One of my favorite books is a grossly overlooked literary history, A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists (1854-1967) by Rachel Cohen.Cohen writes vignettes of 30 intertwined lives in 36 chapters, beginning with Henry James and Matthew Brady’s encounter in 1854 and running up to Norman Mailer and Robert Lowell’s in the late ‘60s. In between, we meet William Dean Howells, Annie Adams Fields, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant, W.E.B. DuBois, Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather and others.
Hello, Goodbye, Hello by Craig Brown
Private Eye columnist Craig Brown’s Hello Goodbye Hello (Simon & Schuster)unlike Cohen’s focus is an amusing exhibition of serendipitous intersections of world-famous people— connecting the strangest couplings—101 to be exact (and for some inexplicable reason each rendered in exactly 1001 words). From Harpo Marx and George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling and Helen Keller, Frank Lloyd Wright and Nikita Khrushchev, Groucho Marx and T. S. Eliot, Elvis Presley met Richard M. Nixon Martha Graham, and Madonna, James Joyce and Marcel Proust, as Ms Kakutani opines,”… weaves together dozens of such encounters into a glittering daisy chain that reads like a mathematical proof of the theory of six degrees of separation.” Here’s an excerpt that appears in Vanity Fair
featuring Frank Sinatra and Dominick Dunne:
On a normal day, Frank Sinatra is not slow to take umbrage, nor to accompany it with the promise of revenge, a promise he enjoys keeping. “Make yourself comfortable, Frank! Hit somebody!” the fearless comedian Don Rickles once greeted Sinatra as he strode into Rickles’s cabaret lounge.
The TV producer Dominick Dunne has never been able to fathom why Sinatra has taken against him. “I wish I knew, but he took a major dislike to my wife and me.” One moment, he was part of Sinatra’s wider circle, the next the object of abuse. “You’re a no-talent hack,” Sinatra says to Dunne as he passes him at a party; whenever Sinatra sees Dunne’s wife, Lenny, he tells her she married a loser. Why this change of heart? Dunne can only imagine that Sinatra bears him some sort of grudge for a TV show on which they worked together some years ago.
Sinatra’s ire appears to increase with their every encounter. Last year, Dunne was having dinner at the Bistro in Los Angeles when Sinatra, clearly drunk, abused him loudly from a neighboring table. Sinatra then turned his venom on Lenny, before continuing around the table, going for Lauren Bacall, Maureen O’Sullivan, and Swifty Lazar in rapid succession. Finally, he grabbed the tablecloth and pulled it from beneath all their plates and glasses, threw a plate of food over Lazar, and stomped out.
This year, Sinatra has been involved in any number of fights. In June, for instance, a businessman called Frank Weissman asked him and his party in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel if they wouldn’t mind piping down. Weissman ended the night in a coma at the hospital…
Amusing and readable—which works for me
Currently Reading And When She Was Good by Laura Lippman (William Morrow)
Last week during the Major League All-Star break I offered up a list of baseball books and naturally I discovered a glaring omission— namely,Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest for Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball by NY Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey and Wayne Coffey(Blue Rider Press). Dickey is currently 13-2 with a 2.97 earned run average and 139 strikeouts which leads the National League(and but forTony Larusso would had started the All Star joust. Dickey was once a No. 1 draft choice of the Texas Rangers when it was discovered he did not have an ulna collateral ligament in his right elbow.Whatever that has to do with pitching mechanics, it posed a huge problem for Dickey, who took it upon himself to learn the mysterious art of the knuckleball— making him one of the best pitchers in the National League. Articulate and charming, Dickey joins up with New York Daily News sports writer Coffey (The Boys of Winter) to tell a traditional American feel-good story of overcoming adversity. It’s not an original narrative but it is well told. Baseball has been good to Dickey.
