The New Yorker pays tribute to Leonard Michaels this week by printing a story of his… a terriffic story called “Cryptology.” The weird timing of all this Michaels stuff has got me thinking that I really ought to read some more of his work. I will have to look around for some of his books. Scroll down a few entries to see more on Michaels. Also in the New Yorker James Wood reviews God’s Secretaries by Adam Nicholson. This is a book about the creation of the King James Bible. It is not the sort of subject matter that I am necessarily drawn to, but it has been incredibly well reviewed by some rather prestegious publications and reviewers: Jonathan Yardley and Christopher Hitchens to name a couple. If any of that looks interesting check out the first chapter.
More on Michaels
New Yorker Fiction by the Numbers
In 2007 and 2008, Frank Kovarik, who writes and teaches English in St. Louis, sent us a spreadsheet that he has used to catalog New Yorker fiction since 2003, and now, with another year of data included, we're going to revisit it.Frank's spreadsheet records not just the titles and authors of the stories published in the New Yorker, but things like gender, country of origin, and frequency of appearance. He also includes his own personal quality rating for each story (your mileage may vary; he writes about his favorites here).Frank has once again generously offered to make his spreadsheet available to Millions readers. If you're interested, you can see it here.With seven years of data compiled, we can get some hard info on the New Yorker's tendencies when publishing fiction.Frequency:
The first thing we always look at is if the New Yorker is bringing new writers into the mix or sticking with its old standbys. Just 10 writers account for 82 (or 23%) of the 358 stories to appear over the last seven years. Just 18 writers account for 124 (or 35%) of the stories. The New Yorker is sometimes criticized for featuring the same writers again and again, but it appears to be getting better on this front. The 18 "standbys" noted above and listed below accounted for only 7 of the 49 stories published in 2009 (or 14%). On the flip side of this argument, 15 writers appeared in the New Yorker for the first time in 2009 (at least since 2003).Gender:
Of the 358 stories in the New Yorker from 2003 through 2009, 131 or 36.6% were penned by women. (That's down from 38.1% last year.)Nationality:
The fiction section of the New Yorker is a pretty multi-cultural place, but Americans still make up the bulk of the contributors. 184 of the stories, or 51% (up from 50% after 2008), are American (and this leaves off several writers who could be conceivably classified as both American and a native of another country). Coming in in second are the Brits at 29 stories and in third the Irish at 23 stories.Returning to the frequency question, below are all the writers who have appeared in the New Yorker at least five times over the last six years. These are the superstars of New Yorker fiction (stars indicate the number of stories, if any, they had in the New Yorker in 2009.):12:Alice Munro10:Tessa Hadley**William Trevor8:T. Coraghessan Boyle7:George Saunders**Jonathan Lethem**Louise ErdrichJohn UpdikeRoddy DoyleHaruki Murakami6:Antonya Nelson*Thomas McGuane5:Tobias WolffCharles D'AmbrosioEdward P. JonesRoberto BolañoLara Vapnyar
Making Strange: On Laura Vapnyar’s ‘Still Here’
Though her book may have more in common with the works of Jane Austen or Claire Messud, her satire is its own form of ostraneniye, as it successfully points out that the essential strangeness of what are now some of the most common elements of American life.
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LBC Picks a New Book
But you have to go to the site to find out what it is. (I loved this book, by the way.)
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Selections from a Winter Reading War and Peace
My winter reading project this year is War and Peace. On an average night I make it through 15-20 pages before I become too tired to follow the story anymore. At this rate I should be done by Easter.
I have read Anna Karenina and The Death Ivan Illych so I am well-acquainted with the pleasures of Tolstoy. A 2007 NYRB article on a new translation of War and Peace described those pleasures well: “No other writer,” wrote Orlando Figes, “can recreate emotions and experience with such precision and economy.”
Reading War and Peace, there is the sense of beginning one of the great experiences one might have in a lifetime. It is an enervating feeling, but also a melancholy one. I imagine I will feel a step closer to death 1,300 pages from now.
But before that happens, I’d like to annotate the most beautiful, strange, penetrating and sublime moments from the book. This desire owes in part to the natural inclination to want to share something as good as Tolstoy. But there are selfish motives at work, too. I hope that I might, by sharing the experience of reading War and Peace, be able to hold onto it a little longer.
First, A few of my favorite passages from the first third of the book:
I found his description of obligatory and irreproachable idleness to capture an unexpected pleasure of parenthood: that even something as lazy as a late-morning nap feels purposeful, even dutiful, when taken alongside a sleeping child.
The Bible legend tells us that the absence of labor—idleness—was a condition of the first man’s blessedness before the Fall. Fallen man has retained a love of idleness, but the curse weighs on the race not only because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our brows, but because our moral nature is such that we cannot be both idle and at ease. An inner voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle. If man could find a state in which he felt that though idle he was fulfilling his duty, he would have found one of the conditions of man’s primitive blessedness. And such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a whole class- the military. The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness.
It’s astounding how often in War and Peace Tolstoy is able to write about overwhelming elements of human experience as easily as if he were observing a rock in his front yard:
After dinner Natasha, at Prince Andre's request, went to the clavichord and began singing. Prince Andre stood by a window talking to the ladies and listened to her. In the midst of a phrase he ceased speaking and suddenly felt tears choking him, a thing he had thought impossible for him. He looked at Natasha as she sang, and something new and joyful stirred in his soul. He felt happy and at the same time sad. He had absolutely nothing to weep about yet he was ready to weep. What about? His former love? The little princess? His disillusionments?...His hopes for the future?...Yes and no. The chief reason was a sudden, vivid sense of the terrible contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable within him and that limited and material something that he, and even she, was. This contrast weighed on and yet cheered him while she sang.
