I waited a long time to get to this book. Gosh it’s good.
At the bottom of the steps, he passes through the lost-articles room, lined with pegboard, furnished with shelves and cubbyholes that hold the thousand objects abandoned or forgotten in the hotel. Unmated shoes, fur hats, a trumpet, a windup zeppelin. A collection of wax gramophone cylinders featuring the entire recorded output of the Orchestra Orfeon of Istanbul. A logger’s ax, two bicycles, a partial bridge in a hotel glass. Wigs, canes, a glass eye, display hands left behind by a mannequin salesman. Prayer books, prayer shawls in their velvet zipper pouches, an outlandish doll with the body of a fat baby and the head of an elephant. There is a wooden soft-drink crate filled with keys, another with the entire range and breadth of hairstyling tools, from irons to eyelash crimpers. Framed photographs of families in better days. A cryptic twist of rubber that might be a sex toy, or a contraceptive device, or the patented secret of a foundation garment. Some yid even left behind a taxidermy marten, sleek and leering, its glass eye a hard bead of ink.
Other than the sheer beauty of the words (zeppelin, marten), there is an awful lot of goodness in this list. it says so much about the people that have passed through the hotel: a logger did, a salesman. The people came and left the relics of their falling-apart bodies — canes, a glass eye — as well as all those hairbrushes, tools to improve the appearance. There are tools for the spirit, too, the prayer items, most obviously Jewish, one Hindu. There are odds and ends, things that should have been missed (odd shoes), things that seem antique — cylinders for a gramophone, a toy zeppelin instead of an airplane or rocket.
And all these things evoke not just the lost and left behind items of the people in this hotel in this fictional Jewish settlement in Alaska, but the items so systematically taken from Jews by the Nazis, those storehouses of personal items (like those now in the museum at Auschwitz). Although it’s a different world, a world where perhaps some of those people might not have been victims of Nazi atrocities, the ghost of our world is there, echoing in the vintage-ness of the items, in the unusual quantities, in the way they’ve been saved and stored. The list ends with an offbeat taxidermied critter, cute yet also undeniably dead.
And that’s only pages 10-11. I can’t wait to get to the rest of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.
I started reading a book last night, a book I thought would be fun. It didn’t grab me, but I was sleepy. So I crashed and after getting up, I read some more.
Then I made breakfast. I ironed a skirt to wear to a barbecue. I wrote a post for tomorrow’s Jacket Copy. All the while, I thought about the book. Still wasn’t grabbing me. I have to get to page 50, I thought. I flipped it open. I was past page 50.
Keep going, I thought. Look how far you are!
But I started noticing things. Like the listing: “There was a bakery, a variety of cheeses, wines, homemade jams, relishes, and salad dressings, and a mishmash of housewares, personal hygiene products, and curios. In one corner, they had jeans, hip waders, fishing lures, and, honest to God, cowboy boots.” At first I wasn’t sure why the listing was bugging me, then I realized: it’s the emptiness. This list is empty of a character’s perception or narrator’s message, empty except for the incredulity at the cowboy boots. What kind of cheeses? What does a variety of cheeses mean? Is this place upscale or touristy or homey or a hard-to-decipher combination? It is none of these things. It is a list.
And it wasn’t just lists of things. This is how a character cleans: he “scrubbed down the entire room, dusting, polishing, mopping, vaccuuming the mattress and the drapes.” The listing started to strike me as lazy. No choices, just words piled on, like an undergraduate trying to reach a minimum page count. Another character is attracted to “this pretty, competent redhead, with her clear blue eyes and sharply carved face. There was something irrefutable between them, a flirtation, an attraction.” God, as I type them the words bug me much more than they did the first time. I crave an editor. Can we just pick one, please? How about an irrefutable attraction? A flirtation? Something between them? Do we need all those things, really?
The other issue was the wackiness/improbability quotient: things got unlikely for no reason, except to ratchet up the kooky factor. Small town. So it’s OK if you want a character’s jealous ex-girlfriend to be a highly-competent dot-com refugee ex-lawyer and the mayor, too. It’s not OK if she’s the one hammering nails into his tires, because then she is a crazy person, not highly competent. It’s OK if you have an aspiring Hollywood producer bring an out-of-control has-been Hong Kong action flick actress to his brother’s smalltown farm because they’ve been kicked out of their hotel; it’s not OK if the brother walks in unaware and said actress is freshly naked and knocks him out with a kick to the jaw. Because that requires a host of illogical things to happen — the producer-type breaking in instead of waiting, the actress riding in a car for two hours without learning where they were going, or noticing they were in a private home, choosing to walk down a strange hall naked and dripping out of the shower instead of finding a towel, having impeccable reflexes even though she’s a has-been, etc…. It’s OK if you have a guy leave a highly successful NY art career, even a People’s 50 Most Beautiful People kind of successful art career, for a smalltown California Brussels sprouts farm, and it’s OK that he’s the last holdout against the evil corporate developers who want his land for a golf course, it’s even OK, despite the fact that we’re to believe he’s the misanthropist of the century, that he makes friends with a local surfer, of all the local surfers the one who lost a foot in a freak shark attack, I’m still OK, even here, but it’s not OK that the farmer has teamed up with said surfer to grow some pot on his property, the same property he so desperately is trying to save from the developers, and accidentally grows too much and he can’t believe the surfer has told his friends about it… because none of that fits. Stoner surfers share. People in fear of losing their land don’t grow pot on it, especially when their ex-girlfriend the mayor has a vengeful ex-husband who’s a cop. And when an artist walks away from the art world, (a la Lee Bontecue, that doesn’t mean they stop making art, stop thinking about art, stop needing to do the art that got them bigtimefame in the first place.
