If You Want Bush to Stump You, Be Sure Your First Name is Dave

There can only be room for Dave in Bush’s brain.

Add comment October 27th, 2006

ZeFrank vs. Rocketboom

ZeFrank’s The Show takes on Rocketboom, the Rocketboom Boy responds, and Ze responds further.

Add comment October 27th, 2006

In Tony Snow’s Universe, An Electrocution to the Nuts is “Playful Shocking”

Editor & Publisher: “He said Cheney is not a guy who ’slips up,’ but a reporter wondered if, in fact, it was no slip up—that is, we do waterboard, and the vice president wanted to signal to voters that the Republicans are tougher than the Democrats. Asked to define ‘a dunk in the water,’ Snow replied: ‘A dunk in the water.’ A reporter later asked, if dunking does not mean waterboarding, does that mean there’s a new swimming pool at Guantanomo? That did not get a reply.”

Add comment October 27th, 2006

Memo to Tanenhaus: Liesl’s Your Only Shot

Dear Mr. Tanenhaus:

Nearly every serious literary person knows that your finger ain’t exactly on the pulse of contemporary fiction. Your coverage, even when it does concern itself with literature, often misses the mark. (This week’s issue, however, isn’t bad. But still, NO BROWINES FOR YOU! Just because I’m under no obligation to resuscitate the Tanenhaus Brownie Watch.)

This is troubling, given that you have long maintained that you are the shit, that somehow the name “New York Times” means something and that we are supposed to ignore the often ridiculous essays that pass for substantive coverage. (And, come on, Sam, was Alford snorting lines when he wrote this nonsense? Or is this the mark of an editor who thinks this and Joe Queenan’s solipsistic hit pieces are funny? For this, I sentence you to two weeks of Buster Keaton, Stanley Elkin and the Marx Brothers!)

However, there is one person among your roster of contributors who does know fiction and who actually loves books (Imagine that! Someone who actually loves LOVES loves books on your payroll! You know, like some of us upstart litbloggers and podcasters!). And frankly Sam, she’s your only shot at the NYTBR having any kind of journalistic credibility in the future.

I’m talking about Liesl Schillinger! This week, she wrote a fantastic review of Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn that somehow escaped the dull, clause-happy house style you cling to like a barnacle to a scow or an attorney to boilerplate.

And yet you keep her in the background, often assigning her a book from Glamour instead of, say, the new Richard Ford book — which you assigned to that assclown Tony Scott, a man who doesn’t understand that he’s a film critic, not a book critic.

And yes I’ll even forgive her solecism against bloggers on the Pessl front.

If you have even a shred of editorial instinct, I urge you to have Liesl cover substantial fiction. During your tenure, you’ve been almost completely tone-deaf in your tenure in providing . But Liesl? Oh, I know me a fellow reader when I see one!

So what of it, Sammy T? The time has come to lay down the gauntlet. Are you writing for readers and literary people? Are you writing to get people excited about literature? Or are you writing for an audience that nobody but you seems to understand? An audience perhaps of humorless bureaucrats?

Very truly yours,

Edward Champion

Add comment October 27th, 2006

Morlocks to Come After All

BBC: “Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge. The human race would peak in the year 3000, he said - before a decline due to dependence on technology.”

Add comment October 27th, 2006

Sam Tanenhaus Crosses the Line Between Advertising and Editorial

If there was any doubt that Sam Tanenhaus lacked integrity after his unethical assignment of John Dean to review Mark Felt’s memoir, Galleycat uncovers this disgraceful juxtaposition of an ad for Jonathan Franzen’s The Discomfort Zone running on the same page as a letter from Tom Bissell gushing about Franzen. (Bissell’s letter is in response to Daniel Mendelsohn’s review.) I observed two weeks ago that the timeliness of this review was suspect. (Mendelsohn’s review appeared almost two months after the book was reviewed by Michiko Kakutani.) Whether this had any bearing on securing the ad, only the folks inside the NYTBR will know for sure.

Even so, I haven’t seen such an obvious shill since the infamous Target-sponsored New Yorker. Ron Hogan emailed Sam Tanenhaus and Tanenhaus responded, “We don’t see any ads until we close” and further noted that “letters are neutral space, unlike reviews.” Except, of course, that Tom Bissell’s letter engages in highly subjective language that is a bit more than “neutral.”

Yeah. My dog ate my homework too.

Sam Tanenhaus sincerely believes that the NYTBR is the best newspaper book review section in the nation. But his continued incompetence leads me to believe that he doesn’t care about journalistic integrity and that he lacks even the forethought, something that every journalism major is aware of, to switch an ad like this to another page. That’s too bad. The NYTBR used to be something worth reading. Now, it’s just a joke.

[To offer something Tanenhaus’s way, I will say that the new issue has some interesting coverage. For example, how many review sections have you seen containing a full review of Fowles’ second notebook? But Tanenhaus interviewing Amy Sedaris in this week’s podcast is semi-disastrous, simply because Tanenhaus’s gruff interrogative questioning style is at odds with his desperate efforts to show how hip he is. Here’s a hint, Sam: loosen up. Also: What the fuck, Henry Alford?]

Add comment October 27th, 2006

Sam Tanenhaus, Let’s Have Lunch

BBC: “”The guitarist walked out, leaving his band-mate to complete the interview. Stern later said he was ‘very sorry.’ Townshend left a reply on his website, saying: ‘Howard, let’s have lunch.’”

Add comment October 27th, 2006

Responding to Dawkins

Terry Eagleton on Richard Dawkins: “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.”

And he’s just getting started.

There’s also an essay by Marilynne Robinson in the November Harper’s.

And this interesting Gary Wolf piece talking with Dawkins and a host of other New Atheists who share the belief that professing one’s atheism is now necessary.

7 comments October 27th, 2006

BSS #74: Jeff Bryant & Sidney Thompson

Guests: Jeff Bryant and Sidney Thompson

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Locked away by a Pittsburgh podcaster.

Subjects Discussed: Faulkner vs. R.E.M., Southern fiction, how music influences fiction, observing unusual behavior, Thompson’s musical background, family as a starting point, taboos, the happy medium between shock value and playing it safe, stereotypes, believability, escaping into fiction, misfits and loners, connecting with despicable characters, morality in fiction, racial assumptions at the Atlantic Monthly, presenting racial conflict in fiction, and thoughts on the Southern fiction/blue-state fiction divide.

(A co-production of the LBC, Pinky’s Paperhaus, and The Bat Segundo Show.)

Add comment October 27th, 2006

Good Day Mr. Kubrick

Hilarious. Unsurprisingly, no trace of this guy on the IMDB. (via MeFi)

1 comment October 27th, 2006

Esposito on Powers

Scott has an excellent Friday column on Richard Powers:

But if in Powers we lose a sense of mystery, we gain a sense of wonder. One of the most striking aspects of a Powers novel is the sense of genuine amazement at the natural world that the reader is left with. This is no small achievement tn an era in which it is often remarked that space shuttle flights are no longer televised because they have become so commonplace, so banal. Powers reveals a very real, very necessary awe at science and nature. This is no preachy exercise, no citing of facts and figures; it is something that is communicated through the stories and metaphors, something that takes hold of you as you read without Powers needing to lay it out for you. It is humbling, which I believe is exactly Powers’s point, to re-instill a needed sense of humility as humans gain truly God-like powers over their environment. This is something that neither Pynchon nor DeLillo does, something I think only a Richard Powers could do.

Add comment October 27th, 2006

Bat Segundo Only Gives Away Good Books

John Barlow, winner of the Bat Segundo Free Book Giveaway, weighs in on Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document.

Add comment October 26th, 2006

I Once Dated Someone Who Had This Condition, And, Strangely, I Didn’t Mind

Reuters: “Researchers are struggling to understand a rare medical condition where sufferers unknowingly demand, or actually have, sex while asleep, New Scientist magazine reported on Wednesday.”

Add comment October 26th, 2006

Another Roundtable

If you liked our Richard Powers roundtable, I’m pleased to report that I’m organizing another one in December. More details to come.

2 comments October 26th, 2006

BSS #73: Joe Eszterhas

Author: Joe Eszterhas

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Groping for borrowed salacious content.

Subjects Discussed: Ambrose Bierce, the screenwriter as god, exclamation points, Robert McKee, the “twisted little man” inside Eszterhas, cynics in Hollywood, William Goldman, the reasons for writing Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, on pinpointing commercial hits, bringing wives to studio meetings, greed, stealing props from films, the ethics of Hollywood business, fighting studio executives, crotch shots, Paul Verhoeven, blaming Bush for everything, responding to Joe Queenan’s review, bedding stars, Charlie Simpson’s Apocaylpse, Bill Clinton, studio movies vs. independent movies, Children of Glory, and writing novels.

Add comment October 25th, 2006

By the Light of the Subliminal Moon

Scientific American: “Even when such pictures were actively canceled out, subliminal images of female nudes helped heterosexual men find the orientation of a briefly shown abstract shape.”

Add comment October 25th, 2006

Sentence of the Week

“The penis, says Eid, is wonderfully resilient.”

Even better, it was printed in Forbes.

2 comments October 25th, 2006

You’re Rich, But There’s a Considerable Downside

The top-earning dead celebrities.

Add comment October 25th, 2006

Pass the Crayolas Please

Discover Your Literary Personality (via Books Inq.)

My results:

4 comments October 25th, 2006

BSS #72: Nora Ephron

Author: Nora Ephron

Condition of Mr. Segundo: Terse, but combative towards golden boys.

Subjects Discussed: The side effects of eating cake, book tour provisos, Marie Antoinette, superthin models, anatomical parts as literary inspiration, ageism, hair dye, Botox, responding to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, declarative sentences, David Markson, the relationship between exposing truth and drawing an audience, New Journalism, the newspaper environment in the 1970s, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, exclamation points, Jonathan Yardley’s reconsideration of Crazy Salad, the real Ephron vs. the written Ephron, the orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally…, dessert spoons, on not sleeping with JFK, Ephron as blogger, and using popular songs in movies.

