The Rake Magazine

Author: Max Ross

  • Judging a Book by its (Back) Cover

    I’ve been taught to trust blurbs about as far as I can throw them, which is roughly about as far as I can throw a book, which is not very far, because I am quite weak, my muscles haveing been described as sauce-like. In fact, the word blurb seems related, if only alliteratively, to the word blog – maybe both should be regarded with about the same amount of seriousness.

    "Long ago," writes writer Stephen Dubner in his "Freakonomics" blog, "I used to think [blurbs] mattered a lot. Then I changed my mind, thinking that blurbs don’t signal much about the quality of the book, but at least they signal something about the quality of the author’s friends or acquaintances who were willing to blurb the book." He goes on to describe a situation where a book’s editor offered to write a blurb for Dubner, and simply attach his name to it, for his convenience. (The link goes to that article.)

    Rob Walker, who writes for the Times Magazine, states in an addendum to the "Freakonomics" piece that "the real audience for blurbs isn’t really consumers at all – it’s bookstore and particularly chain bookstore buyers" who want the imprimatur or well-known artists to hopefully help sell the name of lesser-known artists.

    Fair enough, but I still don’t like the idea that I’m buying my books from people who stock their shelves based on anything but a novel’s actual merit. (Go used or go home, baby.)

    Despite the apparently widespread knowledge that blurbs are basically useless, they appear on the back of every book, and I can’t for the life of me ignore them. Sometimes they’ll even dissuade me from buying a novel.

    There are books that rely on their blurbs: Anything by James Frey, at this point.

    Books that self-consciously make fun of the blurbing tradition (from Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius):

    "This is a blurb. It conveys no information about the book whatsoever, no useful account of its contents, nor any serious comment as to its qualities. Authors like getting blurbs because they indicate that the author is an amiable and well-connected fellow; other authors like giving blurbs because it’s free advertising for their own work. Editors and publicists like blurbs because blurbs help legitimize their own generally rather timid publishing decisions. You, the reader, are not exactly ill-served by this process – it is, at worst, a harmless display of vanity and insecurity – but if you’re looking for a reason to buy and read this book, you’re better off relying on the advice of other readers whose taste you share, or what minimal sense of the writing herein you can glean by standing here and skimming through the pages." – Jim Lewis

    And books for which blurbs are superfluous:

    "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically" – this quote, that is, John Updike’s, is affixed to the back of every Vintage Paperback edition of Nabokov’s books.

    Hot New Authors are often tapped, it seems, to blurb books by Slightly Less Hot New Authors. In the last couple years, I’ve been seeing current NYTimes darling Gary Shteyngart’s name on the back of what seems like every contemporary novel. Shteyngart’s own work (The Russian Debutantes Handbook, Absurdistan) might be described as ‘exuberant,’ and his blurbs, likewise, are notable for their exclamation points. The guy practically redefines hyperbole. What’s interesting is, it seems he’s wholly unaccountable for his opinions – what’s most important is getting Shteyn’s name on that back cover, not what he says. While emphatic, his blurbs are also generic. And some of the books he blurbs are actually kind of mediocre (according to other critics, not just me).

    Just a couple examples (I don’t want to name the actual books, because some of them are in fact good):

    "[ ] can’t write a boring sentence, and the English language is the richer for it."

    "[ ] has written a novel that is – sentence by sentence, idea for idea – peerlessly brilliant. Here is a supreme, mature novelist at the height of his powers. Take me to the hospital. My jaw has dropped."

    So I was delighted to find that someone shares my opinion.

    "I finished Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land which Gary Shteyngart calls ‘genius,’ " writes Stephen Schenkenberg, who edits St Louis Magazine. "Um, maybe a bit much. I really liked Shteyngart’s first novel — even bought it for my cousin in the X-mas gift swap — and he was very funny and lively and smart on ‘Fresh Air’; but how you can call Lipsyte’s book ‘genius’ is beyond me."

    (Finding corroboration about irksome blurbers is hard to do!)

    Completely ripping off Mr. Schenkenberg, and also in homage to him, here’s a little activity. I’ve got some blurbs, with links to the actual books. See if you can guess which book each blurb describes. Wheeee!

    "One is never far from a phrase that feels so acute and so true that it seems to be expressing an essential truth of the soul hewn out of primordial psychological matter."
    – the London Times

    "A page-turner in the most expansive sense of the word: Its gripping plot pushes readers forward…[ ] is a reader’s writer, with sentences so cozy they’ll wrap you up and kiss you goodnight." – The Chicago Tribune

    And finally, one book, two quotes:

    "One of the few books I have been able to read in recent years." – William Burroughs

    "A terrifying and marvelous book." – Roald Dahl

  • Muja Messiah's Debut Album

    "Don’t wait for the critics to jump on this dude before you start giving it up," says everybody’s favorite Albino rhymer, Brother Ali. He’s speaking about Muja Messiah, the latest local rapper to make a big splash in the national underground hip-hop scene. "Muja is the shit. The man is right with his."

    So this is your last chance to go grab (download…) Muja’s debut album Thee Adventures of a B-Boy D-Boy and enjoy it for yourself, before I ruin it with tempered, analytic praise.

    Ready, go. Now come back. We can have a nice discourse in the comments section below. We will agree with each other, all of us emphasizing each other’s opinions in a positive, supporting manner. Which happens.

