escapegrace

Hot Gospel: The Literary Life of Aimee Semple McPherson

2011-05-18T10:17:00.001-07:00

Sister Aimee and her Angelus Temple have come to epitomize the chicanery that marked L.A. religion 1920s-style. In her heyday, McPherson held multiple services daily delivered to thousands of parishioners, complete with an illustrated sermon/spectacle on Sundays, in one of the most vibrant businesses in Los Angeles at the time. In some ways, Sister Aimee has become the anecdotes that survive her. In the early days of the automobile, Charles H. Lippy describes how McPherson “purchased a car that she dubbed the ‘Gospel Auto’ and drove from town to town on her evangelistic rounds” (178). Other accounts have McPherson riding into a chapel on a motorbike, proclaiming a sermon on the futility of seeing salvation as a one-way street.

When McPherson was accused of faking her own kidnapping in 1926 to run away with an employee in her radio station, she was caught up in the histrionics of newspaper headlines and the Los Angeles court system, and she virtually never emerged until her death in 1944. McPherson captured the popular imagination with her eccentric approach to traditional religious worship, and while we shall see her actual biography is much more complex than widespread opinion dictates, she came to represent the power and calamity of religion that strays from convention.

McPherson effectively practiced a mainstream religion – Protestant Christianity – but her choice to practice outside of the tenets of her more traditional brethren, her sensational approach to observance, and her reputation as an embodiment of the liberties Los Angeles took with religious custom all contribute to her importance in a discussion of the city’s alternative religions. Raised as a soldier for The Salvation Army in Canada, Aimee Kennedy embraced Pentecostalism upon her marriage to handsome young evangelist Robert Semple.

Founded by Charles Parkham in 1901, modern Pentecostalism was based on the belief that “all Christians should have an empowering religious experience…called the baptism with the Holy Spirit” (Blumhofer, 69). Evangelism was employed to reach as many Christians as possible, and their empowerment could take the form of the “four major charismata, or gifts of the spirit, as defined by the Pentecostalists: glossolalia (speaking in tongues), prophecy, interpretation of tongues – and the power of healing” (Epstein, 57). Pentecostalism itself was an alternative version of Christianity, and while McPherson can be placed within the American revival tradition, she did not fit neatly or permanently into any denomination.

Denominational loyalties were lightly held in those days, especially in Holiness and pentecostal circles. It comes as no surprise, then that while Aimee had credentials with the AG [Assemblies of God], because of her popularity she was granted credentials by others even when she did not seek them herself. In December 1920, for instance, she received membership in the Philadelphia-based C.C. Hancock Memorial Church of the Methodist Episcopal Church….on March 27, 1922, she was ordained by the First Baptist Church in San Jose, again at their encouragement (Burgess, 857).

Essentially, McPherson did not truly “belong” to any denomination until she founded her own church within the Angelus Temple, The International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. Here, she was able to concentrate her energies, those not drained by court appearances and financial infighting, on the very specific sect of Sister Aimee. “’The power of McPhersonism resides in the personality of Mrs. McPherson,’ one observer commented in 1928. ‘The woman is everything, the evangel nothing.’” (Blumhofer, 385). The cult of personality was very much at play here, and the performative nature of her sermons drew in thousands of parishioners, distinguishing McPherson from her fellow preachers.

After an initial evangelical journey to Asia following her marriage to Robert Semple in 1908 (the site of Semple’s premature death in 1910, one month before the birth of their daughter Roberta), Sister Aimee began traveling throughout the U.S. and Canada, conducting religious revivals wherever people would have her. Eventually expanding her scope to Europe and Australia as well, McPherson spent the years from 1911 through 1923 (the year she set up shop in the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles) on constant tour, becoming known throughout the world for her healing powers. Tens of thousands of sick and disabled visitors to her tents claim to have been cured under the hands of the evangelist. Once she settled down at the Angelus Temple, McPherson was trying to focus more intently on conversion rather than healing, and to do so, she employed every theatrical trick in her repertoire.

In addition to relentless proselytizing, publishing, radio broadcasts, social services, and lectures at the Angelus Temple’s L.I.F.E. Bible College, McPherson also put on one of the most regularly attended dramatic performances in the city each Sunday. In 1927, Sarah Comstock of Harper’s Monthly referred to it as “the most perennially successful show in the United States” (cited in Blumhofer, 260). The “illustrated sermons” would use fairy tales, popular movies, biblical tales, and various other scenarios, change the text to send a spiritual message, transform the temple stage into a detailed set depicting the narrative, and find Sister Aimee dressed up in the costume of L’il Bo Peep one day, the Virgin Mary the next. Starlets like Mary Pickford, Clara Bow, and Jean Harlow would attend the sermons and study McPherson’s techniques. Whether the location of the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles was an intended correlation or a fortunate coincidence, there was a powerful connection between the Foursquare Gospel and the silver screen:

Her years on the tent-show circuit had taught her that a religious service is sacred drama, a species of nonfictional theater, pure and simple. The problem with denominational churches, said Aimee, was that they had given in to their profane competitors – vaudeville, movies, and “legitimate theater” – and thereby had lost the attention of their congregations, who took their excitement wherever they could find it (Epstein, 252).

McPherson’s approach to marketing was unusual in 1920s America, but perhaps not quite as unusual in 1920s Los Angeles. However, her immense popularity thrust her into a spotlight, under which her unorthodox methods were judged and satirized, especially after her alleged kidnapping. As we shall see, she captured the imagination of many literary figures of the time who used her in their explorations of Los Angeles and alternative religion.

Headlines & Hokum: Aimee Semple McPherson’s Attractions and Detractors

James Malloy, the main character of John O’Hara’s 1938 novel Hope of Heaven, is working in his studio office as the story begins, but he is fired by page seven. The rest of the novel involves Malloy’s pursuit of a woman whose estranged father has returned to town with deadly results. Malloy’s romantic rival, Herbert, describes the local impulse to start writing fiction about the city that no longer deals with the film industry: he is writing a book “about Los Angeles, present-day Los Angeles. The Angelus temple. This fellow that killed his wife with the box of rattlesnakes. The neon signs. The health people. No movie stuff. I’m going to ignore the movies” (52). O’Hara doesn’t exactly follow this prescription, but he does pick up on an important move away from the isolated setting of the studios into the streets of Hollywood.

When Los Angeles writers (and writers visiting Los Angeles) turned from the topic of the movies to cultural events in the city at large, the topic that garnered the most attention was the young female evangelist, Aimee Semple McPherson. In fact, she was often the reason that writers like H.L. Mencken were visiting the city in order to report back to their Eastern periodicals about the latest Hollywood scandal, made more culturally relevant by McPherson’s occupation. She was not a mere starlet in trouble, but a religious and commercial force.

By the time McPherson began to appear in the city’s literature, her reputation had already been irreparably damaged by the kidnapping incident and subsequent trial for corruption of morals and obstruction of justice. In novels such as Don Ryan’s Angel’s Flight (1927), Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1927), Myron Brinig’s The Flutter of an Eyelid (1933), and Eric Knight’s You Play the Black and the Red Turns Up (1935), Sister Aimee appears in various guises, but in each, she is thoroughly identifiable, even when dressed up in drag, as in Sinclair’s novel.

In 1926, H.L. Mencken traveled to Los Angeles for the purpose of writing an article on Aimee Semple McPherson for the Baltimore Evening Sun. McPherson’s trial was underway, but she was still delivering sermons at the Angelus Temple. As Mencken observed, “the whisper had gone around that Aimee was heated up by the effort to jail her, and would give a gaudy show” (128). Mencken is disappointed in what he finds and describes it as “an orthodox Methodist revival, with a few trimmings borrowed from the Baptists and the Holy Rollers” (128). The only thing that separates McPherson from other evangelists, in Mencken’s view, is her wealth, but he does not credit the showmanship and allure that has led to these riches. He gives the Evening Sun readers a glimpse into the set-up of the Angelus Temple and the outlines of McPherson’s sermon, but most of his article is focused on his impression of the evangelist as “the madame of a fancy-house on a busy Saturday night” (cited in Ulin, 65).

Mencken goes on to ascribe Sister Aimee’s eminence to the fact that “there were more morons collected in Los Angeles than in any other place on earth,” hardly a profound analysis of America’s most popular religious figure at the time (130). Mencken pigeonholes Iowans as stereotypical of those most susceptible to McPherson’s charms: “The Iowans longed for something they could get their teeth into. They wanted magic and noise. They wanted an excuse to whoop” (130). However, Mencken doesn’t explore what it might be about this particular California phenomenon that draws the average American in droves. He wraps up the article by saying he placed a bet on the outcome of McPherson’s trial. “It will be a hard job, indeed, to find twelve men and true to send her to the hoosegow. Unless I err grievously, God is with her” (131).

Mencken exhibits the common dismissive attitude found in many of his Eastern intellectual contemporaries. In his 1933 essay “Paradise,” Annapolis-born James M. Cain derides the sound of McPherson’s voice within his argument that “good English” is the authentic dialect of Southern California. He blames Sister Aimee’s “dreadful twang” on the fact she comes from Canada (cited in Ulin, 108). He also observes that “[the] whole place is overrun with nutty religions, which are merely the effort of these people to inject some sort of point into their lives; if not on earth, then in the stars, in numbers, in vibrations, or whatever their fancy hits on….[They] are more like pastimes than the religions you are probably accustomed to” (cited in Ulin, 122). Cain claims that the religious pastimes provide a relief from boredom and are easily interchangeable. While Sister Aimee may take up columns in the newspaper, he personally has never met anyone who’s seen her.

However, not all journalists at the time were as flippant in their coverage of Sister Aimee. In his 1931 essay “The City of Our Lady The Queen of Angels,” Edmund Wilson focuses his indignation on McPherson’s mortal enemy, the Reverend Bob Shuler, and his corrupt involvement with the local government. Before delving into this story, Wilson devotes a few words to McPherson’s radio personality, an aspect of her evangelism that also interested Mencken.

In a section on Los Angeles’s “gorgeous business cathedrals,” Wilson writes, “And there is Aimee Semple McPherson’s wonderful temple, where good-natured but thrilling native angels guard the big red radio-tower love-wand and see to it that not a tittle or vibration of their mistress’s kind warm voice goes astray as it speeds to you in your sitting-room and tells you how sweet Jesus has been to her and all the marvelous things she has found in Him” (379).

He compares another of Shuler’s rivals (and former right-hand man), Dr. Gustav A. Briegleb, a less appealing and more staid evangelist, to McPherson and her magnetism: “[She] enchants her enormous audience by her beaming inexhaustible sunshine and her friendly erotic voice. She writes them operas in which ancient oratorios and modern Italian opera are mingled with popular songs and tunes from musical comedies….They adore her and hand her their money. They feel good about their neighbor and themselves” (395-6). In Wilson’s view, there is something redemptive about McPherson’s ministry.