Add comment October 25th, 2006

File Under Things You Really Didn’t Want to Know About Cacuasian Literary Authors

New York Post: “Denham also recalls that Mailer, one of her literary heroes, turned out to be a bit weird. At one party, Mailer and his second wife, Adele, stripped and began jumping up and down on a bed, with Adele trying to coax Denham to get naked, too. ‘Norman was just square, no particular waist or pectoral definition, sturdy legs, large at the knees,’ and an ‘ordinary’ sex organ.”

1 comment October 25th, 2006

Six Words

Wired ask numerous writers for stories contained in six words. (My favorite: Margaret Atwood’s “Starlet sex scandal. Giant squid involved.”) The folks at Metafilter took it one step further. (Alas, I too was seduced for a time while logged in at the blue. Damn these glorious haiku-like formats! Infinitely more addictive than goldfish crackers!)

1 comment October 25th, 2006

So Who is Millenia Black?

Millenia Black recently challenged her critics with this assertion:

For those who are of a practical mindset, and to demystify my previous post, yes, a complaint was indeed filed against the publisher the first week of this month (October), in the Southern District Court of New York. Such documents are public record and are readily accessible via a simple trip to the clerk’s office.

Calling Black’s bluff, I checked the Southern District of New York Court docket. There is no “Millenia Black” lawsuit, per se. There is, however, a lawsuit filed against Penguin Group (USA) Inc. and Signet (Black’s publisher) by one Nadine Aldred, residing in Orlando, Florida. The suit was filed on October 2, 2006, within the time frame suggested by Ms. Black. It is a civil rights case: Case No. 1:06-CV-07887 to be exact, assigned to Judge Paul A. Crotty. (And if anyone wants to drop by the Southern District of New York Court (Foley Square) and pick up copies of the complaint, you can tell the clerk that the case file is available in Volume CS1.)

Is Millenia Black the nom de plume of Nadine Aldred? Well, you make the call. I should note that this is the only case filed against Penguin Group (USA) in the month of October. Further, Ms. Black’s profile indicates that she is from Florida, which matches the location of Ms. Aldred.

Interestingly enough, Ms. Aldred has not retained an attorney for this. She’s filed the lawsuit pro se, which is a fancy Latin adjective that essentially indicates that Ms. Aldred is representing herself. (And why?)

When the complaint becomes available per the Southern District of New York Court’s ECF requirements, I will investigate further.

8 comments October 24th, 2006

Me Use Unnecessary Definite Articles Too! Can Me Be The The Prez?

Bush uses “the Google.”

1 comment October 24th, 2006

Mathematical Roundup

• e + j = ____
• a + k = ___ (b m)
• c + n = ___ (b f)
• g + o = ___
• h to p
• d + l = _____
• greatest value for d = michiko?
• i to o

a = opportunism
b = via
c = reading
d = bitter reviewer
e = Lee Goldberg
f = Syntax of Things
g = sex
h = former journalist
i = your favorite indie band
j = Germany
k = online virtual world
l = Richard Ford
m = Bookninja
n = empathy
o = fiction
p = blog

1 comment October 24th, 2006

Request for the Peanut Gallery

Okay, I’m working on something and I’ve ripped what little hair I have out of my head trying to find a specific story (possibly a short section of a novel) I’m trying to reference. We’re talking volumes ripped out of the library all over the floor. We’re talking crazed Google searches. We’re talking a few desperate emails to hard-core literary pals. This was something I read about fifteen years ago, written in a very poetic manner, that involves a man who walks the streets, who serves as a self-declared guard for a neighborhood community in an urban center but who is very much unappreciated, and whose services are scoffed at by the other people who live in the neighborhood. Think Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, but with the protagonist having more noble aspirations, a great call to duty for services that nobody around him can understand. It’s something that may have come before Ray Bradbury’s famous story “The Pedestrian,” which is similar, but not the story in question! I want to say that this was written at some point during the 1950s, but I’m not so sure. And this may have been the binding, because I think I checked this book out of a library, which is probably why I don’t have the book in question here.

I’m now considering the possibility that I somehow hallucinated this story, but I’m convinced that I read it somewhere. But it was long ago, in the days when I wasn’t so serious a reader, and I can’t recall the precise story. And this kills me, because normally I have a pretty good memory for things like this.

If anyone has any leads on this, I would be beyond appreciative! And perhaps I might send you some books or something. Any ideas what this story might be?

4 comments October 23rd, 2006

Birnbaum Alert

Robert Birnbaum chats with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Add comment October 23rd, 2006

This Week in “The End of YouTube”

Marketwatch: “On May 24, lawyers for Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures convinced a federal judge in San Francisco to issue a subpoena requiring YouTube to turn over details about a user who uploaded dialog from the movie studio’s “Twin Towers,” according to a copy of the document.”

Add comment October 23rd, 2006

But Will Inept Stick Figures Get the Less Artistically Inclined Through a Side Quest?

Wired: “It works like this: In Okami, you play as a wolf that is the incarnation of an ancient Japanese god — and that has the power to literally draw things into existence. At any point in the game, you can hit a button and the scene freezes, transforming into a piece of parchment. You wield a traditional Japanese brush and ink objects on the parchment. When you unfreeze the scene, presto: Whatever you’ve painted transforms into the real, solid thing.”

Add comment October 23rd, 2006

81 Murders to Commit, If I Were a Psychopath

How Many of Me? There are 82 people in the U.S. named Edward Champion. (via Tito)

2 comments October 23rd, 2006

I’ll Start Crying When “Bergdorf Blondes” Makes the Syllabus

Guardian: “Contemporary writers never used to feature on A-level syllabuses. For years, the nearest most candidates got to a living author were the poems that an elderly TS Eliot or WH Auden had published decades earlier. Even by the end of the 1970s, the most up-to-date fiction studied might be one of the novels published by William Golding in the 1950s. Nowadays things are different. This summer candidates were being examined on Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes and Louis de Bernières. Next summer it will be AS Byatt’s Possession and Michael Frayn’s Spies.”

Add comment October 23rd, 2006

Trudeau Stays the Course?

Washington Post: “It turns out he’s not afraid of publicity so much as he’s horrified at being perceived as the kind of person who wants publicity. He treasures his literary license to kill but feels a twinge of guilt that it isn’t really a fair fight. He’s a genuinely humble know-it-all. His regard for injured soldiers is sincere, his knowledge of their lingo profound, almost as if he’s one of them; watching this, you can’t help but hear faint, soul-rattling echoes of Vietnam, which he escaped, like many sons of privilege, by gaming the system. He’s got the greatest job on Earth — no boss, his own hours, enormous clout, public adulation, a seven-figure income, absolute creative freedom — but he speaks with longing about a different career altogether, one that the huge success of ‘Doonesbury’ ensured he’d never have.”

Add comment October 23rd, 2006

Book Standard Now Reports “Unbelievable Claims” As News

The Book Standard: “The unbelievable claim that O.J. Simpson was writing a book about how the murders of his ex-wife and her pal might have happened, had he committed them, turns out to be … not worth believing.”

Well, if the claim was so “unbelievable,” why then did The Book Standard report it as its top story on Thursday with the pretty “believable” headline “Author O.J. Simpson Gets $3.5 Mil For Confessional?” “Gets,” last time I checked, was a pretty foolproof transitive verb.

Add comment October 23rd, 2006

The Last Word on Millenia Black

Monica Jackson declares me a racist because I refuse to pursue the Millenia Black issue further.

I had hoped that my polite stance would be enough, but, if the cuffs are off, then my findings must be laid down on the table. Who knew that myopic demagogues like Monica Jackson were out there? People so fixed in their worldview that they cannot consider the entirely reasonable assumption that something that one person says on the Internet without a shred of supportive evidence may not be true.

First off, I am not in the habit of reporting a bullshit rumor and I am always grateful for reader corrections. I try to confirm information when I can through emails and phone calls. Here, for example, is what I’ve done about the Millenia Black matter:

I’ve talked with Millenia Black herself. I’ve talked with various people inside Penguin. I’ve attempted to contact people in the law firm who is allegedly handling the case. I’ve had exchanges with the bookstore owner. And the upshot is that the story doesn’t check out. This scenario is, as far as I can tell, a great deal of noise from an author who has no recourse for attention other than finger-pointing and lawsuit threats. Ever wonder why print journalists haven’t pursued this story? I mean, think about it. A major publishing house commits an act of apparent racism in the 21st century. It’s a perfectly interesting story that I’m sure any decent editor would lap up. Could it be that the facts are in question? That this may be a question of journalistic integrity? Could it be the same reason that newspapers didn’t immediately report the rumor planted by the National Inquirer and the Book Standard last week about O.J. Simpson getting paid $3.5 million for a book deal? Perhaps because it was utter horseshit denied by O.J. himself?

I find it ironic that the color of my skin is now being laid down as a qualifier. Is this not the same racist assumption that Ms. Black herself has accused others of all along?

Call me a racist all you want, but as Frederick Douglass once said, “I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”

8 comments October 23rd, 2006

The Departed

Contrary to the raves and plaudits now making the rounds, The Departed is not a Martin Scorsese masterpiece, but of the so-called Leo Trio (The Gangs of New York and The Aviator being the first two installments of Scorsese’s Faustian deal with the studios), it is the most satisfying and truest Scorsese picture of the bunch. It’s telling that a slightly lesser Scorsese mob film, sizzling with the kind of punch and life that few contemporary films seem capable of these days, stands so distinguished against its multiplex brethren. And this probably answers Kevin’s bemusement over why so many critics have hailed The Departed as the cat’s pajamas.