    Okay. Let’s start with Bro Ali’s statement that "Muja is the shit." If being ‘the shit’ – and making an album that is also ‘the shit’ – necessitates putting forth an unbroken series of successful songs, then indeed there’s something gorgeous about Muja Messiah. Thee Adventures cycles through a medley of styles. The production ranges from the jazzy slow jam to the upbeat to the downright krunked, the rhymes from egotistical to introspective. And Muja effortlessly navigates from track to track, rapping convincingly over the varied beats – it’s not just like he wrote a rhyme and a producer made a beat and they synced them up and smashed them together; rather his flows seem actually to be linked with the rhythms.

    Overall, his style has a bit more of an edge than most Minnesotan rappers’. Just when I thought the local scene was as saturated as it could possibly be – this is a small city to have as many big names as we do – Muja is able to inject it with something that, if not completely new, is at least new to us.

    Though he expertly tackles the self-conscious and political rhymes that have filled several albums on the Rhymesayers label, Muja Messiah (whose album is put out by Black Corners) is most on point when he’s rapping about his life on the streets of North Minneapolis. (Not to say other rappers here haven’t dabbled in this milieu; it’s just that, to my mind, Muja is so far the most noteworthy.)

    On "What’s This World Coming To" (which features Slug) he’s all like:

    "I was conceived in a mustard green Cutlass Supreme/
    lucky me at the time I was the youngest of three/
    til my big sister drowned in a river/
    years later my brother got gunned down and they never found the killer."

    As this verse shows, he handles his personal history with frankness and even a little bit of humor. It’s his trademark mixture, and proves to be engaging on every track. One gets a sense that Muja is rapping about some important, personal issues, but where applicable he’s able to see the absurdity of his situations. I think that might be called scope.

    What’s maybe most endearing, though, is an inferiority complex that hovers over the album, in regards to street credibility. While Muja Messiah raps about the toughness of his childhood, the murder victims he knows (including his brother), and his absent dad – this is the stuff of Tupac, let’s remember – he still seems to need to validate himself and the city he grew up in.

    On the Lil’ Jon-inspired "Get Fresh," he’s all like:

    "Niggaz backstabbin’ my city
    like it’s all backpackin’ and hippy
    like it ain’t crackin’ in my city
    We don’t be rappin’ about rappin’
    We rap about what be happenin’
    in the streets."

    Likewise, Thee Adventures features guest verses from Black Thought (The Roots), Slug, and I-Self Devine; his beats are produced by guys that have worked with Eminem, Nas, and De La Soul; and yet it seems like Muja’s ego still needs some propping up. It’s sweet, kind of. Coming from the state that labors to make sure everyone knows that Bob Dylan was born here, the self-conscious ego seems a very Minnesotan thing. The overall effect works in Muja’s favor: Because of its insecurities, his thuggish style of rap is accessible even to guys like me.

    At the end of the day, he can’t ignore the fact that Kenwood and Linden Hills are as much a part of his city as any other neighborhood. Seeing as how he’s the wordsmith here, it’s not surprising that he puts it best himself:

    "I’m from a pasture where the grass is greener
    started as a rapper and emerged as a leader…
    I’m down with Black Thought
    I’m down with Black Blondie…
    I am the Black Honkie."

     

    **CD release party Sunday, July 27 at First Avenue**

  • All-Star Break Books Edition

    Skol, baby.

    The Twins’ Justin Morneau fairly dominated all-star weekend, first winning the Home Run Derby (even if Josh Hamilton broke the record for most dingers in a single round), and then, in the bottom of the 15th inning of the All-Star Game, he tagged up on a sacrifice fly to right and hustled his buns to score the winning run, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief because they could finally go to bed.

    Skol.

    The duration of the game was four hours, and fifty minutes. The two main developments as the innings grew later were that the New York fans’ resentment against the Red Sox players lessened, and it became increasingly apparent that Joe Buck is a better salesman than play-by-play announcer. ("This National League line-up is brought to you by Taco Bell…Think outside the bun…Up first…")

    If you include the time spent on announcing the All-Stars, the starting line-ups, the hall-of-famers, and the national anthem, the broadcast lasted well over six hours. I thought to myself, ‘I could’ve read a book.’

    Though I suppose that’s not so different from normal. And it’s not necessarily an impulse I act on as often as I might suggest. But in this specific case, it got me thinking about some of the great novels that have been written about baseball.

    I’m pretty sure, actually, that my initial interest in reading may have been helped along by Mark Harris’ quartet of baseball books, narrated by Henry Wiggins, pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths: Bang the Drum Slowly, The Southpaw, A Ticket for a Seamstitch, and It Looked Like For Ever. I was a fairly prolific baseball card collector, and of course regarded Kirby Puckett and Kent Hrbek as heroes. Harris’ novels were the first glimpses I had into the sort of dirty underside of baseball (pre-steroids, probably). His characters are always stuck in cramped trains or seedy hotel rooms, if I remember correctly. Not surprisingly, I was a lousy ballplayer, and it wasn’t long before I realized that I’d have an easier time accessing the game through prose than through my (lack of) muscles.

    This year, there are a few notable baseball books that have been spawned right here in Minnesota.

    First off, you’ve got Peter Schilling’s The End of Baseball (came out in April), in which a team that ‘almost was’ becomes real. Set in 1944, the wily promoter Bill Veeck hustles his way into owning the Philadelphia Athletics, and in hopes of bringing home the pennant he gets rid of all the team’s white players and recruits the stars of the Negro League. The cast of characters includes Walter Winchell, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Campenella, and Satchell Paige. From the Baltimore Sun: "To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, some baseball novels see things as they are and ask why; Peter Schilling Jr.’s brilliantly conceived The End of Baseball sees things that weren’t and imagines what could have been. The best baseball novel so far this century."

