Conversational Reading

San Francisco Independent Bookstore Tour Itinerary Announced!

We've confirmed the participants and the start time for our July 25 walking tour of San Francisco indie bookstores. Here's the info:

The tour starts at 12:00 pm at Get Lost Travel Books at 1825 Market St. We will have Northern California Independent Booksellers Association canvas book bags for the first 30 attendees, which we are currently trying to fill up with some cool items.

Get Lost is accessible from both the 16th St and the Civic Center BART stops.

Get Lost is one of SF's premiere bookstores for travel guides, travel literature, and maps. They also have a great, hand-picked collection of international literature, and they will be running a special display of international lit for tour attendees.

The other stops on the tour will be:

• The Green Arcade: A very cool addition to the Hayes Valley area. Green Arcade has been around for approximately 8 months and specializes in titles about sustainable living, green architecture and energy, the slow food movement, and organics. They also have a very interesting, well-selected collection of fiction, and the owner will be discussing a few of the more interesting titles he's currently stocking.
• Great Books Symposium: This store has been around for two years and has a very interesting model--it is both a bookstore and a space for multi-week symposiums where a group of 15 meets to discuss a classic work of literature. These are guided discussions similar to a very serious book group. GBS's bookstore stocks the widest selection of classics I have ever seen in one bookstore, and they are all hand-picked among the various translations and editions available (one of the owners reads Sanskrit, the other Greek). The owner will be telling the group a little about the symposiums and the classics they offer.
• Books Inc.: This store offers an incredible selection of both fiction and nonfiction. This location also has a great selection of LGBT authors and some great staff picks.
• The Booksmith: This store is an SF institution, and I believe it holds the world's record for most readings given by William T. Vollmann. In addition to Vollmann, they are always bringing interesting authors by to talk, and they run an awesome "Found in Translation" reading group that discusses a different work in translation each month.

There will be plenty of time at each location to browse, compare, buy, and discuss purchases with bookstore staff and other tour-goers. In addition to myself, the tour will be lead by Annie Janusch of San Francisco's Center for the Art of Translation and Elizabeth Wadell of The Quarterly Conversation.

Machine by Georges Perec Rev'd at Complete Review

Michael Orthofer reviews "The Machine," a radio play written by Geroges Perec and published for the first time in English in the recent all-Perec issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction.

I've read this piece in my copy of the RCF, and it's great. Here are some of Michael's thoughts:

Perec takes the poem and subjects it to a number of operations -- protocols that are, essentially, Oulipian constraints. And, as he explains:

To the attentive listener it may become clear that this play about language not only describes the functioning of a machine, but also, though in a more concealed and subtle manner, the inner mechanism of poetry.

Beginning with a purely technical analysis -- "number of words", "number of metrical feet", etc. -- Perec takes apart and pieces back together the poem in all sorts of ways. It is read front to back, bottom to top, randomly. Then come the more elaborate renderings and readings.

From simple rules ("omission of the last word of each line", "insertion of sounds in the word center") to "proverbialization" and "encyclopaedic diversification" he re-writes the poem in dozens of different forms. It's a study in the ways of the Oulipo (and language/machine-rules) but, surprisingly, also quite illuminating. Poetry does beget more poetry, even in this treatment.

Audio Books Transition to Digital

Publihers Weekly has some interesting analysis of the trend away from audiobook on CD and toward digital downloads:

The poor economy and the decision by the bookstore chains to reduce inventory—two key factors in producing soft book sales—have also hurt sales of CDs, Allessi noted, while the recession has also slowed the growth of digital audio. In addition, cuts in library budgets have slowed sales in that market, noted Kevin Colebank, CEO of the independent spoken-word audio publisher Tantor Media. Overall, the 30 companies that reported to the APA had sales of $331 million in 2008, down 6.7% from 2007.

Despite the obstacles facing CDs, they will remain the biggest part of the market for a while, predicted Michelle Cobb of BBC Audio America. For one thing, CD availability on store shelves makes it easier for consumers to pick one up compared with the digital space, where spoken-word audio faces lots of digital competition, believes Cobb.