Make no mistake: this is an intelligent and engaging two and a half hour crime caper. It delivers the goods. It’s a grand kick to see Scorsese return to film with a playful ferocity. Scorsese is very much in his element here, layering his visuals with the kind of crackling detail often overlooked by today’s emerging filmmakers. Everything from the dollops of sweat congealing on Alec Baldwin’s shirt to the lowered pistol position on Mark Wahlberg’s belt has been carefully decided upon. Scorsese makes Boston his own, opting for cool blues and greens juxtaposed against a feeling of urban decay lurking beneath the antiseptic steel of upper-class life. It’s an interesting riff on Tom Stern’s use of color in Mystic River. Only Scorsese’s long-time cinematographer Michael Ballhaus could have pulled off an homage that felt so fresh.

The great surprise is that Leo actually acts in this one. Whether this is because Scorsese has, after three films, finally figured out how to manage Leo or because Scorsese cast Bostonians Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg in an effort to get Leo to up his game is anyone’s guess. But Leo achieves a vulnerability here that recalls the Leo of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and The Basketball Diaries that I suspect we won’t be seeing again in some years, particularly when he’s now being asked to don an unconvincing South African dialect for the upcoming Blood Diamond.

Matt Damon is, at long last, coming into his own as an actor. Like his role in Syriana, Damon plays another charming golden boy gone horribly askew. Damon has a screen quality which suggests a 1980s-era Michael Douglas in the making: the man who you can still empathize with even when his sleazy qualities come to the surface. In Scorsese’s hands, Colin Sullivan, the seemingly spotless state police officer seduced by betrayal, still keeps his cards close to his chest. Even in the film’s finale, we don’t quite know the full level of self-betrayal that this man is contending with. Even his attempt to pet a dog is fraught with meaning.

Scorsese keeps the pace going at a steady clip. The film moves so fast that it’s easy to overlook such preposterous plot elements such as the state police refusing to pull an officer off an investigation when a major figure is killed or the troublingly inconsistent behavior of Vera Farmiga’s psychiatrist. (Farmiga is very good in her role, but her presence here seems to be more “Oh shit! We have too many guys in this film! We need a token chick!”)

I should note that I haven’t seen Infernal Affairs, the film that The Departed is based on. So I have no basis for comparison. But I’d argue that The Departed serves, in part, as Scorsese’s response to Quentin Tarantino, a grand master both saluting his followers while schooling him for his puerile indiscretions. Consider the mysterious box that Matt Damon holds at the beginning, reminiscent of the mysterious suitcase in Pulp Fiction. Or the way Martin Sheen invites Leo into his home for leftover supper in answer to the half-hearted domesticity seen in the Kill Bill movies. Consider also the nuanced cartoonish nature of The Departed’s violence, where characters are massacred in over-the-top but absolutely fitting ways, reminiscent of Peckinpah’s artistic balance, rather than Kill Bill’s grindhouse excess.

On this latter point, I should observe that film geeks often forget that Scorsese has an almost absurdist relationship with violence in his films, starting from his student film The Big Shave and carrying on to such grandiose heights as Bringing Out the Dead (a film which I will confess I misread on my first viewing, only to discover that movie’s almost Moliere-like approach to the “New York as hell” metaphor). From the moment that Leo deals with the “men from Providence” shortly after finishing up some pasta, I was seduced by The Departed. It is violence that triggers the cracks of the film’s two central characters, much as it reveals the class-based chasms of the world around them. (How does Damon secure a capacious apartment with a “co-signer” anyhow? I think the answer’s in that box.)

I’ve made no mention of Nicholson, but I would contend that had De Niro occupied the role of Costello, the film could have easily dwindled into camp. And while this film needed a superstar heavy, I was more interested in Leo and Damon.

7 comments October 23rd, 2006

Roundup

• The New York Times investigates Aleksey Verner and he still comes across as a wanker. Paul Collins suggests that Verner is the second coming of Hugh Gallagher.
• Jason Boog asks Áine MacDermot about investigative journalism and procures a list of helpful links.
• Hurray, film noir! And speaking of film, I saw The Departed over the weekend and hope to offer some thoughts on what this means for both Scorsese and the film business later this week.
• Housekeeping #1: For those who have emailed me on the Millenia Black story this past week, after several conversations calling into question the veracity of what has been claimed, I have decided to stop pursuing it. I have neither the time nor the inclination to proceed further — unless, of course, a reputable publication pays me to write an investigative article. But if you remain curious as to the why, Lynne Scanlon comes the closest in her speculations.
• Housekeeping #2: And while we’re on the subject of overblown publishing industry scandals, a big amen to Miss Snark for her thoughts on L’Affaire Armstrong.
• Jim Holt quibbles over Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, but Mr. Asher finds problems within Mr. Holt’s review.
• Anthony Grafton on the history of academic charisma — specifically, William Clark’s book on the subject.
• Patrick Kurp reviews Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker.
• Are awards the death knell for literary culture? (via Bookninja)
• RIP Jane Wyatt.
• Poppy Z. Brite on planning out her novel. (via Chasing Ray)
• You say that Oprah is a thoughtful television show? Think again.
• At 64, Harrison Ford is “fit enough” to star as Indiana Jones. And by “fit,” Spielberg assures us that he’s only using the walker on weekends.
• Robert Bly will receive $775,000 for his personal archives. Memo to University of Minnesota: you can have my personal archives for the low, low price of $235,000. And you can pay 10% of this with a lifetime supply of Tootsie Roll Pops. Get in touch with my attorney.
• Is ghostwriting where the real money’s at?
• Video of Chris Ware at the Wisconsin Book Festival.
• You make the call: Does Tanenhaus thinks bloggers are dickheads? (Perhaps penis-shaped brownies are the remedy here.)
• Lauren Cerand on how important bloggers are to publicity.
• As yet unpublished in the States (a solecism for which this Faber fan hopes some publisher will atone for), John Barlow takes a look at Michael Faber’s The Apple.
• Stephen King: MoveOn pitchman.

1 comment October 23rd, 2006

Pynchon Red Alert

I’ve been informed that Against the Day is now in transit from New York. Reading and reporting will begin IMMEDIATELY upon its arrival.

[UPDATE: Mr. Orthofer has his copy and offers some details.]

4 comments October 23rd, 2006

Litblog Sideshow

This week at the LBC, our first finalist, Sidney Thompson’s Sideshow, is discussed by various LBC members. We’re breaking down the discussion story by story, but be sure to look out for an appearance by Sidney Thompson, a podcast featuring nominator Jeff Bryant and Thompson (in cahoots with the fantastic Pinky’s Paperhaus), and considerably more.

Add comment October 23rd, 2006

Lisey’s Story Review

My review of Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story appears in today’s Philadelphia Inquirer.

3 comments October 22nd, 2006

James Murphy Sells Out to Nike

LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy has apparently created a track called “45:33″ for Nike. The song, designed for a workout, is available through iTunes for $9.99. In other words, Bittorrent is your friend.

Add comment October 20th, 2006

Oliver Sacks Victimized by Richard Powers?

As bad as William Deresiewicz’s Echo Maker review was, it doesn’t hold a candle to the silly leaps in logic laid down by Craig Seligman, who accuses Richard Powers of victimizing Oliver Sacks:

Modeling Weber so closely on Sacks was mildly insane, because it points you toward Sacks’s rigorous prose — next to which the heated emotions and the elaborate literary scaffoldings in this book seem overcomplicated and false. If there’s exploitation here, the victim is Oliver Sacks.

Given that there are probably no more than a few pages of “Weber”’s work within The Echo Maker, I’m wondering precisely how Powers has pointed towards Sacks’ prose (Sacks’ ideas and techniques, perhaps; but what does Sacks’ prose style have to do with it?). I believe it can be safely stated that Sacks was certainly one of the inspirations for the Weber character, but I think it’s up to the reader to determine these implicit connections.

1 comment October 20th, 2006

Bringing New Meaning to Autofellatio

8 Films Illustrating That Oral Sex and Cars Don’t Mix (via Cinetrix)

2 comments October 20th, 2006

And the Great Content Purges, Post-Google Deal, Begin

BBC: “Video-sharing service YouTube has wiped nearly 30,000 files from its website after Japanese media companies said their copyright was being infringed.”

Also, Annalee Newitz has some interesting thoughts on the fundamental differences between Google and YouTube.

Add comment October 20th, 2006

No Brownies for Dwight Garner Either!

In this week’s Inside the List, Dwight Garner remarks upon the Observer’s riff upon the NYTBR list and notes, “One sad and striking thing about this list of beautiful books is that only one, McEwan’s ‘Atonement,’ appeared on the Times best-seller list, in hardcover or soft.”

I sincerely hope this is simply an inept ironic statement on how literary works often don’t sell as well as bestsellers. But I have a sneaking suspicion that Garner has been having one too many drinks from the Tanenhaus Kooky Kool-Aid Kooler. The NYTBR contemporary fiction list was roundly mocked precisely because it was less about literary merit and more about extremely obvious literary titles that elitists, clearly out of touch with the habits of anyone under 50, would select. Indeed, why should sales have any bearing on literary merit at all? With this attitude, perhaps this explains why the NYTBR is often more of a hoary tabloid than an honorable publication.

NO BROWNIES FOR DWIGHT! THE BROWNIES HAVE BEEN DENIED!

3 comments October 20th, 2006

Echo Hides the Hurt

Colson Whitehead on Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker.

Add comment October 20th, 2006

Children’s Books: The New Market for Flash Fiction?

BBC: “The average time spent reading was 10 to 15 minutes and over a quarter of those surveyed admitted to skipping pages to speed up the bedtime story.” (via Booksquare)

Add comment October 20th, 2006

I’m Convinced Dan Wickett Had a Hand In This “Remedy”

Publishers Weekly: “Because of the unusual format of Wickett’s Remedy (side notes appear in the margins of many pages), it had to be re-typeset for the paperback, which gave Goldberg the rare opportunity to substantially rewrite parts of the novel.”

