The Believer is one of the magazines we carry on our ever bustier magazine rack.

Believer book reviews are insightful about not only the specifics of the book but why it might be important to a greater body of literature. In a new take on the  ’anonymous review,’ Justin Taylor was asked to invert the standard ‘anonymous review’ formula — if instead of the reviewer having the cloak of anonymity, we were to keep the book under review anonymous from its critic, and thereby shield it from any and all prejudice– whether positive or negative, wheter directed at the author, the publishing house, the blurbers, the cover art, etc. I swore several oaths to stay true to the project (Eds: ‘No googling‘) and soon enough a book arrived at my house. Its covers, front matter, and endpages had all been stripped, and the spine blacked out by a Sharpie.’

After his reading, Taylor found himself ‘freed from the tyranny of the preprogrammed response, set adrift, context-free, at sea with an alien test. Every reviewer–every reader–should hope to be so lucky.’

We’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover or a person by their clothes, but I really like book covers and clothes and I like to distinguish between book covers I kind of like and book covers I love. Also, didn’t the author have some choice over the book cover just like I had some choice over the shoes I put on this morning? I guess judge people. . .within budget. 

Of that opinion is pop philosopher Chuck Klosterman (what?! I really like his book covers), who wrote (and based his whole career around the fact that) ‘ There are two ways to look at life . . .The first view is that nothing stays the same and that nothing is inherantly connected. . . The second is that everything pretty much stays the same (more or less) and that everything is completely connected . . . In and of itself, nothing really matters. The problem is that nothing is ever in and of itself.’

Does anything mean what it really means out of context? Is it wrong to judge a book by its cover or is it wronger to lack to judgement? Would the obviously gay guy from 10th grade have come out if he went to high school in San Francisco? Maybe this is just an existential question for a slightly snowy yet somehow warm winter day (If the snow doesn’t stick and only turns into puddles was it ever snow in the first place? etc., etc.,)

Oh yeah, the anonymous book was Book of Jokes by Momus. I guess sometimes there is a third option, that context matters more than the thing itself.

Tags: Believer, Book of Jokes, Klosterman, literary criticism

It took me a long time to join the planner bandwagon, but dang am I fully on that horse now.  Watch the panic ensue, should I not be able to find my Moleskine.

We have a few styles in stock this year, although the pickin’s are gettin’ slim.

Pocket Daily (a page per day)

Large Daily

Pocket Weekly Horizontal (my fave–spreads the week out over 2 pages)

Large Weekly Horizontal

Weekly Diary (a week on one side with a blank page facing)

Pocket Project (very cool and new for us–the pages stretch out for one long extended look)

Pocket Panorama (also new–turn it sideways)

oMg! i tOtEs <3 mElViLlE.

          As I do every New Year housecleaning, I spotted my double novella edition of Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cereno by Herman Melville. I’ve had this book since I was twelve. It’s been following me around like a homework assignment I didn’t do because it is a homework assignment I didn’t do. I guess I could say it’s my white whale, but not really because I only think of it once a year and now the spitfire strength of these less than 100 pages works makes me want to erase all associations I have between Melville and Moby Dick. Also, Melville House has reissued these novellas in hip, American Apparel looking editions (. . .and that’s a compliment). 

          ‘Wtf is a scrivener? Ew.’ I sat down for what I thought would be a dry read only to find myself thrilled by Melville’s prose and character driven plots and overall view of mankind. Bartleby is about a law clerk in 1850’s New York while Benito Cereno is about a wayward slave ship off of Chile in 1799. Both use this narrative technique I love in which the narrator is a chance acquaintance trying to understand the motives of the main character. The narrators’ struggles to classify both Bartleby and Benito as good or bad, friend or foe, subtly become a metaphor for understanding the world. It sounds so cheesy but it happens absolutely naturally and you kind of don’t even know until you’re done reading and then you’re like, ‘whoa, Herman! Why you gotta do me like that?’