California historian Carey McWilliams examined the plight of Sister Aimee in 1946, two years after her death from an overdose of sleeping pills. “[Not] so much a woman as a scintillant assault,” McPherson arrived in Los Angeles as a single mother with two children, $100 in cash, and the infamous “gospel auto” in 1922 (Brinig, 73 as quoted in Fool’s Paradise, 31). Within three years, she had accumulated more than $1 million and, especially impressive for a woman, she owned $250,000 worth of property. While McWilliams acknowledges that McPherson never recovered from the kidnapping incident and her subsequent return, which garnered 95,000 words of media copy in a single day, he does believe she delivered a positive service to her congregants:

Although I heard her speak many times, I never heard her attack any individual or any group, and I am thoroughly convinced that her followers felt that they had received full value in exchange for their liberal donations. She made migrants feel at home in Los Angeles; she gave them a chance to meet other people; and she exorcised the nameless fears which so many of them had acquired from the fire-and-brimstone theology of the Middle West (33).

McWilliams felt that the fact McPherson was able to recover at all from the kidnapping kerfuffle infuriated the middle-class residents of Los Angeles. The resilience of the evangelist in the face of such scandal may also have irritated those who sought to see her as a caricature of the typical charlatan.

Aimee Semple McPherson: A Reconsideration

As the four novels discussed illustrate [not excerpted here], Aimee Semple McPherson was a literary touchstone for contemporary writers attracted to the scandals surrounding the evangelist. Due to her presence in the media and in literature, McPherson’s legacy is rife with details of indignity and sensationalism. However, the image that exists in the popular imagination is not the full story of the evangelist’s life. In fact, McPherson’s contributions to the role of women in American culture are quite substantial and commonly overlooked. Emphasis on the more salacious elements of her history clouds her accomplishments – a state of affairs that may have much to do with her gender.

Let’s take a look at some facts, remembering that women did not even receive the right to vote in the U.S. until 1920 and many did not work outside the home until World War II. The features of McPherson’s life discussed below have been collected from three primary biographies of Aimee Semple McPherson (listed in order of frequency of use): Daniel Mark Epstein’s Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson (1993), Edith L. Blumhofer’s Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister (1993), and Lately Thomas’s Storming Heaven: The Lives and Turmoils of Minnie Kennedy and Aimee Semple McPherson (1970). Thomas’s biography, a sequel to an earlier volume dedicated to the kidnapping affair, was the most thorough discussion of the evangelist until the dual publications in 1993, not counting posthumous publications by McPherson herself. The details below begin to provide a glimpse into how much more there was to the evangelist beyond the grandstanding and criminal trials.

Aimee Semple McPherson is credited with an impressive number of firsts. She is thought to be the first woman to cross America in an automobile without a man’s help. She was the first woman to lead a religious service in London’s Royal Albert Hall, the first woman to preach a sermon over the “wireless telephone,” and the first woman to receive a commercial license from the FCC. She founded the first religious broadcasting station, KFSG (Kall Foursquare Gospel), preaching to hundreds of thousands of people daily. McPherson was the first evangelist to bring revivalism into large-scale commercial stadiums, and Daniel Mark Epstein claims, “No one has ever been credited by secular witnesses with anywhere near the number of healings attributed to Sister Aimee from 1919 to 1922” (185). She preached in more than 100 cities and towns from 1917 to 1923 and later alleged that she gave more sermons than any preacher who ever lived. The evangelist was even made an honorary colonel by the U.S. Army.

When McPherson began her religious career, female evangelists were rare and not necessarily welcomed by parishioners. She was fortunate in that she was raised within the Salvation Army community, an organization that was made up of a majority of female soldiers. Edith L. Blumhofer writes, “The prominence of women in the corps – as well as visits of female evangelists to local Methodist churches – accustomed the child [young Aimee] to the notion that in the normal course of things women preached, taught, testified, and sang” (48). However, in Canada – where McPherson was born – and elsewhere, the women of the Salvation Army were subject to sexual assault and prison sentences for disturbing the peace. So while the young evangelist may have had models of women in religious service, she also witnessed their persecution firsthand. This did not deter her, and she went on to provide a precedent for the female religious leaders that followed her.

As Lately Thomas described (with slight exaggeration), McPherson arrived in Los Angeles “with ten dollars and a tambourine,” only to build one of the most powerful organizations in the city within four years (20). As the evangelist herself asked, “Who ever heard of a woman without earthly backing…undertaking the raising of funds and the erection of such a building?” (quoted in Epstein, 203). Sister Aimee delivered 20 or more services a week (in addition to her KFSG broadcasts), and rarely repeated a sermon, while simultaneously writing books and photoplays. She composed three lengthy memoirs – This Is That (1919), In the Service of the King (1927), and the posthumously published The Story of My Life (1951) – as well as Give Me My Own God (1936), a text chronicling the universal subjection of women she witnessed during her world travels. Her first memoir was self-published by The Echo Park Evangelistic Association. Carey McWilliams noted, “Mrs. McPherson founded a magazine The Bridal Call, and established two hundred and forty ‘lighthouses,’ or local churches, affiliated with Angelus Temple.

By 1929, McPherson had a following of twelve thousand devoted members in Los Angeles and thirty thousand in the outlying communities” (Fool’s Paradise, 32). A corps of volunteers prayed round the clock in the Prayer Tower in two-hour shifts, surrounded by telephones and taking requests for prayer recipients. The Angelus Temple’s commissary became the greatest welfare agency in Los Angeles during the Depression, providing services as varied as feeding the poor and helping pregnant runaways. Actor Anthony Quinn credited McPherson with keeping the city’s Mexican community alive for five years. In fact, the church’s “defiance of racial barriers and social class is one of the most remarkable features of Sister Aimee’s early ministry” (Epstein, 128).

McPherson believed Los Angeles would be the perfect home for her ministry, and one cannot argue she found great success – despite the scandal – in her adopted city. As we’ve seen, Los Angeles was an ideal locale for a burgeoning religious interest. In 1924 alone, 62 new churches opened, not counting missions and independent congregations (Blumhofer, 240). The epigraph for McPherson’s chapter in This Is That on traveling to Los Angeles for the first time reads: “Shout: for the Lord hath given you the city. Jos. 6:16” (160). She used this text as the basis for her first sermon in Los Angeles. Blumhofer discusses the connection between McPherson’s accomplishments and her choice for the Angelus Temple location:

The thousands of new arrivals in need of religious institutions made the state a laboratory for evangelism….Southern California in the early decades of the twentieth century (as now) was at once a land of promise and a place that threatened traditional morality. Technological and media revolutions seemed to open limitless opportunities in Hollywood in the 1920s for those with the courage to follow their dreams….As a female evangelistic celebrity, she ably blended nostalgia for the past with the taste of the masses for the modern” (137, 387).

Los Angeles was revealed to be a perfect setting for the rise and subsequent fall of the Canadian evangelist. Unfortunately for Sister Aimee, the masses have as strong a taste for the maudlin as they do for the modern. As we’ve seen in the contemporary novels, sex and scandal sell in ways the groundbreaking cultural accomplishments of one woman will not. McPherson’s notoriety may have as much to do with the public’s discomfort toward a single woman who has accumulated a great deal of power as they do with any actual dishonor. Despite the sensational rumors that are attached to the legacy of Aimee Semple McPherson, it would be unjust to not also recognize her triumphs.

52 books in 52 weeks

2010-12-31T16:32:00.138-08:00

22. The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas

I don't know the name for this genre - suburban realism? a la Tom Perrotta? - but I always enjoy it a great deal. The fact The Slap took place in Australia and was read shortly after I returned did not hurt either. The novel of linked stories hinges on a BBQ where one man slaps another man's child. So simple, yet the perfect catalyst to reveal the characters' petty prejudices, selfish motives, and human limitations.

23. If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood, War, and Bluegrass by Ralph Berrier, Jr.

I reviewed this book for the LA Times on October 10, 2010.

24. If You're Not Yet Like Me by Edan Lepucki

This novella is a gem - sharp and sparkling - and I'm not just saying that because Edan's a friend. I first heard an excerpt at the book release party, and the voice of the narrator was totally compelling. Funny as shit and perversely intriguing in her self-involvement. When I read the rest of the book, I was impressed by Edan's ability to sustain the pitch and stay true to the character.

25. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

I got lucky at the end of the year, and I read a bunch of awesome books by women in a row. A Visit from the Goon Squad is probably my favorite book of the year. Each linked story is so rich in its own right, with details so unique and bizarre but also so plausible, and the characters are drawn so fully I still think about them regularly. Jennifer Egan wins again. Brava.

26. Room by Emma Donoghue

Where Goon Squad was remarkable for its characterization and detailed mini-plots, Room was a model for distinctive voice and style. The story is told by a young boy (age 5) who has been held captive with his mother in some suburban shed since birth. All he knows is Room. At first, it's a bit hard to accept he'd be so intelligent and cognizant and basically healthy, but the suspension of disbelief is worth it. Donoghue eerily captures what it would be like to only know such a small world and then...

27. The Best American Short Stories 2010 edited by Richard Russo

It appears that Richard Russo and I have similar taste in short stories. While I didn't love every story, there wasn't one whose inclusion I questioned. And then there were stories I loved, especially Brendan Mathews's "My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer." I can't explain why - uncanny images, emotional turns of phrase, pacing - but I haven't been so creatively turned on by a story in a while.

28. Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky

In the library version I read of Bad Marie, Marcy Dermansky writes that she wanted the book to be like a French film. Aside from the fact it took place in France, that hadn't occurred to me while reading, but it makes perfect sense. The story is decadent, surreal, uncomfortable, detached, and immersive. Marie and Caitlin somehow keep surviving and ending up in the bath, and that is life affirming in its own way.

sunday short stack

2010-12-26T11:27:00.026-08:00

"There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it."
- George Bernard Shaw

The 2011 Tournament of Books long list
50 Wonderful Things from 2010
A cornucopia of Roger Ebert's snarkiest reviews
Why life begins at 46
The Guardian Review literary quiz
Music for Rants 50 Songs of 2010 for streaming or download
Paste Magazine's 50 Best Songs and 20 Best Cover Songs of 2010

thanksgiving video mix

2010-11-24T20:48:00.008-08:00

Not too long ago, someone asked me to make a mix of 20 of my favorite songs. In no particular order, here they are. Happy Thanksgiving!

