Books

Lucky, beautiful, and, now, holy

JIM SULLIVAN — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:26:27 GMT

Rev Run runs straight
He was the king of rock, there was no higher . The sucker MCs, they should call him sire .

It was the mid 1980s. He was the king of rock, there was no higher. The sucker MCs, they should call him sire.

He was Run, and his co-rapping partner was D.M.C. Along with DJ Jam Master Jay, they put Hollis, Queens, on the map and made Run-D.M.C. the crossover act of the first rap/rock era. “It was cool. I enjoyed it,” says Run. “It was new, it was great, it was happening. I was lucky, it was beautiful.”

Run — born Joseph Simmons, younger brother of rap mogul Russell — is now Rev Run, who hosts the popular MTV show Run’s House (Wednesdays at 10 pm), a Father Knows Best for the hip-hop generation. On August 23, he’ll travel to Brookline Booksmith to speak and sign copies of Take Back Your Family: A Challenge to America’s Parents (Gotham), a book he and wife, Justine, co-wrote with Chris Morrow.

Later that night, he’ll rap with his pal Kid Rock at Comcast Center. But rapping is now the smaller slice of Rev Run’s pie. The big piece is being a husband, father, and reverend, as evidenced by his show.

“This is my ministry to the world,” says Rev Run. “We have to serve in some way, in a different capacity, which happens to be a family ministry. Let’s show people how we pull together, show the love in our house.”

He sees the obvious comparisons to The Cosby Show — “professional black people making it and taking care of their kids.” But his literature is not unlike the good doctor’s, too.

In Take Back Your Family — “a by-product of what we’re already doing” — Rev Run discusses his youthful hijinks, which included weed, women, and wildness, and offers parenting guidelines. Among his pearls of wisdom: get rid of clutter, don’t spoil the kids, and run the house with a firm but loving hand.

He’s fortunate that his six kids (from two marriages) are not drawn to the vices he once pursued, he says, and follow the example of their now-mature father.

“That’s pretty crazy going from rapper to reverend,” says Rev Run. “Maybe I am the new Al Green on the hip-hop level.”

As for his transition into a holy man, he says he turned to God after 1988’s Tougher Than Leather album failed to match the sales of ’86’s Raising Hell, and he felt Run-D.M.C. was foundering.

War stories

CHARLES TAYLOR — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:41:40 GMT

Mailer on the ’68 conventions
“We will be fighting for forty years.” Reading those words at the end of Norman Mailer’s 1968 Miami and the Siege of Chicago , you can’t help but feel a chill.

THE TIME OF HIS TIME: Mailer seems so brave precisely because he was so ready to risk looking foolish.

Miami and the Siege of Chicago | By Norman Mailer | New York Review of Books | 241 pages | $14.95 [paper]

“We will be fighting for forty years.” Reading those words at the end of Norman Mailer’s 1968 Miami and the Siege of Chicago, you can’t help but feel a chill. At that year’s political conventions, the GOP performed its Lazarus act on Richard Nixon’s political career in Miami and the Democrats appointed Hubert Humphrey as the public face of their self-destruction in Chicago while, in the streets outside, Mayor Daley’s storm troopers brutalized protesters and anyone else in their path. These were socio-political events begging for the exegesis that Mailer, that dogged visionary, could bring them. Wrong as often as he was right, Mailer seems so brave precisely because he was so ready to risk looking foolish.

In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, which he wrote on assignment for Harper’s, Mailer was not only perfectly attuned to the moment but prescient. The 40 years he foresaw were, he understood, years in which Nixon’s reign of law and order — the appeal to middle-class “forgotten Americans” — represented an end to the sober, careful conservatism that had always ruled the Republican party and the beginning of something more sinister, something whose logical endpoint is the radical right epitomized by George W. Bush. It’s a period that may now be coming to an end as the Republicans, like a cancer that turns on the good cells first, are destroying themselves after nearly destroying the country.

It’s in that context that a potentially unifying figure like Nelson Rockefeller had no chance to win his party’s nomination. And though Mailer says that considering Reagan for the office of president would be like imagining Johnny Carson in the job, he perceives the 57-year-old Reagan as the GOP’s equivalent of the rising young man waiting in the wings. “He had the presence of a man of thirty,” Mailer writes, “the deferential enthusiasm, the bright but dependably unoriginal mind, of a sales manager promoted for his ability over men older than himself.”

Terror-fied

GEORGE SCIALABBA — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:44:12 GMT

Slavoj Žižek’s revolution
This new grand-theoretical manifesto might be completely daft.

OFF WITH THEIR HEADS! For Žižek, Mao’s Cultural Revolution was perhaps only a little too much of
a basically good thing.

I’m going to hedge my bets about Slavoj Žižek, the avant-garde Slovenian intellectual wild man and theorist of everything who has taken Europe and, lately, America by storm. In Defense of Lost Causes, his new grand-theoretical manifesto, might be completely daft. On the other hand, it might be magnificent, revolutionary, a giant step toward unraveling the riddle of History. I’ll wait to see what everyone else says before I decide.

In Defense of Lost Causes | By Slavoj Žižek | Verso | 512 pages | $34.95

In Defense of Lost Causesis a staggeringly ambitious book, ranging — or reeling — recklessly over vast swaths of music and film, literature and psychoanalysis, history and contemporary politics. It is nearly impossible to follow if you don’t have Western philosophy from Plato to Heidegger at your fingertips. Actually, it’s not much easier even if you do. Just when you think you’re beginning to get the hang of Žižek’s dense, allusive, paradox-laden argumentative style, you may run smack into a sentence like this:

The most difficult thing for common understanding is to grasp this speculative-dialectical reversal of the singularity of the subject qua Neighbor-Thing into universality, not standard “general” universality, but universal singularity, the universality grounded in the subjective singularity extracted from all particular properties, a kind of direct short circuit between the singular and the universal, bypassing the particular.

