Readerville

"Bridge of Sighs" by Richard Russo: A discussion

Editor's note: Please join us in our first attempt at having the monthly book group discussion right here in the Journal rather than in the Forum. We're looking forward to hearing some new voices and testing out a new format.
—kt

Richard Russo's latest novel, Bridge of Sighs, follows the lives of two men, childhood friends (of a sort) who've wound up in very different places — literally and figuratively. Russo is known for his intimate portraits of life in downtrodden northeastern towns. In this case, Lou Lynch and Bobby Marconi both come from Thomaston, NY, a town notable for a stream that runs different colors depending on what the local tannery is producing on any given day. Lou spends his whole life in Thomaston, following in his father's relatively unambitious footsteps, while Bobby reinvents himself as Noonan, an expatriate artist living in Venice. Now in their sixties, the two men are variously confronted with the choices and the lives they've made. Let's hear your thoughts! ... view comments

"Lucky Bastard" by Charles McCarry

The Year of Reading Politically | #3 of 12
By Paul Clark

At the end of this acerbically amusing novel from 1998, Charles McCarry includes the following in a "To the Reader" note:

Lucky Bastard is a work of the imagination in which no character is based on anyone who ever lived and no reference is intended to anything that ever happened in the real world. ... [I]n our time history became fiction and fiction history. It is no simple matter to reclaim the one from the other.

McCarry probably felt compelled to write such a note, given that his novel's main character is a hypersexual man who dodges the draft during the Vietnam war, gets a scholarship to study in Europe, returns to the U.S. and marries a woman he meets in law school (who becomes the breadwinner in the family), and starts a career in state politics, rising from attorney general to governor and then the presumptive favorite to become president.

Not like anything in real life at all. ... continue reading

What Our Mothers Read

The Odd Shelf #69
By Kat Warren

Depending on your age (and, doesn't everything), your mother and aunts may have wafted through their days wearing these perfumes:

Shalimar
Chanel No.5
Arpege
Joy
L'Air du Temps
Je Reviens

And they might have read the following books. My mother surely did. ... continue reading

"The Principles of Uncertainty" by Maira Kalman

Most Coveted Covers #167
By Karen Templer

I went to the bookstore, as I always do, looking to see what shiny new cover might catch my eye. It turns out the one book I couldn't manage to leave on its shelf was illustrator Maira Kalman's sketchbook-memoir, The Principles of Uncertainty. The only reason I've managed to not buy it before now is that I hadn't come face to face with it. I admit I rolled my eyes a little when I first heard of its existence. Then, last fall, I watched the video of her NYPL appearance and suspected I'd have to have it. Partly because I could tell, just seeing her with it, that it was somehow the perfect size and heft for a book to be. (Though the cover price kept me from seeking it out.) But as soon as I pulled it from the shelf and saw the bright green United Pickle ticket on the back cover, the "index" on the flaps, I was a goner. I think it's time for me to accept that any "mixed feelings" I have about her are actually just garden-variety jealousy. She got a lot of grief, early on, for riding her husband's coattails, but wouldn't you, given that chance? And it's not as if she's talentless. I don't know what it is exactly about her work but it's charming. It just is. I keep a short shelf of kids' books in my living room for small visitors and they're pretty much all Maira Kalman's. I always relish a chance to pull them out and read them to someone, and I'm not sure why I don't just keep them on the coffee table and flip through them whenever I want. That's certainly where you'll find this one if you ever drop by.

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—Karen Templer is the founder and editor of Readerville. Yes, she is still reading Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

Cristina Garcia, Or the Poetry of Supreme Fiction

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, May/June 2003
By Danyel Smith

Illustration by Christian Clayton

The Monkey King was made God of Victorious Strife. At the beginning of the pilgrimage a helmet had been fitted on the Monkey King's head which contracted upon his skull when he was wayward or wanton. The agony of the contractions had caused him to refrain from wickedness. When, therefore, he was given his new title, the Monkey King begged to have his helmet removed since he had now become an enlightened one. The answer that was given was that if the Monkey King was indeed enlightened, the helmet would have gone of its own accord. The Monkey King reached up to feel his head and found that the helmet had disappeared.
—Ending of one of the many versions of the Chinese legend of the Monkey King

She laughs a lot. Reads relentlessly. Plays herself down with casual, unselfconscious charm.

