Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels for grown-ups, at Amazon. This seems like an idea many people come up with, independently of everyone else, so it shouldn’t be surprising there are so many. Still, though: damn, there are a lot of these out there already.
Over at Robert Yune’s internet pad, Sal Pane rounds out the Robert-curated colloquium on the question of whether literary fiction is dead or not.
I was glad to see Sal pick up on the idea of entertainment in other media crowding fiction out. This was a point I felt strongly about, and maybe wanted to hit harder, but didn’t because it was really just an aside in the greater context of my entry in the series.
It’s made me remember a blog post I read not too long ago, arguing the issue of whether reading a book was inherently superior to playing a video game. (As these things go, I can’t pinpoint whose blog it was, much less find the link. I want to say it was the Atlantic blog of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose writing I like a lot (but whose spelling makes my heart hurt), but I can’t be sure of that.)
The specific argument that sticks in my mind is this hypothetical: Imagine the criticisms of books if video games—the highly evolved, textured, complex and subtle ones that are coming out now; not Duck Hunt—were the dominant medium, and the book was an upstart form. The interface is incredibly passive. A book only stimulates one part of the child’s brain; there’s no visual stimulation. There’s zero motor-skill usage in the act of reading a book. And so on. The argument didn’t even touch on the Wii and the prospect of video games that are exercise, rather than keeping kids from exercising. Read the rest of this entry »
I can remember, during my first year of college, standing in line for a movie with a friend. It was at a big multiplex in Yonkers, New York and the place had an air-conditioned, mass-appeal feeling to it that made me feel vaguely uneasy. Because I was eighteen and considered myself a writer in the slightly haughty way an eighteen-year-old can, I thought that an awesome way to “freak out” all the “mainstream” people standing in line with me would be to show an adult movie instead of whatever they had paid to see. (This was a year or two before Fight Club used a similar idea. Also, in case I’m not conveying the silliness of my college-freshman attitude, the movie we were lined up to see was either The Matrix or 10 Things I Hate about You. The new Harmony Korine flick it was not.)
I liked this idea so much I verbalized it to my friend, and as he looked at me and considered how to respond, I went further. I suggested that it would actually be a really awesome avant-garde thing to do, to bring people together at a theater and show an adult film and have people just, like, respond to it. They could laugh, or be uncomfortable about their arousal, perhaps they’d find their political convictions challenged by their response at the bodily level.
I was picking up steam with this, trying to think through the subversive aspects of rendering a private and taboo genre public, re-contextualizing what was considered a shameful and—when my friend asked, “You mean like at a porn theater?”
I briefly struggled against this simple summary—No, because the films would be shown at an art house, and people would get it, man—but then gave it up. We were able, still standing in line, to see the brief sad trajectory of my avant-garde movie theater, the shift of its clientele from beret-wearing intellectuals to raincoat-wearing sad sacks who’d prefer to sit in a row by themselves. “Oh,” I said by way of concession, “I guess that already exists. And it’s terrible.”
Slightly related to this earlier post on economics and how I find it fascinating, to the extent that I ever understand it, I ran across something interesting this morning.
At my office, there is a department that publishes a journal that is essentially a bibliographic list of economics books. They receive a ton of books on various strains of economic thought, of varying levels of seriousness, from Freakonomics-level stuff for people like me to data-heavy reference books for the hardest of hardcore econ weenies. Every few months, there accrues a surplus of these books and an e-mail goes out announcing that whomever so desires can take whatever books he/she wants (from certain, marked shelves; it’s usually a surefire laugh (for me, no one else) to reach for an adjacent shelf, which will send one of the bibliographers into a mini-conniption, as they go to great lengths to keep their shelves organized and have to account for every book).
Anyway, I ended up taking Peter Leeson’s The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates. It looked interesting, meant for the layman, and concerns an area that I’m doing some minor research in for a project. (See this earlier entry re: pirate research.)
I went to thumb through the table of contents and came across this dedication: “Ania, I love you; will you marry me?”
has cracked The New Yorker‘s “Shouts & Murmurs” section. Why great? The man is a beast. See here for the exhaustive list, but do especially peep “Saved by the Bell: The Grad School Years” (dear to my heart), “Your Best Friend in a Romantic Comedy Is Always There for You,” and my most favorite of all, “Ashton Kutcher Fan Fiction: ‘The Middle School Dance’ by Melissa Bell, Age 13” (also in video form here, though I think seeing someone perform it makes it less funny; this girl is not quite who I pictured in my head).
Wayne’s debut novel, Kapitoil, recently came out. I have not yet read it, though every time I remember it exists, I ask myself, “Why haven’t I read it yet?” My friend and noble roommate, Salvatore Pane, reviewed the book for BOMB and had nothing but good things to say about it.