In fact, the flicker of a suspicion occasionally crosses one’s mind that this book and Žižek’s entire oeuvre are a massive sequel to NYU physics professor Alan Sokal’s now-famous spoof of postmodernist theoretical jargon. If so, it’s a brilliant success.

Bypassing a few particulars, we find that the “lost causes” Žižek is defending are revolutionary violence and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Robespierre, Lenin, and Mao may have gotten a few things wrong, Žižek acknowledges, but they were right about this. Against monarchical absolutism and capitalist exploitation, they affirmed radical egalitarianism — and they meant it. Whoever genuinely wills the end wills also the means.

“If you say A — equality, human rights, and freedom — you should not shirk from its consequences and gather the courage to say B — the terror needed to really defend and assert the A.” No legalistic qualms, no liberal shilly-shallying, or the remorseless logic of domination will reassert itself and the blood of all its victims will be on the hands of the faint-hearted revolutionaries. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs; you can’t make a utopian smoothie without throwing a lot of everyday stuff into the blender.

Words, words, words

JEFFREY GANTZ — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:26:59 GMT

Ammon Shea reads them all for you
Who would do such a thing?

CHRESTOMATHIC That is, Shea is “devoted to the learning of useful matters.”

Can you judge a book by its title? You can if it’s Ammon Shea’s Reading theOED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. What that title doesn’t answer is the question “Who would do such a thing?” Ammon Shea, it turns out, is not some dictionary dilettante hoping to read his way into the Guinness Book of World Records. Although he’s worked as a street musician in Paris, a gondolier in San Diego, and a furniture mover in New York City, his real business is words, and to that end he owns “about a thousand volumes of dictionaries, thesauri, and assorted glossaries.” Those would include seven different copies of the Oxford English Dictionary. No question he’s the man for the job.

Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages | By Ammon Shea | Perigee | 240 pages | $21.95

Reading the OED is laid out in 26 chapters, A to Z, with an “Exordium (Introduction)” and an “Excursus (Bibliography).” Shea begins each chapter with five or so pages describing his progress through the dictionary; that’s followed by anywhere from 10 to 30 words drawn from the OED and starting with the appropriate letter, for which he supplies, in the manner of Samuel Johnson, his own pungent commentary. For example:

Fard (v.) To paint the face with cosmetics, so as to hide blemishes. I suspect there is a reason no one ever gets up from the table and says, “Excuse me while I go to the ladies’ room and fard.” It seems to be very difficult to make a four-letter word that begins with f sound like an activity that is polite to discuss at the dinner table.

Shea’s selections are fun and edifying, but I was more engaged by his account of his own reading. The decision to dispense with modern technology (no reading on-line, or via overhead projector) and just sit down with the 20 volumes, for eight to 10 hours a day. The headaches, the grayed-out vision, the endless cups of espresso. The explanation of how the OED differs from other dictionaries. The distractions at home (car alarms, neighbors dancing and cooking salt cod) and the subsequent retreat to Hunter College Library. The attempt to introduce some fresh air into the project, which takes him to Central Park and then Hoboken and finally back to his HCL basement corner. His impromptu decision to attend the “biannual” (biennial?) convention of the Dictionary Society of North America, in Chicago. His musings on the word “set,” which alone takes up 25 OED pages. The observation that the OED “does not explain how to pronounce words that have not been in common use for hundreds of years for the simple and very good reason that the editors do not know how the words are pronounced.” (Does this mean that eventually we’ll all be text-messaging instead of talking?)

Murder, she wrote

CLEA SIMON — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 23:22:30 GMT

Interview: Tana French's deep crime novels
"It’s always more fun to write people who are really messed up or really vicious."

Tana French’s background as an actor has made her value character — which explains the psychological depth of her wonderfully literate crime fiction. In town to read from The Likeness (Viking), the follow-up to her Edgar-winning debut, In the Woods, the Dublin-based author discussed means, motive, and opportunity.

In both your books, backstory plays a major role. Do you think the past determines the future?
I think there is a context in which life takes place. I’m a big believer in crime being shaped by context. Not in any way that people aren’t responsible for their crimes, but an individual’s psychology shapes whatever goes on around them, whether it reaches a moment of violence or not.

Backstory seems important to your protagonists, as well.
In In the Woods, Rob Ryan’s mind was cracked straight across at the age of 12, and when the book starts, he’s actually doing pretty well. He’s got a career he loves, he’s got a partner and best friend, but when pressure is brought to bear on this crack, it starts to deteriorate — not just his memory but his whole idea of who he is. Cassie [Maddox, Rob’s partner and the protagonist of The Likeness] was orphaned very early, and her life has been creating roots.

To an extent, it seems to me that for people who were interested in these questions of action and consequences, of identity and past and present, it would be natural to become detectives. Because as a detective you’re doing something very much like what mystery writers and mystery readers do. You’re fascinated by the process of discovering answers — not just by the answers themselves, but by the process. There’s an interplay between who they are and what they do, and that works both ways. The strangeness in their pasts comes through in their identities and what they do.