The White Stripes - Effect & Cause [Live]

Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings - Let Them Knock [Live]

Neko Case - Furnace Room Lullaby [Official Video]

Heavy Trash - Bumble Bee [Live]

Donnie Iris - Ah! Leah [OMG Official Video]

Devotchka - Such a Lovely Thing [Live]

Raphael Saadiq - 100 Yard Dash [Official Video]

The Magnetic Fields - I Wish I Had an Evil Twin

Mike Doughty - Nectarine (Part 2) [Live]

Jeff Buckley - Everybody Here Wants You [Official Video]

Johnny Cash - The Gambler (Kenny Rogers Cover)

Liz Phair - Divorce Song [Live]

M. Ward - Magic Trick

Lucinda Williams - Righteously [Live]

Herman Dune - I Wish That I Could See You Soon [Official Video]

Etta James - You Can Leave Your Hat On

Eels - Hey Man (Now You're Really Living)

The Geraldine Fibbers - Jolene (Dolly Parton Cover)

Cousteau - Last Good Day of the Year [Official Video]

Money Mark - Color of Your Blues [Live]

Gogol Bordello - Start Wearing Purple [Official Video]

Cake - Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps

The Hives - Love in Plaster

Daniel Merriweather - Chainsaw

Tom Waits - Little Trip to Heaven

52 books in 52 weeks

2010-09-25T21:01:00.005-07:00

14. Bluets by Maggie Nelson

I love what Maggie Nelson is doing with prose. Bluets doesn't have the macabre power of Jane: A Murder, but it is a beautiful and moving exploration of her relationship to the color blue. The one thing I don't like about the combination of poetry/memoir/aphorism Nelson practices is that I want to bite her style.

15. True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

It's unfortunate that I started here in the Carey canon, because I really could not get into this book. I picked it up as part of an Australian literature immersion around my trip to Adelaide, etc. this summer, and I was not engaged. Ned Kelly is certainly a memorable bushranger, but there was nothing for me to grab on to as a twenty-first century woman living (for now) in Los Angeles.

16. It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want to Be by Paul Arden

I bought this book on a whim at the National Gallery of Victoria. The graphic design grabs you, and then Arden - a British advertising guru - gives you small nuggets of wisdom he acquired on his rise to the top. I read it in one sitting and felt energized, but not for that long.

17. Mission to America by Walter Kirn

My introduction to Kirn's work was his appearance at the Central Library for Lost in the Meritocracy. If you were there, you know the excerpt he read was memorable. (Teaser: there is college humiliation and piano destruction.) So I started this book, which had been on my shelf awhile. Mission to America is enjoyable as a subtle parody of the current state of American spirituality and lack thereof.

18. Dream Stuff: Stories by David Malouf

Unlike Carey's novel, Malouf's short stories gave me a smorgasbord of Australia. I was able to have a quick taste of urban Australia, rural, mid-century, contemporary, adult, child, dark, lyrical...I am very much looking forward to reading more of Malouf, and if you haven't checked him out, it's worth it.

19. Ilustrado by Miguel Sycedo

There are elements of Sycedo's rich, far-reaching novel of the Philippines and the writer's life that are derivative, but he chooses his influences well: Bolaño, Vonnegut, Pynchon...Ilustrado won the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2008, and as a first novel, it's very impressive. There are moments that call out for pruning, but for the most part, it's quite well done.

20. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

If you know anything about me, you know I adore David Mitchell, so I was half heartbroken when I started reading this new novel. I wanted another Cloud Atlas, and this epic history of an eighteenth-century Dutch-inhabited island-ette off the coast of Japan is not very similar at all. But once I got over myself and started reading this novel on its own merits, I longed to escape to Dejima every night before I slept.

21. Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shtyengart

I'm looking forward to reading more Shtyengart. While this novel started to lose me when New York descended into chaos, I was very impressed by his ventriloquism. Both main characters speak - or actually write - in very distinct styles and voices, and I never doubted their authenticity. I'd love to see what Shtyengart could do with characters I really cared about. His portrait of the dystopian near future made me feel ickily anxious.

sunday short stack

2010-09-19T12:16:00.004-07:00

"The penalty for success is to be bored by the people who used to snub you." - Nancy Astor

I would have been in serious trouble if I was required to dance my Ph.D.
5 Great Performance Art Hoaxers
If you're one of the few who still hasn't checked out Arcade Fire's "The Wilderness Downtown," the time is now.
Kiss Off! 28 Gleeful Breakup Songs (Weeks later, Cee-Lo still compels me to jump up and dance.)
No relation to the previous bullet...Ten of the Bloodiest Bedtime Stories.
The Pocket Notebooks of 20 Famous Men
Arthur reprints a 1975 William Burroughs article on Led Zeppelin.
The Battery Park City Library has an excellent Mad Men Reading List.
Tracy Chevalier seems to be suffering some kind of dandruff-related neck pain. Either that or she is one-half of a Siamese twin combo connected at the shoulder.

mid-century los angeles

2010-09-18T14:30:00.002-07:00

Check out more Echo Park/Silverlake photos from Paul Furlong's collection.

Check out more Bunker Hill photos from George Mann.

sunday short stack

2010-08-29T11:24:00.005-07:00

"Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it." - Mark Twain

I don't know why, but I really want to see The Last Exorcism. Here, i09 offers some infamous cases of real life possessions.
Beautiful: 40 Vintage Magazine Covers
20 Authors Who Died Under 40
Paste's 50 Best Albums of the Decade
Subtitle-O-Matic
I always thought ballet was sort of sinister: the trailer for Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan
Top 10 Forgotten Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novels
When book recommendations go wrong...
And also from The Guardian, a weird words quiz
17 Literary Journals That Might Survive the Internet

the way you play your game ain't fair

2010-08-24T21:25:00.010-07:00

et ce n'est pas fini!

2010-08-21T15:37:00.003-07:00

(via @nyrbclassics)

sunday short stack

2010-08-15T09:04:00.001-07:00

"There are years that ask questions, and years that answer." - Zora Neale Hurston

Can you judge a book by its cover?
The 50 Best Fictional Bands
If you liked If Movie Titles Were Honest... a few weeks ago, you'll love Better Book Titles.
A Dozen of Literature's Greatest Jerks
David Mitchell on the internets: Bookworm, Bat Segundo, and The Millions
This is sort of fascinating: 25 Songs About Outdated Technology
There are some things English wordsmiths just can't describe.
Album Covers as IKEA Catalog Pages
Who knew? 50 Must-See French Horror Films

sunday short stack

2010-07-25T16:22:00.005-07:00

"Every moment of one's existence one is growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little more or dying a little bit." - Norman Mailer

On the subject of David Mitchell, here are his six favorite books (although I think it's probably more accurately his six most obscure favorites).
If Movie Titles Were Honest...
Creepiosity: Nerve's Guide to the Unintentionally Creepy
Ten of the Best Nameless Protagonists in Literature
In development...Six illustrated versions of Blood Meridian
Jane Austen's Fight Club
10 Steamiest Moments in Southern Literature
Watch Bad Day, a 1986 short film by Exene starring John Doe as “Tripped-out Cowboy Priest.”
25 Songs for 25 Cities
I'm terribly sad I won't be watching Mad Men tonight with millions of other people, so I'll have to settle for this Mad Men inspired reading list.

hero worship

2010-07-24T14:16:00.002-07:00

Skylight has been kind enough to post a recording of the reading here.

sunday short stack

2010-07-11T20:15:00.003-07:00

"No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one." - Elbert Hubbard

It's true - Tim Tykwer is adapting Cloud Atlas from a script written with the Wachowski Brothers. Whoa. (And don't miss David Mitchell at Skylight on July 21st!)
The 10 Most Unconventional Movie Trailers of the Past Decade
C'mon, everyone was thinking it: "Pregnant Women Are Smug"
Sex and the City 2 actually wasn't as bad as I feared, but here are 20 Gal-Pal Movies to Watch Instead
12 Terrifying Jell-O Recipes
Just because there hasn't been a short stack since this came out...The New Yorker's 20 Writers Under 40
How to Use a Semicolon (The Most Feared Punctuation on Earth) and introducing...The Friendly Period
The 19 Most Hilariously Failed Attempts at Sexy Album Covers

ma's pretty sharp with the cleavers

2010-05-17T12:16:00.001-07:00

sunday short stack

2010-05-09T12:18:00.008-07:00

"The trouble with being poor is it takes up all your time." - Willem de Kooning

In honor of Mother's Day: 21 Creepy Babies in TV and Film and...
’90s Alternative Kids: Where Are They Now?
David Mitchell on historical fiction: "...if History is the family tree of Now, a historical novel may illuminate the contemporary world in ways that straight history may not."
The 20 Most Shocking TV Deaths
Flannery O'Connor in a bizarre video from 1932 about backwards-walking animals
Bill Murray reads poetry to construction workers
Famous Philosophers and How They Were First Discovered
Paste: 10 Indie Films We're Looking Forward to This Summer
I'm not be a student anymore, but you may be - 31 Travel Scholarships, Fellowships, and Grants to Fund Your Next Trip Abroad

52 books in 52 weeks

2010-05-08T12:13:00.011-07:00

I'm only five books shy of being on target. Not bad...

5. Free: The Future of a Radical Priceby Chris Anderson

My friend often talks about how much the internet loves him because it gives him all this free stuff. Ha ha, I would say, not actually understanding the real explanation. Now, thanks to Chris Anderson and his concise explanation of the multiple "free" models that structure much web commerce, I get it. I know there was some controversy when this book was published, but I don't remember what it was.

6. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin

When I first started reading this short story collection, I was taken aback that it had won so many awards because three of the first four stories have basically the same plot. A pretty, poor girl is taken in by a more wealthy landowner/official who denies/abandons her shortly before his death. It was startling and a little surreal. However, the plots and characters vary much more as the collection continues and no doubt, Mueenuddin is a writer to watch.

7. A Dark Matterby Peter Straub

About once a year, I break from my typical reading material and pick up a popular, recently released horror novel with great hopes for spooking. Last year, I read Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box, which was pretty entertaining. This year, it was Straub and I sadly, snobbily found the whole production a little silly. I was not spooked and thought all the characters - especially this Eel chick - were a bit insufferable.

8. We Have Always Lived in the Castleby Shirley Jackson

Now, this was spooky and great fun. Just look at the cover of this recent edition! Creepy! Jackson's classic tale of these recluse sisters - whose family was taken by arsenic poisoning years before, for which the oldest sister was tried and acquitted - is suspenseful and richly drawn. The narrator is delightfully unreliable. When their cad of a cousin arrives on the scene, all hell breaks loose.

9. The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand

I'm not sure who the audience is for this book. I would think it would be me, but I felt I was hearing a lot of what I already knew/could guess. So if it was written for a more non-academic audience, I'm just not sure they'd be all that interested. Beyond that, it's a brief, accessible overview of four different aspects of the current university climate.

10. Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life: A Book by and for the Fanatics Among Us (with Bitchin' Soundtrack)by Steve Almond

I reviewed this for the LA Times on April 29th. Check it out here.

11. Just Kidsby Patti Smith

I did not expect to love this book as much as I did. I thought I'd like to support Smith's writing and learn more about Mapplethorpe. I did not suspect that I would not be able to put this book down, reading every evocative detail with a hunger for that time period in New York that I didn't know I had. I certainly did not know I would finish the book sobbing. Beautiful and moving.