Wherever I Wind UP by RA Dickey
Having developed scholastic ambitions as an undergraduate, I launched myself, head and heart into studying philosophy, very much based on the allure of the greatly complex persona and musings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It only took a few years for me to recover from this malady (in large part because I was in no position to lead an impecunious life as a philosophy teacher searching for a secure sinecure in the academic zoo. I did learn a thing or two—enough to view America The Philosophical by Carlin Romano(Alfred A. Knopf) as a silly hodgepodge of arguments ,intended to say something important about the United States. An all the more surprising feat considering that my past reading of Romano had led me to conclude he was a thoughtful and assiduous commentator. William Giraldi who read Romano’s tome in its entirety (so you wouldn’t have to) rigorously vivisectsAmerica The Philosophical in the LA Review of Books Worth reading even if you don’t care about Romano’s thesis or American “philosophy, here’s Giraldi’s (for me) money graf:
We Americans are eager for any orgy of idiocy that promises diversion or amusement, and yet we are a nation with influence and might enough to shame Caesar. How does a nation of unread dopes dominate the world or elect as president a black intellectual? And what of Pound’s prophesy in ABC of Reading that “a people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing” — and by extension sloppy thinking — “is a people in process of losing grip on its empire and on itself”? Glance at the annals of the bestseller list and you’ll see that we long ago passed from a mere approval of sloppy writing to a torrid support of gorilla-like writing gestures. Mencken thought Americans not only uneducated but uneducable; the United States, he said, is an “Eden of clowns,” and yet he never had the heart to leave because, unlike Henry James, he saw much to love here. If Romano had seen fit to nix a dingbat like Ayn Rand and instead examined Lionel Trilling, one of the most crucial thinkers of the twentieth century, he might have proposed that we learn to be comfortable with a Trillingesque acceptance of paradox, dichotomy, antinomy: that we are both brilliant and brain-dead, leaders often in last place, and that Keats’s “negative capability” is the only real capability at our disposal. In The American Scene (1907) Henry James pointed out that the United States will stand for almost anything you want it to, but it might stand on shaky legs if, in your enviable ardor, you make it hold too many accolades.
Eric Hoffer, Longshoreman Philosopher by Thomas Bethell
At the same time I was under the sway of the enigmatic Viennese genius and a gaggle of erudite Oxford dons, Eric Hofer a San Francisco long shore man was the media”go-to-working class intellectual having been dubbed the “longshoreman philosopher” He wrote 10 books in his lifetime, The True Believer, perhaps, being his best known.Not much has been published on Hoffer, 2 previous biographies being out of print. So Thomas Bethell’s Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher (Hoover Institution Press Publication) is useful addition to the American cultural history bibliography. Hoffer, of course, is a philosopher in the muddled way that Carlin Romano looks at the discipline. Which doesn’t make him a bad guy, just not a philosopher.
As long as I am thinking of my new literary best friend Billy Giraldi, he and novelist /editor Christopher Beha engage in delightfully smart dialogue, in part due to the publication of Beha’s What Happened to Sophie Wilder? (Tin House). It’s in parts, charming and illuminating exhibiting 2 nimble minds at work (or play) I should add I on the basis of the Giraldi/Beha chat I went on to read Beha’s new opus. Which, despite a number of reservations I had about Sophie, was well crafted and compelled me to read to the end.
David Wojnarowicz’ buffalo photograph
Late 20th century American Art especially in Manhattan, where the most important walls (for art) are located, Andy Warhol and the Interview milieu reigned— in addition to Warhol I am thinking of Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe Jean Basquiet and Julian Schnabel. Additionally, the AIDs epidemic which ravaged so much of the creative community served as a rallying point producing formidable voices and artist of which David Wojnarowicz must be acknowledged. Cynthia Carr (long time Manhattan journalist and observer) does such in spades with her rigorous account of Wojnarowicz’s life in Fire in the Belly The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (Bloomsbury) Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of thirty-seven.
He was a pioneering and controversial figure at a time when the quest for discovering the next big thing was a heavy contact sport and his work in a variety of media still provokes debate and worse in US culture conflicts.
