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“Let them touch those things” instantly joined the annals of unhinged celebrity utterance; the hymn was consigned to plastic showbiz sanctimony. But every second was quintessentially québécois: the pro-American but anti-Washington stance, the class consciousness (what other white pop star would not only excuse but advocate poor blacks ransacking retail stores?) and the intense identification with New Orleans, which Quebec sees as both a cautionary tale of language loss and a distant-cousin outpost of joie de vivre in stiff-necked North America. …

Because most viewers couldn’t see the link between the nègres blancs of Quebec and the creole blacks of New Orleans, Céline’s state seemed out of all proportion. But in that light it was as culturally sound as rapper Kanye West’s televised outburst the next week that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

- from Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love (A Journey to the End of Taste)

Nick Hornby recommended the book in the February issue of the Believer, writing that Wilson:

asks the question Why do I and my friends and all rock critics and everyone likely to be reading this book and magazines like the Believer hate Céline Dion? And the answers he finds are profound, provocative, and leave you wondering who the hell you actually are—especially if, like many of us around these parts, you set great store by cultural consumption as an indicator of both character and, let’s face it, intelligence. … In a few short devastating chapters, Wilson chops himself and all of us off at the knees.

I’m on page 38 of 161, so I can only attest to Hornby’s take being 23.6% true. It’s really quite a book, so far.

Semi-related note: The same issue of the Believer is also the one and only reason I’ve heard of Chris Bachelder. So if you’re tired of me saying all kinds of nice stuff about Bachelder’s writing, your most logical recourse would be to send a nasty e-mail to letters@believermag.com.

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I call it “squinting”—you will have your own term. You’ve chosen a favorite musician, probably in your teen years, and the relationship grows through awkward phases—nautical dress, orchestral arrangements, dodgy collections of poems. Along the way, you find yourself squinting to keep seeing what made you fall in love; you will need to pretend that the accordion and the Balkan song cycles are something else. (Fans of Bob Dylan have unusually deep creases.) In pop music, which is a worse deal for the aging than painting and fiction are, there can be a fair amount of effort involved.

With PJ Harvey’s new album, “Let England Shake,” squinting is required. Furthermore, the guitarist and songwriter’s previous album, “White Chalk,” from 2007, was a strictly eyes-closed affair. At some point, she stopped singing from her viscera and brazenly swinging her guitar, and turned into a wispy poet with little more than a piano, a falsetto whine, and a story from everywhere and nowhere—mostly the latter.

- Sasha Frere-Jones in the 2/7/11 New Yorker

To his credit, Frere-Jones goes on to write that “Harvey is allowed to change, and to chase any muse she wants.”

But about this “squinting” thing, I think there’s a pragmatic wisdom to what Nick Hornby wrote in Songbook. (And yes, I’m mindful that I risk over-quoting Hornby.) Anyway, Hornby in Songbook: “… when people ask me what music I like, I find it difficult to reply, because they usually want names of people, and I can only give them song titles. And mostly all I have to have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and get cross when these other people don’t like them as much as I do …”

Frere-Jones’ “squinting” comes from focusing on the musician, from believing — but maybe not fully accepting — that ”Harvey is allowed to change, and to chase any muse she wants.”

Frere-Jones has a Tumblr I enjoy following, mainly for his photos. He used it to post video of Harvey and Björk covering “Satisfaction” in 1994. In the new New Yorker piece, he describes that performance like this:

There’s a performance from that era—at the 1994 Brit Awards, in London—that presages the dilemma of Harvey’s later career: Harvey and Björk covering the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.” Onstage, Harvey reduces the chords to curt, ugly fifths, choppily strummed with downstrokes. She sings in a restrained monotone, and it isn’t clear if she’s dismissing the song, or you, or the very idea of satisfaction. It’s as if the most “useless information” in the world is the song that she’s singing. Of course, it’s a trick, and the song builds, courtesy of the organ that dominated “To Bring You My Love” the following year. Björk stays mum for a verse, and then eases her fifty-foot voice into the song. As Harvey begins to play and sing harder, Björk rockets above her, toying with the words and making disjointed vocal leaps. When they end—not only the song but a certain era of raw performance—on the words “that’s what I say,” it’s absolutely thrilling.


