Hotel Zero

Many Bothans Have Died to Bring You This Post

OK, I now have about thirty tabs open in Firefox for possible blog entries...

Here's the thing: I really feel torn about this blogging thing—is it an enemy of promise? Or a better way to fill the interstices of the day than MLB08-The Show (which is about all the baseball enjoyment I stand to gain this year, as the Twins look fit to lose 100 games)? I can't go on. I'll go on.

So, tortured as it is, I clear the tabs....

1) Two cents on the "bookshelves" debate: I'm an admitted junkie, but I think McLemee is more-or-less right: book junkies don't really care who sees a book on their shelves, so long as the book is there and is not silently conspiring against its owner. But they do conspire, guerillas against our ignorance, our sloth, and worse: our desire to know more than we experience. Now, a note to the world: will you please conspire to find a way to afford Scott McLemee, say, two fully-funded years to write a book? There are few people from whom I'd rather see a big, fat book.

2) "Where are all the Iraq War novels?" asks Greg Cowles at the New York Times. I answer (one among a number of good ones) in the comments section, but you might also check out the talk I had last fall with Matthew Eck.

3) I'm a fair-weather fan of Dave Eggers (or, more accurately, "Dave Eggers"), but the 826 Valencia project is great. If you're up for a very highly caffeinated talk by Dave on that project, his TED speech is really motivational. If anyone starts a project like this in Minneapolis & happens upon this note, definitely drop me a line.

4) The Valve discovers Alan Shapiro. I met him at Bread Loaf way back in 1996—in addition to being a wonderful poet, he tells really great jokes (though it must be said, not nearly as many or with as much gusto as Richard Bausch). The VQR essay referenced by Amardeep is a must-read: a great essay. Plus: the "form is ideology" thing is not only wrong, but tired (see, too: "Plot as Teleology"): there are just too many things "at work" in a poem (or narrative) for this kind of essentialism to be more than a kind of cheap crib.

5) Litblog Co-op is no more. Sad to hear—but I think it's safe to say that the blogosphere thrives anyway. I do wish that more bloggers would coalesce around group blogs (me, too, frankly, if I could find one that suited me—and vice-versa: we need more blogs as hootenanies, group jams, basement tapes).

6) The Internet: a big group hug. A nice talk by Clay Shirky, but one that should be footnoted with... "Uh, Clay: AT&T is now—and again—the largest phone company in the United States."

7) V.S. Naipaul: because every long list of links should have at least one really CRANKY one. This one in two parts!

8) I have a long list of adds to the NBCC Crit Pix, but John Freeman noticed that Randall Jarrell's Poetry and the Age was noted with surprising frequency. Honestly? It's a great book! I can take or leave his defense of Robert Frost, but his essays on Lowell and W.C. Williams—plus the set-pieces "The Obscurity of the Poet" and "The Age of Criticism"--are worth the price of admission. Here's Jarrell on Williams' poetics:

"So far as organization and metre and rhyme are concerned, he is a sort of homeopath or chiropractor impatient of anything but his own fragment of the truth. Yet it is such a wonderful and individual fragment, an eighth- or quarter-truth so magnificently suited to a special case, that we cannot help feeling that his illusion about form is one of those 'necessary heuristic fictions' of the scientist. If you have gone to the moon in a Fourth of July rocket you built yourself, you can be forgiven for looking askance at Pegasus."

PS: Another collection that I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned yet is Richard Howard's Alone with America.

9) Lynndie England interviewed in Die Stern: just when you had forgotten that for too many of our fine military personnel the "Enlightenment Project" was that weekend the SeeBees strung wire and hooked up a generator for the Conex boxes. From my early reading of excerpts/interviews from Errol Morris's forthcoming effort on Abu Ghraib, it seems like England was played the fool (too bad she couldn't have been Bottom in this—but then: Bottom didn't play in a tragedy).

10) You know how people are always recommending books to you as a classic? Twice in as many weeks, I've actually followed up on this & been pleased to find the books in question really were classics. First, a pal got me to take James Salter's A Sport and a Pastime off the shelves and read it: a masterpiece. Second, Jim Lewis plugged Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo in Slate. I'd never heard of this little gem—but Lewis is right: a brilliant disaster of a book, a wreck that will leave you haunted.

OK, go read now... I must go write. But will post again soon.

Spring Awakenings

So, it's spring. In the shadier parts of the yard in which a foot or so of snow still lies it doesn't look like it (and snow again tonight, from the sounds of it), but a brief walk through the yard tells me it's here:

Creeping Charlie can evidently grow beneath snow, as it seems to have overgrown everything it can between our early snowfall last year and the quick melt over the past week.

Daffodils are peeping 1" green shoots up out of the leaves and mulch.

The strawberry patches are already green beneath the snow and showing new signs of growth.

