Stephen Schenkenberg, recently returned from a blogging hiatus, has put together a site devoted to William H. Gass. It’s a useful resource for bibliographies and the like.
It’s a Gass
Appearing Elsewhere: Judgment Day
The day of reckoning has arrived. I've passed judgment on Shadow Country and The Lazarus Project for The Morning News Tournament of Books. Which book did I pick? Click to find out.
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Aliens, Mermaids, and Other Flights of Fancy
Humans have at least one really redeeming quality. We are loath to abandon a good story. In light of cold, hard facts, our imagination, an engine fired by hope and curiosity, suspicion and fear, will and wish and programmed for storytelling, pushes back. For the last week of December, on Twitter, the Central Intelligence Agency rounded up #Bestof2014 -- its ten most-read blog posts and declassified documents from the past year. Number one was a somewhat gently redacted 272-page PDF about an overhead reconnaissance program tested outside of Las Vegas, at a site the agency acknowledges by name as Area 51. “Reports of unusual activity in the skies in the '50s?” the CIA tweeted. “It was us.” Lockheed spy planes flying at the then unheard altitudes of 60,000 feet and above, sure, but not extraterrestrials casing the planet in saucers. By simply cross-referencing UFO sightings with flight logs, the agency said it was able to rule out more than half of the reports. The reaction? To the bureaucratic dispelling of Area 51, one of the great American wonderlands?
“@CIA Nope, I am still going with aliens from outer-space.”
“@CIA Sorry, but this is STUPID! The USAF began investigations in the late 40s, and #UFOs were seen in abundance all over the US.”
“@CIA with all those redactions 64 years later... who could deny Aliens.”
Squinting into the night, thinking we are not alone...even believing we have routinely been visited upon by a greater intelligence, is one thing. But then there are the creatures presumed indigenous to Earth. From diehard mythos (vampires) to diversions in cryptozoology (the Skunk Ape). In November, BBC published news of an 18-month period in Scotland, which, for the first time since 1925, had failed to produce any confirmed sightings of the lake monster initially reported 1,500 years ago by the Irish abbot and missionary Saint Columba. (By the father’s account, Nessie roared and tore a man “with a most savage bite,” but was driven away by the sign of the cross.) “It’s very upsetting news,” an accountant who apparently moonlights as the registrar of sightings said of Nessie’s recent disappearance, “and we don’t know where she’s gone.” Fresh witnesses came forth shortly thereafter, but then so did a local forest conservation group, which had the bad taste to offer a reasonable explanation: the rivers were washing woodland deadfall into Lake Loch Ness, logs and branches, they suggested, which could look an awful lot like a brontosaurus-style neck on the water’s foggy stage. For believers this was, as one commentator put it, “profoundly unsatisfying.” (A more satisfying explanation, which the BBC noted, is the fact that circus elephants were sometimes exercised in that lake.)
These episodes recall what happened in 2012, when Animal Planet broadcast Mermaids: The Body Found. The faux documentary blended some real science -- such as the aquatic ape hypothesis -- and legitimate mysteries -- such as an unexplained sound recorded during Navy sonar tests -- with the sexiest writing and editing television has to offer. It was a narrative feat of speculative biology that claimed merfolk actually exist, and here the proof. “As if we didn’t have enough probably fictitious but possibly real beings to worry about,” The New York Times pooh-poohed. But Mermaids became the station’s most-watched telecast since the Steve Irwin memorial special aired in September 2006. Indeed, it scored the highest ratings of any Animal Planet program, ever, and with so much of the public convinced, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration felt compelled to issue a statement. The official federal position was (is): “No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found.” Tumblr, a mood board, erupted -- “95% of the ocean is undiscovered. You can’t tell me mermaids don’t exist yet.”
There are, of course, deep, necessary reasons for all of the above. Mythology, as Karen Russell often observes, speaks to perennial aspects of human nature. Half-human creatures are vehicles for reconciling our species on the continuum of other beasts. Monsters are projections of an atavistic unease -- born of the sense that something bigger and badder is out to get us (because for the long course of mammalian history, something was). These stories get weird and totally out-of-hand, but they never end.
I’m thinking of the hilarious Victorian novel Cranford. I was just about finishing it, and noticing the CIA’s roundup in the periphery, when the modern new year rang in. Here was a corner of civilization awash, clinging to habits and opinions morbidly out of date. In the last chapter, Peter Jenkyns returns to entertain the village women with tales from afar. He tells them about the time he was up in the heights of Himalaya, hunting, when he accidentally felled an angel. The Honorable Mrs. Jamieson does not call bullshit. “But, Mr. Peter,” she howls, “shooting a cherubim -- don’t you think -- I am afraid that was sacrilege!”
