EE goes on hiatus

EE is going on indefinite hiatus.  Read through these comments over at Donigan Merritt’s blog if you’d like to know why.

Long story short: I’ve got work to do.  The manuscript requires finishing, and all my efforts, spare and otherwise.  I enjoy the hell out of writing this blog but it is rather a samsaric activity.  It requires a prodigious amount of time to be done well and that’s the only way to do it.

So, for now, onwards and upwards with the manuscript.  To wit:

The horse-drawn tram has vanished, and so will the trolley, and some eccentric Berlin writer in the twenties of the twenty-first century, wishing to portray our time, will go to a museum of technological history and locate a hundred-year-old streetcar, yellow, uncouth, with old-fashioned curved seats, and in a museum of old costumes dig up a black, shiny-buttoned conductor’s uniform.  Then he will go home and compile a description of Berlin streets in bygone days.  Everything, every trifle, will be valuable and meaningful: the conductor’s purse, the advertisement over the window, that peculiar jolting motion which our great-grandchildren will perhaps imagine – everything will be ennobled and justified by its age.

I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindle mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for and elegant masquerade.

- Vladimir Nabokov (from “A Guide to Berlin”)

Short Story Review: “Three-Legged Dog” and Single Sentence Animation

Billing itself as “Reading That’s Bad For You,” Electric Literature proclaims that its mission “is to use new media and innovative distribution to return the short story to a place of prominence in popular culture.” EL is tired of hearing about the death of literary fiction. It believes in the future. You certainly have to give EL credit for trying.

Case in point: Single Sentence Animation. An animated short is made based on a single sentence taken from a short story featured in the magazine. This cunning little multimedia term hasn’t been trademarked yet, as far as I could tell. Here’s hoping the EL folks keep it that way, or maybe throw on a Creative Commons license.

To get a grip on Single Sentence Animation, I read all the sentences in “Three-Legged Dog,” by Diana Wagman—captured in a Single Sentence Animation video (caution: sexually-tinged imagery). The story is about a man whose girlfriend has lost a breast to cancer. He is her first lover following the mastectomy. Rather than being repulsed, the narrator is strongly attracted to the young survivor, so fragile and strong. The closely observed details are all there, the feel of a grubby bachelor apartment, the ironic pillow talk, the stream of conscious associations:

My blue sheets were cool. My laundry was all in the hamper. She would be a chilly breeze in my arms. My sweat would evaporate, my skin prickle with goose flesh. I could pretend it was snowing outside. Snowing in southern California. With her, anything could happen.

It’s a clever enough story, in a writer’s workshop sort of way. The narrator insists on a cool detachment throughout, leading to a decidedly cold-hearted denouement and little in the way of development or disclosure.

But Martha Colburn sure liked it. Enough that she picked the following sentence, very much representative of the story’s spirit, and made a 1:55 animated short out of it:

I like the bare expanse of that half of her chest, an empty sky, an open question about what will happen next.

The short is quite a take on the story, an approach I’d never seen before. Like most innovations, this one is rough around the edges. For one thing, it only makes sense within the context of the story. Although this may not be a bad thing. Normally we tend to think of filmwork based on literature as possessing a life of its own. The animation here is an extension of the story, though. I like how the words remain primary, of necessity.

I don’t know if Wagman and Colburn collaborated on this project or not. I like to think they didn’t. I like to think Colburn read the story, and was inspired. I like to think that the written word still has the power to inspire, my reservations about this story aside, even in the age of the 30-second YouTube clip. To that end, let’s hope the folks in at Electric Literature keep up the good work, and prove this to be so.

First paragraph of “Three-Legged Dog”:

My girlfriend is missing her left breast. She has a horizontal scar across half her chest, like the seam of a pocket that holds her heart. She had cancer before I met her. I don’t mind. I once went with a girl who had multiple labia piercings and that was more annoying. This is kind of cool. The skin around the scar is darker than the rest of her as if shadowed by a permanent cloud. A constellation of tattooed points circumnavigates the incision: on her sternum, beneath her collarbone, under her arm, along her first rib. The radiologist put them there as guides. One night, I took a marker and connected the dots. No hidden picture emerged, just an awkward box around the void. I like the bare expanse of that half of her chest, an empty sky, an open question about what will happen next.

Purchase info for EL: Here.

Detail: The EL cover image is from the first issue, the one in which the Wagman story appeared. It is not the latest.  This post originally appeared on TeleRead.