    Then, in a couple months, you can check out hometown boy Bill Meissner’s Spirits in the Grass. From the flap: "In Spirits in the Grass we meet Luke Tanner, a thirty-something baseball player helping to build a new baseball field in his beloved hometown of Clearwater, Wisconsin. Luke looks forward to trying out for the local amateur team as soon as possible. His chance discovery of a small bone fragment on the field sets in motion a series of events and discoveries that will involve his neighbors, local politicians, and the nearby Native American reservation." Meissner’s earlier collection, Hitting into the Wind can tide you over until then.

    What else?
    Of course there’s Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (that link goes to a 1952 review of the book), about the prodigious Roy Hobbs whose career is sidetracked first by a crazed fan, and then by disease. I heard a story that when Malamud saw the film version – starring Robert Redford – for the first time, he sat in the theater as the credits rolled, and cried because they’d ruined his book. If you read it, you’ll understand why. (Hobbs is also used as an entity in some Peanuts strips.)

    Then there’s Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, concerning the Patriot League’s Ruppert Mundys – the only homeless big-league ball team in American history. The players include Gil Gamesh, "the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire," and John Baal, the Babe Ruth of the Big House, who never hit a home run while sober.

    Those are the ones that ring my bells. Or something. Here is a more comprehensive list that’s worth checking out. And as always, feel free to add your own favorites below.

    Just for good measure: Skol.

  • An Existential Miscommunication

    I live over by Kenwood Elementary School…and steal their wireless Internet signal from time to time…somewhat by accident…Anyway, they’ve been doing a lot of construction on the school this summer. Right now they’re working on replacing the windows, I think, and there’s a big yellow cherry picker that goes up and down the side of the building, and a guy who takes out the old frames and puts in the new ones and then, I imagine, eventually washes the panes.

    I’ve been watching this for a few days now, and then read this poem by Stephen Dunn, from his Pulitzer-winning collection Different Hours, which shares the same central image. Buy it here. His work, to my mind, is filled with big themes, and tempered descriptions of them. Like all fantastic poets, he has a knack for pointing out those things we all know about, but don’t necessarily notice until someone explains how amazing they are. Different Hours largely has a somber tone to it, which Dunn explains, somewhat coyly, is the result of his being an optimist (because he always expects good things to happen, he’s often let down).

    Better than I’m able to set a background for the poem, perhaps the poet himself, will explain a bit about his work.

    The following is taken from an interview with Guernica:

    Dunn: But the world is always somewhat vicious. I take that as a given, but at various times in various circumstances that fact will be no more than a shadow or an echo behind the poem. Other times it will be more manifest. I try to write myself into articulations of half-felt, half-known feelings, without program. I’m always working toward getting my world and, hopefully, the world outside of me into a version that makes sense of it. Viciousness requires the same precision as love does.

    And this is from an interview with Nightsun, Frostburg State University’s litmag.

    Dunn: The notion of restraint and extravagance has interested me for a while, I think especially because I tend to be someone who is temperamentally restrained. The great danger for somebody like me is that he might employ restraint out of habit, as opposed to employing it to heighten effects. I think restraint matters when it is harnessing something of size, something a little uncontrollable, something wild. I use the example of Fred Astaire, who seemed to me and to everybody, always under control. He was really using his skill to regulate emotion and to keep out the extra gestures that make art feel false.
    I like the poets of extravagance too. I love Whitman, I love Ginsberg’s "Howl," but I’m just not that kind of expansive poet.

     

    So here it is:

    "Men in the Sky"

    Leaves are falling as the telephone men
    ascend to the tops of poles.
    They are riding a magic long-armed
    machine. No need anymore to climb.
    To speak through wires is as natural now
    as falling leaves, natural as men in the sky.
    The telephone men in the cupped palm
    of the long arm are reducing the static,
    helping me reach far out of town.
    They are beautiful in their hard orange
    plumage. Finches and cardinals: mere birds
    by comparison, unchangeable, nervous.
    It’s a shame the men must come down.
    I stood next to them at the 7-Eleven
    at lunch break, heard them order ham
    and cheese on a hard roll, Dr. pepper.
    I saw them get out of their trucks
    and spit. Now the leaves graze
    their shoulders suddenly more golden
    for having touched them. My phone
    is ringing. It’s one of the telephone men,
    the highest, the one with a sufficiency
    of tools around his waist, calling to see
    if everything’s all right. Everything isn’t.

  • Lolita Barbies!

    For all this talk about the decline of literary reading in America, there’s really been very little offered in the way of solution. As per usual, I’m probably unqualified to be writing this (caveats seem to have worked for Britt; maybe they will for me too), but I think I have an idea that might possibly save the book world: Better advertising. At the very least, it’s worth a shot.

    I think it’s time that publishing houses – Penguin, Random House, Harcourt, et al – take seriously the notion that the American entertainment economy is saturated and competitive (duh…) and therefore that books shouldn’t be competing against other books; rather books as a medium should be competing against movies as a medium, or music, or porn, or anything else that might take time away from reading.

    If this is already their mindset – many of them are incorporated, after all – then they need to pull their heads out of their asses and be more effective. Where do I see advertisements for books? In the New Yorker, in the New York Times Book Review, in Harper’s, in literary journals – places readers already are. And while there’s something to be said for targeting your audience, in order to thrive, I would think you need to attract some new customers.