12. Fun with Problemsby Robert Stone

I'm still hungover from Stone's latest story collection. It took me about four attempts to get into the title story, but once I got past that, the remaining stories were lively and pleasantly uncomfortable - full of messy drunks causing messes.

13. Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House by Meghan Daum

I reviewed this for the LA Times on May 9th (yes, in the future). Check it out here.

sunday short stack

2010-05-02T11:38:00.007-07:00

"The universe will reward you for taking risks on its behalf." - Shakti Gawain

Aimee Semple McPherson's Arabian castle in Lake Elsinore is for sale.
17 Films About Getting in Way Over Your Head in the Big, Bad City
1977: Tom Waits makes a boozy appearance on Fernwood Tonight.
The 50 Best Book People to Follow on Twitter and 40 Bloggers Who Really Count (as opposed to all those other pesky bloggers, but what is Naomi Klein doing under Food?)
They did not like Roget's Thesaurus in 1854. At all.
Were the "mad" heroines of literature really sane?
I promise to be vigilant against these top 20 most annoying reviewer clichés.
Historians have long concurred in identifying professional authors as the occupational group most prone to habitual tobacco use (with awesome photos).

los angeles festival of books 2010

2010-04-28T17:11:00.004-07:00

Another Festival of Books has come and gone...I may have more commentary at some point, but I'm going to let photos and my panel coverage for Jacket Copy do the talking for now.

The first panel I covered on Saturday was Rebooting Culture with Ander Monson, Nicholas Carr, and David Shields, moderated by David Ulin..You can read the coverage here.

That afternoon was Carol Burnett...

And on Sunday, I had the pleasure (ahem) of covering Bret Easton Ellis.

sunday short stack

2010-04-18T18:42:00.005-07:00

“This is what I thought: for the most banal even to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it.” - Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Are the Wachowski Brothers adapting Cloud Atlas?!
25 Notable Recluses
This is almost (but not quite) too precious to post: Cute Boys with Cats
10 Weird Duets
When a Bad Movie Has One Incredibly Great Scene
A recovered survey from 1992 reveals the sex lives of librarians.
The 10 Most Epic Stage-Dive Fails
The Creepiest Children's Books Ever
President Obama has two tickets to that thing you like.
10 Songs for English Majors and Other Word Nerds
I love Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" - more people should talk about it all the time.

people hang on his every word, even the prepositions

2010-04-17T16:40:00.000-07:00

He really is...

sunday short stack

2010-03-28T11:56:00.003-07:00

"Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for truth." - Benjamin Disraeli

From Flavorpill: 10 Films about Music We Can't Wait to See and Our 35 Favorite Music Moments in Film
From The Top 13: Best Acting Performances by Musicians
Now Playing: The Audreys
Sophie Blackall creates illustrations to accompany Missed Connections.
The Top 10 Places You Don't Want to Visit
I think I must have this pinnacle in packaging from Tank Books.
Glimpse Banksy in the "the world’s first street-art disaster movie."
The shortlist for the "lost" 1970 Booker Prize has been announced.
Hemingway Novel Character or "Match Game PM" Star?

I like samantha mathis in anything

2010-03-27T20:31:00.000-07:00

and more of the best movie posters of 2009.

sunday short stack

2010-03-14T12:42:00.004-07:00

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive." - Anäis Nin

Write or Die (!) starts erasing what you've written if you stop typing.
10 Literary Ladies in Desperate Need of a Gay Friend
Donatello doesn’t call it “TV” because nicknames are for friends...and more from Hipster Kitty.
Sam Lipsyte takes us on a walking tour of Astoria.
Top 10 Movie Gang Fights
Check out Richard Ramirez's letterhead. That's just wrong.
I want 4 by Poe.
15 Witty Pieces of Text Graffiti
This is a "pretty insane project": A Reference Of Female-Fronted Punk Rock: 1977-89
Jon Stewart tries out Chatroulette.
The 16 Best Dystopian Books of All Time
I didn't say this anywhere else and I should have: Mary Gaitskill's reading at the Hammer this past week was thrilling.

52 books in 52 weeks

2010-03-13T13:40:00.000-08:00

Ridiculous! I cannot believe I've only read four books this year so far. Time to step it up...

1. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

This novel is the epic undertaking critics claim, painting a great world within the borders of Manhattan. Characters converge around the 1974 walk of Philippe Petit between the World Trade Center towers, and while some characters are more memorable than others, the whole book is greater than the sum of its parts. More balance between the chapters would have made it a bit better read for me, but others may disagree.

2. The Best American Short Stories 2009

Alice Sebold was this year's editor, and she chose some memorable selections, especially "Hurricanes Anonymous," which I can't get out of my head. Unfortunately, the pace of the collection staggers somewhat dramatically toward the end. I've never seen this happen before in a BASS collection, and I don't think Pitlor, Sebold, or the last 3-4 writers alphabetically are singularly responsible, but it was not a strong finish.

3. Blame by Michelle Huneven

I adore Michelle Huneven's writing. It's as simple as that. She takes the stuff of ordinary life and seemingly does nothing all that groundbreaking with it, but her novels stick with me in a way few do. I also stop and linger over some of her sentences and think, "Damn. I wish I had written that sentence." I can think of no other writer - except maybe Francine Prose - who infuses the accessible with insight and truth quite as well.

4. Tinkers by Paul Harding

I can't tell whether the hype for this book ruined it for me, or whether I hate nature writing, or whether I just wasn't in the mood for such indirect prose after Blame, but at times, I almost walked away without finishing it. Yes, there is some beautiful writing, and I admire what Harding was attempting, but the narrative just did not flow for me.

crab-bucket syndrome?

2010-02-27T10:04:00.003-08:00

Maria Bustillos compares the hatin' on Dave Eggers to that directed at Wyndam Lewis.

Part of the reason it took so long for the Vorticists to come into their own is that Wyndham Lewis was a very questionable specimen. Lot of things to dislike about this guy. He was wildly anti-Semitic; he even managed to write a whole book in favor of Hitler in 1931 (Hitler, it is called.) The man just shot his mouth off like crazy. As you can imagine, Lewis felt pretty bad when he found out what was actually going down in Nazi Germany when he went to Berlin in 1937! So he took it all back, which is at least something. (His idea of contrition was to write a book called The Jews: Are they Human?, in 1939.) Wilde’s friend Robbie Ross called Lewis “a buffalo in wolf’s clothing.”

All this brings me to Dave Eggers, you may be surprised to hear. Dave Eggers, though evidently not an openly combative or buffalo-like person, is like Lewis in being both talented and roundly disliked; an outsider in his own circle.

Dave Eggers is a thorn in many a side in today’s America, my own included. His bizarre combination of fame, enthusiasm and sentimentalizing drives a lot of people up a tree. It’s safe to say that Eggers is currently the most detested man in American haute-literary circles. To support this contention, I’ve made a table of Google searches using the phrase “I hate _________,” and put in a lot of divisive-seeming haute-literary names...

sunday short stack

2010-02-21T18:11:00.004-08:00

“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human … is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.” - David Foster Wallace (via Slaughterhouse 90210)

Who says girls can't play drums?
The Best of Journalism (2009)
The A/V Club lists literary works that should never be adapted to film or TV again.
Is luck a skill you can learn?
Flavorwire wants you to read these books from LOST.
Faulkner’s brother John claimed that he would often fake being drunk to avoid work.
What happens to record stores after they die?

sometimes the good life wears thin

2010-02-06T14:32:00.002-08:00

Here's the trailer for Strange Powers: Stephen Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, ten years in the making.

And here are my two favorite Magnetic Fields songs.

I Wish I Had an Evil Twin - Th...

All My Little Words - The Magn...

do I advise the housekeeper on where to buy fish?

2010-02-05T14:30:00.003-08:00

David Mitchell's forthcoming novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet won't be out until June, but you can read an excerpt here.

sunday short stack

2010-01-31T10:47:00.003-08:00

"Everybody loves money! That's why they call it money!" - David Mamet

"The octopus was full of judgment." Unhappy Hipsters hilariously shows it's lonely in the modern world.
Art Based on Infinite Jest
At thesixtyone, new artists make music and listeners decide what's good. Ready?
Sex Explained Graphically By Pens
From Paste: 10 Best Songs About Libraries and Librarians
Browse this Flickr set of passport photos of famous artists.
Brilliant: How to Report the News
Indiewire reports on the best and worst of Sundance.
"First I stole a panda bear, then we drank malt liquor together." 10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling

j.d. salinger (1919 - 2010)

2010-01-27T23:11:00.001-08:00

J.D. Salinger has died at the age of 91.

Mr. Salinger...perfected the great trick of literary irony — of validating what you mean by saying less than, or even the opposite of, what you intend. Orville Prescott wrote in The New York Times in 1963, “Rarely if ever in literary history has a handful of stories aroused so much discussion, controversy, praise, denunciation, mystification and interpretation.”

The above quote is from the New York Times obituary. Some other noteworthy links...

From The Onion: Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger
Virginia Heffernan: "Mountain Man"
David Ulin on Salinger's gift of words and silence
How Salinger's NH neighbors had his back
Lillian Ross on "my long friendship with J.D. Salinger."
Kim Morgan: Salinger Inspired Cinema
Michiko Kakutani on teen angst and an author's alienation
A round-up of songs about Catcher in the Rye
A William Wiegand review from 1959: "The Knighthood of J.D. Salinger"
Secret J.D. Salinger Documentary Revealed

wood anniversary

2010-01-26T15:05:00.002-08:00

Today is the fifth anniversary of escapegrace. It's sort of amazing to think of all the opportunities I've had and the people I've met as a result of something as simple as a URL and some typing. The future of this blog is uncertain, but I hope it keeps going strong and grows into something even better than it's been. Thank you for reading!

sunday short stack

2010-01-24T11:26:00.004-08:00

"The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions." - Ellen Glasgow

Letterheady collects letterhead designs from the famous and infamous.
"It's like saying John Lennon's favorite Beatle is Micky Dolenz."
Siblings or Dating?
A graffiti documentary possibly directed by Banksy is playing at Sundance.
Awkward Stock Photos
Take the Kandinsky questionnaire!
The 50 Best Inventions of 2009
The Playlist's Most Overlooked/Underappreciated Films of 2009
Rhapsody's Most Anticipated Indie Albums of 2010
Kate Winslet will play Cain's Mildred Pierce in an HBO miniseries.
A Timeline of Film's Favorite High School Nerds

capela dos ossos (chapel of bones) in Évora, Portugal

2010-01-21T08:27:00.006-08:00

(Happy Birthday, G)
-

sunday short stack

2010-01-17T11:19:00.003-08:00

"Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.” - Chuck Close

Paste posts a Vic Chesnutt memorial playlist.
In response to more loss, Beck is streaming Jay Reatard's cover of "Gamma Ray." (Scroll down.)
At least, Jack White is still here and planning a solo album.
Pride and Prejudice in emoticons
A Fool in the Forest collects some Sylvia Plath-related video.
More vintage poetry video from Anna Akhmatova
Popular Websites as Vintage Books
NYU is the recipient of The Kathleen Hanna Papers.
Top 10 Places You Can't Go in the World
I might have to see The Book of Eli, after all. (Not to mention The Imaginarium...Tom Waits abundance.)

jay reatard (1980 - 2010)

2010-01-14T08:39:00.002-08:00

happy 2010 from lisbon!

