It was pressed upon me

yesterday at a barbecue by my dear old friend T. and his friend C.--they swore it was the best thing ever--and they were right. Just finished the attractively named Don't point that thing at me, published in a value-for-money volume called The Mortdecai Trilogy (the author's Kyril Bonfiglioli, and you can also get the novel in a volume on its own, if you prefer). Excellent! Excellent! Excellent! The guys who recommended it to me are big Wodehouse fans, and there's certainly a bit of that here, but it's much darker and campier and funnier--Wodehouse infused with Derek Raymond, my particularly most favorite English noir writer. If you want more of the flavor before making a commitment to spend money, read this very charming New Yorker essay about Bonfiglioli by Leo Carey (it's got lots of excerpts from the novels). Here's one of my picks for most representative and likeable passage:

'Jock,' I said crisply, 'we are going to defenestrate Mr Martland.'
Jock's eyes lit up.
'I'll get a razor blade, Mr Charlie.'
'No no, Jock, wrong word. I mean we're going to push him out of a window. Your bedroom window, I think. Yes, and we'll undress him first and say that he was making advances to you and jumped out of the window in a frenzy of thwarted love.'
'I say, Charlie, really, what a filthy rotten idea; I mean, think of my wife.'
'I never think of policeman's wives, their beauty maddens me like wine. Anyway, the sodomy bit will make your Minister slap a D-Notice on the whole thing, which is good for both of us.'
Jock was already leading him from the room by means of the 'Quiet Come-Along' which painfully involves the victim's little finger. Jock had learned that one from a mental nurse. Capable lads, those.
Jock's bedroom, as ever, was bursting with what passes for fresh air in W.I, the stuff was streaming in from the wide-open window. (Why do people build houses to keep the climate out, then cut holes in the walls to let it in again? I shall never understand.)
'Show Mr Martland the spiky railings in the area, Jock,' I said nastily. (You've no idea how nasty my voice can be when I try. I was an adjutant once, in your actual Guards.) Jock held him out so that he could see the railings then started to undress him. He just stood there, unresisting, a shaky smile trembling at one corner of his mouth, until Jock began to unbuckle his belt. Then he started to talk, rapidly.

The Y chromosome

I am fond of science fiction as a category, but fussy about what I like (my crime fiction tastes are much more promiscuous), so it was with great delight that I read a truly EXCELLENT s-f novel, Life by Gwyneth Jones. I read Bold As Love a few years ago (can't remember how I heard about it--some random mention of a rewriting of the King Arthur myth caught my attention?), really loved it but found it impossible to get hold of the sequel. However all seem to be more easily available now than last time I checked, when I had to get the English edition through BorrowDirect at the library. Must get that sequel.... Anyway, Life is amazing! My perfect science-fiction novel, a really excellent read, with all the kind of biology stuff I most enjoy and an attractive main character and good research-scientist story and interesting feminism/gender thing going down. It's got interests distinctly overlapping with the much higher-profile Darwin's Radio, by Greg Bear; but where that's a high-concept science-fiction thriller (I liked it a lot, don't get me wrong, but it's not in the end my kind of a book), this one's much more subtle in the writing and really imaginative and powerful in its conception as well. Read it if you have any taste for science fiction whatsover! (Also if you like novels and science but don't care for science fiction.)

I've been thinking about this whole "not for everyone" book controversy, spurred initially by a piece by Anne Burke that you can read here, and summed up in her following statement:

One of the reviewers’ favorite lines about Dalkey Archive titles is that—even when the reviewer is generally praising the book—they aren’t “for everyone.” A number of years ago, this line seemed to be a requirement for any reviewer at the New York Times Book Review or NPR. Its latest appearance is in a review by—of all places—the Complete Review (perhaps the most interesting review source on the net), which recently reviewed Patrik Ourednik’s Europeana. Since these reviewers seem to know that a book “isn’t for everyone,” then should we assume that they have a list of books that are for everyone? Surely they must. Let us also assume that they would all agree that such authors as Homer, Shakespeare, Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner are “not for everyone.” So, since they appear to use “for everyone” as a standard to which writers should aspire, what books could possibly achieve this universal acclaim that Europeana fails to achieve? The only one that comes to mind is The Little Engine That Could. I’ve never heard any complaint whatsoever about this book.