    According to tradition, a potential convert to Judaism is supposed to be turned away by a rabbi – three times. If that person persists in his effort to convert after the third rejection, he is considered serious enough about the faith, finally, to be allowed in. The publishing world seems to make their barriers similarly ridiculously high; advertising, like religion, is a means to access mass amounts of people, but literary advertising seems to confine itself only to people already of the faith, so to speak. In Judaism, we bitch about intermarriage diluting and possibly annihilating the religion. Likewise, the publishing world bitches about the reallocation of words from the well-regarded print periodicals to poorly edited blogs (hi!).

     

    But neither Judaism nor literature, it seems, proactively recruit fresh constituents. Is it elitism? Is reading something so holy that it shouldn’t need to be marketed? Something so inherently valuable that people should flock to it of their own accord, and any need for a commercial here and there is preposterous? Yes. But then there’s reality to deal with.

    Right now the most vibrant literary events in Minneapolis are the Books and Bars series, Talking Volumes, Talk of the Stacks, and the existence of The Loft. (Doubtless there’s some great stuff I’m leaving out, like the reading series at Spoon River … feel free to PR and big-up yourself in the comments section below, and I’ll throw in a hyperlink if you don’t. I’m making a different point, though … right … about … now:) As far as I know, these goings-on are funded by independent bookstores, bars, the library system, and MPR – not by Random House, Penguin, and so on.

    Meanwhile, the most effective advertising for books is done, I think, by Amazon, which tells me what books I might like, based on what books I’ve previously bought. Again, the publishing houses aren’t behind this, I don’t think – rather it’s simply Amazon’s self-interest in promoting sales.

    Furthermore, it seems publishers are incompetent with the money they actually have for marketing. Last night, best-selling author/sometimes-musician Darin Strauss was in town to promote his new novel, More Than It Hurts You. About fifteen people showed up at the Galleria Barnes & Noble to hear him speak. Maybe five of them, he estimated, bought his book –– totaling roughly $125 for penguin, minus B&N’s take, minus cost of printing, etc. This, Strauss said, was a fairly typical turn-out for his current tour. He explained that the real intent of an author tour is to generate publicity, via interviews and reviews on local radio stations and in local newspapers.

    But, aside from this amazing piece of writing, Strauss had nothing lined up in the Twin Cities. Neither the Strib nor the Pioneer Press has yet run a review of the book, nor did he get on the radio. I think City Pages mentioned he was coming in a blurb on their A-List.

    And yet he was here, which means Penguin (his publisher) shelled out for his flight, his hotel, and a hired car to take him to his reading. That’s got to be getting close to $600, if not more. There are about twenty stops on his tour. This is money that could be spent buying print or radio or television or (gasp) movie preview slots to advertise, which one hopes could generate more than five book sales.

    So – and feel free to amend – a few thoughts on what publishing companies can do to help save books in the modern world, without resorting to E-Books, God willing:

    – Take a big chunk of the money allotted for author tours (except in cities guaranteed to get a big audience draw) and spend it on advertising.

    – In the short term, forget specific authors and books, and do a good campaign promoting books in general, with a heavy, heavy emphasis on literary novels by current authors.

    – Advertise in ways that will draw new readers. (Oprah’s great for having her book club, but it’s a little scary that she’s the pre-eminent bookseller of our times.) This may take some thought. Product placement? We’re all suckers for it, anyway. So why not?

    – Merchandising! On The Road – the Toilet Paper Scroll. Are you telling me you couldn’t have a Holden Caulfield action figure, which actually broods? A Lolita doll? Or less perverse toys thereof?

    – A rough idea: Fuck hardcovers! I’m not sure what their function is anymore, except to make people not buy books. Fairly frequently I hear someone browsing the new releases section at Magers and Quinn and hear, "Oh, I’ll just wait until it’s in paperback." Yeah, buddy – I bet you will. I’m not sure this testing-of-the-market to see if it justifies a paperback run is useful anymore. With the advances of
    immediate and on-demand publishing, why not just spend an extra nickel on a more-endurable paperback to begin with (Penguin Classics-type quality), and use the extra cash on, I don’t know, more advertising.

    – Community involvement. If Target can sponsor free museum days, Random House can sponsor outreach programs, too. According to me, at least.
    Check this: Even B&N and Borders are struggling now in the giant commercial suction cup that is the Internet. The dominant bookstores soon might be those that people feel personal connections to. So maybe instead of paying to put shitty cardboard displays with books We’ve All Been Meaning To Read up front, publishers should finance Independent Bookstore Community Involvement Stuff. What about a tutoring program inside a bookstore? Kids could get help with their English homework for free and get comfy with the environment of must and dust. Booksellers and publishers would be seen as giving back to their communities (more than they already do simply by peddling great books). If the program were two days a week for two hours, you could pay one employee (if volunteers are unavailable) probably less than $10,000 a year. Would other infrastructure be needed? I’m sure English teachers would promote it to parents. Just a thought.

    One last cheap tie-in to religion: Without playing the advertising game, reading looks to be going the way of Reform Judaism – something its practitioners respect, and probably hope to pass on to their children, but which is really only observed once or twice a year.

  • The world is full of downers…which is maybe why Gonzo took so many uppers

    This is one of those rare mornings where The New York Times‘ homepage isn’t dominated by a picture of Obama or McCain. So I figured I might as well bring the election back into forefront…of this blog about books…oy. The real reason I’m posting this can be found after the poem.

