In which the Little People Drink Sake, Say Ho ho. (Illustration by Rokuro Taniuchi)

I looked it up, ok? Wikipedia says it’s wordplay, that kyu (Q) and kew (9) are homophones. So it’s 1Q84, not 1984. I was compelled to look this up because a friend of mine had been calling it “IQ 84″ and I kept calling 19Q4 for the first five hundred pages.

They were a long first five hundred pages. I didn’t understand why the first book ended where it did, at a point which didn’t seem complete or suspenseful, and did not leave me hungering for the second book. I assume that’s part of the reason the trilogy came out as one book in the U.S. A lot of the information seemed redundant, like filler. I kept telling myself that maybe it had to be when sold separately, that with months between publishing books 1-2-3, the audience would have forgotten everything. I’m a slow reader, and carried the book with me through many airports and different cities. It sat unopened in a hotel room in St. Louis for a week. I learned to skim to survive the repeated passages.

I had been so excited when the book came out. I think it was the first time that I bought a book the day it hit  shelves. I felt smug. I like Murakami. His short stories are fantastic, I empathize with characters who must enter wells to think, and I had a most pleasant time reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World while on a Delaware beach last summer. Read more »

remember when newspapers used to have book sections?  that was awesome.  remember when they started going away?  that was not.  remember when newspaper book sections made a triumphant return and the world rejoiced?  me neither.  but i’m still holding out hope for that one.  in the meantime, i’ve got the new printers row from the chicago tribune.  and i have no idea what the fuck to do with it.

in theory, it sounds like a good idea maybe.  it’s got all the things i used to love about the books section: reviews, recommendations, essays, interviews, fun little Q&A’s with book-loving peoples, best-seller lists, a calendar of literary events, all that good shit.  it’s even got a column from rick kogan, the best storyteller/old school newspaperman our town’s got since dear studs passed away.  but here’s the thing: the newspapers had all that before, and got rid of it.  probably because of economic inefficiencies, or economies of scale, or sliding scales, or because the terrorists finally won.  so, obviously, they had to do something different this time.  and what they decided to do was charge for it.

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Fine, this is what it looks like.

It took me forever to get this review written.  I bought Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s latest work, in November, soon after it came out.  It’s a small book and I figured I could read it in a day and get to work. I started it pretty quickly and read 40 pages.  And then it sat on the night stand by my reading chair in my bedroom.  I took the cover off, and the back photo haunted me every time I saw it—Didion’s daughter, young, sitting on a chair, elbows on knees with towhead in hands, too serious. And I couldn’t read it.  I knew it was about mortality, and as Didion says “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.” I knew her daughter, so ill in the first memoir, was going to die, had died, and so I spent a lot of time not reading it.  And when I went back to Blue Nights in January, I opened my reading journal to see what I’d written, to remind me.

“There’s a sense of clinging about this…it’s humbling and haunting and it makes me want to stop reading it and go read a book or play a game with my kids.”

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What stayed with me was the strangeness of it. Sarah’s story wasn’t especially well-written. There wasn’t much in it that was novel except the act of writing it down, heavy with mystery and a sense of loss, and sending it out into the world rudderless. It was like stumbling upon something secret, and I wanted to know more. To enter further into that mystery. So, naturally, I turned to the internet.

Last month, I wrote about Sarah’s story, which I found handwritten on the flyleaves of a used book I bought online. That post includes a transcript of what little she left for the amateur internet sleuth, so I won’t belabor the details here. But there are a couple highlights that, if this were a TV mini-series, would surely appear in the “Last Week on…” montage that rolls before the theme song:

1. Sarah met and fell in love with a man named Mike. Mike was a park ranger who, according to Sarah’s friend Stu, had started an Outward Bound program in Seward, Alaska, where Sarah’s story takes place. According to Sarah, Mike was “her second half.” He “changed [her] life… gave [her] pure love.”
2. Sarah misspells his name when she writes it out. Instead of Michael Adrian Vanbeek, the standard spelling of the two given names, she writes “Micheal Adrain Vanbeek.”
3. She writes in vague terms about the loss of the relationship. Twice in the draft, she approaches this subject and then jerks away from it, like she has accidentally brushed against a wound.

Mike Vanderbeek is the one who looks like he's being attacked by the guy in the jean shorts.