It was at page 112 that I cried mercy. It was contrived, not fun. I felt like I was reading an elaborate storyboard, not a novel. If someday it gets made into a wacky movie — well, I don’t think I’ll make it to minute 112.
One of the things I love about Los Angeles is the way we get all the good book stuff. Take Sunday: Nam Le read at Skylight Books in Los Feliz from his debut collection, The Boat. He read part of the first story, which has a character that appears to be himself; this has confused some people, who think this makes the story nonfiction. They should pay attention to the way Le is deliberately playing with literary conventions and expectations. At one point in the story, he introduces a gun, which, shortly later, is fired; if this isn’t a literalization of Chekhov’s dramatic principle (”If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there”), I’ll eat the ARC of your choice. All I know of The Boat is what I heard in that story, and I can tell that Le is a writer who is aware of expectations and works to disrupt them — or at least to churn them up a little.
Le went to the Iowa Writers Workshop and a huge posse of his classmates and friends showed up at the reading. I had no idea so many Iowa MFAs had come to Los Angeles. There are great writers everywhere here, camouflaged as all sorts of normal people.
Not that going to Iowa makes one necessarily a great writer. But it is a motherfucker of a program.
Mark’s house, that is. A new John Banville Q&A is live and sparkling at The Elegant Variation, including:
The Elegant Variation: What is it about the German thinkers that has always seemed to resonate with you so profoundly? And how do you think they reach us today?
John Banville: German literature, including philosophy, has been an abiding interest with me since I was a teenager. I find it exciting and challenging and, I suppose, a fascination since, having been born in 1945, I grew up in the long, ashen shadow of the concentration camps. How could such a culture end in such catastrophe? I’m still reading, still trying to find out.
Barbara Bauer, a literary agent, has sued 19 defendants in New Jersey over unflattering remarks made about her on the internet. She is upset about being included in a list of the 20 Worst Literary Agents that started here and got picked up multiple places. She’s suing Wikipedia. She’s suing AbsoluteWrite. She’s suing YouTube.
I know nothing about Ms. Bauer’s skills as a literary agent. But as a person existing in today’s multimedia world, I’d say she’s clearly a fucktard.
If I were up on my semiotics I’d be able to fully explore the layers of sign and symbol I experienced last night at the Hollywood Bowl.
1. 41st Anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s
2. Sgt. Pepper’s performed live at the Hollywood Bowl
(2a. Although the Beatles twice performed at the Hollywood Bowl, both shows were before Sgt. Pepper’s)
3. Sgt. Pepper’s performed by Cheap Trick with the LA Philharmonic
(3a The Beatles broke up in 1970. Cheap Trick formed in 1971).
4. Guest vocalists joining Cheak Trick: Ian Ball (Gomez), Simone (daughter of Nina) and Billy Corgan (despite all his rage, he’s still a Smashing Pumpkin).
(4a - where to begin? I’m overwhelmed.)
Cheap Trick and Ian Ball and Billy Corgan seemed driven by a true love of the original music. Ball’s performances were incredibly winning, combining a personal spin with a respect for the originals. Corgan was good, too, if nasally/whiny in that classic Corgan way. But Rick Nielsen made the night, with occasional admonishments to the audience and general onstage enthusiasm.
The thing is, as much as seeing Cheap Trick fulfilled some latent schoolgirl dream, there’s nothing that wonderful about seeing Cheap Trick cover the Beatles. It’s kind of a (forgive me) cheap trick. If I’m going to see them live — and believe me, part of me is ashamed to admit this — I want to hear Surrender. I want to hear I Want You To Want Me. The only Cheap Trick song they played last night was an old buried track that wasn’t even a B-side — which is fine, in the midst of a show when the goods are delivered, but here they stuck to being the Beatles. But there’s no changing the fact that they’re Cheap Trick — if they were just a group of aging musicians doing Beatles covers, they wouldn’t be on stage at the Hollywood Bowl.