    The following is lifted from Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, which is Hunter S. Thompson’s take on the 1972 presidential election, written for Rolling Stone.

    What’s striking to me is how many parallels there seem to be between the 1972 cycle and this year’s. The first chapters of Fear and Loathing focus intently on the youth vote, the minority vote, the need for change, and the need for hope. Spooooooooky…

    Just an additional quote fro the book that I liked:
    "The nut of the problem," Thompson wrote, "is that covering this presidential campaign is so fucking dull that it’s just barely tolerable…and the only thing worse than going out on the campaign trail and getting hauled around in a booze-frenzy from one speech to another is having to come back to Washington and write about it."

    Anyway, here’s the semi-poem.

    "28 newspapers"

    This world is full of downers, but where is the word to describe
    the feeling you get when you come back tired and crazy from a week on the road
    to find twenty-eight fat newspapers on the desk:
    seven Washington Posts, seven Washington Stars,
    seven New York Times, six Wall Street Journals,
    and one Suck…
    to be read, marked, clipped, filed, correlated…
    and then chopped, burned, mashed, and finally hurled out in the street
    to freak the neighbors.

    After two or three weeks of this madness,
    you begin to feel As One
    with the man who said, "No news is good news."
    In twenty-eight papers, only the rarest kind of luck
    will turn up more than two or three articles of any interests…
    but even then the interest items are usually buried deep
    around paragraph 16 on the jump (or "Cont. on…") page….

    The Post will have a story about Muskie making a speech in Iowa.
    The Star will say the same thing,
    and the Journal will say nothing at all.
    But the Times might have enough room on the jump page to include a line or so that says something like:
    "When he finished his speech, Muskie burst into tears and seized his campaing manager by the side of the neck. They grappled briefly, but the struggle was kicked apart by and oriental woman who seemed to be in control."

    Now that’s good journalism.
    Totally objective; very active and straight to the point.
    But we need to know more.
    Who was that woman?
    Why did they fight?
    Where was Muskie Taken?
    What was he saying when the microphone broke?

    If Colin Covert is allowed to write a 700+-word ‘review’ about Gonzo:The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, the documentary now showing at the Lagoon, which has less than fifty words of criticism in it (and therefore about 650 words of obvious biography and navel-gazing), then I figured I’m allowed to take a minute and post one of Thompson’s poems.

    And yes, I take most of my journalistic cues from Strib movie reviewer Colin Covert.

    Covert writes: "Thompson burst onto the national scene at 26 with "Hell’s Angels," [sic] his account of a year spent on the road with the outlaw motorcycle gang. It was vivid traditional reporting and became a bestseller, winning the young author a spot on ‘What’s My Line?’ But it was his invention of ‘gonzo journalism,’ mixing solid factual research and epic flights of fantasy, that won him a place in pop culture history. His writing was daring and adventurous; it took big chances and made important arguments in relentlessly funny ways."

    But he never tells us whether the film is effective in depicting this or not. We’re told that it’s a ‘celebratory documentary,’ and that because of his ‘comfort in the spotlight, [Thompson] made great pictures.’ But that’s all.

    It’s really more like an essay that’s occasioned by the film, except the essay has nothing to say about Thompson that even casual readers can’t figure out by reading one sentence from the guy.

    For those interested, here’s a more comprehensive point-by-point review of the flick.

     

  • A Rakish Interview with Darin Strauss — Part II

    Part II (To see the first part of this interview, click here)

    "If you don’t belong to a book club," Ron Charles wrote in The Washington Post last week, "Darin Strauss’s bitter and brilliant new novel is reason enough to start one." The novel – Strauss’s third – marks a departure from the author’s previous books, both of which were (somewhat incidentally) historical fiction. More Than It Hurts You sets us in über-modern Long Island, a place where George Clooney, Austin Powers, and "Everybody Loves Raymond" all figure into the collective consciousness (while Fitzgerald and Tolstoy hide in the shadows).

     

    The book finds its thematic center in a rare disease called Munchausen by proxy, in which a mother will harm her child to get attention forherself. Playing out the drama are three principal characters: Dori Goldin, the young mother accused of Munchausen; her unknowing husband Josh; and Dr. Darlene Stokes, an African American physician who suspects foul play when Dori brings her infant into the ER.

     

    As their lives tangle in the courtroom and in the press, morals are trumped by flashy headlines, and relationships become so clouded that Josh doesn’t know whether to trust the doctor or his wife. Before long, More Than It Hurts You transcends its storyline, as the syndrome becomes symptomatic of something larger – America’s masochistic obsession with attention in general, and the ramifications thereof.

    The Rake

    With all its references to pop culture, it’s clear you were aiming for a contemporary feel in this novel. Another aspect that makes it feel so contemporary is its use of dialect. Was this something you knew was vital to making the book current?

    Strauss

    I was really conscious with the Intelligent Muhammed stuff [Darlene Stokes’s father – a newly released ex-convict]. I wanted it to be authentic, but it’s always risky being a white guy writing a black guy’s voice. You don’t want to sound like a caricature. Actually I listened to a lot of hip-hop, and I went down to where the ex-cons are dropped off. It’s actually a place, where if you don’t have anyone to pick you up from jail, that’s where you go.

    The Rake

    Did your students unwittingly help out with some of the dialogue?

