You're viewing all posts tagged with The Believer
“

“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.

Played 10 times
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Bookstores paralyze me. Not always. Often, though.

With so many choices, there’s no realistic chance of finding the one book that’s most right for whatever version of me stands before the shelves on a particular day in a particular mood in a particular phase of my life. If I’m being reasonable, I settle: I understand the right book to be mythical and pick a right book.

If I’m being unreasonable, stingy, and risk-averse, I flip through book after book, failing to connect and finally succumbing to a 57-channels-and-nothin’-on lie. I become incapable of imagining that I’ll ever feel the way I feel right now.

The way I feel right now has everything to do with novelist Chris Bachelder. In the week or two since I learned of his existence via The Believer, I’ve blogged about him here and here.

If we can pretend for a minute that reading someone’s fiction for the first time is exactly like a blind date, then my blind date with Bachelder’s Lessons in Virtual Tour Photography soared well beyond a cautious “let’s do this again.”

Don’t make me get more specific. I’ve painted myself into a corner with this blind-date analogy, and I don’t want the pressure of knowing that Bachelder’s armada of attorneys will slap me with a restraining order if my words fail to convey the distinction between falling in love with a writer and falling in love with a writer’s writing.

What I’m feeling — this glorious buzz that I bet you’ve felt since you love books enough to endure seven paragraphs of me going on like this — smashes the 57-channels-and-nothin’-on lie. It’s the feeling of believing that Bachelder’s U.S.! is the one book I should read next.

Here’s what the back cover of U.S.! says about the novel: “In Chris Bachelder’s bizarre world, muckraker Upton Sinclair is repeatedly exhumed (and miraculously resurrected) by beleaguered but optimistic leftists, and then gunned down (and once harpooned!) by those seeking fame, fortune, and American business as usual.”

If that premise doesn’t make you wince and flee, you may be pleased to learn that Bachelder read from the novel in 2006 when he was still teaching at Colorado College. You can hear his reading by pressing play above or by clicking this link. A full listing for the Colorado College Notable Lectures & Performances podcast is here.

“
Once again, the octopus extends its tentacles all over the instrument, touching and probing the bagpipe. The tentacles gingerly move over the blowstick, the drones, and the bag. This happens for quite some time, the octopus continuing to touch the bagpipe without playing it. Eventually the bartender comes over and says to the man next to the octopus, “Well, buddy, is he going to play it or not?” And the octopus says …

- Chris Bachelder in The Believer

This is from “The Dead Chipmunk (An Interrogation Into The Mechanisms of Jokes)” — a piece that’s more enjoyable than it has any right to be.

I don’t want to spoil a punchline, but I will say that nobody who gets offended by octopi or profanity should click the link above.

“
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.