The transition to digital presents spoken-word audio publishers with another issue familiar to their book publishing counterparts—pricing.

Judged By Its Cover

Seth Godin writes:

Is the purpose of the cover to sell books, to accurately describe what's in the book, or to tee up the reader so the book has maximum impact?

Which is it? The answer is interesting.

Curriculum Vitae by Yoel Hoffmann and A Critical Mass of Internet Reviews

I think this is the first time the Complete Review and Open Letter reviewed the same book on the same day. Here's the first graf from each.

The Complete Review:

Curriculum Vitae is a life-account -- of sorts. In 100 pieces and a number of line-drawing illustrations by the author, Hoffmann conveys impressions and stations of his life, as well as odd thoughts and observations (which are, in fact, often truly quite odd). This is far from straightforward autobiography, and yet it gives good insight into the author. Part of the book deals with his family's stay in Japan and his fascination with Japanese culture and language, and the zen-cultural influence is also reflected in the small bits of writing (and drawing).

And Open Letter:

Imagine the scene we are all familiar with: you are writing up a C.V. to send out to those who might judge your capabilities, your efficacies, and the quality of your existence to date from what you were able to condense onto a single side of a sheet of letter paper. Imagine adding, among sections detailing work experience and education, sections that enumerate your preferred breakfast cereals, your ongoing spiritual conundra, and personal illustrations that are little more than impressionist contour doodles. Imagine allowing yourself a healthy dose of humor; it can’t hurt to make your assessors laugh a little. Now imagine reading such a thing.

I'm not sure that writing up a CV is quite the universal experience that the Open Letter reviewer would have it as; nonetheless, two solid reviews (although the Complete Review's is a bit on the short side), and now they've got me wanting to drag my copy out on the subway with me.

This conjunction of reviews brings up some interesting questions. Seems that this book reached Chad and Michael at about the same time (and for the record, I just received a review copy). While it's great that we're at the point where something like this could happen, one does hope that translators of fiction that haven't yet been reached by sites like Three Percent, the Complete Review, and this one will begin to see us as placed to get their books covered.

The Right Price For Information

Malcolm Gladwell has a pretty good review of Chris Anderson's new Wikipedia-plagiarizing book, Free. Gladwell makes some good rebuttals to Anderson's thesis of "give away the product and make money around it." YouTube is instructive:

So how does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies. Credit Suisse put the cost of those licenses in 2009 at roughly two hundred and sixty million dollars. For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that “crap is in the eye of the beholder.”) But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the “abundance thinking” that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.

If Gladwell is really representing Anderson's book fairly, then his main idea sounds so naive that it makes me re-think the weight I gave to his prior concept, the long tail. Per Gladwell, Anderson seems to think that if the cost of bandwidth effectively reaches zero, then it's next to impossible not to make money on the Internet as long as you can find a way to attract enough hits. Though, obviously, no matter what happens with bandwidth, compelling content isn't easy or cheap to produce and you can't make money off of trash (unless you have a monopoly, which was why network TV managed to last as long as it did).

According to Gladwell, Anderson also has this to say:

Anderson begins the second part of his book by quoting Lewis Strauss, the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who famously predicted in the mid-nineteen-fifties that “our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.”

“What if Strauss had been right?” Anderson wonders, and then diligently sorts through the implications: as much fresh water as you could want, no reliance on fossil fuels, no global warming, abundant agricultural production. Anderson wants to take “too cheap to meter” seriously, because he believes that we are on the cusp of our own “too cheap to meter” revolution with computer processing, storage, and bandwidth. But here is the second and broader problem with Anderson’s argument: he is asking the wrong question. It is pointless to wonder what would have happened if Strauss’s prediction had come true while rushing past the reasons that it could not have come true.

But even if we were to assume that somehow energy became incredible cheap, it's unlikely that it would be the panacea Anderson thinks. Of course we don't have electricity that's too cheap to meter, but here in California we have the next best thing: water that's either subsidized to a cost little different than zero (in the case of farms) or provided to consumers at a ludicrously low flat rate. And the result? Enormous grass lawns on 3 million homes built in what used to be a desert, Chinatown, multiple rivers sucked dry, and an ongoing water crisis. True, offering a scarce resource as though it were free is a little different than having so much of something that you can basiclly give it away, but the point is instructive: a price of free can induce some serious negative externalities. It's surprising that Anderson seems to think he can skate right over that, although he recently had his own run-in with free, so maybe he's realizing the point now.

