Bookstorm

Michael Chabon, also known as The Coolest Writer Working Today, discusses genre with the Los Angeles Times.

Where did this bias against work created for a popular audience come from?

In all fairness, it came from the fact that the vast preponderance of art created for a mass audience is crap. It's impossible to ignore that. But the vast preponderance of work written as literary art is high-toned crap. The proportion may settle down in the neighborhood of 90/10--Sturgeon's Law said that 90% of everything is crud.

Let's talk about this in a specific instance--Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road" and its reception.

I thought it was an excellent novel. The least interesting thing to me as a reader was that it was science fiction. It presented a very pure example of post-apocalyptic literature, pared down to the essentials of a post-apocalyptic vision. But it's nothing that anybody reading science fiction over the last 60 or 70 years hasn't seen done many, many times before--maybe not by writers of McCarthy's caliber.

In terms of the vision it was presenting, it was notable only for the intense, McCarthy severity.

In fact, I responded to it much more as a work of horror fiction. But the response you saw out there generally was the sort of oh-my-God isn't this incredible, Cormac McCarthy has written a science fiction novel! Sometimes a little bit of a panic sets in, where critics aren't sure what to do about it or say about it.

And when this happens, when a writer of unassailable literary reputation, like McCarthy, does produce a work of genre fiction, under his own name, unlike say John Banville, the critical machine prints out and issues a pass to a writer: "This isn't science fiction, because it was written by Cormac McCarthy." Or, "We think all science fiction is bad, unless it's written by a Margaret Atwood or Cormac McCarthy."

In some ways the book may be closer to a work of prophecy, biblical prophecy, than anything else, and that's what we're responding to.

Ultimately with any great work of art, whether it was written by a Ray Bradbury or a Philip K. Dick or Cormac McCarthy, it's really the intensity with which it's been imagined and been brought into language.

The weekend round-up--this time with less lasso. Gimme back my bullets!

• Seattle's Only Newspaper gives you a few good reasons to check out the mysteries of Fred Vargas.
• Senator John McCain endorses Senator Barack Obama.
• I'm not John Cheever, and I'm an alcoholic.
• Have you ever wondered what the French literary scene was like circa 1940? Me neither, but I imagined someone reading this to me in a snobby French accent. That, coupled with the idea of actually reading the entire survey, made me very tired: "Leiris's book shows how little the Surrealists are beholden to workaday Freudian orthodoxy. It goes without saying that it is the positivist rudiments of the doctrine that trigger their protests; but since any serious critical effort is foreign to them, they end up reintroducing metaphysical concepts into Freudian doctrine. This brings them closer to Jung. It is Jung to whom Bachelard appeals in his most recent book, devoted to the forefather of Surrealism, Lautréamont. This book is instructive for many reasons. Before outlining the three main aspects, I will conjure up the figure of the psychoanalytic sniper, as embodied in Adrien Turel. I do not know if you are familiar with the famous explanation of the Divine Comedy, or more specifically of the Inferno, whose nine circles, according to Turel, represent the nine months that the embryo spends in the mother's womb. That will give you a basic idea of the atmosphere of Bachelard's studies. For all that, the argument from which the book begins is solidly established."

Haruki Murakami is here to fix your life (in two hundred words or fewer?), and the Esquire Books Blog gives you a sneak peek:

Yo Haruki,

Your Kanye video was dope! Love your art, man. Question: One of the advantages of animation is that you can use long exposures and slow film stock to reduce grain and capture a lot of fine detail. Can you recommend a film stock?--Filmishly Flummoxed

Eighteen years have gone by, and still I can bring back every detail of that day in the meadow. Washed clean of summer's dust by days of gentle rain, the mountains wore a deep, brilliant green. The October breeze set white fronds of head-tall grasses swaying. One long streak of cloud hung pasted across a dome of frozen blue. It almost hurt to look at that faroff sky. A puff of wind swept across the meadow and through her hair before it slipped into the woods to rustle branches and send back snatches of distant barking--a hazy sound that seemed to reach us from the doorway to another world. We heard no other sounds. We met no other people. We saw only two bright, red birds leap startled from the center of the meadow and dart into the woods. As we ambled along, Naoko spoke to me of wells.

I stole this link from Matthew ...

Here's an interview with novelist Tom McCarthy. Topics of discussion include Friedrich Nietzsche, Italo Calvino, and Marcel Proust. It's good stuff, kids.

Shortly after reading this ridiculously speculative article, I was reminded of a certain androgynous, washed-up pop star of questionable race and humanity, who sports a detachable nose and a bizarre obsession with all things Never-Never-Land.

