Word Tsunami

I love literary quarterlies. I mean, I just think they're swell - Black Clock, McSweeney's, The Paris Review, Tin House, Glimmer Train, A Public Space. I love the care and passion that these editors and publishers put into their little magazines, working from tiny budgets with shoestring staffs. I remember when I interviewed George Plimpton a few years ago in his apartment, I was stunned to see that The Paris Review at the time was produced from his cramped, low-ceilinged basement. It looked fit for a college yearbook, let alone the most important quarterly of the past half-century.

I love that both established authors and great soon-to-be-knowns contribute. I love that these magazines insist that our time is worth theirs. Despite the fact that the quarterly audience presumably reads the paper everyday, grazes the alt-weeklies, tries to trudge through The New Yorker on a semi-weekly basis, and also keeps up a steady book-reading habit, the quarterlies tells us, no, it's not enough, and now is the time to read tens of thousands more words that will enrich your day, week, life. Subscribing to a literary quarterly is like putting a fixed-rate mortgage down on your future reading time - you might not get to it for a while, but when you do, it'll pay itself off many times over.

Tales of Hoffman

The San Diego Padres reliever Trevor Hoffman broke the all-time saves record on Sunday with his 479th save. Wow, a remarkable achievement, made even more so by the fact that Hoffman was a shortstop in the minors! Apparently, Lee Smith, the man that Hoffman leaped frogged in the record book, was invited to attend the game, but missed it due to "prior commitments."

Smith has been getting some player-hatred online for this, but I ask you - how fun is it to watch someone break a record you thought might carry you into immortality? I have no beef with Smith shining on the game; it must be very painful for him to deal with a drop into second place. I cringed when the Maris family was invited to witness Mark McGuire as he busted their dad's single-season home run record - especially now that we know that McGuire was juiced. Sportsmanship has to run both ways, after all - if McGuire had broken the record on a level playing field, I would say more power to him. Because he didn't, I say fuck him.

Sullivan's Travails

Sorry for that interregnum...dealing with work and other paying matters.

I was struck the other day by Andrew Sullivan's plight. His publisher had to recall the first print run of his new book after a portion of one chapter was inexplicably lumped in with another. I can relate, thought my situation was a bit milder, as it was a galley, not a first print run. My British publisher (which shall go unnamed) produced a reviewer's copy that was completely screwed-up -a large chunk of text was repeated in two different places. See, there's a difference in kind between a galley proof that has typos and a galley that's poorly organized. Reviewers understand that they will encounter their share of misspelled words, "tk" holes, and such - but this was more like an unintentionally bad attempt at Mark Danielewski experimentation. What would reviewers think - that I somehow thought Truman Capote had written In Cold Blood in 1975?

But I digressively whine - In the final analysis, I don't think it made a damn bit of difference. Maybe If I had made a big stink then, it could have been some left-field cause celebre. Book didn't sell squat in England anyway.

A Trip to Sundance

So, as I wrote earlier today, I spent three glorious days at the Sundance Resort in Utah this past weekend to talk about my book The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight. Most folks think only of Sundance in regard to film, and for good reason. But for the past four years, local bookstore owner Karen Dallett has organized a series of author forums grouped around specific themes. My talk was part of a six-author package on the media. (it was the penultimate talk in the series, which concludes on September 30th with 'American Theocracy' author Kevin Phillips)

It worked like this: Patrons, most of whom are loyal to the Sundance author events and have purchased the entire six-author enchilada, showed up at around 12 to have lunch in The Tree Room, a beautiful dining space at the resort, with huge windows that reveal tangles of pine trees and the towering peaks beyond - which, incidentally, are starting to sprout patches of auburn (the leaves turn fairly early here) Then at 1, I was on, bloviating in my usual way about New Journalism. There was a spirited discussion afterwards, with a lot of interesting questions and insights - one woman told us that her engineer husband had been called to testify during the Watergate hearings about Rose Marie Woods' 18 and a half minute gap on that infamous Nixon tape. I signed a bunch of books in the library, and for that lunch hour, all was right with the world.

Events like these are a boost to the fragile author's ego; In Utah, I was pumped full of self-importance and love for mankind. It's illusory and all too transient, of course - your plane touches down on Burbank tarmac, and it starts to feel like a hazy dream. The trip had a salutary effect, though - all writers should be made to feel that their work isn't in vain every once in a while, and you can do worse than Sundance.