     

    Strauss

    Teaching definitely helps with keeping your ear fresh. There’s one point in the hospital, in the first chapter, where Josh comes across an email, and that comes I think from emails I get from my students.

     

    [The email goes like this: "what up kid im so sorry im not around for you but U will beat it lookemia is "BULLSHIT" I am here with Marisa who thinks I am SO into nice walks on the beach under the sunset lol"]

     

    But a lot of the speech came from a friend of mine who’sactually in ad sales, and had the job that Josh had. I was able to watch him interact, and see how that happened. Also I read a lot of Don Delillo – I think he has modern-speak down.

     

    The Rake

    Is listening to your characters talk a way for you to understand them?

     

    Strauss

    Yeah, going back, with Chang and Eng I was thinking, ‘How am I going to make characters from men that are so different from me?’ I thought their speech might be a decent way to do it. Then I found out neither spoke English, though, so that wasn’t going to help me. I had the thought that I should make one speak better than the other. Because if one speaks better, that can mean something: He’s more studious; he’s more serious. And so on. Pretty soon character begins to emerge.

     

    The Rake

    A book I hope you’ll riff on is Anna Karenina. You use the word ‘Happiness’ in the first sentence of the More Than It Hurts You, and happiness/unhappiness is a theme that recurs throughout the novel, which seems to be a sort of tip-of-the-cap to Tolstoy.

     

    Strauss

    Definitely I had that book in mind. I wanted Josh to be a bit like Stepan Oblonsky – just a very likeable guy, despite his infidelities.

     

    James Woods argues that Tolstoy’s characters are all symbolic of one thing, all have one primary element to their natures, but then they’ll often surprise themselves by going against that. I wanted to create Darlene in the same way. The way she walks gives her a false impression of weight. I tried to make her multi-dimensional by having her surprise us, like when she’s trying to figure out how to tell Leo she loves him, which is not very natural for her. Heaviness is her norm, but she tries to break through it. But then she always falls back into herself. Actually I was thinking of a bunchof Tolstoy books. The flashback of Darlene’s life is based on something from The Death of Ivan Ilyanich.

    The Rake

    You’ve said your method for dealing with historical fiction is to do as much writing with as little research as possible, and then when you’re done to go back and make sure the facts match. Were you able to use the same tactic here, with all the hospital content?

     

    Strauss

    I blew it in this. With Chang and Eng, I wasn’t sure if the manuscript would get published. So I think I was a little more relaxed with it- I wasn’t afraid of people going over it with a fine-toothed comb, because I wasn’t sure if anyone was actually going to read it or not.

     

    This one I knew would get published. Doctors would read it, and I didn’t want them to say, ‘No no no – this isn’t how it is.’ The first chapter, which is set in a hospital, took me a year to write, but then it was way too researched and jargon-heavy. It seemed like a bad episode of "ER." I ended up taking a lot out, and realized that so long as I knew what I was writing about, and had a sort of command over the material, I didn’t necessarily have to add every little thing in.

     

    The Rake

    You are not one half of a conjoined twin, nor are you a turn-of-the-century flim-flam artist/boxer. You are, however, an assimilated Jew who grew up in Long Island, and has spent time both at Tufts and NYU, much like the characters of this book. Was this a conscious decision to align your biography with theirs?

     

    Strauss

    I was thinking, as long as it’s set in contemporary America, I might as well set it in some place that I know. Actually it was partially so I wouldn’t have to do so much research, I could save myself some time.

     

    But even though I knew the setting, in a lot of ways this book was harder than Chang and Eng for me. People said it must be hard to write that one, from the perspective of a conjoined twin, but it was kind of easy. All I did was think about how I would act if I were attached to someone.

     

    But it was much harder to make Dori relatable andsympathetic. In my first draft I thought I was being subtle, but then I showed it to friends, and they all said, "Oh, so she’s crazy." I had to tone it down abit.

     

    I wanted to examine parenthood from different angles, and Dori’s was a difficult angle. How could I make her poison her kid and still be likable? It was tough to get inside her head. In any relationship there are alot
    of ambiguities, and that’s another thing I really wanted to examine, especially through Dori and her marriage to Josh. This book is very much about how you can never know someone fully, no matter how close you think you are to them.

     

    Part II (To see the first part of this interview, click here)

    Darin Strauss is the author of the international bestseller Chang and Eng and the New York Times Notable Book The Real McCoy. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. The recipient of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction writing, he lives in Brooklyn, and teaches writing at New York University.

     

     

  • An Insatiable Lover

    We’ve been having some pretty ridiculously great weather lately. If I had a real job (sorry, Mom), I probably would have played hooky last week to go and hang out by one of the lakes. Instead I just read a bit by Calhoun, but without the sense of freedom (or guilt) of having emancipated myself from a necktie.

    Anyway. The poetic equivalent to our early summer comes, I think, in the verses of former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins. Whenever I finish one of his poems, I just feel so damn pleasant afterwards.

    Maybe here’s why (from an interview with Collins conducted by The Cortland Review):

    Collins: Most of the devices used in poetry-meter and rhyme and assonance and the other kinds of tropes or effects-are really meant to give the ear pleasure in a way that prose does not. Poetry also appeals to the ear because poetry is an interruption of silence. A poem should be preceded by silence and followed by silence. A poem for me displaces silence the way your body displaces water.

