File under: Hell yes

For obvious reasons.

negative space is the place

Okay. Go here, select "Comics", and select the first image under "Issue Two".

Hot damn, is all I can say.

We interrupt this broadcast...

No, Bookslut, no!

(I think I can safely speak for all the readers of this blog when I say that tonight's NBA Finals Game 7 makes literature seem insignificant, frivolous and worthless by comparison. Literature has the power to change lives blah blah blah, but there's one thing it doesn't have: Robert motherfucking Horry. Go Spurs.)

So he's right about the finals game, but my poor little heart can't take this news about Bookslut's basketball allegiance. And thus, from the other side of the book-reading, bastketball-watching table, I must say: GO PISTONS.

Back to lit-chat now.

PS. The Timberwolves are really my favorites. And I only really hate the Kings. And Shaq.

Thoughts on Clint Smoker

I dig the writing of Martin Amis quite a lot. Up until the beginning of this month, though, I'd read far more of his nonfiction and criticism than his fiction. (The only novel I'd read? London Fields, recommended by one of my cohorts here.) During my recent trip overseas, I read his recent Yellow Dog, and picked up the British edition of Money in Prague. I'm going to focus on Yellow Dog here, and zero in on one particular aspect of it. Yellow Dog is divided into a number of parallel plotlines, some of which converge as the book progresses.

Am I insane for thinking that the parts of the novel that focus on Clint Smoker, a tabloid journalist, be read as a fairly biting parody/piss-take on the work of Michel Houellebecq?

Clint Smoker is, by a longshot, the least appealing of a number of relatively unsavory major characters in Yellow Dog. He's materialistic, amoral, proudly xenophobic, and unable to maintain any sort of healthy romantic relationship. Over the course of the novel, he begins to court a reader of the newspaper, a young woman who seems equally disillusioned with the current state of gender relations. There is a payoff to all of this, and it's a startlingly bizarre and unexpected one.

Smoker's politics, his jaded attitude towards modern life, his detachment are all reminiscent of the protagonists of Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles and Platform. And yet there's one clear difference: Smoker is ultimately a loathsome figure, while Houellebecq's protagonists are far more complex. But were I to sit and write a parody of one of these characters, I suspect they wouldn't look all that different from Clint Smoker.

The other item in Yellow Dog that sets my mind to wondering whether or not it's a response to Houellebecq comes late in the book, when one character delivers a lengthy speech about the peculiarities of the adult film industry. And -- without getting too explicit, lest this site begin attracting traffic that's not seeking out literary discourse -- this speech singles out one act in particular as rarely existing outside adult films. It's this act for which -- unless my memory's imploding -- Bruno in The Elementary Particles finds himself practically on a quest. And if Amis is implying that this has no place in a realistic novel....

****

I have no idea whether or not Martin Amis has read any of Houellebecq's work. (For the record, I'm a fan of both.) But while reading the Clint Smoker sections of Yellow Dog, I couldn't help but think that Houellebecq was being taken down a notch or two. Perhaps, though, I'm reading too much into things.

My Two Cents...

This thread regarding Young Adult Fiction is just too good not to weight in on.

I can't help but feel like Ann Hulbert is totally "picking a fight that doesn't, by any stretch of the imagination, need to be picked", mainly due to the fact that this sounds more like an issue of a particular teacher assigning books that are clearly aimed at a much younger audience, which I find more disturbing than the controversial content of The Buffalo Tree. I think it's downright criminal to talk down to 11th graders (or any child for that matter), let alone insult their intelligence by making them read the kind of books they should have been reading at say, age 8 or so, depending on reading ability. To wit, Ann Hulbert even alludes to that notion before careening off into an intellectual ditch...

"A book like The Buffalo Tree can't really bear more than reductive analysis, which reveals it to be a studiously packaged pedagogical lesson, a contrived vehicle for an ultimately upbeat psychosocial message that is at odds with the supposedly realistic setting ("At the end of the novel, Sura … has returned home with his spirit and his sanity intact"). But this is just the sort of saccharine simplicity that high-school kids, newly alert to life's ambiguities, are beginning to pride themselves on seeing through. It's hard to imagine an exercise more effectively designed to leave kids with the impression that fiction—in class and out, classic or not—is unlikely to be either very entertaining or enlightening."

What?!
Excuse me Ann, but do you read this stuff back to yourself before it goes out over the net?

I think tearing apart The Buffalo Tree is a pretty pathetic exercise in intellectual masturbation, given the fact that the book is clearly intended for an audience much younger than 17. So yes, the book is strikingly simplistic, and of course 17 year olds will see through that, not to mention the teacher that had the bright idea to assign it in the first place. Way to go Ann. You really dug deep there. Also, just because you didn't find The Buffalo Tree entertaining or enlightening doesn't mean that it isn't for someone that is so far beneath you intellectually. Could you be any more condescending?

As far as exercises that "leave kids with the impression that fiction—in class and out, classic or not— is unlikely to be either very entertaining or enlightening", I can think of one that's far worse than choosing a book that's "too young" for its reader- namely, the perpetuation of the idea that "fluff books" are destroying our Literary tradition, which is what I think Hulbert is alluding to. There just doesn't seem to be any room in Literature for books that get us started as readers. They are constantly derided as not being "adult" enough, but isn't that their exact point? No one dreamed of handing me Ulysses when I was 8, and why would they? How is an 8 year old supposed to even fathom the complexity of that book?

And finally, before I completely lose it - I never worry about the "fluff" that young kids read because I have faith in a young reader's ability to grow beyond the "fluff", and even if they don't - so what? Who made the rule that we all have to be Literary snobs?