The Imperial Messenger by Belen Fernandez
If you belong to the growing number of readers ( Matt Taibbi is in this camp) who wonder why Thomas 3 time Pulitzer winner Thomas Friedman is paid attention, Belen Fernandez, whose Imperial Messenger (Verso)ably deflated the dirigible that is the NY Times columnist and best selling author, continues to monitor Friedman’s pronouncements In response to his recent column on Syria (already pronounced by Taibbi as Friedman’s most incoherent ever),Fernandez observes:
As for Iraq’s simultaneous existence as fetus and U.S. babysitting charge, the use of infantilizing terminology vis-à-vis Arabs and Muslims is a mainstay of Friedman’s Orientalist repertoire (“I feel like we’re like an unemployed couple who just went out and decided to adopt a special needs baby”—Friedman on Afghanistan, 2009). It could potentially be argued that his qualifications to dictate the birthing process in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere stem from his own reproductive experience—recounted in Longitudes and Attitudes—on September 11, 2001, at the beachfront Tel Aviv Hilton:
It was there, massaged by the Mediterranean breeze, that my head started to clear and I finally gave birth to the thought that had been bothering me most: ‘What kind of world are my two girls going to grow up in?’’
Oh yeah!
Currently reading How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charlie Yu (Pantheon)
“Written in celestial prose” is how the how the inimitable Cynthia Ozick describes Brian Doyle’s new opusThe Wet Engine Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart(Oregon State University Press)
Internet tourists and visitors to this far flung place may recall that I have been a vocal enthusiast of Oregonian Brian Doyle based on his first novel Mink River
and his latest story collection Bin Laden’s Bald Spot.`
Here’s how Doyle begins The Wet Engine:
My son Liam was born nine years ago. He looked like a cucumber on steroids. He was fat and bald and round. He looked healthy as a horse. He wasn’t. He was missing a chamber in his heart, which is a problem, as you need four chambers for smooth conduct through this vale of fears and tears, and he only had three chambers, so pretty soon he had an open-heart surgery, during which doctors cut him open and iced down his heart and shut it down for an hour or so while they worked on repair…
Though it is a slight volume (128 pages) it astonishes me how much Brian Doyle was able to compress into this story that involves parental love, medical science, spiritual healing and the super sized metaphor that is attached to the vital organ known as the heart.
THere is much to admire in this book and much to savor —as Brian Doyle intones. “Romance is a small sea in a vast ocean.The heart leaps in so many directions at once.”
I have been meaning to read Edward St. Aubyn since 2006 when Open City published the 4th of what are currently published in one volume entitled the The Patrick Melrose Novels: (Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk) (Picador). But as these things go hundreds of books intervened. I noticed that Francine Prose has written intelligently commending St Aubyn’s latest tome At Last (FSG) which is asserted to be the culminating novel in this series. She mentions At Last’s predecessors
… “The Patrick Melrose Novels,” can be read as the navigational charts of a mariner desperate not to end up in the wretched harbor from which he embarked on a voyage that has led in and out of heroin addiction, alcoholism, marital infidelity and a range of behaviors for which the term “self-destructive” is the mildest of euphemisms. For fans of the Melrose cycle, “At Last,” which is set on the day of Eleanor’s funeral, provides some of the exultation and relief of watching that sailor, so often nearly drowned, bob, gasping, to the surface.
And adds:
It’s possible to read “At Last” without being familiar with the earlier novels, but that would be a bit like paging straight to “Time Regained” and skipping the rest of Proust…
Personally, having a choice, with both volumes in hand, I opted to read the precendent Melrose novels first. And every commendation that Prose heaps on St. Aubyn is present—dark, savage brilliant humor. With every page fill of unerringly accurate prose and unlikely tidbits of hilarity and farce.Here Anne, an American journalist converses with Victor, a British philosopher, her lover of the past year:
Victor looked uneasy.”Were you insulting each other in the car, or just attacking David and me?”
“Neither, but the way that everyone else was insulted I knew that we would break off into smaller and smaller combinations until everyone had been dealt with by everyone else.
“But that’s what charm is: being malicious about everyone except the person you are with, who then glows with the privilege of exemption
“if that’s what charm is,” said Anne, “it broke down in this occasion , because I felt no one of us were exempt.”
“Do you wish to confirm your own theory by saying something nasty about one of your fellow dinner guests?”
“Well now that you mention it,” said Anne laughing, “I thought that Nicholas Pratt was a total creep.”
“I know what you mean. His problem is that he wanted to go into politics,” Victor explained, “but was destroyed by what passed as a sex scandal some years ago and would probably now be called an “open marriage” Most people wait until they become ministers before they ruin their political careers with a sex scandal, but Nicholas managed to do it when he was still trying to impress Central Office by contesting a by election in a safe Labor seat.”