Each of these books has a different protagonist, and the one you're working on now features a colleague of Rob and Cassie, Frank Mackey. Does this mean that each character has only one story?
I know the standard thing is to write a series of books about the same detective. But what I’m interested in are those crucial turning points in people’s lives where you know that whatever you decide in that situation, you’ll never be in the same place again. In the Woods was that for Rob — the decisions he made have shaped the rest of his future, probably not in very healthy ways. The thing is, people only have a certain number of turning points. So I could keep dumping this poor guy into high-stakes, life-changing situations, or I could dilute it and write about less important situations in his life, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. I kind of envisioned Rob spending the next couple of years trying to patch himself together. I wasn’t sure he’d have that much of a story. Or I could change the narrator. Cassie is interesting and hadn’t had a chance to tell her story, so I wondered what might happen in her life, what she might be doing next.

Car talk

AMY FINCH — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 16:04:58 GMT

A close look at driving
For days post-late-merge, Vanderbilt had feelings of guilt and confusion.

All it took was one rash “late merge” to inspire Tom Vanderbilt to write his tome on traffic. (He flouted “lane ending” signs till the last second, then barged his way into the adjoining still-open lane.) For days post-late-merge, Vanderbilt had feelings of guilt and confusion. Was what he’d done so wrong? He went on-line to Ask MetaFilter and drew plenty of riled-up responses. Fans of fairness proclaimed the righteousness of queuing up and waiting your turn; fans of physics cited the practicality of using all available space for maximum efficiency. That clash of opinions got Vanderbilt to thinking about how people’s attitudes toward driving reveal a lot about psychology and culture.

Vanderbilit has written for the New York Times, Slate, Rolling Stone, and a long list of other familiar titles. In a previous book, Survival City, he visited fallout shelters and other Cold War–era buildings to examine what it meant to live with a constant sense of vulnerability. In Traffic, he looks at what it means to go careering down the highway with no sense of vulnerability whatsoever. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but he does have some good ideas about our misguided approach to driving, some of them counter-intuitive, some not. To live longer, don’t drive on rural non-interstates. To be safer, jaywalk. To remain alive around 18-wheelers, don’t drive like a dope.

Vanderbilt asserts that “traffic culture can be more important than laws or infrastructure in determining the feel of a place.” In the ’60s, the ever-progressive Netherlands invented woonerven (“living yards”) in small towns. Woonerven have no high sidewalks, traffic signs, or crosswalks, but plenty of trees, flowerpots, cobblestones, and fountains. The boundaries between the worlds of pedestrian, bicyclist, and driver dissolve. Yet cars can’t go faster than walking speed (5 to 10 miles an hour), so, no surprise, the roads are safer.

Many of Vanderbilt’s findings are similarly unsurprising. Everyone considers himself/herself to be an “above-average” driver. SUV drivers are more apt to drive aggressively, yak on cell phones, and speed. Maybe that’s because they’re higher off the ground and don’t realize how fast they’re going.
Or maybe SUV drivers tend to be jerks, and maybe we’re just plain cocky about our imaginary driving skills. But Vanderbilt is not one to judge, sometimes sticking to the scientific approach beyond the point of logic. At length, he ponders the differing ways we choose parking spots and draws analogies to animals’ hunting strategies. Isn’t it possible that we spend forever looking for a great spot because we’re l-a-z-y?

Victim, not vixen

CLIF GARBODEN — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 19:59:43 GMT

Sex, death, and the filthy rich
Florence Evelyn Nesbit was the most beautiful woman who ever lived.

INNOCENT: Evelyn Nesbit at age 17, posed as half child and half woman by Photo-Secessionist portraitist Gertrude Käsebier.

American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, The Birth of the “It” Girl, and the Crime of the Century | by Paula Uruburu | Riverhead Books | 372 pages | $27.95

Florence Evelyn Nesbit was the most beautiful woman who ever lived. So said many at the turn of the century, and looking back at the visual record of her youth, you’re hard-pressed to argue. She also had terrible taste in men and consequently became the central figure in a 1906 homicide scandal that claimed, and has maintained, the title “crime of the century.”

Nesbit’s father died young, and her waifish beauty, contravening the buxom-and-pudgy Victorian ideal, made her, at age 14, America’s most popular artists’ model. Evelyn took her charms to the Broadway chorus line, from which she was snatched by society architect Stanford White, who in turn befriended, supported, and, when she was 16, raped her, after which she became his underage mistress. Mentally ill Pittsburgh millionaire heir Harry Thaw vied for her attention; he took Evelyn to Europe, where he sadistically beat her as punishment for enduring White’s “seduction.”

Evelyn nevertheless married Thaw in 1905. They lived in Pittsburgh with his pious nouveau riche Presbyterian family, who held her in the kind of contempt today reserved for porn stars. Then while on a trip to New York, Thaw assassinated White during a musical staged on the roof of Madison Square Garden. The subsequent trials exposed Evelyn’s sordid past and set legal precedent for the insanity defense.

It’s a famous story, dramatized by Hollywood in the 1955 film The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (which starred 22-year-old Joan Collins as Nesbit), and drastically reimagined as fiction by E.L. Doctorow in Ragtime. Nesbit herself published two, sometimes inconsistent, accounts: The Story of My Life (1907) and Prodigal Days (1934).

Never has this awful tale been better researched or described than in Hofstra University English professor Paula Uruburu’s American Eve, which sets a lot of records straight. To say that Uruburu takes Nesbit’s side oversimplifies the deep and subtle arguments she makes in the defamed showgirl’s defense. Uruburu defuses the obvious question — “What was she thinking?!” — by building a psychological profile in which sexual naïveté plus parental abandonment aggravated by an unearned notoriety based on looks alone adds up to certain doom. Is this telling the story from the “woman’s point of view?” Yes, but American Eve is by no means an exaggerated or strident feminist tract. And it is, after all, a woman’s story.

