Ignorance + Curiosity

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Sun, 07 Mar 2010 01:20:00 -0800

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Sun, 07 Mar 2010 01:20:00 -0800

"Jason Epstein launched the trade paperback format in the US in 1952 as a young editor at Doubleday..."

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:42:00 -0800

“Jason Epstein launched the trade paperback format in the US in 1952 as a young editor at Doubleday …”

- from the bio of the man who wrote this NYRB piece called “Publishing: The Revolutionary Future.”

I was minus-20 years old in 1952, so I grew up in a world in which trade paperbacks were just a given. It somehow never occurred to me that anybody had to launch them into existence. I can’t readily explain why even now — ten hours or so after reading that little sentence about Jason Epstein — my brain buzzes a little when I re-read it. I’m glad I finished Epstein’s piece without knowing anything about him. Otherwise, I’d have to question whether the glow of his bio had tricked me into thinking his ideas are important enough to share.

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Fri, 26 Feb 2010 22:05:00 -0800

Hornby ≠ Tolstoy. And yet ...

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:28:34 -0800

Having finished Anna Karenina recently, I’m vaccinated against throwing around hyperbole about books. So anything I write about Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked is going to be muted.

Maybe you should judge the novel by my actions. There are the actions you can see here on this blog: I’ve interrupted my life twice — today and Tuesday — to post quotes from the novel. There are other actions you can’t see without me telling you about them: I’ve listened to the audiobook of Juliet, Naked while jogging; I’ve listened while lying down, eyes shut, easing into sleep; I’ve listened while switching clothes from the washer to the dryer; I listened to the end of the story just now while picking up more books and audiobooks from the library.

The novel is engrossing, basically. Not at first. I got hooked — and stayed hooked — when Hornby put readers inside the head of a character named Tucker Crowe.

I seem to be solidly in the Hornby demographic, whatever that is. Hornby sees people — or, at least, certain types of men — for what they are. He’s honest. I’m even tempted to say brutally honest, except that there’s nothing brutal about it. Hornby’s honesty makes the world more hospitable. He depicts idiosyncrasies — even idiotic idiosyncrasies — without dismissing their owners as irredeemable idiots.

Juliet, Naked is not Anna Karenina. Hornby is not Tolstoy. Hornby’s writing in the novel is, in fact, so unassuming that I’m tempted to say that it’s not even good writing. But that’s nonsense. A book is just words. The words are written. If what is written manages to engross, to ring true, to coax laughter, to provoke introspection, to yield blog posts from a guy who loves Anna Karenina, then the writer might be doing something — perhaps even many things — very well.

(Side note: Hornby blogs; Tolstoy doesn’t.)

"What was the big deal? Why had he spent half his life trying to hide from people like Duncan? How..."

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 13:08:00 -0800

“What was the big deal? Why had he spent half his life trying to hide from people like Duncan? How many of them were there? A handful, scattered all over the globe. Fuck the Internet for collecting them all in one place and making them look threatening. And fuck the Internet for putting him right at the center of his own little paranoid universe.”

- from Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked

Buy it. Borrow it.

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:30:00 -0800

Buy it. Borrow it.

Buy it. Borrow it.

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:29:00 -0800

Buy it. Borrow it.

Buy it. Borrow it.

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:27:00 -0800

Buy it. Borrow it.

"The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product."

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:04:00 -0800

“The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product.”

- from Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked

Spaniel of a Certain Age + Bath = ********************* Buy it....

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:08:00 -0800

Spaniel of a Certain Age + Bath =

*********************

Buy it. Borrow it.

If the sight of something bores you, find a new way to look at...

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:03:00 -0800

If the sight of something bores you, find a new way to look at it.

*********************

Buy it. Borrow it.

"Nick Hornby on TSOYA" aka "Why I used to love podcasts and apparently still do"

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:45:00 -0800

For a good stretch, I listened to almost nothing but podcasts. No audiobooks. Hardly any music, even. I’m not clear on why I stopped. But because I stopped, iTunes stopped downloading new podcasts. So last night, when I inexplicably went hunting for a podcast to listen to, I found that my most recent episode of “The Sound of Young America” was from 11/10/09. It turned out to be an interview with Nick Hornby, who still is probably most famous for having written High Fidelity.

The interview is everything that is right about the podcast and its creator. Jesse Thorn is sincere. He’s curious. He’s interested. He can also walk right into awkward conversational moments. These might well derail his interviews. Instead, they seem to help make the interviews more real, more illuminating. Take this exchange with Hornby, who deserves credit for either not taking umbrage or for getting over his umbrage:

Thorn: My wife and I watched “An Education” earlier today and she read the book as well and she said to me, “Well, you could tell Nick Hornby was involved.” And I was like, “Why is that?” And she said, “Oh, you know, like, some people are in it and they’re sort of dissatisfied with what’s going on, and they go through a big long thing, and …” She did not mean any of this pejoratively and I want to make that clear.

