Authors! Live!

Colm Toibin is at 192 Books tonight at 7 PM; Mary Gaitskill is there same time next Thursday.  Now, how to get another get out of jail card; it might not be possible after last night's girls' night out.

Even ACOAs get the blues

Tom Robbins has apparently written a children's book called B Is for Beer.  Hilarious, right?  I have not read the book, so my immediate reaction is based solely on what I have read about it.  The main character is a kindergartner, who actually drinks a beer in the story.  And that reaction is, this is pure insanity.  As the child of an alcoholic, the title B Is for Beer does not make me laugh or smile.  My associations are of the more stomach-churning variety.  Having read and loved Tom Robbins in my time (it would be interesting to go back and read him now, 20-odd years down the road), I am sad that he would come up with such an ill-conceived, such an ill concept.  I know I might be coming off like a shrill temperance freak, but this is not an area where I can pretend to be cool.  Now if it had been W Is for Wine, my reaction would not be as visceral, but I would still wonder--why?  Why did this have to be a children's book?  I don't think I'll be recommending it for my kids' school book fair.

Enter Roth

Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I'd give it more than five stars if I could. I love Roth, and this book is a distillation of all his classic themes. God, I love Roth. Nathan Zuckerman at 71, returning to New York City after self-exile of 11 years, trying to seduce a 20-something woman, while vowing to do evertyhing in his power to prevent E.I. Lonoff's biography from being written, while meeting with Lonoff's erstwhile young mistress now an old woman close to death, at the time of the Kerry/Bush election. It just has it all. I can't do it justice, and I can't really review it; it seems so beside the point. I can only recommend it very highly.

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Duplicitous Preservation

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
It took me a ridiculously long time to finish this book, for reasons into which I shall not go, but that is no reflection on the book itself. It is about the decimation of our libraries by fiendish proponents of microfilm. Untold treasures of periodicals and books have been lost due to the persuasion of librarians by "preservationists" that the paper would soon crumble into dust. One test that would be done to prove the incipient crumbliness of a page was called the "Double Fold" test. Nicholson Baker has a field day with this one, as the root meaning of "duplicity" is "double fold." The test involves folding down a corner of a page, and then folding it all the way back, and repeating until the corner falls off. Not surprisingly, it doesn't take that many folds; that's why your mother/teacher/librarian always told you not to dogear your books. Baker makes up his own test, which is basically turning the pages of a book exactly as you would do if you were reading. Again not surprisingly, all the books tested in this way hold up strikingly well, even very old ones. So how can it be that so many librarians allowed bound periodicals and books to be "disbounded" in order to be photographed for microfilm, and then thrown in the trash? Especially when the microfilm was very often of very poor quality? The answer is not clear, but through no fault of Baker's. It's just one of those stupid outcomes of bureaucracy and false economy. Having actually done research on microfilm, I know from experience that it is a heinous technology, and a major cause of headaches among students. Luckily, digital technology has made it largely obsolete; however, that does nothing to bring back all the pages that have been lost. At the end of his book, Baker describes heroically trying to save many volumes of old, bound newspapers by buying them from the British Library; if only more people had cared before him about the preserving the actual objects than just the content of written works.



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Pure Poetry

April is National Poetry Month, so it's time to get ready.  Tonight at McNally Jackson Books, there is a reading with a bunch of great poets: Robert Pinsky, Sharon Olds, Philip Schultz, Mark Strand, C.K. Williams.  It's called Essential Pleasures, which is also the name of a new anthology that Robert Pinsky put together, with a focus on poetry as language to be spoken aloud.  Wish I could go, but I'll be lucky if I'm still standing after an afternoon of carting kids around, following a morning of puppy care.

Somehow last week, though, I did make it to an evening event: A panel up at Columbia of authors/academics discussing crime fiction with great gusto.  The participants were Charles Ardai, Leonard Cassuto, Jenny Davidson and George Stade, mediated by Jean Howard, chair of the English Department.  The Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences was also on hand to make some opening remarks; his name escapes me but George Stade calls him Hank.  Even though he is a mathematician, he is well versed in the crime genre, especially the French  --le polar (policier + noir).  I felt almost like I was back in school again--and I mean that in a good way.  One of the first topics was the transgressive, liberating experience of reading crime fiction; a paradoxical way to see murder done safely, with of course perspective on how the genre has changed over time in terms of protagonists, structure, etc.  There was also some discussion of why crime fiction should be considered serious literature, which is to me a moot question, and certainly was to everyone there.  

Stade did a recap of his discussion of Mickey Spillane that I remembered from his course on popular fiction lo these many years ago.  After giving many examples of the laughable hamfistedness of I, the Jury, he asked the question why this book was so popular in the late 1940s.   The beginning of his answer to this question was, "The news is not good."  Indeed Spillane was arguably the most popular American novelist of the 20th century.   An audience member suggested the in the post-WWII era, Mike Hammer embodied a fascistic impulse that the masses unconsciously needed to discharge after having fought against fascism itself in the war.  Hmm, transgression isn't always so great, is it?

I gathered many names of crime authors I must check out, especially the late Donald Westlake, who also wrote under the name Richard Stark, and one of whose books was recently published by the University of Chicago Press.  Jenny Davidson and Charles Ardai are both authors I plan to read; Ardai is also the publisher of the Hard Case Crime books--a great, retro-looking bunch of reissues and new noir titles.  Leonard Cassuto wrote a book called Hard-Boiled Sentimentality that I picked up.  I also have added to my blog list Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, to try to keep up to date with crime fiction.  Too many books, not enough time--that leads to my next topic: libraries!  Coming soon.