2 comments October 20th, 2006

The Book Standard’s Editorial Policy: Unreliable Fourth-Hand Gossip is Now “Publishing News”

Those who still believe that the Book Standard is a trustworthy beacon of journalism might wish to observe this unsigned item about O.J. Simpson getting $3.5 million for an upcoming memoir called If I Did It, which Galleycat is also questioning.

There are several reasons not to believe this:

1. The source is the National Enquirer, apparently a “secret source” who spoke to the Enquirer.
2. There is no publisher named for this deal. (Little, Brown was the publisher of O.J.’s last book.)
3. O.J. Simpson has already authored a book called I Want To Tell You, which appeared in 1995 and for which O.J. received a mere $1 million advance (along with $3 million more).
4. While I Want To Tell You was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and sold half a million copies, it’s worth noting that these sales came when O.J. mania was in the air. There is nothing to suggest that anything O.J. Simpson authors eleven years later will have the same effect.

Given these circumstances, why did the Book Standard bother to report this without making a few calls to confirm the veracity of this rumor? Are they truly that lazy over there?

2 comments October 20th, 2006

Next Up: Pynchon & Salinger in Elle

How the fuck did Wired get to “hang out” with Cormac McCarthy?

2 comments October 20th, 2006

Of Course, Tolstoy’s Original 10,000 Page Manuscript Was Even More “Restrained.”

Scott Esposito reviews War and Peace and finds it “unfortunately restrained.”

1 comment October 20th, 2006

Echo Maker Roundtable #5

(This is the fifth in a five-part roundtable discussion of Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker. Be sure to check out Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.)

Richard Powers writes:

Holy Hippocampus (Bat Man): settling into this braided conversation gives me the weirdest and most wonderful sense of estrangement. And having to play the Author (while not quite believing the role) feels a little like a Weber-like misidentification syndrome, say, clonal pluralization of the self, or like some kind of anti-Capgras, where everyone here feels kin-deep to me, except me!

In any case, I’ve felt so much pleasure in the comments so far that I really hesitate to do any additional water-muddying at all. But as several folks have already pointed out, the book is all about the long, inescapable descent into the messiness of existence. So here goes No One.

I was thrilled by Judith’s invocation of Stevens (after Yeats, the poet who has meant the most to me) and by Jessica’s mention of Stoppard (the body of contemporary work I covet most). To me, they are both Apollonian, formal, neocortex writers who, in their very different ways, find their ways back into the swirling, Dionysian amygdala. This was my aim in Echo Maker: to put forward, at the same time, a glimpse of the solid, continuous, stable, perfect story we try to fashion about the world and about ourselves, while at the same time to lift the rug and glimpse the amorphous, improvised, messy, crack-strewn, gaping thing underneath all that narration.

To this end, my technique was what some scholars of narrative have called double voicing. Every section of the book (until a few passages at the end) is so closely focalized through Mark, Karin, or Weber that even the narration of material event is voiced entirely through their cognitive process: the world is nothing more than what these sensibilities assemble, without any appeal to outside authority.

(In this light: Jenny raises the valuable and highly-charged [don’t get excited, Jessica!] question of using scientific information, when that info is already familiar in non-fictional forms. To me, all the science in the book is less data in itself than highly loaded material *inside* Weber’s (or Karin’s, etc.) psyche. What happens to a man who knows all these facts intellectually, when he is suddenly slammed with them viscerally, personally? By the way, I heartily second Jenny’s recommendation of Ramachandran, for deeper looks at the material *as* scientific material, and I’ll add the names Feinberg, Gazzaniga, Broks, Damasio, and Skoyles—an amazing and growing body of literature.)

But as Levi suggests, all this exploration of the locked room of brain and memory circles back on the question of empathy. Are we sealed off inside our own narratives, or can we briefly know what it means to be another person, another species, another earlier or later version of our own shifting selves? Can our perfect, self-protecting story break and reassemble in a way that is large enough to include someone else’s? This may connect to Carolyn’s insight into how “characters” in each of our authored stories double back to challenge and give life to their would-be authors—each of us, condemned to “bring back” someone else.

I loved Sarah’s account of her little bout of reduplicative paramnesia on returning to NY after finishing the book. My four years of working on the book were filled with those quicksand moments. I’d go to these evening parties and involuntarily recreate whatever misidentification I’d just been reading and writing about all day. Story as sympathetic symptom adoption! At best, I hope the book can raise in the reader a profound doubt about the stability and reliability of her own self-narration, while suggesting that Capgras and the like are not just pathological exceptions but resemble transient conditions inside baseline consciousness. And that fact can open us to one another. Only in self-uncertainty can we make a little space for someone else’s story.

I definitely understand Judith’s worries about brokenness and closure. For me, even as the plot “wraps up” the mystery of the note and night of the accident, it tears open all the real questions: will Mark and Karin recognize each other, this time next year? (Perhaps they will never be closer than that moment, before his chemical “cure,” when he asks the Kopy Karin to remember him, even if his real sister reappears.) Will Barbara face down her conscience, or flee? If she stays, will Karin come to terms with what Barbara did? Is Karsh right that Karin will come back soon, as she always does? Where will Daniel go, when he realizes that even Alaska is already irreversibly compromised? Will Weber stay raw to his dismantling over the last year, or will he tidy himself back up (as he did with his cleaned-up memories of Barbara’s precursors)? Messiness: unlivable, inescapable, invaluable, cyclical…

I’ve probably gone on too long already, even without taking up Ed’s nature/nurture challenge, Dan’s question about hard-wiring, Megan’s musing on the cranes’ true memory, or Jessica’s doosey about the precise location of God in the tangled network. But let me say how wild it is (in all senses) to share symptoms with a group of total strangers, about whose age, race, location, nature, etc. I have no clue, but who feel weirdly familiar to me, simply for our having briefly inhabited the cracks in the same story.

Add comment October 20th, 2006

Deconstructing Yankovic

Slate: “Unlike Salvador Dalí or Mel Gibson, Yankovic isn’t essentially weird—i.e., a figure with whom we have nothing in common. In fact, the opposite is true. Weird Al’s essential service is to point out that, from the perspective of the middle-class suburban lifeworld, pop culture itself is weird. This is the paradox of Weird Al’s weirdness: He’s actually Normal Al, a common-sensical, conservative force. He’s Everyman trapped on Neverland Ranch, exposing as many stylistic excesses and false profundities as he can.”

Add comment October 19th, 2006

Move Over Foley…

…here’s something seedier.

Add comment October 19th, 2006

A Keep Away From Runaround Sue

Even more absurd, she was replaced by an empty chair at her own request.

Add comment October 19th, 2006

Lacking Knife, Bush Attempts to Carve Jack O’Lantern With Idiotic Stare

1 comment October 19th, 2006

Pretention Every Day?

Brilliant satirical sendup of “photo every day” videos.

2 comments October 19th, 2006

Perhaps This Explains Why I Pour Salt on My Wrist Just Before a Blog Post

New Scientist: “The US could be rife with ‘internet addicts’ who are as clinically ill as alcoholics, according to psychiatrists involved in a nationwide study….Most disturbing, according to the study’s lead author Elias Aboujaoude, is the discovery that some people hide their internet surfing, or go online to cure foul moods – behaviour that mirrors the way alcoholics behave.”

1 comment October 19th, 2006

(Middle Class) Smart Women Don’t Necessarily Finish Last

Yahoo: “The Center for Economic and Policy Research reports that women ages 28 to 35 who earn more than $55,000 a year (roughly the top 10%) are just as likely to be married as other women who work full-time. Indeed, Whelan’s survey found that 90% of high-achieving men want a spouse who is as smart as they are, and 71% say a woman’s success makes her more desirable as a wife. Maybe it’s because these men do want to marry Mommy - 72% of moms of high-achieving men worked outside the home as they raised their sons.”

Add comment October 19th, 2006

A Literary Question With Thrust

Various authors, including Nell Freudenberger and Meg Wolitzer, have been asked by NOW Magazine to reveal which literary characters they’d like to sleep with. I like Freudenberger’s answer. Wolitzer’s response, on the other hand, is the kind of canned response I’d expect from an English undergraduate. Mr. Darcy indeed. Right. And Paul is your favorite Beatle.

1 comment October 19th, 2006

Witold Rybczynski: Chickenhead of the Month

Journalistically speaking, Witold Rybczynski is like a paunchy, loutish drunk guzzling MGD at a dive that was cool in 1995 but that’s gone steadily downhill, incapable of citing specific examples (Maybeck had plenty of homegrown architectural followers, you foolish fuck), while he’s castigating two thirds of the bar through his rambling and uninformed generalizations and bitter dismissals, and who people would beat the shit out of if he weren’t so pathetic in articulating arguments or if it weren’t so easy to get the hubristic toad to buy you a drink because you smile and nod as he can’t stop boasting about his apparent “genius.”

(In other words, nobody fucks with my city and gets away with it.)

Add comment October 19th, 2006

Pesky Muppet Quizzes

I’m Elmo too! I protest with Gwenda. Why not the Snuffleupagus!

2 comments October 19th, 2006

Disney Confirms Its Reputation As a Bunch of Humorless Pricks

BBC: “Disney has condemned staff at its Paris theme park who took part in a joke video where they dressed as cartoon characters simulating sex.”

Add comment October 19th, 2006

RIP Miriam Engelberg

Sad news. I never got the chance to meet Engelberg, who lived here in San Francisco. But she was a good memorist and, by all reports I’ve heard, a good person. (via Galleycat)

Add comment October 19th, 2006

Technology and Terrified Book Critics

Over at Critical Mass, Ellen Heltzel points (but doesn’t link) to this Terry Caesar essay. Caesar suggests that when a college student sits down to read a book, she might find difficulty looking for a space to read. Apparently, Caesar and Heltzel don’t seem to understand that the United States, which recently surpassed the 300 million population mark, has 3,537,441 square miles, or a little over a tenth of a square mile for each person. For those playing at home, that’s about 528 square feet per person. Do you mean to tell me that with this kind of mutable density, there isn’t anywhere to go to read? There isn’t anywhere to be alone with a book?