Since I didn’t have any helpful information about Sarah, I began by googling Mike. I made the rookie mistake of starting with his full name, both Sarah’s rendering and the spelling-corrected version. Of course, this yielded no real results. Then I tried “Mike Vanbeek”—too many results. Then I tried searching “Mike Vanbeek” and “Outward Bound” together. Here where it got interesting.

Google suggested that maybe I meant “Mike Vanderbeek” and Outward Bound, and it showed me what I would find there. Mike Vanderbeek, as it turns out, started Outward Bound’s Alaska program in Seward. He was indeed a park ranger, an advanced mountaineer, and he would’ve likely been in Seward in the summer of 1997, when Sarah sets her story. All of this fits, but all of this information is found around the edges of the articles. For Google, the thing you need to know about Mike Vanderbeek is that he is dead. Read more »

No one likes to be misunderstood.

At least I’m assuming, and shamelessly projecting upon others the alienation that I myself do not savor…

The fact is — as I write whatever I write — I do not really know what I’m intending to mean, and therefore appreciate another soul making the effort to comprehend that proposition or observation or truth claim around which my words take tentative and perhaps over-confident stabs in the dark.

This, I’m afraid, is the best any reader or any literary critic can offer by way of definitive credentials.   “Ours is in the trying,” muses T.S. Eliot (italics mine).  We put our stuff out there and hope for a dialogue partner, and at our best, do not react with a hyper-critical defense which degenerates into the slinging of mud or jello…  Or even the defense which ostensibly folds its arms and snickers in condescension.

Daisy Fried, in her New York Times articles and in her Poetry Foundation commentaries, has exercised her readership’s cerebral capacities for over a decade now.  I love that about the poetic graduate of Swarthmore College — that she pushes and prods and gets our synapse connections firing on all cylinders.   And I want her to know that I used to ride my bike through that upscale campus and pick up, as through osmosis, the academy’s deepest thoughts.   I did this, however, not for the sole purpose of one day asserting that  William Carlos Williams is the Dante of the American twentieth century (a comment that makes me want to dig further into the Inferno and perhaps learn the epic in the original Italian).  But I thought those thoughts, which were clearly above my blue-collar rank, because it seemed to me then, and seems to me now, that no one owns this dialectic terrain… that intellectual property is nothing more than a cold, stony seat in the amphitheater where scholars and non-scholars may cool their heels, listen and perhaps chime into the conversation.

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Maybe Nuremberg Needs One of These?

Der Klügere gibt nach.  (The cleverer give in.)
–A German Saying

A retired German man was walking in a German city not long ago. He saw a group of people trying to cross the street at a dangerous intersection. The cars wouldn’t stop so some women created a human chain as a barrier to help the others cross. An Audi drove up to the woman-made-chain and pushed their bodies out of the way with his car. The women were shocked; their hands dropped, chain broke, and they didn’t know what to say.

The retired man went over to the Audi and told the driver to stop pushing people around with his car. The man in the Audi opened his car door, got out, and yelled at this thin man who must be in his late sixties. The thin older man pushed the driver back into his Audi and shut the car door. The driver opened the door, got back out of the car, and towered over the old-ish man, yelling some more before driving away. Read more »

Right now, I am in the middle of six books. The number jumps to fourteen, however, if you count books I’ve started and mean to finish but haven’t picked up in over a year. It goes up again to sixteen if you count the two books I’m reading (very slowly) in French. Seventeen if we include audio books. And I admit it: this is pretty normal for me. The number one reason I don’t finish books isn’t because I don’t like them but rather because I forget about them. I’m easily distracted by newer and shinier books, or at least by ones that I don’t have to walk all the way into the living room to retrieve.

Some people are one-book-at-a-time readers. It’s one and done for them, one and done. I don’t understand these people.

I like books to fit my mood. I like having books for all the many occasions that might arise. For instance, if I were to take a trip tomorrow, do I have a book that would (1) pack easily, (2) not earn me strange stares in public, and (3) engross me enough so that I don’t get bored in the backseat of the car, in the airport terminal. Then, there’s the book I read over meals or in the bathtub. This book is almost always a reread, something I can pick up and put down at a moment’s notice, something I could do without if I dropped it in the water and had to wait a few days to but a new copy. (True story: I dropped a first edition in the bathtub the other day; this was actually a poor bathtub choice.) Finally, there’s the book I think will impress my colleagues or my peers. Preferably, this book is also somewhat unknown so that I can recommend it to everyone I meet and it will be a new discovery for them. Read more »

I didn’t think there was another person on the planet besides my mother,who could scold me in such a manner that I couldn’t make direct eye contact for a full ten minutes afterwards. But alas, I have found such a person and he is my thesis advisor. During our first meeting of the quarter, he quietly dismissed my excuses for not having read but three of my thesis books (that he assigned last Spring). When I said that I didn’t want to be influenced by other voices, he said, that this (graduate school) was the time to be influenced, this was the time to steal.