From her home in Santa Monica, California, a cheerful Cristina Garcia endures the hopeful awkwardness of her daughter Pilar's clarinet exercises — scales, scales and scales again. With the exact same breeziness, Garcia shares her passion for Wallace Stevens, Federico Garcia Lorca, Anne Carson and her quest for the Perfect Cuban Black Beans. In all the talk about writing and books, Garcia doesn't mention that, in addition to Monkey Hunting, her first novel in six years, Cubanisimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature was also published in April. She edited the collection. ... continue reading

Literature's Main Event

By Karen Templer

The book world is a largely eventless place, isn't it? Think about it: It takes J.T. Leroy-style shenanigans to get the book world all abuzz. For a book to make mainstream, headline news, it has to have some celebrity scandal attached. (Think O.J. Simpson or Mrs. Seinfeld.) The only thing that gets lived in anticipation of, in any broad sense, is midnight release parties for boy-wizard books. That is, unless you count the five minutes, every few months, when Oprah announces her latest pick. And you must count that — it's what amounts to a literary event in today's culture. In the US, we marvel at the notion (if we're even aware of it) that, in the UK, bookies make odds on literary awards. Can you imagine anyone betting real cash money on the National Book Award outcome? ... continue reading

Escape to Vroman's

By Shelley Silva

When I heard that Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California, had been named Bookseller of the Year by Publishers Weekly, I felt a little sad. I realized that the bookstore had fallen off my radar a long time ago. I no longer stop in when I return to Southern California, as I did for many years. I began to wonder why we'd parted ways.

In recent years, the store has gone all fancy-schmancy, trying to keep up with the rest of Old Town Pasadena, no doubt. (A place that used to be merely old.) You know the type: wooden shelves, plush carpeting, coffee bar. Every title you can think of; a plethora of genera giving way, somehow, to the merely generic.

The Vroman's I fell in love with in the 1970s wasn't pretty. It was post-war utilitarian, all clean lines and right angles, like a geometry proof. It had thick plate glass windows that looked out onto Colorado Boulevard, glary in the afternoon light. There wasn't any wainscoting. The floor was linoleum. ... continue reading

"Alcoholism" by Neil Kessel and Henry Walton

Most Coveted Covers #166
By D.G. Strong

There are two things I am a stout defender of: Helvetica and negative space. Okay, maybe there are some others (pinot noir, Gena Rowlands, Topsy-Turvy), but as a designer, these are the two about which I am stalwart. Pelican, a Penguin imprint, utilized both to an almost otherworldly degree, especially in the 1960s and '70s. (Just LOOK!). Pelican's design influence reached its apotheosis in the '70s, and Alcoholism is the acme of that particular period. I am 99% sure this is a David Pelham cover (feel free to comment in the Letters to the Editor section if you know otherwise) and it's almost preposterously perfect. Let's think about it. What would make you pick up a cover about a disease? I love that the designer chose to balance the seriousness of the title with something we've all seen (or, because I know some of you are practically Amish, at least heard about): the pink elephant in the room. I love that you see the abrupt title — Alcoholism — and then you have a long visual pause (and mental one, actually) before the elephant makes any sense. I only wish that when I first saw the pink elephant (Freshman orientation party, PGA punch, Prince's Purple Rain) there had been a strong title in the upper left-hand corner of my vision, in Helvetica Bold, offering a little bit of guidance. It really would have helped. Regardless, I think it's a pretty ageless cover; if it showed up at my local Borders (faced out, of course!) I'd definitely notice it.

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—D.G. Strong is a regular contributor to The Readerville Journal and Forum. He has no idea why you are laughing that he selected this particular book title.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

Irish Writers You Probably Haven't Heard Of, Yet

The Odd Shelf #68
By Jack Long

For such a small island, Ireland has made a disproportionate contribution to world literature, especially in the short story form. Ask anyone familiar with the genre and I'm sure they can name at least one famous story by an Irish author. But what of the present (and future) state of the Irish short story, or Irish fiction in general? Which new writers have the temerity to cut turf on a sacred bog of rich literary history containing the likes of Joyce, Wilde, Trevor and McGahern, and can show a command of the narrative form and lyrical sweep of their poetic predecessors? I'm always on the lookout for work by new and emerging Irish writers, something fresh and novel that mines new territory. Fortunately, I've not been dismayed, and in fact have been quite surprised at the quality of what I've discovered.