Sunday Morning Soundtrack 5: The Beatles

After putting up a White Album spoof earlier this week, I figured I’d better put up the real deal this Sunday morning.  This is my favorite track off the record this week.  One of the ways you can tell it is a great album is because my favorite song on it changes on a near-weekly basis.

Rest assured The Great Ones will be putting in more Sunday morning appearances.

Cage match: Eugenides vs. McEwan vs. Diaz

Took the scioness to storytime at the library the other night.  Glancing over the paperbacks for sale, I spotted Middlesex, by Jeffery Eugenides, Atonement, by Ian McEwan, and The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz.  Picked ‘em up for a buck a pop.

Not being much up on non-ebook contemporary lit, I haven’t read anything by any of these writers before.

Cage match!

Any votes for reading order, best to worst?

Philip Roth says the novel is screwed

Daily Beast Editor Tina Brown asked esteemed author Philip Roth, in this Vimeo video, about the future of the novel.

Basically, Roth says, the novel is screwed.  Not even the Kindle can save the novel, because it has to compete against all those screens: first the movie screen, then the TV screen, and now the computer screen.  Now all three of those are out there, and the book just doesn’t measure up.

Roth predicts that in 25 years the novel will have a “cultic” following, perhaps slightly larger than the group of people who now read Latin poetry.  What do you think?  Is he right?  Or will the novel carry on as it has these last centuries?

Grumpy old man

It does occur to me that as recently as a century or two ago, the reading public for a novel was perhaps at what Roth might call a cultic level.  Then came the Golden Age of Reading, from perhaps the late 1800s through, say, the 1930s.  Now novel-reading is in an inevitable decline, soon to return to being the pastime of a small group of hobbyists?

But perhaps Roth is speaking only of the literary novel, which already could be said to have largely a cultic following, big prizes and splashy headlines aside.  People line up for Dan Brown’s pulp, but how many will read Roth’s latest offering, The Humbling? And he is among the biggest names among contemporary literary novelists, if a grumpy one.  What hope, then, for those as-yet unknown writers?

Have a look at the video, and then have your say in the comments.

Lenny Dykstra’s blues

The schadenfreude mill has caught up to another one.

More chaw means more forearms, kids.

In spring 2008 I read, fascinated, a New Yorker article about how my childhood hero Lenny Dykstra had become a multimillionaire businessman wheeler-and-dealer extraordinaire on account of being, well, Lenny Dykstra.  He bought Wayne Gretzky’s old house in LA for $18 million.  He rode around in luxury jets.  He did lunch at the St. Regis hotel in Manhattan.  He yelled at umps at his kid’s little league game.  Living in the Third World at the time, I distinctly remember thinking, I have got to get home.  If Lenny can get rich, for chrissakes, anyone can.

Turns out ole Lenny wasn’t another Warren Buffet with oncoming mouth cancer.  When the bubble burst last year, Lenny lost everything.  He’s now declared bankruptcy.  He owes his creditors a cool $31 million.  The little league umps ignore him.

Ah, Lenny, if you weren’t such a crass, pompous asshole (really, read the article), we could feel sorry for you for being so dumb.  As it is … well, good luck with that whole bankruptcy thing.

Funny, that the lying liar Jim Cramer was a big fan of Lenny’s.  And that almost a year to the day after the feature on Lenny came out, that lying liar would be outed as such on national TV.

That interview is funny like being punched in the gut is funny.  This, however, is just good old-fashioned snarkastic humor.  As is this:

more about “Lenny Dykstra’s Financial Career | Th…“, posted with vodpod

Rare Alternate Version of “I Will”, by the Beatles

more about “Paul McCartney ‘I’ll Kill’ “, posted with vodpod

Never ceases to amaze me how much energy people put into free hilarity.

Pondering kids? Read this

Came across some good reading for anyone out there pondering your reproductive capacities:

It’s not that I think family life is so awful no one in their right mind would want it; it’s that child-free life can be so good that I’m annoyed it is almost always presented as second-best, cold and empty. “Who will be there for you when you’re old?” people say. (Contradicting themselves, these same people will often chide the childless for being selfish.)

And:

Humans have the capacity to rise above the biological imperative to reproduce. That we do not place the highest value on passing on our genes is part of what makes us different and, yes, in some sense superior to our fellow animals.  … If many more of us do not have grandchildren, then perhaps we will make it clearer that sexual reproduction may be the meaning of animal life, but it sure ain’t the best or only reason for humans to get up in the morning: refreshed, after a night uninterrupted by the cries of little angels.