    Or maybe here’s why (from an interview with Collins conducted by Terra Incognita):

    Collins: I am extremely reader-conscious, perhaps because I am tired of reading poems that seem to ignore the reader. I feel that I am talking to a reader/listener as I write, so that a good deal of my effort is just to make the poem clear. To get things in the right sequence so that the poem is easy to follow. Not just easy, but easy to follow because the poem is going somewhere, and I want the reader along to share whatever surprises the journey may hold. I try to begin the poem on a common ground, which is a way of assembling a little group around the campfire of the poem. Scoutmaster Collins will then tell some scary stories.

    Or maybe here’s why (from an interview with Collins conducted by Guernica):

    Collins: There’s a great pleasure in-I wouldn’t say ease, but maybe kind of a fascinated ease that accompanies the actual writing of the poem. I find it very difficult to get started. There are just long gaps where I can’t find a point of insertion, I can’t find a good opening line, I can’t find a mood that I want to write into. But once I do, once a line falls out of the air, or I get a little inkling of a subject and I recognize that, it’s like the sense that a game has started. Part of writing is discovering the rules of the game and then deciding whether to follow the rules or to break them. The great thing about the game of poetry is that it’s always your turn-I guess that goes back to my being an only child. So once it’s under way, there is a sense of flow.

    And now one of his poems. This is from his Nine Horses collection. (Click the link to buy it…)

    Aimless Love

    This morning as I walked along the lakeshore,
    I fell in love with a wren
    and later in the day with a mouse
    the cat had dropped under the dining room table.

    In the shadows of an autumn evening,
    I fell for a seamstress
    still at her machine in the tailor’s window,
    and later for a bowl of broth,
    steam rising like smoke from a naval battle.

    This is the best kind of love, I thought,
    without recompense, without gifts,
    or unkind words, without suspicion,
    or silence on the telephone.

    The love of the chestnut,
    the jazz cap and one hand on the wheel.

    No lust, no slam of the door –
    the love of the miniature orange tree,
    the clean white shirt, the hot evening shower,
    the highway that cuts across Florida.

    No waiting, no huffiness, or rancor –
    just a twinge every now and then

    for the wren who had built her nest
    on a low branch overhanging the water
    and for the dead mouse,
    still dressed in its light brown suit.

    But my heart is always propped up
    in a field on its tripod,
    ready for the next arrow.

    After I carried the mouse by the tail
    to a pile of leaves in the woods,
    I found myself standing at the bathroom sink
    gazing down affectionately at the soap,

    so patient and soluble,
    so at home in its pale green soap dish.
    I could feel myself falling again
    as I felt its turning in my wet hands
    and caught the scent of lavender and stone.

  • Sometimes All the Time

    Jonah’s
    throat was sore, lately. It hadn’t bothered him in the last couple
    days, but Jonah still waited for the pain to resurface, so that whenever
    he swallowed it would feel like swallowing sand, like it had for the
    past month or so. This waiting made him impatient, but the painkillers
    he took somewhat tempered his anxiety. Right now he had a eucalyptus
    lozenge in his mouth, and he bit down on it – not all the way through,
    just so his molars sunk in halfway.

    There
    were eleven tables, and he placed the salt-and-pepper shakers and the
    miniature Tabasco bottles from each on his cocktail tray. Becky followed
    behind him, blowing out the tea lights (too hard: wax fanned out against
    the sides of the candleholders) and wiping the tables with a bleach-soaked
    rag. In the office – a desk and laptop behind a velveteen curtain
    – their manager settled the credit cards and listened to vintage rock
    radio, the songs muffled and heartfelt through the drape, and Jonah
    and Becky knew that really they were actually alone.

    "I’m
    coming over later, still," Becky said.

    "Yeah
    that’s cool," said Jonah. "If you want." He paused at a four-top
    by the front windows, and looked up and out over Lake Calhoun, trying
    to find one of the half dozen or so constellations he could recognize,
    but it was too cloudy, or maybe the lights from the bars and condominiums
    in Uptown Minneapolis were too bright and distracting, or the Percocets
    he’d taken dampened the stars like they did his feelings (physical,
    emotional, and otherwise), or maybe the stars tonight were dimmer than
    usual, farther away and burning out. He scribbled something on a guest
    check that later, when he tries to re-write it into his astronomy journal,
    he will be unable to read.

    "I
    want," Becky said. She slid into a booth and began to polish silverware.

    She
    had two blond streaks in her hair, interwoven with the black. Nights
    they spent together, Jonah guessed what her original color had been,
    but Becky wouldn’t tell him. Also – and this was maybe more important,
    at least to Jonah – she couldn’t come during sex, or at least not
    with him, or at least not yet; he asked her why she wanted to sleep
    with him so often, why she was so insistent, but she wouldn’t tell
    him that, either.

    "Okay,
    then," Jonah said. "I’ll call you after Jenna’s gone, I guess."

    He
    sat down next to her, making sure the outsides of their legs touched
    under the table, but Becky scooted away.

    Jenna,
    his friend, ex-girlfriend, possibly hopefully girlfriend-soon-to-be,
    was coming tonight to pick up their dog because Jonah worked longer
    hours on weekends. He did not like this arrangement: the time he spent
    away from Rabbit was confusing and remarkably un-linear. Tomorrow, Friday,
    Jonah will wake up the same time as usual, but realizing his dog is
    not there needing to be let out, he will fall back asleep, and in the
    two days after, his sleep will drift later and later into the morning,
    and the events of his day will be without the regular, nearly grammatical
    punctuation of walking Rabbit. Which is why tonight he was thinking
    about trying to convince Jenna to move back in with him.