Generational Differences

Lauren has a pretty good take on the Mavis Gallant interview in the current Granta:

What I found most interesting about their conversation was the generational difference in the way the two approach not only their writing, but the conversation about writing. Lahiri is a very generous interviewer, giving Gallant lots of ideas and references to work with, but she is also a product of a deeply anxious, self-conscious generation of writers. Gallant is much more schematic, more declarative, while Lahiri scurries after making qualifications, or politely begging to differ. For example:

JL: This is one of many examples in your stories where at some point or another we're in every character's head. It's an amalgam of points of view. It's what Tolstoy does in his novels, but you do it in the confines of a story. For me, it was very hard to get to that point. When I first started writing, I always wrote from a single person's point of view. But in your work, even in something early like Green Water, Green Sky, you're already dipping in and out of various characters' minds. Was this something that came easily?

MG: It must have, or I wouldn't have done it.

JL: I felt that I couldn't to it. I read your stories and other people's stories to learn. I didn't know how to go about it. But for you it felt natural?

MG: I never questioned it. The problem is getting it right.

I wonder if this isn't rooted in the way writing gets discussed in creative writing programs. Probably it isn't-- Lahiri sounds like any other writer talking shop, and I'm sure Gallant is a great shoptalker when she's in the mood-- but there does seems to be a difference of attitude on display here.

I noted a lot of this going on in the interview as well. I don't want to speculate as to why, but I will say that I've never been a big fan of the "how-do-you; how-does-it-feel; etc" brand of interview questions, as most writers (at least the honest ones) don't have much of an answer. I like Lahiri's lead-up to "Was this something that came easily?", and I think this is where a lot of interviewers run afoul of things . . . good lead-up, but then it can be hard to find just the right question to put after that, so they just dump off a "How do you . . ." sort of question.

Observation vs Research in David Foster Wallace's Writing

I like what Andrew has to say about Infinite Jest's "research":

Specialized knowledges pervade the book—tennis, recreational drug use, optics, burglary, even punting (surely the most narrowly specialized position in football). But one of the more (in)famous elements of "research" in the novel is the filmography Wallace includes in endnote 24. In the age of IMDb, we might be apt to forget that the filmography is (or was) actually a highly specialized and intensely laborious feat of archival research, but the almost eight-and-a-half pages of James O. Incandenza's collected works should surely remind us that a filmography is actually the product of research, and not Googling.

Yet there was, of course, no research necessary for composing this "artifact"—having no basis in reality, everything in it is a pure product of imagination. Yet Wallace never seems comfortable simply acknowledging that the imagination that produced it is his own. In just about as many ways as possible, Wallace continually disrupts the filmography with secondary or tertiary commentary to let us know that he's looking at it from the outside too: I kept waiting for that click where the self-distancing irony would drop away and, as with Borges or Pynchon or Bolaño or even (especially) Auster, you get a real note of dread or mystery where the author seems to have been finally convinced of the reality of his artifice. Even in the last entry, which is about The Entertainment itself, there are three skeptical footnotes embedded.

If you read all of Andrew's post, you'll see that this insight comes in the context of a consideration of the postmodern novel of information. Essentially, Andrew is saying Wallace wrote a novel of information in which the research was replaced by something more akin to observation, since Wallace was "researching" things that didn't exist. Of course, the book also includes research (no scare quotes) into lots of things that did and do exist. I suppose this would make his work postmodern in ways I hadn't even imagined before I read Andrew's post.

Andrew goes on to elaborate on his point that Wallace never quite gets over his skepticism as to the world he has created

And this type of thing occurs many times in the text: consider the phrase, "Goethe's well-known 'Bröckengespenst' phenomenon³⁸" (88). If it's so well-known, why the hell does it need to be footnoted? This feels like Wallace simply can't decide how to be authoritative: does he want to be assholically authoritative ("well-known"), learnedly authoritative (using the German term in the first place), or helpfully authoritative (sticking in a footnote)? If the confusion is simply an attempt to undermine the idea of authority in the first place, then it needs to be decisive confusion: subversion can't be done lackadaisically, and self-subversion even less so.