The problems with the problem YA fiction article.

Below, Toby referenced the Slate article about young adult "problem novels." Leaving aside the problems (no pun intended) with the limiting, dismissive "problem novel" label, there are still a lot of holes in Hulbert's argument. The librarians and other YA experts on both the long-lived Child-Lit mailing list and the ALA's YALSA-book mailing list (Young Adult Library Services Association) have pointed out, among other things, that while ostensibly discussing YA lit, she references a book that is about a much younger age group; she got the name of the Printz winner wrong (it's How I Live Now); she seems to have read The Buffalo Tree and not a single other YA novel of any ilk; and, in my own opinion, she's picking a fight that doesn't, by any stretch of the imagination, need to be picked. YA books are already a put-upon, much-maligned and grossly underappreciated segment of the ficion population. Sure, there are trite, lessony books that read like after-school specials. There are also striking pieces of writing in honest, astonishing voices that reflect an experience that kids are not likely to read about in Moby Dick or that tired, picked-over standard of high school lit class, Of Mice and Men.

And with that thesis statement, I'm off to do my laundry and think about my argument before I post more. But one last thought before I go: Hulbert says, "The genre, as teachers have discovered with the help of accompanying guides, lends itself to trendy and tidy didacticism." I'm inclined to think that the flaw there is not inherently with the book, but possibly with the teacher who thinks this sort of lesson is a good idea. And I love English teachers.

Too Much Lethem? No such thing.

Roughly 2 years ago I crossed the great divide into Brooklyn, happily forsaking the trappings of an East Village existence for cheaper rent and more space. In the midst of transferring nearly fifty boxes of books, via a dozen or so runs from Alphabet City to Greenpoint in a rented mini-van, I came to realize that I have a serious character flaw- procrastination.

A large percentage of the books I hauled over the mighty Williamsburg Bridge had gone unread, and untouched for at least 2 years. It was a shameful discovery. I had every intention of reading them all, but hadn't for a myriad reasons that were mostly bullshit. I vowed to change my ways, and I actually did for a pretty significant period of time. I was reading about 2 novels a week for quite a while, and then I dropped off. Again, the reasons are more bullshit than truth so I'll spare you.

What does all of this have to do with Jonathan Lethem? Very little I suppose. But, Motherless Brooklyn was one of the titles I actually managed to read before I became a Brooklynite, and it's characters and places moved through my little brain every time I crossed the Williamsburg Bridge on the fateful day I became a Brooklyn dweller. It's a terrific piece of Fiction, and an excellent introduction to Lethem.

Fast forward to yesterday.
I finished Fortress of Solitude, and was immediately sad that it was over, but I had been putting off reading it for months because... because I'm a goddamn procrastinator, that's why. Also because the last Lethem book I read was Girl In Landscape which kind of left me cold, compared to Motherless, and I was worried that I'd be let down. Well, that, and the fact that I'm a terrible procrastinator. Now I'm pissed that I waited so long to read Fortress, especially considering that I had a copy well before its initial on sale date. What can I say? I'm a dolt.

Now, if you don't mind, it's high time I started tearing into those unread books.

Mr. Lethem, the IFC Center, and more...

The IFC Center opened in Greenwich Village last weekend. Their site tells me that Jonathan Lethem is curating a night of films there, but -- as far as I can tell -- doesn't actually provide me with any additional information. Thankfully, this savage art does.

Methinks I'll be heading over to the Center before too long -- out of curiosity, if nothing else, as a onetime employer of mine was involved in the design of the place. However, this isn't an "if nothing else" type of situation -- I've got a pretty major hankerin' to see Me and You and Everyone We Know, and I can't argue with a good art-house theatre. (Although the prospect of crossing a picket line to get in is not a particularly pleasant one).

...the unknown

NinthArt has an interesting article up now on Jonathan Lethem's dip into the waters of writing comics -- in this case, a revamp of 1970s Marvel character Omega The Unknown. (Artist Farel Dalrymple, a fine writer in his own right, is also on board). It should make for an interesting bit of work, though the creator of the character in question is not exactly happy about the whole thing. See the article linked above for details.

following up on that last one..

Slate's offering up Ann Hulbert's interesting take on the Buffalo Tree controversy, and "problem" young-adult novels in general. The article makes an interesting point. Based on my own experience, by my junior year in high school, if not before, the books we were reading were all firmly in the "adult" camp. (Hell, our junior year class project involved reading three novels by one author and seeking out specific themes in them. For the record: my project was on Tom Robbins). Any educational theoreticians want to take a crack at some of the questions that this debate poses?

"I had to read this junk."

Small Pennsylvania town pitches a fit over Adam Rapp's The Buffalo Tree.

These parents want reading lists of everything assigned to their children, complete with summaries and notes on possibly objectionable content.

I feel a little queasy. This is hardly unusual, but the things that caught my eye here were the district superintendent's willingness to interpret the ban as loosely as possible (keep the book available, just don't teach it) and the article's slant toward connecting this issue to the rise of the evangelical side of the right wing:

Judith Krug, director of the library association's office for intellectual freedom, attributed the most recent spike to the empowerment of conservatives in general and to the re-election of President Bush in particular. The same thing happened 25 years ago, she said. "In 1980, we were dealing with an average of 300 or so challenges a year, and then Reagan was elected," she said. "And challenges went to 900 or 1,000 a year."

I love librarians.

***

I've read a lot in the last few weeks. I'd link to my most recent review, but it's not very good, so I'll spare you. Apparently, though, I'm just lazy. Like all habits, I need to get in the swing of posting.