Hornby: That’s fine.

Thorn: “They go through a big, long thing, have a lot of adventures, and the biggest thing that they learn is how to be confortable with what they were, rather than how to be a new thing.”

Hornby (laughing): Yes, um, well I would say that’s kind of my subject, and it’s quite a good subject, I think, because it seems to me there’s too much in the culture that teaches us how to be a new thing. And that’s what most books are about. And they have messages. And the message is that you can be a whole, brand-new you. And I think that’s probably particularly true of America. And I don’t really believe that. And I think that the best we can do is make peace with ourselves and who we are and what we’ve got.

Thorn: Was that ever hard for you to do?

Hornby: To make peace with myself and what I was? It’s difficult to answer because I wouldn’t have been able to make peace with myself if I hadn’t been able to write or I hadn’t been able to make a living as a writer. I think I would have been pretty dissatisfied. So once I got published, it was pretty easy to make peace with myself because that was really the ambition, I think, was to be able to support myself through writing.

Thorn: Sometimes I have nightmares about the protagonist of High Fidelity, who’s struggling with this conflict within himself which is essentially is he going to be a guy who makes things or a guy who listens to things that other people made and categorizes them.

OK. You get the idea. I’m not going to transcribe the whole thing. It takes more time than I have, and I’ll probably run afoul of copyright law if I transcribe much more. If you want more, here’s a link to the interview just in case I don’t manage to embed the full audio of the interview right below this paragraph.

The Sound of Young America

My very first impression of Lydia Davis: efficient

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:35:00 -0800

Once you’ve read the first paragraph of a story called “The Sock,” you will have read as much Lydia Davis as I have. Here. It’s just 107 words. Go ahead and read it:

My husband is married to a different woman now, shorter than I am, about five feet tall, solidly built, and of course he looks taller than he used to and narrower, and his head looks smaller. Next to her I feel bony and awkward and she is too short for me to look her in the eye, though I try to stand or sit at the right angle to do that. I once had a clear idea of the sort of woman he should marry when he married again, but none of his girlfriends was quite what I had in mind and this one least of all.

That’s on page 129 of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. It’s not my habit to start on page 129. The book just sort of fell open to page 129 when I got it home from the library today. I’d been waiting for it since December. According to the Seattle Public Library’s web site, 54 people are waiting for me to finish the book and bring it back.

Now, about that opening paragraph, those 107 words.

Play along for a minute. Pretend you’re a cop. Pretend you’re at a crime scene and you find nothing but a scrap of paper bearing those 107 words. Now, take a moment to realize all the facts those 107 words give you — the relationships, the histories. Go further, though. Beyond facts. Think of everything you can reasonably surmise about the character responsible for those words. It’s a lot. I’m getting that nice brain tingle that comes from encountering a writer who’s in charge.

Bad disclosure and bad mustaches

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:40:00 -0800

Having just used the comments section of somebody else’s post to nitpick about lack of disclosure, I want to pause and acknowledge that my own blog — despite links to this short bio and this hodgepodge about privacy, ads, and links — falls far short of the meticulous disclosure readers get from someone like Jeff Jarvis. If you haven’t read Jarvis’ disclosure statement, you should. It’s really something.

That said, I don’t have much to disclose these days. That is sure to change since I bought a Lotto ticket yesterday. Update to follow. (And really, that’s the point. I disclose when I feel like there’s something to disclose. I try to do it right in whatever post a possible conflict might relate to. My last post, for instance, linked to a newspaper op-ed written by my uncle. In that post, it felt important to mention that my uncle is, well, my uncle.)

Finally, something that is not in my bio: At the giddy behest of my children, I’m growing a mustache all this month. Does that make this blog suddenly pro-mustache? Hardly. While some kind people claim to like my mustache, I don’t. A guy whose band I photographed back in December deemed my mustache “pretty sleazy” and predicted it will only get sleazier by the time February runs its blessedly short course. I agree. But I’m having fun. So rather than skewing pro-mustache or anti-mustache, I think the bias of this blog will continue to be toward doing harmless things — mustache-related or not —for the amusement of grateful children.

"So why not force the Republicans to show their hand - to appear on the floor of the Senate and talk..."

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:20:00 -0800

“

So why not force the Republicans to show their hand - to appear on the floor of the Senate and talk to death bills that the public wants? Simply bring a bill to the Senate floor (Harry Reid can still do that), force the Republicans to talk around the clock to block it, call a “cloture” vote to end debate and vote on the bill (which requires 60 votes to succeed), and lose - with a majority of senators, all Democrats, voting to bring the bill to a vote.

And when they’re done with that one, bring up another, and another, with the same result.

Agreed, this doesn’t sound like bipartisanship. But there has never been bipartisanship in this Congress, and at this point it’s more important for Democrats to demonstrate that they are fighting for legislation that people want than it is for them to play along with that treacherous myth.