I've long considered Kurt Vonnegut as one of my favorite authors, but I've recently become completely obsessed with him. Cat's Cradle is sheer genius, one of the funniest, sharpest satires ever written, and I'm currently enmeshed in Slaughterhouse-Five, which I picked up at the bookstore last night. (I know, I know--I'm always late to the party.) But I can't explain it. All I know is that I've been in a reading slump lately, struggling through the final one hundred pages of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and eyeing the last half of John Steinbeck's East of Eden with equal parts exasperation and fury--exasperation because I don't really want to read it, and fury because I know I won't be able to leave it unfinished.

But Vonnegut--he's exactly what I've needed these days, someone who can point out the fallacies of modern society while simulaneously giving a big, shit-eating, postmodern grin: "Oh well." He's my kind of satirist: his humor is black as pitch and completely ridiculous. (Billy Pilgrim's abduction by Tralfamadorians, where he was "displayed naked in a zoo," gave me a few much-needed chuckles.) He's funny in the way a swift kick to the balls is funny. Considering how bleak the daily news has been recently, and with no relief in sight, I've come to realize just how much I miss him.

An interesting take on Senator Barack Obama's writing style, though I wouldn't grant the senator as much literary genius as the article implies. That's not to say that Obama is a bad writer--when he restrains himself, he's actually quite gifted. The problem I have is with how Obama depicts himself in Dreams from My Father: he's a lost son searching for his roots, a loner often given to pages of introspection on how events have shaped his outlook on a range of issues, most notably poverty and race relations. He seems to have had a pretty uneventful life, and is painfully aware of that fact: the book is less focused on his life and more focused on self-reflection. (In the introduction, written almost ten years later, Obama writes, "... I sound like I'm trying to hide from myself.") Those delving into the book searching for character flaws and dirty laundry will be disappointed: if we're to take the Dreams from My Father at face value (and, as with most memoirs, I hesitate to do so), Obama's character is impeccable--at worst, he learns from his mistakes, and comes away from them humbled and much better as a person. (Yes, the Reverend Richard Wright figures in the story, but his role is small and Obama glosses over his past in a few sentences: "He had grown up in Philadelphia, the son of a Baptist minister. He had resisted his father's vocation at first, joining the Marines out of college, dabbling with liquor, Islam, and black nationalism in the sixties." However, his effect on Obama's views seems negligible, with Obama disagreeing with some of the Reverend's views on race relations.)

Yet Dreams from My Father is notable in that it was written without an agenda (unlike anything "written" by Senator John McCain). When it was first published, Obama was years away from running for the Senate, so there's no sense that he's refuting common political attacks, or that he's making an effort to portray himself in the most favorable light. Sure, this may be the most undiluted portrait we're going to get from a presidential candidate, but it's weighed down with needless description and overwritten sentiment. There's no doubt that Obama is incredibly intelligent and well-read, but Dreams from My Father, while eloquent in places, isn't a great book--it's mediocre at best, and downright dull at worst. There's a sense that Obama is preaching, but what he's preaching is often lost amidst blocks of text and overly-wrought emotional drama. It's the portrait of someone who would likely go on to great things--but not great things as a writer.

My bookmarks have gotten out of control, so I'm offloading some of them on you ...

• Perhaps not surprisingly, Playboy's list of the hottest bloggers doesn't feature a literary blogger. However, my vote would go to Brigitte Dale. She's fucking gorgeous--and, with twenty-six percent of the vote at the time I posted this, she's in the lead.
• Newsweek reprints a 1945 letter by the late, great Kurt Vonnegut. (The letter, incidentally, is in Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect.)
• I thought this question--"Are men boring?"--had been settled centuries ago. (The answer, of course, is yes. Just ask your wife.) Apparently, it still merits "deep" analysis: "Jess Spillane, 44, a teacher in Plymouth, says: 'It's to do with macho-ness. The more macho a man is, the more boring he can be--that's why gay men are generally better company. When macho men talk about their work, they have a point to make. They want to drum it home. Or they don't talk at all. There are two types: the pompous and the somnolent. Heterosexual men with macho leanings are the opposite of women who are happy to divulge the downsides of their life or job, the moans, the insecurities. You bond with people when they admit their vulnerabilities. Self-doubt is interesting.'" Sorry, I was busy watching Die Hard and trying to think of somewhere to drive, so I can fiddle with my new GPS navigation system. What were you saying?
• Somehow, the Suicide Girls are back in my bookmarks. It's been a few years since I last paid them a visit, but it's nice to know they're still among the most beautiful women on the Internets.
• As a devoted fan of all things heavy metal--particularly death metal and, to a smaller extent, black metal--this struck me as interesting: "A common mistake made by the uninitiated listener is to conflate death metal and black metal. I've been at a few parties or dinners or whatever where someone has asked me to describe the difference between the two. To answer involves me trying to explain a blast beat, followed by vocal impressions of a death-metal vocalist (low, deep, guttural growling) vs. a black-metal vocalist (usually higher, wispy, wraithlike, and screeched). Admittedly, sometimes it can be like splitting hairs. Black metal's gone through various shifts, but generally speaking, the guitars buzz, the drums are quick, the vocals shrieking, ghostly, and anguished. The early work had a particularly eerie, lo-fi sound. As the scene developed, and younger musicians mastered their instruments, the structures grew more complex. Black metal is generally not as straight-up technical as death; it's usually more classically symphonic. (Of course, there are always exceptions, such as the early Floridian death-metal crew Morbid Angel, who created complex, epically sublime death constructions.)"