Tricky Dick

PETER KEOUGH — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:03:23 GMT

Philip K. Dick's second Library of America volume
The Philip K. Dick phenomenon might be petering out.

WHAT IS TIME? WHAT IS DEATH?: The two LOA volumes compose an unresolved fugue of philosophical and psychological obsessions.

Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s | Edited by Jonathan Lethem | Library of America | 1148 pages | $40

The Philip K. Dick phenomenon might be petering out. At least if movie adaptations are any indication. They seem to flourish when the GOP is in power: Blade Runner during the Reagan administration in 1982, Total Recall under the elder Bush in 1990, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly during the reign of George W.

Published last spring, the first Philip K. Dick volume in the Library of America series caught this wave at its peak. This new offering might not be so fortunate. Could renewed optimism and faith in the political system have dispelled the cynicism and the paranoia that draw readers to Dick? Never fear: the next terrorist attack, needless war, shocking assassination, economic collapse, or Republican administration will put the Dick industry back in business

In the meantime, Philip K. Dick: Five Novels of the 1960s & 70s, edited by Jonathan Lethem, who did the first volume, can be read in a more personal context. Taken together, the nine novels in these two collections compose an unresolved fugue of philosophical and psychological obsessions, mapping twists and turns in an exhilarating and terrifying mental labyrinth.

Rather than being simply an exercise about imperialism in an extraterrestrial setting, Dick’s 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip poses the kind of questions that might bug a brilliant mind cranked up on speed at three in the morning. Like, what is time? That proves a headscratcher on the sparsely settled Red Planet colony where Goodmember Arnie Kott, the crudely ambitious but nonetheless appealing head of the powerful Water Workers Local plumbing union, figures that what he needs to get ahead is a “precog,” someone with the gift of prophecy. For though the planet’s climate might not nurture much in the way of agriculture, it has spawned a generation of autistic children, and according to Dr. Glaub, a Martian psychiatrist, these enfants terribles suffer from an inability to experience time sequentially. Like God, they see everything happening at once in a single everlasting instance.

Islander

JON GARELICK — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:01:07 GMT

Julie Hecht’s self-help
There’s still time to spend some of your summer with Julie Hecht.

LIFE’S STORIES: Hecht’s narratives unfold like elaborate improvisations.

Happy Trails to You | By Julie Hecht | Simon & Schuster | 224 pages | $24

There’s still time to spend some of your summer with Julie Hecht. She’s been winning awards for her short stories almost since she began publishing them, first in Harper’s in the ’70s and then in the New Yorker starting in the early ’90s. Her two collections and one novel are told in the same first-person voice: that of an unnamed photographer who splits her time between East Hampton in the winter and Nantucket in the summer. Prickly, anxiety-ridden, deadpan-funny, vegan, this narrator doesn’t sound much different from her creator in the rare interview Hecht gave to the Believer in May. The jacket flaps of all Hecht’s books (which also include a collection of “talks” with Andy Kaufman, Was This Man a Genius?) provide the same bio: “She lives on the east end of Long Island in the winter and in Massachusetts in summer and fall.” The same author photo has been published with all four books.

Hecht’s stories read like elaborate improvisations. Almost plotless, they recount a loosely related series of events, all embellished with the narrator’s singular social observations, free associations, phobias, and obsessions. The title story of her first collection, Do the Windows Open?, is ostensibly about trying to overcome her fear of taking the South Fork bus from East Hampton to Manhattan. (The title gives you an idea of the base level of anxiety.) The recurring themes and characters include an unnamed husband who floats through the background offering commentary like a one-man Greek chorus. One character is referred to by a phrase that’s repeated verbatim and functions like a call-back in a comedy routine: “the world-renowned reproductive surgeon Dr. Arnold Loquesto.”

Hecht told the Believer that when people ask her what her stories are about she says, “They’re about the way things are now.” The domestic is always yoked to the global or the infinite, in the space of a paragraph, or even a sentence. And everywhere Hecht is marking civilization’s decline: from personal etiquette and the degradation of the English language to fashion to international catastrophes, the “Alfred E. Neuman president” and “the globally warmed-up days.”

Parlor salon

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:40:13 GMT

Spreading the words in Salem

Grave matters

CHRISTOPHER MILLIS — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:01:41 GMT

The Merry Cemetery of Sapanta
Entering the small back room at Gallery Kayafas, you feel you’ve been transported into the shadowy pages of a small, mysterious book.

MEMENTO Imagery and poetry combine to tell the story of a community.

The Merry Cemetery of Sapanta | Photographs by Peter Kayafas, Epitaph translations by Adrian G. Sahlean, essay by Sanda Golopentia | Purple Martin Press | 120 pages | $45

Entering the small back room at Gallery Kayafas, where Peter Kayafas’s photographic tributes to the poignant sculptures that dot a solitary cemetery in a remote Romanian village are on display, you feel you’ve been transported into the shadowy pages of a small, mysterious book. In fact, you have. Kayafas’s show marks the publication of The Merry Cemetery of Sapanta (Purple Martin Press), which celebrates the riveting and crude carved wooden grave markers in an isolated village in northern Transylvania. It also chronicles the germination and fruition of a real folk art.

A carver of gates and crosses, Ion Stan Patras (1908–1977) eventually began carving the likenesses of his fellow villagers for their tombs. Over time, the likenesses became representations of a central theme in the life of the deceased (a woman who sang in her church choir, a man who loved his oxen) or, more dramatically, a re-enactment of the moment of death. Lightning strikes one ill-fated farmer; a rabid horse spits in the face of another; vehicular accidents abound; a youth meets his end rollerblading in a Paris subway; the shepherd Saulic Ion was shot and beheaded by a Hungarian.