The oregano and tarragon and thyme are already busy sending up new growth--not to mention the mint, which also seems to have thrived beneath our four month blanket of snow. I even noticed, amidst the dead plants I didn't bother to pluck from the early snow last year that some fallen coriander seeds have begun their second lives as cilantro.

All of which is to say: yes, I'll start blogging again.

Crying for HIS Mother

Overheard on MetaFilter post on Brett Favre:

Jesus was shit on third down and long.

And when you needed a last-second TD to win, do you put him in? Hell no, you call his mother.

New Standards

I'm not going to say anything about these guys except to say:

I totally, totally hope someone decides to yell some day, from the back of the lounge, "Judas!"

... and that Chan Poling's response is to tell the band, "Play fucking soft!"

OK: One more thing... what would a New Standards' version of Shit Hits the Fans be like? Call it a "gepunkenexperiment."

Page Points

Got the new Levenger catalog today (and what does "new" mean for those guys, anyway? this week's?) and saw the item listing for their Page Points—which used to be my favorite Levenger item. They still are, sort of: except that Levenger changed the design of their Page Points and the old (and better) design can be had for 1/2 the price at Lee Valley Tools, where they sell them as book darts. Book darts, very handy:

... and as you can see: you can sure go through a lot of them. If I use 50 on Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (a real possibility—and I'm not quite done), that adds $10 to the "price" of the book. But it would have been $20 if I still shopped for them at Levenger.

Yes, that is a Brodart wrapper on the dust jacket. Most economical way to buy them is direct from Brodart, in the huge rolls. I like the Just-A-Fold III Archival Quality covers. Works out to about $.50 a hardcover. Totally worth it: more than one book has been saved from a spill by a quick lifting of the cover and gentle wiping of the plastic.

OK, that's the enough of this week's installment of "The Frugal Librarian."  Next week: how shopping at Oriental foods wholesalers can really put the zing back into your reading habits!

Real World Bourbon Guide

I do love The New York Times, but every once in a while they write something that's so ridiculously effete or wrong-headedly, you know, New York, that my inner Marine or Fly-Fisherman or cranky, sullen Middle-Westerner gets the best of me and I just shake my head.

Tonight it was reading their article, "Bourbon's Shot at the Big Time." There should just never be a sentence about Bourbon written like the following: "We all noted the wide range of flavors in these bourbons, from creamy chocolate and fruity to grassy and herbaceous." This makes a selection of the United States' only native contribution to the bounties of fermentation sound like a party of cows getting it on at the Christopher Street Piers. Bourbon's chief virtues are its clean palate (you should only drink it one of two ways: straight or with one or two ice cubes and a splash of water) and its slightly-sweet, somewhat oak-tinged flavor. To the degree that a Bourbon is smooth and drinkable on that basis, it's a good Bourbon. It shouldn't taste like an old boot dug up from a peat bog or like someone dumped a dairy pail full of potpourri into the barrel. And yes, like Marine, it's always capitalized (even if, like me, you have a mixed relationship with the subject).

Most importantly: no list of essential Bourbon's should exclude Maker's Mark. That's just wrong.

With the exception of a case of beer or so a month, depending on the season—less in the Winter and more in the Summer—all I drink is Bourbon. And here's what I drink, when I drink it, and why.

1. Maker's Mark. 70% of the time. For price/taste/danger value, this is the Bourbon to keep on your desk. I generally drink from about 10 PM until 2 AM, maybe starting a little sooner and ending either earlier or later depending on what's on the calendar for the following day. I start with a couple of ice cubes, a splash of water, and then just keep the bottle on my desk or end-table until I go to sleep. As such, I sip slowly over a long period of time. There are better tasting Bourbons, but none so reasonably-priced, so good, and so unlikely to leave you feeling like someone crawled inside your brain, dug a trench with an e-tool, and took a healthy shit as Maker's Mark.

2. Knob Creek. 20% of the time. Used to be 100% of the time, because among reasonably-priced Bourbons it's the easy champion all the way around. Unfortunately, it's about 20% more expensive than Maker's Mark and about the same amount stronger. Which means that if you drink it like I do—in slow sips over a more-or-less regulated period of time—you're liable to spend 20% more and get 20% more drunk. Flavor is no small thing, but Knob Creek's advantage over Maker's Mark doesn't exceed the algebra in calculating poorer and more-likely-to-be-hungover.

3. Bulleit. 4% of the time. This is a newer Bourbon on the shelves in Minnesota. It's cheaper by 20% than Maker's Mark, and not bad—but it's not as good. Whenever I buy a bottle (and I buy a bottle of Bourbon every week and have done so for the past ten years, at least), I think, "OK. But I'm picking up Maker's Mark next time."