Sundance, Kid

Sorry for the delay - I was in Sundance over the weekend as part of their Authors on the Media series, and it was fab. More later, when I have the time to gather my thoughts and get it down here...

Disney, finally..and Mailer, too

Here is something a lot of us have been waiting for - perhaps ten years, maybe longer? I've lost track. It's Neal Gabler's mammoth, definitive biography of Walt Disney, one of those long-gestating projects that never seem to materialize. Looking at the Amazon page for Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination however, it seems like this book is going to be a mind-blower, delving as it does into Disney's alleged anti-semitism and alcoholism.

This, and a new Mailer novel, too? It's going to be an interesting Winter.

I Have No Flipping Idea

Jesus, this is harder for me than I thought it would be - I can't let go of summer. Summer means I can be irresponsible and call it a well-deserved break, and for an adult that's called grace. Fall means hunkering down, a fresh start, and all that crap. I can't deal. Therefore, I'm running on empty, blog-wise - the tank needs to be filled up a little before anything decent appears in this space any time soon.

The End of An Era

As you might have already read elsewhere on the web, Robert Christgau, the self-proclaimed dean of rock critics and mentor to countless writers, was axed by the Village Voice yesterday. I had my issues with Christgau, as did many readers who had read his Consumer Guide of pocket record reviews for eons (Blue Oyster Cult is better than Black Sabbath? Nigga please...,) but the man did help me to build one hell of a great record collection. He was the zen master of the capsule commentary; Christgau could pack more ideas into three sentences than most cultural critics could articulate in a 10,000 essay. My hope is that Christgau will now pocket his severance and put his talent to good use, maybe write a book or two.

So, how many reviews has Christgau written since 1967? Check out his web site - er, that would be 13, 236! Just graze through that index, it's quite astonishing to behold.

God's speed, Dean....

Good Things, 9/1/06

The end of the summer, already? Christ almighty, I am getting older by the minute. Very good things:

Three more days of summer

Alice Kaplan's "French Lessons"

Tom Snyder's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Talk Show DVD

Fretboard Journal

Allen Ginsberg's Howl (Happy 50th birthday)

My Kids

Best Literary Stunt, Ever!

Oh, what an absolutely exquisite gag. I mean, no reality TV producer in his right mind could have come up with something as deliciously vengeful as this. You might have read about it in the NY Times today. The short version: A.N. Wilson, esteemed and insanely prolific British literary author, publishes a biography of John Betjeman, the late poet laureate who was as well-known and as beloved in England as Paul McCartney and the Queen Mother. In his book, Wilson publishes a "love letter" from Betjeman to a friend named Honor Tracy as exhibit A of an apparent love affair between the two.

The letter, which was ostensibly written by a friend of Tracy's named "Eve de Harben," was a fake, and now it seems as if it was written by Bevis Hiller, the author of a massive three-volume biography of Betjeman that Wilson slammed in The Spectator in 2002. Hiller's gushing letter, which begins, "I loved yesterday. All day, I've thought of nothing else..." and so on, is actually a nasty anagram. The first letter of each sentence spells out A.N. WILSON IS A SHIT. Wilson printed this letter in his own book!

Hiller, who apparently spent 25 years of his life working on his Betjeman bio, apparently can't let go of a bad review. The two have been bitch-slapping each other in the British press for the last couple of years, but I can't imagine that Hiller isn't gleefully rubbing his hands together, murmuring "game, set and match, old chap," or something like that, over and over. He has clearly prevailed in this dust-up.

Dylan's Modern Times

Feverishly rushed to my local Book-Record-stationary store today to grab the latest Dylan album, what with all of the critical hosannas. Halfway through the first song, I was asleep at the wheel; by track five, I was seething with anger and wondering what else my 13 bucks might have bought (the new Tortoise compilation?)

It is time, fawning Dylan rock critics, to lay down your pens and prick up your ears. What on earth are you hearing that I ain't? Modern Times is flyweight stuff for an artist of Dylan's stature, a light breeze that might kick open a screen door. This album reveals two unenlightening aspects of Dylan's musical character, circa now: He's listening to a lot of Hoagy Carmichael and Muddy Waters records. Two songs on the album are direct Waters lifts - a slightly reworked "Rollin' and Tumblin'" (OK, that's an old blues song of unknown provenance, but it's Waters' arrangement) and a slightly rejiggered 'Trouble No More" which Dylan has cleverly retitled "Someday Baby" (that'll fool 'em). Yet, scanning the jacket copy, I see no mention of Waters anywhere, just 'All songs written by Bob Dylan.' When is homage thievery?