But the enchanting power of these colorfully painted scenes is only partly explained by Patras’s carving. Below each portrait or tableau, a poem has been etched into the wood, and thanks to a linguistic device that’s as simple as Patras’s sculptural style, The Merry Cemetery of Sapanta casts a hypnotic spell. Each poem is delivered in the first person, the voice of the dead. Some are philosophical (“Man goes through life with many trials/More bad than good”), some bitter (“Maybe mother cursed me/When she rocked the cradle”), some penitent (“Forgive me father/I did not listen to you”). All are terse, idiosyncratic, and utterly personal — you’re delivered into the frequent sorrows, occasional joys, and continuing passions of a people. How Patras developed the literary complement to his effigies remains unclear, though Sanda Golopentia’s graceful essay alludes to funeral rites in the region of Sapanta in which the officiating deacon sings to the bereaved in the voice of the deceased.

The poems’ translator, Adrian G. Sahlean, has rendered the rhymed trochaic couplets of the Romanian into English that’s earthy, uncomplicated, and direct. The result reads as uncompromised and strange.

Bookman

GEORGE KIMBALL — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:47:38 GMT

Larry McMurtry’s life in the trade
Larry McMurtry, the best I can tell, remains the only man to have both won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and written an Academy Award–winning screenplay.

WHALE OF A TALE: Among other things, McMurtry learned how to edit Moby-Dick.

Books: A Memoir | By Larry McMurtry | Simon & Schuster | 272 pages | $24

Larry McMurtry, the best I can tell, remains the only man to have both won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction (Lonesome Dove, 1986) and written an Academy Award–winning screenplay (Brokeback Mountain, 2005). His latest autobiographical work might be considered a companion memoir to his 1999 book of reflections, Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Books is more specifically focused on the novelist’s parallel career as an antiquarian bookseller, from his college teaching days at Rice through his three-decade sojourn in Georgetown to his home town of Archer City, Texas, where he presides over a stock of more than 450,000 mostly rare titles that makes Booked Up one of the largest used-book stores of its kind in the world.

McMurtry’s diversion as a bookseller was initially an avocation. For many years, he says, “I was seeking books that I wanted to read — not sell.” Although he seems unable to pinpoint the precise date of his subsequent metamorphosis from reader to collector/seller — a “bookman” — it is apparent that at some point he ceased to care what might actually be between the covers of an otherwise valuable volume.

Functioning simultaneously as both an author and a purveyor of fiction can produce embarrassing consequences. As a young man, McMurtry sent off a fan letter to Gershon Legman (a cantankerous polemicist greatly admired by McMurtry, if few others), along with an inscribed copy of Leaving Cheyenne, his second novel. “Legman immediately fired back a letter informing me that fiction was shit, after which our correspondence lapsed for about ten years.”

Late in Legman’s life, McMurtry became his patron, visiting him in France with occasional donations of money. Still, laments McMurtry the bookman, “that copy of Leaving Cheyenne. . . has been on sale on the West Coast for several years. Legman didn’t want it, and neither does anyone else.”

Bookmen maintain a constant watch for “sleepers,” those undervalued diamonds in the rough that can turn up anywhere from a stall in London to a small-town yard sale to an estate liquidation or even on the shelves of a fellow bookman. McMurtry was sifting through a recently acquired lot when he came upon The Fiend’s Delight, by one Dod Grile. Pencil in hand, he was about to price it at $15 when a competitor who happened to be in the store mentioned that Dod Grile had been a pseudonym employed by Ambrose Bierce. The Fiend’s Delight turned out to be a priceless first edition of Bierce’s first book. “Not every bookseller, with a sleeper about to be ready to hand, would have been that nice.”

Repression illustrated

CLIF GARBODEN — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 20:46:20 GMT

People’s history in graphic format
Graphic novels are an acquired taste.

JUST THE FACTS: Geary’s Hoover is a masterpiece of understatement.

J. Edgar Hoover: A Graphic Biography | By Rick Geary | Hill & Wang | 110 pages | $16.95

Graphic novels are an acquired taste. Because they’re often driven as much by the art as by a theme, their stories tend to be, uh . . . non-linear. Which is a nice way of saying they don’t make a whole lot of sense. Not so with National Lampoon/Heavy Metal illustrator Rick Geary’s graphic bio of the notorious FBI strongman, J. Edgar Hoover, or American Splendor author Harvey Pekar’s anthology of new-left living-history reminiscences, Students for a Democratic Society.

Geary’s Hoover is about as linear and minimalist a narrative as you could ask for, reeking of non-judgmental detachment that creates a masterpiece of understatement. Railing against the pompous, unyielding, dictatorial, hypocritical, closeted-gay, right-wing-extremist FBI chief would be your basic barrel-fish target exercise. Fun, but not convincing. Geary’s flat delivery, by contrast, makes Hoover’s bodacious sins, which will be as unfamiliar as they are astonishing to younger generations, all the more believable for presenting them in the passively accepting context in which they were committed.

The panel addressing FDR’s empowerment of the Bureau reads simply: “Roosevelt authorized telephone wiretaps, although such abridgment of civil rights was of questionable legality.” On Hoover’s dossier on Eleanor Roosevelt: “The first lady did not share her husband’s camaraderie with the director. . . . To Hoover, Mrs. Roosevelt was the worst sort of ‘sentimental moo-cow’ — a bleeding heart for the enemies of American society.” On competition from the newly formed CIA: “He immediately ordered a policy of non-cooperation between the FBI and this upstart group.”