All reviewers, in the future, should be required to list at least five books that they see as “for everyone,” a practice that might allow us to judge their tastes and intelligence rather than simply using the phrase to dismiss a book that they seem unable to dismiss in any other way, or at least any way that can stand a close inspection[.]

(And here's the response at the Complete Review, which includes links to other blog discussions if you scroll down to the bottom of the post.)

I want to stand up for the usefulness of the phrase "not for everyone." I don't think I'd use it in a print review, I see the objection that it's lazy, but in a blog entry about a book, what's wrong with it? Seriously, I love Gwyneth Jones, but her books are not for everyone. I read a lot of books that I like very much, but there's a lot of variety in the ways that I would then recommend them to others: there are books that have a remarkably widespread appeal, and others--no less good--with a narrower one. I'm not talking here mainly about genre issues, though I will note in passing that people who say they don't read science fiction or don't read crime fiction are missing out on some of the best novels around. And judgments like this are of course also very personal--I bet that nobody would agree with every single judgment I make below, and it's wholly possible that someone might make exactly the opposite set of judgments. But I would say that everybody should read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go but that while Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty is a work of complete genius & one of the best novels of 2004 & one of my FAVORITE novels of 2004 it is nonetheless "not for everyone." A novel that is demanding or deliberately difficult in its prose style might not be for everybody. A novel that is full of explicit violent or sexual content might not be for everybody. A novel that just has a very distinctive sensibility of one kind or another might not be for everybody. Whereas there are novels that in some other sense really are suitable for the widest possible audience, whatever that audience might think about its genre preferences etc.--Kate Atkinson's Case Histories is a book like this, and so is American Gods by Neil Gaiman, and so are older novels--here's where I'm getting onto shakier ground, I'd guess--by Dickens or Austen or my very beloved James Baldwin. Novels written for the widest possible human constituency, as opposed to novels about which it can legitimately be said that they are "not for everyone." (BTW I do think Homer and Shakespeare are for everyone, but wouldn't make the same allowance about Joyce, Proust or Faulkner.)

Must get off the soapbox now and go and get some work done....

Very 'Flowers in the Attic'

Just finished reading Kelly Braffet's Josie and Jack. There's no doubt this is an excellent first novel, but in the end, I didn't like it as much as I expected to. Partly it's a bit too 'literary' for my taste (though there are some really striking passages: "Suddenly I was intensely unhappy: forceful, tidal-wave unhappiness, the kind that washes over you and fills your ears and your eyes and your lungs. Sometimes when I feel that way it helps to get drunk, but it's like shoring up a high-rise with playing cards. Sooner or later something happens--a word or a song or a turn of phrase or, more often, an unwelcome memory--and everything comes crashing down"). Partly it suffered from comparison to two rather similar books I'd just read--literally I started them all the same week, this was the one I put aside--I liked The Bitch Posse most, it's brilliantly well-written and (I am sorry to say) most fits my memory of what being a teenage girl feels like. Then I read gods in Alabama, which isn't nearly so remarkable but is very delightful in its own way, with an extremely attractive main character & a similarly persuasive account of teenager-ness. So Josie and Jack is a very good novel, don't get me wrong, but I enjoyed it less than either of the others. Trying to put my finger on what felt wrong, I decided that this one romanticizes adolescence in a way the others refuse to. There's a Goth-y, Flowers-in-the-Attic, doomed-tubercular-Shelley-type sensibility here that I didn't share even when I was a teenager and have relatively little sympathy for now. I wished Josie would just get a temp job and move on! Seriously....

Spent the last couple days reading a really EXCELLENT novel that I will blog about elsewhere, so won't write more about now. It's Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. In three words: Believe The Hype!