Art by Ellis Rosen, illustrator of Woundabout by Lev Rosen, forthcoming from Little, Brown.
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Books in the News
Scanning the headlines for news about books:I noticed, after I'd been working at the book store for a while, that there is a religious book industry that shadows the mainstream book industry. There isn't much crossover between the two: there are mainstream bookstores that sell exclusively mainstream books and Christian bookstores that sell exclusively Christian books. But now the Associated Press is reporting that the lines are blurring thanks to the success of the The Da Vinci Code and the odd cultural phenomenon of Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ. According to the story, several psuedo-religious books, books that don't fit neatly into either segment of the book industry, have become big sellers in the last year. The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, and The Woman With the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail by Margaret Starbird are among the beneficiaries.Advanced Book Exchange is a giant online marketplace for used books. I happened to notice that they recently posted a list of their "top 50 bestselling used, rare and out-of-print books on Abebooks in 2003." It's an interesting list that includes current bestsellers (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix), classics (East of Eden), collectible magazines (National Geographic Magazine), and scholarly texts and reference books (Black's Law Dictionary).And while we're talking bestsellers, here's Barnes & Nobles' 100 bestselling books of 2003, including one of my favorite books of recent years, Ian McEwan's Atonement coming in at number 46.
New book previews: Mohammed Naseehu Ali, Christian Bauman, T.C. Boyle, Jill Ciment
The Prophet of Zongo Street is the debut collection by the Ghanian writer Mohammed Naseehu Ali. The collection of ten stories has garnered a number of high-profile reviews, including in the NY Times, the SF Chronicle and the LA Times, in which Merle Rubin wrote, "Although many in these stories are misled by philosophies, faiths and ideas that promise to provide all the answers, Ali shows time after time how ordinary human kindness is the one quality capable of redeeming it all." You can read an excerpt from the book here, and Ali's story "Mallam Sile" was in the New Yorker a few months back.Christian Bauman's new novel features a prominent blurb on the front cover from Robert Stone - a good sign if you put stock in such things. Bauman's first novel, The Ice Beneath You, was "a war story for the new millennium," according to PW, about the US effort in Somalia. Bauman's new book, Voodoo Lounge takes on similar themes, set this time in Haiti. From the review in Booklist: "The term 'voodoo lounge' refers to the machine-gun nest on the port bow of a ship. Reading this startling novel is the literary equivalent of standing watch on that perch." Bauman's Web site is here. The book comes out around Sept. 1.T.C. Boyle, an old favorite of mine, has a new collection of stories coming out shortly called Tooth and Claw. All of these stories have been previously published in various periodicals, including several in the New Yorker - here, for example, is the collection's title story. Boyle also has an excerpt up at his Web site. And, by the way, if you are a fan of Boyle at all and haven't visited his site, I suggest you check it out. It features a very active message board that includes frequent appearances from the author himself.John Irving isn't the only one who's written a novel about tattoos lately. Jill Ciment's latest, The Tattoo Artist, is about an artist couple - Sara and Philip, enmeshed in Manhattan's avant garde scene in the 1920s, who travel to the South Pacific in search of inspiration. Once there, they are forcibly tattooed by the natives and then trapped by WWII - a castaway story. The book has recently been reviewed in the NY Times and somewhat more favorably in the SF Chronicle.
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There Are Brit Gangsters Too… Apparently
Today, British crime photographer Jocelyn Bain Hogg stopped by the store. We had him sign copies of his intense photography book The Firm. The book is a photographic expoloration of British organized crime from the inside. These are the real life characters that Guy Ritchie borrowed for his laddish gangster films. Check out photos from the book here. Hogg followed these violent characters around for two years after he was introduced by a friend to members of the inner circle. Like many in organized crime, these guys had no problem with maintaining a very public profile, and in no time at all they delighted in having Hogg photograph them in outrageous circumstances. He described gangster holidays in Tenerife, and how he made sure to run his photographs by the "boss" before they saw the light of day. Though he claimed that he never felt as though his life was in danger, he carried himself with the nervous elation of the once condemned. The book's rocky reception from the British press caused him to no longer consider himself a journalist; instead, he sees himself as nothing more than "a man with a camera." He's in Los Angeles doing preliminary research for his next book, preliminarily titled 15 Minutes, an exploration of fleeting fame in our celebrity-obsessed culture. He said that he was especially inspired by the throngs of psuedo-celebrities (reality-TV-spawned and otherwise) that enjoy brief tenures in gossip mags and on second rate talk shows. We told him that L.A. was the perfect place to start.
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