Neither does Geary’s art add much excitement to the words. If anything, the images are even calmer and more matter-of-fact than the narrative, the action depicted lacking all passion — which makes the darkest points powerfully ironic. The tone is a deft parody of the goody-goody text style used in, say, the Hillary Clinton coloring book that used to be available at the Clinton Museum Store in Little Rock. It adds up to very sophisticated way of letting readers understand that Hoover was scum.

Master builders

DAVID EISEN — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:46:05 GMT

Books on, and by, architects
A good architectural monograph is more than just a big colorful book with too-good-to-be-true photos; it’s a window into the heart and mind of the architect it profiles.

HIGH TECH: Terminal 4 at Madrid’s Barajas Airport typifies Paul Rogers’s skeletal style.

A good architectural monograph is more than just a big colorful book with too-good-to-be-true photos; it’s a window into the heart and mind of the architect it profiles. Four new monographs reveal four architects’ personalities and four different ways of looking at — and even transforming — the world.

Richard Meier is, it’s clear, in love with order. HOUSES AND APARTMENTS (Rizzoli; 296 pages; $85) illustrates 35 years’ worth of his well-oiled machines for living. The book’s generous proportions (12-1/2 x 12-1/2), spare but elegant graphics, and nearly wordless spreads are of a piece with his pristine modernist monumentality.

Meier’s gleaming white country houses and perfectly sculpted urban apartment buildings are as cleanly designed as an iPod and as seductive as softcore porn. He composes his curving walls, serpentine stairs, and glass-wrapped galleries to provide the choreography for an idealized vision of domesticity. The result retreats into a glorious but icy perfection that is remote from life as most of us live it.

Steven Holl is more open to the impositions of an unruly world, taking the quirky character of a place and a client and giving them a poetic interpretation. ARCHITECTURE SPOKEN (Rizzoli; 304 pages; $75) talks and walks us through his work, which includes projects as diverse as the Simmons Hall Dormitory at MIT, the glowing glass Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, and the long, thin metal-paneled tube that contains a sewage treatment plant in Hamden, Connecticut. Holl’s buildings, and the book, are organized around ideas like “porosity” and “compression” that allow his strange and often contorted buildings to tell a story. Excerpts from his lectures articulate the intellectual and experiential qualities he wants his projects to embody. Unlike Meier, Holl doesn’t have a signature style. His childlike sketches show the origins of his fractured forms in emotional responses to landscapes and programs, rather than in a desire to reorder the universe.

Kenneth Powell’s RICHARD ROGERS: COMPLETE WORKS (Phaidon) documents the life work of a prodigious tinkerer. Rogers creates mechanistic structures, like the Centre Pompidou in Paris (a collaboration with Renzo Piano), that are suffused with a humanistic spirit. Most of his buildings use imposing steel skeletons to order urban environments, and smaller-scale elements of wood and masonry to maintain an ever-changing sense of vitality. This three-volume ($175) boxed set is stuffed with photos, sketches, autobiographical notes, and explanations illustrating his use of high-tech engineering to implement a social vision.

Confessions of an editor

NINA MACLAUGHLIN — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:07:16 GMT

DeWitt Henry's candid new collection of essays meditates on manhood
There’s a quiet courage in these essays, and a revelatory sense of the continuing challenge of pressing on.

In Safe Suicide, an assemblage of revealing, interrelated essays, DeWitt Henry — Emerson professor, writer, and founding editor and longtime guiding creative force behind literary magazine Ploughshares — offers up to us his world, honest and intimate. The essays concern his family life growing up in the Philadelphia suburbs (sexually charged; alcoholic father looming); his marriage and struggles over his own possible parenthood (questions of sacrifice as well as his readiness, willingness, and even ability to be a father); the birth, adoption, and raising of his two children; the genesis and development of Ploughshares and the literary scene in Boston from the seventies onward; plus, thwarted ambition, marathon training, fatherhood, friendship, and the lifelong challenge of how and where to focus and divide your passions. Taken together, the essays become an extended — and elegant — meditation on manhood.

Henry’s candor in writing about his childhood and adolescence can be disarming — is he actually telling us this? In “Subversions,” the strongest piece in the collection, Henry recalls himself as an eleven-year-old when his mother asks him to please rub Ben-Gay on her aching back. “She tells me harder, more, and I feel queasy, and even angry, rubbing as high as under her brassiere strap and as low, at her insistence, as the top of her buttocks and buttocks crevice.” We’re squeamish with him, cringey, discomforted. Later in that same essay, he reveals that as a 13-year-old, toeing the threshold of sex, he asked his 20-year-old sister if he might see her naked. A bold request. Bolder still: she obliges, in the fullest possible way, “showing me more than I had understanding to see.” Henry’s writing is confessional, yes, but these episodes don’t feel designed to shock. More so, they’re an acknowledgement of the strange, strained intimacies we share.

Henry takes a more guarded, distanced approach in describing his father, a recovering alcoholic, “perpetually brooding, silent and withdrawn.” The overriding attribute ascribed to him is of impotence, “of utter flaccidity.” It’s a motif (and a condition) that will echo in Henry’s life as well. In “Arrivals,” another highlight — which, paired with “Subversions” carries much of the emotional ballast of the collection — Henry parallels his reluctance over starting a family (“just a little longer”) and eventual acceptance (due in part to advice from writer Richard Yates: “Think of the girl”) with the beginnings of his literary life and the founding of Ploughshares. His exhilaration and pride, over his new daughter and the literary magazine, are richly felt. But infertility, of body and mind, will afflict and nearly cripple him. It takes balls to admit that your novel gets repeatedly rejected, that you can’t make your wife pregnant. And here again, Henry’s candor gives access to great depths of frustration and fear.