Another excellent concert

this time at the Tenri Cultural Institute. The Line C3 percussion group playing an assortment of (all very interesting and satisfactory) pieces, including Nico's Ta & Clap (which you can listen to if you follow the link; highly recommended, it's well worth the minor trouble). I like percussion--and surely of all instrumentalists, percussionists (barring those very ponderous tympanists you get in regional symphony orchestras) are the most intelligent and funny?

An interesting piece

(the confessions of a compulsive reader, which of course caught my attention) by Lauren Baratz-Logsted over at MoorishGirl. It includes this very sensible observation: "When I first started reviewing books, I read every word, just as I had compulsively read every word of every book I'd read up to that point in my life. But somewhere into my 292-book reviewing career with [Publishers Weekly], I discovered something: if I could tell by page five that a book was not going to be to my taste, that I would in fact hate it, the resulting review was about as nasty as it could get. After all, I'd suffered. Why, then, would there be any grace left in me? So I learned, in those cases, to skim judiciously. And I discovered that I could still review a book both descriptively and analytically, and yet the resulting review was fairer, because I was no longer bitter. There was no longer a need for me to be cruel and I cannot help but think the world a better place with a little less cruelty."

Saw a great concert last night

at 21st Century Schizoid Music--Downstairs at the Cornelia Street Cafe, featuring ACME (" the American Contemporary Music Ensemble is dedicated to the outstanding performance of contemporary masterworks for chamber ensemble, principally written by American composers. The dynamic ensemble's concerts are a unique blend of intelligent performance and vibrant energy"). I was there in particular for an amazing piece for viola and tape, Keep In Touch, by Nico Muhly; it was played spectacularly well by Nadia Sirota, who's definitely another one to watch. (And Nico's Ta & Clap will have its American premiere on Friday evening at the Tenri Institute.) But the rest of the program was great too: there was an Ives string quartet I could have done without, but also a really excellent and intellectually stringent piece by Charles Wuorinen, Grand Union for cello and percussion (also played very well by Clarice Jensen), and a lovely string quartet by Kevin Volans that I'd never heard before. Very enjoyable.

I had a delightfully reclusive weekend

finishing my novel revisions, virtually no human contact whatsoever, so of course there was time for some light reading. Four enjoyable novels, though nothing in the end completely earth-shattering (they're all good, really, but suffered in comparison to a few extraordinary ones I've read recently--or perhaps I was just in a jaundiced frame of mind, since I see a pattern emerges below): gods in Alabama, by Joshilyn Jackson (a prime example of why I love lit blogs--I'd never have picked this up if I hadn't seen the author-to-author interview at Beatrice--I really liked it, it's smart and funny and everything chick-lit should be but isn't, but it isn't as good as the truly exceptional The Bitch Posse, with which it shares a number of features); Shannon Hale's Enna Burning (good, but not as good as The Goose Girl, to which it's a sequel); Midnighters 1: The Secret Hour by Scott Westerfeld (I loved some things about this--the thirteen-letter words!!!--but in the end it didn't quite work for me, mostly because the main characters are a little flat--it feels too much like series fiction, I love young-adult trilogies but don't love young-adult series and this somehow was more like the latter than the former; but I am looking forward to reading his other stuff, this had lots good in it); and The Sunday Philosophy Club by the dreaded Alexander McCall Smith. I've held out against this guy for a long time--I simply will not read books with such coy and cutesy titles (though I see that I have a "No. 1" in my novel title as well, not sure if this counts as some kind of a Freudian slip or just a failure of self-knowledge?). I picked this up randomly at the library. I enjoyed it while I was reading it (the main character thinks about writing an article "In Praise of Hypocrisy" that actually sounds exactly like my academic book, which opens with the sentence "Very few people are willing to speak up for hypocrisy"), but afterwards I felt the reading experience had been quite thin. I am not a reader for whom the words "charming" and "whimsical" are compliments, and this book is certainly charming and whimsical. However perhaps I'm not being fair--he's certainly an unobtrusive and skilled stylist, and I suppose I will be interested to see how far he develops Isabel's character flaws in the next one(s). Perhaps I'm not doing McCall Smith justice, but I felt that he was too kind to his character--he could have taken a lesson from Austen's Emma and handled her a little more ruthlessly....