Picking my favorite stories from this eclectic group has been a Literary Crogah Patrick. There's such a wealth of good writing. But after much reading and pondering I've come up with this list of the best stories from five authors whose work I felt could be distinguished from the others. Although you probably haven't heard of these writers, there's a good chance you will. Rest assured, Irish writing is in grand fettle and flourishing ahead into the 21st century. ... continue reading

Pitching Books Upside-Down

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, May/June 2003
By Amanda Davis

Editor's note: It was with great sadness that Readerville received the news that one of our friends had died in a plane crash on March 14th [2003], while on tour promoting her novel Wonder When You'll Miss Me. Amanda Davis had only been posting in the Readerville Forum for about six weeks, but as anyone who knew her would tell you, her personality was larger than life, and it felt like she'd been with us all along. She found us in the nervous weeks before her novel was to be published, so most of her posts were focused on that process. As with most authors, her experience was a mixed bag of jubilation and frustration, and we were glad to experience it all with her. With the permission of her boyfriend and siblings, we thought we'd share with you some of what she shared with us.
      I didn't realize until compiling this collection how often Amanda ended her posts with an ellipsis — as if the thought was just in formative stages; she'd always have more to say; she'd always be right back ...
—Karen Templer, May 2003

Jan 26, 2003
Hi everyone. I've been lurking for a while, but the subject of pre-publicity came up and I figured it was finally time I got off my duff and joined. I have a novel coming out very soon (1st novel, 2nd book) and am full of all sorts of pre-pub anxiety, not the least of which is that I'm not doing everything I could be. After reading your discussion, I promptly bought M.J. Rose's Buzz Your Book, which I plan to read ASAP. Any other advice?

Jan 27, 2003
The novel actually spun out of the last story in my story collection, Circling the Drain. I don't have the brief synopsis thing down yet, and never feel like I'm doing it justice, but here goes: It's about a 16-year-old girl who is haunted by the ghost of her formerly fat self, commits an act of revenge and runs off with a small circus ... continue reading

Real Authors Just Inches from Your Face

By Douglas Cruickshank

Everywhere you turn, with each passing day, (as long as you don't turn away from your computer screen) there are more and more video canapés stuffed with writers and waiting to be nibbled on. Last month Authors@Google was featured here; now, thanks to Readerville contributor Susan Ito (if you haven't read her wonderful The Lost Story, stop reading this and go read that posthaste), we learn of one more website where procrastinating writers, interested readers, garden variety goof-offs and anyone else capable of clicking a mouse can wile away the minutes in the virtual company of authors. It's called BookVideos.tv.

It's a marketing tool for publishers, featuring short videos of authors talking about their books. You won't be surprised to hear that some are better than others — the videos, the authors and the books. There are a number of self-help volumes featured on the site, which I can do without; I'm not into helping myself. But there are also such treats as three minutes with the irrepressible and prolific Mary Roach talking about her new book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. Among the gems she imparts: seems there is a third place on the human body where erectile tissue is found. We know the two that get all the press. You'll have to watch the video to learn what the third is, but here's a hint: Achoo!

Another writer made for video is Alison Larkin, who talks about her new novel, The English American. Larkin, who was adopted, says of her young sons: "It's the most amazing thing to be living with genetic relatives who look like you." Also on the subject of relatives, Jeannette Walls, author of The Glass Castle, tells of coming across a street person who she then recognizes as her mother, and then we hear from her mother. In other videos, John Carter Cash discusses growing up with his parents, Johnny and June (he's written a book about his mother), and Bliss Broyard, author of One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life — A Story of Race and Family Secrets, tells of discovering that her dad was part black.

Most of the videos are two to five minutes long.