You know how many full, undisturbed nights of sleep I’ve had since 09/09/2007?  That’s right – zero.

Would I change a thing?  Not on your life.  The scioness (and her hypothetical siblings) is the ne plus ultra of our existence and that’s an end of it.

Still, for those of you yet to reproduce, you can get an earful from every parent on the planet about what to expect, but you’re not likely to hear much about what you could expect, if you didn’t.

Making “Not doing it for the kids“, by philosopher Julian Baggini, well worth a read.

The scary section

In Japan there was once a department store hall that featured a crucified Santa as part of a “Christmas” campaign (though Snopes says this is of dubious authenticity).  I personally saw an energy drink advertisement in a subway with salarymen dragging a cross a la Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. More amusing than offensive, really, unless you are one of those who take ancient parchments and Hollywood scripts far too seriously.

But surely advertisements featuring Adolf Hitler represent a universal taboo, right?  Right?

Nope.

The Thai says: "Hitler is not dead!"

This giant billboard was prominently displayed on the main highway into Pattaya, Thailand, where about half a million Thais live, 3 million foreign tourists visit annually, I used to drive to work every day, and the scioness was born.  Meant to promote some new waxworks “attraction”, the sign drew more than 100 letters of protest and an official letter of protest from the Israeli embassy.  The managing director of the museum, Somporn Naksuetrong, doesn’t understand what the fuss is all about:

“We think of Hitler as an important person, but not in a good way,” he said.

“In the museum we don’t show him with other world leaders, we show him in the scary section.”

“We think of Hitler as an important person, but not in a good way,” he said. ”In the museum we don’t show him with other world leaders, we show him in the scary section.”

Ohhhh, the scary section.  I see.  Well, never mind then.  Besides:

Mr Somporn said they were considering offering discounted entry to the museum by way of an apology.

Problem solved, then.  Ah, Thailand.  You stagger on.  I’m looking forward to visiting you again, seeing the village and in-laws, re-acquainting the scioness with half her heritage.  And then leaving again.

Sunday Morning Soundtrack 4: The Tragically Hip

In late winter 2002 I was living in Tokyo.  I quit both my jobs, keeping just a few private tutoring gigs to keep the rent paid and the lights on, and set about writing my first novel.  Though thankfully that sincere but botched effort was never eyeballed by more than a few unfortunates, I retain happy memories of the 7 weeks it took me to churn out the thing, hunched over a desk in a cold apartment (I was afraid to turn the heat up too high), chain-smoking and drinking cheap coffee in the mornings, cheap bourbon at nights, waiting for my girl to come round so I could put the pen down.

On the cusp of the MP3 era, all I had was a limited CD collection, listened to over and over.  Thankfully, a good friend lent me Up To Here, by The Tragically Hip.  Every time I hear this song, “Boots or Hearts”, I wish I’d learned to play the guitar:

more about “The Tragically Hip – Boots Or Hearts“, posted with vodpod

Normally I don’t post live videos, preferring the polished work of studio albums.  But the lead singer Gordon Downie is manic live, as evidenced by the Killer Whale Tank version of “New Orleans Is Sinking”.  You’ve got to listen to the whole thing.

more about “New Orleans Is Sinking Killer Whale T…“, posted with vodpod

I was actually introduced to The Hip by my little brother via a mix CD featuring “Nautical Disaster”.  Still one of my favorite Hip songs, a decade on.

(I also normally don’t post actual music videos, but these guys are the first bona fide rock stars I’ve posted on, sporting their own YouTube channel and everything, so I’m going to.)

more about “Nautical Disaster – Day for Night – T…“, posted with vodpod

Straight up rock and roll.  What’s not to like about Canada’s finest export?  Especially here by the 100th meridian where, you know, the great plains begin.  Here’s Gordon Downie doing the finest whiteboy shuffle this side of Michael Stipe:

more about “Tragically Hip – The 100th Meridian“, posted with vodpod

I think Nagai would have approved of The Road

Doubtless Nagai Kafu was being sarcastic in his envisioned movie plot, but I think he would have approved of Cormac McCarthy’s earthshattering uber-post-apocalyptic The Road being made into a film.  After many long delays, it is evidently set for US release on November 25, according to Imdb.  Evidently they’ve hewed closely to the plot, meaning the movie has a chance to follow in the book’s footsteps and become possibly the darkest and finest production of the 21st century.

The trailer seems to indicate as much.  I was stunned into a state of despondency by the book, yet I immediately turned back to Page 1 to re-read.  Anticipating the movie, I’ve never been excited to be made so gloriously unhappy.