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I developed something of a crush on Elizabeth Bishop after reading The Anthologist. I downloaded an MP3 of her reading “The Fish,” and on an overnight work trip to Barcelona I took with me a copy of Bishop’s collected poems but no clean socks, which is exactly the sort of thing that Paul Chowder might have done. I would say that in my half century on this planet so far, I have valued clean socks above poetry, so The Anthologist may literally have changed my life, and not in a good way. Luckily, it turns out that you can buy socks in Barcelona. Nice ones, too.

- Nick Hornby, from the online excerpt of his latest “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column for The Believer

Three of the more than three things I’d add if I had time:

1) Anyone made crazy by the meanness of “The Problem With Memoirs” piece in Sunday’s NYTBR should check out Hornby’s columns. The column’s basic rule, which Hornby mostly follows, amounts to what so many of our parents taught us: If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. So it celebrates the books Hornby enjoys. I value it.

2) Like Hornby, I loved The Anthologist. Please click here and here if you’d like to read a couple of the posts I wrote about it.

3) Thanks to http://ourswimmer.tumblr.com/ for putting Hornby on my mind with this post.

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Anne Tyler is the person who first made me want to write: I picked up Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in a bookshop, started to read it there and then, bought it, took it home, finished it, and suddenly I had an ambition, for about the first time in my life.
Nick Hornby in Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, giving me yet another book I hope to find time to read and cementing my fear that I’ll become a needle-tracked junkie if someone devises a way to cook literature on a spoon and draw it up into a syringe. Stay in school, kids.
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Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal, about a fortysomething pottery teacher who has an affair with a fifteen-year-old pupil, was moving along nicely until a character starts talking about football. He tells a teaching colleague that he’s been to see Arsenal, and that “Arsenal won Liverpool 3-0.” Readers of this column will have realized by now that I know almost nothing about anything, but if I were forced to declare one area of expertise, it would be what people say to each other after football matches. It’s not much, I know, but it’s mine. And I am positive that no one has ever said “Arsenal won Liverpool 3-0” in the entire history of either Arsenal Football Club or the English league. “Beat,” thrashed,” “did” or “done,” “trounced,” “thumped,” “shat all over,” “walloped,” etc., yes; “won,” emphatically, no. And I think that my dismay and disbelief then led me to question other things, and the fabric of the novel started to unravel a little. … I like Zoë Heller’s writing, and this book has a terrific narrative voice that recalls Alan Bennett’s work; I just wish I wasn’t so picky. This is how picky I am. You know the Arsenal bit? It wasn’t just the unconvincing demotic I objected to; it was the score. Arsenal haven’t beaten Liverpool 3-0 at Highbury since 1991. What chance did the poor woman have?

- Nick Hornby in The Polysyllabic Spree, one of several collections of his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns from The Believer magazine.

I’ve known of this book for a long time. I’ve picked it up at bookstores. I’ve held it, flipped through it. I’ve always set it down. Why? The truest and most foolish reason is that I have this aversion to music groups that wear any sort of uniform. So I’ve never given The Polyphonic Spree a chance. The title of The Polysyllabic Spree forced me to think of The Polyphonic Spree. Therefore, I couldn’t give The Polysyllabic Spree a real chance. Foolish and true. True and foolish. More foolish still since I loved High Fidelity and found Juliet, Naked engrossing enough to post “Hornby ≠ Tolstoy. And yet …” back in February.

Now, somehow, after only a few pages, The Polysyllabic Spree has won me over so thoroughly that I’m feeling guilty for never giving The Polyphonic Spree a chance.

This could happen to you.

The only reason the book is in my house is that I tried and failed to talk someone into letting my son shoot baskets at his school’s gym today. Having failed, I fell into talking with a man who’s teaching a summer class at the school. A basketball class. But he’s also a writer.

Soon, we’d gone from “Sorry. No. We have to close up.” about shooting hoops and moved on to Malcolm Gladwell, Carl Sagan, the value of prose that’s accessible without being dumb, and then ultimately on to the accessible-without-being-dumb Nick Hornby.

The man recommended the books of Hornby’s columns so enthusiastically that I hit the library on the way home. I scored The Polysyllabic Spree and Shakespeare Wrote For Money. And now, having evangelized to the two or three people on Earth who have denied themselves these books because of lunatic prejudice against uniformed musicians, I would like to go back to my reading and then on to bed.

Hornby ≠ Tolstoy. And yet …

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.)

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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
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The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product.
from Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked

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

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