better off with Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong and--my favorite of his books--Charlotte Gray. I can't wait to read his new one, Human Traces, but the Amazon page suggests it hasn't been released yet--perhaps it's only having UK release for now?)

Tom Stoppard

on his recent visit to see underground theater in Belarus, at the Guardian:

A young man put in: 'I had 10 friends at school. Now only three are alive. The rest died from overdoses. Should I not write about it?' Later he said: 'I am listening to you, and I feel there is a vast gulf between us. My mother is 51. My father is 52. They have never been abroad and probably never will. They live on 100 dollars a month. Everything they earn goes towards food. They don't go to the theatre or cinema. They have worked all their lives only to feed themselves and us children. I wanted to describe their life. When my mother read my play she told me she didn't like it, because she has enough darkness in her life. But I wanted to show her how bad her life was.'

My take on this doesn't play well in Belarus: 'Theatre is firstly a recreation, it doesn't score points for subject matter, for intention. If you write about your mother, you better be good. Isn't that the point?'

Not really.