A Magazine Named RALPH

By Douglas Cruickshank

RALPH (The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities), the great and cantankerous online literary magazine, has been around since 1994. RALPH's precursor was The Fessenden Review ("The Noisiest Book Review in the Known World"), an equally cranky print magazine that I was involved with from 1985 to 1990. I've been feathering my own nest since then, so I've had little to do with RALPH other than enjoying it for fourteen years. Primarily a book review, RALPH also features essays, poetry and an eclectic selection of excerpts.

A one-page history that describes the intertwining lives of The Fessenden Review and RALPH, explains the Web site's upchuckable acronym: "We are especially taken with this nickname — a fine, tacky phrase out of the '50s. To ralph means, in medical terminology, to toss one's cookies. If we were to say that the magazine should have its readers doing just that, it might be self-serving, if not inaccurate. But we like the hint of vulgarity being brought to the otherwise sententious world of publishing, letters, poetry, literature, literary arts and artistic reviews."

At its best, which it often is, RALPH is brilliant, trenchant, very funny and occasionally heartbreaking. The criticism often cuts with samurai precision and merciless insight, and it can be both infuriating and enlightening, sometimes simultaneously. At the moment, the site is featuring a sampler drawn from its first years: "All-Time Hits from the Early Days ... 21 funny, interesting or groundbreaking reviews, essays, poems and letters to remind our readers (and ourselves) of the original ways of our infant magazine." There couldn't be a better way to start getting acquainted with RALPH.

Talk about it: Literary Periodicals

—Douglas Cruickshank is about to read Carlos Amantea's essay In Praise of the One-Holer in RALPH

"Never Drank the Kool-Aid" by Touré

Most Coveted Covers #165
By Karen Templer

Almost exactly a year ago, I sang the praises of Philip Earl Pascuzzo's graffiti-style photo-illustration for the paperback edition of The Messiah of Morris Avenue. While I like that cover quite a lot, it was remarkable mostly for not being the awful dustjacket design that preceded it. But now Pascuzzo has done himself one better, while mining the same territory. This time the book is Never Drank the Kool-Aid, a collection of essays by one-named journalist Touré that were originally published in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and other publications. Never one to stop at a good stock photo and some tasteful type, Pascuzzo has in this case taken a David Stuart photo of a guy in a suit, hand over mouth (the author? who knows), and obscured most of his head with some gestural patches of paint, upon which he's then placed the typography and a few graphic doodads. The end result is a little bit street, as if the book itself has been tagged, and a little bit kooky. I'd like it better without the arrow under the hand-lettered name, but that much also appears on the Pascuzzo-designed cover of Soul City, Touré's novel, so maybe it's really his signature. As it turns out, the author has been quite lucky with covers and illustrators. His story collection, The Portable Promised Land, has a cover by one of the immensely talented Clayton brothers.

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—Karen Templer is the founder and editor of Readerville. Her current before-sleep read is Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

I Can Name That Blowhard in Three ... No, Two Phrases: You and the Media Personalities

Excerpted from So You Want to Be President?
by John Warner

The Punditocracy. No, it's not the latest cool-kid band out of Brooklyn; it's the name for the collection of talking heads (again, not the band) that clutter our various media outlets. They frequently come in the form of newspaper or magazine opinion columnists (George Will, David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Joe Klein) who spend their Sundays not in church, but sitting around a table with Tim Russert or George Stephanopoulos.

We also have the political "media personalities." Media personalities tend to be hosts of their own often eponymous television shows. They and the pundits are close cousins, species with many similarities but several key differences — kind of like chimpanzees and orangutans, or Hanson and the Osmonds. ... continue reading

Not Another Literary Scandal

Weekend Special | From the Forum
By Tramp Louie

Joshua Ferris won, and was then almost immediately stripped of, the 2008 PEN/Hemingway Award after revelations that broke only minutes later that the novel was actually a memoir.

In Then We Came to the End, a critically acclaimed novel published last year, Ferris wrote about the eccentic and often paranoid life of designers and copywriters in a failing ad agency, brilliantly conveying the collective fear, pettiness, stupidity and yet also the compassion of office drones as anxiety rises to a fever pitch in the American dot-com workplace.