Further, Caesar and Heltzel suggest, rather foolishly, that text messaging, instant messaging, and television, in Heltzel’s words, “promote groupthink” and are thus “a dangerous place to be in a democracy.” Caesar (never was there a more ridiculous byline for a generalizer) cites an empirical example. The daughter of one of his friends flunks out of a state university because “she could never actually read anywhere.” But instead of suggesting that this student was not particularly effective at locating a reading environment that suited her (or, for that matter, suggesting that good grades aren’t necessarily reflective of good reading; or, for that matter, considering the other circumstantial factors which might have caused this student to drop out), Caesar makes an astonishing leap in logic, writing that “the girl fell victim to the energies of a text-messaged, i-Poded [sic] and above all cell-phoned American culture.”

First off, even if we assume the unlikely scenario that students are putting down their books to text message each other every paragraph or that these students cannot attune to their surroundings, what exactly about the freeflow exchange of information is “dangerous?”

If Caesar and Heltzel are going to point the finger at technology, why stop there? What about the forms of communication that came before? Why not rail against the letter or everyday conversation, where people (shocK! gasp! horror!) actually talk and thus engage (in Heltzel’s words) in “groupthink?” By what stretch of the imagination does a student sending an IM reading “hey! meet u at party; book great!!! byob lulz” become groupthink? I really wish Caesar and Heltzel would have had the courage to state what might really be on their minds: perhaps it is they who can neither understand nor adapt to the swift beat of technology. But instead of trying to determine how it exists in relation to culture and reading, they rail against it with hasty generalizations and without taking the time to understand it.

2 comments October 19th, 2006

The Same Could Be Said of Her Novels

Danielle Steel: “For 25 years, I’ve been asked to put my name on a fragrance, and Anna Wintour made the match. I finally decided if it brings me some money, why not?”

Am I bad for thinking about Danielle Steel crawling through an urban gutter without her financial safety net? I want to see Steel confronted by cokehead editors who demand that she learn how to write. And then I want to see her forced to come to terms, like the hacks who languish in the slush pile (thank you, editors!), with the almost certain fact that she has no talent. And if, sans the stupendous sales of her shitty novels, she ends up whoring herself out in a crackhouse or marrying some affluent bozo for money, I contend that this would be a nobler service to humanity than the relentless solipsism that steers her plastic and vacuous mug through newspapers.

I’m probably a bad man for thinking these things. But then I have an issue with people who do things exclusively for commercial purposes. I’m not against commercialism completely. I realize we live in a capitalist society and there are certain (ethical) things we must do to get by. But I do take issue with folks who would rather live extravagantly than write extravagantly (and by “extravagantly,” I single out not necessarily showy prose, but those who write with great nuance). The Danielle Steels, John Grishams, Dan Browns, and Chuck Klostermans of our world so thoroughly debase the great art of writing that the great fury I feel for their pestilent contributions to American letters sometimes has me walking for miles to calm down. Only someone with a sophist sense of the world could find comfort in these authors. Only an artless savage could anticipate any of their next books.

(via Bookdwarf)

5 comments October 19th, 2006

All He Needs is a Chain-Smoking Habit

Man, Keith Olbermann really is angling to be the 21st century Edward R. Murrow.

2 comments October 19th, 2006

Echo Maker Roundtable #4

(This is the fourth in a five-part roundtable discussion of Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker. Be sure to check out Part One, Part Two, and Part Three, and Part Five.)

[NOTE TO READER: Because this particular conversation reveals plot points about the end of the book, the text has been set in white to protect readers from spoilers. If you would like to read this text, use your cursor to highlight the blank spaces.]

Jessica Stockton writes:

I am No One
but Tonight on North Line Road
GOD led me to you
so You could Live
and bring back someone else.

The totemic note that sets the structure of the novel, which we ultimately find out was written by all-American, fucked-up Mark Schluter himself (sorry for the spoiler if you haven’t finished it), has something of the outsider artist about it: those improper capitals and line breaks making a kind of deeper, even mystical sense — whether or not they were consciously placed. Talk about cyclical, Ed: Mark’s desperate point in his last moments before the brain spike that changed him into someone else was that all-American, fucked-up Mark Schluter himself Barbara (though he doesn’t know her yet) must follow the same path he has (like a crane?) and act as a savior. The implication at the novel’s end is that all-American, fucked-up Mark Schluter himself,has something of the outsider artist about it: those improper capitals and line breaks making a kind of deeper, even mystical sense, whether or not they were consciously placed. Talk about cyclical, Ed: Mark’s desperate point in his last moments before the brain spike that changed him into someone else was that Barbara (though he doesn’t know her yet) must follow the same path he has (like a crane?) and act as a savior. The implication at the novel’s end is that it may be the cranes she is destined to save (if Mark’s efforts to get her involved in the Refuge and contribute her reporter’s skills are successful); though could it also be Weber she saves, or Karin, or Mark himself? The pattern is a little messy, but that’s also in keeping with the themes of the novel. I love Sarah’s point that some of the novel’s messiness and even its imperfection is a structure-reflects-content thing about the complexity and illogic of brain circuits and relationships and the whole human thing.

One thing that no one’s pointed out is the oddity of Mark evoking “GOD” in his note — he doesn’t seem particularly religious before or after the accident, and it would seem his experiences with his wacked-out religious fanatic mom would have soured him on the whole project. It seems to be something deep in Mark’s brain and his culture that comes out only at this most intense of moments. (To take a stab at Ed’s question: maybe it’s the environment that creates the latent makeup, the Midwest acting as a sort of mini-evolutionary petri dish to breed a certain kind of person and way of thinking, whether or not they ultimately become aware of it.) I think another one of the big American/social themes of the novel is that really old one: where does God fit in as we learn more through science, and does embracing God mean rejecting acquired knowledge? The scene with Karin and Bonnie terrified over the suggestion that the idea of God is just a set of wires in the head is their most powerful scene together, and Karin’s unvoiced thoughts go a long way toward articulating what seems to be Powers’ less extreme take on it. But reading between the lines as Powers seems to ask us to do, it’s the church-choked town of Kearney that’s soaking up the water resources that keep the cranes around; so maybe it’s God vs. nature? Honestly, I don’t think so. I’d be curious what Mr. Powers would say about it, but I imagine he would be more likely to say that crane’s memories of migration and human’s ideas of God are somewhat the same, a way to navigate the world even as it changes around you, modified as necessary but no less “real” than the ground they travel
over.

As an integrator and a see-both-sides kind of writer, it seems unlikely that Powers is interested in contributing to the right/religious vs. left/environmentalist polarization that was kicking into higher gear at the time the novel is set.

And that’s another big-picture-reflects-small picture part of the novel that has been talked about in some of the interviews: the traumatic event of 9/11 making America lose its memory, refuse to recognize its closest kin (all men being created equal) and spin strange, self-justifying delusions. Mark is looking for the author of the note. America is also looking for itself. Mark can ultimately take a drug that calms his frying circuits enough to re-recognize his loved ones and start to put his life back together. Is there a comparative measure possible for the body politic, or is it too far gone?

Carolyn Kellogg writes:

This is fun. I deliberated for a while about what to write but Jessica’s thoughts on the note got me thinking …. this.

The mystery of the note-writer is one of the things that drives the plot; Mark goes to extraordinary lengths to figure out who it might have been. The fact that we get to the end and Mark has written the note himself is both shocking and, really, the only possible answer (and, yes, Ed, cyclical). It’s a lovely reversal: what Mark is looking for, the person with the answers about his accident, is himself. But it’s a former version of himself, a post-accident, pre-Capgras Mark, one that will disappear as soon as the note is written. It’s another fractured self, one that is lost but for what is captured on paper.

What I read in the text was that Mark was addressing Barbara. Mark writes: GOD let me [Mark] to you [Barbara]. Mark is saving Barbara. She stepped in front of his truck, wanting to die; by steering away from her, Mark saved her life.

I picture Mark in the truck, at the crash. Everything is dark. His head is bloodied. His truck has landed among the birds gathered in the wetland, the cranes, with their “blood red” heads. Hmm. Mark is like a crane. Reading the Bookforum review with Powers, he says the inspiration for the book came when he happened across the crane migration. Taking these two things together, isn’t the note also about authorial inspiration? Mark, the character, speaking to Powers, the writer?

I am No One
But tonight on North Line Road
GOD let me to you
so you could live
and bring back someone else.

Mark doesn’t exist (”I am No One”) until Powers invents him. When Powers is on the road and sees the cranes, the story is born. With his bloody head, Mark is a crane out in that field. And with divine inspiration for a new novel — divinity being naturelike more than churchlike, but that’s just me — the author again has a reason to live, bringing back not just Mark but the whole kaboodle of “someone else”s that make up The Echo Maker.

Maybe it’s a little extreme to say that characters exist to give life to an author (”so you could live”). But Gerald Weber’s story is of a writer who’s lost confidence, of an author in crisis. And so much of The Echo Maker is about the construction of narrative, whether physically in the brain, psychologically, with an affliction like Capgras, or through memory and the stories we tell (or don’t, like Barbara) — that I think the note can also be seen as being about narrative. Even as being about the writing process itself.

Levi Asher writes:

I’ll take a shot at Ed’s question (”is it the environment that causes these characters to disconnect or is it the characters’ latent makeup?”). The first thing that comes to mind is how much the characters in this book *do* connect, as well as how much they yearn to connect with each other when they are unable to do so.

A few of us have noted with pleasure the central place a brother-sister bond holds in this book. Mark Schluter is such a likable character, and the warmth he holds for the idea of his sister is deeply touching (as is the warmth he feels for his lost dog, his lost home, his lost job, his lost truck). Mark also yearns to connect with Bonnie, Barbara, Gerard Weber and even his old rejected best friend Daniel. He’s a smart-ass who covers up his vulnerability with constant insults (”Kopy Karin”, “The Incredible Shrinking Man”) and yet the character practically gushes over with love for those around him. The humanity Mark Schluter evokes is one of the most remarkable things in this book, and added greatly to my enjoyment of it.

