In August, Emre mentioned In Me Own Words: The Autobiography of Bigfoot by Graham Roumieu, a very funny book – written in Bigfoot’s own voice and filled with illustrations that somehow straddle grotesque and amusing. Now Roumieu has brought Bigfoot back for another book, Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir, so Bigfoot fans can get their long-awaited Bigfoot books. These are certainly my most favorite Sasquatch-themed books. For more, visit Roumieu’s Web site.
Bigfoot back
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
As I recall there was a brief burst of interest in Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo when the movie came out in 2002. It makes sense because the movie does a good job of capturing this story of intrigue and revenge, and, in fact, the novel lends itself well to the screen because it is so packed full of brilliant schemes and vivid characters. At the start of the book Edmond Dantes, a young French sailor, gets unwittingly wrapped up in the political machinations of his day, and ends up getting hauled off to the Chateau d'If, an island prison as sinister as it sounds. At this point, though we feel sorry for Dantes, we are treated to 50 or so pages of his struggle against hopelessness and his friendship with a priest named Faria. Dumas' account of Dantes time in prison is thrilling both for its emotional weight and for the ingenious plans that Dantes and Faria concoct. By the next stage of the book, when the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo begins stirring up trouble among the Parisian elite, you wonder what else could be in store, since so many adventures have already occurred. But it turns out there's a whole lot more. Dozens of characters are introduced, and though at times it becomes a bit overwhelming trying to remember who is romantically involved with whom and who is trying to kill whom, the whole massive web manages to untangle itself wonderfully in the end. The book is a real joy to read and Monte Cristo is a brilliant character. You will find him to be both enthralling and terrifying.
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The Anatomy of a Break Up
Thoughts of suicide, depression, and listlessness for weeks on end are just a few ways the loss of a lover is mourned. Unrequited love can open an abyss in which time and activities cease, or it can turn us towards life, as Rilke states in The Duino Elegies, sending us trembling like arrows, leaping into the future. Roland Barthes wrote A Lover's Discourse after separating from a lover: his compendium of reflections from the lover's perspective makes the solitary sorrow less so, by reflecting on the universal experience of madness, delusion, and exaltation when falling in love, and later the jealousy, anxiety, and sorrow distance imparts. Barthes traces the trajectory of love, which feels so personal and irreplaceable, and in doing so reveals the common course of love: "('It develops, grows, causes suffering and passes away' in the fashion of a Hippocractic disease): the love story (the 'episode', the 'adventure') is the tribute the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it."Sophie Calle took the arrow's course upon her lover's spurning and transformed her misery into art. As obsessive as Barthes, she explores and classifies love from the perspective of the break-up. Her lover ended their relationship in an email that closed with the line, "Take care of yourself." Her exhibition now showing at the Paula Cooper Gallery is her response. Calle consulted one hundred and seven women and asked them analyze the letter according to their professions: a markswoman shoots the letter, a parrot chews up the crumpled letter, a copy editor breaks the letter down grammatically and calls it repetitive, the criminal psychologist calls the letter's author manipulative and psychologically dangerous "or/and a great writer." Although Calle won't reveal the author's identity in the exhibition or in later interviews - according to her, "What I'm putting on show is a dumping... I don't talk about the man, and all the better. The subject is the letter, the text..." - the psychologist's analysis is accurate in at least one respect: Calle's former lover is a respected French writer, Grégoire Bouillier.With the aid of the community of women's responses, Calle depicts the anatomy of a break-up while on the rebound. In the video of Calle's session with a family mediator, where the letter sits in a chair across from Calle in place of the lover, Calle works through her grief, her astonishment, and attempts to move past it. Although she didn't like the letter, she states, it was better than nothing, and transforming it into this exhibition "has done [her] a lot of good." It was good for her and even better for us, for the ephemeral relationship ended with a relic that Calle has transformed into a poignant meditation on lost love and the lover's obsession. Barthes writes in A Lover's Discourse, "the love which is over and done with passes into another world like a ship into space, lights no longer winking: the loved being once echoed loudly, now that being is entirely without resonance (the other never disappears when or how we expect)." With Take Care of Yourself, Calle bids her love adieu. As she states, in the end, "the project had replaced the man."