As middling Dylan records go, it's not wholly offensive, like "Empire Burlesque" or "Under The Red Sky." But I think I'd rather listen to some abject failure like "Self-Portrait" than endure Dylan's newfound romance with torch songs. There's nothing more banal than a slumming genius. But maybe I just need to be convinced -- I felt the same way upon first hearing Love and Theft and I have affection for that record now - but perhaps you feel otherwise?

But Is It Art?

I don't want to go all "sports nut" on ya'll here, but was that Aggasi-Pavel match riveting stuff or what? Agassi pulled out one of his greatest late-career first round victories; down 0-4 in the third set, he refused to lose, and bent Pavel to his will. Aggasi is now playing the role that Jimmy Connors once played at the Open - the aging warrior who toughs it out for his adoring NY fan base one...last...time.

The New York Times' online coverage of the Open is terrific. The Times' art critic Michael Kimmelman is blogging from the Billie Jean King Tennis Center every day and his smart, punchy dispatches are well worth reading.

Steve Lyons is An idiot

Baseball fans, especially Dodger fans, know that Fox Sports color dude Steve Lyons is a dumb jock, but I had no idea that he was a dumb racist jock. On Sunday, while working the Angels-Yankees game, Lyons was talking about Yanks' catcher Sal Fasano, and the fact that he had to shave his Fu Manchu moustache to accommodate Steinbrenner's absurd Eisenhower-era grooming code. Then there was a comment made by the other Fox guy (he's so non-descript that his name isn't even worth mentioning) about how you don't want to cross Fasano. Well, Lyons replied, you know Fasano is the type of guy "who knows a guy that knows a guy."

ugh, spare us the racial profiling and just stick to strategy, please.

Good Things, 8/25/06

Am I becoming depressingly incurious in my dotage? I have no new records, movies, etc to report; the best I can do is Talladega Nights, which made me laugh out loud so often that my kids were embarrassed. No one else in the theatre was laughing, either, and granted, it's not THAT funny. But Will Ferrell can do no wrong in my book, and so I laughed at even the dumbest telegraphed gags, at all the gags regarding testicles, beer and redneck 'tude - and I didn't even realize that Sacha Cohen was in this thing - hooray for Sacha Cohen and his French accent of indeterminate ethnicity!

So that's how lame I am, recommending the top grossing film for the month of August - I am SO bleeding-edge....

I Miss William Buckley

As Katie Couric prepares to take over at CBS, my thoughts have turned to William F. Buckley Jr.

When I was a kid, Buckley was the most public intellectual in the country, not because of anything he had written (and he had written plenty by this time, including his notorious anti-left screed God and Man at Yale) but because he was on TV, of course. Firing Line, his public affairs program, aired from 1966 to 1996, a run comparable to Johnny Carson's, but with socialist academics and unknown politicians. There was always much to hate about Buckley. Often cited as the father of the conservative movement, or at least its prime theorist, Buckley's politics were often offensive, i.e., his advocacy of Joe McCarthy and his cold-war absolutism. Dyspeptic and defiantly Anglo-Saxon, prone to bug-eyed fits of mild outrage, Buckley was an awkward TV host - his intellectual condescension towards his guests, whether on the Left or the Right, was never less than transparent, and Buckley's frequent fits of OED show-offery always had my father scrambling for the dictionary.

I really miss him. Stanford University, which is the conservator for the complete Firing Line archives, has made a partial list of the shows available online, as well as teasingly short Real Time clips of a handful of random programs. But just scan that list of shows for a minute - can you imagine a talk show in 2006 tackling subjects like "Mobilizing The Poor?" "The Idea of The Great Ideas?" "Race and Conservatism?" It's great to watch Buckley give equal air-time to prime movers and professors alike - he reels off academic C.V.'s as if they were movie credits. Granted, this was public TV, but not even public TV has the courage of its pledge-drive convictions anymore - if you think of Tavis Smiley or Charlie Rose as the heirs to the Firling Line mantle, well, them's fighting words. Firing Line reminds us of a time when television, albeit ghetto-ized TV for people with PBS tote bags, could sustain a serious public-affairs show that had nothing to do with entertainment news. Do take a look at these clips, and you, too, will feel the elegiac sting of a good time gone forever.