The problem is that all of it is true. ... continue reading

My Back Pages

By Michael Milburn

Illustration by D.G. Strong

"Read slowly and mull."
—Samuel Pickering

A remedial reading class may be the last place one would expect to find a Harvard freshman, but that's where I was ordered to appear after failing a proficiency test required of all new students. This wasn't supposed to happen. Though I had always been a terrible test taker, English was my strongest subject. My A's in high school literature classes had offset my C's in math and science, and, along with a family legacy, had smoothed my way into Harvard in 1975. Besides, I liked reading, and completed more challenging books in my free time than most of my classmates bothered to open for their courses.

Still, my performance on the test, which measured both speed and comprehension, shouldn't have surprised me. I'm a frustratingly sluggish reader and thinker. Not stupid, just slow to absorb information. Abraham Lincoln once likened his mind to a piece of steel: A great deal of time and effort was required to scratch anything onto it, but once information was there, it was there forever. I like to think that this is true of me, though the stuff that achieves permanence on my piece of steel usually strikes me as trivial: memory fragments, song lyrics, sports statistics, details of celebrities' lives. This tendency to retain the chaff rather than the wheat from what I read turned out to be the worst kind of handicap to bring to Harvard. ... continue reading

BibliOdyssey's Curator on the Copyright Conundrum

Over at BibliOdyssey, the visually extravagant blog that was celebrated here in TRJ late last month, there's suddenly a lot of text — written by the site's curator, Paul. Fortunately, it's a quite interesting (to those of us interested in such things) disquisition on the nuts and bolts of the copyright issues he deals with when posting material to the site, and how those same issues were dealt with when putting together the recently published book, BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet.

As Paul points out in his article, Permission Unpossible I (it's publishing in two installments), most of the images he posts are old enough that copyright is not a concern. As for those that are still under copyright, he believes, "however misguided or contestable in an ethical or legal sense, the majority of entries appearing on this weblog operate on the assumption that by being thorough about identifying and linking to the source material, I am satisfying all, or close to all, concerns of the artist, digital image host, book and copyright owner or their agent(s).... And if there is one overriding truth or ethos that has been born out by the production of the BibliOdyssey book, it's that if you are careful and consistent with naming and linking to the source material online, then libraries, galleries and other repositories will, more often than not, respond favourably when you come knocking on their doors seeking permission to use their images out in the real world. In sport, it’s otherwise known as fair play."

You may agree or disagree with Paul's approach and assumptions. In any case, it's a conundrum that has popped up repeatedly — and will continue to pop up — as the digital and print worlds intersect and cross-pollinate. His detailed assessment of the situation, and the admittedly unusual issues he and the book's publisher had to consider, is worth a look.

Wipe That Smile off Your Face

By Douglas Cruickshank

Stop Smiling makes me smile. It also made me pick it up the first time I saw it. When I spotted its tagline — "The magazine for high-minded lowlifes" — it was true love at the newsstand. Next it became one of the few periodicals I subscribe to. Today, we're married.

Stop Smiling is a thick, perfect-bound, handsomely produced print magazine with a lively website. It's published eight times a year and the site is refreshed regularly with online-only articles, such as book reviews, a media blog and various worthwhile ephemera. The magazine's preoccupations are art and culture — music, movies, publishing. But it's not what Stop Smiling does, it's how well it does it that makes it an exceptional publication. It always features numerous interviews, but calling them interviews is misleading. Reading them is like sitting in on a smart, spirited conversation in which you get far more involved than you think you will. I might believe, say, that I'm not going to read an interview with Jay Z, who, frankly, I'm not that interested in, but I not only read it with fascination, I go back and reread it a day or two later.

Each issue is carefully focused and yet it has just enough quirkiness to make it feel handcrafted and to keep the reader off balance. The current number (34), for example, is a celebration and examination of jazz, including interviews with Ornette Coleman and Ron Carter (of course he played with Miles, but who knew he also recorded with A Tribe Called Quest — once they promised him there would be no swearing?), an article on Tommy Dorsey, and another on Louis Armstrong in Los Angeles, a fine, short rumination on Sun Ra and Moondog ("Costuming the Super Anti-Hero"), and then suddenly — hey, where did this come from? — a conversation with actor Seymour Cassel and producer Al Ruban, talking about the righteous, ragged, early days making low budget movies in the streets of New York with John Cassavetes — the hardest, softest, rawest, most challenging independent American filmmaker of the 20th century.