2010-01-01T14:41:00.003-08:00

sunday short stack

2009-12-20T08:59:00.001-08:00

“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.” - E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

Already? I read a whopping 8. The 2010 Tournament of Books Long List
The Most Anticipated Band Reunions of 2010
Anne Patchett: Writing is a job.
Rolling Stone's 100 Best Songs of the Decade
Federico Garcia Lorca's corpse is missing.
Facebook's Five Most Annoying Parents
NPR (John Freeman) selects the best debut fiction of 2009.
The Guardian's 100 Best Films of the Noughties
Yay! The White Stripes are releasing a live box set.
"All the hot chicks dig guys with supernatural cars that kill people." Via @ebertchicago, screenshots of actual Comcast movie plot summaries.

santa baby

2009-12-18T10:01:00.029-08:00

Dear Santa -

Think of all the fun I've missed
Think of all the fellas that I haven't kissed
Next year I could be just as good
If you'd check off my Christmas list

XO Chris

Gramercy Gate Compact @ Etsy (citybitz) $40

Miz Mooz Amelia Button Boot @ Amazon $220

Pictorial Webster's Dictionary @ The Curiosity Shoppe $35

Aesa Diamond Vein Necklace @ Barneys $267

Stanton T90 USB Turnrable @ ebay $299

Electra Orbit 3i (Emerald) @ Cyclewerks $549

The Bombshell Woolie @ Etsy (superjennylove) $46

Collins Sofa @ Crate & Barrel $2499

a life beyond nostalgia

2009-12-17T10:12:00.003-08:00

Anne Trubek on the death of handwriting:

The moral of this story is not that typing is superior to handwriting, that parents should have to transcribe the stories of their offspring or that private schools are superior to public ones. The moral of the story is that what we want from writing — what Simon wants and what the Sumerians wanted — is cognitive automaticity, the ability to think as fast as possible, freed as much as can be from the strictures of whichever technology we must use to record our thoughts. As Wolf writes: "A system that can become streamlined through specialization and automaticity has more time to think. This is the miraculous gift of the reading brain." This is what Palmer wanted for his students — speed. This is what the typewriter promised Twain. This is what typing does for millions. It allows us to go faster, not because we want everything faster in our hyped-up age, but for the opposite reason: We want more time to think.

Related, a student brings a typewriter to class (via Open Culture).

52 books in 52 weeks

2009-12-08T09:18:00.008-08:00

33. A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Sigh...I'm not getting the accolades. I am a huge Lorrie Moore fan, but this novel did not do it for me at all. It took many, many pages to emerge from a somewhat boring beginning and never quite seemed to find its purpose. Of course, because it's Lorrie Moore, there were sentences of quirky, startling insight, but not as many as I would have liked. However, if the praise for this novel leads to more rapid release of another, then that's fine by me.

34. A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century by Cristina Nehring

I love anyone who dares to point out that twenty-first century heterosexual relationships are suffering at best, totally fukakte at worst. Nehring doesn't explicitly state she's focused on male-female connections, but her use of literary and historical examples of this type imply it. She attributes this contemporary dilemma to a denial of much of the emotional currency that supported the traditional romantic economy. Is everything she says reasonable? Not necessarily, but at least she's saying it.

35. That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo

I grew up in Massachusetts and took summer vacations in Maine, so I hoped the settings would charm me, regardless of any other narrative element. No such luck. This book wasn't painful to read and the second half was much more engaging, but I didn't really connect with any of the characters in this character-driven novel. There is one successful scene of absurdity that seems out of place, but it is also the most memorable section of the story.

36. Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow

I can't quite believe this is my first Doctorow novel, but there it is. I enjoyed this quick read that fictionalizes the story of New York's most famous hoarders, the Collyer Brothers. There's a mild Forrest Gump-like narrative arc that shows the brothers responding to different monumental events of the twentieth century. I questioned whether the idiosyncratic recluses would have never had a fight (really?), but the men and their increasingly cluttered home were effectively evoked.

sunday short stack

2009-12-06T11:26:00.003-08:00

"Telepathy and clairvoyance play a part in every love story." - Isaac Bashevis Singer

Margaret Atwood offers 10 editing tips for your fiction manuscript.
The Spirit Awards announce their nominees for 2009.
Classic art + graffiti = The Graffiti Ren 2 Contest
"My MFA Workshop Responds to My Twitter Status Updates"
Bored? Make all 48 recipes for your favorite LA restaurant dishes.
Holiday dating? Guys and girls to avoid...
The bands of tomorrow: SXSW 2010
50 Things a Writer Shouldn't Do

End of the year "Best of" lists are piling up. A random selection:

Favorite Fiction of 2009 from the LA Times
Said the Gramophone's Best Songs of 2009
The Boston Globe's Fiction of the Year
KCRW DJ Picks for Top 10 Albums of 2009
Jessa Crispin's Picks for Best Foreign Fiction
The Barnes & Noble Review's Best Books of 2009
Gorilla vs. Bear's Albums of 2009

the death of uncool

2009-12-02T10:01:00.000-08:00

Brian Eno thinks we're living in a stylistic tropics.

There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

going west

2009-12-01T10:49:00.002-08:00

A beautiful short film for the New Zealand Book Council:

Via @spikenlilli

you should have offered her your boots

2009-11-30T08:32:00.001-08:00

V.L. Hartmann reflects on Joan Didion after seeing her on the street.

For some of us, mimicking Joan Didion has become the height of literary ambition, and not just her sentences. “Goodbye to All That” is a jumping-off point, California will fall short of its promise, but there is always Hawaii, and a penthouse, even when you are broke. There is a husband across the hall in his own study in your house in Malibu while you write. This is the Joan Didion who is forever leaning out of that Stingray with a cigarette in her hand. She appeared to be living in her sentences, and it was this intimacy that took me everywhere that she had been, even in the decades before I was born. The text might say it was hard, but the style makes it look easy.

sunday short stack

2009-11-29T09:53:00.006-08:00

"Only a world without love would be worse than one without music." - Kingsley Amis

100 Notable Books of 2009 from The New York Times
Oddly Specific: The Strangely Particular Website About Peculiarly Exacting Signs (via @GreatDismal)
So you have invented Twitter. Congratulations. This is where that time machine would definitely have come in quite handy.
Mary Gaitskill, Lionel Shriver, Walter Kirn, and others contribute to New York Magazine's Political Fictions Project.
LA Weekly's Post-Apocalyptic Playlist
What does indie mean to you?
Rick Moody starts his 153-tweet fiction project tomorrow @ElectricLit.
The AV Club's 10 best short-story collections of the ’00s
No duh: Jack White is The Observer's rock 'n roll start of the decade (via @largeheartedboy)
The Guardian's Best Books of 2009
Make sure you have some time: The 99 Most Jaw-Dropping Movie Moments

ladwp holiday light show by day

2009-11-27T12:59:00.007-08:00

Every year, the LADWP hosts a bizarrely retro light show along a road through a golf course at Griffith Park. Yesterday, I made a Thanksgiving morning pilgrimage in order to take some photos. The whole collection can be seen here, but below are some of my favorites.

happy thanksgiving!

2009-11-26T10:23:00.001-08:00

judging a book

2009-11-23T10:04:00.001-08:00

i09 presents a history of 16 science fiction classics, told in book covers.

sunday short stack

2009-11-22T10:10:00.002-08:00

“Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.” - George Saunders

Nick Cave joins nine other writers on the Literary Review's bad sex in fiction award.
Limone!
LA Weekly's Top Ten List of Major Stars Covering Other People's Music
1000 Awesome Things
McSweeney's offers standards for grading the life of an adjunct composition professor.
Three Guys One Book is just what it says.
The 25 Greatest Coens Movie Moments
I wish I had been at this Jesus Lizard show.
Top 10 Bad Messages from Good Movies
From Neatorama, 13 Examples of Literature in Song and from Flavorwire, Writers Who Sing, Singers Who Write
Check out Google Image Swirl.
NYC's Best New Buildings of the Decade
Jack White and Wanda Jackson are going to make an album together!
I never got around to posting this when it came out, but behold: the four-part Paste feature, "Glory Days: Dispatches From an Academic Conference on Bruce Springsteen."

what an essay is, exactly, these days

2009-11-21T16:07:00.000-08:00

Zadie Smith wonders what essays offer to a novelist:

Within the confines of an essay or – even better! – an aphorism, you can be the writer you dream of being. No word out of place, no tell-tale weak spots (dialogue, the convincing representation of other people, plot), no absences, no lack. I think it's the limits of the essay, and of the real, that truly attract fiction writers. In the confined space of an essay you have the possibility of being wise, of making your case, of appearing to see deeply into things – although the thing you're generally looking into is the self. "Other people", that mainstay of what Shields calls the "moribund conventional novel", have a habit of receding to a point of non-existence in the "lyrical essay."

These are all satisfactions the practice of writing novels is most unlikely to provide for you. Perfect essays abound in this world – almost every one of Joan Didion's fits the category. Perfect novels, as we all know, are rarer than Halley's comet. And so, for a writer, composing an essay instead of a novel is like turning from staring into a filthy, unfathomable puddle to looking through a clear glass windowpane. How perfectly it fits the frame! How little draught passes through!

disco bloodbath is a pretty great name

2009-11-21T16:00:00.000-08:00

The New York Times looks at the indie music scene in Greece.

One factor in Athens’s downtown indie transformation was a recent explosion of free press in the city. Five years ago, there was only The Athens Voice, an alternative weekly that then had a meager listings section and only a few pages devoted to the arts.

But along came Velvet (www.velvetmagazine.gr), a free monthly first published in 2004 by the Athens-born brothers Lakis and Aris Ionas, who run a veritable do-it-yourself culture factory out of their fourth-floor downtown studio.