I often wonder whether the elements of our lives—the Internet, chain stores, abundance, self-consciousness—influence a conscious experience that is unique to our time. Tolstoy’s answer is that they don’t:
“Yes, that is true, Prince. In our days,” continued Vera—mentioning “our days” as people of limited intelligence are fond of doing, imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of “our days” and that human characteristics change with the time.
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Hollywood and Capitol Hill
Jennifer 8. Lee in the New York Times describes the "Washington read." A practice in which Washington insiders peruse the index of a current political best seller, Plan of Attack or Against All Enemies, for example, to see if they have been mentioned. It is sort of a test one's own importance inside the beltway, and many, prematurely certain of their own historical significance, are crushed to find that they have been omitted from history's first draft. Washington, however, does not have a monopoly on such practices. I lived in Washington D.C. for most of my life before moving to Los Angeles, and I have observed many times the similarities between the two cities' chief industries. I don't know if I coined this analogy, but I've always thought that politics is just Hollywood for ugly people. And so it makes sense that I discovered, over the last couple of years, that there is such thing as a "Hollywood read." It usually goes something like this: an older guy stands at the front of the store flipping through the latest Hollywood tell-all. He is deeply tanned and his shirt is unbuttoned to reveal tufts of silver chest hair. He is wearing ridiculously oversized sunglasses and smells of cigar smoke. He leans over to me and points to the book and says, "I used to work with this guy," and then he goes back to scanning the index to make sure his old buddy mentioned him. Samuel Fuller's posthumously published A Third Face generated this reaction. And those in the music biz went straight to the index of Walter Yetnikoff's Howling at the Moon. Last fall, a mention in Down and Dirty Pictures by Peter Biskind meant that you officially matter in today's Hollywood. But to have been mentioned in Robert Evans' The Kid Stays in the Picture indicates a special sort of notoriety.
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Some Books I’ve Noticed
Now that Thanksgiving weekend has finally come to a close, I have a bit of time to let you know about one or two odd and interesting books I've noticed lately. I happen to think that Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of the more enjoyable books I've ever read, and I also loved reading about Kesey in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (which, by the way is fantastic if read back to back with Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels since the books tell essentially the same story but with different points of view and writing styles). So, I was rather intrigued when I came across Kesey's Jail Journal. It's a colorful amalgamation of collages, drawings, and text that he created during various stints behind bars over the course of thirty years.Another interesting looking book is Six Feet Under: Better Living Through Death which is a companion book to the HBO series. I'm not a big fan of TV show companion books. They are nearly always hastily produced assemblages of screen captures and mind-numbingly idiotic text, but this one appears to break the mold a bit. The book isn't an episode guide; instead it meanders through various backstories in an appropriately eerie sort of way, with lots of odd photos and ephmera related to the show. In that sense it's interesting for what it is, but it's also a triumph in book design. The book slides into this odd, plastic, vertical slip cover that is faintly reminiscent of a coffin, and the book itself lacks a traditional spine, and instead appears to be a series of booklets artfully woven together.Finally, I'm sure all the Mcsweeney's watchers have seen this item, which for me falls into the annoying "weird for the sake of being weird" category. Projects like William T. Vollman's Rising Up and Rising Down keep me interested, but it bugs me to see McSweeney's squandering the advantages they have over other independent publishers with so much forced silliness and ironic posturing.
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Reader Beware
Advance readers copies, the paperbacks sent out early to book reviewers, often contain special notes from authors or editors that impart a little back story or extol the virtues of the book at hand, but I've never seen an author's note quite like the one that Pete Dexter penned for the advance readers copies of his forthcoming novel Spooner: As far as I know, sometime in November of last year, the book you have in your hands was three years late. There are many reasons it was three years late, probably the most conspicuous being that it was once 250 pages or so longer than the version you hold, and it takes maybe half a year to write an extra 250 pages, and at least twice that to subtract them back out. I realize this leaves another year and a half unaccounted for, and all I can say about that, readers, is get in line. Whole decades are missing from my life and I am pretty sure I wouldn't have it any other way.At any rate; it turns out that bringing a book home three years past deadline presents problems for the publisher. Publications have to be set (again), covers drawn, generous comments collected - god knows how many of my greatest admirers have died while I've been diddling around with this thing - and so you can understand, perhaps, that in the end someone had to put his/her foot down and say enough, and in the end somebody did. Be assured it wasn't me. I could have kept this up for another five years. Oh, and a title. They thought a title might be nice.All to say that what you have here, while not exactly a first draft, is further away from the finished product than most advanced readers' editions are, and when you come across sentences you particularly don't like, keep in mind that I probably didn't like them either. On the odd chance that the bad sentences are still there when the book comes out, then you should keep in mind that you're reading somebody who is still missing 18 months of the last 36, and has no idea about 2006 at all.This isn't the first time that Dexter has prefaced a book with an introduction that threatens to divide his readers into those who get his sense of humor and those who don't. The introduction to Paper Trails (this time in the actual published edition), which collects Dexter's columns and articles from his legendary newspaper career, lets us know that he had little interest in collecting his columns in the first place. He tells us that the 82 columns and articles we are about to read will lack dates and any indication as to where they first appeared because, basically, he and his editor Rob Fleder didn't want to dig them up. He also calls the venerable Washington Post book critic Jonathan Yardley a "worn-out old whore."What's interesting to me about Dexter is that, while his fiction is quite good, his wry, impolitic sense of humor doesn't always shine through in his noirish, almost hard-boiled novels. Instead, you need to read his (essential) Paper Trails or keep an eye out for things like the remarkable author's note quoted above.
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