But Mark Schluter isn’t the only one hungry for connection. There’s a lot of hooking-up in this book! The book portrays a sudden clustering-together of humanity, almost a migration of people to the Platte plains. Emotions abound in this book — hurt feelings and new attractions and past resentments and new fascinations fly in all directions. And yet, it is a book about disconnection, about the failure to recognize the ones we love best. My best shot at an answer to Ed’s question is that it is an overflow of emotion — an overabundance of connection — that causes these characters to disconnect.

And I don’t believe this condition is found only in Nebraska, or only occurs as a result of brain injury. I’m pretty sure this is meant to be a universal condition.

I see two hints of this in the book. When Gerard Weber is talking to Dr. Hayes, he suggests that there must be an emotional basis to Mark’s syndrome. This is later apparently negated by the success of drug therapy, and yet we know as readers that Weber’s point remains important despite the ironic “easy solution” of an anti-psychotic drug.

The second hint is when Karin asks Mark whether their father ever abused him. This single mention is never returned to, never explained. Certainly, though, it relates to Weber’s point when talking to Hayes. There was some trauma — some reason why Mark clutched with sudden fear at Karin the first time he saw her face in the hospital, before the brain swelling that made his condition worse. Whatever is the answer to the question, it has something to do with this.

Dan Wickett writes:

Ed puts forth a question for us, specifically referring to incidents affecting Karin, and Gerald Weber:

“… is it the environment that causes these characters to disconnect or is it the characters’ latent makeup? Are they like the cranes, migrating by instinct, congregating in a diner to meet their spouses by complete coincidence?”

I wonder if it can’t be a combination of the two? There’s at least a minor assertion that even the cranes are not working solely on instinct alone:

The fledged crane colt follows his parents back to a home he must learn to come from. He must see the loop once, to memorize its markers. This route is a tradition, a ritual that changes only slightly, passed down through generations. (277)

And to look at Ed’s reference above, while Gerald Weber did meet his future spouse by complete coincidence, he was not in the diner by chance – he had been sent there specifically to find his potential future mate by friends. Without that aspect of his environment, does he boldly walk up to Sylvie and begin talking to her? Probably not based on his history.

I think Powers has differentiated his characters widely enough to make it very difficult, if not impossible, to unequivocally state it is environment or instinct. In the cases of Karin and Weber, you have two extremely different individuals. Karin was constantly beaten down by her father, growing up wanting nothing more than to receive acceptance and love. She seems to me to be on a very cyclical life plan, moving from one person to another throughout her life, searching for the one that she can conform to their ideal.

Weber, on the other hand, seemingly had it all. An enduring marriage, a successful child (though her sexuality completely throws him), and has become famous in his field through the success of his first couple of books. His life is more like a sin curve, going right up to a peak, and then plummeting drastically (with the seeming probability by the end of the novel that he’d hit that bottom and was on the rise again). He isn’t only reacting to critical response to his book, the questions he is being asked cause him to question not just his work, but his ethics, his morals, his complete person. Has he been nothing more than a vulture, picking the bits of flesh and mind from patients (victims?) that he needs and leaving the carcasses behind?

Their scenarios, as well as those of Barbara, Rupp, Duane, and nearly every character in The Echo Maker, has me wondering if perhaps Powers is noting that one instinct we all share is that of self-indulgence. Our environments may lead us in different paths towards how we work towards it, but instinctively, we all are drawn to it.

Megan Sullivan writes:

Okay, I don’t have much to say. Lots to think about though. I feel the need to go back and reread major portions of the book this weekend.

One of the things I noticed in the book is that though the characters all seem disconnected from the world at times, Powers gives them a connection at some point in the book. Karin and Mark recognize each other not as brother and sister, but as lost souls at the Fourth of July celebration. Weber feels like he recognizes Barbara from the moment they meet (which is really the second time they’ve seen each other). And everyone seems to want to recognize someone or something, be it their “mission” or whatnot or themselves in many of their cases. Perhaps Dan, Powers is saying that the one thing all humans have in common is the fact that we yearn to recognize, ourselves and others. That the disconnect in life could be both natural and man-made but the point is that we all struggle to overcome it?

Add comment October 19th, 2006

The Hold Steady

I haven’t yet listened to the new album, Boys and Girls in America. I plan to rectify this solecism soon. What I can tell you is that I saw them Tuesday night and I can tell you, with very little doubts, that these guys kick ass live. Like Tito, who was there with me, I’m still percolating upon this fantastic live experience. But I hope to offer substantive thoughts soon. But I would advise all San Francisco music fans to avoid the band Black Fur, if at all possible. Without a doubt, Black Fur was one of the most ridiculous and self-pitying bands I have seen on stage in the past two years. The reasons and the report, I hope, will come later.

In the meantime, check out the Hold Steady’s new video, which I suspect owes an inspiration to the infamous Whicker’s World parody from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. (Yes, Alan Whicker is a real person.)

[UPDATE: I’ve now listened to the new album twice and, while I’m still letting my impressions kick in, overall, I think I like it more than Tito did — at least in the early rounds. More to come later.]

1 comment October 19th, 2006

The Other Side of Neal Pollack

Marrit Ingram: “Two things struck me. One is that ‘Preschool of Rock’ seemed awfully familiar, right down to the music-lessons motif and ‘Iron Man’ references. Why, I’d written this article myself in 2004, when it was syndicated on AlterNet and noted across the Web. Stung, I blogged links to both pieces and asked readers for their impressions. A couple of people encouraged me to investigate the similarities. Another reasoned that Pollack ‘probably just never considered any literature that deals with the parents’ perspective before he himself became a parent, and now he thinks he’s inventing the wheel, or fire, so that we can all follow his light, admiring his insights.’ In either case, Pollack’s piece seemed to confirm the bad rap he got in New York Magazine, and I was less inclined to defend him if what he wants is praise for serving beer and punk at playgroup.”

2 comments October 18th, 2006

Influential Fiction

The 101 Most Influential People Who Never Lived.

2 comments October 18th, 2006

Phil Collins’ Divorce Bills Causes Avarice, Unnecessary Reunion and More Crappy Music

BBC: “Collins had already voiced interest in a reunion before he announced his spilt from Orianne, his wife of six years, in March.”

Add comment October 18th, 2006

Roundup

• The Beatles’ Discography in Limerick Form.
• Coover & Silverblatt (via Rake).
• Why do books have to be ugly?
• The Myths of Writing (via Booksquare).
• C. Max Magee on Tin House’s graphic issue.
• The Man Asian Literary Prize? What George said.
• Verizon to give grant for literary services. And by literary services, I think we all know that this means more text message haikus.
• Apparently, the owner of Centuries and Sleuths really, really, really likes Erik Larson.
• Did Theo Marzials write the worst poem ever?
• Laura Miller on Laura Kipnis.
• Spy Magazine stuff on YouTube. (via Waxy)

Add comment October 18th, 2006

Echo Maker Roundtable #3

(This is the third in a five-part roundtable discussion of Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker. Be sure to check out Part One, Part Two, Part Four, and Part Five.)

Dan Wickett writes:

Like Levi, and it seems Sarah, I’m indebted to Ed and his roundtable idea as I’d not read any Powers before, and now have a small mountain of books I look forward to getting into soon.

I think Powers has done a magnificent job, with The Echo Maker, in giving his readers a great deal to think about. The storyline of Mark Schluter and Capgras Syndrome, a condition I’m going to assume most are unaware of, would have been thought provoking enough, but the inclusion of cognitive neurologist, Gerald Weber, a man who has observed and taken case studies over the past two decades allows Powers to drop many different neurological syndromes onto the reader throughout.

Reading the various anecdotes Weber either tossed out to others in the novel, or thought to himself, left me wondering just how rare it is for a person to see him or herself, others, or the world, in what might be considered a normal way? Is it possible that a child who never seems to be able to stop him or herself from doing something we believe that they know they will get in trouble for, is actually just acting as their neurological system allows them to, and not out of some obstinance?

Not having read other work by Powers (yet!), but having read an interview or two that he’s given, it’s pretty apparent, as others before me have mentioned, that he’s a writer of ideas, and I’ve seen his name linked with writers such as Delillo and Pynchon in this regard. I think one of the more difficult aspects for such a novelist is balancing along that very thin wire that holds him or her from falling too far into ideas and not writing about characters that the reader will care about — just creating enough to allow them to get into the ideas they want to dig into — something akin to an old Hollywood set with wooden fronts for buildings because the scene was going to be out on the street and not inside.

Powers, at least in The Echo Maker, has kept his balance. There are a good five or six characters within that I was interested in enough to worry about how the ideas were affecting them, and not just about the ideas themselves. Like Jenny, I love the fact that Powers concentrated so much on a sibling relationship, allowing Mark and Karin to delve into their individual and combined relationships with their parents as well. While marriage, and one’s nuclear family is certainly an important aspect to who we are, the fact is, most of us live with our parents and a sibling or two for the developmental stages of our lives, and especially through the stages where we develop the most in terms of neurological issues.

Megan Sullivan wrote:

Wow, people have thrown out lots of interesting ideas and questions. One of the things I love best about Powers is that his books always draw deep discussion. No matter the topic, I usually end up thinking long and hard about what I’ve just read. With The Echo Maker I would say that he’s succeeded in creating a novel of ideas complete with complex believable characters, which most critics don’t seem to think possible.

Like Dan, I found the relationship between Mark and Karin one of the more fascinating aspects of this book. Familial roles are hard to change. They seem fixed and can often seem like a burden. I know that when I go visit my family, we fall into old familiar patterns. Once Karin’s role as the steady caretaker is taken away by Mark’s Capgras, she loses her identity. WIthout those familiar “landmarks” how is she supposed to find her way? How does the crane find its way?