I'm laughing at myself

for as usual having been ridiculously overoptimistic about how long this novel (that's Dynamite No. 1) would take me to write. I started this blog in May 2004--I was about 90% finished with the first draft & cheerfully predicted that I'd use the blog to describe my progress towards completion and publication. Well, it's 12 months later--I finished the draft in June 2004, I did a minor rewrite in August 2004 and major rewrites in October-November 2004, January-February 2005 and March-May 2005. I never say anything about the novel because I don't want to jinx it! (Not until I have a book contract will there be any details here. I will say, though, that I've just sent the latest--I hope sort-of-temporarily-final--version to the genius agent, and will wait to hear what she thinks.) If you're interested, there's a description of the whole project if you scroll to the bottom of this interview; and I thought I'd paste in a few paragraphs as well. This scene comes in chapter five:

At half-past seven, Sophie changed into a faded pink cotton frock and a soft gray cardigan she had reclaimed from the rubbish after Peggy pronounced a verdict of moth. She found the sitting-room downstairs full of ladies of all shapes and sizes. None of them noticed Sophie come in, and she was able to stand by the door and review the room in peace.

Her eyes kept coming back to a large woman in black who sat by herself in the corner, holding her heavy body upright like someone not sure of her welcome. The oppressiveness of her presence, together with the dense jet beading of her bodice, persuaded Sophie that this must be the medium.

As the mantel clock struck eight and Great-aunt Tabitha began to round up the guests and herd them into the dining room, Sophie was surprised to find the woman’s eyes meet her own. When Sophie smiled and gave an awkward half-nod—she didn’t want to but she couldn’t help herself—the medium simply stared at her, not turning away until Sophie’s great-aunt arrived at her side to escort her in to supper in the next room.

Supper was the usual ordeal, food-wise, though lots of the women swallowed their spoonfuls of haddock soup (its gelatinous consistency beyond rational explanation) in a calm way that betrayed a familiarity with institutional cooking.

For pudding, there was a choice of gooseberry fool or stewed fruit. Sophie asked for the apricots, which were bland and inoffensive. She decided not to take a sponge finger from the biscuit barrel when it came round. Sophie’s great-aunt insisted on Peggy making them at home rather than buying the packets of ready-made ones at the shop, which she said were low-class. When they weren’t soggy, which they quite often were, they had a texture like corrugated cardboard. As Sophie watched, the lady across from her picked one up and dipped it into her pudding before taking a small bite, then put it hastily back on the side plate, a funny expression on her face. Had she broken a tooth?

As the maids came in to clear the table, Sophie’s great-aunt stood and announced the order of affairs for the rest of the evening. Great-aunt Tabitha would examine the medium in private, in the presence of two fully paid-up members of the Caledonian Guild of Spiritualist Inspectors. Meanwhile Miss Gillespie would organize the others into a sitters’ circle in the conservatory at the back of the house.

Sophie had already got up from her chair and folded her napkin when her great-aunt appeared beside her, looking worried.

“Sophie, this is quite irregular, but Mrs. Tansy has asked for you to join us upstairs for the examination.”

Sophie could not help looking over at the medium, whose impassive face and folded arms did not conceal the fact that her eyes rested directly on Sophie. Sophie couldn’t imagine why the woman wanted her there, but there was no good reason to say no.

She followed the other women up the stairs, Great-aunt Tabitha leading the procession like a brisk but demented mother duck. They made their way to a little-used bedroom on the top floor, directly opposite Sophie’s. It was wretchedly cold and damp and the fireplace looked as if it hadn’t been used for years.

Though she had read about this kind of thing, Sophie had a bad feeling it would be quite different in person. What happened next was absolutely awful. Under Great-aunt Tabitha’s penetrating eye, the two inspectors stripped the medium completely naked. One woman searched her—Sophie blushed and looked away when the medium was asked to bend over so her body cavities could be checked for the concealed lengths of muslin used to fake ectoplasm—while the second inspector carefully examined each item of clothing.