          Methinks narrative style is Melville’s most important genius but then there’s the prose which has neither aged nor lost its bite in 150 years. Taciturn Captain Don Benito of the latter story is described as ‘a loaded cannon, which, until there is call for thunder, has nothing to say.’ When the narrator feels something amiss in the juxtaposition of the disarray of the ship’s shabby country-style attic and the calm ocean, Melville writes, ‘The similitude was heightened , if not originally suggested, by glimpses of the surrounding sea, since, in one aspect, the country and ocean seem cousins-german.’ I had to read this sentence about three times to fully appreciate the genius of Melville (I may still not know what ‘cousins-german’ means in which case I don’t know what I’m appreciating. . . oh well).

          I love Melville’s concern with being American. In an 1850 essay, Hawthorne and His Mosses, he extolled the originality of the adolescent American writing scene (Thanks to Professor Bailey for letting me know about this!)  But representing 19th century America as he does of course raises the issues that have gotten all dead white males besides Oscar Wilde kicked out of class curriculums. I don’t read a lot of fiction written before 1970, mostly because I’m self involved but partially because for many Americans, our absence cannot help but be noted in a canonical works in which we can never be heroes. In Brown: The Last Discovery of America, Richard Rodriguez wrote this of his youthful attempt at reading Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: ‘William Makepeace Thackeray mocks my mother’s skin. And mine . . . really how can I laugh?’

          Fiction, almost more than ‘non-fiction’ historical accounts, exists as a sort of screen-capture of that moment, typos and inappropriate google autocomplete searches and all. The question that arises then is: ‘How are we supposed to read Melville’s attitude towards slavery?’ aka ‘Was Melville racist?’ The short answer to the gut question is: duh. After all, a la Do The Right Thing (incedentally, the President and the Mrs.’ first date), racism may be the only thing we all have in common. Melville is part of racism by default as part of the dominant group in a caste society but I prefer him to orientalizing travel writing, cus at least he’s honest about it. Within the rigid racial hierarchy presented by Benito Cereno, characters of all races are given some room to breathe and assert themselves as human which is actually no small feat considering the views of the time.

Here’s Richard Howorth, owner of the utterly wonderful indie store Square Books, located in downtown Oxford, Mississippi (this top-tier bookshop and cultural bastion is worth a road trip to ole Miss, believe me; I spent a couple hours browsing there one afternoon in 1987 and I’ve never forgotten it). The quote is taken from an interview with Howorth in the Jan./Feb. 2010 issue of Poets & Writers magazine.

“I think they [e-books and conventional books] can coexist is what I’m saying. And by the same token, I think bookstores offer an experience to book consumers that is unique. To be able to go into a place physically, to experience a sensation that is the precise opposite of all that is digital, and to talk to people about books in a business that has as one of its objectives a curatorial function, and the presentation of literature as another [objective] — that is, I believe, irreplaceable.”

Bingo. If Poets & Writers (that’s a hint, P&W) ever decides to interview us, we’ll try our hardest to put it any better.

Richard Florida’s insightful 2008 book, Who’s Your City?, links economic and cultural innovations with city living. Not a first by any means, but well written and surely with the statistics to back it up. Although he doesn’t quite challenge Thomas Friedman’s assertion that ‘The World Is Flat,’ Florida argues that in a globalized world of so much mobility, place matters more than ever. I enjoyed his rereading of Jane Jacobs as an urban economist and that he did mention that blase complete mobility really only applies to 200 million people worldwide (sorry again, people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam and. . .lost count)

The maps in it are so so enjoyable and really make it worth a read or a skim in my eyes:

(but um, lawsuit check on the neurosis map being read as anti-Semetic?)

While we’re on crazy maps, this one comes from my favorite out-of-print book that you absolutely can’t buy at at the store, Joel Garreau’s 1981 Nine Nations of North America. Somehow this book is still predicting the future!

And to a man who cared more about America than can possible be mapped . . . Happy MLK Day!