In addition to running the magazine, devoted entirely to the local indie scene, the Ionases have an art collective, a fashion line (their mother sews all their futuristic neon-colored metallic wool creations), and an art-punk band called the Callas. The group has self-released two albums and performed throughout Europe — often in homemade spandex Superman costumes — with the Callasettes, their five “laboratory-made groupies.” Following Velvet, many other locally focused free publications, like Lifo, FAQ, Don’t Panic Athens and Ozon, which has an English-language Web site (www.ozonweb.com/en), have sprung up.

video fun thursday

2009-11-19T10:25:00.001-08:00

The new Beck/Charlotte Gainsbourg video:

The N.A.S.A. Tom Waits/Kool Keith video:

sunday short stack

2009-11-15T09:45:00.001-08:00

"For all that has been, thanks. For all that will be, yes." - Dag Hammarskjold

Orhan Pamuk, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kate Christensen, and Margaret Atwood - among other luminaries - explain how to write a great novel.
Make Your Own Academic Sentence
New York magazine thinks these 40 songs define "the Brooklyn sound."
Jacket Copy reprints the 1958 LA Times review of Lolita.
Martin Scorcese joins me in thinking The Shining is superlatively scary, but he also nominates 10 other scariest horror movies of all time, skewing classic.
I've started following Roger Ebert on Twitter (@ebertchicago) and he's got the good links, including the one above, Famous Authors Narrate the Funny Pages, the world's worst jobs, and a cookbook written by Nelson Algren.
Also always great for links, birthday boy @largeheartedboy: the 50 most despicable Oscar snubs of the 2000s and the craziest international bootleg superheroes.
And for complete and utter listmania, check out Paste's Best of the Decade lists, with everything from breweries to fashion designers.

the ladies, they write good!

2009-11-06T08:35:00.005-08:00

Lizzie Skurnick weighs in on the all-male Publishers Weekly top ten.

Before I continue, let me borrow a phrase from the majority and say that some of my best friends are men. Some of my best friends are male writers. There are many men I love, many male writers I love, and many loves counted by me among writers of the male persuasion.

But that said, I, female, longtime book critic, longtime lover of males, writers, and male writers, must nonetheless point out an inconvenient truth: It has been a very strong two years for female writers and a weak two years for male ones, and the fact that the latter have garnered unseemly armfuls of praise and prizes for their tepid output is a scandal.

the impossibility of contentment

2009-11-05T19:25:00.002-08:00

The Smart Set excerpts a new translation of Kierkegaard's Repetition.

The older one gets, the better he understands life and the more he comes to care for and appreciate comfort. In short, the more competent one becomes, the less content. One will never be completely, absolutely and in every way content, and it is hardly worth the trouble to be more or less content, so one might as well be thoroughly discontented. Anyone who has really thought through the issue, will agree with me that no one is ever granted even as little as a half an hour out of his entire life where he is absolutely content in every conceivable way. It goes without saying that more is required for this sort of contentment than that one has food and clothing. I was close to achieving it once...

sunday short stack

2009-11-01T12:01:00.006-08:00

"There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction."
- Edgar Allen Poe

I've been telling people for awhile now how I fantasized about opening a decadent foodie restaurant in Echo Park, and I had drooled over a newly vacant property. Who beats me to it? A raw food/vegan joint. Sigh.
How to Write Badly Well
Enter at your own risk: Largehearted Boy's Best of the Decade (2000-2009) Online Music Lists
Jeanette Winterson adores the night.
The 10 Worst Food Trends? Really?
NaNoWriMo starts today!
M. Ward and Okkervil River were on Austin City Limits last night.
Ten Delightfully Creepy Etsy Finds for Halloween and All Year 'Round
I saw Paranormal Activity yesterday, which could have been much scarier with a few replaced scenes and a completely different ending. This led to a conversation of the scariest films ever. For me, it's The Shining hands down. On that note, one opinion on the 10 most terrifying scenes ever filmed.

something about verandas

2009-10-31T17:23:00.002-08:00

Colson Whitehead describes his what-to-write-next dartboard for The New York Times.

I recently published a novel, and now it’s time to get back to work. If you’re anything like me, figuring out what to write next can be a real hassle. A flashy and experimental brain-bender, or a pointillist examination of the dissolution of a typical American family? Generation-spanning door-stopper or claustrophobic psychological sketch? Buncha novellas with a minor character in common? To make things easier, I modified my dartboard a few years ago. Now, when I’m overwhelmed by the untold stories out there, I head down to the basement, throw a dart and see where it lands. Try it for yourself!

As a side note, Whitehead's appearance at the LA Public Library earlier this year was one of the most entertaining readings I've ever seen. He's got the funny.

thoughts upon returning from a hike

2009-10-29T17:39:00.001-08:00

1) If you're a middle-aged white man, we're the only two on the trail, and you don't make eye contact, I *will* think you're a serial killer.

2) I have mad respect for the girl who took the time to apply full-on Amy Winehouse eye makeup before heading out to hike.

3) Sometimes I worry that I run like Phoebe in that one episode of Friends.

checking into the doctoral motel

2009-10-29T16:58:00.003-08:00

Louis Menand on "The Ph.D. Problem":

Up to half of all doctoral students in English drop out before getting their degrees (something that appears to be the case in doctoral education generally), and only about half of the rest end up with the jobs they entered graduate school to get—that is, tenured professorships. Over the three decades since the branch was grabbed, a kind of protective shell has grown up around this process, a culture of “realism,” in which exogenous constraints are internalized, and the very conditions that make doctoral education problematic are turned into elements of that education. Students are told from the very start, almost from the minute they apply to graduate school, that they are effectively entering a lottery. This has to have an effect on professional self-conception.

I wonder if Menand feels responsible for contributing to my professional self-conception as one of my grad school professors. (Not at Harvard, folks.)

sunday short stack

2009-10-25T09:54:00.001-08:00

"To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself." - Albert Einstein

There is a new edition of L.A. Bizarro. Let's hope they do something interesting with their blog.
Five Great (and Strange) Musical Origin Stories
Antiga Confeitaria de Belem, here I come: The 50 best things to eat in the world, and where to eat them
Elizabeth Gilbert TED-talks on nurturing creativity.
Step Out Into The Light: Fourteen Covers Of Daniel Johnston's "True Love Will Find You In The End"
I have no idea how they even began to determine this, but the Top 100 T-Shirts of the 2000s
Cracked considers The World of Tomorrow (If The Internet Disappeared Today)
On a more serious note, Paul Carr writes on Weezer, plane crashes and everything else that’s worrying about the real-time web.
Ten Things You Need to Stop Tweeting About
Congrats to Randa Jarrar for being one of the Best 39 Arab Writers Under 40.

52 books in 52 weeks

2009-10-24T12:18:00.001-07:00

29. The Book of Night Women by Marlon James

The narrative voice in this epic history of 18th century Jamaican slavery is fiercely hypnotic from page one. The story is told in a linguistically compelling dialect; it reminded me a bit of the "Sloosh'a's Crossin'" chapter in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. The plot is dramatic and, at times, brutally violent, but there is something about the telling that comes a little too close to historical romance for me - not in the "romantic" sense, but in the lengthy, overly descriptive tendency toward repetition.

30. You Don't Love Me Yet by Jonathan Lethem

Oh, Jonathan. What are you doing to me? I love your novels - I've pushed Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude on dozens of readers, but what the heck was this? That poor pathetic girl was not an engaging protagonist, and if you're going to have a kangaroo kidnapping subplot (and I would have lobbied against this), I need details to make it at all credible or absurd. I, too, would like to write a novel landscaped with all my favorite LA eastside spots, so perhaps I can just appreciate it for that.

31. The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

If you like The Turn of the Screw, you will love The Little Stranger. Waters's post-WWII ghost story very skillfully captures the historical detail and sense of place that make for a creepy haunted house narrative. What takes the novel beyond conventional imitation is the richness of Waters's characters. The not-quite-successful country doctor, his likely closeted paramour, her fading gentry mother, and even the adolescent scullery maid are all fully drawn. They easily carry the weight of trying to do something new with a long-established genre.

32. Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

Perhaps the best part of this book was having cocktails with Dan Chaon after his Vroman's appearance while I was in the middle of reading it, but I digress. Chaon deserves the accolades he's been receiving. This novel is both parts literary and cinematic - his descriptions stretch the boundaries of how common objects are usually perceived. He brings his scenes to life in a way that is vividly visual. The complicated plot is woven well between the three alternating narratives, and the denouement does not disappoint.

is hip-hop a cat?

2009-10-23T10:26:00.002-07:00

Das Racist respond to Sasha Frere-Jones's claim that hip-hop is dead.

Before a handful of (white) internet commenters wild on me saying “Sasha Frere-Jones is not a racist,” let me clarify that I’m not saying he’s consciously and intentionally trying to assert his superiority. I’m just trying to point out that his language is typical of that (white) journalistic voice which presupposes the (white) journalist’s authority.

Perhaps it’s first worth examining further why “periodization” is such a “dicey proposition” to begin with, regardless of how early or late. Concepts like “periods” and even “genre” are loose collections of tropes that have no inherent meaning but rather contextual meanings that are only useful to the extent to which they can help organize texts. The point at which they actually serve to define texts is when they can enter a lens of scrutiny so intense as to render them meaningless.

her voice is full of money

2009-10-21T11:24:00.001-07:00

What can be learned from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tax returns?

To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until 1937 he kept a ledger—as if he were a grocer—a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition. No one could call Fitzgerald frugal, but he was always trying to save money—at least until his wife Zelda’s illness, starting in 1929, put any idea of saving out of the question. The ordinary person saves to protect against some distant rainy day. Fitzgerald had no interest in that. To him saving meant freedom to work on his novels without interruptions caused by the economic necessity of writing short stories. The short stories were his main source of revenue.

Until the Hollywood years (1937–40), Fitzgerald handwrote his income tax returns. During the Hollywood years, the returns were prepared by accountants and typed. He, of course, kept his ledgers by hand. Regardless of how they were transcribed, the returns and the ledgers reveal a great deal about Fitzgerald—how he lived and how he struggled.

sunday short stack

2009-10-18T13:44:00.006-07:00

"Writing is like sex: a lot of trial and error."
- Winston Churchill

YouTube comment or e.e. cummings?
NPR has two exclusive first listens worth checking out: The Swell Season and the Ben Gibbard/Jay Farrar Kerouac project.
10 Coolest Bookstores in the U.S. (Go Skylight!)
10 Must See Bands at CMJ
These cassette tape skeletons almost defy belief.
The 18 Most Explicit Music Videos Ever
The 2009 National Book Award finalists have been announced.
Top 5 Songs to Hear After Being Dumped and some more suggestions @popcandy.
Smithsonian magazine collects Great Road Trips in American Literature.
The 15 Best TV Shows That Were Canceled Too Soon
I must not be on this list because I don't blog about professorial things: 100 Best Professors Who Blog
I wish upon a star that someone would take me to the Monsters of Folk show tonight at the Greek Theater. (Can't hurt, right?)

art isn't a surface activity

2009-10-17T09:10:00.002-07:00

Jeanette Winterson writes in praise of the crack-up.