“Precocious,huh?” said Anne,”What exactly did he do to deserve his exile from paradise?”
“He was found in bed with two women he was not married to by the woman he was married to, and she decided not to stand by his side.”
“Sounds like there wasn’t any room, said Anne, “but like you say, it was a case of band timing.Back in those days you couldn’t go on television and say how it was a “really liberating experience.”
Actually I am more than a bit surprised that this mordant vivisection of the British upper classes is so captivating but take that a salute to Edward St Aubyn’s brilliance. In the spirit of audacity (which is often better conceived of that executed) that marks any number of the creatures that inhabit the Melrose cycle, I was tempted to include the only video interview with Edward St. Aubyn that I could find, which happens to be in French but I am opting for this British Broadcasting Corp. recording
Currently reading Poison Flower by Thomas Perry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Lawrence Weschler is most certainly not an unheralded writer—at least two of his books are classics(if there is a such a thing) of contemporary non fiction—Vermeer in Bosnia and Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders. He does, however engage readers at remote junctures and out-of-the-way labyrinths, both geographically and epistemologically. His newest tome Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative (Counterpoint)collects twenty three of his narrative gems, all tagged with his signature sense of wonder. Subjects range from efforts of digital animators to create a realistic human face, to profiles of novelist Mark Salzman, film and sound editor Walter Murch, artist Vincent Desiderio and his Weschler’s grandfather, composer Ernest Toch.
One of the pleasures of reading Weschler is a near-guarantee that he will be operating from an oblique perspective, challenging conventional (for lack of a better word) wisdom. For instance, though not focused on matters of governance and politics (more often, he trains his curiosity on arts and artists), Weschler is not blind to or oblivious of the darker quarters of those people and politics. One of my favorite books by him is A Miracle, A Universe (Pantheon) an account of post dictatorship human rights groups efforts in Brazil and Argentina attempting to determine the final disposition of the countless “disappeared” cause by previously genocidal regimes, which introduced me to one of the most decent people on this planet Eduardo Galeano.
Here’s a recent Weschler rumination on political corruption that Tomsdispatchpublished In its conclusion he explains the US system to Godfrey, a Ugandan cab driver:
…Education, meanwhile, is funded according to narrowly local property taxes — and the rich make sure it stays that way. The result? Their kids get a far better education than those living in poorer neighborhoods. When people try to remedy that injustice through affirmative action programs which at least recognize the unfairness of the competition for access to, for example, university slots, the rich protest and get judges to overturn such programs as racist. They are, however, perfectly happy to take advantage of other programs that assure the acceptance of the children of alumni, no matter their scholarly performance, and no one says boo. It’s all perfectly legal.
And as a rich frosting on this confection, there is this quote from W.E.B. DuBois, “We let men take wealth which is not theirs; if the seizure is ‘legal’ we call it high profits. And the profiteers help decide what is legal.”
Currently reading Stories of Village Life by Amos Oz (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
I chatted with British writer Michael Dibdin sometime in the last century as he was making a splash (or at least the kind of a splash successful crime story writers make). Especially as he had embarked on a series featuring an Italian police detective displaced from his home town of Venice to work in Rome. Add to his outsider status, his incorruptibility and integrity and the unusual moniker of Aurelio Zen and their was the promise of (some) engaging drama. Dibdin published 11 books in the Zen serials before he died in 2007.
Now come 3 BBC produced films based Dibdin’s first Zen’s stories Vendetta, Cabal and Rat King via PBS’s Masterpiece Theater. A number of qualities recommend these spaghetti thrillers— you will lay your eyes on the most beautiful woman on TV, in the person of Caterina Murino. Rufus Sewell is intriguing as the idiosyncratic Zen who is reminiscent of Eliot Gould’s Marlowe in the Long Good Bye —all mumbles, twitches and tics and misdirects. The employment of English actors and no attempt to affect Italian accents (except of course for the transcendent Senora Morino)is a charming touch. And there is, of course, the photogeneity(sic ) of Rome and it denizens and the charming attitudes exhibited by them regarding life love and death. There also are murders and betrayals and mayhem and most prominently, corruption
The third final episode (a term I use loosely) in the series air on July 31 and I for one hope the producers go back for more.