The Blurb of Death: The collected blurbs of James Frey and JT Leroy
The New York Times has a little piece about books that have been blurbed by recently discredited authors. Taking the cake is Nic Kelman's Girls which was blurbed by both JT Leroy and James Frey.Just for fun, here are some more blurbs from each.Frey:"[This] should join Catch-22 and The Things They Carried as this generation's defining literary expression of men at war." for The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell by John Crawford (Note how he cites two works of fiction in blurbing a memoir.)"Charlie Huston is a bad-ass writer, Six Bad Things is a bad-ass book. I loved it, absolutely loved it, as I did his first book. Can't wait for whatever else comes from him." for Six Bad Things by Charlie Huston"Blue Blood is real, authentic, true. Beautiful and inspiring, terrifying and heartbreaking. It is a great book." for Blue Blood by Edward Conlon"Perverse and somewhat depraved, Rod Liddle's fiction is a sexy but not too beautiful montage of what happens when people succumb to their urges and fantasies without considering the consequences." for Too Beautiful for You by Rod Liddle"I have read many translations of this ancient text but Mitchell's is by far the best." for Tao Te Ching translated by Stephen MitchellAnd finally there's an "Amazon.com exclusive" where Frey reviews Jay McInerney's new novel, The Good Life (review available here until Amazon realizes it and gets rid of it): "It's also a deeply personal book, McInerney's most personal since Bright Lights, and it feels to me like I'm reading about variations of McInerney's own life. He, like Fitzgerald, is at his best when he's putting his own experiences into the lives of his characters, and I've never felt more of McInerney, or felt more vulnerability, which to me is a sign of strength in a writer, Unfortunately, Fitzgerald's life was unsustainable. He died drunk, penniless, alone, forgotten. McInernery could have followed his path, and it sometimes seemed like he would. Thankfully he didn't. People wondered what kind of writer Fitzgerald might have been had he lived. McInerney, his closest succesor, is starting to show us."And two more from Leroy:"Corgan steps to the plate at the first scent of menace, prepared, as one who is born into the language of battle. His hands might be balled tight, but his soul absorbs what his fists cannot truly deflect. Never just the spectator, Corgan transforms his world into the palpable, lyrical beauty of the heartbreak of one who cannot turn away, allowing us to get as close as we dare without blinking." for Blinking with Fists: Poems by Billy Corgan"Really, really great...close-to-the-nerve honesty, severe suffering, intertwined with that leavening cynical humor." for Important Things That Don't Matter by David Amsden
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Campaigning
I've been having a really good time following the race for the Democratic nomination. As is usually the case with me and politics, I'm far more interested as an observer than as a participant. The daily maneuvering makes for good reading. I've mostly been following the action at The Note, the daily column put together by ABC News' political unit. It's a great behind-the-scenes look at the process. All of this politicking has got me thinking about one of my all time favorite books. Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 combines, in a way that only Thompson can, political reporting with author's deteriorating ability to keep it all together. I enjoy this book the most out of all of Thompson's books because it provides a terrific outsider's look at the mealy insides of American politics. Thompson sharing the back of a limo with Nixon on a ride from Boston to Manchester is priceless. But it is also amazing because it comes at an odd moment in Thompson's career, the point of transition from the clear-headed, idealistic recklessness of Hell's Angels to the addled egotism of his later work. The book got me excited about politics, but I was frustrated that Thompson wasn't able to keep writing at this level for the rest of his career. Still, it remains a fantastic book for anyone who is interested in history or politics, especially if you have taste for Thompson's singular, stylistic flair.
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Life Imitating Art (Or, At Least, Taking Notice of It?)