Technical difficulties prevent me from embedding the trailer in this post.  You can watch it here.

On the popular arts

“Once I was asked by a certain person to suggest a plot for a movie.  I was able to reply immediately.

How about having some poor, impoverished old man run down by a rich man’s automobile, I said.  He dies and his son goes to work in a factory, but, involved in a strike, he is arrested, charged with a crime he did not commit.  The poor old mother, left behind, is ill and has no money to buy food, much less medicine.  The daughter, Miss Something-or-other, gives up the piecework she has been doing, pasting boxes together, and sells herself as a geisha.  While she is thus caring for her mother, she acquires syphilis and loses the sight of both eyes, and so the whole family dies of starvation.

How would that be? I asked.  You would have them wailing in the aisles.

He looked at me with wide eyes, said that I seemed to have dangerous thoughts he had not suspected me of, and did not come again.”

- Nagai Kafu

Nagai Kafu

This seems about right

Spotted on Salon.

Why I don’t fear for the future

At breakfast the snow was coming down and the MP3 player was on random.  The scioness was at her waffles. “Worker’s Song” by the Dropkick Murphys came on.   Her ears perked up.  Her eyes widened.  She looked at me and offered up this little Sunday morning hallelujah.

“Daddy,” she said. ”I wanna rock and roll.”

Preach on, daughter.

(I note in passing that this is probably the rockingest song to feature a bagpipe solo ever.)

Sunday Morning Soundtrack 3: The Jayhawks

I’ve referenced The Jayhawks before, but here’s the deal: I’ve been listening to them on constant repeat for a solid year, and each time it sounds as good as the last.  I can’t offer up much higher praise than that.  This is probably their best song:

more about “The Jayhawks – Angelyne“, posted with vodpod

One of these fine days, I’m going to upgrade and host my own bloggage, at which point I will commence to upload some tracks of my own.  Nothing on YouTube or elsewhere that I could locate off The Jayhawks’ 1986 debut, my second-favorite after Rainy Day Music, above.   A Letterman appearance will have to suffice:

more about “The Jayhawks – Stumbling Through The …“, posted with vodpod

From their 3rd-best album, Smile (which, I note, is still better than 99% of “best albums” out there):

more about “Watch The Jayhawks – I’m gonna make y…“, posted with vodpod

Sometimes I catch myself wondering the same thing:

more about “The Jayhawks – What led me to this to…“, posted with vodpod

What I like about The Jayhawks: not even a slick Sony/BMG can make these guys look like rock stars.

more about “The Jayhawks – Music From The North C…“, posted with vodpod

More next week.

Book Review: American Fever

Earlier this week, I took my family to get a seasonal flu vaccine. We waited in a line that extended to the sidewalk with hundreds of others, eyeing every cough and sneeze and sniffle with suspicion. This in my unassuming hometown (pop. 14000), where everyone knows everyone. Imagine such a scene in, say, New York.

In American Fever: A Tale of Romance and Pestilence, Peter Christian Hall does, and doesn’t stop there. The story of a flu-obsessed blogger who predicts a flu pandemic and then records its ravages, Hall taps into a deep literary vein of paranoia. Having previously ventured into the epidemic-as-apocalypse genre myself, my expectations were high. True to form, this novel-as-blog soon had me wiping down every surface in reach with disinfectant.

Hall grapples with a thorny problem: how to create a live novel. The “hypernovels” of the 90s were dismal failures, I’m not sold on e-book chapter mashups, and Vooks manage to be both unreadable and unwatchable. American Fever is by far the best stab at the future of the novel I’ve seen. It also makes clear that live novels (livels?) have a ways to go. Someday when we’re reminiscing fondly on the dawn of e-books, American Fever may very well occupy pride of place among the original innovators. Its sophisticated approach, however, is not is not always backed by prose equal to its packaging.

American Fever’s hero is a blogger-turned-“flugitive.”  Observing the pandemic’s progression from his Brooklyn apartment with growing disbelief and anger as the sickness cuts down friends and strangers alike, he caustically comments:

“All I ever do is google.  What else is there to do … pray?”

A self-taught influenza expert, the Ayn Rand-loving blogger operates a “personal protection” business out of his apartment, selling masks and gloves and the like. Gradually he becomes something of an online hero, calling out an increasingly totalitarian American government for its misdeeds. Arrested and tortured on trumped-up charges, he flees the country with his socialist girlfriend and fellow flu survivor, but not before watching his beloved metropolis descend into barbarity.