What’s more, in a Beatles cover show — and I am a lesser person for having been to one, let’s agree on that — there’s something unseemly about having the same guy sing both the Paul McCartney and John Lennon parts. Their two individual personalities brought an electric tension to the band, especially circa Sgt. Pepper’s in 1967. Not that Robin Zander didn’t make a valiant attempt — he hit the notes, generally — but his bombastic style flattened almost all the songs into a high gloss rock, lacking the nuance of either original Beatle (let alone them both).
As for how the George Harrison songs were handled, let’s just skip the guy best known for his performance in Beatlemania, and the sitar group who are probably great musicians but looked like extras from that new Mike Meyers’ movie. As for Simone — she’s a performer. That’s as nice as I can be.
The Hollywood Bowl is a wonderful place to see and hear music — outdoors, most everyone carrying in their own bottles of wine and delicious snacks — and last night, not too hot or cold, was almost sold out. Apparently Cheap Trick did Sgt. Pepper’s last year, for the 40th anniversary, and it went over so well they brought it back for this year. Do people love the Beatlesness of it? It’s only Beatles-ness — no Ringo in the house, and no Sir Paul. Are people so mad for the Beatles, so many years later, that even a simulacrum brings them joy?
If so, why am I such a spoilsport. Above, the Hollywood Bowl with excellent Ian Ball singing, although too teeny for you to tell; below, same thing, with Billy Corgan.
Ed Park’s novel Personal Days is set in a company drastically downsizing. This flickr set of the empty spaces left behind as the San Jose Mercury News downsizes perfectly illustrates what I pictured as the novel’s workspaces. I guess it made the rounds earlier this year, but it’s back in the news — the longtime designer who took the photos was just told he’s been laid off, too.
Ray Bradbury spoke at Long Beach’s doomed Acres of Books last night. He said nice, touching things about the bookstore and his fondness for it. Right on.
Then he said: “Right now there are no bookstores in downtown L.A. That’s terrible. That’s stupid, isn’t it?” Yeah, sure is. Except Metropolis Books IS in downtown LA, near 4th and main, and has a fantastic selection of literary fiction. It’s a new, wonderful independent bookstore and could use your support, Mr. Bradbury.
Then he said: “There’s no bookstore in Venice, California right now.” Bzzzz! Wrong again. There are TWO independent bookstores in Venice, California. Right now. Small World Books is easy to find — on the boardwalk — and has a well-known bookstore cat. In the retail district on Abbot Kinney, Equator Books features art books, specialty books (from skateboarding to bullfighting) and collectibles. Probably even some vintage Bradbury.
Mr. Bradbury, so many people listen to you, and you’re good at making stuff up. But when it comes to dissing neighborhood bookstores, please make sure you know what you’re talking about.
Tod Goldberg posts some fantastic photos of a 1990 Jane’s Addiction show. One really captures the dynamism of Perry Farrell’s movement and the crunch of the crowd into the band. I saw them live in a small show about this time, maybe earlier, and after drinking two 40s of malt liquor was asked to tend the door because I was the most sober person the organizers knew. I didn’t have a camera with me, and if I did, I wouldn’t have had the sense to use it or hold onto it during the massive property destruction that followed. But even in that state, I had more sense than Dave Navarro — dude, please don’t do the ratted mini-dread thing again.
Author Rabih Alameddine creates a playlist for his book The Hakawati at Largehearted Boy, and it’s far from Hollywood fare: “Oum Kalthoum, the voice of the Arab people, is the more famous. Five million Egyptians attended her funeral in 1975. The second is Munir Bashir, (1930-1997), the great Iraqi oud player, who single-handedly revived classical Arab music.”
Beck and Dangermouse. Important? Cool? Geniusy?
UPDATE: the headline is from “Jane Says,” a song by Jane’s Addiction. Me, I don’t own a wig.
Ed swipes at Jay McInerney, unfairly, I think. McInerney’s review (of Andre Dubus III’s The Garden of Last Days) was so entertaining that it made me curious about what else McInerney is writing these days. For my money, though, the best review of the book appeared in the LA Times; although it was a little more sedate, it provided historical context, illuminating a seeming contradiction in the balance of fiction and fact that Dubus lays claim to.
Max answers the question: why is there no literary imdb? It could be easy, since there are obviously APIs for books’ ISBNs — that’s how LibraryThing and Goodreads must get their data. But the original question isn’t for a massive database of books so much as it is for a massive database of book reviews. I think Librarything and Goodreads both are good for this — they combine social networking and book databases and reviews — but it might help if the major book review sections joined and added their voices so you could follow them.
Speaking of joining and following, publisher W.W. Norton is on Twitter. I didn’t realize that I’d been getting addicted to the micro-blogging service (can I call it that?) until it went haywire last week and I got a twitterjones. Anyway, as Ron says, it would be nice for publishers to use web 2.0 services like Twitter for behind-the-scenes info rather than just another press release venue. But maybe that’s just us, Ron — maybe we’re too inside baseball, and the average reader can’t be expected to care too much about what Andre Dubus had for breakfast.