Provocative, Searing, Blunt. Yes, please.

I came home with his office copy of Elizabeth Alexander’s “Body of Life”, disgruntled with another book that seemed to focus on the Black Experience. Didn’t I already know that CH wanted me to focus on the Black Experience?, Read more »

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard and/or read about Marie Calloway. But if by some miracle, you’ve been enjoying your life and ignoring sordid internet shitstorms, I’ll be your tour guide today. Put on your raingear and some goggles. Note: This whole thing began more than a month ago, which in internet time is approximately 1.7 million years. Even though I avoided reading it/writing about it for weeks, I’m doing so now mostly because I was bewildered by some of the comments made in a recent interview with the writer in question. But we’ll get to that.

(I feel sort of like Inigo when he’s trying to explain to Wesley what’s going on after they wake him up from being almost-dead. “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”)

So there’s this young female writer who had posted a couple of pieces on Thought Catalog about losing her virginity and spending a day as an escort in London.* She had her own blog under the pseudonym Marie Calloway, which she has since taken down, but many of her posts were about sexual encounters with men she contacted through the internet, and a few times she posted naked pictures of herself. She read and admired some writing by an older man in New York, who is apparently in or on the fringes of one of the cool kids’ clubs of writers in the city. (As a non-resident of New York, an unpublished writer and a decidedly uncool kid, let’s just say I’d never heard of the guy in question.) She made contact with him, and suggested they meet up and have sex while she was in the city. They met and did have sex, despite his admission that he had a girlfriend but that he was “bored,” and the fact that she was traveling with another man who’d paid for her trip and who she was also sleeping with. (She says the other man, Patrick, was supportive of her plan to sleep with the writer, and that he was happy with how he was portrayed in the account/story.) She took some photos on her phone, and wrote a detailed account of the whole liaison for her blog, using the real names of everyone in question, publishing the photos she took (including one of her face with the writer’s semen supposedly all over it), and essentially giving a play-by-play of all their conversations. Oh, and also play-by-plays of all the fucking.

So people started to notice it, and her blog exploded with hits, and then (this is where I get fuzzy) for some reason she took the post down. Not sure what that was prompted by. But then, a couple of days later, lo and behold: nearly the exact same account, in its entirety, was published on Muumu House as fiction, with one main change: the male writer in question’s name was changed to Adrien Brody, at the suggestion of Tao Lin. Ms. Calloway had communicated with him previously and sent him her writing, so she sent him her 15,000 word piece and he agreed to publish it, advising that she change the man’s name to that of a celebrity.*

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While I was in Seattle last month, a friend lent me two books: Tweak by Nic Sheff and Beautiful Boy by David Sheff. Tweak is Nic Sheff’s memoir about his crystal meth addiction. Beautiful Boy is a companion piece of sorts – it is Nic’s father’s account of the same events and the impact Nic’s drug use had on him and his family. Beautiful Boy covers a much larger swath of territory than Tweak. It begins when Nic is born and follows him all the way to his last stint in rehab, whereas Tweak is really only concerned with two years in Nic’s early 20s. But, as one might imagine, there’s a lot of overlap, content-wise. Both books were published in 2009. My friend recommended I read one right after the other.

My first instinct, prior to having read the books, was that my friend’s instruction was spot-on. In fact, I thought, all memoirs should come with a secondary account that can be held up next to the original to provide outside insight and perspective. After all, we never see ourselves clearly, and therefore never write ourselves clearly. Plus, debunking memoirs is almost a literary sport. Readers of nonfiction seem very much to enjoy speculating about what may or may not have actually happened in any book that claims to be a “true story.” In Tweak’s case, the friend who gave it me offered the caveat that she knew someone who had gone to college with Nic Sheff for a year and said while he was a thief and a liar, she never saw him on drugs and thought his account of his using at that time was very much inflated. So this method – reading two books about the exact same thing, one right after the other – seemed like a good way to get around that trickiness of memoir. How much the son’s story should I trust? Daddy will clear that right up.

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