Also, as an aside, the fact that Teddy Wayne produced all this screamingly funny stuff for McSweeney’s website and now has this (still funny but decidedly) tamer piece in The New Yorker reminds me of this article in The Onion, the upshot of which is that pitcher Mike Mussina has no problem getting his satirical pieces into “Shouts & Murmurs” but finds McSweeney’s a tough nut to crack.
My friend, colleague, and, tantalizingly soon, roommate Robert Yune hosts a few thoughts I had in response to this crotchety Lee Siegel article (which I think came out last month). His earlier, scientifically rigorous thoughts on the question here (seriously, that one has a reference list at the end) and here. Another takedown of Siegel’s piece from another former classmate here. This guy can’t catch a break!
Also, someday I’ll have a blogroll. And on that day, I’ll surely include a link to Robert’s blog, which is what my blog would be if I had more patience, focus, and seriousness of purpose, and less propensity to making ball jokes and writing about cheeseburgers.
I’m listening to an episode of The Best Show on WFMU (which I slavered over here) from a couple of weeks ago. Jon Wurster is in the studio as Rick Spangler, “a record producer with a diverse resume.” Although usually unflappable, Wurster here cracks himself up repeatedly, playing it off as an effect of pollen and breath mints, and glossing over the covered-microphone silences as his having fallen out of his chair.
And I am loving it. It’s reminding me of this Elliott Smith cover, “All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down),” a Hank Williams, Jr., song, which is on the CD that comes with Autumn de Wilde’s Elliott Smith photo book. I think the CD is called “Live at Largo,” if a CD in the back of a book can have a proper title, but in any case that’s what the music is: recordings from a show at Largo in Los Angeles (which, just to make this post splinter off in as many directions as possible, here is a New Yorker piece describing the scene at Largo (though you have to have digital access to get at more than the abstract, so maybe save yourself the click if you don’t want your interest piqued and then rudely stifled)).
But anyway the reason I love the song is that Smith laughs repeatedly during the song and sounds, generally, happy. He totally blanks on part of the lyrics, which I’ve now discovered to be “corn bread and iced tea took the place / Of pills and ninety proof.”
Also, here’s Hank Williams, Jr. playing the original. Not surprisingly, I prefer the Elliott Smith version. Last weekend I picked up a cassette of Hank Williams, Jr.’s greatest hits at Salvation Army (minus any kind of cover or case, which made it all that much more thrilling) and by Tuesday I was pretty well done with it. Country music remains, like the films of Jerry Lewis, way better in theory than in my actual experience of them. It is a great song, though.
And another plus is that I now get the self-referential line Williams, Jr. throws into the Monday Night Football theme at the end, when he goes, “All my rowdy friends are here on Monday night.”
One of my best friends from college, the extremely talented poet Ms. Bridget Lowe, has been blogging elegantly for Ploughshares! Reading through her archives has been great. But this one, about an early rejection from Highlights for Children, is pretty phenomenal. If you click through, don’t miss the comments section.
A few months ago I met a guy who had a tattoo on his inner forearm that read “Visceral Realist” in a typewriter-type font. I was impressed and amused by it, and by the coincidence of it: I’d recently finished The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolano, the novel that inspired the dude’s tattoo. And, moreover, the friend who’d loaned me the book was in town visiting, and had an hour or two before recounted a story a professor had told about knowing the real-life version of one of the characters, Luscious Skin. It was a pleasingly dense cluster of coincidences, which sort of felt true to the spirit of The Savage Detectives.
Anyway, the tattoo occasioned a subsequent bar conversation about what literary tattoo we each would get. It made me realize that a good book- or poem- or writer-themed tattoo is hard to come by; I had nothing, and I only remember people mentioning books they’d like to honor, rather than specific and germane images therefrom. (Tangential tattoo note: I doubt I’ll ever be inked, but I’ve long maintained that the tattoo I would get would be an image of a German shepherd’s head, placed squarely on my bicep a la a sailor’s tattoo of his faraway or long-lost dame. Something along these lines.)
So it was with interest that I came across this story, on Flavor Wire, which includes a fair number of literary tattoos, some great and some less great. As the story notes, it’s NSFW and also NSFLAATPL (Not Suitable for Looking at at the Public Library).
Embroidering the point I made yesterday (to wit: that Jack Pendarvis is awesome), I tracked down an excerpt from Awesome, printed in the Yalobusha Review, that I recalled having cracked my shit up. A sample:
Dottie set up a kind of clinic where I breathed on people’s backs and gave them orgasms. Each person was observed to exhibit some kind of material improvement.
Gertrude sang in a lovely contralto.
Annabel became an expert in medieval Russian iconography.
Adam Reger | Freelance Writer 