Baby Got Books

An almost summer round-up:

• Galley Cat rounds up a variety of summer reading lists.
• The AJC also has a summer reading list – presented as a slideshow (much less reading involved) – and the reviews are actually from the Washingtom Post. But hey, it’s multimedia! Who needs a books editor?
• When I am in charge of the publishing industry, all book release events will be just like this one.
• LA Weekly gives some love to McSweeney’s, makers of the finest hand-crafted books around.
• The New Yorker gives a positive (but brief) review of James Meek’s We are Now Beginning Our Descent, even though “the characters and the setup may be a little overdrawn.” My copy is still available to whoever wants it.

If you missed it, yesterday I posted Part 1 of my interview with Rivka Galchen, author of the exceptional debut novel Atmospheric Disturbances. Today’s final installment includes startling revelations by the author and an embarrassing faux pas by the interviewer. Read on…

BGB: Dr. Leo Liebenstein, your narrator, is a man of science – a very rationale person. Yet he has a very philosophical view of reality. At one point he refers to what we would call objective reality as the “consensus view.” He also seems very keenly aware of the limitations of human perception. These characteristics would seem to make Dr. Leo more susceptible to the delusions that he appears to suffer from. Conversely, these same characteristics may also make him more open to recognizing the type of conspiracy that he suspects that he has become involved in. The line between madness and “crackpot” genius is a fine one. I’ve alternated in firmly believing one interpretation of Dr. Leo’s state-of-mind over the other, and then switching back again, equally sure that this time I’ve got it all figured out. Was it difficult to maintain this ambiguity while writing the character of Dr. Leo? Did the scientist in you want to remove the ambiguity?

RG: Well, maybe I am of that variety of people who consider the search for absolute truth a vain and superstitious habit. That is, I have more faith in, and am more dedicated to, the project of finding new and better and more interesting ways to be wrong. (I mean, one could make the argument that the history of science, or the history of philosophy, is just that: an exciting evolution of differently incorrect ideas, of ideas not making the same old mistakes but instead new, unforeseen ones.) In this way, I never thought of Leo being right or wrong, or the reader as being right or wrong, I just thought it was a contest of different ways of being wrong, and which was more compelling at which moment. Maybe this is a smoke and mirrors answer in an unfair way. But it’s just like how scientific language can sometimes give that sense of elucidation at the very moment that it obscures, and vice-versa. Sometimes, in a certain context, an equation say, or an MRI, really does explain in a substantive way; but at other times, in other ways, these same things are really misdirections, some stealing away of the attention while in the other direction a rabbit is being stuffed into a top hat. After all, even something like the laws of gravity—it’s hard to articulate whether they really explain gravity or just describe it very lucidly. Neuroimaging and mental states—ill, aberrant, normal, all the labels are useful but nevertheless grossly insufficient—surely bear an even more muddled relationship to one another.

BGB: The novel also features a mysterious meteorologist named Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen. At first I thought that he was just a literary device since your last names are identical except for a hyphen. I was surprised to learn via Google Scholar that he was, in fact, a notable meteorologist with a significant body of research. (Whoa!) Is there any relation between yourself and the famed meteorologist?

RG:Yes, he’s my dad! He died 13 years ago. (When I got American citizenship–later than him–we got rid of the hyphen in my last name mostly because it caused endless clerical errors. I’m glad his name is slightly different though, it’s this chance thing, and yet emotionally spot on, because it’s a very ‘alternate’ Tzvi who is in the novel.)

And yes, well, there’s a lot of misdirected emotion in the novel, and likewise, the process of writing the book for me was like a kind of sublimation of my own emotions for my own lost love. In a sense the dead and, say, the person we were ten years ago—neither of those people are walking down the street tomorrow. They’re both gone forever. Or at least probably. Leo is on some level searching for a woman who no longer exists in his world, and I was, while writing, similarly ‘searching’ for someone who no longer exists in my world. Naturally my search sent me to my dad’s research, because that’s one of the few things that’s still here, and still just what it was when he was around. There’s also a mood in the novel—maybe I’ll call it a 70s mood—and it’s a mood, a set of interests, that kind of brings me back to who I myself used to be, who I was when I still had him around. So that’s two ghosts. The ghost of my dad, and the ghost of the former me, kind of collaborating, meeting up over these old science research papers.

BGB: Wow. That revelation adds so much depth to the story. My mind is blown. I have to go back and re-read the novel now. So is the picture of Tzvi’s family in the book really your 70’s vintage family? You’re the “little chub of a girl” in the “Bavarian” dress?!

