Hotel Zero

F. Kafka, Everyman

As I pack for a red-eye to LAX for a 4th of July at the world's second-most-spectacular ersatz Neuschwanstein Castle with my three  year-old, I say only: read THIS.

Meanwhile, I ask the Commander in Chief: "Is there a hole I can get sick in?"

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!

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.

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...

Norman Mailer, R.I.P.

Annoying, full of shit, and absolutely irreplaceable: Norman Mailer is dead at age 84. He lacked Hemingway's "built-in, shock-proof bullshit detector" (but then, so did Hemingway at times), but no one since has had Hemingway's early fearlessness and constant ambition. Bellow was the greater genius by far, Roth is his own unruly animal, and hundreds have written better novels and journalism—but none with the dedication, flair and outsized personality (which sometimes achieved outsized results) of Mailer.

Brother Can You Spare a Comment?

OK, quick thread-rescue/reminder/bleg.

1) I'll be closing comments on the kottke.org interviews on The State We're In at the end of this week. If you've got something to say (or, in this guy's case, mock) this is your last chance.

2) Only one person in running for the Hotel Zero Godard/Breathless give-away: comment for your chance to win.

3) Really: one of the 5,000 or so of you who've been here in the past couple weeks must have at least one favorite political book not on my list. Would be great if there were, oh, I don't know: two of you?

Carver-Lish Revisited, Revisited

When I posted about the NYT story on Tess Gallagher's latest move in the Carver-Lish legacy chess match, Michael Hemmingson was kind enough to e-mail me to say that he had recently sold a book on Lish and was working on a biography of Carver. I asked him if he'd be willing to do a short interview on the matter and I'm happy that he said, "Yes."

Hemmingson is the author of 43 books, including several acclaimed novels, and studies of Bukowski, Carver, and Vollmann.  His study of Lish will be published by Taylor & Francis in 2009. His first produced screenplay, The Watermelon, will be released by LightSong Films and Hand Picked Films in 2008. Check out a trailer here--and Hemmingson's blog about the two-year process from script to production here.