Priorities, rediscovered

JENNY HALPER — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:15:22 GMT

In her first book, actress Debra Winger focuses on home, not Hollywood
Instead of checking into rehab, the actress spoke her mind.

Debra Winger as Wonder Girl

Back in the eighties, Debra Winger was dubbed an It Girl as John Travolta’s bull-riding wife in Urban Cowboy, and her subsequent Oscar nominations — for her role as a strong-willed mom in Terms of Endearment and a love-struck idealist in An Officer and a Gentleman — were coupled with a public image roughly parallel to twenty-something media targets/darlings of today. Except instead of checking into rehab, the actress spoke her mind. In 1995, on the heels of another Oscar nomination (for Shadowlands) she quit show business and focused on raising her sons.

“It’s that old adage, ‘whatever they ask, answer what you want,’” says Winger, whose first book, Undiscovered,doesn’t harp on Hollywood or even the globe trotting she’s been doing for Sight Savers International, which she’s involved with because of an accident involving a truck and a troll costume that left her blind for ten months at the age of seventeen. Instead,the title refers to a discovery of self.

Alternating essays with poems, and examinations of her inner journey with bitterly funny anecdotes (she embarrasses a director with a particularly choice swear word), Winger has succeeded in compiling thoughts on aging, motherhood, and the reasons we walk on a wire, with insight that never comes across as pompous: she asks as many questions as she answers. On a sweltering June day, in between grabbing aspirin and groaning at an incessantly ringing phone, she tells me why.

In Undiscovered, you refer anonymously to rude directors and ex-boyfriends. Did you feel you had to make an effort not to offend people?
No. That’s really a great question because in public I can say ten great things and one, I think, funny thing, which may be a little acerbic. I was talking to Whoopi Goldberg yesterday — I started out in standup comedy and she was coming up in some clubs in San Francisco when I was working at some comedy clubs in LA. When you’re a comedian, you never get quoted unless it’s really really rank, you know? You can have a forty five minute routine where you jab at every one, and no one quotes you unless it’s extremely funny. But if you’ve made your way being something else, like an actress…look at these stupid things I say, they’re not serious.

Frank Bidart’s ambivalent appetite

SVEN BIRKERTS — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:23:44 GMT

The poet probes human opposites in his latest collection
Frank Bidart adores the savage Catullan paradox.

ART IS LONG: Bidart’s brevity is relative. To those accustomed to his distances, these poems may feel short. But not fast.

Watching the Spring Festival | By Frank Bidart | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 72 pages | $25

Frank Bidart adores the savage Catullan paradox. In his 1983 collection, The Sacrifice, he included a reframing of “Odi et amo” that in 13 words told us all we need to know about the violence of appetite: “I hate and love. Ignorant fish, who even/wants the fly while writhing.” In Watching the Spring Festival, his seventh and most recent book, Cantabrigian Bidart — now a fully emerged, Bollingen Prize–winning American poet — offers a riposte of sorts. “Catullus: Id Faciam” in its entirety reads: “What I hate I love. Ask the crucified hand that holds/the nail that now is driven into itself, why.” This poem removes pleasure from the equation, but then it opens the deep question of the redemption of suffering.

It also gets us close to the ongoing dynamic of the poet’s vision: the clarification and underscoring of ambivalence. If human opposites, those binary formulations we are said to live by, have a point of contact, that is where Bidart applies his probe most forcefully. In the powerful long works that have made his reputation — “Ellen West,” “The War of Vaslav Nijinsky,” and “The First Hour of the Night” — madness and vision, desire and self-destruction, and sin and its expiations are of imagination all compact. And they are no less present in the mostly shorter poems that make up Watching the Spring Festival.

Bidart’s brevity is relative. The poems are not short; mostly, they are simply (and here I confer Bidart-style italic emphasis) not long. To those accustomed to his distances — the pages and pages of staggered-line assaults on the big questions — they feel short. But not fast. Like all of Bidart’s poems, they make the line break almost a category of consciousness. Every enjambed line, every bit of white space, every pause is the product of a decision. Every ounce of the unnecessary has been lopped away with one of those razor-sharp Japanese fish knives, and you can feel the fresh face of language greet the air. Or, to use Bidart’s own words, turning them into unintended self-description (from the opening stanza of “Sanjaya at 17”): “As if fearless what the shutter will unmask/he offers himself to the camera, to/us, sheerly — /vulnerable like Monroe, like Garbo.”

Small presses

DEIRDRE FULTON — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:48:10 GMT

Big ideas, and a match made in heaven
Rose Metal Press focuses on unique, non-traditional literary forms such as flash fiction, prose poetry, or novels-in-verse.

"Who reads short shorts?" by Deirdre Fulton

A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness is the latest offering from Rose Metal Press, an independent Boston-based publishing house launched in 2006. The press focuses on unique, non-traditional literary forms such as flash fiction, prose poetry, or novels-in-verse, and its founders — Kathleen Rooney, 28, and Abby Beckel, 29, who met when they both attended grad school at Emerson College — see much promise in the fusion of small presses and innovative writing. Rooney and Beckel run the press from afar, since both of them have day jobs in other cities (Chicago and DC, respectively). So we e-mail–interviewed the pair — here’s an edited transcript; find their full thoughts on publishing, literary links, and the start of Rose Metal Press at thephoenix.com/blogs/wordup.

