The Great, Great Gatsby

As most of you who follow BGB are aware, a dear friend of ours, Frank McElrath, passed away a couple weeks ago. I’ve known Frank for somewhere in the neighborhood of 13 years and have spent countless hours discussing many highbrow issues with him (and many lowbrow issues as well), and I was (I thought) as well aware of Frank’s love of reading as the next guy. It wasn’t until his passing, though, that I learned that his favorite book was The Great Gatsby.

I’ve owned a copy of The Great Gatsby for many years, and I’m pretty sure I read it once long ago, but I couldn’t really remember a whole lot about it. So I took it upon myself to read it once more.

This might not be news to anybody who reads this, but this really is a pretty great book. I was truly taken in by Fitzgerald’s telling of Gatsby’s (or Nick’s) story, as well as by the way in which he described a discreet era in our country’s history, from the heart of that era. I noticed early on how Fitzgerald seemed to have a stable of words that he used often (“thrilling” was near the top of the list), and as I got through the book, I realized that he was a master at using exactly the right word at exactly the right time, even if it meant using a word like “thrilling” yet again.

From an academic standpoint, the version I own and just read is supposedly the “authorized text”, with many errors that have been committed and passed along by publishers throughout the years corrected, but with certain errors in chronology, etc., left intact, exactly as Fitzgerald intended (or not). In my reflection back on the book upon finishing it, the thing that struck me was that I don’t know if I liked Gatsby or not. I really couldn’t (and still can’t) decide whether he was a good guy or a bad guy. But my inability to come to any conclusion on that in no way took away from my enjoyment of the book.

My thanks go to Frank once again for a great read.

An ek-a-lec-tic batch o’ links

The President discusses his highbrow reading with NBC.  Not only did he read Camus in Crawford, but he also polished off “three Shakespeare’s”.  Lest you think W is getting all “East Coast elite” on ya, he mispronounces “eclectic” to reassure the base.

Download a coupla three or four Shakespeares, some Huckleberry Finn, some Thomas Jeffersons, and other public domain works for free at Google Books (click the “Full View Books” to get the full text).

Jonathan Franzen is a craphead.  A huge, huge craphead.

Nick Hornby has new book out, Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, which is the second collection of his monthly Believer column, Stuff I’ve Been Reading. Here’s an excerpt where he ponders the point of reading books:

What would happen if I read no books ever? Let’s imagine someone who reads no books ever but polishes off every word of the New Yorker, the Economist, and their broadsheet newspaper of choice: well, this imaginary person would do more reading than me, because that’s got to be a couple of hundred thousand words a week, and would also be a lot smarter than me, if you use that rather limited definition of smart which involves knowing stuff about stuff.

Speaking of the Believer, this month’s issue includes a review of Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani .

In other McSweeney’s world news, Dave Eggers appreciated The Known World way more than I did.

NPR has some nice New Orleans tunes to listen to while digesting the Katrina Year.

Finally, combine Katrina and digestion by checking out last weekend’s Wall Street Journal article, Comforting Food: Recapturing Recipes Katrina Took Away.  The Ruby Slippers Cookbook, which we’ve salivated over, is highlighted.  Sadly, the article is locked safely behind the Journal’s impenetrable wall that keeps the likes of us out.  If you have a subscription, check it out.

5 Fists of Science! ….(+ 9/11)

My unfailingly positive experiences with the graphic novel have come to an abrupt and conclusive end.  The Five Fists of Science by Matt Fraction unambiguously sucks.  The “five fists” are Nicola Tesla, Mark Twain (more of a science cheerleader in the book, but whatever), and a one-armed junior-level assistant named Timmy. Seriously.

The villains in the story are the industrialists of the time – Morgan, Carnegie, etc.  The intro says that Carnegie was really a nice guy though. So they’re just kidding.  It was terrible.  Maybe it is the genre that isn’t my bag. According to WikiPedia, 5 Fists is a steampunk graphic novel.  Think of the crappy Will Smith/Kevin Kline movie Wild Wild West, and you’ll get the picture.  I have nothing nice to say, so I’ll move on.

Luckily, I’ve been having a positive graphic novel experience that offsets the 5 Fists experience.  Some geniuses decided to give the 9/11 Commission Report the graphic novel treatment, and it is riveting.  You can check it for free a chapter at a time at Slate. I didn’t read the original, so I have nothing to compare it to.  I highly recommend it.  I feel smarter already, and there are six more chapters to come.