Guitar Tabs? Pray for Hal Leonard

For every amateur musician who blesses the Gods of the Internet every time s/he downloads the tablature to a song s/he just HAS to figure out THAT VERY SECOND, the news that music publishers are going to crack down on illegal tab sites is mighty disturbing indeed. OK, I'll amend that sober third-person lead - what I meant to say was, shit, this is bad news for me! I love these tab sites, and so do countless guitar players who have filled their fakebooks with thousands of crib sheets taken off sites like Chordie and GuitarTabs.

Back in the day, us guitar hacks would spend ridiculous cash to buy songbooks that were never quite inclusive enough. 30 bucks tends to be the suggested retail price for most of these books, the economics of which I have never understood. Do we really need to spend more on the fakebook than on the record itself? You can see where I'm going with this - tab sites freed us and gave us grazing ability - we could download, say, one Merle Haggard song, one from Neil Young, etc, and build own own DIY fakebooks. The possibilities are endless - I have always found what I'm looking for, no matter how obscurantist.

Like so many web-ocrites, I tend to a take a "free stuff for me, but not for thee" approach: If I can rip stuff off the web that benefits my lifestyle, I'll overlook the fact that someone else has just been ripped off a few pennies. I don't download music for free off the web, but if music publishers think that cracking down on tab sites is going to solve their problems, they're just strumming past the graveyard. What they need to do is make their books cheaper and more accessible, expand the genre options, and get creative. Otherwise, tabs will forever slouch towards my Martin dreadnought.

Martha Gellhorn

I reviewed Martha Gellhorn's letters for today's Washington Post. Here 'tis:

Addicted to War
Marriage to Hemingway was just one episode in this journalist's rip-roaring life.
Reviewed by Marc Weingarten
Sunday, August 20, 2006; BW15

SELECTED LETTERS OF MARTHA GELLHORN

Edited by Caroline Moorehead

Henry Holt. 531 pp.$32.50


Where is the Martha Gellhorn biopic? Why hasn't some enterprising movie producer figured out that this writer's rip-roaring life is the stuff of breathless action-adventure? War correspondent, novelist, short-story writer, playwright: She should be as well known as Truman Capote, but the fact that she's a historical footnote has more to do with the inbred sexism of American mythmaking than with Gellhorn. In a life dense with incident, her five-year marriage to Ernest Hemingway has overshadowed everything else.

Caroline Moorehead, the editor of this fascinating volume of letters, tried to rectify the situation with her excellent 2003 biography of Gellhorn. But, alas, it didn't exactly do boffo box office, and so we must now turn to this book in hopes that it will expose the curious reader to the extraordinary thrill ride that was Gellhorn's life.

Born into a family of overachievers, Gellhorn at first took the conventional path. She worked hard in school and attended Bryn Mawr but chafed at the regimented academic grind. In search of adventure, she turned to journalism. After a short stint as a cub reporter for a paper in Albany, N.Y., the 21-year-old upstart moved to Paris and began her career as a kind of writing nomad. During her long life, Gellhorn put down stakes in Africa, England, Cuba, Florida and Mexico and traveled to countless other countries for her work.

Gellhorn first made her mark during the Spanish Civil War. Sitting down with ordinary citizens and listening to their tales of survival, she filed a series of stories for Collier's magazine that revealed a gift for unflinching observation and unforced pathos. Her stories from Spain -- difficult to find today -- were much better than Hemingway's.

Gellhorn's correspondence from the 1930s and '40s reveals a strong desire to be in the thick of pitched battles. War was an addiction for her; it gave her the motivation to work hard and produce good work. Shortly after her assignment in Spain came to an end, she confessed to her college friend Hortense Flexner that her newfound placidity was dull. "Nothing in my life has so affected my thinking as the losing of that war. It is, very banally, like the death of all loved things." Gellhorn was desperate to make her mark as a writer of distinction, and epic global conflicts were the best kind of raw material. She was certainly everywhere she needed to be: Dachau after the liberation of the camps, the beaches of Normandy during D-Day, Vietnam. Disdainful of journalism despite her considerable skills (it was all just rent money to her), Gellhorn also gave short shrift to her fiction but produced a number of very good books, including a World War II novel, The Stricken Field .