In the first wave of articles on Governor Sarah Palin at The New York Times, I came across a reader-comment that Ms. Palin looked like Geena Davis in the TV show Commander-in-Chief. In this short-lived 2005 drama, Davis played the first woman Vice President, who ascends to the presidency after the death of the President. The Times reader's comment also reminded me of another fictional first president, 24's President David Palmer (played by Dennis Haysburt). Had this wildly popular (and very long running - Haysburt played the president from 2001-2005) imaginary depiction of a black president helped acclimate Americans to the idea? I found myself wondering if shows like Commander-in-Chief and 24, which offer fictional visions of scenarios that have not yet come to pass, give history a nudge. Can art/entertainment (the distinction between these two being a debatable one) help us as a culture imagine historical changes - and so help to bring them into being?It would not be the first time in our history that art has given life - and particularly public opinion and national politics - a little push. There is the famous (and quite possibly apocryphal) story of Abraham Lincoln meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Or, Life Among the Lowly, in 1861, and greeting her with words, "So this is the little lady who started this Great War." Apocryphal stories aside, Stowe's novel from 1852, sometimes considered a direct response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 but more likely the result of Stowe's lifelong belief that slavery was a sin in the eyes of God, sold 300,000 copies in the US in its first year and went on to be the first international American bestseller, and the best-selling book of the century, after the Bible. While the novel's sentimentality and deeply Christian worldview can be alienating to some modern readers, its vivid narrative - by turns realist, gothic, and melodramtic - is undeniably haunting (though its perpetuation of black stereotypes has become proverbial). Uncle Tom's Cabin has been credited with capturing the national imagination, raising national consciousness, and giving the issues of slavery and emancipation a national urgency that precipitated the Civil War.Stowe's work - not that of the freed slave turned orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass - is more often assigned the role of cultural catalyst in the American move toward abolition. Douglass' work, both for its status as a first-hand account of life as a slave, and for the power and intelligence of Douglass' narrative voice, is far superior to Stowe's, but it is Stowe's - the more melodramatic, the more imaginative, the more comparable to television drama - that sold 10,000 copies in its first week, while Douglass' best-selling 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave had 11,000 copies in circulation only after three years in print. Also suggestive of a television-esque quality, Stowe's Uncle Tom was originally published serially in a magazine - in episodes. If popularity in fiction is any indication of a country's readiness for a historical change in fact, it would seem that America is ready for a black president but perhaps not quite ready for a female running mate who stands a decent chance of ascending to the presidency (given McCain's age and history of skin cancer). It's all much more complicated than this, of course, but I find the idea that the imaginary can give shape to the real (in a non-Don Quixote-ish way) quite captivating.
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Books on Stoops
My wife and I are moving out of the apartment we've rented for the last five years and into another apartment in the same neighborhood. The onerous task of culling through our books has fallen to me - perhaps justly, since I'm the one who collected most of the damned things in the first place. My goal is to discard at least two boxes. I've been struck, though, by the number of books on my shelves that I found among other people's discards.Indeed, hardly a day goes by in Brooklyn that I don't see a box of cast-off books sitting on a stoop or by a curb, with a "Free - Take Me" sign, or (once) a glow-stick casting its alien light over the offerings. The entire borough, viewed from a certain angle, is like a great rotating library: you take my copy of Mules and Men, I'll relieve you of your Sense and Sensibility.What follows, in no particular order, is a catalogue of the 30 books I've apparently taken from other people's stoops over the last five years: a sort of portrait of a certain time and place. I'd be curious to hear about your own finds in the comments box below.Baker, Nicholson: Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of CivilizationAckerman, Diane: A Natural History of the SensesMaugham, W. Somerset: The Razor's EdgeElizabethan Plays (a 1933 anthology; no author)Heidegger, Martin: Being and Time (trans. Macquarrie & Robinson)Baldassare Castiglione: The Book of the CourtierGarcia Lorca, Frederico: Three PlaysBréton, André, ed.: What is Surrealism?Tsvetaeva, Marina: Selected PoemsMitchell, David: GhostwrittenHarvey, David: Spaces of HopeGrimm, Jacob and Wilhelm: Fairy TalesPinter, Harold: The Proust ScreenplayMarlowe, Christopher: Plays and PoemsWoolf, Virginia: Essays, vol. IIFaludi, Susan: Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American WomenMerot, Pierre: MammalsPope, Alexander: The Rape of the LockReed, Lou: Rock & Roll Heart (okay, it's a VHS tape, but still pretty cool)Marcuse, Herbert: One-Dimensional ManCalvino, Italo: Italian FolktalesThompson, Willie: Postmodernism and HistoryCocteau, Jean: Five PlaysAmis, Martin: Visiting Mrs. NabokovGibbon, Edward: Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. IVBissell, Tom: God Lives in St. PetersburgCalasso, Roberto: KaPortis, Charles: NorwoodDidion, Joan: MiamiSt. Augustine: The City of God[Image credit: steelight]
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The Bestseller List: Bastion of the Middle Aged
Lulu, a self-publishing outfit, went back through 50 years of New York Times fiction bestseller lists and determined that the average age of the bestselling author is 50 and a half (via BBC). It makes sense in that the upper reaches of that list are often dominated by franchise-type writers - Stephen King and Danielle Steel are cited - whose careers plateau at a point where every book they write goes to number one, no matter the quality. A younger writer with few books under his or her belt has no reputation to ride on, but the middle-aged writer can ride on reputation to year after year of number ones. But NYT bestsellers are kind of a bore, I'd be more curious about the average ages of the winners of different prizes. Regardless, it almost goes without saying that the most exciting voices in fiction are younger than 50, except for the ones who aren't.
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