The stories are well known; Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear and went mad. Sylvia Plath gassed herself. Anne Sexton committed suicide. Emily Dickinson was manic-depressive. Virginia Woolf worked through alternating bouts of madness and depression for most of her life. The mad, bad and dangerous wild boys of high art and popular culture make great copy—whether it's Caravaggio on the run for murder after one of his rages, or Allen Ginsberg, naked and drunk, howling through Manhattan. The women—Plath, Frida Kahlo, Maria Callas, Janis Joplin—imploding like dark stars, are the stuff of obsession.

The collision of creativity and mental instability is so marked that the tortured artist has become a cliché. But with depression rising fast right across the population—and twice as fast among women as men—it is worth trying to separate the cliché from the truth it masks, and to ask whether the connection between creativity and depression can help us think again about the bigger picture.

sunday short stack

2009-10-11T10:22:00.003-07:00

"The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink." - Fran Lebowitz

LA Weekly's Best of LA: Hiking
The 8 Most Surprising Music Collaborations of 2009 (Flavorwire)
100 European Hotels Under $150
Regretsy is funny because it's true. (Handmade? It looks like you made it with your feet.)
Zombify Yourself, then Black Dynamite Yo'self (via Pop Candy)
10 Best Twilight Zone Episodes (TV Squad)
The Inquisitor has 10 Monty Python clips to celebrate their 40th birthday.
Take Proust's questionnaire.
George Saunders provides commentary for the GQ slideshow: Tent City, USA.
10 Killer Rock 'n Roll Photographs (Paste)
Pitchfork has a previously unreleased live Nirvana track from the Bleach reissue.
David Ulin reviews The Book of Genesis Illustrated by Robert Crumb.

drama is everywhere

2009-10-10T14:33:00.003-07:00

I love the internet for the sheer fact that, on any given day, you can stumble upon something like a post by Jim Shepard on the subject of fiction based on non-fiction.

The first worry writers have when they consider working with something like historical events has to do with the issue of authority: as in, where do I get off writing about that? Well, here’s the good and the bad news: where do you get off writing about anything? Where do you get off writing about someone of a different gender? A different person? Where do you get off writing about yourself, from twenty years ago?

Writers shouldn’t lose sight of the essential chutzpah involved in trying to imagine any other kind of sensibility. And that they should take heart from that chutzpah, as well. The whole project of literature – the entire project of the arts — is about the exercise of the empathetic imagination. Why were we given something as amazing as imagination, if we’re not going to use it?

whatever makes you happy

2009-10-09T13:04:00.001-07:00

"I Cut Like a Buffalo" is by far my favorite track off the Dead Weather album. Now the Jack White-directed video is out.

landscape of the dispossessed FTW

2009-10-08T12:01:00.002-07:00

Herta Müller - "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed" - has won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. You can read an excerpt from her latest book Atemschaukel (or as it's known in English Everything I Own I Carry With Me) here.

sunday short stack

2009-10-04T10:31:00.004-07:00

"The bear must deal with 20 obstacles, and each one of them involves pears, because the bear adores pears." - Sufi proverb

#shortstacksunday was a trending topic on Twitter for a brief time yesterday, and I got all excited. It turns out it was an IHOP promotion. (And just to show how much Apple has permeated our culture/my brain, I initially typed that as iHop.)
Listen to the new Noah & the Whale album at NPR.
The 38 Essential Los Angeles Restaurants (Eater LA)
Flavorwire chooses the defining romance flick of each decade, from Casablanca to When Harry Met Sally.
The Top 10 Most Depressing Books (Abe Books)
I love this song and I am being thwarted by international downloading restrictions.
Ladbrokes has odds up for the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature (to be announced October 8). Amos Oz leads with odds of 4/1.
The 10 Worst Movies of the 2000s (Complex.com)
The Pitchfork Guide to Upcoming Releases: Fall 2009 (but visit largehearted boy's Try It Before You Buy It every week).
While you're over at Pitchfork, you can also check out the recently released Top 20 of the Top 200 Albums of the 2000s.
The Top 10 Worst Movie Accents of All Time (Paste)
Salon has a roundup of Polanski reactions around the web.

a double shot of virginia woolf

2009-10-03T14:04:00.002-07:00

New Scientist excerpts correspondence between Virginia Woolf and science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon. She was a fan. (via io9)

Dear Mr. Stapledon,

I would have thanked you for your book before, but I have been very busy and have only just had time to read it. I don't suppose that I have understood more than a small part - all the same I have understood enough to be greatly interested, and elated too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you - as one does those who reach what one has aimed at.

Many thanks for giving me a copy,
yours sincerely,
Virginia Woolf

to smooth out all traces of that crab-like and crooked path

2009-10-02T15:27:00.002-07:00

Virginia Woolf on criticism and Hemingway:

And here, indeed, we may conveniently pause and sum up what point we have reached in our critical progress. Mr. Hemingway is not an advanced writer in the sense that he is looking at life from a new angle. What he sees is a tolerably familiar sight. Common objects like beer bottles and journalists figure largely in the foreground. But he is a skilled and conscientious writer. He has an aim and makes for it without fear or circumlocution. We have, therefore, to take his measure against somebody of substance, and not merely line him, for form’s sake, beside the indistinct bulk of some ephemeral shape largely stuffed with straw. Reluctantly we reach this decision, for this process of measurement is one of the most difficult of a critic’s tasks. He has to decide which are the most salient points of the book he has just read; to distinguish accurately to what kind they belong, and then, holding them against whatever model is chosen for comparison, to bring out their deficiency or their adequacy.

Recalling The Sun Also Rises, certain scenes rise in memory: the bullfight, the character of the Englishman, Harris; here a little landscape which seems to grow behind the people naturally; here a long, lean phrase which goes curling round a situation like the lash of a whip. Now and again this phrase evokes a character brilliantly, more often a scene. Of character, there is little that remains firmly and solidly elucidated. Something indeed seems wrong with the people. If we place them (the comparison is bad) against Tchekov’s people, they are flat as cardboard. If we place them (the comparison is better) against Maupassant’s people they are crude as a photograph. If we place them (the comparison may be illegitimate) against real people, the people we liken them to are of an unreal type. They are people one may have seen showing off at some café; talking a rapid, high-pitched slang, because slang is the speech of the herd, seemingly much at their ease, and yet if we look at them a little from the shadow not at their ease at all, and, indeed, terribly afraid of being themselves, or they would say things simply in their natural voices. So it would seem that the thing that is faked is character; Mr. Hemingway leans against the flanks of that particular bull after the horns have passed.

the street as platform

2009-09-30T11:32:00.003-07:00

I'm enjoying this meditation by Dan Hill on "The Street as Platform" (via @mkgold).

We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.

sunday short stack

2009-09-27T14:20:00.003-07:00

"Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut."
- Ernest Hemingway

"Dude Watchin' with the Brontës"
The 2009 MacArthur Fellows have been announced.
The Future’s Twelve Worst Haircuts (New York)
Don't miss Aquarium Drunkard's awesome L.A. Burnout compilation.
Peanuts, by Charles Bukowski
The Millions names The Corrections the best book of the millennium (so far).
The Only Two Writing Tips You’ll Ever Need
Information Is Beautiful offers "ideas, issues, knowledge, data – visualized!"
Twenty Ridiculously Literal Album Covers (Paste)
Twenty Weirdest Zombie Movies Ever Made (93 Studios)
Richard Barnes's photos of natural history museum installations are beautiful and creepy.
The hunt is on for Griffith Park's coyotes because one nipped a napping man's foot in an attempt to get fed.

forever stuck in the background

2009-09-26T11:27:00.003-07:00

Miranda July's extra self-portraits for Vice.

legitimate discipline? pastime? empty tank?

2009-09-26T11:20:00.002-07:00

At The American Scholar, William M. Chace examines "The Decline of the English Department."

In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent. Despite last year’s debacle on Wall Street, the humanities have not benefited; students are still wagering that business jobs will be there when the economy recovers.

What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.

duckface with gang signs

2009-09-24T12:17:00.003-07:00

The LA Weekly linked to Stop Making That Duckface! (a.k.a. antiduckface.com), which reminded me of a favorite video from 2006: White Chicks & Gang Signs.

best fiction of the millenium

2009-09-23T11:36:00.005-07:00

The Millions is/are counting down The Best Fiction of the Millenium with an all-star panel. I'll be interested to see the top 5 after today's entry at #6: The Road.

This is perhaps the most shocking aspect of The Road: what remains, what you remember years after you’ve read the book, is the beauty, the compassion, the relentlessness of possibility that burns on the colorless horizon. You understand—much in the way that you first understand poetry, through feeling and syntax and imagery rather than logic—that no matter how desolate the story, it is made bearable through language. There is, the novel asserts, something like triumph in the very telling of a tale, a commitment to the act of witness, and to receive a story is to exalt the imagination, to participate in the process of faith, to accept deliverance. Why else, then, would the father in the novel—when his son is too scared to sleep, when the noise of the world dying its cold death keeps him awake—comfort the boy with narrative? They’ve been stripped of everything except voice, but even on the darkest path words can retain their meaning, their promise of light that will lead lost travelers home.

Update: At least Cloud Atlas is in the top 3 (although nothing else could possibly belong in the #1 position, IMHO).

grounding in what is beautiful

2009-09-22T13:58:00.011-07:00

I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a group of people who were reminiscing about learning cursive. Some people found it an oppressive tyranny on their block printing and still look back upon the lessons with dismay. Others - including myself - saw learning cursive as a doorway to adulthood that had finally been breached. I recalled writing looping lines as a cursive-less child, thinking they somehow conveyed meaning I just couldn't understand yet. My parents were trained as elementary school teachers, and they were both indoctrinated into the penmanship standards of the time. And I mean indoctrinated - to this day, when I receive cards in the mail from either of them, I am unable to tell their handwriting apart. As their daughter, I take great pride in my cursive style, so I read with interest Umberto Eco on the lost art of handwriting:

My parents' handwriting was slightly slanted because they held the sheet at an angle, and their letters were, at least by today's standards, minor works of art. At the time, some – probably those with poor hand- writing – said that fine writing was the art of fools. It's obvious that fine handwriting does not necessarily mean fine intelligence. But it was pleasing to read notes or documents written as they should be.

My generation was schooled in good handwriting, and we spent the first months of elementary school learning to make the strokes of letters. The exercise was later held to be obtuse and repressive but it taught us to keep our wrists steady as we used our pens to form letters rounded and plump on one side and finely drawn on the other. Well, not always – because the inkwells, with which we soiled our desks, notebooks, fingers and clothing, would often produce a foul sludge that stuck to the pen and took 10 minutes of mucky contortions to clean.

sunday short stack

2009-09-20T14:04:00.004-07:00

"Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content." - Paul Valéry

Oh, Kanye!
If you printed the internet...
Dear Old Love...
25 Greatest Cult TV Shows Ever
25 Delectable LA Dining Deals
Flavorwire deconstructs Lady Gaga's VMA ensembles.
The 10 Myths of Riot Grrrl
Top 100 Film Studies Blogs
Watch the trailer for Jason Reitman's Up in the Air.
Watch the new trailer for Where the Wild Things Are.
Awesomely Bad Engagement Photos
The Morning News followed up its 2004 music bloggers roundtable with another this past July.

alphabetary vitals and viscera

2009-09-17T09:09:00.003-07:00

In preparing a new syllabus, I was reminded of this Gary Lutz talk published in The Believer earlier this year: "The Sentence Is a Lonely Place"

...I favored books that you could open to any page and find in every paragraph sentences that had been worked and reworked until their forms and contours and their organizations of sound had about them an air of having been foreordained—as if this combination of words could not be improved upon and had finished readying itself for infinity.