I don't think this indecisiveness is the quite as purposeful as Andrew seems to believe. Rather, it seems to me to be a result of Wallace's self-consciousness, which I would say is one of the larger liabilities of his fiction (at least in Infinite Jest; at other points (for instance "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) Wallace uses his self-consciousness to great comedic effect).

I also once saw Wallace claim in an interview that he wanted the book to have a conversational tone, as if someone was speaking to the reader, so that might also explain the "lackadaisical" element Andrew mentions here, as well as the superabundance of squishy words (e.g. sometimes, about, etc) that he discusses later in his post.

The Real Inventor of Magical Realism

From the NYRB's review of the current Garcia Marquez bio:

García Márquez popularized the style, but he was not its inventor, and One Hundred Years of Solitude would not have been possible without his hav- ing studied, at Carlos Fuentes's urging, the works of an older generation of Spanish-American writers who were magic realism's pioneers, among them Alejo Carpentier and Miguel Asturias.[3] It is remarkable that so little influence on his writing is credited to his Latin American precursors. This is partly because García Márquez himself has been reluctant to give them their due. At times he seems to enjoy casting himself as the magician who created a new Spanish-American literature out of thin air.

The footnote embedded in the paragraph informs us that

[3]The Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier coined the term— lo real maravilloso—in 1949 to describe what he thought of as his variation on French Surrealism. Miguel Angel Asturias's phantasmagoric novel about a dictator, El Señor Presidente (1946), was the prototype for García Márquez's The Autumn of the Patriarch. In 1967, Asturias, a Guatemalan, became the first Latin American novelist to be awarded the Nobel Prize. García Márquez was awarded the prize in 1982.

Read Alejo Carpentier.

Forthcoming: The Beijing of Possibilities by Jonathan Tel

The Beijing of Possibilities was published on June 30. Publishers Weekly's review called it "part W.G. Sebald and part Italo Calvino. From the publisher's copy:

Blending elements of the surreal with carefully observed details of life in present-day Beijing, Jonathan Tel’s short stories offer a rich and highly entertaining guide to the city and its many and varied inhabitants–from a modern-day Monkey King to an equally contemporary indentured servant, from a boy tasting his first cotton candy to a Ming Dynasty princess posting her first online profile.

From Vertigo's review of The Beijing of Possibilities:

Not too long ago I wrote about Jonathan Tel’s 2003 novel Freud’s Alphabet, which has embedded photographs at the head of selected chapters. His new book of short stories The Beijing of Possibilities (Other Press, 2009) also contains embedded photographs, but this time they are more randomly placed in the manner of W.G. Sebald. Tel’s cities (Freud’s Alphabet is really about London) are wonderful constructs of the imagination. “While in New York he writes about Beijing, while in Beijing he writes about New York,” reads the blurb about Tel on the cover of Beijing. His books continue a rich literary tradition going back at least to Baudelaire of presenting cities as juxtapositions of the random and the fortuitous, where it’s almost possible to believe in the impossible.

An excerpt can be read in Zoetrope: All-Story.

Another excerpt can be read here.

Click here for previously featured Forthcoming books.

?????

This is much more entertaining than I would have anticipated.

Backstory here.

Will Inherent Vice Be Filmable?

With the possible exception of The Crying of Lot 49, Inherent Vice might just be Thomas Pynchon's first filmable novel. PW reports that the book is circulating through Hollywood:

Though a rep from CAA would not comment about it, we hear Bob Bookman at the agency is shopping the film rights to Thomas Pynchon's August-dropping new novel from Penguin, Inherent Vice. The notoriously reclusive Pynchon, whose biggest flirtation with Hollywood was his pixelated cameo in The Simpsons (complete with bag-over-head), has never had any of his complex postmodern prose turned into a film, so who knows what the fate of Vice will be in Tinseltown. The book, which bloggers started chattering about back in November after some outlets, like the L.A. Times, got hold of Penguin's digital jacket copy, is promised to be leaner and less weighty than some of Pynchon's previous efforts. (It's less than 400 pages, which is something for Pynchon, who's penned 1,000-plus-page tomes.) About a billionaire land developer in late '60s L.A., per Penguin, the novel might be the author's least serious. As Wired noted: "Inherent Vice sounds less like the fractal paranoia of Gravity’s Rainbow and more like the deranged sunshine noir of The Big Lebowski."