AJC: back on my list

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution returned to fertile ground this past weekend, electing to mock children on Page 1. To be fair, they are choosing to belittle both jocks and nerds. No kid is safe from the comedy gold mine that is the AJC. If you can’t read the poorly reproduced headline, it says, “There’s no crying is baseball.” Nice. This kid’s crime was getting emotional in the Little League World Series, where his team from Columbus, GA had been kicking ass on their way to winning the LLWS. Like the word nerds, this poor kid gets an extra helping of grief at school, compliments of the friendly community paper. Front page news.

Bush: On Pace for 90 in 06

The White House has rolled out the most incredibly hard to believe statement yet to be foisted upon the American public. This is right up there with “Mission accomplished!” and “Heckuva job, Brownie”. From US News and World Report:

Bush has entered a book-reading competition with Karl Rove, his political adviser. White House aides say the president has read 60 books so far this year (while the brainy Rove, to Bush’s competitive delight, has racked up only 50).

BULLSHIT. I get it. The White House wants to pump up the Prez’s gravitas. But it seems to be a point of honor with these guys to stretch whatever the “possibly credible” to the “ridiculously out of touch with reality”. There is just no way. I’m an avid reader, and I am not anywhere near 60 books on the year (or even Turd Blossom’s 50). It’s not from a lack of will, but a lack of time. I’m pretty sure that the President’s job is more difficult than mine. At least I hope it is. As Huffington Post commentator Bob Cesca says, “…the president, any president, shouldn’t have more free time than you and I.” Do we want him to have the time to read 90 books in a year?

The History of Love 3

I agree with Nitro that this book was too much like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (which I finished just before starting The History of Love) for me to rave about it without reservation. That said, I really liked it. Leo Gursky is one of the most poignant characters I’ve encountered in a long time. His complete lack of any appreciation of his enormous talent, his fierce loyalty to and grumpy affection for his sole friend, Bruno, his fatalistic but sad acceptance of his lonely march towards death, and his undying love for Alma, make it impossible not to feel an overwhelming tenderness for him. I guess it’s ok ’cause I’m a girl, but I did not feel DJ’s urge to put a fake jacket over the book, even as I sat in the Delta Crown Room bawling as I finished it.

Saturday — What Am I Missing?

I recently started to read Saturday by Ian McEwan, but I had to stop. I got about 12 pages in and had a strong urge to throw the book in the C&O Canal (I happened to be sitting on the bank of the canal on an absolutely specatular, uncharacteristically cool summer day in Washington, DC when I began the book). I found the writing to be stilted, inelegant, and sometimes just plain bad. One example: “They cross towards the far corner of the square, and with his advantage of height and in his curious mood, he not only watches them, but watches over them, supervising their progress with the remote posessivenes of a god” — Awful sentence. Another: “As he glides across [the bedroom] with almost comic facility. . .” — what the hell is “comic facility”?

I understand that others LOVE this book! What am I missing? I suppose I’m willing to be persuaded that I need to give it another shot. (If anyone wants to borrow it, I did not throw the book in the canal — I schlepped it home in my suitcase.)

A tale of two train wrecks

In the mags:

The authors of Sweet Jesus, I Hate Bill O’Reilly review the talking head’s body of written work at The Nation.  My favorite quote:

The No Spin Zone amply demonstrates that O’Reilly continues to be locked in an epic struggle with his fans to determine who’s dumber.

Forbes, partying like it’s 1959, warned men this week (before they pulled the online article) against  marrying “career women”.  A “career woman” is defined as any woman with a college education working more than 35 hours a week and who makes more than $30K.  Now they tell me.  Read the sordid details at Slate.

To Do List

Don’t worry, it’s a short list.

Watch Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts on HBO.  Holy shit is it amazing.  If you don’t have HBO, invite yourself over to watch it at the home of someone who does.  It may take several viewings.  Bring some pizza and beer, they won’t mind.  Drinking game: you have to chug whenever a New Orleans native says something “colorful”.  Bring your overnight bag.

Vote on this year’s Quill Awards, the “American Idol” of book awards.  Some of the categories even have legit titles nominated.  For example, the Young Adult section includes both King Dork and The Book Thief.  The Tender Bar is also nominated, as is the former “next President of the United States“.  Remember to be pissed in October when Marley and Me wins the Book of the Year.

“Discuss your favourites” for this year’s Man Booker Prize on their new forums.

Excerpts & Pessl Watch

Mark Haddon of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time fame has a new book coming soon called A Spot of Bother. The Guardian has an excerpt that does not feature any mention of A Level maths.