Also, I wonder if Powers is suggesting that the cranes and possibly Nature are the only real possessors of true memories. This passage struck me: “He blunders toward that fact, the only one large enough to bring him home, falling backward toward the incommunicable, the unrecognized, the past he has irreparably damaged, just by being, Destroyed and remade with every thought. A thought he needs to tell someone before it, too, goes.” (451) Nothing we remember can be completely accurate. Yet the birds are able to navigate their way back and forth each year, even with landscape changed by the vagaries of mankind. It’s imprinted, its memory is a map.

Ok, I’ll stop there. I’ve got a lot more to think about and I’m looking foward to more emails.

Edward Champion wrote:

Well, folks, you’ve set down some very interesting observations. Before I offer some additional thoughts (and I have about eight pages of notes here, so pardon the length), I wanted to jump back to Judith’s evocation of Wallace Stevens and suggest that there’s something considerably more intricate going on in this book about the role of absolute values in American culture. I believe that The Echo Maker is very much the social novel that Powers intended with Gain, revisited and repolished. As Jessica observed, while the book concerns itself with many nuanced social arcs, this novel is less partisan, permitting one to see “both sides of the argument.”

I don’t believe the broad ethical dilemma that Powers offers is solely a matter of what it means to “be” and “seem,” but how one negotiates through absolute environmental variables (e.g., “WELCOME CRANE PEEPERS”) that are ever shifting — a conundrum which extends not just to the cranes’ dissipating existence, but to the town of Kearney, Nebraska and nearly every character in this book. Karsh’s developmental fervor has already been remarked upon. But consider how Weber cannot pinpoint the name of his daughter’s lover, or Barbara’s overqualified status as a nurse (in particular, her great familiarity with books). Consider too the migratory nature of Karin’s life reflecting the cranes, viewed by her rebooted brother as an impostor (perhaps due to not being in a fixed environmental locale?) and fairly ordinary, even though Powers tells us, “She herself had altered, perhaps more than any of them.” (263) I also found Powers’ description of clothing quite interesting. Sartorially speaking, he was most specific with Barbara and Karin, the two characters who are perhaps hiding the most and who have, we are led to believe, failed the most.

This not only reinforces Judith’s dichotomy, but sets up a mighty textual terrain containing interesting fusions: “heavy bluegrass metal,” the consistent comparisons to life as a video game, the Wikipedia-like People’s Free Encyclopedia merging fact with conjecture, and cell phones often compared with mere props from thrillers and science fiction films. For me, one of the most interesting fusions was Mark as both hunter and naturalist, suggesting a working-class reincarnation of Theodore Roosevelt. There are references to gods, particularly near the end of the book, just as the characters hope to make one big existential kill before the end of the book’s year-long cycle (of which more quite soon). I think the recurrent imagery of cars is also very important: not just because it is the quintessential American symbol of power, but because the automobile (specifically, the truck) is a great symbol of momentum, of divagating through an uncertain environment, unsafe at any speed. And yet it is the truck that has caused Mark himself to spill over. He has moved too fast and hard, and it is this failed momentum that causes his life and the lives around him to shatter. (On a side note, I found it interesting that his girlfriend Bonnie is religious and yet is taken with painting toes, thus “marking” Mark. And what is painting toes but bending over in a circular and thus cyclical position? As I’ll go into more in a minute, I think The Echo Maker can be read as the representation of a cycle.)

No matter how happy or successful the characters are, they often face the pitfall of being unable to adjust to the world around them, often bogged down with self-destructive, solipsistic impulses (Karin smoking and Weber letting his book’s critical reception tear him down, to name just two). Now for each of these two examples, I think it’s fair to judge these as “self-destructive and solipsistic,” since Powers himself judges as omniscient narrator and thus invites us to, portraying both Karin and Weber’s feelings as these incidents happen. It is clear that what these characters feel is as important as what they perceive.

As Sarah suggested, this is very much about “meditations on levels of discontinuity.” But I think it’s important to identify where this discontinuity comes from. So I put forth the question to the group: is it the environment that causes these characters to disconnect or is it the characters’ latent makeup? Are they like the cranes, migrating by instinct, congregating in a diner to meet their spouses by complete coincidence?

In some sense, Capgras Syndrome is something of a liberator for Mark. Because while the other characters must face the challenge of continually adapting to ever-shifting absolutes, Mark has the advantage of a fresh perspective. He is, as I suggested above, reborn. Rebooted. Does this make him susceptible to false ideologies, whether science or religion?

No one has made mention of the mysterious note: “I am No One / but Tonight on North Line Road / GOD led me to you / so You could Live / and bring back someone else.” There is something within this note that suggested to me the capitalized nouns of the Declaration of Independence, that the note, like our founding document, is a statement of ideology, a blueprint for surviving in a world changing too fast. But this note is about random compassion, of paying it forward, so that the powers of good might live to restore brothers or cranes or any other target of basic human decency. The real question is whether kindness will be enough to preserve the world.

To return to the troubling William Deresiewicz review, I was initially inclined to agree with Deresiewicz’s criticism that some of the characters’ voices “sound like Powers’ mouthpiece” — in particular, the Three Muskrateers, who, despite Powers’ efforts to flesh out Rupp’s backstory with Karin, felt particularly singular. But it occurred to me, upon further rumination, that Powers may have intended this trio to serve as a 21st century Greek chorus. It is their singularity of voice which imputes absolute cultural values that crush the Muskrateers’ spirits, turning them into perfect synchronous tools, and, as Levi notes, in at least one case causing them to be unconsciously exploited by external forces promising them a reliable answer. But on the other side of the coin, Daniel himself is also quite singular, retreating to a “monk’s home” — in his own way, relying upon others to help him safe the Refuge. It cannot be an accident that Karin is attracted to both
of these men.

This brings up another aspect of Echo that I found interesting: the concentration on fixed labor vs. work that one enjoys doing. Both Karin and Weber find a certain redemption when they choose work that comes closer to their hearts. And yet Mark, by contrast, wants to get out of cognitive therapy and get back to his job. There is the moment when one of the Muskrateers confronts Karin about how much he makes a month, and this suggested to me that money is, likewise, an absolute value that clutters the more individualistic and heartfelt powers of goodness.

I was also curious if any of you viewed the four main parts (with the fifth part serving as an epilogue of sorts) as four seasons. I think it’s pretty significant that Mark’s accident happens during the winter, the peak time when the cranes are migrating (as opposed to flying, like Kalatozov’s great 1957 film, to which I kept mining the text for a reference, curious if Powers was familiar with it, because there’s a good deal of cinematic references in this book). I also believe that the first part’s imagery of wheat and plant life pushing through snow is as suggestive as the cows that occupy the third and fourth parts, grazing upon the grass and waiting for their eventual demise upon a barbeque. What’s interesting is that the seasons here don’t quite match up with the way the narrative is split up into four parts and yet I sensed an agricultural cycle at work here, something perhaps undetectable, if not wholly disregarded, by humanity.

I would also like to remark on Jenny’s observation about the relationships in this book. I found it interesting that Weber referred to his wife as “Woman” and, while I appreciated the sincerity of this marriage, seeing Powers’ attempt to qualify a type of relationship he hasn’t really written about, I felt that something about the telephone calls was askew. Then again, like the Three Muskrateers, this may have been part of the point: another meditation on discontinuity that further flummoxed Weber.

In case it isn’t clear enough, I could probably go on about this novel for some time. So I’ll shut up for now, maybe weighing in later, and let others riff from here.

Add comment October 18th, 2006

Dig Those Dance Moves

I think it can be safely said that this is remarkable.

[UPDATE: Remake by college students.]

2 comments October 17th, 2006

Wesley Snipes is Probably Regretting Getting Paid to Say “Always Bet on Black.”

BBC: “Hollywood actor Wesley Snipes has been charged with plotting to defraud the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which collects taxes in the US.”

Add comment October 17th, 2006

On Kurosawa’s Composer

Slate’s Jan Swafford has decided that Toru Takemitsu is the greatest film composer of all time.

Add comment October 17th, 2006

Houston Police Assault Concertgoers & Band

At a small club in Houston, a cop entered the club to investigate a noise disturbance. Reports are coming in that, instead of having the decency to talk with the management, the police officer walked directly up to the stage and slammed a musician to the ground. Not stopping there, this police officer then tasered three people just for kicks.

This rampant abuse of authority, which resembles behavior that I was subjected to earlier this year by San Francisco’s “finest,” is uncalled for in any context. There were numerous peaceful methods that this officer could have employed to deal with the situation. But instead of talking reasonably with the club owners or the crowd, he gave into stress, pressure, violence, or who knows really, and created a situation that escalated out of control.

I sincerely hope that the victims of this officer’s abusive behavior plan to file a report against the officer and that they do not remain silent.

Links: YouTube video, Houston Metblogs, more video, more links, band’s message forum. (via Boing Boing)

[UPDATE: According to this site, the cop’s name is G.M. Rodriguez and his badge number is 7854. You can air your complaints by calling the police station’s public affairs division at 713-308-3200.]

[UPDATE 2: The Houston Chronicle has presented this incident as if Rodriguez was the one attacked. It would seem that the video links suggest otherwise.]

Add comment October 17th, 2006

Too Many Books, Not Enough Time

Jessa Crispin opines that Peter Boxall’s list is well-balanced and makes efforts to get in touch with Boxall himself. For what it’s worth, I’ve only read 235. Lots of catching up to do.

Add comment October 17th, 2006

Why She Gave Up On Hip-Hop

Option 1: Rambling 2,200 word article.

Option 2: Four-word summary by Edward Champion: “Because she got old.”*

* — And before I am characterized by politically correct readers as an ageist punkass, I should note that one can remain both young at heart and reasonably mature. One such act of maturity involves not embarassing yourself in a major newspaper by lambasting something in an uninformed manner that you can never and will never understand, permitting those who enjoy their cultural fixations to keep tapping their toes. Accordingly, I recuse myself from any further commentary on Napoleon Dynamite.