4. Woodford Reserve. 3% of the time. I think this is about the same price as Maker's Mark. Maybe between Maker's and Knob Creek. It's a very good Bourbon. Maybe I should drink it more, but maybe the bottle is just too well-designed. It's true that Duffy here in Minneapolis designed the whole line of fancy Jim Beam Bourbons (Knob Creek, Basil Hayden's, etcetera) and did a marvelous job... but at least they had the sense to build the brands around Bourbon-looking themes. Woodford Reserve looks like what Kenneth Cole would design if he was designing a bottle of Bourbon.

5. Evan Williams Single Barrel. 3% of the time. This is a pretty good Bourbon, reasonably priced. Along with Bulleit, though, it's one that I always finish with the thought, "Next time, Knob Creek or Maker's Mark."

A few final thoughts on the New York Times piece: Under no circumstances should you buy Jim Beam Black over any of the Bourbons listed above. It's not better and it's not better priced than the Bulleit or the Evan Williams Single Barrel. Also: Bourbon should never be more expensive than Knob Creek. It's an everyday sipping booze, folks. If you want to drop $100 on something, get a rare single malt, a nice Cohiba, and spend a night getting so drunk and stinky that you don't care that you still smell (and feel) like an old boot dug up from a peat bog in the morning.

Update: Just back from liquor store and it appears that Maker's Mark is the same price as Knob Creek (at least for the 750ml—a little less for the 1.75l). The Maker's Mark has gone up. Just in time for the holidays? You wonder. So I bought Knob Creek and am here to report it's still just as strong and just as good as it was the last time. Like I said: the class-act of the non-ridiculous Bourbons. Also, the Woodford Reserve was a few dollars more expensive than the Maker's Mark and Knob Creek. Curious: is there a liquor distributor in the audience? How often do these prices change/how much to they vary?

Bukowski

Jim Harrison has a marvelous review of the new Bukowski Pleasures of the Damned: Poems 1951-1993 in the New York Times this weekend. It's worth reading just for the sake of it:

Even more surprising in this large collection are the number of poems characterized by fragility and delicacy; I’ve been reading Bukowski occasionally for 50 years and had not noted this before, which means I was most likely listening too closely to his critics. Our perceptions of Bukowski, like our perceptions of Kerouac, are muddied by the fact that many of his most ardent fans are nitwits who love him to the exclusion of any of his contemporaries. I would suggest you can appreciate Bukowski with the same brain that loves Wallace Stegner and Gary Snyder.

I've always avoided Bukowski. Don't know why really—some part just not getting around to it and some part about "perceptions...muddied by the fact that many of his most ardent fans are nitwits." Maybe, too, that I grew up around bars and drunks and houses falling down the hills of West Duluth and joined the Marine Corps and went to the University of Minnesota to get away from all that. Still, you are who you are: I remember, as a very little kid visiting my dad's father's place in Hammond, Indiana and seeing—and falling in love with—a gigantic bottle of Jim Beam or Jack Daniels (you could fit an Eisenhower half dollar through the mouth and it must have been two or three feet tall & it was all we could do to turn the thing over an empty all the coins out onto the cold, hard floors in our search for Indianhead and wheat and steel pennies, buffalo nickels and mercury dimes...): anyway, this gigantic bottle that went some ways toward pickling the old man had a life-size set of rubber tits molded around it. For some reason, whenever I think of Bukowski, I think of those rubber tits and booze and scrounging for pennies & their place in that haunted little 800 square foot house in Hammond on a sweltering July day.

So, yes: maybe it's time to go and read some Bukowski. Maybe even pour a couple of shots of Bourbon, too... it's hard to know what is necessary and what isn't—what's still working and what's fucked up beyond recognition—when you're playing in the Theater of the Soul. You shouldn't, really, be playing there—and it shouldn't be theater—but you do and it is. But isn't that part of Bukowski's thing? Or Mailer's or Hemingway's or Hunter S. Thompson's? To make the play inseparable from reality, each a back-door into the other. Of course, in each of those cases the door became locked and contained some pretty bad shit, but maybe that's just another part of the play... and the reality.

re:ma(r)king books

In 1996, Heather McHugh turned me on to Tom Phillips' A Humument [+ book version].

For a long time I thought this was the most fascinating reuse of a text. But maybe I wasn't paying attention? Or it's become incredibly cool—just lately?

...Because:

Last year Eric Lorberer of Rain Taxi turned me on to the work of Rosamond Purcell, specifically: Bookworm.

Then Kottke linked to the work of Thomas Allen early last year [ + more] [ + Chip Kidd's uses].

And yesterday I was blown away by the Boing Boing link to Brian Dettmer's Book Autopsies [+ gallery show].

Finally, lest I forget: there were Douglas Coupland's fantastic (arc)hives, made from chewed up copies of his own work.