RG: Yes, that is my family, and we think my dad looks the coolest in that photo. That’s one thing I love about fashion; it makes it quickly vivid how strange our normal in fact was all along, and must still be. I should admit though, I do love that dress I’m wearing there, and if I had a larger version, I would definitely wear it.

BGB: You mentioned the poetry of science earlier, and the idea that first came to mind for me is when scientists refer to “elegant” solutions. The bits of Dr. Gal-Chen’s research that you present in the novel are “elegant” in that they nicely echo the book’s themes. For example, the Initial Values Problem – that our ability to adequately model the future is limited by our ability to adequately measure and describe the current conditions – struck me as particularly apt. Can we really know one another – or even ourselves – with any certainty given the relatively small amount of information that we are presented with or can process at any one time? Or am I reading too much into that?

RG: Your mind is after my very heart; I, as you seem to have intuited, also can’t help but project all sorts of emotional value into scientific phrasings and concepts–can’t help but want to extend their analogical power. (Leo is similarly, though much more so, inclined.) Sometimes I think such projection is legitimate, sometimes not so much. But regardless, I’m always interested, even when it tells us more about the projector than about what’s being projected onto. Within the context of the novel, I’d say those science terms and methods fall somewhere along a spectrum between Rorschach blot and map of the world; somewhere between ‘every interpretation is real and valid and significant’, and ‘No, if you want to sail the Straits of Magellan, some map interpretations are significantly more valuable than others.’

I do think though, that science is this other language, and that, just like with any language, it has its turns of singular and untranslatable beauty; even if we aren’t fluent in the language, we can catch something of this.

BGB: In an interview that you conducted with Nathaniel Englander, you mention that although you are now friends, the two of you unknowingly wrote in the same Brooklyn coffee house for a time. Your novel and his wonderful The Ministry of Special Cases both discuss the disappeared in Argentina’s dirty war (yours less than his, obviously). Is that just a wonderful coincidence, or did some of what you were each working on seep into the other’s novel?

RG: The coffee shop isn’t in Brooklyn! The Hungarian Pastry Shop is here in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. (More on that below!)

As for the Argentina overlap, well, my longtime friend Shlomit, whose family is Argentine, insists she is the origin of Rema being from Argentina. But of course there’s also Borges. And his concept of “the South.” Which is where, mentally, I needed my narrator to go. So: lots of answers. Probably my friendship with Nathan isn’t as irrelevant as we like to imagine it is, although I knew him for a long time before I knew where his then-still-unfinished novel was set. Maybe the truest explanation is just that there was so much coverage of the economic shock down in Argentina right around when I started writing? Hard to say where notions come from.

BGB: The New York Observer recently printed a map of the literary hot spots in Brooklyn and the “literary 100″ – a list of the top literary players in the Borough. What’s the mood among Brooklyn writer’s about who made/didn’t make the list? Are you glad that the coffee shop that you write in was left of the map? Is there really a law that says that all writers are required to live in Brooklyn?

RG: Yeah, so like I said, the sad truth is that I don’t live in Brooklyn, which means that when I want to see almost any of my friends, I have to get on a subway for a solid 45 minutes in order to do so. (Result: a lot of my husband and I just renting DVDs, or, on wilder nights, going out for tacos on Amsterdam Avenue.) It does often seem that there can’t be more than seven writers (sign of apocalypse?) left on the island of Manhattan. I don’t think that’s actually true. But it’s true-ish. We probably have a chip on our shoulder around here. Maybe because we know that Brooklynites have much finer record collections than we do.

But as for what the true Brooklyn writers think about all this? Isn’t it part and parcel of the definition of being a hipster that you disdain hipsterdom and will have nothing to do with it? I imagine the Brooklyn writer scene is a similarly impossible set of all sets that do not contain themselves.

Well that’s embarrassing. I guess that she’s the exception that proves the rule that ALL writers live in Brooklyn. Oh the humiliation of it all.

More on Atmospheric Disturbances and Rivka Galchen can be found at these links of distinction:

• Check out the trailer for the book
• See the book’s official web site, featuring Rema and her doppelganger
• …and the official doppelganger site
• Read Chapter 1
• and Chapter 3
• and Chapter 8
• and part of Chapter 13
• The New York Observer calls Galchen “The latest successor to Pynchon”
• A Rivka Galchen short story in The New Yorker
• Bookforum hearts Atmospheric Disturbances

Rivka Galchen is the author of the wonderful debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances. The novel went on sale yesterday and already Galchen is being compared to Pynchon, Auster, and Borges. (Read my review of the book here.) The author is also very generous with her time, and she agreed to subject herself to some Q&A. Read Part 1 (of 2) of my interview with Rivka Galchen below.

Baby Got Books: I’ve read that while an undergraduate in the English Department at Princeton, Joyce Carol Oates was your thesis advisor. That seems like it would be incredibly intimidating for an undergraduate. What lessons, if any, did you learn from her that you’ve carried forward into your novel?

Rivka Galchen:Alas, Joyce Carol Oates would more appropriately be described as the grader of my thesis, rather than the advisor (even though ‘advisor’ is, I believe, what is listed in the official ‘filing’ of my thesis.) We didn’t workshop the manuscript together or anything. But. She is quite am imposing presence on that campus, far more imposing than you might imagine a 90ish pound person could possibly be. I never really had the courage to talk to her, even though I had a class with her…but I’d see her slight bespectacled self around and just know: there’s this wild, rigorous, strange, Trollope-scale-prolific imagination there. Just right there. So that’s a nice atmosphere—one that makes whining about being ‘too busy’ to finish a story seem pretty pathetic. Her work ethic is infectious; I only wish the infection could be a raging one.

BGB:Your bio notes that you received an MD degree from Mount Sinai School of Medicine (specializing in psychiatry) and then went on to get your MFA at Columbia. Atmospheric Disturbances has been called a “novel of ideas that tries to bridge science and literature.” While you seem uniquely qualified to bridge that gap, was that your intent when you sat down to write the novel?

RG:So far as I can remember—and, for better or worse, my memory landscape is as dynamic as my present, it always seems to be shape-shifting when I look back into it—but, again, so far as I can remember, my main intent in writing the novel was somehow to get away with writing my dad’s name down again and again, of making it become a significant clue. So maybe the novel for me was more of a bridge between the living and the dead than a bridge between science and literature. The fact that there’s a great deal of science in the novel just seems really normal to me, as normal as there being, say, a great deal of the Civil War in someone else’s novel. It’s just this enormous interesting thing out there in the world, and it happens to be one of the ‘things’ that I’m most perpetually drawn towards.

BGB: With chapter titles like “Least squares method of fitting functions to data,” you’ll have the full attention and enthusiasm of the scientists. It also appears that you have not dumbed down any of the scientific discussion. Do you worry about how the book will be received by those without a science background?

RG: Well one sad fact is that most of the books I really love I find on the remainders table at my corner bookstore. Or on the street for $2. So, I don’t know, perhaps it’s dangerous company.

But I think even a non-science-geek can be susceptible to the poetry—often accidental—of scientific language; it certainly has that old air of mystery and authority. It tempts towards interpretation, it hints at profound significance, but then, sometimes anyway, it undermines those sentiments at the same time. I guess for years now science is this thing that as a culture we both kneel before and raise the mighty paw against. And that’s interesting to me, even on just an emotional level, that seduction, that ambivalance. Leo often appeals to science, and yet also wrenches and distorts it and misappropriates it to his own emotion ends—and I like that kind of engaged, manipulative work that he does. I think we can learn a lot about a character not just (or even) by the direct content of that they say, but about their choice of materials and methods for saying so.

Tune in tomorrow for Part 2 of my interview with Rivka Galchen…

Rivka Galchen’s novel Atmospheric Disturbances is an amazing debut. Though it clearly stands on its own merit, Galchen also brings a fascinating back story to the novel. The author majored in English at Princeton where she had Joyce Carol Oates as a thesis adviser. From Princeton, Galchen attended Mount Sinai where she received an MD, specializing in psychiatry. She then went to Columbia to get an MFA in creative writing. Somewhere in there, Galchen won a grant that allowed her the wherewithal to write this novel. (I feel like such a slacker.) What emerged may be the best possible synthesis of those experiences. Atmospheric Disturbances is a gem.

The novel is told from the perspective of Dr. Leo Liebenstein, a psychiatrist, who makes a sudden and unexpected discovery: “Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.” Dr. Leo, is unsettled by the appearance of his wife Rema’s doppelganger in his home. Dr. Leo begins to believe that a patient, Harvey, may hold the answer.

Harvey appears to be symptom-free to Dr. Leo, except for his belief that he works for a secret organization, The Royal Academy of Meteorology, which works in opposition to a rival underground agency, the 49 Quantum Fathers, to control the weather. Harvey’s alleged contact is a famed meteorologist, Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen. Dr. Leo begins to study the work of Dr. Gal-Chen while searching fro the “real” Rema and finds oddly relevant passages in the scientific journal articles.

Being a man of science, Dr. Leo is able to recognize the oddity of his beliefs, but he is also expertly equipped to rationalize it. For example, Dr. Leo is unwilling to accept that the simulacrum in his home is actually Rema purely on the basis of that having previously been the case:

I knew that my reasoning was post hoc, and another voice came in, mocking me, reminding me that post hoc reasoning is the consolation of the psychotic – all evidence interpreted under the shadow of the belief that one is Jesus Christ, or the King of Sweden, or made entirely of glass.

Dr. Leo’s search for answers leads him to Buenos Aries and Patagonia, believing himself to be “on assignment” for the Royal Society. Depending upon whether you believe Dr. Leo, he may or may not be breaking from what he calls the “consensus view” of reality. Is his head really in the clouds? (The author, mercifully, steers clear of this horrible pun.)

The novel uses several devices that some may call “post-modern” – all to good affect. For example, the use of what can be dense scientific language is no literary parlor trick. The articles that Dr. Leo excerpts about meteorological research problems highlight the issues that he is grappling with in subtle and unexpected ways. Also: The Royal Academy actually exists. The name of the rival top-secret weather controlling organization, 49 Quantum Fathers, appears to be a nod to Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, which also featured a mysterious controlling organization. Galchen also judiciously employs a few photographs and isopleth figures from scientific journal articles. There’s a lot going on in this novel.

And of course, Rivka Galchen herself studied psychiatry, so on some level Dr. Leo may be a stand in for the author. Only after reading the novel did I learn that the mysterious meteorologist Dr. Gal-Chen is not an interesting literary device that plays on the author’s name. Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen is the name of Rivka Galchen’s father, who was an actual published meteorologist. Viewed in this light, the novel takes on a whole new perspective. I went back and re-read several sections of the novel that were now open to brand new interpretations. I think that the book, at its heart, is a love letter to the author’s father, Tzvi.

What may seem on the surface to be a simple story about a man who may or may not have an interesting psychosis is a beautiful examination of our ability to truly know ourselves and those close to us. Atmospheric Disturbances made me think. It’s the kind of book that you want to talk to other people about as soon as you’ve finished. In a stroke of outrageous fortune, I was able to conduct a brief interview with Rivka Galchen. Part 1 of the interview will be posted tomorrow. I advise using the time between now and then to run out, pick up the novel, and get started reading. If you can’t wait, start with Chapter 1 and then read another selection. See you tomorrow.

I haven’t seen the consumer preference data, but I would have thought that chocolate or vanilla would be favorites over “dry ice”. The product liability on a flavor like that has got to be HUGE.

In other news:

The Wall Street Journal has put together a Summer Reading Guide.

Salon has also posted a list of Summer Reads.

A guy writing on The Guardian’s Book Blog wonders why some authors use pictures in novels.

Neal Stepehenson is answering questions about his upcoming novel Anathem. I’m a big Stephenson fan and will be looking forward spending a few weeks with this one (his novels are enormous).

Two book reviewers at Salon discuss a new book, The Death of the Critic.  Many of the usual discussion points are rehashed, but then the lit blog world is thrown this bone:

And believe it or not, I’ve learned things from Amazon reviews, from letters pages, from literary blogs, from all sorts of non-traditional outlets. The quality of writing is certainly variable, but then so is the quality of traditional journalism.

No! I can’t believe it!

For all the talk of the end days of literary criticism, I’ll point out once again that membership in the National Book Critics Circle has risen by almost 50% since last year.  Sure, they’re letting clowns like me in, so at worst book criticism is becoming a less exclusive club.   Maybe even less serious.  Maybe less academic.  However, death of criticism itself seems a bit of an over statement.

Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting, Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs) writes about the pros and cons of rage in The Guardian.  I found this bit useful:

With violence, like other things, you tend to find your own level, and I was a crap fighter who usually fought other crap fighters. Nonetheless, there’s something very demeaning about it. And it’s never a good idea to give away what makes you angry. It only encourages people to wind you up.

Good tip, kids.  Welsh seemed very likable when he was here in Atlanta.  Luckily, I didn’t cross him.

I saw this on the rack in an airport book store:

Surely the depths of the Chicken Soup book empire well have been exploited to their fullest.  What could possibly be next?  Chicken Soup for the Lost Soul?

Today my parents returned from a 3 week cruise that took them to all sorts of spectacular places. When my dad mentioned how amazing it was that about this time yesterday they were touring the Vatican, I could only respond that about this time yesterday I was talking with Barbara Walters. Really. Here’s how it happened:

Barbara at the press conference

Last Friday Wordsmiths‘ Russ contacts BGB’s Tim and informs him that we (BGB) have been invited to participate in a “closed door press conference” with Barbara Walters before her appearance at Agnes Scott College to read from her much publicized memoir, Audition, the following Monday. Obviously, Tim would attend this cozy little gathering, ask tons of original and insightful questions, and blog about his up close and personal conversation with BW with the wit, zest, and zeal we’ve come to expect from his posts.

Except that our fearless leader had to jet off to our Nation’s capitol to accept a very prestigious science award, leaving me the job of representing BGB and the entire blogging world as one of 5 or 6 people sitting in the front row below a raised platform on which BW answered whatever questions we felt like asking. Like, “Beach Boys or Beatles?”, “What was the last nightclub you visited?”, and the perfect opener, “Is this your first visit to Atlanta?”

Let me explain. This is not my thing. When face to face with fame and fortune, I prefer to hide over there and keep my mouth shut. I knew BW had written a memoir, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t on my to read list when this came up. I do not watch much television, so I’ve missed all the action on The View (not to mention the Oprah appearance), and I pretty much grew up turning the channel or leaving the room during the 60-minute celebrity interviews that typically brought everyone to tears.

But I wasn’t going to miss this.

It turns out that yes, Barbara has been to Atlanta on a long ago tour of CNN with Ted Turner, who asked her about “that cute little girl, Jane Fonda.” She thinks Atlanta is beautiful and can’t wait to get a pork sandwich for the plane ride home. Mara from 92.9 wriggled out of her that she chooses the Beatles over the Beach Boys, that Elton John is a good friend (”oh, is he in town right now?”), and that if she had a nightclub she would name it Oui, Oui.

The AJC guy had Barbara explain that she had planned on writing this memoir more about her family, but her publishers insisted she include “politics, murder, and intrigue”. No one present asked about any of that extra marital intrigue, but we did find out she developed empathy for celebrities by watching her father handle all the action in his Vegas night club.

I can’t remember the question that was asked, but BW then shared how she felt she was a “dismal failure” as a co-anchor when she went on to do those interview specials (which were written in her contract) that she became even more famous for. The ratings indicated that no one wanted to hear about her interview with the Shah of Iran (name-dropper), but everyone wanted to see those celebs.

When asked about the book writing process, B explained she had old interviews to watch and lots of help putting things into historical perspective. She was dismissive to the idea that she paved the way for women saying, “It’s not like I was waving a flag”, and she very eloquently answered my question (yes! I spoke!) about the advice she would give to working mothers raising daughters. Without missing a beat she said it comes down to having Balance, for men and women. She admits to the sacrifices and struggles, successes and failures, and wants all to know there should be Balance.

Soon after my question the publicist ended the interview, a few photos were allowed, and Barbara went on her way. I immediately gushed to Wordsmiths’ Alice that I actually spoke up, called to debrief Tim, and completed my end of the balancing act by picking up my hive-ridden child from the nice friends who were watching her and rushing off to the nearest urgent care center.

How books get done in the internet age…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxschLOAr-s[/youtube]

[via The Elegant Variation]

While I was on spring break with my wife and kids recently, we got to spend some time with a friend of ours that we hadn’t seen in a while. He and I were talking about his new watch, which had what appeared to be semaphore flags around the bezel of it, and he asked me if I had heard of the book Longitude, by Dava Sobel (foreword by Neil Armstrong!: ed.) . I told him that I hadn’t, but after he described it, I had to track it down (and did so from our friends at Wordsmiths [ring plug bell now]).

I have to confess that I had never really thought about the differences between latitude and longitude; in fact, I typically couldn’t remember which was which. Well, apparently a sailor who can’t tell the difference and can’t accurately calculate his or her latitude or longitude is in deep trouble (or shallow trouble, to double up on the pun). And as it turns out, latitude isn’t that difficult for those in the know to track and measure, going back hundreds and hundreds of years. The simple answer is because latitude (those are the lines that go horizontally around the globe) can be fairly easily calculated based on the positions of the sun and stars, and every latitude line is spaced equally apart from the next.

Longitude, however, is a different story. Calculating longitude is much more difficult, because the spacing between the longitude marks varies depending on how far north or south you are on the globe.  Calculating this is apparently very difficult without the right instruments; what those instruments should be is really the crux of the story behind this book.

After way too many shipwrecks caused by incorrect calculations of longitude, in 1714 England’s government offered a reward to whomever could come up with a methodology for accurately determining longitude at sea. This book follows the efforts of several inventors, scientists, and others who sought to earn this prize, and tells the triumphant story of a clockmaker named John Harrison who invested countless years in his quest to prove that a good timepiece was the answer.

As it turns out, in order to determine longitude at sea you have to know what time it is where you are, as well as what time it is a point of known longitude at that exact moment. And clocks didn’t work so well at sea in the old days, as pendulums were victims of heat, cold, moisture, and the turbulence of the ocean. Harrison devised some new schemes for building timepieces that would not be affected by these elements, and against all odds (and some powerful individuals with ulterior motives), he managed to convince the world that the answer lied in the use of these clocks (as opposed to, for instance, tracking the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter). And he built clocks to do the trick — spending nineteen years alone on his third (of four) iterations.

I’ll spare you the details of Harrison’s story, because the book itself is so short. But I will tell you that this book completely changed the way I think about geography and telling time.

I’ve written glowingly about James Meek’s The People’s Act of Love, which I called “a masterpiece”. I was prepared, and fully expected, to be blown away by Meek’s new novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. It brings me no joy to report that I will be panning the novel.  I’m expecting that my opinion may be in the minority view on this one.

Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin has called Descent “f-cking fantastic”. The San Francisco Chronicle says, “this somewhat shapeless but nonetheless absorbing novel have a grittiness and authenticity that only firsthand experience could have produced.” I’ll count that as a positive review. The Guardian says, “In this fragmentary or splintered narrative, there is no loss of clarity. The story is always clear.” Another back-handed compliment, but I’m counting that in the “pro” column. I’m solidly in the “con” camp.

While I agree with the negatives that were inserted into some of these critiques, the reviews were still generally positive overall. I don’t get it. I’ll try my best to detail my grievances.

The biggest shortcoming of the novel was a complete lack of focus to the story (which even positive reviews called “shapeless” and “fragmentary”). Here’s The Reader’s Digest version of everything that is shoe horned into the plot:

The novel is about a journalist, Kellas, who finds himself covering the war in Afghanistan for a British newspaper. He has written a critically acclaimed novel that has sold poorly. (Wait, is this Kellas or Meek that we’re talking about?) He (Kellas) decides to boldly sell out and write a military-style thriller. Still in Afghanistan, Kellas meets and falls for an American war correspondent named Astrid, but they are separated (for what will turn out to be an improbable reason) while fleeing the country. Back in England, he tires spectacularly of the chattering class while at a dinner of people he admires but doesn’t appear to like. Wait! His ex is unexpectedly part of the party. Hi-jinks ensue. He leaves the UK, still bleeding, to find Astrid in America. He thinks that she has summoned him through what will turn out to be an improbable plot device. Things don’t go exactly as planned with Astrid, and her Secrets are revealed. The reason behind Astrid’s appearance in Afghanistan is spectacularly improbable and almost offensive to the reader. At least this one. And then the novel closes with an ending that seems only too fitting for the whole maudlin affair.

Well, when I put it that way, it almost seems like a coherent novel. It rarely is. Most of the narrative is told in jerky time shifts that hint at something ominous down the road. The omniscient narrator notes, “He needed to be running two or three lives at once.” Kellas (and the reader) would certainly have been better off it were possible. There are at least two or three excellent novels carefully hidden within this one.

Did you note the frequent use of the word “improbable” in the summary above?

Another sticking point for me is the story line surrounding the book that Kellas writes. Kellas thinks that writing in the Tom Clancy genre will be easy and will make him a household name. The gist of Kellas’ novel: America goes it alone in Iran and ends up at war with the UK and Europe. Unfortunately, Meek decides to share the artless beginning of Kellas’ novel with us at the opening of Descent. The section ends with Iranian school girls mowed down by US military vehicles. Here’s a snippet:

Even when the bullets pierced Sarina’s body, the camera continued to record, writing the billions of digits of information that would be found intact in her cold hand, later that morning, among the heaped bodies of the dead.

Kellas himself describes the novel to a friend:

It would subvert the genre by making America the enemy…American characters would be portrayed as clichéd, humourless, two-dimensional, degenerate, ignorant characters, while their European counterparts…would be wisecracking, genuine, loving, courageous, salt-of-the-earth types.

Even Kellas doesn’t like his own novel. That’s all well and good I suppose. Along the way though, it seems that Meek inserts his own views into the story rather baldly . Our omniscient narrator states:

She would spend most of the night editing and transmitting the pictures to her paper in the US. The Californians had an appetite for looking, over coffee, at the exact monumental broccoli shapes their bombs made in the sky after they were dropped.

Really? Maybe it’s just the Californians that I know, but I doubt if this characterization is even remotely true. A more likely, and damning, critique would have the reporter’s pictures and story bumped off the front page by Spearsian or Hiltonian-level shenanigans. Descent could succeed as a commentary on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (of which I am neither fan nor supporter) if the text wasn’t often so ham fisted.

And it should be repeated: Astrid’s reason for being in Afghanistan in the first place is ridiculous. R-i-d-i-c-u-l-o-u-s.

Bottom line: Read The People’s Act of Love and wait for Meek’s next book. If you’d like to form your own opinion on the matter, you are welcome to my copy of the novel. Leave me a comment if you want it, and it’s yours.

Quiz: Can you spot the two words that mean the same thing and are synonyms?

And they didn’t use an oxford comma!

Have a great weekend, everyone, and stay fly.

A few days ago, I linked to a presentation on the Penguin blog about books that make interesting use of text. I liked it so much, that I made my own presentation, which you can check out here.

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This may easily be my most nerd-tastic endeavor yet. Or maybe that record is still held by this…

I just finished reading Republic Sublime, by Christopher Cessac, for the third time. Chris is a friend of mine who lives in Marfa, Texas, with his wife and little girls. I was lucky enough to befriend him while we were in law school together, and I even got to play in a band with him during that time. Anyway, I digress. The point of this post is to share the power of poetry.

This book won the 2002 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry, a very prestigious honor that goes to one — count ‘em, one — book each year. That should say something right there.

There’s been a lot of hype recently about The Raw Shark Texts, including the local hype surrounding Steven Hall’s reading here at Wordsmiths in Decatur. I loved that book, and I loved Hall’s reading; the reason I mention it here is that Hall really tried to look at the text of his book as more than just words — he wanted to examine those works as visual imagery (hence the allusion to the Rorschach test in the book’s title). Hall did this through the use of several devices, including presenting the words on the page in a graphical format.

Cessac’s work demonstrates, at least to me, another device that makes words more than just words — namely, well-constructed poetry. And by “well-constructed”, I don’t mean that it rhymes. I mean that the words he uses, and the way he lays the words out on the page, are awesome. He uses countless biblical, historical, literary, geographical and mythological references, most of which are completely lost on me, but the beauty of his writing can withstand my ignorance. I don’t need to know who Christopher Smart is to appreciate his poem “Fragments of a Letter to Christopher Smart”, which includes this passage:

. . . much of madness is nothing more

than devotion misplaced, a passion of loss:

for widows, monks and lunatics concur

nothing hurts so much as loving too much

that which doesn’t move among this world –

a dead husband, a god, idea or cause . . .

I urge anyone who’s got the slightest passion for poetry, or who’s willing to invest a bit of themselves to see if one’s there, to read this book. It truly is remarkable what Cessac does with words, even when you don’t know what those words mean; the sound of them, the look of them, the flow of them, have given me a new appreciation for an art that I can’t claim to have cared for.

Come on, man. Try!

(photo by the Journopals – Manhattan)

Browsing the aisles this week, I stumbled on a volume titled Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Café. The Nuyorican is a cultural center for writers in New York. It began in 1973, in the living room of writer and professor Miguel Algarín. His goal was to provide a venue for emerging writers and artists to showcase their work. By 1975, Algarín realized that his living room salon was much too small for the large number of new artists in the city, so he rented an Irish Bar called the  Sunshine Café and converted it into the Nuyorican. Over the course of the last 30 years, the café has hosted innumerable emerging writers, musicians, and filmmakers as well as established artists, including Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and Amiri Baraka.

The Nuyorican is located in the Lower East Side, a neighborhood that has seen significant changes. In 1975, the Lower East Side was certainly not among the most sought-after neighborhoods in the city. Now, the LES houses young professionals and the few remaining artists who haven’t been priced out of Manhattan by skyrocketing rent. But when asked whether he believes this transformation will have an impact on the café, Algarín has asserted that it will not, because the café was never intended to cater to any particular group of artists, but rather to provide a meeting place for artists with a wide range of backgrounds.

(photo by Raúl)

Aloud is a comprehensive collection of poems that have been performed at the café and works by artists who have appeared there. True to Algarín’s philosophy, the poems vary widely in style and theme. They’re edgy, personal, and often experimental. It’s an eclectic anthology with a history just as diverse, and it’s definitely worth a read if you’re a fan of poetry that’s honest and emotionally unfettered.

The Penguin blog put together this nice slide show of “books that make interesting use of their type.” I would have also included Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts and Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions. Especially those two. I need to get to work on my own slide show.

 

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I graduated college with an engineering degree. With high honors. And at one time I was pretty good with physics. However, over the course of the nearly twenty years since I earned that degree (and went on to law school and the practice of law), I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve gotten a little rusty in matters of science and mathematics (right down to simple arithmetic at times). But I’ve carried this faint optimism with me that some “magic bullet” exists that will get me back up to speed in no time.

The Universe in a Nutshell, by Stephen Hawking, is not it. It’s a nice looking book, and it will probably wow and impress people as it collects dust on my coffee table, right next to big shiny books on muscle cars and mid-century storefront design. But the aspirations I had of learning how the universe works and regaining my mastery of physics through a couple hours of simple reading were about as well-founded as those of the foolish scientist who built Harvard’s Jefferson Lab entirely without iron nails so as not to interfere with their attempts to measure the “ether”, failing to recognize that the reddish brown bricks of which the building was constructed contained large amounts of iron. Can you imagine!? I didn’t think so.

After repeated attempts at a quick and easy epiphany — a “Eureka! Now I get it!” realization — I think I’ve come to accept the fact that no matter how simply and clearly you show illustrations of figures in elevators next to figures in rocketships, or bowling balls and billiard balls warping the surface of a trampoline, the concepts of the space-time continuum are just a little too complicated for my apparently stegosaurus-sized brain to fully grasp. And those are the easy parts of books like this. When you start getting into quantum mechanics, M-theory, 11-dimensional supergravity, superstrings, black holes, 10-dimensional membranes, and P-branes, I really start to feel like a . . . well, a P-brane. To a layperson, I think the best I’m ever going to understand things like the so-called “grandfather paradox” — i.e., what happens if you go back in time and kill your grandfather before your father was conceived — is through the teachings of those esteemed researchers Logan and Preston (a/k/a Bill and Ted).

One of the nice things about this blog business is that occasionally I am given books that I wouldn’t have ordinarily come across on my own. The most recent such book? Shut Up, I’m Talking: And Other Diplomacy Lessons I Learned in the Israeli Government by Gregory Levey. Leavey’s memoir is hilarious. And by hilarious I mean funny, but often in an, “Oh my God, we’re all going to die” kind of way.

Levey, a Canadian, found himself adrift in his second year of law school in the US. His plan was to take a break before completing his third year of law school and join the Israeli Army. On a lark, he sends a resume to the Israeli Mission to the UN to apply for any internships that may be available. Hilarity, of a sort, ensues.

Levey finds himself hired, not as an intern, but as a speech writer for the Israeli Ambassador to the UN. The misadventures at the Embassy are hilarious, but also frightening when one factors in the whole precarious nature of the Middle East.

The memoir is written as a fish out water story, and Levey himself points out at almost every opportunity that he has absolutely no business in the jobs that he held for the Israeli government. Examples of absurd situations for a 25 year-old non-Israeli citizen to find himself in abound. Levey has to decide how Israel should vote on an UN resolution when he stumbles upon the realization that he is the only person at the UN affiliated with Israel (a country of which he is not a citizen). Result? The U.S. and Greg vote “no,” the rest of the world votes “yes.” An international incident hinges on his shaky translation of French. Etc.

Despite his own feelings about his capabilities, just as he plans to leave the UN Mission the situation escalates. At the request of Prime Minister Sharon(!), Levey moves to Israel to become an English speech writer for the PM’s office. While in Israel, Levey has a front row seat during a particularly volatile time in Israeli history. The author feels very much the outsider despite his position with the corridors of power, in no small part because of his inability to abide the rudeness of the Israeli’s themselves. In one passage, Levey notes:

…life in Israel was difficult. I was sure there were many wonderful, kind, and caring Israeli’s, but they all seemed to be on vacation. “The customer service alone is enough to make you want to start an intifada,” an American I met quipped…

I am quite sure that Levey’s book will be seen as controversial in some Jewish circles. In fact, there were passages that I read and thought, “This guy is either really brave in his honesty or else he is really, really stupid.” I don’t think that it is the latter.

The web site Very Short List, which features a daily post about things that are worth your time, came up with the following Venn diagram to describe the book:

Close enough. However, the book that Shut Up, I’m Talking reminds me of most is Dan Kennedy’s Rock On. The absurd behind the scenes look by an employee that feels completely lost and out of place in the employee of a powerful and monolithic entity is true enough for both books. Levey’s memoir carries additional weight, because – oh my God- this is a sovereign nation’s government that we’re talking about.

While the memoir is specifically about Levey’s service with Israel, I have no doubt that similar issues and absurdity exist for all countries (particularly my own). As such, Shut Up I’m Talking is a useful reminder of the inherent fallibility of governments. Shut Up is a fun, engaging, and sobering read. I recommend it to all that might find the subject matter – the fate of the world as we know it – of interest. It’s also good fun if you’ve ever found yourself over your head in the job world. Levey’s experience shows that it could have been much, much worse.

It just so happens that Gregory Levey will be reading from Shut Up, I’m Talking at Wordsmiths this Wednesday night. Quel coïncidence, no?

Check out the author’s blog.