”

- from “Filibuster might cut both ways” by Harry K. Schwartz (2/16/2010, Philadelphia Inquirer). Click HERE for full op-ed.

My uncle wrote this op-ed. It ran today. The bio at the end mentions my uncle’s time as a Senate aide and his service in the Carter Administration. What goes unmentioned is that he used one leather briefcase during most, if not all, of his legal career. He oiled it, I think, to keep it looking beautiful. When I was about 12, he and I sat on his family’s deck one evening while he did all his regular upkeep on the briefcase. I basked. It seemed to me the essence of everything that was enviable and honorable about being a grownup.

"To submit to Muumuu House find a person published by or associated with Muumuu House and read their..."

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 23:57:30 -0800

“To submit to Muumuu House find a person published by or associated with Muumuu House and read their writing. If you like their writing make comments in their comments sections or message them expressing your feelings in a natural manner. Eventually someone will read your comments or messages and find your internet presence and maybe communicate with you. If that person likes you to a certain degree they will maybe tell other people about you, causing a further amount of people to maybe communicate with you. After an amount of time, if communication is sustained with various people, other things may happen, including maybe being published by Muumuu House.”

- Muumuu House, which I hadn’t heard of until 90 seconds ago, may have the greatest submission guidelines ever.

Strunk & White fistfight in heaven

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:56:00 -0800

Whatever else it may be, Leon Wieseltier’s New Republic attack on Andrew Sullivan is a chore to read. Only one thing caused me to slog through: the knowledge that Wieseltier would eventually get around to indicting my favorite blogger on charges of being either “a bigot” or “moronically insensitive” toward Jewish people.

I don’t know Wieseltier’s other work, so let’s just agree that I’m a jerk for wondering how the literary editor of an established magazine can write sentences that would push Strunk and White into a despondent fistfight over who gets to use the noose first. Sentences like this: “But the scale of this impact is too inconsiderable to assure anything that Israel does an important place among the causes of jihadism.” And this: “Worst of all, the explanation that Sullivan adopts for almost everything that he does not like about America’s foreign policy, and America’s wars, and America’s role in the world–that it is all the result of the clandestine and cunningly organized power of a single and small ethnic group–has a provenance that should disgust all thinking people.”

How perfect, then, that Wieseltier should conclude a piece so badly in need of robust editing with a jab at the “divine right of bloggers to exempt themselves from the interrogations of editors.”

(Note: I edited this post. Out of pure spite. Like all bloggers, I have a skilled professional editor sitting here next to me. He offers me money, bonbons, shiatsu. But I rebuff him. Always. I am exercising my divine right to exempt myself from his interrogations, to shield myself from his insights, to spare myself the nuisance of him paying me for my words.)

"We took his pickup and rode out of the city on razor-straight roads to the oil fields—an ocean..."

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:32:00 -0800

“We took his pickup and rode out of the city on razor-straight roads to the oil fields—an ocean of gray dirt, unmarked, parched, spectacularly monotonous, not a ripple in it except for the occasional sunken spot of a former buffalo wallow, until you get to the edge of the Permian Basin caprock and fall off into the rest of the world. We skirted ranches on which little sprouted except for shrubby mesquite and rows of skeletal pump jacks bobbing for oil, and zigzagged across square miles so wide and empty that, even when we raced along, we seemed to be standing still. It looked like nothing, except that there were millions of dollars underneath us, sacks of money banked in stone.”

- from Susan Orlean’s “A Place Called Midland” (2000)

Today, while driving, I listened to the audiobook version of a collection that includes this piece. The passage I’ve quoted here jumped out at me. The economy of it struck me as much as anything else. Here, in what turns out to be 122 words, is a convincing, vivid, memorable rendering of a place. Not easy. I just love it.

For those who missed my earlier link, Orlean is teaching a course at NYU right now. The syllabus is here. I’m continuing to fall behind on the reading because I’m doing things like listening to random Orlean pieces instead of reading the stuff she’s assigned to her class. This, I think, is an improvement on my actual college career when I skipped reading assignments so I could have more time to play roller hockey and to um um um … Honestly, I can’t remember how I pissed away the time.

I can’t even blame this amnesia on drugs since I fall into the eccentric category of Berkeley graduates who came and went without ever so much as smoking pot. It’s a good thing, too. I needed to be fanatically attentive during lectures because college exams are rightly cruel to people who skip big chunks of the reading. I wish they’d been even crueler.

Our second dog ate her second book tonight. As she becomes more...

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 01:20:00 -0800

Our second dog ate her second book tonight. As she becomes more sure of us and less anxious that we might disappear from her life like her original owners did, we hope our books will be safer. Books aren’t cheap. Luckily, we’ve already read this one many times. Unluckily, we probably would have read it even more.