No doubt writer Daniel Woodrell had a following before his fine novel, Winter’s Bone was made into an Oscar nominated motion picture (doesn’t that rubric seem archaic?) However, for the unannointed Woodrell’s The Bayou Trilogy (Mulholland Books) has just been reissued in one handy volume containing three of his early novels Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing and The Ones You Do.
Whether saddling Woodrell as the creator of “red neck noir” plays to his advantage is beyond my reckoning. Of course I am not sure being affiliated with red necks has aided anyone (you can read Joe Bageant’sRainbow Pie, A Redneck memoir to ascertain this) but I am certain of a couple of things. Woodrell can write and Woodrell knows a thing or two. For instance here is a quick take on the 1927 flood
…When the big river calmed and the swamp settled back to level, families that had known no life but the swampy decided that the allure of wild rice ranching and nutria trapping was overshadowed by the grand tales they’d swallowed of city life, a place where sugar-cured hams were free so long as a you bought a potato, pigeons were fat and sleek and tasted like shrimp, cash was doled out twice month and there was an endless supply of liquid cheer and hoochy-koochy bonhomie. The flood pushed these folks from the remote life of the swamp and into the bullshit embrace of the bluff winking city.
Others have commented gushingly on Woodrell’s writing so I will spare you the paean —let me just say that you can pretty much flip open his books to any page and have a very good chance of encountering an outstanding example of his craft and sly sense of humor. As in the following, where John X Shade explains to Lunch Pumphrey what happened to the money that was stolen from him
See, I took the advice of the pigskin experts, Lunch, and I put fifteen K down on them wily ‘Bama boys.Saturday last, they lined up against a team from Florida whose star quarterback and favorite wide receiver had just been carted off to jail on rape charges. That ought be an edge, right? Short of a fuckin’ jailbreak that game had to be a lock for the Crimson Tide. But as you might know, late in the fourth quarter their star running back, the one that beat the burglary rap back in the spring, coughed it up inside the Florida ten-yard line, and that Florida linebacker who’d just come off suspension from that summertime assault beef the papers were full of, jumped on the ball and kept ‘Bama from coverin’ the spread.
Long time fans will be pleased to learn that Woodrell has a collection of stories coming out this fall. New converts have a treasure trove of a back list to root through.
Having ignored my predilection to (with some exceptions) avoid reading reviews, by reading two of such regarding Sigrid Nunez’s Sempre Susan (Atlas & Co.), I was steered to an exercise in nastiness masquerading as a book critique, after speaking with Sigrid —she told of the unfavorable notice in New York Times Book Review.
Now I believe any reader, professional or not has the right to grind their cutlery in opining about a book or movie or recording. There is a large and emphatic BUT though—which is that good sense and dare I say intelligence ought to be exercised by the editors of literary journals publishing ill tempered, ill mannered and misbegotten pseudo cogitations from which alchemical wizardry would be required to draw anything useful or instructive.
From the very first sentence—”It’s not easy to pick the most unforgettable image from the many that flutter through this memoir like snippets from an overturned wastebasket” —an unkind metaphor is offered for the images that MS Nunez evokes in her slender remembrance of the few years in her youth that she spent orbiting around the celestial intellect that was Susan Sontag. And among other quibbles leveled against this insightful book, using an Italian word in the title and that Nunez’s attitude toward her subject is a”mystery”.
Of course, there is no real” mystery” as the writer of this purple faced screed proffers in a full disclosure attached at the end:
Full disclosure: I met Sontag once myself in the ’70s, interviewing her while she was on a book tour, and came away bewitched. She was the smartest woman in the world! Just as [Terry] Castle suggests, if you were a would-be intellectual feminist in those days, you had to idolize Sontag; it was the cost of doing business. But you didn’t have to sign on for years of fealty the way she and Nunez did
Susan Sontag was a true original in an age of branded copies and outright imposters. And however her intellectual and creative legacy resonate in today’s cultural playground, monographs like Sempre Susan are fascinating snapshots of a rare original operating in a millieau not exactly overstocked with her peculiar species. And what is not mysterious at all is Nunez’s well expressed fascination with the singular Susan Sontag.