Richard Ford’s forthcoming The Lay on the Land is previewed excerpt-style at the New Yorker.

According to the Paper of Record, Marisha Pessl is still hot. More on this story as it develops. Excerpts of Special Topics in Calmity Physics here and here (with pictures and potential spoilers).

Bookseller of Kabul

I read The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad after receiving the book as a birthday present. It was a happy accident, because I’m not sure that I would have read this one if it wasn’t given to me.

Think of Bookseller as the non-fiction Kite Runner (and in my opinion, the better book). Seierstad is a Norwegian journalist who was covering Afghanistan after the U.S “involvement” in 2001. While there, she met an interesting bookseller, and decided that he would be a unique character through which to learn more about life in that war-torn nation. She asked the bookseller, Sultan Khan, if she could live with his family, and he surprisingly said yes. Seierstad notes in the introduction that she makes no contention that the Khan family is representative of the typical Afghan family. They’re just the family she ended up with.

The book is the story of the tumult of life in Afghanistan as Seierstad came to know it by living with the Khan family in their Kabul home. It is a grim tale of suffering and hardship. The author is particularly attentive to the life of women in Afghanistan (where were women in Kite Runner?), which even in this relatively enlightened home is traditional, i.e., horribly repressive. Women are so isolated from society at large, that in one isolated community, overt homosexuality has become the norm among all of the men – while the women have been completely removed from public life.

Seierstad’s writing style is crisp and evocative. The book is presented as though the Khans are a fictional family, even though it is essentially a journalistic recounting of her life with the family. Seierstad never inserts herself into the story by describing how things made her feel personally or how the situation differed from her usual life. In fact, Seierstad does not refer to herself at all outside of the introduction. She allows the situations that she describes to speak for themselves and the reader to draw his/her own conclusions.

Since the book has been published, Sultan Khan has been threatening to sue Seierstad. He feels betrayed by Seierstad for portraying him as an egomaniacal tyrant after he invited her into his home. Seierstad begs to differ.

An aside: Because of this web site, I have begun to track my reading over time. I am more than a little embarrassed to admit that this is the first book by a woman that I’ve read in 2006. I’ll get to work correcting that oversight ASAP.

The Luna

Fellow BGBer, Shaft, commisioned me with an intriguing task. He asked me to assemble a CD that would be my estimation of Luna’s greatest hits. Luna is one of my all time favorite bands. Perhaps, the favorite. As I set to work, I was blown away by just how amazing the band’s body of work truly is. Many bands claim to be influenced by the Velvet Underground; Luna included VU guitarist Sterling Morrison on one of their albums. Each song is better than the last. How do you pare this down to 80 minutes? Basically, all of Penthouse and Bewitched are included in this hypothetical “best of”. I might even have to put 23 Minutes in Brussels on twice – just because. 23MiB is the best 6:40 you’ll ever spend. Live, that song would easily go 10+ minutes. All of it awesome.

But then it hit me. This is totally illegal. For some reason when I owned all of the CDs and a tape deck, this was a non-issue. I could make Shaft a tape without worrying about the jack-booted thugs from the RIAA kicking in my door. I still own every single one of their CDs, but burning a small fraction to CD (eliminating the tape deck) is totally illegal. WTF?

Sorry, Shaft. You’ll need to go buy your own. You’ll need to definitely buy Penthouse and Bewitched, in that order. Then buy Pup Tent. Then start filling in the holes in your collection. Note that with Luna, the holes in your collection will also include buying all of Galaxie 500′s albums. Then, you will need to buy Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips post-Luna albums, because Dean is the band. Then, you can buy the DVD of the band’s swan song tour, Tell Me Do You Miss Me. Of course, this has nothing to do with books. It’s just what I’m up to on a Saturday night. I leave you with Dean and Britta’s song Night Nurse. We return to our regularly scheduled programing on Monday.

Speaking of Grups…

The original hipster dad, Neal Pollock, has created a MySpace page for his parenting persona, Alternadad. Alternadad, his upcoming book, is also available for pre-order. Pollock also makes a convincing case in Slate for jumping on the Dodger bandwagon, you know, if your team is under-performing *cough – Braves – cough*. He also written a review in The Nation for a new biography of Timothy Leary. It turns ou that Dr. Leary was kind of a putz. If that weren’t enough, Pollock is also part of a group of writers who are reviving Cracked magazine. That’s right, Cracked. What have you been doing with your spare time, fellow Grups?

Care Bears on Fire

And you thought your kids were cool.