This collection is punctuated with stinging lashes to her ego. "I would rather be a writer than anything else on earth," she wrote to Hemingway's editor Max Perkins in 1941, "but I am lazy and there are communal demands on time, and then besides, I feel very troubled in the head and heart." Those troubles could be traced to her stormy relationship with Hemingway. Her letters to Papa from the late 1930s are flush with flirtatious platitudes ("I love you. That's the main thing. That's what I want you to know"), but she later confesses to Flexner that "Ernest and I, really are afraid of each other, each one knowing that the other is the most violent person either one knows."The marriage ended in 1945 with a vicious and recriminatory letter from Hemingway: "Sleep well my beloved phony and pretentious bitch."

Other toxic relationships followed, including a marriage to former Time editor-in-chief Tom Matthews, which collapsed in 1963 when Gellhorn discovered he had been engaged in a long-term affair. Many of these letters are taken up with musings about the impossibility of enduring romance and her futile efforts to find a lasting relationship. To her good friend Allen Grover, she despaired of ever finding "comforting loving trusting arms that were to be guarantee forever against nightmares." But romance receded to the background as Gellhorn grew older. Work and old friends sustained her even when she felt "blind and helpless with unwriting." Her creative metabolism slowed down only when her body began betraying her. A hysterectomy in 1973 left her feeling like a "frail, bowed, little old lady, aged 102." Then, in 1974, while driving along a barren road near her Kenya residence, Gellhorn struck and killed a small child. "There was absolute silence," she wrote to her longtime confidante Diana Cooper, "nothing in the world, only me sitting dazed in the car in the ditch and a little body curled up in the road." Though she was held blameless, the incident, perhaps more than any wartime ugliness she had witnessed, left an indelible mark on her psyche.

Over the next two decades, the intrepid Gellhorn settled down a bit, but never stopped working. In 1996, two years before her death at the age of 89, Gellhorn wrote to her friend Victoria Glendinning that she had completed a 42-page article on Brazil for Granta, even though it had driven her "into exhaustion and despair. Typing and not seeing, trying to remember what I had already written and trying to get a mass of information when . . . I could not read my own handwritten notes." In 1998, sick with cancer and other maladies, Gellhorn calmly took a pill and ended her life, in control of her destiny until the very end.

These letters, which have been placed into their proper historical context by Moorehead's thoughtful annotations, reveal the indomitable spirit of a titan of American letters. It's high time for Gellhorn to emerge from the shadows of 20th-century literature into the bright light of mainstream recognition. ·

Good Things 8/18/06

Not many good things to report on today - it just wasn't a "good things" kind of week. Let's see what we can drum up here, though...

I like the new Viva Voce record Get Yr Blood Sucked Out. Aside from packing the best song titles of the year ("How to Nurse A Bruised Ego, "Bill Bixby, ""We Do Not Fuck Around"), the album has an appealingly trippy, drowsy, coming-down-from-a-Vicodin-high vibe. I like how the strident guitars play off of the hushed vocals, while the drums tumble down a flight of stairs. It has an echo of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, which is always a good thing.

I've also rediscovered Sparks' 2002 release Lil Beethoven. It's a very strange and eccentric concept album - a mock-operatic meditation on poseur rock stars, suburban ennui, narcissism, and er, lots of other things. I root for bands like Sparks, who have kept it together for almost 30 years, scraping for record deals and maintaining a fan base by not compromising, all that good shit. Don't like the new record too much, though, but I'm assuming there will be another soon.

Headline (or subhed) Of The Day

From today's Malibu Times:

"Jamie Gold won the World Series of Poker's Main Event and a $12 Million Prize. Not needing the money, he says he will use it to help his friends and father, who is in the final stages of Lou Gehrig's disease."

It's heartening to know that Gold cares about his friends and family, but..NOT NEEDING THE MONEY?! Who says the rich are getting richer?

Off to Lynch The Wizard

This is a disturbing story: Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz was a nasty (and quite vocal, apparently) racist. Now here's a little game for you kids: match the characters of the Wizard of Oz with their racist archetypes. The Tin Man? Baum was obviously an anti-Tin-ite!