I tried to break Wordle by putting several pages of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake through the Wordlizer. No dice. In fact, the final picture sucked. So I went back to the drawing board and, just for kicks, Wordled my blog. Ironically, nowhere in the final picture does "Bookstorm" show up. Clearly, this thing won't feed egos.

My anti-marriage streak continues:

Dr. Burton was neither the first nor the last to comment that marriage is a hindrance to "all good enterprises." "Woman inspires us to great things," remarked Alexandre Dumas, "and prevents us from achieving them." The bitter Friedrich Nietzsche believed marriage (if not women, in general) a distraction from philosophical pursuits. It is a commonplace that most important writers, artists and philosophers have been bachelors, or in the least effectively single in the way Abelard, Franklin, Rousseau, Milton, Thomas Paine and Shakespeare remained. "Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men," wrote Sir Francis Bacon (not a bachelor, but perhaps wishing he were). H.L. Mencken, who once suggested bringing back the dollar-a-day bachelor tax (it was worth that much to be single) likewise commented on the superiority of the bachelor--only to Mencken it was the bachelor's great intellect and creativity that kept him single, not the other way round. "The bachelor's very capacity to avoid marriage is no more than a proof of his relative freedom from the ordinary sentimentalism of his sex, in other words, of his greater approximation to the clearheadedness of the enemy sex. He is able to defeat the enterprise of women because he brings to the business an equipment almost comparable to their own."

But what about the bachelor himself?

One enduring myth holds that the bachelor is an expert on the female sex, a legend encouraged by Mencken when he said that "Bachelors know more about women than married men; if they didn't they'd be married too." To my knowledge there has never been a study that sought to determine why men remain bachelors, though the most reluctant among them seem to possess one common trait: a deep and abiding cynicism toward the fairer sex. Not that the bachelor is completely immune to female charms and wiles; he simply has a greater resistance than the average guy, combined perhaps with a more profound dread of connubial bliss. It is a cynicism borne of endless reports of ruined marriages and bitter dissolutions. Of the 50 percent of couples that successfully weather the storms of holy matrimony, a mere 38 percent allow that their marriages are happy ones. Yet for all this doom and gloom the happily unmarried man is not opposed to love. Far from it. More likely he idealizes love more than his married counterpart. "Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing," notes Goethe. "A confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished." Today's relationship gurus warn that marriage must be treated not unlike a job. "When you bring the work strategies that you use in the workplace at home, you can be really successful," says one marriage expert, which brings to mind the words of Robert Burton--that marriage is the last and best cure of romantic love.

[ ... ]

It is easy to adopt an iconic view of the bachelor--a resigned cynic or hopeless romantic, a man of infinite sorrow and sophistication or the misanthropic barroom brawler of story and song--but when it comes to bachelors no single image prevails. "Some will find [bachelorhood] enviable, others pathetic, and both may be right; for it would seem that a bachelor's way of being in the world is both rich and arid, exciting and static," concludes Lopate. And what could be more bittersweet than the memories of unrequited love nursed by an old bachelor? Washington Irving was one well acquainted with this sentiment: "With married men their amorous romance is apt to decline after marriage ... but with a bachelor, though it may slumber, it never dies. It is always liable to break out again in transient flashes, and never so much as on a spring morning in the country; or on a winter evening, when seated in his solitary chamber, stirring up the fire and talking of matrimony."