    "What
    time will that be?" Becky asked. She wiped a pair of wet spoons with
    a black napkin.

    "The
    usual time. I don’t know. I just thought I should tell you, is all."

    "You
    shouldn’t have," Becky said.

    She
    was wearing a pair of his soccer socks – they came up to the middle
    of her thighs, the Puma logo stretched around her kneecaps – and Jonah
    thought it was strange how easily and comfortably she’d been able
    to insinuate herself into his life. That was, actually, the most fascinating
    aspect of their now-month-long relationship: its normalcy. After only
    a couple nights together, symbiotic sleeping positions and synchronized
    wakings had been established. Jonah was impressed with himself for this
    because he considered Becky to be a little too good for him. Not because
    she was too pretty, though maybe also for that reason, but because she
    seemed so sad, and wise in her sadness, (and pretty in her sadness),
    and for him melancholy trumped beauty: it was a sort of barometer for
    how human one was. And Becky couldn’t even say why she was on the
    anti-depressants she was on – she’d tried explaining several times
    and just given up – and this intrigued Jonah and turned him on a little.

    Right
    now, he loved the way she stopped rolling silverware, and brushed crumbs
    from the booth to the floor, hair hanging forward in a way that exposed
    the sparrow she had tattooed below her left ear.

    "What’s
    wrong?" he asked.

    "Nothing."

    "What’s
    nothing?"

    "Nothing’s
    this big void in the universe. Scientists aren’t sure if it actually
    exists or not, but it does. I feel it a lot."

    Jonah
    coughed, and then spit into a beverage napkin – candy lozenge shards,
    mostly – which he folded and put in his apron.

    "Is
    your throat okay?" Becky moved closer to him. "I hope it’s not
    strep. I don’t have the energy to get sick right now."

    "I’m
    fine, I think," he said, taking a pill from his pocket.

    "I
    can get you more, if you want," she said. "It might be generic this
    time, but basically the same. I’ll ask my guy. Then I’ll bring it
    over tonight, if you’ll let me over. Whatever. I’m hot. You’re
    dumb."

    Later,
    after the chairs are all flipped over onto the tables and the lights
    turned out, after the manager unlocks the restaurant doors so they can
    leave, and Jenna come and Jenna gone and Becky and Jonah in bed together,
    the night crew will come to sweep and mop and bleach the floors.

  • A New Lorax Is Needed

    In the corner of St. Croix Antiquarian Booksellers, over by the color-coded antique maps, is a framed edict that’s actually more of a poem:

    "I, Richard Booth
    King of Hay
    Lord of all booktowns
    & their protector in perpetuity
    hereby declare that
    Stillwater Minnesota
    Is the first booktown
    In the western hemisphere.
    Let no one gainsay
    Or dare to dispute
    This is my official decree."

    I’m writing this too late: Booktown has now mostly disbanded. Gary Goodman, who owns the shop, pointed across the street. "There used to be thirty-two booksellers in that building," he said. Now, like much of historic downtown Stillwater, it’s an antique mall. Goodman then began to count in his head the number of tomes that used to fill the stores by the St. Croix. "I think there used to be five-hundred-thousand books in the Stillwater area," he tallied.

    Not anymore. The number of bookstores has dwindled down to four. There’s St. Croix Antiquarian, which is the biggest and most impressive; The Valley Bookseller, which is this town’s Wild Rumpus, with its vast childrens’ section and its cage of assorted, fluorescent birds; Chestnut Street Books, a new-and-used shop which has limited hours that coincide with likely tourist rushes (they’re closed Mondays and Tuesdays, and generally don’t open before noon); and then a theologically based bookstore that’s a bit off from the main drag, in a spot which residents refer to as, "Up the hill."

    It’s the usual story of Amazon, EBay, and AbeBooks, Goodman explained, all of which allow individuals to unload their books at better prices than stores might pay for them, and to do so more conveniently. Even Valley Booksellers – by far the most conventional of the shops – seems to be feeling the unfortunate tug of the Internet. For the local high school’s required summer reading, they’d ordered twenty copies of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. As of today, nineteen were still on the shelf. "Maybe by August, when school’s closer to starting, most of them will be gone," a blond clerk said hopefully.

    I had the idea for this blog post since last summer, but hadn’t gone back to Stillwater until this week. It was supposed to be about how their downtown had an incredibly impressive wealth of independent bookstores, their inventories unmatched by most sellers in the Twin Cities. (Hell, in terms of rare, out-of-print, and first editions, some of these places gave The Strand a run for its money. Antiquarian still does.)

    I’d wanted to focus part of the piece on a new-and-used shop that had been on the corner of Main Street and East Chestnut Street, which Goodman estimated had once held 250,000 books. Now it’s the Summit Boardshop, a place that sells skate- and snowboards, its title written on the building in faux graffiti.

    Nevertheless, those bookstores that remain, while they remain, are worth checking out. (And this is the real tragedy – they really all were worth checking out…now there’s just fewer of them.) Their stocks are varied, unique, and unpredictable. At Antiquarian, my booknerd friend found an illustrated first edition of The Little Prince author Antoine de Saint Exupery’s memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, as well as an early translation of Kafka’s The Castle, whose introduction reads, "Franz Kafka’s name, so far as I can discover, is almost unknown to English readers."

    These are treasures, and the booksellers in Stillwater that are left are full of them. My suggestion? If you have any interest in books, which if you’ve made it this far in the post I’m guessing you do, go while you still can.