Sophie had never seen a grown-up person without any clothes on. She couldn’t take her eyes away from the vast expanse of flesh: the enormous breasts, yellow and goose-pimpled in the cold, the folds of fat over the woman’s hips and abdomen, the imbalance between her bulky thighs and skinny calves. Worst were the raw red marks where the woman’s steel-boned corset had printed her body. In places the chafing had actually broken the skin.

Sophie dared not look at the woman’s face until the inspectors had given her back her undergarments and a cloak to cover herself. What she saw there puzzled her. Instead of the humiliation or anger you might have expected, the medium wore an expression of calm satisfaction. As Sophie’s eyes met hers, the woman’s face broke into a disturbing smile like a person gloating over a private victory.

When they reached the conservatory, the medium’s wrists were tied with tape, the knots sealed with wax and the ends of the tape tied to the chairs on either side of her. Eight chairs had been arranged in a circle around a black-and-gold lacquered table of vaguely Japanese provenance.

They took their seats, Sophie choosing one as far from the medium as possible. The maid dimmed the lamps and stood waiting by the door in case they needed anything else.

“Join hands,” Great-aunt Tabitha intoned, “to promote the energy-flow between the sitters. Spirits of the Great Beyond, we are gathered this evening in the company of your servant Mrs. Patricia Tansy in the hope that we will be honored by some sign of your presence. We will hear anything you wish to impart about life on the Other Side. We await your instructions.”

Most of the women had closed their eyes, but Sophie opened hers a crack, just enough to sneak a look round the table. The sitters’ hands were clasped together, each pair of hands resting on the table in front of them. The medium was absolutely motionless, her glassy eyes staring off into the middle distance.

When the voice came, Sophie jumped and almost lost her grip on the hands on either side of her.

“Who calls me here?”

It was a man’s voice, and it seemed to emanate from a point in mid-air several feet above the medium’s head. The accent was lightly German or Scandinavian, Sophie couldn’t tell which, altogether unlike the medium’s lowland brogue.

“I do,” said Great-aunt Tabitha, her voice not faltering at all.

“I cannot tell of life on the other side,” said the voice, “for I speak to you from limbo. Though my body has long since fallen to dust, my soul is not yet able to leave its shell. I answer your call for another reason. I am here to speak to the youngest one amongst you, whose help I require to release me from my mortal coil.”

The table rocked slightly beneath their hands. Several women gasped.

To Sophie’s dismay, she felt a slight breeze and the sensation of a hand touching her face, a feeling so real that she could hardly believe the message of her eyes that nothing was there.

“Sophie, dear child,” said the voice. Its disembodied use of the endearment was frankly disconcerting. “Do not be afraid. I come to warn you of great danger and to tell you to be careful whom you trust in weeks to come. A journey lies ahead of you, and I count on seeing you myself before too long. I have arranged for help along the way. Your future depends upon your past, but the way from the present to the future is cloudy. Meanwhile you must follow the one your heart inclines to, and keep your own counsel.”

The hand brushed through her hair and then left in a whoosh like air rushing to fill the space at the top of a jam-jar when you first pop open the lid. Sophie wanted to scoff but her pulse was racing so fast she thought she might faint.

Most of the women had opened their eyes now, though the dim light made it difficult to see much. The medium groaned. Then her face convulsed into a rictus so horrible it reminded Sophie of a gruesome illustration in a book she’d once seen, a police photograph of a dead woman lying on the floor of a grand Paris apartment with her throat cut. The shadow cast by the fastening of the medium’s cloak exactly mimicked the gaping hole of that wound.

To be continued....