American Fever is the first novel I’m aware of that is written entirely in a blogged epistolary style, complete with rabbit-hole references, pop culture innuendo and cutting sarcasm:

“For the sake of innocent readers I’ve acquired, I’ll explain that I don’t want to have to monitor the site for abuse. Nor will I host debates about what politician would make a worse president, or which movie star or pop singer is doing more to fight bird flu (“I feel stupid and contagious/here we are now/ entertain us”).”

The epistolary style has a built-in weakness: nothing can be experienced directly by the characters, only described afterwards. It’s a tough hurdle to leap, and Hall doesn’t always clear it.  The very structure of the book keeps us out of the heat of the action: the main character always has to return to his laptop. So we get secondhand reports, emotional recountings, snatches of scenes.

“Disorder has turned universal. Armed hospital invasions are common in blue states, red states, border states, states of anxiety, hopeless states. Is the State itself in danger?”

A single taut, well-written description of an armed hospital invasion would suffice for any number of notifications of such. Replete with Googled Wikipedic tidbits, the chatty tone and truncated sentences take American Fever dangerously close to pedestrian blog territory:

“So far my ‘hood merely looks like a police state war zone. We all still love one another. I didn’t feel afraid when I went out. The worst thing that happened was that I seem to have exacerbated my back injury climbing over debris on B. It hurts like heck. No, worse: It feels unprintable.

The East Village can survive this. It survived crack and yuppies.”

The end of American civilization witnessed via the witticisms of your neighborhood blogspotter: it rings a little hollow. I’m not sure this is the best vessel for a novel. I’m not saying it isn’t, either.  But the net effect is, when Hall does reach for more sophisticated language, he strikes a tinny note:

“Time melds itself like freshly bruised enamel paint, smoothes my days. I could run down the street naked and no one would remember, so long as I was back in my perch tomorrow.”

Nonetheless, American Fever gives us some tantalizing hints as to what a blogged novel could be, and to my mind represents a real advance in e-lit. The blog is chock full of lit savvy, which serves to further blur fiction and reality with links to Hall’s flu blog on the Huffington Post.  He also sells personal protection gear and “Cultural Merchandise.” Add in the fact that the book has an RSS feed to subscribe to, and what you have is a novel direction for the novel.

Books are meant to be finished, permanent projects; American Fever bristles with links (though these thin out as the plot progresses). How to keep the links current, and relevant?  Today’s fascinating article on Avian Influenza Age Distribution is tomorrow’s 404 Error. Should the effort even be made? I mean, I can imagine that in the near future aggregator bots will automatically update e-book links. (Which brings up another question: can you really be said to “own” an e-book if its links are constantly changing?) But if a book relies on constant link updates, or links at all, is it a book? And if not, what is it? American Fever doesn’t answer these questions. But it certainly puts them out there in a fascinating way.

For now, American Fever is live online. As of this writing, it’s on Day 156, of 220. I do wonder why you can only subscribe to the novel in-progress. Why not adopt an asynchronous approach, as in DailyLit?  How many readers are likely to read 156 blog entries to catch up with the story?  Not this one—I read American Fever on my Kindle via a PDF advance copy. (Which, in keeping with the FTC’s new book-reviewing guidelines, I hereby note is extant in my email, two computers, and my Kindle, so it is thereby safe to say I intend to keep it.)

All gripes aside, you’re missing something if you miss American Fever.  Start your reading here.

American Fever will be complete by December 2009.  The print / e-book release date is as yet undetermined, but the blog project will remain online indefinitely.

This post originally appeared at TeleRead.

Art defined

“Beauty plus pity. That is the closest we can get to a definition of art.” -Vladimir Nabokov

The perils of hubris

Another short lesson on fantasy vs. reality:

more about “Why You Don’t Show Off Before A Fight.“, posted with vodpod

The first lesson.  Spotted on Facebook.

Why we still have class conflict

Murakami takes the Nobel?

Please.

Tom Conoboy has speculated that the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami may win the Nobel Prize for Literature, to be announced tomorrow.  I’ve read plenty of Murakami.  It’s inoffensive enough.  High-lit at its mildest.  Each new Murakami book is an exercise in diminishing returns.  Maybe it’s because they read, more or less, like faded copies of each other.

If Cormac McCarthy is an example of a writer whose extraordinary voice defines literary output at its finest edge, Murakami is its blandest.  A minor talent at best.

If Murakami wins the Nobel, it is the last time I will take the Nobels seriously.  Seriously.