1 comment October 17th, 2006

Musical Moments in Cinema

The top 40 musical moments in film history. (via Black Market Kidneys)

Discounting musicals, I would add The Who’s “A Quick One” during the vengeance montage in Rushmore, Schubert’s Piano Trio in E-Flat Major in that absolutely beautiful long shot of Lady Lyndon falling in love with Barry in Barry Lyndon, Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance during the hula hoop montage in The Hudsucker Proxy, that horrible version of the Eagles’ “Hotel California” during the Jesus montage in The Big Lebowski, the ironic use of Rossini in A Clockwork Orange, Night Ranger’s “Sister Christian” in Boogie Nights, Slaughterhouse’s “Power Mad” in Wild at Heart (beautifully twisted), Alan Price’s songs in O Lucky Man!, the use of Wagner in L’Age d’Or, and “Drum Boogie” in Ball of Fire (if you’re talking film history, which would include movies made before 1980, how the hell could you leave that out?).

(In fact, while I’m on the subject, I think it’s safe to say that the opening to Sexy Beast could not have worked without The Stranglers’ “Peaches” playing in the background. And the only reason why Sofia Coppola’s soulless films dupe their audiences is because of the music. I’d ramble further about how certain movies are absolutely hollow without their music (the mute button really reveals wonders), but there’s only so much time in the day.)

7 comments October 17th, 2006

Web Traffic: It’s All About the Writer’s Voice

Editor & Publisher: “Ebert took a leave in June to recovering from surgery for salivary-gland cancer, and according to Crain’s Chicago Business the site’s overall traffic was down 25% by August. RogerEbert.com, which is hosted by the Sun-Times, lost 65% of its visitors between June and August, falling from 1.1 million to 378,000.”

It seems that bloggers aren’t the only ones who can’t take vacations.

1 comment October 17th, 2006

Oliver Stone, The New Hollywood Apparatchik

BBC: “But the film-maker told Variety magazine that the new movie would be ‘compelling drama, not a polemic.’…Stone has called it ‘the least political film I’ve made.’”

Add comment October 17th, 2006

The Case for Brand Names

“Though I’m usually put off by any use of brand names in fiction (it’s a lazy writer’s way of ‘placing’ a character, and nothing can be date a work more quickly than a reference to a brand of bed linen that no longer exists) it’s also true that certain consumer choices can communicate a wealth of information. Anyone who has ever listened to the NPR-syndicated call-in show Car Talk, will have noticed how much the brothers ‘Click and Clack’ can tell about each listener on the basis of what sort of car a caller drives, and the nature of his or her engine-repair or brake-drum problem. Once, I heard a man phone in to ask the brothers’ opinion on whether he should buy a red Jeep or a red Miata, a question to which the acutely perceptive reply was ‘So tell me, when did you get your divorce?’” — Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer

1 comment October 17th, 2006

Calling Cthululu from 1996

JCO on HPL. (via 1996)

Add comment October 17th, 2006

Echo Maker Roundtable #2

(This is the second in a five-part roundtable discussion of Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker. Be sure to check out Part One, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five.)

Levi Asher writes:

I’m really glad this roundtable inspired me to read this book. I find The Echo Maker to be a very big book — big themes, big scope, a big impression on anyone who reads it. Like the Platte River, its greatest dimension is not its depth but its width — like the brain in the neurologist’s fictional first book, The Echo Maker is “wider than the sky.”

Why is this so? Well, as Sarah’s observations indicate, the book seems designed to give each reader a taste of Capgras Syndrome. Broken connections are everywhere. To fall in love, as both Karin Schluter and Gerard Weber find out, is to will yourself into forgetfulness. One of the funniest moments in the book is when Capgras-stricken Mark Schluter complains that he doesn’t recognize his favorite radio station anymore, because it doesn’t play the same kind of music it used to. Who among us hasn’t suffered from this particular societal disassociation?

Many reviewers have listed the numerous metaphors for memory
dislocation in this book: the flimsy Homestar trailer where Mark lives, the magnificent birds that only one sorry hippie named Daniel bothers to commune with. I love it like crazy that Powers dares to hit on current events and hand us the Iraq War as the book’s culminating break with reality (and it’s one of Richard Powers’ grimmest jokes when the lovable slaughterhouse-laborer and reservist Rupp packs off for the Middle East, expecting to return in a few weeks).

What does it mean to forget something you know, as Mark forgets his sister, his dog, and his home? In this book, I think it’s Richard Powers’ method not to address this question, but to turn it upside down, to make us realize that, from a neurological point of view, recognition is an act of synthesis, even an act of will. This is a large point. Like the pterodactyl living inside the sandhill crane, Mark Schluter lives inside us all.

Jenny Davidson writes:

I’ve got two things to contribute here: the first an observation (well, maybe a sequence of observations) and the second a question.

I found The Echo Maker an extremely moving and satisfying read. The Powers novel that I really particularly fell in love with (I read it pretty much in one greedy long sitting, I couldn’t believe how much it was the perfect novel) was The Time of Our Singing; I’m drawn in general to his style of fiction-writing, which is at once highly intellectual and extremely humane, but elsewhere I’ve sometimes felt the cerebral comes at the expense of the character development. I’m not sure The Echo Maker is quite as high up on my list of favorites as The Time of Our Singing (I’ve got a soft spot for novels about music, I’ve added that one to Rebecca West’s The Fountain Overflows and James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head as my top-favorite three best music-and-family novels of all time), but I found its contribution to the ongoing conversation in Powers’ fiction about human nature and human identity very compelling. It’s also becoming clearer to me that one of Powers’ great topics is the sibling relationship. I am a sister but not a wife, so I am especially pleased to read a novel (marriage is one of the novel’s all too classic topics, and I am often grumbling that not enough novelists — Muriel Spark is a striking exception — are interested in the dynamics of small groups or non-romantic pairs rather than sexually involved couples) that so thoughtfully explores the
same-generation familial bond.

I took the intellectual crux of the book to come when the narrative arrives at neurologist Gerald Weber’s doubts about the ways that “[i]maging and pharmaceuticals were opening the locked-room mystery of the mind”:

[S]ometing in him did not like where knowledge was heading. The rapid convergence of neuroscience around certain functionalist assumptions was beginning to alienate Weber. His field was succumbing to one of those ancient urges that it was supposed to shed light on: the herd mentality. As neuroscience basked in its growing instrumental power, Weber’s thoughts drifted perversely away from cognitive maps and neuron-level deterministic mechanisms toward emergent, higher-level psychological processes that could, on his bad days, sound almost like elan vital. But in the eternal split between mind and brain, psychology and neurology, needs and neurotransmitters, symbols and synaptic change, the only delusion
lay in thinking that the two domains would remain separate for much longer.

He knew the drill: throughout history, the brain had been compared to the highest prevailing level of technology: steam engine, telephone switchboard, computer. Now, as Weber approached his own professional zenith, the brain became the Internet, a distributed network, more than two hundred modules in loose, mutually modifying chatter with other modules. Some of Weber’s tangled sybsystems bought the model; others wanted more. Now that the modular theory had gained ascendancy over most brain thinking, Weber drifted back to his origins. In what would surely be the final stage of his intellectual development, he now hoped to find, in the latest solid neuroscience, processes that looked like the old depth psychology: repression, sublimation, denial, transference. Find them at some level above the module. (189-90)

This seems to me to capture miraculously well both the pathos and the pull of old-fashioned depth psychology (even the term has an antiquated ring to it these days, it makes me think of the classic mid-twentieth-century discussions of Chaucer and Shakespeare and the workings of the first-person character soliloquy), as well as the lure of the new brain science. This takes me, though, to my question.

I’m completely addicted to popular science writing, especially to stuff about neurology and genetics. I like the way Powers handles Weber being an Oliver Sacks intellectual lookalike; it’s a running joke, people mistaking the doctor for the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife. One of the other neurologists Powers name-checks is V. S. Ramachandran, whose book Phantoms in the Brain really and seriously totally blew my mind when I read it. (If you have not read it, get it and read it at once, Ramachandran has a truly and endearingly dire sense of humor but the book is in every other respect pretty much perfect.) I can’t give the exact quotation here, since I’ve bought and given away several copies of the book since I initially read it, but the thing that absolutely transformed my notions about identity and consciousness (I’ve had a longstanding obsession with the phantom limb problem, starting with my intractable addiction to Locke’s chapter on personal identity in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding) was Ramachandran’s discussion of the confabulation of, say, a stroke patient unable to use a particular arm and in the grip of extraordinary forms of verbal rationalization for what feels to him- or herself like a decision not to act rather than an incapacity. This book also includes some of the mind-bending experiments with body parts and mirrors and boxes that Powers alludes to in the novel. But at times, particularly in the first half of the book, I wondered whether it’s really a good idea to rely so heavily on a relatively recent set of scientific developments that have already been so effectively popularized in non-fiction. If you’ve read Ramachandran and Sacks and others seriously (and these are, after all, bestsellers rather than obscure or long-ago writers), doesn’t it spoil some of your pleasure in the material? I especially felt that integrating this material in a third-person narrative is problematic. If it’s a first-person narrator, it makes sense in terms of that person’s, oh, enthusiasm or preoccupation with material that he or she can presumably have read about in the same books as the novel-reader. Any thoughts on the fiction/non-fiction question, and ways of handling this potential “seen it before” problem? One context for this kind of conversation might be the way similar questions arise around, oh, a novel like Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon; this is a somewhat different question from the debate about using real people’s biographies in novels (David Leavitt and Stephen Spender, various people and Sylvia Plath, etc.). Alternately it might be more fruitful to consider it in the context of the nineteenth-century social novelists’ use of work from disciplines like economics and geology. Like my friend Steve Burt, who reviewed the novel for Slate this week, I found myself very much reminded me of George Eliot.

2 comments October 17th, 2006