RMP has been around for about two years. What have been the biggest challenges so far? What are you most proud of?
KR The biggest challenges are probably two-pronged and not that unusual to anyone who runs an independent press: that we could always use more money (who couldn’t?) and more time (since we both work nine-to-five day jobs). One of the things I’m most proud of is our authors, who in addition to being talented producers of the kind of work we like to see in print, are also consistently nice, thoughtful, fun, and hard-working, and very much team players.

AB I’m also proud of the way our books look and of our designers and cover artists for helping us present the work in interesting ways that reflect the innovativeness of the writing.

What makes short shorts or flash fiction special?
KR Short shorts — they have the economy of a poem, and often the linguistic and syntactic richness, but so too do they incorporate the elements of narrative and prose fiction — are intelligible to a wide readership because of these similarities to other forms, but they also have their own distinct character, in much the same way that a sonnet or a haiku has a distinct character.

Mike Edison walks alone

AMY FINCH — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:22:46 GMT

Funhouse
On his death bed, Mike Edison probably won’t lament that he didn’t do this or he didn’t go there.

VIDEO: Mike Edison demonstrates the "Bong guitar"

I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World | By Mike Edison | Faber & Faber | 352 pages | $25

On his death bed, Mike Edison probably won’t lament that he didn’t do this or he didn’t go there. His leap-then-look approach to life leaves no time for hemming-and-hawing, and even the title of his new memoir reads like bang-bang-bang. (He’s also just released a ranted-word CD of the same name, with his outfit Edison Rocket Train, and Jon Spencer producing.) Over the past twentysomething years, Edison has written for and edited magazines of varying degrees of ridiculousness and decorum: Wrestling’s Main Event, Screw, Cheri, Hustler, Penthouse, and High Times. What better journalistic outlets for a guy with a refined sense of the absurd and the overblown? The first time he saw the WWF on TV, he wound up in fits of laughter: “It was all so completely insane, so colorful, so out of control, so ridiculous — how could this even be allowed to happen in a civilized country? — I was sold instantly.”

Granted, his neurons weren’t firing straight because of the blotter acid he’d taken that night, but his pro-wrestling revelation endures: “It is the least self-conscious of all art forms. Wrestling never worries about how silly or absurd it looks.” Hence one adult male might bean another adult male with a child’s lawnmower or a plate of nachos, or while eating a meatball sub.

Like pro wrestling, porn often flaunts its phoniness — and whatever its larger societal implications, who would argue that it can’t be ludicrous? Of course, Edison had a blast making up pole/hole stories, until he burned out and started plagiarizing himself. (Tony and Maria became David and Michelle . . . ) Screw magazine, where he eventually became editor-in-chief, was ideal for a guy who cannot stomach self-delusion, pretense, or hypocrisy, and who’s intent on exercising his First Amendment right to free speech.

One of his first Screw assignments was to write a profile of infamous turd-tossing rocker GG Allin. Edison and GG became friends, and Edison played drums and recorded with GG. He also played drums for Sharky’s Machine (named for the Burt Reynolds movie) and the Raunch Hands, and he wrote for a trade magazine called Soft Drinks & Beer. The common thread: all those projects (except GG) satisfied his urge to ramble, sending him to Japan or Europe to drum and take drugs or to drink beer and write about breweries.

Spy games

CLEA SIMON — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:03:21 GMT

Alan Furst’s “Night Soldiers” novels
The gray afternoon, the loveless assignation, the endless bureaucracy.

AFTER SMILEY: The complexity of Furst’s tales put him in the forefront of the latest wave of espionage writers who play on the moral ambiguities of “the good war.”

The Spies of Warsaw | By Alan Furst | Random House | 288 pages | $25

The gray afternoon, the loveless assignation, the endless bureaucracy. By any measure, the clandestine world of Alan Furst is as far from that of centenarian Ian Fleming’s as John le Carré’s. But as his evocative new The Spies of Warsaw shows, Furst’s spies — particularly his latest, the dashing Colonel Jean-François Mercier — merit a little more romance than the cold, small clerks of le Carré’s world, at least more than George Smiley ever had.

Warsaw, Furst’s 10th novel in the “Night Soldiers” series, opens, like its predecessor The Foreign Correspondent, with an assignation. Edvard Uhl, a senior engineer at a Breslau foundry, has been lured into an affair. His big, brassy lover, who styles herself the Countess Sczelenska, just happens to have “friends” who would like Uhl’s help in obtaining plans for armaments manufactured at the German foundry. Unlike The Foreign Correspondent, which viewed such a meeting through the cold eyes of a waiting assassin, Uhl’s romance is experienced firsthand, doubts and all. “And was she a countess? A real Polish countess? Probably not, he thought. But so she called herself, and she was, to him, like a countess.” Self-deception is only one of many layers shielding the citizens of Eastern Europe in autumn, 1937, as the continent grinds toward war.

The sex enjoyed by Mercier is equally loveless — “a man of the world, a woman of the world, a brief, pleasant adventure, all memory courteously erased” — but the participants more honest. Mercier is a lone wolf of a hero. An aristocrat, a graduate of the prestigious Saint-Cyr military academy, Mercier serves as France’s military attaché in Warsaw, a wound from the Russo-Polish war of 1920 having necessitated his move into the diplomatic service. From here, he runs Uhl and the “countess,” and undertakes other little adventures with the help of his bluff Polish driver, Marek. Like his Saint-Cyr classmate, Charles de Gaulle, Mercier believes Germany is planning to invade. But Pétain and his cohort are in power, and all Mercier can do is file reports and wait.