Stop Smiling's lush blend of content is invariably rich and surprising. What more could one ask for in a marriage ... or a magazine?

Talk about it: The Magazine Stand

—Douglas Cruickshank is the features editor of The Readerville Journal. He agrees with Patricia Barber who, in the current issue of Stop Smiling writes, "Nina Simone is the voice of America: proud, revolutionary, muscular, ecstatic, fun-loving, inventive, lost, angry, and found."

An Entitled Conversation

By Tramp Louie

Have you noticed how many fiction titles are complete sentences lately?

No, I can't say that I have.

Subject, verb and predicate. And on top of that, the titles often seem to be having a dialogue. That is to say, a conversation, amongst themselves. Telling a story, so to speak, with a narrative arc and a central consciousness, in which the titles may not even be cognizant or willing interlocutors.

Sounds eerie.

It is.

You're going to have to give me some examples.

I been in sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots.

That's a real book?

Susan Straight.

Good grief.

Lolly Winston.

Wait a minute. That's not a complete sentence. ... continue reading

"Flair" edited by Fleur Cowles

Most Coveted Covers #164
By D.G. Strong

For one year — twelve glorious months, from February 1950 through January 1951 — there existed in the magazine world something so extraordinary and unlikely that it couldn't possibly have lasted one moment longer: editor Fleur Cowles' insanely influential arts, travel and culture magazine Flair. Each issue was focused (loosely) on a particular subject — Paris, Spring, Men, Spain etc. — and each one went back to the drawing board when it came time to design. Full of tip-ins and fold-outs and die cuts — some on contrasting, oniony paper stock — it's a near-miracle that copies have survived for almost sixty years. The contributing luminaries were cut from a wide swath of cloth: Tennessee Williams, Dawn Powell, Cecil Beaton, Lucien Freud, Gypsy Rose Lee, the Duchess of Windsor, Salvador Dali, Jean Cocteau, Margaret Mead, Talullah Bankhead. (I wish I could say "countless others," but with just the dozen issues, it's pretty easy to count them all.) One constant is that each cover featured a peek-a-boo cutout, revealing something on the page underneath. And each one was so expensive to produce that even at the cost of fifty 1950 cents, the financial future of the magazine was pretty clear early on. It's an amazing periodical to peruse; it's still fresh-off-the-press modern, every little gimmick thoughtful and innovative and somehow necessary. It's the Visionaire of its time. (And cheaper to collect!) There's a modern reprint of some of the highlights, The Best of Flair, but it's probably less expensive to just eBay all the original issues. That's what I did, anyway.

Talk about it: Judging a Book

—D.G. Strong is a regular contributor to The Readerville Journal and Forum. He is currently at the beach reading Joan Crawford: The Essential Biography. For some reason.

[To view the Most Coveted Covers 2001-2007 click here.]

Tolstoy's Tale of Two Marriages

Flashback | The Readerville Journal, November/December 2002
By Kate Moses

One 1970s summer Saturday when my brothers and I had been rounded up from in front of the television and grimly conducted to the garage of our childhood home, my mother paused in the midst of what seemed to us a familiar tearful tirade about chronic cleaning issues, ungrateful children and subsequent maternal escape fantasies. ("You never ... you always ... I wish I could just leave!") As I said, she paused to stand disheartened amidst the repository of banal suburban squalor that was our garage, we children guiltily shuffling, fingering the handlebar fringe on our dusty bicycles, glancing at the covers of heaped-up National Geographics and tuning her out. Our father must have been at his office; he was forever at his office. Only our mother's uncharacteristic pause caught my attention, her genuinely pained sigh — the sound of having your breath knocked out of you — and I saw her staring up at a queue of forgotten books shelved on the wall above the freezer and the cabinet, where we kept rock salt and tire chains. "Oh," she gasped to herself, her hair sweaty under a red bandana. She was looking at the title on the faded spine of a copy of Anna Karenina. ... continue reading