And as I encountered any such sentence, the question I would ask myself in marvelment was: how did this thing come to be what it now is? This was when I started gazing into sentence after sentence and began to discover that there was nothing arbitrary or unwitting or fluky about the shape any sentence had taken and the sound it was releasing into the world.

no coffee, no ads, no sign

2009-09-16T12:16:00.003-07:00

This is an unexpectedly romantic story about a couple in Wisconsin who run a 12-building bookstore.

Via @maudnewton

jim carroll (1950 - 2009)

2009-09-13T15:54:00.007-07:00

Jim Carroll died of a heart attack Friday in Manhattan at age 60.

James Dennis Carroll, the son of a bar owner, spent his childhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he attended Roman Catholic schools. After the family moved to Inwood, at the northern end of Manhattan, he won a basketball scholarship to Trinity. There he discovered a love of writing and began spending time at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the East Village, falling under the spell of Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara.

Still in his teens, he published a limited-edition pamphlet of his poems, “Organic Trains” (1967), which, with its successor, “4 Ups and 1 Down” (1970), won him a cult following that was enhanced when The Paris Review published excerpts from his journals in 1970. “Living at the Movies” (1973), issued by a mainstream publisher, won him both acclaim and a wider audience.

His life was colorful. Hailed by Ginsberg, Berrigan and Jack Kerouac as a powerful new poetic voice, he became a fixture on the downtown scene. After briefly attending Wagner College on Staten Island and Columbia University, he found his way to Andy Warhol’s Factory, where he contributed dialogue for Warhol’s films. Later he worked as a studio assistant for the painter Larry Rivers and lived with Ms. Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, the photographer. He chronicled this frenetic period in “Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-1973.”

sunday short stack

2009-09-13T09:55:00.002-07:00

"You should know more about human nature every year of your life." - Norman Mailer

Back in New York, I was hired to conduct research on Gilbert Rohde, modernist American furniture designer. The resulting book has been published.
This ink calendar is amazing.
Slaughterhouse 90210 (via Jacket Copy)
Died Young, Stayed Pretty is a documentary about the indie-rock poster subculture. Watch the trailer.
Paste nominates the best voices in indie rock.
Take this quiz on starting school in literature.
Joe Wilson is Your Pre-Existing Condition
The National Book Foundation is coming to the end of its daily overview of 60 Years of the National Book Awards.
Simpsons writer takes revenge on Pynchon scholar who doesn't watch TV. (via @maudnewton)
10 Awesome Images That Are Actually Paintings
Michael Schaub on 15 Rich-Ass Authors I’ve Suddenly Decided To Like

The following links have been around for awhile, but they're still good:

let me tell you what I got

2009-09-11T12:54:00.004-07:00

I was delighted to come across this Nina Simone footage from the 1969 Harlem Festival. Click through for more.

me want

2009-09-10T12:12:00.003-07:00

I just bought a nice new pair of speakers, but these are gorgeous.

the silver bullet

2009-09-10T12:06:00.002-07:00

Rosie Schapp goes in search of the Auden martini.

Just as it's tricky to untangle this Auden of legend—dissolute, disheveled, living in squalor that some accounts suggest could rival that of the Collyer brothers—from Auden the masterful poet (and librettist, playwright, and teacher), it's tricky to confirm exactly what Auden's martini preferences were. We know that the martini was sufficiently present in Auden's consciousness to inspire him to write, in taut haiku, this passage of his poem “Symmetries and Asymmetries”:

Could any tiger

Drink martinis, smoke cigars,

And last as we do?

Never mind war, disease, poverty, or the passion that could reduce Auden himself to despair. Here, the measures of our toughness and endurance as a species are the cigar and the martini. Our ability to partake of these pleasures “as we do”—which I take to mean: a great deal—and live longer than so many of our fellow creatures, seems, at least to the speaker of the poem, a miracle.

not the muddy dogtrack

2009-09-09T11:31:00.001-07:00

On the Right Way to Write Criticism:

Stories, we all know, should not be too self-involved. Even in an era as utterly solipsistic as our own, it is not difficult to find warnings against those unrequited literary endeavors that have their nose wedged deep within their navel. If the accusation of solipsism against critics these days is less common than against novelists (perhaps because so many critics still write for captive audiences), solipsism is no less deadly to good criticism than good fiction.

sunday short stack

2009-09-06T09:27:00.006-07:00

"The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer." - Edward R. Murrow

The 46 Essential Rock Reads
Watch the trailer for The Men Who Stare at Goats (Ewan!)
67 Excellent Documentaries Available Through Netflix (via @largeheartedboy)
More abandoned buildings...theaters, this time.
50 Things That Are Being Killed by the Internet
The smells of New York City, by neighborhood
The Museum of Animal Perspectives
The New York Times investigates reading in the subway.
T-Pain reads the classics.

the false permanence of human arrangements

2009-09-05T09:49:00.006-07:00

Click here for more photos of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles from Catherine Corman (with text by Jonathan Lethem).

do good books have to be hard?

2009-09-05T09:35:00.001-07:00

Lev Grossman tries to answer the question:

After all, the discipline of the conventional literary novel is a pretty harsh one. To read one is to enter into a kind of depressed economy, where pleasure must be bought with large quantities of work and patience. The Modernists felt little obligation to entertain their readers. That was just the price you paid for your Joycean epiphany. Conversely they have trained us, Pavlovianly, to associate a crisp, dynamic, exciting plot with supermarket fiction, and cheap thrills, and embarrassment. Plot was the coward's way out, for people who can't deal with the real world. If you're having too much fun, you're doing it wrong.

sunday short stack

2009-08-30T12:19:00.005-07:00

"I take a simple view of life: keep your eyes open and get on with it." - Sir Laurence Olivier

Sophie Tucker is profiled on the occasion of a new anthology of her early recordings.
Must Pop Words
Awhile ago, Mark Leyner laid out what he knows for sure about women. (via @shockozulu)
21 Songs About Booze
Elina Shatkin compiles L.A. restaurants, bars, and chefs on Twitter.
10 Cardboard Boxes That Are Worth More Than Your Soul
Watch the trailer for East of Sunset, a documentary on the Silverlake/Echo Park music scene.
Watch the film The Gits.
The New York Times has a slide show of the Annenberg Community Beach House. (I must have those rhinestone sunglasses.)

kiss of fire

2009-08-28T10:50:00.000-07:00

This is a view of the smoke suffocating Los Angeles today.

52 books in 52 weeks

2009-08-25T12:03:00.011-07:00

24. The Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis

If this book had taken place in California, it would have been perfect for my dissertation on alternative religion. There was something Upton Sinclair-ish about the style, and while I did not find it as uproarious as the blurbs promised, the characters and their intermittent devotion to their sect kept me interested.

25. The Epicure's Lament by Kate Christensen

Why are novels told from the point of view of the misanthropic so damn enjoyable? I could have spent another novel's worth of time with Christensen's narrator. The supporting cast successfully supported, but Hugo Whittier's voice is what kept me from wanting to put the book down. As this was my first Christensen book, I look forward to more.

26. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I almost didn't read past the first few chapters, which is something I practically never do. Zusak has off-putting writerly tics - especially diction that made me check more than once to see if the book had been poorly translated - but the narrator (Death) and the tale of a young German girl during WWII won out in the end. The novel is long, but despite this, it's a quick read.

27. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower

I was certain Tower's debut story collection would not live up to the hype, but it did. Each story opened up an original, singular world that hit just the right notes. Even the one story with a female narrator rang true. Tower's vocal versatility is impressive. More, please.

28. Nobody Move by Denis Johnson

Disappointing. Johnson can be a fantastic writer, and I was often left wondering about his choices in this pulpy thriller. I will say that I was reading it during a particularly nasty bout of insomnia, and the style and action got me through several sleepless nights, so thank you, Mr. Johnson. I'm sorry I didn't like it more.

sunset junction 2009

2009-08-24T21:06:00.008-07:00

Some photos from this year's Sunset Junction...

The Sonics

Wet Platinum Personal Lubricant provided all the trash receptacles.

Woman vs. Bull

Bull wins.

Racist carnival ride

My old neighbor Bob

Dancin' folks were all about Arrested Development.

Built to Spill

sunday short stack

2009-08-23T11:38:00.005-07:00

"He who falls in love with himself will have no rivals." - Benjamin Franklin

Virginia Woolf speaks.
Dissertation Haiku
There, I Fixed It: Epic Kludges + Jury Rigs
Cecil Castellucci on young adult books that rock
Paste's Playlist that Proves Metal Isn't as Inaccessible as You Think
Write to Done offers 176 Tips for Writers.
The Longest Poem in the World
Pitchfork decides upon The Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s.
Watch the trailer for David Lynch-produced, Werner Herzog-directed film My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done.

I will make my character laugh where sensible people think he ought to cry

2009-08-22T16:08:00.003-07:00

I'm finally getting around to reading this profile of the new (Knut) Hamsun Centre in Presteid, Norway.

Børset wants the Hamsun Centre to be a place of reconciliation as well as literary debate, creativity and scholarship, open to everyone. Holl faced up to this debate when he first accepted the commission in 1994. Referring to the current exchange of letters, he says: "I think that all those things, good and bad, can be shown in a museum dedicated to the life of one person. You can include the stains in the exhibitions. Life isn't all clean. It has some messy corners."

several discs or an extensive playlist at least

2009-08-22T15:16:00.001-07:00

Does every relationship have a soundtrack?

"If you bond over the Smiths, for example, that's not good," Neustadter said. "That's a recipe for disaster."

don't be an egomaniac or a chowderhead

2009-08-21T14:21:00.004-07:00

Via @maudnewton, Kurt Vonnegut on "How to Write with Style":

7. Pity the readers

They have to identify thousands of little marks on paper, and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don't really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high school --- twelve long years.

So this discussion must finally acknowledge that our stylistic options as writers are neither numerous nor glamorous, since our readers are bound to be such imperfect artists. Our audience requires us to be sympathetic and patient readers, ever willing to simplify and clarify --- whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightingales.

That is the bad news. The good news is that we Americans are governed under a unique Constitution, which allows us to write whatever we please without fear of punishment. So the most meaningful aspect of our styles, which is what we choose to write about, is utterly unlimited.