On 'The Mysteries of Pittsburgh'

An interesting essay by Michael Chabon at The New York Review of Books, about writing his first novel. My attention was especially caught by these paragraphs about genre fiction versus the other kind:

The truth was that I had come to a rough patch in my understanding of what I wanted my writing to be. I was in a state of confusion. Over the past four years I had been struggling to find a way to accommodate my taste for the genre fiction I had been reading with the greatest pleasure for the better part of my life--fantasy, horror, crime, and science fiction--to the way that I had come to feel about the English language, which was that it and I seemed to have something going. Something (on my side at least) much closer to deep, passionate, physical, and intellectual love than anything else I had ever experienced with a human up to that point. But when it came to the use of language, somehow, my verbal ambition and my ability felt hard to frame or fulfill within the context of traditional genre fiction. I had found some writers, such as J.G. Ballard, Italo Calvino, J.L. Borges, and Donald Barthelme, who wrote at the critical point of language, where vapor turns to starry plasma, and yet who worked, at least sometimes, in the terms and tropes of genre fiction. They all paid a price, however. The finer and more masterly their play with language, the less connected to the conventions of traditional, bourgeois narrative form--unified point of view, coherent causal sequence of events, linear structure, naturalistic presentation--their fiction seemed to become. Duly I had written my share of pseudo-Ballard, quasi-Calvino, and neo-Borges. I had fun doing it. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't stop preferring traditional, bourgeois narrative form.

I wanted to tell stories, the kind with set pieces and long descriptive passages, and 'round' characters, and beginnings and middles and ends. And I wanted to instill--or rather I didn't want to lose--that quality, inherent in the best science fiction, which was sometimes called "the sense of wonder." If my subject matter couldn't do it—if I wasn't writing about people who sailed through neutron stars or harnessed suns together—then it was going to fall to my sentences themselves to open up the heads of my readers and decant into them enough crackling plasma to light up the eye sockets for a week.

But I didn't want to write science fiction, or a version of science fiction, some kind of pierced-and-tattooed, doctorate-holding, ironical stepchild of science fiction. I wanted to write something with reach. Welty and Faulkner started and ended in small towns in Mississippi but somehow managed to plant flags at the end of time and in the minds of readers around the world. A good science fiction novel appeared to have an infinite reach—it could take you to the place where the universe bent back on itself—but somehow, in the end, it ended up being the shared passion of just you and that guy at the Record Graveyard on Forbes Avenue who was really into Hawkwind.

I wasn't considering any actual, numerical readership here—I wasn't so bold. Rather I was thinking about the set of axioms that speculative fiction assumed, and how it was a set that seemed to narrow and refine and program its audience, like a protein that coded for a certain suite of traits. Most science fiction seemed to be written for people who already liked science fiction; I wanted to write stories for anyone, anywhere, living at any time in the history of the world. (Twenty-one, I was twenty-one!)

Sad to learn

from the Literary Saloon at the complete review that the Israeli novelist Batya Gur has died. Her books are really wonderful, sort of the ideal detective fiction (not at all like Henning Mankell or Ian Rankin in their texture, but similarly a very well-executed version of a very good kind of thing). I think my favorite is Murder on a Kibbutz: A Communal Case, but I've also got a soft spot for A Literary Murder and Murder Duet--oh, they're all great, anyway, and I think that The Saturday Morning Murder is the first in the series. Highly recommended--they are often compared to P.D. James, but they are much better than any but the couple best classic James novels, and infinitely better than any of her recent ones.

The highland mangabey

A new species of monkey has been discovered in Africa: "The newly discovered monkey, a tree-dwelling creature, is about three feet long, with long brownish fur. It has a crest of hair on its head and abundant whiskers. Unlike other Lophocebus mangabeys, which communicate with a 'whoop gobble,' the new species has an unusual 'honk bark,' the researchers said." If you click on the link at the NYT, you can hear a recording....

I have this

doubtless completely mistaken idea that everyone reads the New Yorker as faithfully as I do--it arrives on Monday evenings and unless I'm having a really busy week (or have an unusually good supply of light reading) I usually read the whole issue all at once on Monday night, barring the fiction, which I almost always skip--it is staggering how much less interesting it usually is than everything else in the issue. So I don't usually link to stuff there. But this week has an especially funny piece by Anthony Lane about Revenge of the Sith:

The general opinion of 'Revenge of the Sith' seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, 'The Phantom Menace' and 'Attack of the Clones.' True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion. So much here is guaranteed to cause either offense or pain, starting with the nineteen-twenties leather football helmet that Natalie Portman suddenly dons for no reason, and rising to the continual horror of Ewan McGregor's accent. 'Another happy landing'--or, to be precise, 'anothah heppy lending'--he remarks, as Anakin parks the front half of a burning starcruiser on a convenient airstrip. The young Obi-Wan Kenobi is not, I hasten to add, the most nauseating figure onscreen; nor is R2-D2 or even C-3PO, although I still fail to understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years of my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay, gold-plated Jeeves.

