Bookstorm

The Literates is one of the best comic books I've ever seen: it features booksellers as superheroes.

Navigating the slush pile doesn't take long, but it's still pretty inefficient: to find those little gems, someone has to slog through hundreds of would-be authors imitating Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. But it seems slush has some sad and weirdly funny merits:

The slush pile seems, in some sense, to serve as a sort of representative sampling of the collective unconscious of the American public--a surreal landscape of vengeance, conspiracy, otherworldly beings, and really big guns. Sexual relations between ladies and gentlemen are fraught with peril (especially given that one or more participants in any romantic endeavor may very likely be aliens, demons, were-vampires, undead, or in a coma); queerness is almost nonexistent, as is any sort of radical politics (unless by "radical" one means "hoping to overthrow the government and install in its place a parliament selected by extraterrestrials from a more spiritually advanced dimension"); and people of color exist only as grotesque caricatures.

I wish I could say that my role as an intermediary between the humble masses and a publishing contract has taught me grace and compassion; instead, it's taught me that the world is overrun with racist, lady-hating lunatics, hell-bent on inflicting their own horrific visions upon an unsuspecting populace. And yet, once in a very great while, I find a little island of magic in a sea of despair: that query so lovely, so perfect, so charmingly funny that I can almost picture its author, its sample pages peppered with a handful of flawless phrases that make me catch my breath in wonder and think, Yes, thank God, this one. This one. For that chance, I'll keep reading.

The thought of continuing with Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary is depressing. I started it last week, then stalled during the second part. It sounds like an appealing book--it features adultery, financial woes, and a heroine who commits suicide at the end. (I see shades of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina here.) And though Flaubert hasn't yet painted a full portrait of Emma Bovary, I'm already sick of her. I'm imagining her as a teenager--she seems restless, spiteful, and unsatisfied. Flaubert is called "The Father of Realism," and in that respect, maybe Madame Bovary is a success. Emma is selfish, and often complains about trite matters, and seems to believe that people exist to keep her entertained and happy. True, she isn't very compelling or interesting, but that's because she's a lot like most people you meet in real life.

If you aren't familiar with Lydia Davis's fiction, get educated. She's one of my favorite authors.

I was delighted to see Philip Roth on the shortlist for this year's Bad Sex Award (the only literary prize worth caring about), but a part of me would like to see Jonathan Littell win. I never finished The Kindly Ones, and Littell's nomination makes me feel slightly vindicated: his book was so sloppy that I wondered if his publisher ever bothered to send the manuscript to an editor.

Umberto Eco: "I like lists for the same reason other people like football or pedophilia."

At the Wall Street Journal, John Jurgensen interviews Cormac McCarthy. The topics discussed include fatherhood, The Road, and whether or not one can film Blood Meridian.

I enjoyed Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close--not enough to want to read Everything is Illuminated, mind you, but enough to think, Well, that wasn't a complete waste of time. And, admittedly, I dont know much about his new book, Eating Animals, but I do know this: he is beginning to piss me off. He may have converted Natalie Portman, but if there's one thing I despise, it's self-righteousness:

... [W]hat Foer most bravely details is how eating animal pollutes not only our backyards, but also our beliefs. He reminds us that our food is symbolic of what we believe in, and that eating is how we demonstrate to ourselves and to others our beliefs: Catholics take communion--in which food and drink represent body and blood. Jews use salty water on Passover to remind them of the slaves' bitter tears. And on Thanksgiving, Americans use succotash and slaughter to tell our own creation myth--how the Pilgrims learned from Native Americans to harvest this land and make it their own.

I get it: meat-eaters are violent, genocidal maniacs who kill poor, defenseless animals in order to feel superior.

If this is the best you can come up with, I'm not convinced. What's more, self-righteousness always has an adverse effect on me--if anything, I often side with the camp who annoys me the least. Framing the vegetarianism debate--a debate which shouldn't even be happening--as an ethical one is absurd. The only thing I'm taking from this is that Foer vegetarianism is the new Christianity: convert people by disgusting them (That burger you're eating probably got mixed with cowshit--you're eating cowshit!), and if that doesn't work, tell them they're immoral, and attempt to make them feel bad for their heathen, meat-eating ways. But conversion tactics often masquerade as self-validation (see Kirk Cameron, Christianity's latest pitchman): you don't feel so out of place when you have everyone eating a salad.

The problem, however, is that the meat-versus-vegetables debate isn't a matter of ethics, and no amount of righteous indignation will change that. It's tempting to dismiss Foer as an asshole, but he only strikes me as strangely passionate. (Remember when that Baldwin brother became a religious nutcase, with humorous and annoying results?) Still, played correctly, Foer as vegetarian Christ-figure, with Portman as his Mary Magdalene, could be comical--if, like Cameron and the Baldwin brother, the two of them weren't so irritating.

I should start checking The Stranger more often--Seattle's Only Newspaper always has great literary coverage. Case in point: "Cows, Collards, and Heroin," posted on October twenty-seventh, in which Lydia Davis discusses short stories, "the existential hum," and translating Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary.

The most immediately unusual thing about your stories is their brevity. Why so short? When did you first realize you could write--were allowed to write--such short, short stories?

Although I had read Kafka's Parables and Paradoxes in college, I never thought of trying such short forms, as though this "classic" were enclosed in an untouchable box. The only form I seriously considered was the traditional short story. Then, at a time when I was stuck in my writing, a few years later, I happened to read the stories--what he calls poems--of Russell Edson. The volume of his that I read contains short, mostly domestic tales in which not all the protagonists are human. It also helped me that not all the pieces were successful--I could see how to attempt something and not mind failing. I set myself the exercise of writing two paragraph-long stories each day. Although I've written many longer things since then, including a novel, I still find the short form wonderfully flexible and effective.

I've got to get my hands on her collection.