AJC Does Something Right

The AJC writes about Mr. Frank.

Dirt Clod Oven

This just somehow seemed appropriate for my first post since “Mission Accomplished.”

Booker Time

The Man-Booker Prize season began yesterday with the announcement of this year’s long list.  Flaunting my ignorance, I’ll admit to not having heard of any of the books on this year’s long list other than David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green.  My absolute favorite thing about the Booker Prize nominations is the subsequent announcement of the sports book odds (Mitchell is favored at 5-1).  Can you imagine getting a line in Vegas on the National Book Award?  I’m looking forward to rooting through that list and finding some new “must read” gems.  It’s like Christmas.

Ms. Pessl

The NYT Book Review began Sunday’s review of Special Topics in Calamity Physics by noting the outrage in the blogosphere about Ms. Pessl getting special treatment because she’s hot.  Lit-blog Galley Cat called bullshit on that aspect of the review immediately after receiving an advance copy of the Book Review (Part 1 and Part 2).

I’ve written on several occasions that I can’t wait to dive in to Calamity Physics. As an apparent side effect of my enthusiasm, we’ve been getting some hits here at BGB by way of some interesting Google search terms.  There have been a lot looking for “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” + “excerpt”.  Nothing too strange about that.  There have also been numerous searches for “Merisha Pessl pictures”.  Sorry, we’re keeping those all to ourselves.  The search terms that have been creeping me out a little bit are along the lines of “Merisha Pessl – jew”. One enthusiastic searcher, determined not to miss any nuances, searched using the following term – “Merisha Pessl jew jewish jewess”.  That ought to cover it, dude.  What is that all about?  For the record, Mr. Google search guy, we don’t know, nor do we care, whether Ms. Pessl is Jewish or not.  However, we will continue to firmly adhere to Part 86, Subpart B of our published Standard of Conduct, which clearly states that we will not comment, in any way, regarding how hot Ms. Pessl is.

Mr. Frank

Friend of the Blog, Mr. Frank, lost his almost two-year long battle with a freak illness this afternoon. In May, Mr. Frank felt well enough to weigh in on Jonathan Lethem’s Fortress of Solitude via instant messenger from his physical rehab facility (we posted it here). He even used the phrase “Gormenghast trilogy” – I had to look it up. Mr. Frank was a man of letters, a bar stool philospher’s bar stool philosopher, and a fucking champ of a human being. Wherever you find yourself today, raise a glass in memory of our Mr. Frank.

The Tender Bar Redux

I finished The Tender Bar, by J.R. Moehringer, last week. I’m at least the third BGB’er to read it, and was contemplating not even posting on it until our blogmaster commented that not posting would be “lame”. So here goes.

Let me start by saying that I liked this book. I did. But it wasn’t what I thought it would be, and that led to some waffling in my mind about what I thought of it. Basically, I thought it was going to be about young J.R. and how he spent time at a particular bar, which became special to him in some way. And it was. But then it went on into the rest of J.R.’s life, usually finding a way to tie happenings in his life back to that bar, sometimes tenuously.

Don’t get me wrong — many of the stories from his life are interesting, some are hysterically funny (losing his virginity on top of a desert mountain outside Phoenix was a hoot, but you couldn’t possiby understand what made it funny unless you read his account), and some were heartbreaking. Most were moving in some way. And worth reading. But I had my mind set on a particular path, based on the title of the book and the photo on the cover, and once it veered off that path, I was sort of confused. My fault, not the book’s. But so it was.

And I’d be lying if I the book didn’t make me think about every bar I’ve ever frequented, just to see if there were any parallels. And there were a few.

My gripe with the book (and I’m bracing for the slings and arrows from the readers who gushed over it) was the Epilogue. It was a tacked-on piece about the post-9/11 situation in Manhasset, where J.R. grew up. I don’t disagree with any of his insights from the Epilogue, but I just didn’t get the pathway there. The book ended sometime in the early 1990′s, with J.R. getting off a plane in Colorado to hang out with his pal Jimbo, and then you turn the page and you’re at 9/11. I just didn’t follow.

Now, to brighten up this post, I came across a story from Esquire magazine by Mr. Moehringer called “The Endorsement: Not Drinking”. Maybe our fine blogmaster can find a way to put a link here if he searches the archives of Esquire.com. Good story, talking about how bars can be a lot of fun for non-drinkers.

Update: Here’s the Esquire article by Moehringer and here’s a link to DJ Cayenne’s post on the same book[ed.]