No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in 'Gremlins' when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which the Yoda legend has hung. At one point in the new film, he assumes the role of cosmic shrink--squatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room, where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. 'Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose,' he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you’d leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Also, while we’re here, what’s with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a fucking give.

I have sometimes found Lane a rather glib reviewer, but the turning point for me was his absolutely superb essay about P. G. Wodehouse from a year or two ago. It was one of my favorite things, a really excellent piece of writing. And now I read him with a more sympathetic eye...

Three separate book-buying sprees

in the last week or so (one online, two bricks-and-mortar), a sign of end-of-semester stress as usually I am a library-user and rarely buy books in hardcover. But it means some good-quality light reading coming up. Just finished the one I was DYING to read (this book is going to be a big thing, I think): Martha O'Connor's The Bitch Posse. This is an amazing novel! I really, really loved it--seriously, it's like what you'd get if you asked Joyce Carol Oates to write the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Books... (I love JCO in general, and I'd say that Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang is one of her very, very best.) Anyway, The Bitch Posse fully lived up to my high expectations. Aside from everything else, I'm the exact right age for it (I'm about to go and put on Doolittle, I love every song on this album but "Hey" is my particular favorite, seriously takes me back to 1990....). Another thing I really liked was the rather delicately handled series of literary allusions--usually I sort of HATE literary allusions in page-turner-type fiction, they are often horribly pretentious--but this novel is really steeped in exactly the things I like, and glimpses of other literary texts come through in a great way that you wouldn't notice or bother with if you didn't like things like this, but that are really appealing if you do: Macbeth of course, and The Eumenides, but also the starling that's from Sentimental Journey by way of Mansfield Park and Goblin Market (I had a children's book version of this, illustrated by Ellen Raskin, that I loved when I was little) and my favorite "Who killed Cock Robin?"

There's an excellent "Backstory" by O'Connor up at M. J. Rose's blog about publishing; read it if you are having a disheartening time trying to find an agent and/or publish your first novel.

Why do playwrights

misguidedly think that plays are a good medium for imparting biography? Just got back from a pretty mediocre play about Charles Lindbergh at the Lucille Lortel; however dinner at Andavi on Christopher Street was excellent, not by any means cheap but really delicious and a very attractive space. Play: not recommended; restaurant: highly recommended.

Crippled Detectives

in the VLS, a great piece by Ed Park about a really demented and brilliant and lovely novel written by a little girl called Lee Tandy Schwartzman in the mid-70s and published in the magazine Stone Soup: "If ever a book deserved to be published in a facsimile autograph edition, Crippled Detectives is it. Reading Schwartzman's manuscript is like walking into a sheet of sheer concrete poetry. Punctuation has gone AWOL, and the lettering generally leaves as much breathing room as a sequence of DNA. 'This has got to be great,' William Rubel, Stone Soup's other founding editor, recalled thinking, upon seeing the MS. 'You can't even read it!'"

I wonder if there is any way to get hold of a copy?

Random semi-related observation: the out-of-print children's book that I MUST GET SOMEONE TO REPRINT (actually, I'm thinking about trying to track down the author, find out what's up with the rights and persuade Soft Skull to do it) is The Great Escape: Or the Sewer Story by Peter Lippman. (This book is a work of genius. It's about cute little alligators that people buy as pets, then get rid of when they grow unattractively large; the alligators congregate in the NYC sewers and hatch a plan to return to their natural habitat in the Florida swamps. However, this summary does not do justice to one of the funniest and most attractively illustrated books of my childhood.) Our childhood copy seems to have vanished, last seen in an apartment of my brothers' circa 1993.