I'm a little disappointed in Rachel Deahl for getting the story of the Inherent Vice cover exactly backward. If she bothered to read to the end of the Jacket Copy post that she links to, she'd see that the LA Times actually rightfully credits this blog (including a link) for being the first on the scene. Deahl's phrasing also obscures the fact that the LA Times first reported on the Inherent Vice cover on a blog; indeed, bloggers were "chattering" about the new book long before old-media outlets began to catch on.

Kamila Shansie Interview at The Quarterly Conversation

Michele Filgate's interview with Shamsie discusses her new novel, Burnt Shadows, which brings together the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the ongoing nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan, and 9/11 in the United States.

MF: A section of this novel is set in New York after 9/11. Did you deliberately set out to write a post 9/11 novel?

KS: No. As I said earlier, I originally envisaged a very different kind of novel. In fact, when I told a writer friend that I was writing about Nagasaki he said, “Oh, so that’ll be your 9/11 novel” and my reaction was to get quite annoyed. I recall thinking, “No it won’t. There are other stories in the world!” It was only when I was about halfway through—finishing up the Delhi 1947 section—that I realized that the novel was not going to be about the Indo-Pak nuclear standoff and was, instead, moving towards a War on Terror narrative. Even now I quite deliberately use the phrase “War on Terror” rather than post-9/11 to talk about the final section of the novel. It may seem just a semantic difference—but to talk about a “War on Terror” novel is to really talk about the consequences of the decisions made by various governments (including those of the US and Pakistan), rather than to place the terrorists of 9/11 at the centre of the narrative.

Murakami Interivew

Via the Literary Saloon I see a two part interview with Murakami dealing with his recent work, including his new novel, 1Q84.

Q: For the first time in one of your full-length novels, the narrative is given in the third-person. However, an intimacy close to that of a first-person narrative is maintained, and the young people in it are beautifully depicted. This made me realize once again that, even though you have been writing novels for the past 30 years, your work is still literature about early adulthood.

A: As they age, authors usually write well about the generation they're in. I'm more interested in young people who are living in the present day and continuing to mature. I don't mingle with people in their 20s and I know little about mobile phone novels or anime works. But I think these factors have little to do with the art of creating an "actual" story.

When I was 30 years old, I could only write well about my 30-year-old self. But I managed to write about a 15-year-old boy in "Kafka on the Shore" and a 19-year-old girl in "After Dark" as if writing about myself. In this work, I wanted to start the story by describing the feelings of 10-year-old Aomame. In particular, I wanted to delve deeper into how women feel or think in this work.

Since I was writing this story day after day over a long period of time, I came to feel like I was living together with the characters in the story and came to understand more clearly what kind of people they were. I would revise my writing over and over again to fine-tune it. Changing one descriptive word or a line of sentence can sometimes bring a certain character to life.

Richard Posner: Save Newspapers by Banning Hyperlinks

In what can only be termed the nadir of the debate over how to save newspapers, Judge Richard Posner, generally considered one of the greatest minds of his generation, has advocated banning hyperlinks to copyrighted materials:

Posner is a United States Court of Appeals judge in Chicago and legal scholar who was once considered a potential Supreme Court nominee. He is someone who should know better. Yet in a blog post last week on the future of newspapers, he concludes there may be only one way to save the industry:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent . . .

Erick Schonfeld provides a very thorough explanation for why this makes no sense whatsoever, although, admittedly, what he says will probably be obvious to anyone who knows anything about the Web.

So now we're at the point where we need to radically reconceive fair use in order to prop up the dying newspaper industry . . .