Tags: America, Florida, Maps, MLK

We’re getting an ice sculpture of a pop-up book.  Should be super cool.  And since it’s going to be 41 freaking degrees tomorrow (awesome, yes, but still–it is the Ice Carnival) you’ll have to get here early to see it before it melts.  I hate that.

Note: I have not read either of the two books discussed below, but I believe (almost singularly) in osmosis. I am basing my opinion on a small and probably statistically insignificant number of books purchased, all apologies, high school math!

Asking a question like ‘Why do some books sell while others don’t?’ is like asking why some businesses, or even some people fail. Who knows? (Possibly Malcolm Gladwell). But I cannot help but draw a comparison between two hyped late 2k9 Jewish hipster Jonathan releases: Foer’s Eating Animals and Lethem’s Chronic City. I’ve watched Chronic City sit on the shelf chronically alone, while Eating Animals has flown off the shelves (I think I sold one copy to a member of the band Cobra Starship?)

Although hailed as one of the best books of 2009 by the New York Times, Chronic City has also been described (somewhat complementarily) as a stoner novel by Hari Kunzru in BookForum. Jonathan Lethem is graying, folks, and there is nothing sadder than a middle aged hangover. The two main characters of Chronic City are a former child star and an aging hipster doofus (the wonderfully named Perkus Tooth). Forget terrorism, the real problem of the 21st century will be what to do when one was once young and cool.* ‘The old man looks in the mirror and thinks, ’maybe tomorrow I will be young again.” -Richard Rodriguez wrote something along these lines.  

On the other hand, Eating Animals with its almost children’s book like cover and title sits in the window, all Great Gatsby green and fresh. Eating Animals is not really trying to be anything cool but like Woody Allen it doesn’t succeed. On the brink of fatherhood, Foer offers a deep ahem, dissection of the morality of how we eat as a culture. I generally dismiss food writing, (more about me than about food writing), but I can see how this book is probably everything people like about good food writing. It’s part memoir and part new journalism as it requires Foer to midnight maraude at a factory farm. Proust aside, maybe the reason that readers are more attracted to Foer’s new work than Lethem’s (or that I am more attracted to it and am shamelessly using phantom readers as a proxy) is simply because it seems to be proud and forward-looking rather than wallowing in the developed world’s pandemic prolongued adolescence.

Both writers appeared in the Zadie Smith edited, McSweeney’s published, for charity collection, Book of Other People, featuring light, character driven short stories. Lethem’s Perkus Tooth and narrator actually come from a great short story of the same name in Book of Other People. I can see hints of Eating Animals‘ themes as well in Foer’s contribution, ’Rhoda,’  in which his grandmother sits at her kitchen table and habitually interrupts the singing of her own immigrant song to offer him food. I guess this post somehow turned into yet another plug for Zadie Smith’s literary prescience, the very thing I spend my whole day trying to avoid.  But Maya Angelou once said (and this came to me via a captioned picture of Oprah in Newsweek), ‘People don’t remember what you said or what you did, but they remember how you made them feel.’  Statistics for the insane, inside, I like the cover of Eating Animals. And this is what this whole post has been about.

*Even Thomas Pynchon’s latest effort, Inherent Vice, is still set in the ’70s.

Tags: Foer, Lethem, McSweeney's, prolongued adolescence, Smith

Today I’ve been asked: A., Do you carry napkins? And, B., Do you sell books there?

Note to self: Have a cold frosty beer when you get home.

Many, many thanks to the good people of Graywolf Press for reissuing The Delicacy and Strength of Lace, a slim volume of letters between two great American writers: Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright. Silko and Wright met only twice (the second time at Wright’s deathbed), but they carried on a brief — 1978 to early 1980, when Wright died of cancer — epistolary relationship of profound depth and intimacy. Does anyone write letters anymore? Probably a very few; read this book, though, and reacquaint yourself with the unique power and expressive possibilities of the humble letter. Snail mail never looked so good.