Matthew Eck's The Farther Shore

A USA Today reporter called me a couple years ago to ask, “Which of the 300 books published about the Iraq war”—and this was 2005, just two years into the war—“are going to last like Jarhead and Baghdad Express seem destined to do?” Setting aside the assumption that either my book or Tony’s was going to “last,” the question struck me as ridiculous: “No one knows,” would have been the only proper answer to both her assumption and her question. But you know—you have to play the game, right? I mentioned Generation Kill as a likely candidate, but then said there were two big problems inherent in any book coming out so quickly after its author had served in a war (or a journalist had covered it): “Did they know how to write a novel or memoir?” and “Could they get their head around it—all the way around: morally, aesthetically, and so on?”

I looked back at how it had taken Hemingway and Remarque ten years or so to digest World War One and how, with the exception of Mailer—who had won the Story competition while still at Harvard prior to his WWII enlistment, most of what we now consider the classic accounts—especially in memoir—had taken decades: With the Old Breed by Eugene Sledge came out in 1981; Farley Mowat’s And No Birds Sang in 1979; Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier—out in 1967—was almost precocious by comparison.

There are always exceptions, it’s true, but in general: the longer you wait, with war, the more likely you are to have developed your chops as a writer and cleared your head—and prepared your heart—for the journeys you have to take through your experiences & the even more difficult one of preparing it in such a way that others might take that same journey.

Now, along comes Matthew Eck with The Farther Shore & we’re lucky he took his time: he’s delivered a small masterpiece.

Adventures in Paragraphs

It just came in the mail today, so have only browsed, but came across a wonderful little paragraph in Julia Llewellyn Smith's Traveling on the Edge: Journeys in the Footsteps of Graham Greene:

It was difficult to get to know the Vietnamese. For a start there was the language barrier. Vietnamese is a tonal language. Take the word Ba. Pronounced alto it means three. Soprano it means grandfather. Bass—poisoned food, Mezzo-Soprano—any. Heaven knows what Victoria and I ended up asking for every time we ordered the local 333 beer.

For starters, there's a nice rhythm to this paragraph. The exemplary list of difficulties culminates in a joke which is not extended beyond what is necessary. Finally, what is conveyed is not only the fact and nature of Smith's troubles, but a nice kicker about her personality: she is the sort of traveler who not only goes for a beer, but the local beer. All told in just 58 words.

If You Happen to be Looking for HIM...

So I come downstairs to check e-mail after dinner only to hear, not five minutes after the post-meal lull, the quick rumble of little feet on the wood floors above my head—followed by the screams: "Look, Mama! I found God! I found the God that made me! I found him! I found him! I found him in my room!"

It's good to know that if I ever need HIM, he's probably buried beneath a pile of stuffed animals and plastic dolls and stray Lego pieces next to the fish tank.

Joe Sacco at The Walker

Joe Sacco, author of the amazing Palestine (out in a new special edition) and Safe Area Gorazde, is giving a talk at The Walker Art Center tomorrow night. The event is co-hosted by Rain Taxi and starts at 7:00 PM. I'll be going & the event is also being webcast live.

I'll give a report here after the event. In the meantime, there's a good interview with Sacco at the Walker website:

There is a moment in Safe Area Gorazde where Riki continues to sing after he eats breakfast with you and Edin; he’s leaving to join the battle lines. You wrote, “at that moment I came as close as I ever had to bursting into tears in Bosnia”. What was it about that moment that got to you, when you have heard so many brutal stories about the war?

I think the answer to that question should lie in the pages you mentioned and not in any exposition I can make now. Like many other writers or artists, I've fallen into the bad habit of explaining myself in interviews and at talks. I am beginning to understand that the work needs to speak for itself, and that the reader's imagination has to be allowed to put things together. I realize that will be an unsatisfactory answer for people who are unfamiliar with the work, but...

Marlboro Marine

You may remember this iconic photo of a Marine catching a butt during the November 2004 Battle of Fallujah—but its aftermath is another story altogether. L.A. Times photographer Luis Sinco stayed in touch with James Blake Miller after the war. His story of their relationship—and his attempts to reach out to a Marine suffering suicidally severe PTSD—is chronicled in a moving series of print and multimedia essays in the L.A. Times. I think this is the most powerful thing I've seen—in any medium—about the war in Iraq.

The Very Model of AWESOME Blog Post

John Holbo has posted what might be the Platonic ideal of a blog post over at Crooked Timber: on Winsor McCay. Guaranteed to gobble up—but by no means waste—thirty or forty minutes of your day.

Bonus Army and the G.I. Bill

Jim Webb and Chuck Hagel wrote an op-ed for the New York Times yesterday calling for a new, expanded G.I. Bill as comprehensive as that passed at the end of World War Two (and which lasted until the end of Vietnam).

Here's 2:38 on how we got the first one: